Is Michael Needham Ready For His National Coming Out Party?

Michael Needham first started appearing on the pages of this blog just over a month ago, in a story about how the Republican Party is being Cruzified. Needham is a spoiled, slimy little operative for the right-wing extremists around Jim DeMint and his Texas protégé, Ted Cruz. Needham was celebrated by the Wall Street Journal at the time as one of "the masterminds behind a new generation of young conservatives." He likes taking credit for the government shutdown and promises there's plenty more like that to come. A Republican Party Madame Thérèse Defarge, Needham is deciding who's a real conservative and who's just a faker.

Yesterday, Chris Hayes sat down with Julia Ioffe, author of the much-noted New Republic Needham exposé, A 31-Year-Old Is Tearing Apart The Heritage Foundation. Needham credits his demented strategy to a shiny new millennial mindset-- rather than to America's existentially dangerous and brutally ravenous plutocracy. Even admirers say, "I consider him a friend but he’s a huge asshole." The asshole has managed to utterly take over and remake the Heritage Foundation in his own asshole image.

Needham is the 31-year-old CEO of Heritage Action, the relatively new activist branch of the Heritage Foundation, the storied Washington think tank that was one of the leaders of the conservative war of ideas ever since it provided the blueprint for Ronald Reagan’s first term. Although DeMint is Heritage’s president, it was Needham who had designed much of the defund Obamacare strategy. Beginning in 2010, when Heritage Action was founded, Needham pushed the GOP to use Congress’s power of the purse to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act. He formed a grassroots army, which he used to keep congressional Republicans in line. “They make six hundred phone calls and have a member of Congress in the fetal position,” says one GOP congressional staffer.

After months of furious lobbying, Needham sold, at most, 20 members of the House on his plan of attack. In the end, this was enough to cement the party line—and lead the GOP to a spectacular, deafening loss.

Sorting through the wreckage, Washington conservatives can barely contain their anger at Needham for his ideological inflexibility and aggressive, zero-sum tactics. “Their strategic sense isn’t very strong,” griped a prominent Republican lobbyist. “They’ve repeatedly been wrong about how to handle this.” Says a senior House Republican aide, “Mike Needham played a large role in defeating ideas that would have worked out better.”

But the wrath is not solely reserved for Needham; his employer now inspires plenty of disgust among conservatives, too. Increasingly in Washington, “Heritage” has come to denote not the foundation or the think tank, but Heritage Action, Needham’s sharp-elbowed operation. Instead of fleshing out conservative positions, says one Republican Senate staffer, “now they’re running around trying to get Republicans voted out of office. It’s a purely ideological crusade that’s utterly divorced from the research side.” (“If Nancy Pelosi could write an anonymous check to Heritage Action,” adds the House aide bitterly, “she would.”)

As a result, the Heritage Foundation has gone from august conservative think tank revered by Washington’s Republicans to the party’s loathed ideological commissar. “It’s sad, actually,” says one Republican strategist. “Everybody forgets that Heritage was always considered the gold standard of conservative, forward-looking thought. The emergence of Heritage Action has really transformed the brand into a more political organization.”

Needham’s strategy has also sparked a war inside the halls of the foundation itself, where many feel duped by the stealthy yet brutal way the Heritage Action takeover went down. Some now wonder whether the foundation can ever recover its reputation as a font of ideas. “I don’t think any thoughtful person is going to take the Heritage Foundation very seriously, because they’ll say, How is this any different from the Tea Party?” says Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation. Looking at the organization he helped to create, Edwards finds it unrecognizable. “Going out there and trying to defeat people who don’t agree with us never occurred to us,” said Edwards. “It’s alien.”

…Like all good revolutionaries, Michael Needham had a sterling upbringing, the kind that allows a young man to pursue ideological purity free from worry about consequence or reality. Needham’s mother is a former Saks Fifth Avenue executive; his father runs a boutique investment bank. The future Tea Party rabble-rouser grew up on the Upper East Side. He attended Collegiate, a prestigious New York prep school, then Williams. As a political science major and, eventually, the editor of the college newspaper, Needham loved to provoke his liberal classmates, arguing that Social Security was unnecessary and that the minimum wage hurt the working poor. “It’s amazing how little reflection he’s given to his privilege,” says a classmate. "It was all kind of a game to him. It was an experiment in winning.”

…On issue after issue, Needham’s ideological flame-throwing has made Heritage Action enemies in even the most conservative corners of Congress. Says the House GOP aide, “People on the Hill are very much rubbed the wrong way by a former Giuliani staffer who is around thirty years old, running around and determining whether they’re conservative or not.”

With DeMint’s arrival, Heritage’s government relations team, which once boasted the ability to meet with 250 GOP and as many as 40 Democratic congressmen on any given day, disappeared. “The people at government affairs would go down to the Hill, and they had Hill folks saying, ‘Listen, we don’t want to meet with you because of what the folks at Heritage Action did yesterday,’” says the former Heritage staffer. Heritage analysts now have a hard time getting meetings on the Hill, even with Republicans. The congressional staffer told me that, for many Republican members of the House, “their research staff is probably not dealing much with Heritage anymore. They’re systematically going elsewhere for their information.”

Shortly after this summer’s farm bill debacle (Heritage Action pushed members to rid the bill of its food-stamp half, then still sent out a “no” alert on the revised bill, hanging out to dry members from agricultural districts), the outrage was such that the Heritage Foundation was banned from the weekly lunches of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a conservative caucus of House Republicans. This was particularly ironic as the RSC and Heritage were once interwoven: In the 1970s, Feulner had been the RSC’s first executive director. “It really speaks volumes about a betrayal of trust,” says the Republican strategist. The House GOP aide puts it more starkly: “There are over two hundred thirty bridges to be burned in the House. Over two hundred of them are burned, and they maybe have about thirty more left.”

The frustration grew in the build up to the budget fight as Heritage Action organized DeMint’s nine-city tour, and Needham blitzed the conservative media--giving constituents the impression that defunding Obamacare in one knockout move was perfectly plausible. In meetings, congressional staffers couldn’t even get Heritage Action to entertain the possibility that the strategy might fail. “They never wanted to discuss anything past defund,” recalls the Republican staffer. “We would ask, ‘What if [Democrats] say no and don’t budge, what do you do then?’ They kept saying: ‘That’s not our role. You figure it out.’” In an August interview with CSPAN, Needham was asked a similar question: How can Republicans achieve their goal of defunding Obamacare without control of the Senate or the White House? “I think that, rather than trying to figure out where we’re going to be at the end of September,” Needham said, his underbite jutting contemptuously, “we should actually fight for something.”

But congressional staffers couldn’t fully ignore Needham. Heritage Action sent e-mails out to its grassroots army, telling its foot soldiers to press their representatives to hold the defund-or-else line. Many Republicans, who felt less than certain about the defund strategy, felt entrapped, especially when these angry constituents confronted them at town halls. “They created this false narrative,” says the Republican staffer. Inevitably, the semi-regular Hill meetings between staffers and Heritage Action grew tense. As the staffer explains, “People came away with the feeling that they’re willing to drive a truck off a cliff, but with no purpose.”

On the morning of October 16, just hours before a deadline whose crossing could have pushed the United States into default, and hours before a deal averted that possibility and ended the 16-day government shutdown, after weeks of pushing House Republicans not to back down from the defund Obamacare plan that had gotten everyone to this point to begin with, Needham appeared on Fox News. “Everybody understands that we’re not going to be able to repeal this law until 2017 and that we have to win the Senate and we have to win the White House,” he said.

