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As we already saw with the "class act" of Dana Loesch's husband Chris and Fox contributor Steven Crowder and their sorry, racist excuse for what's supposed to pass for a "rap" video, the real wingnuttery at CPAC this year was with the panel segments as opposed to just the general contempt for liberals and horrid policy prescriptions being offered by the headliners.

Case in point, this panel as described by the CPAC web site -- Tea Party versus Occupy:

Unlike their leftist counterparts in the “Occupy” movement, Tea Party activists do not need to be paid or coerced into advancing their ideas, free market activists said during one of the closing panels at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Dana Loesch, Editor-in-Chief of BigJournalism.com, told audience members that progressives operate from a false assumption that says Tea Party activists will not demonstrate without offered some kind of inducement. In reality, she said, they actually describing themselves. Occupy members who were demonstrating outside of the CPAC conference in D.C. acknowledged that were being paid $60 to be there.

“It always amazes me how progressives think that conservatives can’t get organized or demonstrate without getting paid,” Loesch said. “They do it for free because they believe in it.”

Amy Kremer, chair of the Tea Party express, said that the movement she was identified with has more staying power because it has the right ideas. By contrast, the “Occupy” movement has resorted to unsavory tactics and has already lost credibility with the American people.

There's a bit more there, but they somehow forgot to mention this gem from panelist and Americans for Prosperity Pennsylvania State Director Jennifer Stefano:

STEFANO: The one thing I get asked is, what is the difference between the tea party and Occupiers... but I always say one thing. If you're standing in a room and you're not sure how to separate the tea partiers from the Occupiers, do one thing. Raise an American flag. The tea party will stand and put their hands over their heart and pledge to it while the Occupiers deficate on it.

I find that really humorous since the only person I seem to remember being proud of "dropping trou" lately, was her cohort on that panel, Dana Loesch.

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Following up on her reporting from last week where Rachel Maddow called Herman Cain a "performance artist and "the practical joke no one is getting", Maddow took us for a little walk down memory lane on the scandal ridden Tim Phillips, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist who all have ties to the Koch brothers and Herman Cain's campaign manager, Mark Block.

Cain's headaches with these charges of sexual harassment or possibly sexual assault after the accusations made today are not the only troubles his campaign is facing by far.

As Rachel reminded us, we recently had Cain the complaints filed against his campaign by CREW, calling himself "the Koch brothers' brother from another mother.":

On Friday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over allegations that Prosperity USA had illegally funneled donations to the Cain's campaign through Americans for Prosperity. At the time, Prosperity USA, the Wisconsin arm of Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, was operated by Cain campaign manager Mark Block.

"It is not sufficient for the Cain campaign to investigate itself," CREW executive director Melanie Sloan said in a media advisory. "Rather, the FEC -- the federal agency charged with enforcing campaign finance laws -- must look into the matter."

Cain first met Block while working as a speaker for Americans for Prosperity in 2005.

The New York Times has more on the allegations against the Cain campaign here -- Cain to Review Links to a Nonprofit.

With the news that convicted lobbyist just got out of prison and is now out there trying to sell his new book as we just saw during the 60 Minutes interview this weekend, it was nice to see all of them called out properly for just how big of crooks they are.

Rachel reported on Tim Phillips and his ties to Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed back in March of this year and she did a nice job of going back through some of that material in the segment above.

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I don't know if anyone else is as sick of the Tom Brokaw/Chris Matthews consecutive book tours that we've got going on at MSNBC along with a couple of other networks, but this bit from Tuesday's Morning Joe where Brokaw was pushing his book along with some Villager conventional wisdom about what needs to be done to cure our country's ails left me feeling even more disgusted than I was with him after his appearance on Meet the Press this past Sunday.

The amount of cognitive dissonance necessary for either Tom Brokaw to make these statements in the first place, or the viewers that he thinks should be buying into his clap-trap here is really quite astounding.

After being asked by Willie Geist about American's “incredible levels of cynicism in government” and our Congress' nine percent approval level rating, and how some faith is potentially restored in our government, Brokaw responds this way.

BROKAW: Well again, it really requires the citizenry from the ground up to get involved in reclaiming their government. I've used this almost everywhere I go as an example. However you feel about the tea party, they got angry. Then they got organized. Then they got to Washington and they stayed disciplined and they were having an affect, out of proportion to their numbers, frankly, in the Republican debate.

But that's a demonstration of organization and power. And the other things is that I think both parties have to look at the enormous impact of big money on politics. K Street and the lobbyists and they're in there all day, every day.

Brokaw is apparently either completely detached from the reality, or just doesn't mind lying to the viewers since he's willing to ignore the fact that the “tea party” AstroTurf movement has been organized and co-opted by... lobbyists. Dick Armey... lobbyist. Matt Kibbe... lobbyist. Tim Phillips... lobbyist. And there are a lot more there where I could go on and on with who's pumping money into this “tea party”, another of which is one we've covered here extensively, the Koch brothers.

If Tom Brokaw honestly thinks that lobbyists have too much influence on our government, then the last thing he should be doing is trying to paint the “tea party” as grass roots and a cure for getting the influence of money out of politics.

