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If anyone needed any more proof that the butthurt Rep. Keith Ellison administered to Sean Hannity still smarts, here you go. After having his ass handed to him Tuesday evening by Ellison, Hannity decided for the third night in a row to attack Ellison, and for the second night in a row to hide behind black conservatives to go after Ellison for him.

This Friday, Hannity's guests were David Webb, who is one of Fox's favorites that you can read more about here, and another Astroturf "tea partier" Niger Innis, who again attacked Ellison for daring to attend the Million Man March, and played the guilt by association game we saw from his other two black conservative guests the previous evening.

If Hannity had an ounce of courage or integrity, of which he has neither, he'd allow Ellison back on his show so he could respond to these drummed-up allegations. But he's probably afraid of being made to look like an ass if he allowed Ellison to speak freely.

I really thought I'd seen the worst from Hannity when he went on his months-long attack on President Obama for his association with his former preacher Rev. Wright, but I was wrong in that assumption. With his continued attacks on Rep. Keith Ellison, simply because he dared to let Hannity know to his face what he thought of him, is right up there with that same racial hatred and disgusting flame-throwing we saw over and over from him back then.

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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, panel member and Hayes' fellow contributor at The Nation brought up a topic at the end of the show that we unfortunately don't hear too often on MSNBC, which is the fact that the "Fix the Debt" campaign is not really interested in "fixing" anything. They're funded by a bunch of billionaires that are pushing for austerity measures and who are really just interested in lowering their taxes.

Sadly I don't expect we'll be seeing any disclaimers from the network every time they have one of these lobbyists from Pete Peterson's group on any time soon though, especially considering they've got one of them on their payroll. The more we complain, the more the so-called "liberal" network puts Ed Rendell on the air without disclosing his conflict of interests on the matter and he's just the tip of the iceberg when you look at the entire list of their leadership.

As Nichols informed the viewers here, there is a new web site that's been launched by The Center for Media and Democracy called PRWatch which has a lot more information on "Fix the Debt." You can check out the site here: PRWatch.

And here is more from one of their recent posts: Pete Peterson’s “Fix the Debt” Astroturf Supergroup Detailed in New Online Resource at PetersonPyramid.org:

Madison, WI -- One of the most hypocritical corporate PR campaigns in decades is advancing inside the beltway, attempting to convince the White House, Congress, and the American people that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner that will destroy our economy unless urgent action is taken. Soon this astroturf supergroup may be coming to a state near you.

“We would not be here if it wasn’t for the Peterson Foundation and Pete Peterson. They laid the groundwork and we stand here on their shoulders.” – Fix the Debt Co-Founder Erskine Bowles

Today the Center for Media and Democracy launches a new wiki resources on the funding, leaders, partner groups and lobbyists of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, see it here at PetersonPyramid.org.

Move over David Koch and George Soros! The effort is being bankrolled by one of the wealthiest men in the nation. Peter G. Peterson made a fortune at the Blackstone Group on Wall Street. He conveniently cashed out with $2 billion shortly before the 2008 financial meltdown and now has pledged to spend $1 billion of that payout to convince Americans -- who overwhelmingly want to keep and strengthen Social Security and Medicare -- that these programs threaten our very existence as a nation.

His task is a tough one. [...]

Key to the strategy is ginning up a crisis. In lockstep, the CEOs, politicians, and partner organizations stormed the media last fall warning of the looming disaster of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” Breaching the fiscal cliff “will lead to chaos,” warned Erskine Bowles; “derail the fragile recovery,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein; generate a "shock to the financial markets and a painful return to the recession,” said the CEO of Morgan Stanley.

But this chorus of calamity was pure hype. One Fix the Debt steering committee member, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, let slip that the strategy was to create an “artificial crisis” that would force Congress to act.

Their goal is to achieve a Simpson-Bowles style “grand bargain” on an austerity agenda for the United States by the nation’s 237th birthday on July 4, 2013. [...]

Many Fix the Debt firms pay a very low or even a negative average tax rate, contributing to the nation's deficit. Fix the Debt is secretly pushing for a major tax break that would exempt profits earned overseas by U.S. firms from taxation and encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs. While the Fix the Debt CEOs call for cuts to Social Security, many of the publicly-traded Fix the Debt firms underfund their employee pension plans -- making their workers even more dependent on the popular social insurance plan that American workers pay into with each paycheck.