The hypocrisy was not lost on many House Republicans, who, for all those weeks, had lived in fear of Needham and Heritage Action. As the day wore on, the video made the rounds to much indignant headshaking. “A lot of people were upset,” says the Republican staffer. “If it was impossible, then why was he going around the country convincing other well-intentioned people that it was absolutely doable? To suddenly say at the end that we knew this all along struck a lot of people as disingenuous.” It struck others as a lily-livered delusion. “It was like a general applauding himself for reaching the top of the hill, while the army is being slaughtered at the bottom,” says one Republican strategist.

And yet Needham’s blithe remark came as no surprise to the former veteran staffer at the Heritage Foundation. “One of the hallmarks of that millennial profile is an inability to acknowledge mistakes,” the staffer said, sounding equal parts bemused and exasperated. “Everything is right and nothing was a mistake, and they can spin it any way they want.”

In keeping with this philosophy, later that morning, Heritage Action would issue another alert. Despite Needham’s admission that the imminent repeal of the Affordable Care Act was a lost cause, the alert warned House members to vote against the budget deal. “Heritage Action opposes the Senate-negotiated proposal and will include it as a key vote on our legislative scorecard,” it said. To this day, Needham stands by his strategy. It “may feel like bullying to a member of Congress,” he told Politico Magazine, “but it’s the reality of the world that we live in.”

Tomorrow Is A Big Day For Miss McConnell

Tomorrow, Jim DeMint's radical right Senate Conservative Fund will begin it's advertising campaign against Senate Minority Leader Mitch ("Miss") McConnell. No, they're not trying to help Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes or community leader Ed Marksberry, both Democrats, beat McConnell. And they're not just trying to throw a noisy tantrum. What they are trying to do is to get McConnell to change his already horrible behavior. They want much worse behavior. This is what DeMint's PAC sent out over the weekend:

Fellow Conservatives:

U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is failing conservatives.

Senator McConnell is the Republican Leader. He has more power and clout than any other Republican in the Senate and probably more than any Republican in the country. Yet he is not using that power to fight for conservative principles.

As you may know, Senator McConnell has negotiated three deals with President Obama this year that:

1. Raised taxes on 80% of Americans;
2. Suspended the debt ceiling; and
3. Funded the implementation of Obamacare

Now, he's failing conservatives on immigration too.

Senator McConnell has done absolutely NOTHING to stop the "Gang of Eight" immigration bill-- a plan that provides instant amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants and won't secure our borders.

Senator McConnell voted for amnesty in 1986 and is now helping Congress pass it again. He praised the bill when it came out of committee and voted with Harry Reid to bring it to the Senate floor.

The critical vote in this debate is now scheduled for Monday on the Hoeven-Corker compromise, another 1,000-page, amnesty-now-border-security-later plan that was written behind closed doors and will include all sorts of earmarks and kickbacks. And, of course, nobody will have time to read it.

Senator McConnell should publicly oppose this deal, insist that senators have ample time to debate it, and use his clout to get wavering senators to defeat it. Instead, he is quietly allowing the amnesty bill to pass.

Many of you have called Senator McConnell to urge him to stop this bill, but so far he is not listening. It's time to increase our appeals.

We're going to launch a new radio and TV ad campaign on Monday to flood Senator McConnell's office with more calls so he cannot ignore us.

We're not asking him to vote against the bill. A simple "No" vote is not enough from a leader. We're asking Senator McConnell to use his position as the Republican Leader to defeat it.

We don't want excuses. We want results.

Please make a contribution to the Senate Conservatives Fund today to help us flood Senator McConnell's office with calls.

The amnesty bill is not just bad policy. It's also bad politics. Of the 11 Republicans who voted for amnesty in 2007, only two remain in office today-- John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The others have either been defeated or forced into retirement.

Amnesty is a political loser for Republicans yet Senator McConnell is sitting on his hands while his colleagues march off this political cliff.

Let's send McConnell a message next week and get him to lead.

UPDATE: The Anti-McConnell Ad

Threats Of Primaries By GOP Racists Make It Harder For Non-Southerners To Back Popular Mainstream Positions

As soon as Jim DeMint took over the already right-wing Heritage Foundation, he made sure it would be even more extreme and, especially, more racist. Their first big effort under his regime was to put out a phony "study" claiming immigration would cost American taxpayers gazillions of dollars-- or, to be more "exact," 6 trillion dollars. No doubt, South Carolina's former KKK senator brought the figure with him and asked the propagandists at Heritage to write a justification of it. The KKK senator from Alabama, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was so sold on the Heritage nonsense, he demanded the professional and nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirm it. The report, as we mentioned yesterday, didn't go the way Beauregard expected. Instead of DeMint's $6 trillion deficit, it "estimates that in the first decade after the immigration bill is carried out, the net effect of adding millions of additional taxpayers would decrease the federal budget deficit by $197 billion. Over the next decade, the report found, the deficit reduction would be even greater-- an estimated $700 billion, from 2024 to 2033."

This is bad news for Republicans who prefer to keep their racism and bigotry under cover. It's not going to matter for the real crazies-- mostly in the South-- whose overt appeal is racism anyway, your Steve Southerlands (R-FL), Patrick McHenrys (R-NC), Louie Gohmerts (R-TX), Tom Prices (R-GA), Alan Nunnelees (R-MS), Steve Stockmen (R-TX), Virginia Foxxes (R-NC), Rob Pittengers (R-NC), Steve Scalises (R-LA), Tom Rices (R-SC), Trey Gowdys (R-SC), John Micas (R-FL), or Bob Goodlattes (R-VA). But what happens to the Republicans who were looking for a legitimate fiscal excuse to vote against comprehensive immigration reform-- the ones who want to maintain a veneer of not being pawns to the racist yahoos who run their party?

It puts "mainstream" Republicans like Chris Gibson (R-NY), Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Charlie Dent (R-PA), Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm (R-NY), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Pat Meehan (R-PA), Tom Petri (R-WI), Jon Runyan (R-NJ), Mike Turner (R-OH), Tom Reed (R-NY), Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), Richard Hanna (R-NY), David Joyce (R-OH), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Dan Benichek (R-MI), Dave Reichert (R-WA), Jim Gerlach (R-PA)... in a bind. The immigration bill turns out to be a gigantic deficit-reduction plan-- both in the short term and in the long term! Their constituents are different from the die-hard racists in the backward parts of Texas, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The voters in these districts may not appreciate racism as a raison d'etre for refusing the solve a pressing national problem. Of course, on the other hand, there is an overt threat to these congressmen. Either vote NO on immigration reform, or face a well-financed primary.

And if you won't think primaries by radical extremists are real enough to scare the hell out of Republicans, look what's already happening to high profile Tea Party Senator Marco Rubio. During an interview the other night on WMAL, anti-Hispanic sociopath Allen West, who has the ability to raise millions of dollars from fellow extremists, said he will look into a primary challenge against Rubio.

"That's a pretty heavy lift, because you're talking about running against a sitting senator, and then, of course, that creates that schism that the other side would love to see happen," said West, who appeared as a guest co-host on WMAL's Mornings on the Mall Wednesday.  West was pressed further by WMAL's Larry O'Connor, who asked him directly if he would rule out a challenge against Rubio.

"Chirping... chirping... chirping...," replied West with a chuckle, before elaborating with a more direct response.

"If I see people that are not taking our country down the right path, if I see people that are not standing up for the right type of principles, and putting their own party politics before what is best for the United States of America," West indicated he might make a run.

Rubio, who rode a wave of Tea Party momentum to the Senate in 2010 in the same election that sent West to the House, has fallen out of favor with some Republicans because of his support for the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" immigration reform bill. West told WMAL he has a "lot of concerns" about the measure himself.

...But will he attempt to make that point as a Senate candidate against Rubio?

"We'll see what happens down the pike," said West. "God will set my feet on the right path."

And if you doubt Heritage and other far right extremist groups have the clout to mount effective primaries against mainstream Republicans you've probably never heard of Heritage's venal Conservative Action Project, which Lee Fang has exposed in his new book, The Machine.