After poo-pooing agriculture subsidies as one of the problems we have with lobbying groups having too much influence, which I do not disagree with by the way, Brokaw went on to champion our government having more “public/private partnerships” and used examples such as privatizing our schools, roads and water districts.

So Brokaw thinks we need to get rid of the influence of lobbyists in our government, but doesn't seem to mind so much the commons and institutions that should belong to the taxpayers being sold off to private industry so they can make a profit off of them.

This was followed by him talking to billionaire Mort Zuckerman who was touting his usual lines about how Washington is broken and complaints that there's not enough upward mobility in the United States any more, of course ignoring the fact that trickle-down economics, a race to the bottom on wages and labor protections due to globalization, lack of regulation of the financial industry among a host of other issues are what brought us to where we are now.

Nothing like MSNBC getting the opinion of one of the “little guys” like Zuckerman to let everyone know what the opinion of the one percent is so they can have a “fair and balanced” discussion on Morning Joe. So much for that "liberal" MSNBC. A lot of MSNBC's programming is really horrid but if there was ever one show anyone could consider pre-packaged for Fox and ready to move directly over there, Morning Joe definitely qualifies.

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Well, it looks like all of the potential Republican presidential contenders came out to kiss the boots of Americans for Prosperity's Tim Phillips tonight. You've got to love what they called this event -- the Summit on Federal Spending & Job Creation. Or in other words, Republicans reciting their conservative wish lists to continue slashing and burning the government and finishing off what's left of the middle class in America.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann was the final speaker at the event, which included Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former Senator Rick Santorum, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and syndicated columnist, radio talk-show host and Tea Partying presidential candidate Herman Cain.

After telling the audience about her wish list for what the Republicans would like to do if they "win the trifecta" of getting both houses of Congress back and the White House, Bachmann proclaimed that she'd like to see the Republicans "pass a mother of all repeal bills" which in her words, "should take committed Constitutional conservatives about a long weekend to get it done."

Michele Bachmann's lovely list she compiled for America is Tim Phillips and his astroturf Americans for Prosperity and their rich corporate donors' wet dream, but other than in wingnut world, that little wish list of hers doesn't work out so well for the peons.

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As the Koch brothers attempt to counter the protests in Wisconsin with an astroturf bus tour of their own, brought to you by Tim Phillips and Americans for Prosperity, Rachel reminds us of Tim Phillips lovely past before he went to work for the Koch brothers -- working with Ralph Reed helping to rip off Indian casinos and fooling Christian groups along with Ralph Reed to support the exploitation in the Northern Mariana Islands because the Chinese workers there were being converted to Christianity. What a guy.

Here's part of a report on him from Think Progress' The Wonk Room from back in May of 2009 -- Tim Phillips, The Man Behind The ‘Americans For Prosperity’ Corporate Front Group Factory:

As a Virginia-based political consultant, Phillips got his first big break managing the campaign of Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). After serving as Goodlatte’s chief of staff for four years, Phillips joined former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed in 1997 to create an astroturf lobbying and campaign consulting operation called Century Strategies. The firm promised to mount “grassroots lobbying drives” and explained its strategy as “it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard — and by whom.”

After being recommended by Karl Rove, Century Strategies signed its first major corporate client – Enron. Phillips and Reed were paid $380,000 to mobilize “religious leaders and pro-family groups” to push energy deregulation in Congress and on the state level, a policy shift that led to the energy crisis and economic meltdown of 2001. The Washington Post reported that the pair informed Enron that they had leveraged their relationships with members of Congress and “placed” articles in prominent papers like the New York Times.

Part of Phillip’s role at Century Strategies was to manage the firm’s direct mail subsidiary, Millennium Marketing. In 1998, now disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff hired Phillips’ firm to pressure members of Congress to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws. A federal report “found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.” Nonetheless, Phillips sent out mailers claiming Chinese workers “are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ” while on the islands, and many “are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.” The mailers then encouraged the recipients to contact lawmakers and ask them to oppose the Marianas labor reform legislation.

The Marianas stealth lobbying effort was not the only time Phillips worked with Abramoff. Reed and Phillips conspired to generate conservative Christian outrage towards gambling at Indian casinos in a cynical plot to encourage those same tribes to hire Abramoff to lobby on their behalf. In some cases, Phillips’ anti-gambling crusade would simply be part of an effort to kill off competition to Abramoff’s clients. And while Phillips and Reed postured to be motivated by anti-gambling Christian values, the pair helped launder lobbying money from an Abramoff Internet gambling client called eLottery.

Though Phillips and Reed are best known in the campaign consulting world for engineering the dual victories of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Republican Gov. Sonnie Perdue in Georgia (by associating images of Osama bin Laden with the incumbent Democratic senator), the pair can also be credited with the most below the belt tactics ever seen in modern Republican primaries. The duo “spearheaded” the telemarketing and direct mail efforts for George Bush against John McCain in the 2000 primaries. It is widely believed that Century Strategies executed the mass mailers and robo-calls which accused McCain of fathering an illegitimate child with a black woman, using the image of McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh.

Much more there so go read the rest.