And as Hayes mentioned during the segment as well, Nichols contributed to The Nation's article on Peterson's group here: Stacking the Deck: The Phony 'Fix the Debt' Campaign.

I hope everyone checks out the entire article and the rest of the resources at PRWatch and I wanted to share just one more item from there. From their SourceWatch page: Fix the Debt Leaders and Conflicts of Interest:

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I have to say that I have been enjoying watching Republicans squirm while they try to figure out what to do about the fact that pandering to the worst elements among their base for decades has put them in the position where they're going to have to decide how to deal with this Frankenstein monster that they've created, or eventually all of the gerrymandering and election rigging in the world isn't going to keep them from going the way of Whigs.

I also thoroughly enjoyed seeing a conversation about their predicament end up leading to Republican history revisionist and head turd-polisher David Brooks inadvertently admitting to something I'm sure he'd rather not talk about at all -- which is the fact that these politicians calling themselves members of the "tea party" are actually just Republicans.

Sadly you're never going to hear Brooks or anyone on PBS admit that there is no "tea party" and that it's just an AstroTurf rebranding effort by the Koch brothers and their allies to get people to forget that George W. Bush ever existed after the damage he did to their party.

And as my fellow C&L contributor Driftglass has reminded his readers on a regular basis, they built this, and what they are finally being forced to confront right now is nothing new by any means: The Fall of the House of Bircher:

They built this.

Yes they did.

A long assembly-line of Conservative miners, smelters, cutters, assemblers, welders and polishers stretching back through Fox and Rove and Bush, through Falwell and Weyrich, through Atwater and Limbaugh, through Reagan and Nixon, though Wallace and Thurmond...all playing with the awful tools of paranoia, rage, white supremacy and faith...all scavenging the barking mad remnants of the Confederacy and the Jesusland dreams of Christopaths to forge for themselves a mighty machine.

A mighty, angry, crazy, bigoted reactionary electoral beast fed on drivel and dung and led by the nose from cause to cause and candidate to candidate, getting a stronger and wilder and more anxious to spit out the bit and run amok every day.

They were warned.

Yes they were.

They were warned -- by Liberals -- as far back as the 1960s that they were tampering with terrible forces (from me, five years ago):

From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:

…

What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct. …

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

Modern Conservatism was born steeped in original, bigoted sin ever since Lyndon Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act --

In conjunction with the civil rights movement, Johnson overcame southern resistance and convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed most forms of racial segregation. Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. Legend has it that, as he put down his pen, Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation," anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.

-- and the rise of the Southern Strategy --

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

-- and has been sliding deeper into the septic tank ever since.

They were warned, but they did it anyway. Kept mollifying thugs. Kept flattering bigots. Kept slaughtering science to appease the theocrats and the garden-variety stoopid. Kept whispering to the stone crazy that their paranoia was patriotic. And, of course, kept on dehumanizing and demonizing patriotic, reality-based Liberals who were trying their damnedest to keep their Pretty Hate Machine from rolling back the whole Enlightenment.

More there so go read the rest. And never mind all that according to David Brooks "the establishment is going to have maybe an easier time of it than some might think" with reigning these people in and there's going to be some "new wing that's going to rise up and change the party from the outside." That's going to be a neat trick without completely alienating their wingnut base they've been pandering to for ages now. Sounds like Brooks is still pushing the same "Third Way," "No Labels" crap we've been hearing from him and his ilk for years now.

Full transcript below the fold.

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As Digby noted, it seems the Republicans are now trying to kill the Frankenstein monster they created:

Karl Rove was instrumental in creating this monster. Now it's got a mind of its own.

It's hard to know how this will play out. The Tea Party is really just the re-branding of the far right of the Republican Party. But it may just be that the establishment made a mistake in doing that. They don't see themselves as Republicans anymore. They see themselves as a distinct movement that wants to explicitly run the Republican Party.

The wingnuts have always had real power within their Party but they didn't know it. Now they do. And they have spent the last 30 years having people like Karl Rove rev them up and expand their egos into believing they represent a majority of Americans and have a responsibility to hew to their principles no matter what. It was a good way to market conservatism. But it was never true.

Rove, Tea Party in GOP civil war:

As they try to pick up the pieces from last fall’s defeat, the establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP are at each other’s throats.

