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Oh my. Juan Williams probably didn't make his overlord Rupert Murdoch too happy with this segment on Fox News Sunday. What's next? Him letting everyone know that one of their owners is a sponsor of the "ground zero mosque" that's not a mosque? The horror! Williams actually dares to point out that outside groups like the health care industry and the oil industry are funding the "Tea Party" astroturf movement.

I found it fairly humorous to hear the rest of them on the panel pretend like this is not just the fringe right of the GOP while admitting that the so called "movement" has been good for Republicans in the mid-term elections with energizing their base and that they've not taken the movement outside of the party. Well of course they haven't. The teabaggers are the Republican Party and as we've said before, nothing but a re-branding effort to get that Bush stink off of the name. And note to Liz Cheney, if there's an "elite" sitting at the table, it's you, not Juan Williams. Your butt would not have had the job you did at the State Department or be sitting on Fox News as a panelist if it weren't for your daddy.

WALLACE: Juan, you know, I want to get back to this point. At least seven states that we counted, tea party insurgent candidates beat the Republican establishment candidates. I don't think you can ignore the fact that there's a sea change going on here inside the Republican Party.

WILLIAMS: I don't see how you can get away from the idea that there's a, I guess, civil war or whatever you want to call it going on within the party for exactly what does the Republican Party represent.

In fact, so much money that is funding the tea party clearly now is coming from outside the Republican establishment, some of it coming from, I guess, the health care industry, some of it from the oil industry. They're all angry at Barack Obama.

But they've overdosed now in terms of the anger at Obama -- you know, Obama's a socialist, Obama's a Muslim, Obama's this and that, not born in the country. And it's stirred up things to the point where I think the establishment has lost control and the tea party is now in control in terms of picking candidates. And when I hear you guys talking about O'Donnell, I mean, it's amazing to me. OK, so O'Donnell has trouble with taxes, her academic credentials, paying for school, paying her own mortgage. She's someone with no record.

And when you start to talk policy -- you know, Obama's un- American, she wants to do away with the Education Department, she's someone who says her jobs plan for America is simply cut the capital gains tax, I think when the voters of Delaware -- by the way, Delaware has very few Republican voters, more independents than Republicans, and more Democrats than independents -- I just think people are anti- establishment and willing to challenge things. They're wiling to give Republicans a chance.

But when they look at that kind of candidate, they say, "This is fringe. This is extreme." And that's the problem across the country.

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Republican operative and CNN political commentator Alex Castellanos plays a nice little game of false equivalencies when talking about the chances of right winger Christine O'Donnell and whether that GOP/Tea Party candidate might upset Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican primary race for the U. S. Senate. Never mind the extremism of the right wing and the teabaggers and who is funding that movement, the left wing blogosphere is just the same thing when it comes to the fringes of either party.

I take Castellanos to task for a few things here. One, the teabaggers out there are not some movement that started from a grassroots political uprising. They are a movement that wanted to re-brand the Republican Party so it got the taint of the Bush stink removed from it and that want to pretend they are something different than just the rabid right wing base of the Republican Party. They're sponsored by Dick Armey and Tim Phillips and every other Republican front group that is taking advantage of these seniors that they're busing out there to participate in their protests.

The left wing blogosphere is not some organized group that walks in lock-step with the Democratic Party and pretends like everything the leadership is doing is alright with them. To compare the two is utterly ridiculous but of course no one was going to point that out on Cooper's show.

COOPER: Well, Alex, if she does win the Republican Party nomination, it does say -- does it say much about the power of Sarah Palin? I mean, how much do you think she would owe that victory to Sarah Palin?

CASTELLANOS: Oh, I don't think -- I think this is much bigger than Sarah Palin.

Republican primaries like this one, closed, are a little bit like private clubs. Only Republicans get to vote. So, even if it's Delaware, a left-of-center state, you can still have a very right- leaning primary. And that's what you have here.

Now, the left has the blogosphere. The right has the Tea Party. And they're a little bit like the lines on the side of the road. You're glad you're there. They tell you how far you can go, but you don't necessarily want to drive there all the time.