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Americans for Prosperity's Tim Phillips managed to get a nice softball interview from CNN's Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker. They allowed their viewers to come away hearing this guy complain that his ultra-rich corporate donors just can't be disclosed because they're going to be harassed. And he got praised by Spitzer for being "brave" enough to say the retirement age should be raised and that we should be going after both the jobs and the pensions of federal workers.

And of course there was no mention of how much backing his group has got from those that stand to benefit from our current health care system keeping the insurance companies when the conversation turned to Medicare reimbursements.

It's too bad he wasn't debating someone who would explain that we could make Medicare affordable if we weren't dumping the sickest and most expensive patients onto the government instead of having single payer where the young are contributing to the same system as well, and cutting his buddies out of the massive profits they've been making doing their best to insure as few people as possible while they line their pockets.

SPITZER: Our "Headliner" tonight is Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing group who Barack Obama claims was at the center of questionable Republican campaign spending in 2010. He called out the group at least 19 times in campaign speeches. A highly unusual level of attention from the president.

PARKER: Phillips is a major player in the rise of Tea Party. His organization has invested heavily in the fight against health care reform.

Welcome, Tim.

TIM PHILLIPS, PRESIDENT, AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY: Nice to be here.

PARKER: How do you feel about being identified as a right-wing activist group? Is that accurate?

PHILLIPS: I think free market is the word. But we'll take whatever.

SPITZER: Those are words you guys use anyway. We're trying to be good to you.

PARKER: All right. Well, let me ask you this. Now that the elections are over --

PHILLIPS: Right.

PARKER: -- you recently had a meeting in Virginia with some other conservative leaders to develop a strategy for the next two years.

PHILLIPS: Right.

PARKER: So what did you come up with?

PHILLIPS: We're going to take on the Obama health care plan. We're going to make sure that issue stays in front of the American people. We think it's terrible legislation. The American people don't want it. And we're going to insist that this Congress continue to revisit that issue because it's crucial to our prosperity and individual health care choices.

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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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The panel of David Gergen, Candy Crowley and John Avlon pretend like the astroturf teabaggers are not tied to the hip with the Republican/conservative movement and that they're some sort of true grassroots uprising. As all of us know, that's not the truth since we've been following the movement since they first started with Fox News promoting them and corporate lobbyist groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity organizing many of these rallies.

Not to mention that their dear leaders like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are working for ClusterFox. Can anyone imagine Al Gore doing what Palin has done after he lost (or had it stolen from him rather) the presidential election, and the media calling his rallies "grassroots"? We already know they wouldn't. For that matter they'd never allow the Democratic establishment to get away with a scam like this.

Funny none of them could be bothered with mentioning how the Tea Party movement got started and who is sponsoring all of these buses we've seen running across the country. Buses CNN has been happy to embed themselves with and hype as well. Instead they're pretending as Candy Crowley said they're a group the Republicans "are going to have to deal with". Sorry Candy, but they're already "dealing with them".

As Dave already pointed out this is what the Tea Party is really all about.

[T]he Tea Party is fundamentally a way for conservatives to reclaim the reins of power while the brand-damaged Republican Party undergoes a right-wing makeover.

This is just one more example of CNN proving themselves to be Fox-lite and doing their best to help the GOP out as well.

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Well I've got to give Michele Bachmann credit for being honest for once since we all know ClusterFox helped organize and promote these astroturf protests along with their buddies Dick Armey and Tim Phillips among others. It's just a bit unusual to hear one of them say it out loud.

Given the way these protests are shaping up I've got to wonder how much worse it's going to get before these members of Congress attending these rallies are censured.

Thanks to our good friends at Media Matters who are watching these clowns in much larger doses than I've got the stomach for.

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Oh lookie here. Chris Matthews decided to have himself a little astroturf tea party with FreedomWorks' Matt Kibbe and Americans for Prosperity's Tim Phillips. Never during the interview did Matthews talk about or ask either of these guys who funds their groups. I'm sure Dick Armey is grateful Chris. Maybe he was just trying to make up to Tim for the pummeling he received on Rachel Maddow's show.

I will give Matthews credit for this at least pointing this out about Ronald Reagan to Matt Kibbe:

MATTHEWS: Has there ever been a strong conservative president, for example, in your lifetime or anybody -- your grandfather`s lifetime? Who do you look to as a good role model for the tea party people?

KIBBE: Well, obviously, Ronald Reagan is the closest thing we have.

MATTHEWS: What did he do in terms of fiscal policy?

KIBBE: Oh, he -- he said that we shouldn`t spend money we don`t have, and he said that the government shouldn`t get involved in things that it`s not very good at doing.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Yes. Have you ever checked the numbers with Reagan?

KIBBE: Well, I understand. I understand...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: The national debt went from under $1 trillion to $3 trillion. He did more to increase exponentially the size of the debt of any president in history. And he`s your role model.

Here's the treatment Tim Phillips got on Rachel's show--Maddow Blasts AFP's Tim Phillips as "Parasite", "Bad for the Country" Quite a difference from the warm and fuzzy interview Matthews did with him today.

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Full transcript below the fold via.

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