Karl Rove, fresh off the multi-million dollar disaster that was 2012, has launched a new initiative, The New York Times reported Saturday. Known as the Conservative Victory Project, the group, a spin-off of Rove’s American Crossroads, will help recruit establishment Republicans, as well as defend Senate incumbents against challenges from more conservative candidates.

The aim, in a nutshell, is to push back against the Tea Party and bring the GOP’s nominating process back under the control of the party’s Washington power-brokers. In recent cycles, Tea Party-backed Senate candidates have won the Republican nomination over more moderate GOPers, only to be defeated in the general election. In several cases—think of Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks—they’ve been done in thanks in part to campaign trail slip-ups that more seasoned candidates might have avoided.

But the news has triggered a full-blown revolt among conservative activists, both inside and outside Washington. Read on...

And here's more from Steve Benen: Welcoming the Conservative Victory Project to the field:

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Chris Matthews actually tried to get a coherent response out of now ex-chairman of the astroturf FreedomWorks about why Republicans claim to be the party of small government, but they can't seem to keep themselves from inserting government into women's reproductive health or from hating on gay people and insisting that they can't get married. Armey's response was to basically fling as much poo as he could find in the direction of the other party and say "but the Democrats...":

Armey acknowledged there had been several “foolish mistakes” the GOP made during the campaign season, including Mitt Romney’s remarks about the 47%. He insisted the party was trying to “rediscover its relationship” with constitutional limitations on big government and fiscal responsibility.

Host Chris Matthews asked why, if the Republicans are really the party of limited government, does the party have its candidates trying to get rid of contraception, and outlaw gay marriage and abortion. “Why don’t you stay out of people’s lives if you really wanted limited government?” asked Matthews.

The former lawmaker insisted that there were simply a few bad apple candidates, just like the Democrats have “had a few rather strange people,” too. When Matthews pointed out the GOP platform includes items about personhood and contraception, Armey insisted the Democrats also have “unusual” and “strange” items in their platform.

“Name one,” Matthews challenged.

“Homosexual marriage, all right. Abortion on demand,” Armey shot back. “These issues are in your platform. You don’t think it’s strange for these issues to be in your platform pointing in one direction, but you consider it outrageous that the other party has the same issues pointing in the another direction in their platform.”

Matthews responded, “The Democratic party generally supports Roe vs. Wade. It does not support ‘abortion on demand,’” adding the issue of gay marriage is going to be decided state by state, not nationally.

Matthews tried to get Armey to dish on FreedomWorks a bit more, now that he's taken the $8 million golden parachute of a retirement they paid so they could be rid of him, but Armey didn't have much to say on that front and was still trying to pretend that they're some grassroots movement -- and not a rebranding effort to get the Bush-stink off the word Republican. Driftglass has more on that and Dick Armey from back in 2010 here.

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I guess no matter how badly these so-called "tea party" leaders behave, we won't see them kicked off the air any time soon. Case in point: Wingnut Judson Phillips, CEO of Tea Party Nation, who as we've noted here is prone to misogynistic attacks on female Democrats, has had some trouble paying his group's hotel bills and who wants President Obama to prove that he doesn’t smoke crack and have gay sex. What a guy. But here he was on MSNBC this Thursday, being allowed to pretend he doesn't know Republicans won the House due to gerrymandering, and throwing both Boehner and Romney under the bus.

Thomas Roberts might be good when it comes to LGBT issues (which he actually cares about), but he's fairly useless when it comes to holding most of his guests' feet to the fire on anything else. This interview was just another example of that.

Naturally, Phillips was demanding that John Boehner not give an inch on these "fiscal cliff" negotiations and that we cut spending to take care of our deficit. I agree with him on getting rid of government waste, but I suspect he and I might have very different ideas about what amounts to "wasteful spending." Republicans always think "waste" equals gutting our social safety nets - he was short on specifics and wasn't asked to clarify.

Phillips was also happy to make excuses for why Republicans lost the presidential election and threw Romney right under the bus --and even backed over him a couple of times: Tea Party Leader: Romney Was ‘The Worst Candidate In History’:

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips on Thursday disputed that President Obama claimed a mandate in November's election, arguing that his re-election victory came over "the worst candidate in history in Mitt Romney."

