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Chris Matthews carries water for the C-Street house members and asks Jeff Sharlet if some of them are living there because they just want a cheap place to stay. This is after having Jeff Sharlet fully explain to him what type of activities are going on there.

Matthews also seems to think that he has "outed" these members. Not hardly Chris. You're only almost a month and a mound of interviews behind your co-worker Rachel Maddow with your interview of Jeff Sharlet. Matthews appears to be a whole lot more worried about the reaction he's going to get from the Congress members for this interview than reporting the truth about them.

Matthews just can't seem to wrap his brain around the idea that Irish Catholics or Jews might be staying at the C-Street House as well and that not all of them are "fundamentalists".

Matthews: Let me ask you about what's wrong here. So what? My favorite question. So what if a bunch of these guys go to prayer breakfast and all live together. I see some guys here like Irish Catholic Mike Doyle, Bart Stupak, he's not a fundamentalist. I know what Zach Wamp is. John Ensign, you mentioned him, Tom Coburn is probably a fundamentalist. What, people have their own religion, they go to prayer breakfast, I don't know that culture very well, but what's so harmful about it?

Sharlet: Absolutely nothing going to a prayer group or you want to pray with some folks, you want to get support. The issue is when you have an organization that is not registered like a lobby that's acting like a lobby...

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If you've been a follower of not just Crooks and Liars, but my little corner over here at Video Cafe, you're fully aware already that Rachel Maddow has given the C-Street creepy, Christian cult plenty of coverage on her show on MSNBC. Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, was a guest on this week's Real Time with Bill Maher, and they delved into one topic that I've yet to see Rachel devote a lot of time to, and that was the topic of mega-churches on military bases, and the likes of C-Street member Zach Wamp making sure they're funded. If this isn't enough to make your skin crawl if you care about separation of church and state, I don't know what is.

Maher: And they are you say more of a lobbying group, even though it somehow gets away with being a tax exempt church.

Sharlet: Yeah, at one point they actually discussed, you know we should, we should register as a lobby. We can be a lobby to advance god's kingdom, and then they had a brain storm, you know what, we can be much more effective if we don't register as a lobby and we just work behind the scenes. Which is true. And which is why we have laws requiring you to register as a lobby.

Maher: And one of the things they're lobbiying for is for example mega-churches on military bases.

Sharlet: That's one of the things that's come out in fact as a result of the C-Street revelations. Zach Wamp is a Congressman who lives at the C-Street House.

Maher: Who?

Sharlet: Zach Wamp. Great name. He's running as the Governor of Tennessee.

Maher: Zach Wamp.

Sharlet: Wamp.

Maher: Wamp.

Sharlet: Wamp. Remember his name. Wamp.

Maher: How could I forget it. It's...Zach Wamp, where is he from?

Sharlet: Chattanooga. Wamp of Chattanooga. Um, Wamp pretended...

Maher: What does he want to do?

Sharlet: Well, he's ganged up with a group of his buddies on the subcommittee of the appropriations committee, and what they're doing is funneling last years, over fifty million dollars towards the construction of mega-church chapels on military bases around the country. Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Fort Hood down in Texas, and a lot of these constructions, in fact I think the biggest buildings that the Army is building now.

Maher: And you've written about this too. I mean broaden this out a little bit. The military, I don't think people know this story either. This is really scary stuff, that the people with the guns are becoming sort of a messianic cult.

Sharlet: That's, that's when, you know, it starts getting scary. When there are guns attached, right? Well fifty years ago...

Maher: Guns and tanks. I mean, you know...

Sharlet proceeded to quote from his article at Harpers, Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military. Scary, scary stuffl. As Maher pointed out when ending the segment, Sharlet is a brave man for doing the reporting he's done.

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Rachel reports on the latest shoe to drop in the C-Street House, John Ensign scandal.