The Heritage Foundation’s most audacious move to harness the conservative movement has been its role in crafting the Conservative Action Project-- a strategy committee that meets at the Wednesday morning breakfast hosted by the Family Research Council. This is the same meeting that rivals Norquist’s Wednesday morning planning meeting and is closely connected to the aggressively ideological Weyrich Lunch. The Conservative Action Project is actually part of a broader plan set forth by Heritage vice president Becky Norton Dunlop, a point person for Heritage’s sprawling external affairs program. Throughout her career, Dunlop had spun through the revolving door of working in various Republican administrations on both the state and federal level, a corporate PR firm, and multiple conservative nonprofits, including Heritage, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy. A committed conservative, Dunlop was once asked how to spread conservative ideas at a panel discussion hosted by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. “How do you maintain liberty?” Dunlop replied, “Well, at the end it’s at the cartridge box if you can’t win at the ballot box.” She then smiled and said that her response was probably too “extreme” for her audience of international right-of-center donors.

As the Heritage Foundation’s “chief ambassador” to the movement, Dunlop helps the American Conservative Union plan its annual CPAC convention, the largest annual gathering of conservatives. Philanthropy Roundtable, Dunlop and her external affairs team also organize multiple events to bring corporate donors and conservative foundations together, and she organizes regional and President’s Club events. Dunlop sits on the boards of over half a dozen other organizations, from the Phillips Foundation, which disburses grants to young right-wing journalists, to the Family Foundation of Virginia, a religious right powerhouse in the state, to the American Conservative Union itself.

Despite Dunlop’s impressive set of official responsibilities, her most important duty is not revealed on her profile page on the Heritage Foundation website. Behind the scenes, Dunlop serves as the president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive right-wing committee that has brought together key Republican officials, Christian right eaders, and wealthy right-wing donors to set the conservative agenda since 1981. Although she had been a director for the CNP for many years, according to tax disclosures filed with the IRS, Dunlop appeared to take the reins of the organization in 2008. Called the “most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of” by ABC News, the CNP is still critical to the conservative movement, and deeply entwined with Heritage and other prime players of the conservative movement.

Initially organized by fundamentalist preacher Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind Rapture-genre series, the CNP is credited with cementing the role of the religious right within the modern Republican Party. The CNP initially hosted Pat Robertson, the televangelist owner of a network of different Christian media companies, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, LaHaye, and theologian Cleon Skousen, an influential thinker within the religious right who wrote that white slave masters were the real victims in the antebellum South. Some of the first wealthy businessmen included in CNP were Amway’s Richard DeVos and oilman Charles koch. Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese eagerly embraced the group and served as a direct link between the CNP and the Reagan White House. In addition to Republican Party officials, the religious right, and wealthy donors, CNP members include representatives from the conservative media infrastructure, libertarians, and many neoconservatives. Although the CNP has never allowed the press access to its events, it is widely known that the group hosts several meetings a year to allow Republican leaders to consult with movement conservative types. According to Bob Barr, the Republican lawmaker who spearheaded the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Barr met with the CNP to hone “our message and focus” around the impeachment effort at a CNP meeting in 1997, well before Clinton made his claim that he did not have “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. In his memoirs, Barr said the CNP members were in “near universal agreement” that impeachment was necessary because of Clinton’s “abuses of power” concerning “national security.” However, CNP continued to support the impeachment when it transformed into a crusade against Clinton’s claims about his sexual improprieties.

In 1999, George W. Bush reportedly gave a speech to the CNP promising to only appoint pro-life judges, which in turn helped guarantee the support of CNP members and solidify Bush’s nomination in the Republican primaries. Although little is known about the activities of CNP events, many have speculated about the degree to which CNP used its influence within the Bush administration. Salon’s Ben Van Heuvelen has noted that the rise of the private military contractor Blackwater, now known as Academi, might have stemmed from the fact that Blackwater CEO Erik Prince’s parents Edgar and Elsa Prince were prominent donors to the CNP and its affiliates, especially the Family Research Council. Prince family members met regularly with prominent Bush administration war planners, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer, through the CNP.

John McCain kowtowed to the CNP in a speech shortly after locking up the GOP nomination in 2008, but still struggled to gain their trust. “I want to look you in the eye and tell you that I won’t let you down,” pledged McCain to the group of evangelicals and donors in his March 2008 address to the group. According to the New York Times' David Kirkpatrick, several audience members in the CNP crowd said that McCain made “little impression” despite his pandering. James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and many social conservatives simply did not trust McCain, and viewed his acclaimed “maverick” streak as a liability to the movement. According to the New York Times and The Nation’s Max Blumenthal, CNP officials finally pledged their support to the McCain campaign-- and in turn the support of tens of thousands of evangelical churches organized by CNP members, various right-wing front groups owned by CNP members, and other conservative organizations-- only after McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Heritage can put a lot of resources behind targeting mainstream Republicans who are looking towards independent swing voters. The GOP base is still predominantly racist, bigoted and unable to think beyond the latest rants on Hate Talk Radio. But in many districts outside of the South, that's not enough to win elections. Look at the report from the new Iowa Poll for example. Steve King, one of the most viciously anti-Hispanic xenophobes in Congress spent Wednesday lying about immigrants and about the reform bill. The picture up top is from his rally yesterday. And King is backed by Iowa's increasingly senile Senator Chuck Grassley. But 54% of their state's voters approve of the Senate bill with a path to citizenship. 68% of Democrats approve and 54% of independents approve. True, just 44% of Republicans approve but only 48% of Republicans are opposed. The only demographic group that is against immigration reform are the elderly-- 65 years or older-- and even in that case, 48% approve but only 40% oppose. The rest are unsure.

Jim DeMint, Tea Party Be Damned, Can't Recognize That Jamie Dimon Is A Dangerous Part Of A Parasitic Elite America Needs To Be Protected From

Even Rand Paul (R-KY) thought self-styled chief Senate teabagger Jim DeMint (R-SC) was a little offbase with his snivelling suggestion that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon should "guide" Congress when it writes banking regulations. "Probably not the best thing in the world," offered Paul dryly. I might add that though it doesn't measure up to the massive bribes taken by other friends of Dimon like John McCain ($36,531,885), John Kerry ($20,045,202), Chuck Schumer ($18,760,091), Joe Lieberman ($10,967,241) and Miss McConnell ($6,887,747), DeMint has accepted $2,925,367 in bribes from the banksters over the overly long course of his career as a federal lawmaker. The only senator on the Banking Committee with the guts to stand up to Dimon today was Oregon progressive Jeff Merkley. But just before Dimon got sworn in to testify in front of the committee, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) released the detailed findings on Dimon and other Fed board members whose banks and businesses benefited from Fed actions. Over $4 trillion in near zero-interest Federal Reserve loans and other financial assistance went to the banks and businesses of at least 18 current and former Federal Reserve regional bank directors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. "This [GAO] report reveals the inherent conflicts of interest that exist at the Federal Reserve. At a time when small businesses could not get affordable loans to create jobs, the Fed was providing trillions in secret loans to some of the largest banks and corporations in America that were well represented on the boards of the Federal Reserve Banks. These conflicts must end," Sanders said. I guess that's why Elizabeth Warren has been demanding that Dimon resign from the board of the Fed.

Tea party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) on Wednesday asked JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who recently announced that his company had lost at least $2 billion in the derivative market, to “guide” Congress in creating friendly banking regulations.

I'm certain it's just a coincidence, but today, over at Tyler Durden's place, just when Dimon was celebrating a reunion with some of the many senators he's bought up, economist Charles Hugh Smith was offering his insights into parasitic elites and their ability to persuade Congress to allow them to not pay any taxes. He answered the question, "Do the Parasitic Elite Pay Any Taxes?"