I do think the Tea Party's detriment, their -- the liability of the Tea Party is overstated by the media. Tea Party candidates are running ahead in places like Colorado. Ron Johnson is running even with Russ Feingold.

So, the Tea Party -- if you ask Americans, hey, do you agree with the Tea Party, 60 percent say yes. And it's because of Washington. This is an anti-Washington election. So, don't count these candidates out yet.

COOPER: So -- so, you think she could still win in that state, even if she gets the Republican nomination?

CASTELLANOS: Oh, I think she could, but I think it's -- Paul is right. It's much tougher. In a general election, it's not a private club. And it is a left-of-center state, and it would be much tougher. There's no question.

But, you know, here's what Republicans say. What good would it do us to have an Arlen Specter in the Senate? And that's the way many Republicans up there look at Mike Castle. You know, we had to ship Arlen Specter back over to the Democrats, where he was much more comfortable. What good would it do to try to build a new Republican Senate majority around that?

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Rachel Maddow showed us the extremism and political activism of wife of Supreme Court Justice and self-proclaimed Tea Party member Ginni Thomas without comment other than to note that she's married to someone that has a lifelong appointment to that court and this is something we've never seen before. I'll not refrain and just say that it's pathetic that I think it's pretty obvious how badly our Supreme Court has been politicized by the right when one of the Justices couldn't bother to ask his wife to refrain from doing this and that it's also really pathetic that our mainstream media for the most part has paid no attention to this story other than to hype her as a "Power Player" over at Fox.

If one of the more liberal members of the court had a spouse out there at either union rallies or something sponsored by MoveOn.org, our media would be covering it like a bunch of rabid dogs and insisting that the Justice renounce the activities of their spouse. But if your wife is out there with the astroturf teabaggers drumming up the hate, you get a collective yawn from them. Pitiful. Good for Rachel for shedding some light on what she's doing in the manner it deserves, with or without comment. The video speaks for itself.

MADDOW: We don't think there is any precedent for a spouse of a sitting Supreme Court Justice being engaged in political activism to the extent that the wife of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is doing right now and of which we have tape. In general the family member of a Supreme Court justice would not be somebody who's activities would be considered inherently newsworthy. Same goes at least as far as I'm concerned for politician's families, unless they get themselves involved in politics.

But I don't know of anybody else who has ever held the job title "Supreme Court Justice" while their spouse has been a very public national activist like this. So noted without further comment, just so you know it's true... Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginni Thomas.

(Cut to video)

They're scared to death of you... cheers. There's a war going on against tyranny. We're at risk of losing the country. Ginni Thomas is married to Clarence Thomas who has a lifetime appointment as a justice of the United States Supreme Court and other than that, we are noting that without comment.

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Think Progress' Lee Fang has been doing research on the billionaire Koch brothers for some time now and this week author Jane Mayer also wrote an extensive piece on them for The New Yorker, Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.

Lee Fang appeared on Countdown to discuss his research at Think Progress.

For the past two years, ThinkProgress researcher Lee Fang has been digging into the nefarious activities of the Koch family, reporting on their funding of the tea parties, the depth of their astroturfing, and their family’s record of right-wing radicalism.

Using a great deal of TP’s research, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer published a lengthy article this week that gives the “Kochtopus” ideological network the mainstream media attention it deserves. In order to “alter the direction of America,” the oil family has been “giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups.”

Jane Mayer joined Rachel Maddow the following hour to discuss her article in The New Yorker.

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How would you like to be Gov. Jennifer Granholm and get stuck debating Dick Armey after the way he treated Rachel Maddow after their appearance together on Meet the Press and Joan Walsh on Hardball? I sure as hell don't envy her. For a little reminder of why no woman should ever want to appear on the air with the aptly named Dick Armey, he told Joan Walsh on Hardball "I'm so glad that you could never be my wife because I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day." Then after Rachel Maddow dared to challenge him for calling Medicare "tyranny" on Meet the Press, he insulted her at one of his phony astroturf teabagger rallies held by Americans for Prosperity and called her "some woman named Rachel Maddox" who "has a Ph.D. in something that doesn't matter." What a guy.