Maddow: We now have news that just eight days after the public announcement of his own affair, Sen. Ensign gave a $5000 contribution to one of his C-Street housemates, Congressman Zach Wamp. Ensign's political action committee made the contribution on June 24th. Congressman Wamp's campaign committee accepted the contribution five days later on June 29th. So far Congressman Wamp has not returned the money. Zach Wamp of course is a conservative family values Republican. He is campaigning for governor in Tennessee in part on his enthusiasm for the sanctity of marriage.

Oh these wonderful family values Republicans. As Rachel notes, there are still no answers as to whether Rep. Wamp and the others living at C-Street had anything to do with Sen. Ensign getting his parents to funnel hush money to his mistress and her family, and the C-Street scandal is starting to catch up to all of the people involved as their local press starts to ask more questions.

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Rep. Zach Wamp's office contacted The Rachel Maddow Show to complain about the C-Street coverage on her program last Friday.

Maddow: Well on Friday's show I quoted an account from the Knoxville News Centinal in which a member of congress who lives at C-Street described one of the most worrying aspects of this shadowy, powerful organization, its secrecy. The Congressman in question is Zach Wamp of Tennessee. He has lived at C-Street for a dozen years and here's what I said about him on Friday.

Zack Wamp of Tennessee is a Republican member of Congress who says he has lived in the C Street house for 12 years. Today, he told “The Knoxville News Sentinel” that the members of Congress who live there are sworn to secrecy.

Quoting from the “News Sentinel,” “The C Street residents have all agreed they won‘t talk about their private living arrangements, Wamp said and he intends to honor that pact. ‘I hate it that John Ensign lives in the house and this happened because it opens up all of these kinds of questions,‘ Wamp said. But, he said, ‘I'm not going to be the guy who goes out and talks.‘”

Maddow went on to say that although Wamp's office claimed he was misquoted on her show, but they have not asked the Knoxville News Sentinal to correct their article and until they do, she's standing by her reporting. Good for her.

I don't think Wamp's doing the GOP any favors by complaining and giving Rachal Maddow another reason to keep this C-Street story alive, not that Ensign and Sanford aren't doing a good enough job without his help.

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From Bill Moyers Journal, former CIGNA head of public relations Wendell Potter and Moyers discuss the Republicans mindlessly reading from Frank Luntz's memo, which is based on health insurance industry talking points and fear mongering

BILL MOYERS: I have a memo written by Frank Luntz. He's the Republican strategist who we discovered, in the spring, has written the script for opponents of health care reform. "First," he says, "you have to pretend to support it. Then use phrases like, "government takeover," "delayed care is denied care," "consequences of rationing," "bureaucrats, not doctors prescribing medicine." That was a memo, by Frank Luntz, to the opponents of health care reform in this debate. Now watch this clip.

REP. JOHN BOEHNER: The forthcoming plan from Democratic leaders will make health care more expensive, limit treatments, ration care, and put bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions rather than patients and doctors.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL: Americans need to realize that when someone says "government option," what could really occur is a government takeover that soon could lead to government bureaucrats denying and delaying care, and telling Americans what kind of care they can have.

SEN. JON KYL: Washington run healthcare would diminish access to quality care, leading to denials, shortages and long delays for treatment.

REP. JOE WILSON: How will a government run health plan not lead to the same rationing of care that we have seen in other countries?

REP. TOM PRICE: We don't want to put the government, we don't want to put bureaucrats between a doctor and a patient.

BILL MOYERS: Why do politicians puppet messages like that?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, they are ideologically aligned with the industry. They want to believe that the free market system can and should work in this country, like it does in other industries. So they don't understand from an insider's perspective like I have, what that actually means, and the consequences of that to Americans.

They parrot those comments, without really realizing what the real situation is.

I was watching MSNBC one afternoon. And I saw Congressman Zach Wamp from Tennessee. He's just down the road from where I grew up, in Chattanooga. And he was talking-- he was asked a question about health care reform. I think it was just a day or two after the president's first-- health care reform summit. And he was one of the ones Republicans put on the tube.

And he was saying that, you know, the health care problem is not necessarily as bad as we think. That of the uninsured people, half of them are that way because they want to "go naked."