The parasitic financial Elite don't do any "work" in the sense of something beneficial for society, as no voluntary payment for their services exists.

If a parasite's entire income is leeched from the productive, then isn't their entire income a tax on those creating value? In this sense, the share of the parasite's income which is carved off by the Central State as tax revenues is a secondary tax: the parasite's entire income is a tax on the economy.

This distinction between legitimate wealth derived from value creation (think Steve Jobs/computer industry) and parasitic wealth skimmed from the productive (think Mitt Romney/investment banker) is the heart of Correspondent James B.'s insightful inquiry into the question: can the parasitic Elite be said to pay taxes at all, given that their income is itself a tax on legitimate wealth creation?

...If we understand the difference between parasitic wealth and real value/wealth creation, we can properly align the tax structure to reality: the tax on authentic wealth creation should be low, to encourage wealth creation and the employment (broad-based wealth creation) generated by legitimate value creation.

We must also understand that the Central State now protects and enables parasitic skimming as the primary function of the nation's financial system. Thus the entire financial system is parasitic on the wealth of the nation.

Financial parasitic incomes should be taxed at 99%. If Mitt Romney reshuffles assets created by others and skims $100 million, 99% of that parasitic wealth should be returned to the nation via taxes. The parasite still gets to keep $1 million, more than enough to live well but not enough to buy the presidency, the Congress and the regulatory machinery of the Central State.

All those who claim the Mitt Romney/investment bankers are "creating wealth" are either terribly confused about value creation and capitalism, or they are lackeys/ apologists of the parasitic Elite.

Iceland, you'll recall, defaulted on the kinds of bankster interest payments that are causing so much pain and suffering among real people in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Wisconsin, Ireland, Britain and other countries that are allowing the German and Wall Street Austerity agenda to destroy the middle class and drive teh working poor into destitution. And Iceland threw some of those banksters-- and the politicians that enabled them-- into prison. How's that working out for them? Really well, as a matter of fact. It's not quite the second anniversary of this column by Paul Krugman and he's trumpetting the astounding success they've had by telling the Germans to shove their Austerity where the sun don't shine.

Iceland is, of course, one of the great economic disaster stories of all time. An economy that produced a decent standard of living for its people was in effect hijacked by a combination of free-market ideology and crony capitalism; one of the papers (pdf) at the conference I just attended in Luxembourg shows that the benefits of the financial bubble went overwhelmingly to a small minority at the top of the income distribution.

And in the process of building short-lived financial empires, a handful of operators built up enormous debts that their fellow citizens are now expected to repay.

But there’s an odd coda to the story. Unlike other disaster economies around the European periphery-- economies that are trying to rehabilitate themselves through austerity and deflation-- Iceland built up so much debt and found itself in such dire straits that orthodoxy was out of the question. Instead, Iceland devalued its currency massively and imposed capital controls.

And a strange thing has happened: although Iceland is generally considered to have experienced the worst financial crisis in history, its punishment has actually been substantially less than that of other nations.

...The moral of the story seems to be that if you’re going to have a crisis, it’s better to have a really, really bad one. Otherwise, you’ll end up taking the advice of people who assure you that even more suffering will cure what ails you.

Yesterday he was writing that although "GDP is still below previous peak... I think one could argue, much more so than in say America, that a significant part of that peak involved a Ponzi financial sector that isn’t coming back [and]... Iceland’s heterodoxy was yielding a surprisingly not-so-terrible post-crisis outcome."


UPDATE: Bernie Sanders



Would you like to help make sure Bernie gets back into the Senate? At least he recognizes that Wall Street regulates Congress instead of Congress regulating Wall Street. Here's where you can help Bernie be reelected.

Occupation Valuation

Jim DeMint (R-SC) is allowed to keep his gold-plated retirement plan

My best bud, Roland, is a school teacher in Compton. He works hard. At the end of the day he's exhausted. He makes a modest living. I mentioned to him the other day that the son of one of my best friend's from college had just graduated from law school and stepped right into a six-figure job. "They work those lawyers like slaves," is what Roland said. They do? Like slaves? Really? I had a whole department of lawyers working for me at Warner Bros. They pulled their weight. But "work like slaves?" No; they didn't work any "harder" than anyone else did. Oh, some individuals may have-- but that because of their own work ethic and has everything to do with what drives them as an individual, rather than something intrinsic to their well-paid career.

Is there something intrinsic in a job that makes society value it-- financially, which is almost solely what defines value in our world-- above other jobs? Why do school teachers make a living wage while financial manipulators make billions? Why does a family doctor make a so-so living while an attractive soap opera actor make millions? And that had an awful lot to do with the whole Wisconsin kerfuffle that ended-- at least for now-- badly Tuesday night. Call it the politics of envy. Conservatives have been using it to divide working people for centuries and clobbered us with it this week.

Billionaires like the Koch brothers, particularly the Koch brothers, don't think they should have to pay for the costs to run a civil society. Wealthy conservatives never have. They can afford their own teachers why should they have to pay for someone else's teachers? They don't buy into this whole Elizabeth Warren way of looking at it. That's why there seems to be a marked tendency for billionaires to turn into sociopaths. It's why billionaires shouldn't exist. But the Koch brothers and their ilk have an awful lot of politicians on their payrolls-- Scott Walker and Paul Ryan only being two of the most prominent-- who violently disagree. In fact they have an entire political party that violently disagrees... and another one that is conflicted, confused and doesn't know what the hell it stands for anymore. Obama's first appointment after winning the presidency made it abundantly clear to me that the Hope and Change thing was a campaign slogan, not a governing proposition. There are no Republicans worse than Rahm Emanuel when it comes to protecting the special interests of Wall Street and the predatory financial manipulators. Obama gravitated-- heavily-- towards that end of the Democratic Party, especially when it came to his key economic appointments. That was the end of the game, before it even began. And now we have Republicans trumpeting that the results in Wisconsin Tuesday are proof that it's safe for Republican state governments to go full blast on the Koch/ALEC agenda of disabling democracy and destroying the middle class.

Tuesday night it wasn't just the results in Wisconsin that pointed in that dismal direction. Voters in two of California's biggest cities, San Diego and San Jose, also decided that whims of billionaires must be put before the needs of school teachers. They did? Oh, yes. Let's get it right from the mouth of one of the most dangerous neo-fascist politicians in America, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. Writing for a far right website after the results came in, he realized how important for their movement the referenda in San Jose and San Diego were. Both cities have opted, by huge margins, to convert defined benefit pensions to 401 (k)-style plans. That's has worked badly in the private sector-- for millions and millions of workers... so of course the billionaires and politicians who exist to serve them (like DeMint) want to force it down the throats of public sector workers as well. He calls them "unaffordable" (and they are as long as billionaires exist) and "unfair," a divide and conquer strategy the wealthy always use to defeat working families.

"It is simply unjust," insists government employee DeMint, "for government employees to require private sector workers, who don’t have gold-plated retirement plans, to subsidize such plans for themselves. That is, it’s not fair for government employees to demand better benefits than their bosses, the actual taxpayers." With no class consciousness to speak of, workers in San Jose and San Diego were more than happy to go along with the billionaires' brigade... again.

"The status quo cannot be sustained," writes DeMint. I agree. Abolish billionaires through rational tax policies, the way it was before Reagan. And pay teachers better.

America's Fighting Men And Women Did Their Duty; We Need To Live Up To Our Obligations To Them

Miss McConnell was booted out of the Army after one week for groping a private's privates. He's been getting revenge ever since

Maybe last week you saw the vicious attack by self-entitled 1%-er Steve Womack (R-AR) against decorated war hero Ken Aden. That's typical of the 1%-er attitude towards working people-- including working people who go off to fight, bleed and die in their unjustifiable corporate wars in horrible places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, typical! These young men and women are expected to go over and do the dirty work for the 1% and the political whores like Dick Cheney, who love sending other men and women's sons and daughters to fight in their wars. Oh, yeah-- and Willard Mitt Romney.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons' decision not to enlist in the military, saying they're showing their support for the country by "helping me get elected."