"You know, Obama ran on the fact he was going to raise taxes, the Republicans put up the worst candidate in history in Mitt Romney, yet Obama allegedly has this mandate," Phillips said during an appearance on MSNBC. "Well, why did Republicans keep the House if Obama has this great mandate? People don't want their taxes going up. What people do want is spending cuts."

If Romney was the "worst candidate" ever, what does that say about the rest of the wingnuts he was running against in their primary? He would have been a bad candidate already, but Phillips and his ilk along with the rest of the GOP base pushing him to the right helped to assure his fate. He alienated every group out there other than crusty old white men and the millionaires paying his tab, and he paid dearly for it later.

It's always amusing to watch these guys come on the air and complain about a problem they helped create. It's too bad they're not called out for it and asked about who is funding these AstroTurf groups that they represent when they're allowed on the air.

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I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Joan Walsh get a chance to give Dick Armey his due after the way he treated her on Hardball back in early 2009. While discussing the mess over at FreedomWorks, which Karoli already wrote about here, Walsh called Armey and his fellow astroturfers exactly what they are -- a bunch of grifters.

Matthews took issue with the description, but I'd say Walsh is spot on. Armey and his ilk have lined their pockets, nicely extracting money from their rich backers and from those naive enough to actually believe that this so-called "tea party" is a grassroots movement, instead of what it actually is: a rebranding effort to get the Bush stink off of the label Republican.

Unlike Matthews and his producers, who seem more worried about trying to book Armey and Kibbe as guests on his show, his colleague at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow called out Armey among a host of others who are getting rich off of these con games earlier this month. Karoli wrote about that here: Rachel Maddow Slams Conservative Fox Commentators and Other Right Wing Scammers and MSNBC now has the transcript up for that show as well.

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As Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was about to sign their union-busting right-to-work-for-less bills into law, Chris Matthews spoke to UAW President Bob King and the State Director of the Michigan chapter of Americans for Prosperity's Scott Hagerstrom. Matthews attempted to get Hagerstrom to come clean about who "signs his paycheck" and despite repeated badgering from Matthews, refused to acknowledge that AFP is just a front group for the Koch brothers.

He just works for a grass roots organization, like the Red Cross don't you know! And they have lots of donors. He didn't want to talk about their one big one though. Here's more on Hagerstrom and his remarks back in February of 2011 from Think Progress: Koch Front Group Americans For Prosperity: ‘Take The Unions Out At The Knees’:

In a speech earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference, Americans For Prosperity-Michigan Executive Director Scott Hagerstrom revealed the true goal of his group and its allies like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) efforts. Speaking at CPAC’s “Panel for Labor Policy,” Hagerstrom said that AFP really wants to do is to “take the unions out at the knees”:

HAGERSTROM: It’s easy to go out there and fight taxes and increased regulation, you know we send out an action alert on taxes to AFP and we get thousands of people to respond. You send out one on a more complicated issue and it just doesn’t quite resonate…We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.

Taking “the unions out at the knees” has long been a goal of the Koch brothers and their many front groups. In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the Kochs worked with other anti-labor billionaires, corporations and activists to fund conservative candidates and groups across the country. Now after viciously opposing pro-middle class policies for years, Koch Industries is trying to eliminate the only organizations which serve as a counterweight to the well-oiled corporate machine.

Sadly they managed to succeed in that goal today in Michigan. Sourcewatch has more on Americans for Prosperity here and the fact that they are indeed just a front group for the Koch brothers here.

This interview has a bunch of right wing blogs worked up of course, the usual suspects that I'm not going to link to, calling Matthews "unhinged" and claiming he "berated" Hagerstrom because he asked him time and again who funds AFP. If they think this is Matthews coming "unhinged" they must not watch the show much, because this is pretty mild by his standards. There are times that stuff can be annoying out of him. This wasn't one of them.

The AFP chair was on there pretending he's got the interest of those workers in Michigan at heart and that they're just some grass roots organization instead of an AstroTurf front group who only care about a race to the bottom on wages so their rich donors can squeeze some more blood out of the working class.

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Now that it appears Republicans' backs are against the wall on whether taxes are going to go up for the wealthiest among us one way or the other, Bill Kristol decided to double down on his remarks that Republican Party shouldn't "fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires." I don't think he got the Koch brothers' approval for the claim he made this Sunday, which is that there are a lot of "tea party" guys that "don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes."