REP. ZACH WAMP: Half the people that are uninsured today choose to remain uninsured. Half of them don't have any choice but half of them choose to, what's called, go naked, and just take the chance of getting sick. They end up in the emergency room costing you and me a whole lot more money.

WENDELL POTTER: He used the word naked. It's an industry term for those who, presumably, choose not to buy insurance, because they don't want to. They don't want to pay the premiums. So he was saying that half... Well, first of all, it's nothing like that. It was an absolutely ridiculous comment. But it's an example of a member of Congress buying what the insurance industry is peddling.

I highly, highly recommend watching the entire interview for anyone that hasn't already. It would be nice to see someone in the main stream media have Potter on as a guest, but I'm not holding my breath.

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Rachel Maddow follows up her reporting on the C-Street House and what secrets lie within it.

Maddow: But we start tonight with a mystery. A mystery that’s unfolding along side the two major political scandals of the summer. It’s a mystery that concerns this house, at 133 C Street Southeast in Washington D.C. I’m calling it a house because, that’s what it looks like to me and people do live there, but if you consult this building’s financial paper trail you will find that it’s actually considered to be a church. That designation makes C-Street a convenient tax free haven for the secretive organization that runs it. An organization that is known as The Family.

It also makes for some awkward tax and income questions for the at least five, probably seven members of Congress who live at the house in exchange for what appears to be substantially below market rent. As explained by our guest last night, Jeff Sharlet who secretly infiltrated The Family to write a book about them, the C-Street house is a former convent. It’s used as a sort of subsidized, really upscale dorm for members of Congress who are associated with this powerful, poorly understood religious group.

The Family and the house at C-Street have ended up reluctantly in the headlines now because of the two major politicians’ sex scandals that are embroiling the Republican party this summer, and that have taken two of their reported 2012 presidential hopefuls out of political contention.

Embattled Sen. John Ensign lives at the C-Street house. The husband of Sen. Ensign’s mistress says that prominent members of The Family and this religious group including the sons of the group’s founder, as well as other members of congress who live at C-Street were both aware of Ensign’s secret affair, and were involved in his efforts to pay off the mistress and her family as the affair was on again, off again, ending. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn lives at C-Street with Ensign. He has said he encouraged Ensign to end the affair, but he has denied the allegation that he specifically encouraged Sen. Ensign to pay the mistress off to the tune of millions of dollars.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford mentioned C-Street by name in his long public statement of regret about his affair with a woman in Argentina.

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MSNBC's Tamron Hall had her mind blown dealing with yet another southern Republican congressman, this time Zach Wamp who jumped right out the gate calling any move towards health reform by the Obama administration a move towards "socialism" and "class warfare". Wamp described health care as a privilege, not a right.

John Amato:

I can't really write much about this. Wamp's view speaks for itself and most of the GOP.

Raw Story:

President Obama is set to convene a summit on reforming healthcare Thursday, and some Republicans are already taking shots. Rep. Zach Wamp (Rep-Tenn) told MSNBC's Tamron Hall that Obama's proposed healthcare plans would be a "fast march to socialism", and that he believes that healthcare is not a right because many choose not to have insurance.

"This is almost class warfare in order for him to be able to say everyone now has health care. Listen, healthcare is a privilege," said Wamp.

The MSNBC anchor was almost taken aback by the "privilege" remark and asked Wamp to explain. "If you have cancer right now do you see it as a privilege to get some treatment?"

"I was just about to say, for some people it's a right but for everyone frankly it's not necessarily a right," he said. "Half the people uninsured today choose to remain uninsured. Half of them don't have any choice, but half of them choose to what's called 'go naked' and take the risk of getting sick. They end up in the emergency room costing you and me a whole lot more money."

After Wamp finished, Hall came very close to implying that the GOP couldn't come up with any viable alternatives.

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I've already posted one example of this, and now here's a second one I happened across. Zach Wamp went on Washington Journal and repeated the CBO stimulus lie debunked by the HuffPo. This is going to be an ongoing theme and the subject of more posts here at Video Cafe until these guys quit repeating this lie.