Romney, who did not serve in Vietnam due to his Mormon missionary work and a high draft lottery number, was asked the question by an anti-war activist after a speech in which he called for "a surge of support" for U.S. forces in Iraq.

Right-wing extremist Jim DeMint (R-SC) sent the military/veterans community a great big middle finger yesterday for Veteran's Day, the ONE senator to vote against the government trying to help returning vets find work. The Senate voted on Jon Tester's amendment yesterday, and it passed 94-1, even DeMint's usual followers abandoning him to his own demented lunacy. I wonder why he didn't rush to the defense of the Bush Administration's policy of throwing dead American soldiers into a Virginia landfill.

When she was in Congress, Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) was the staunchest defender of military men and women and veterans on the House Armed Services Committee, where she served on the Military Personnel subcommittee. Today is Veteran's Day and I can't think of a more appropriate person to talk about what our society owes our veterans than Carol, who is running to regain her seat against pathetic corporate shill Frank Guinta. Please read her guest post and consider giving her a hand.

America Must Keep Its Promises to Those Who Serve

-by Carol Shea-Porter


When veterans and military folks hear “Thank you for your service” messages from Congress this Veteran’s Day, after they say “Thank you,” they need to say something else as well-- “Do you support cutting my benefits?” They need to ask both parties that same question, and be prepared to dig deep to find the truth. As Congress casts around to cut spending, they have been tempted to tamper with these hard-earned benefits, and that would be detrimental not only to the individuals involved, but also to our military and our nation.
 
I first have to confess that, while my husband does not collect any benefits nor does he use the VA health care system, I am more than a neutral observer. Almost every man in my family served, my husband grew up on military bases, and I met and married him while he was in the Army, so I was a military spouse. I am proud of them and the millions of others who have answered America’s call. I also know what these men and women and their families sacrificed to answer that call. While it is an honor to serve, they continuously experience so many challenges. Leaving loved ones, moving the family frequently, accepting difficult assignments because they cannot turn them down, fighting wars that strain marriages and often terrify the children-- all these situations leave lasting scars. Troops and their families miss birthday celebrations, weddings, births, and funerals. Americans owe more than words of thanks, and we know it. That’s why you never hear citizens demand that we cut the military and veterans benefits. People know that they were earned.
 
Americans are actually upset when they find out that troops and vets are not receiving excellent treatment.  Remember when they found out that conditions at Walter Reed and other military facilities were bad? I was serving on the House Armed Services Committee, and constituents were outraged and wanted us to fix it fast. When Congress passed the new GI Bill of Rights to help this new generation go to college after serving in a war zone, Americans were very supportive. When we passed the largest increase in funding in history for the Veterans Administration (VA), there was wonderful bipartisan support, as there should be. And now, hopefully, there will be bipartisan resistance to any partisan or bipartisan effort to shrink benefits.
 
What benefit cuts are being considered? The Veterans of Foreign Wars has a list called the “10 for 10” plan, saying that Congress or the Pentagon wants to cut 10 benefits to pay for 10 years of war. This list includes increasing healthcare premiums for retirees, increasing pharmacy fees for troops, families, and retirees, freezing military pay, and ending government subsidies to military commissaries. The worst idea on this list is to eliminate the 20-year military retirement plan. Those in uniform and their families always look forward, whenever they are at their most challenging points, to “going home” someday, with a secure pension alongside that heartfelt thank you. That pension also happens to be a terrific recruiting and retention incentive for the volunteer military, and it is ridiculous to change that. As American Legion National Commander Fang Wong said, “If our leaders in Washington are intent on making military life like the private sector, then that’s the path our young people will choose-- the private sector!” My husband’s November issue of MOAA’s Military Officer states, “This isn’t just about equity. It’s about an attack on the core elements that sustain the quality career force.”
 
These are responsible, patriotic organizations. These organizations are full of good people from all different backgrounds and different political beliefs who loved this country enough to serve it.  They still love our country and care deeply about its well-being and financial security.  But they believe that in America, a deal is a deal, and they want our country to live up to its promises. They also know the risks if Congress tries to cut benefits to our military personnel and retirees and to our veterans. Congress and the Pentagon must listen. 

Tea? Or Something More Nutritious?

Yesterday I was reading an interesting interview with self-described "recovering Republican" Bob Ney, the Ohio freak show and designated patsy, who went to prison in the Abramoff scandal, which, in reality, should have send at least two dozen Republican congressmen to prison, if not Bush himself. What originally caught my attention was his analysis of the upcoming presidential election. He thinks Romney, the anointed Establishment pick, will be the nominee and he thinks the party's doctrinaire conservatives don't care that much if they beat Obama or not-- Miss McConnell's stated top priority for 2010-12. Ney worries that's an ass-backwards approach.

[F]rom the conservative end, under their breath, well, they think it doesn't matter if we don't beat him. They think if we don't beat him he's going to do such a bad job over the next four years there will be no Democrats standing in the House, no Democrats standing in the Senate, we'll take the whole ball of wax (in 2016). That theory's out there ... to keep the "bad guy" in for four more years and you'll really see what happens. That's not necessarily what reality becomes.

Interesting tangent to follow up on... sometime. But not where I want to go today. Today we're here to examine how the teabagger thing is working out for the Members of the House who joined the Michele Bachmann-led official teabagger caucus of 60. Ney was always a kind of cloddish and superficial establishment Republican but he indicates he has a lot of admiration for the teabaggers, even if he doesn't understand how completely controlled they are by the fascist-oriented Koch family and a tiny handful of predatory billionaires. Ney:

I think the Tea Party has been very good for this country. I really do. ... They raised an issue out there. And they were smart, they didn't get into abortion, gun control, gay marriage. They got into one element of the financial side of it, so I have to give them a lot of credit.

A congresswoman I don't even know was on the floor yelling, They're holding the Congress hostage. First of all, 62 members of the House are "Tea Party" candidates. Only 30 are active in the Tea Party caucus. So this Democrat is standing there saying they're holding us hostage, wow, she's really giving them credit for completely running the congress. The Tea Party wouldn't run my office, but I am very respectful of what they've done. ... The Tea Party has helped the Republican Party morph back into what it was supposed to be.

... I'm currently unhappy with the Republican leadership. They took a debt ceiling issue, a very serious issue, there's 535 members of the House and Senate ... and they said OK, we'll pass the debt ceiling bill with cuts ... but we'll create a committee of 12 people who will speak for all 535 people, so to heck with 97 percent of the Americans who send their members to Congress.

Here's what John Boehner said, and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama. They all three said this: You all aren't smart enough, you can't make those tough decisions, we'll take 12 people as a representative body of the House and Senate and the president and we'll tell them to make a decision by Dec. 23. If I was Standard & Poors or Moodys, I would be like "OK, that gives me a lot of confidence." They should of had a vote, ugly as it could have been, let the process work. ... They punted this down the road to 12 people. They're going to make Jack Abramoff and me look like pikers with the defense lobbyists and the campaign dollars. ...

On the biggest issue to me of importance to my grandchildren and future generations, and currently to all these unemployed people ... you had Harry Reid, John Boehner and Barack Obama and you ended up with something like the 72nd anniversary of the Wizard of Oz: no brains, no heart, no guts. It was Oz. These three tried to do this private secret deal without having votes.
They should have been voting all along. The Republican Party had the biggest opportunity ever to really nail this one.