Tell that to their leaders Bill. That seems to be all they care about. These AstroTurf groups know who they're beholden to and who is funding them. Of course he qualified that by saying they'd accept it because it would lead to the "grand bargain" they're all pining for and tax rates being lowered later as part of that deal. So I don't think he's completely off the reservation as Bob Woodward asserted here. The truth of the matter is, Republicans are not bargaining from a position of strength right now, and Kristol and the rest of them know it, whether they're willing to admit it or not.

Here's the exchange from Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: And let me explain what came out of the meeting on Friday, is the idea, is a two-step compromise, that there is a down payment and there's talk about $50 billion, perhaps, by the end of the year and, then a promise with triggers they would achieve a grand bargain -- heard that word before -- next year, major tax reform, major entitlement reform.

Bill Kristol, how realistic is that two step approach.

KRISTOL: I think it is pretty realistic. I think -- and I think Republicans are going -- there will be a deal by December 31, and I believe Republicans will yield a bit on top rates. I mean, President Obama ran twice on this platform and he won last I looked, both presidential elections.

He's...

WALLACE: What was the reaction - you made a lot of news last week when you said it wouldn't kill Republicans to raise the top rate. In fact, as you know, you were favorably cited not by name, by the president during his news conference. I'm sure that shot your credibility...

KRISTOL: That was bad. That was a bad moment. But you know you've got to persevere, even when these things happen.

WALLACE: What was the reaction among Republicans?

KRISTOL: The private reaction one Republican congressman was honestly, including very conservative ones, was, I don't know, do we really have to give anything - I guess maybe we do. Maybe it was good that you said that, because we need to cut a deal.

He won two elections. He didn't raise rates correctly in 2009 because we were in the midst of a horrible downturn. Republicans won a huge off year election in 2010 and were able to bargain to a status quo deal. I just don't think Republicans have the leverage, or that it's worth using all their - whatever leverage they have, to maintain rates at 35 percent instead of 37 or 38, especially if you can take it up to millionaires.

I just don't think it's economically as a matter of policy important enough.

Then the big deal has to be big tax reform with lower rates, I think.

WALLACE: 30 seconds left, Bob. And this was the subject of your book. How optimistic are you that they make a deal and avert the fiscal cliff?

WOODWARD: well, let's hope they do. But they are going to burn Bill Kristol's Tea Party card hearing him talk like this. You are off the reservation.

KRISTOL: You know, a lot of the Tea Party guys don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes, honestly.

WALLACE: But are you optimistic.

WOODWARD: Well, you have to - because if this isn't fixed we're going to have a global catastrophe.

WALLACE: On that happy note, thank you. See you next week.

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Indiana Republican Sen. Dick Lugar and his 77 percent conservative voting record was not good enough to prevent him from having a "tea party" primary challenger, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. Complete and total obstruction rather than an iota of compromise to make sure the government actually functions seems to be the new standard of what it means to be a "conservative" these days.

The panel on ABC's This Week weighed in on Lugar's primary challenge and pundits Bay Buchanan and George Will think it's just wonderful that Lugar is facing a primary challenge, despite the fact that he's got a lot better chance of defeating his Democratic challenger, Joe Donnelly. They might want to be careful what they wish for.

Nate Silver has more on that: Lugar Loss Could Provide Pickup Opportunity for Democrats:

The latest veteran lawmaker to be the subject of a vigorous primary challenge is the 80-year-old Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who is being challenged for the Republican nomination by State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. [...]

If Mr. Lugar loses, it should increase Democrats’ odds of picking up the Senate seat in November. Democrats have a fairly good candidate in Indiana in the form of United States Representative Joe Donnelly, who represents the Second Congressional District and who narrowly retained his seat in a very tough environment for Democrats nationally in 2010. The Second District, which includes South Bend and Michigan City, is slightly Republican-leaning relative to the country as a whole but slightly Democratic-leaning relative to the rest of Indiana.

I'm not getting my hopes up on this one, but it would be nice to see Republicans lose a seat in the Senate because of their purity tests. This AstroTurf so-called "tea party" of theirs, which is nothing but a rebranding effort by the far right wing of the party which wants to push them continually to the right has done some damage in previous elections already. Maybe we get lucky here and they do it again.

Transcript of the panel discussion below the fold.

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