Granholm did a pretty good job of beating back teabagger Dick Armey's ridiculous arguments on Social Security and Medicare when Armey and David Gregory would let her get a word in. Armey's pretty good at filibustering for someone who came out of the House and not the Senate. You can't shut him up and he interrupts the other guests at every opportunity, which seems to be standard operating procedure for most Republicans when they go on television.

Americans do not want to see their benefits cut so the rich can keep their Bush tax cuts and to pay back the deficit after the treasury's been looted paying for these wars and tax cuts for the rich.

MR. GREGORY: Talking about your folks, you're talking about tea partiers around the country and the movement that you've written about. One of the arguments that Democrats make about some of the candidates who are supported by the tea party is that they're, frankly, too extreme for the--even the mainstream of the Republican Party. And I want to go through some of the top races and have you respond to that.

REP. ARMEY: Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: Colorado U.S. Senate race, Ken Buck, Republican nominee. He wants to eliminate the Energy and Education Departments, says separation of church and state is too strictly enforced. To Kentucky, Rand Paul, tea party candidate in the Senate race, critical, of course, of the minimum wage law, civil rights law, supports cutting back on unemployment insurance, calls Medicare socialized medicine. Nevada, Sharron Angle, for the Senate again, talks about no adoption for same sex couples, the U.S. should pull out of the U.N., privatize Medicare and Social Security. And finally, in Utah in the Senate race, you've got Mike Lee. He wants to repeal the progressive income tax, supports changing the 14th Amendment of birthright citizenship. If this is the tea party's impact on national politics, there's certainly a lot of Democrats who say too extreme for the mainstream of the political country.

REP. ARMEY: Well, first, first of all, each one of these candidates won a Republican primary as a Republican candidate with a variety of different stresses on different issues. I am not going to take the Democrat Party's characterization of a Republican Party candidate's position on any issue as the gospel truth. I don't know if you've noticed, but politicians say insincere things; and, frankly, I don't quite listen to the Democrats on the candidates. But the voters paid attention to the candidates and made their choice. Now, the Democrats are--they have a guy down in, in South Carolina who wins the primary and, and is then convicted of a felony. They ought to concern themselves with, "What is the quality of our candidates, and can we meet the challenge of trying to race against these candidates?" who are going to beat their person in the, in the fall.

MR. GREGORY: Governor, is this an example of what, what they've called a mainstream political movement, some of these candidates and their views?

GOV. GRANHOLM: Well, you know, no. I think it's far outside the mainstream. In fact, one of the things--you just held up Paul Ryan's, you know, proposal regarding Medicare and regarding Social Security. I think a lot of which you've jumped onto as well. But there was a recent poll out that said that 85 percent of Americans don't want to see Social Security cut to solve the, the deficit. The reality is, you know, as a governor of the state that has had the toughest economic go-over the past eight years, I'm just really interested in what works to create jobs, what works. And the proposals that are coming from these candidates are not proposals that work. This is the laboratory of the states right here, and I can tell you what has worked. What has worked is the government smartly intervening to save the auto industry; smartly, strategically, surgically intervening to invest with the private sector to create, for example, the electric batteries for the vehicles; smartly intervening with the private sector to be able to do the breakthrough technologies that the private sector doesn't have the funds to be able to do. That's what other countries are doing. And we've got to realize that these economic models that just say, "We've got to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut," you know, who's applauding most is China. They're happy that this movement is happening...

MR. GREGORY: But there's...

GOV. GRANHOLM: ...that's going to continue to cut away.

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Keith Olbermann talked to The Washington Post's Dave Weigel about the significance of Bob Bennett's defeat in Utah.

How the Club for Growth beat Bob Bennett:

The free-market PAC's spokesman, Mike Connolly, explains all to David Catanese. The rundown:

-- The Club for Growth spent only $177,750 against Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), "largely on phone calls to delegates, online strategy, mailings and robo-calls."

-- The pivotal moment for Bennett, as many strategists told me, was the election of a new crop of conservative activists in the March 23 caucuses. Those activists, many coming out of the tea party movement, held Bennett's fate in their hands. And he never had a chance at the convention.