Ney didn't quite have his numbers right. There are 60 members of the House teabagger caucus, the one led by Bachmann. More than half are from the Old Confederacy. And, of course, all of them are Republicans. This seems to be the definitive list, although there have been a couple of members who have joined and left and rejoined and left again. Freshmen are in bold type:

Sandy Adams (R-FL)
Robert Aderholt (R-AL)
Todd Akin (R-MO)
Rodney Alexander (R-LA)
Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)
Joe Barton (R-TX)
Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)
Rob Bishop (R-UT)
Diane Black (R-TN)
Michael C. Burgess (R-TX)
Paul Broun (John Birch Society-GA)
Dan Burton (R-IN)
John Carter (R-TX)
Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
Howard Coble (R-NC)
Mike Coffman (R-CO)
Chip Cravaack (R-MN)
Ander Crenshaw (R-FL)
John Culberson (R-TX)
Jeff Duncan (R-SC)
Blake Farenthold (R-TX)
Stephen Fincher (R-TN)
John Fleming (R-LA)
Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Phil Gingrey (R-GA)
Louie Gohmert (R-TX)
Tom Graves (R-GA)
Ralph Hall (R-TX)
Vicky Hartzler (R-MO)
Wally Herger (R-CA)
Tim Huelskamp (R-KS)
Lynn Jenkins (R-KS)
Walter Jones (R-NC)
Steve King (R-IA)
Doug Lamborn (R-CO)
Jeff Landry (R-LA)
Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO)
Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)
Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
Tom McClintock (R-CA)
David McKinley (R-WV)
Gary Miller (R-CA)
Mick Mulvaney (R-SC)
Sue Myrick (R-NC)
Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)
Rich Nugent (R-FL)
Steven Palazzo (R-MS)
Steve Pearce (R-NM)
Mike Pence (R-IN)
Ted Poe (R-TX)
Tom Price (R-GA)
Denny Rehberg (R-MT)
Phil Roe (R-TN)
Dennis Ross (R-FL)
Ed Royce (R-CA)
Steve Scalise (R-LA)
Tim Scott (R-SC)
Pete Sessions (R-TX)
Adrian Smith (R-NE)
Lamar Smith (R-TX)
Cliff Stearns (R-FL)
Tim Walberg (R-MI)
Joe Walsh (R-IL)
Allen West (R-FL)
Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA)
Joe Wilson (R-SC)

Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), a Jew who converted to Mormonism, a Democrat who converted to Republcianism, who was campaign manager and then chief of staff for Governor John Huntsman, defeated a very conservative incumbent Republican, Chris Cannon by running as a hard-core teabagger. His #1 issue was being virulently anti-immigrant. Since being elected he's also been virulently anti-gay. He joined the Congressional Arts Caucus instead of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, kvetching that "[s]tructure and formality are the exact opposite of what the Tea Party is, and if there is an attempt to put structure and formality around it, or to co-opt it by Washington, D.C., it’s going to take away from the free-flowing nature of the true tea party movement."

Yesterday on This Week Jim DeMint told Christiane Amanpour that "the Tea Party's being thrown around a lot today, but for everyone who calls him a Tea Party-- themselves a Tea Party member, there are hundreds of people who have the same concerns about our spending and our debt. We know over 70 percent of Americans want to balance the budget... I think it's one of the best things that's happened to our country and to politics, because there's a broad cross-section of Americans involved in citizen activism today. And some are called Tea Party; some are not. But all the candidates are going to have to appeal to this new grassroots movement. And that's really what I'm looking for... Any of these [presidential] candidates are going to have to appeal to those Americans who are unified, particularly around fiscal issues." 

DeMint, of course, didn't get into a discussion with Amanpour about the true nature-- the ugly racist nature-- of what's behind the grassroots of the Tea Party or about the billionaires financing it to achieve their own plutocratic goals and agenda. National surveys have all shown that self-described Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Republican, overwhelmingly old and overwhelmingly extreme right-wing. They also tend to be wealthier than the average American. Most Tea Party supporters are male (61%) and almost half are evangelicals or "born again." Surveys that have dared delve into it have all found that the teabaggers are deranged racists, which was completely apparent to me when I spent a day with them at their first big Los Angeles event two years ago. A University of Washington study found that teabaggers are "more likely to be racially resentful" than the population as a whole, although, in fairness, most extreme conservatives are racists.

So far this election cycle, only one Blue America-endorsed candidate, Nick Ruiz down in central Florida, is squaring off against an admitted teabagger and actual member of the congressional caucus. Nick's opponent, freshman Sandy Adams, is one of the less bright of an already far from glowing caucus. Yesterday Nick's battle against this lunacy went beyond the lunatic and racist fringes of Teabaggia.

There is a fragile tension that’s growing, but it’s not the tension you think it is.
 
Not the Tea Party lunacy. Not the corporate Republican debauchery. Not even the thirty years gone of abdication on the part of the Democratic Party, that ironic party of the people, to do the right things for the majority of Americans-- by fighting for the America we laud in textbooks.
 
It’s us. Progressives. For too long, we have supported people we know will do us political harm and disservice, by evidence and history and by all reasonable projections of their future actions. Why?
 
We send them our money, our political contributions-- and they squander them on politicians that vote against almost everything we believe in-- and call it ‘pragmatic progressivism,’ the ‘third way,’ the ‘center,’ and of course, ‘compromise.’ But there is little compromise in a room full of sharks.
 
We wear their pins and buttons, we fill out their incessant requests for petitions and email addresses, as they fill their databases and their coffers with our information and our passion and currency-- only to have them commit small token efforts of advertisement and ‘advocacy’ at best, and at worst, the full-fledged endorsement and financing of candidates who will never do one socially just or legally fair thing for us and America.
 
All while the entourage ‘keeps the change’ and pockets the difference.
 
Progressives thus far have failed to produce a New Deal America. In fact, they have been failing for decades. Not even to fail better, but to fail worse-- because indeed, political circumstances are not improving-- they are disintegrating.
 
I say we can turn this around-- but not by proceeding as the status quo.
 
Progressives, there is a New Deal America waiting for you this 21st century. But you will have to do more than you have done to see it through. Don’t be suckerpunched by a silk tie and a white pearl necklace. It takes a progressive to get things done. Ask FDR. Ask MLK. Ask the scientists that proclaim the Gulf is still leaking oil, with no end in sight. Ask the real Harriet Tubman, not the self-proclaimed Harriet Tubman fake, Tea Party Caucus member Allen West (FL-22).
 
How will you support a New Deal America? By breaking the cycle of complicity-- and backing New Deal Democrats that will do what is necessary to bring about a New Deal America for the 21st century. By endorsing candidates that reject complicity and excessively narrow corporate overtures. People like Dennis Kucinich (OH-10) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). There are others. Find them.

Americans want economic security-- it starts with a federally mandated, livable minimum wage: $15 per hour, not a paltry $7 and change.
 
Americans want to protect vulnerable families-- it starts with a robust, rather than underdeveloped U.S. Social Safety Net. We need better food assistance, housing assistance, unemployment insurance, and ultimately, retirement assistance-- Social Security. For people who need it, when they need it, until they no longer need it.
 
Americans want America to promote equality of opportunity-- not cronyism, legacy and special favors. That’s for royalty-- and no American fits that description. Promoting equality of opportunity starts with freedom-- freedom of good health, with universal health insurance; freedom of religion, speech, suffrage, sexual preference, expression and equal opportunity of education-- essentially, the freedom to be who you are and accepted, rather than tolerated.
 
A New Deal America is going to take more than boldness, pink t-shirts, courage or guts. There is plenty of that to go around, in fact, perhaps too much, because those emotions often become something else entirely. And if that was working-- we’d have seen some results by now, no?
 
A New Deal America needs national coherence. And that means that there must be alliance and allegiance and that means people working together in order to elect dozens of progressives nationwide. Folks, one or two, are not going to be able to accomplish anything on the federal level. We need more than the cult of celebrity and a rock anthem.
 
We need a progressive orchestra and a New Deal symphony.
 
It’s never going to get any clearer.

In 2008 Blue America didn't waste its time-- or its contributors' money-- on supporting middle of the road corporate Democrats like Barack Obama. Nor will we waste our efforts on him this year. I hope we can find the "dozens" of progressive New Deal Democrats Nick says we need. We haven't so far. So far this is what we've got (on the House side): our candidates. After Labor Day (today) we're going to start stepping it up a bit with other progressive fighters from across the country, like Connie Pillich (D-OR) and John Waltz (D-MI). If you want real change-- not small change or backwards reactionary change-- in America, please consider helping us find good candidates and supporting good candidates. And, while you're at it... watch this:

DeMint Stakes His Political Future On Murdoch Being Too Big To Jail... Or Even Fail

I'm starting to lose track of the mayhem inside the fascistic Murdoch media empire as the criminal regime starts unraveling. Over the weekend the head of his operations in the U.K., Rebekah Brooks, resigned and was subsequently arrested "in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking." Les Hinton, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and head of Dow Jones, who is thought to be neck-deep in the U.K. scandal, was shoved overboard last week. The noose beginning to close, next to go was the head of Scotland Yard.

Britain's top police officer resigned Sunday and Rupert Murdoch's former aide Rebekah Brooks was arrested as the phone hacking scandal finally tore into the heart of the British establishment.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson said he was quitting due to speculation about his links to Murdoch's empire and the force's botched investigation into hacking at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

His shock announcement came just hours after police arrested Brooks-- who resigned on Friday as head of News International, Murdoch's British newspaper arm-- on suspicion of phone-hacking and bribing police.

...Stephenson was linked to former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis [who was arrested last week] in reports Sunday which said the police chief accepted a five-week stay earlier this year at a luxury health spa where Wallis was a PR consultant.

...Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband piled on the pressure by calling for Murdoch's British media interests to be dismantled, telling the Observer newspaper: "I think he has too much power over British public life."

Abandoning his earlier defiance, Murdoch placed ads in most of Britain's Sunday newspapers for a second day, this time entitled "Putting right what's gone wrong" and promising to fully cooperate with police.

Prime Minister David Cameron has meanwhile faced questions about his decision to invite his former media chief Andy Coulson [arrested earlier this month], another ex-News of the World editor, to his country residence in March, two months after Coulson quit Downing Street.

Australia has also kicked off an investigation of Murdoch's criminal activities in his homeland and the FBI is either investigating or covering up... whatever they do these days. Several members of Congress, including heavyweight Democrats like Jay Rockefeller and Dick Durbin (usually a good reflection of Obama's thinking), as well as Republican Homeland Security Committee Peter King are clamoring for congressional investigations into what Murdoch has been up to in this country. It is widely suspected that his organization was illegally tapping phone lines here-- including of the families of the 9/11 victims-- just as he was doing in the U.K. Actor Jude Law has accused the Murdoch organization of hacking his phone on U.S. soil.

Murdoch's American empire is also said to be 'exploding and unravelling' as he faces the threat of losing control of his Fox and other cable networks if found guilty of breaching anti-corruption laws.

As panic started to set in in right-wing circles that their primary media ally could be neutered just as election season gets rolling, reactionaries wondered who would stop the hemorrhaging. As if on cue, along came Mary Jim DeMint, the fascist senator from South Carolina. DeMint told David Gregory on Meet The Press yesterday that the Senate should leave the Murdoch scandal alone and concentrate on the GOP's latest repackaging of the widely discredited Ryan budget, now being called "cut, cap and balance."

DeMint won't be able to prevent a Senate investigation. Darrell Issa, who heads up the House committee that should be investigating Murdoch's activities, is strictly about partisan witch hunts and, as expected, he is refusing to do anything at all. But investors in News Corp are getting antsy and are starting to focus on James Murdoch, the person in the organization who was authorizing the bribes and other expenses for the criminal activities.

John Whittingdale MP, the chairman of the [culture, media and sport select] committee, said they would be particularly keen to hear Mr Murdoch clarify remarks he made last week that executives at News International, the publisher of the News of the World, had misled MPs in earlier appearances in 2007 and 2009 by making statements about the scandal “without being in full possession of the facts."

Tom Watson, a Labour member of the committee, said he also expected Mr Murdoch to be questioned about what he meant when he said, hours after closing down the Sunday tabloid, that he had approved out-of-court settlements over phone hacking when he “did not have a complete picture.”

Mr Watson has written to Richard Alderman, director of the Serious Fraud Office, drawing his attention to these payments, and others, and asking if he will consider investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty by directors of the relevant News Corp subsidiaries, including Mr Murdoch.

One investor, whose holding is about one per cent of BSkyB shares, said at the weekend: “At the moment, we are trying to strike a balance. James doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong and he has been a good chairman of the company.

“On the other hand, we all know that mud sticks and we wouldn’t want people saying they were going to cancel subscriptions in Sky because of the Murdoch association.”

Another investor, with a larger holding, added: “This committee meeting is going to be box-office television. It’s a pity Sky can’t put it on pay-per-view.

“But to be serious, if on television he came across as someone with something to hide, or he got angry with MPs or, who know, anything might happen, you might take a view that Sky could be affected and it would be better not to have the Murdoch name on the chairmanship.”

A third investor added: “We think we should have a non-Murdoch chairman, but we’ll wait to see what Tuesday brings. Having said that, I would be more worried if I was a News Corp shareholder. In the States, there is more than a sense that things aren’t real till they’ve happened on television.”

Teabaggers Making Trouble For The GOP Again

Trouble in paradise

What a shame there was no teabagger running for RNC Chair yesterday! Apparently, though, they're all too busy running for everything else. Last year, implausible teabaggers O'Donnell, Buck and Angle cost the GOP Senate pickups in Delaware, Colorado, and Nevada. And this year just the threat of a teabaggy primary has sent Kay Bailey Hutchison into a premature retirement, rather than face the same fate meted out by the extremists to mainstream conservative incumbents Bennett (UT), Murkowski (AK) and Castle (DE). Richard Lugar (R-IN), on the other hand, thinks he can kick any teabaggy ass that comes his way. Lugar, after weeks of negotiations with teabaggers demanding he change his mainstream approach on a wide variety of agenda items, says he's expecting a primary challenge in 2012.

"I anticipate that there will be a candidate or candidates running in the Republican primary against me," Lugar said on an episode of Bloomberg TV's Political Capital to air this weekend. "This is why we have taken a very early campaign stance of vigorous fundraising, vigorous campaigning, anticipating that that kind of a campaign might occur. It's not one that I welcome, but nevertheless, this is a democracy... People are free to express views that they want to," the Indiana Republican said. "But likewise, I'm free to as vigorously as possible point out the things that I think are very important for our country."

Lugar knows he has too much clout inside the Senate for King Teabagger, Jim DeMint to fuck around with his race. DeMint picks on girls but he wouldn't dare lift a finger against Lugar. In fact, yesterday when he came barreling into the Texas Republican primary against Establishment favorite, Lt. Gov. Dave Dewhurst-- and on behalf of extremist teatards Michael Williams and Ted Cruz-- Texas' other senator-- and purported NRSC Chair-- John Cornyn, who has pledged neutrality in the race, swatted him down.

"Is that guy from Texas?" Cornyn said, after asked about DeMint's involvement.

"I'm certainly not going to weigh in or try to steer anybody in any particular direction. That's what the primary campaign is for," Cornyn added. "I just don't think these kinds of endorsements have that big of an impact. People want to jealously guard their prerogative to cast their vote, especially people who are living in that state. They don't want to delegate that authority or responsibility to someone else."