It emphasizes that as exciting as this story was, it's simply not repeatable in other states -- Utah's empowerment of the most dedicated activists, which lets them shrink the primary field to their two preferred candidates, is unprecedented.

Keith asked Dave Weigel if electing these tea party candidates is going to be beneficial to the Democrats.

Weigel: Well, they do celebrate whenever this happens. They’ll have a better shot at a couple of Senate seats, a couple of House seats if tea partiers nominate somebody who can’t win. In this case Utah’s a very tough nut to crack. They’ve got a candidate but they’re not optimistic. But in Arizona if J.D. Hayworth beats John McCain they’ve got a Phoenix city councilman who they think could win there.

Charlie Crist if he ends up winning that three way race or if Kendrick Meek wins in Florida that’s better than they could have had in a two way race. They actually had a bad situation this weekend in Hawaii where there’s an intra-Democratic Party feud that cost them a seat. But generally they’re quietly cheering and they’re waiting to unleash a lot of opposition research once these nominees are well chosen. Utah not so much, other states like South Dakota, Ohio, not Ohio yet, other states they’re hoping that tea party candidates make these challenges.

Keith also asked him if some of them getting elected are going to hurt the Republican Party since it's going to show them to be extremists. Weigel expressed something along the lines of my feelings about Republicans. If the crazies like Michele Bachmann haven't already hurt the party, a few more of these wingnuts isn't going to matter much with the electorate as pissed off as they are now at politicians in general.

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Rachel Maddow warns us about the lastest astroturf group which we're sure to see more of as the debate over financial reform continues. As she notes, Rick Berman has been setting up web sites and corporate front groups that mirror legitimate watchdog sites to try to undermine them. The Consumer Rights League was set up in 2007 and it shares the same acronym with the Center for Responsible Lending, which was set up thirty years ago as an actual consumer rights group. The Consumer Rights League is now organizing protests against the real consumer rights group, the Center for Responsible Lending.

The Huffington Post has more on this here -- Center For Responsible Lending In Fight With Front Group:

The Center for Responsible Lending says the Consumer Rights League is just doing the bidding of the financial industry, which opposes reforms advocated by the center.

"This is an industry-funded front group, also known as Astroturf, that can't win on the merits of their arguments so they have to attack people personally," said Kathleen Day, spokeswoman for the Center for Responsible Lending. "They lack transparency. "That should make everyone wonder why. Whose water are they carrying?"

"We don't claim to be a grassroots organization. We claim to be a different voice for consumers," Flynn said.

But who's paying for the megaphone? Flynn refuses to say, though he admitted to Roll Call that the financial industry does contribute to the group.

According to tax forms, the league was founded in 2007 with Flynn, Jason Roe, Duane Dicharia, Michael McKay, and Theresa Kibbe as its directors. Roe and Mckay are both principals in the Federal Strategy Group lobbying firm, which has some clients in the financial industry and was paid $40,000 for start-up costs. Kibbe is married to Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, which provided office space to the league.

Flynn said the league is not connected to the Federal Strategy Group. He said James Terry has replaced Terry Kibbe as the group's chief public advocate, that McKay is no longer one of the directors and that he (Flynn) works from home.

A key part of the league's complaint is that the center's big donors benefited from the center's lobbying. It's the same argument made against the center on websites like www.activistcash.com, propagated by notorious industry PR man Rick Berman, for whom Flynn used to work.

Flynn provided the government with two news clippings purportedly showing how the center is a front for its donors. One, a BusinessWeek story from 2007, suggested that hedge fund Paulson & Co. gave $15 million to the Center for Responsible Lending hoping to benefit from bankruptcy reform legislation for which the center had been lobbying. Another is a December 2008 New York Times story about Herb and Marion Sandler, who helped found and fund the Center for Responsible Lending. Citing this article, Flynn wrote in his letter to the IRS that Herb Sandler "made billions of dollars as the owner of a bank that wrote what are now called subprime mortgages for the low-income beneficiaries of CRL's various advocacy efforts."

As Rachel and the HuffPo article points out, they shared office space with Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, they won't say who funds them but admitted to Roll Call that they are at least in part funded by the financial industry, the board of directors of the Consumers Rights League included FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe's wife Terry Kibbe, who is a Republican fundraiser and a banking lobbyist.

Rachel said to watch out for the right wing media to start promoting the protests from the Consumer Rights League and one last tidbit, the former President of the Consumer Rights League Mike Flynn now is the editor and chief of Andrew Breitbart's site BigGovernment.com, which is promoting the fake astroturf protests. And as Rachel noted, Mike Flynn used to be a lobbyist for Rick Berman. More on that from TPM.

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This was a pretty good debate with Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks and former Libertarian vice presidential candidate, now tea bagger Wayne Allyn Root. If you didn't watch it I posted this clown along with fellow wingnut Dana Loesch on Larry King talking about getting rid of Social Security. I bet most of those tea party protesters who look like they are old enough to be on Social Security and are out there with them don't know they want to take their evil Socialist entitlement program away.

Cenk tries time and again during this interview to get Root to admit that he's just a corporate tool of Dick Armey's and asks him why the tea partiers aren't out there protesting Wall Street. Root pretends he doesn't like what they've done either but spends most of his time changing the subject rather than actually answering Cenk.

It would be nice to see these wingnuts challenged by our sorry excuse for a "main stream media" as well as Cenk did here. They'd be marginalized in the manner they deserve to be rather than propped up as some sort of grass roots movement, which they're not.

This tea party movement is one part Dick Armey and company fake astroturf protest, one part angry McCain and Palin soreloserman, one part abortion clinic protester, one part white nationalist militia movement/gun rights nuts, one part ClusterFox/Glenn Beck brain dead watcher, one part anti-immigration Lou Dobbs/Tom Tancredo fan, one part southern racist that isn't done fighting the Civil War yet and one part Ron Paul/Libertarian.

What could ever go wrong with that special blend of tea? And you can argue that what I described here is not all of them, but I think it would be very hard to make the case that most of the people out there protesting at these tea bag rallies don't fall into one or more of those categories.

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Ed Rendell points out that the media has been over-hyping these Tea Parties given the very small number of people that have been attending their rallies.

Rendell: I think David the first thing we have to define is what's the tea party itself. If you say it's the anger that people feel about the economy, etc. that's giving the tea party too much credit. We had two recent tea party demonstrations in Washington. One a week before the health care vote drew about 1000 people, the tax day rally by the organizers own estimate was 1500 people.

If I organized a rally for stronger laws to protect puppies, I would get 100,000 people to Washington, so let's... I think the media has blown the tea parties themselves out of proportion, that's number one.

That didn't sit too well with Marsha Blackburn. Sorry dear but he's right. Those numbers are small and the press has been over-hyping the astroturf movement for obvious reasons, like helping the Republican Party regain power. As we've already pointed out here there were huge anti-war protests that the media all but ignored. Now we get these tiny crowds showing up in D.C. and the media is hyping them with wall to wall coverage. It's pitiful.

John Amato: The Tea Party movement is an extension of the conservative movement. Every poll we've seen basically pegs them as sore losers.

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Rachel points out the bizarre unsolicited letter that Koch Industries to Talking Points Memo Koch Industries: We Don't Fund Tea Parties (Except For The Tea Parties We Fund):

Koch Industries, a major backer of myriad right-wing causes, issued an unsolicited statement last night in advance of Tax Day claiming it has never provided funding "specifically to support the tea parties." But when TPMmuckraker followed up, a spokeswoman acknowledged that Koch funds one of the most prominent national groups that organizes ... tea parties.

"Because you have covered tea parties in the past and we imagine you will cover tomorrow's Tax Day Tea Party in DC, we want to reiterate some important facts," wrote Melissa Cohlmia, the company's director of communication, in the email Wednesday evening.

"Koch companies value free speech and believe it is good to have more Americans engaged in key policy issues. That said, Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch and David Koch have no ties to and have never given money to FreedomWorks. In addition, no funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties. Thanks for your consideration." Read on...

As TPM pointed out Koch Industries didn't explain how that statement squares with their support of Americans for Prosperity and their promotion of the Tea Party rallies among other things.

Compare and contrast John King's little love-fest with Dick Armey to Rachel Maddow's coverage on the subject a couple of hours later.