And in Virginia, where Republicans are hoping to score against the kind of conservative, uninspiring Democrat who did do badly in November, the Tea Party just threw a spanner in the works of a GOP Establishment that has already decided on ex-Senator and good old boy George Allen. Jamie Radtke, chairwoman of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation filed to run for the Republican nomination for Jim Webb's seat on December 23.

She had considered running for state Senate but switched to U.S. Senate after Virginia's first tea party convention, which drew an estimated 2,800 people to Richmond in October. She said she worries that her children will suffer from a ballooning national debt and criticized Congress for its recent deal on President Bush's tax cuts.

"I am the mother of three young children, and my first priority is both to protect them today and protect their future,'' she said in a statement. "I truly worry about what the next five years holds for our children and the nation, given this climate of reckless and immoral spending. Someone must step into the gap so that our children and America are not crushed in the coming years under the weight of insurmountable debt and debilitating taxes."

There are at least 3 other Virginia teabaggers looking to jump into the race. And why not-- the more the merrier. After all, how much damage can a crazed teabagger actually do? Oh, yeah... that guy in Maine... "Maine's governor told critics Friday to 'kiss my butt' over his decision not to attend the state NAACP's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations over the holiday weekend. Gov. Paul LePage declined the organization's invitations to a dinner in Portland on Sunday night and a breakfast in Orono on Monday because of prior commitments." I got this statement from Mary Erin Casale, Executive Director of the Maine Democratic Party:

"Monday is a day for both the celebration of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the tireless movement for equality and understanding that he helped foster. Through non-violent action, peaceful assembly and soaring rhetoric, Dr. King helped show all Americans a better way forward and reminded our nation that all are created equal.
 
"The Maine Democratic Party holds the principles and vision of Dr. King as an integral part of our core values. While we remain imperfect, we have come a long way since Dr. King's speech nearly a half century ago. On this day we certainly reflect on our progress, we also look forward to bettering ourselves and our nation and to upholding the values Dr. King spoke of when he addressed a nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The continued struggle for economic justice and equal opportunity for all. 
 
"We find it unfortunate that Governor LePage dismissed one of the oldest civil rights organizations, the NAACP, as a 'special interest group' in advance of this holiday. Equality is not a special interest and we hope he can find a way find a way to use more respectful language in the future."

Cornyn Better Watch His Back-- DeMint's Got A Million Prayers He Can Turn Loose On Him

In 2002 Texas Senator Phil Gramm, having accomplished all the banksters had asked him to do, decided that rather than run for the Senate again he could make a lot more money as a bank lobbyist. So John Cornyn ran for the open seat and won. (Gramm sucked up $5,513,718 in contributions" from the finance sector and so far Cornyn, in a much shorter time, has taken in $4,690,892 from the same crooked banksters.) Gramm was the third biggest recipient of legalistic oil company bribes in the history of Congress-- after John McCain and Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Cornyn is 4th but is expected to overtake Gramm's record early next year and surpass Kay Bailey and McCain long before his next reelection bid in 2014.

He was just reelected to head the NRSC, the corrupt committee charged with winning Senate seats for Republicans. And this week, in closed door caucus session, he went after Jim DeMint, who is widely blamed for having kept the GOP from winning control of the Senate by helping torpedo mainstream conservative Republicans in favor of reactionary and-- more to the point-- unelectable sociopaths like Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell. DeMint doesn't get the kind of corporate bribes that Cornyn does. Big Oil has only given him $231,939 and the finance sector a mere $2,612,173. But if "Big John" Cornyn were to piss off DeMint badly enough, DeMint could make his reelection propsects a lot less bright. DeMint has a different kind of non-traditional power inside the GOP.

DeMint did not respond to Cornyn’s comments, the Republicans said. However, the two lawmakers have had several conversations since Election Day, GOP aides familiar with the situation said.

NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh declined to comment, but according to Republicans, Cornyn delivered his warning in a speech to the entire Conference during their leadership elections. In the speech, Cornyn noted that some members of the Conference were unhappy with the conservative credentials of Cornyn’s picks and opted to actively work against them during the 2010 cycle.

Rather than attack candidates who have been backed explicitly by the NRSC or by a state’s party, Cornyn said, unhappy Members should come to him with their concerns.

Cornyn’s speech and his post-election meetings with DeMint are unlikely to curb the South Carolinian’s efforts to forge a more conservative GOP Conference in the Senate. Although he did not have the kinds of successes this year that would warrant the title of conservative kingmaker, he nevertheless was a key player in the victories of Sens. elect Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rand Paul (Ky.).

His Senate Conservatives Fund political action committee also helped funnel thousands of dollars to conservative [when Inside-the-Beltway publications like Roll Call say "conservative," they actually mean "reactionary" or "fascist;" conservatives are called "moderates"] candidates, and DeMint has built over the past two years a significant donor list to help fund future campaign efforts.

Additionally, there have been long-standing rumors that those close to DeMint actively worked behind the scenes to help Republican Mike Lee in his successful primary bid against Sen. Bob Bennett (Utah), although DeMint has repeatedly denied those claims. Lee went on to win the general election.

While DeMint is still expected to actively support conservative candidates in primaries for open seats or seats held by Democrats, he said Thursday that he has agreed not to “plan” to support primary challengers looking to oust any of his colleagues.

“I have no plans to oppose incumbent Republicans in primaries, but I do plan to play an active role in primaries where there is a Democrat incumbent or an open seat. It’s important that principled candidates like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul are not overlooked by our party,” DeMint said.

Cornyn and McConnell had not just backed mainstream conservatives Charlie Crist and Trey Grayson for those two seats, they had recruited and helped finance them. DeMint's interference in those races-- as well as in Utah-- have weakened the Establishment conservatives and strengthened the reactionary-- or even neo-fascist-- forces inside the GOP caucus. Although Rubio is likely to revert to his Establishment roots-- many say the teabag thing was just a pose-- Mike Lee and Rand Paul are out-of-control kooks on a level with some of the more outrageous and dangerous Republicans elected in the House-- from Daniel Webster, Allen West, Sandy Adams and Steve Southerland (the 4 fringe lunatics elected in Florida) to anti-gay zealot Vicky Hartzler (who replaced less of a zealot but still effectively plenty anti-gay incumbent Ike Skelton), obsessed racist Lou Barletta, all around teabag crackpot Alan Nunnelee, and Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin. And DeMint has plenty of fringy allies if he really decides to take Cornyn (or McConnell) down a peg:

Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, issued the following statement regarding a declaration in support of Senator Jim DeMint signed by 56 Tea Party and conservative leaders that was sent to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, National Republican Senatorial Committee John Cornyn, and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele:

"As recently as two days ago, a bitter Lisa Murkowski joined the ranks of GOP establishment whiners who wrongly claim Senator Jim DeMint's support for constitutional conservatives somehow cost Republicans a majority in the Senate.

"Members of the GOP establishment tried to undermine Ronald Reagan in the '60s and '70s, but failed. They will fail in their efforts to undermine Senator DeMint, and the consequences will be far-reaching to the party committees.

"Conservative leaders want it made clear that they consider any attack on Senator Jim DeMint as an attack on conservatives and Tea Partiers.

"Constitutional conservatives stand behind Senator Jim DeMint, who, more than any elected Republican official, is responsible for energizing the conservative base and keeping the Tea Partiers in, or moving them to, the GOP."

On top of that the American Taliban, led by hatemonger Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, is asking religious fanatics to pray for DeMint. "When the establishment failed to energize the base with its moderate platform, Senator DeMint became a crusader for principled conservatism that reached beyond the GOP,” Perkins said. “We want the men and women from both parties to know that an attack on Senator DeMint is an attack on all conservatives and people of faith. He says hee'll have a million of his followers "pray on a regular basis for Senator DeMint.”