Washington DC - I arrived at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, around 9:30 a.m. People snaked around turnstiles waiting to get their badges certifying they had paid the $195 adult entrance fee.

Upstairs, the student line was much longer. They only had to pay $35. It's important to get young blood into the Grand Old Party.

They had paid to see the stars of the conservative movement. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt, Marco Rubio, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, even Sarah Palin has come out of hibernation and is scheduled to speak on Saturday.

There was talk of an Occupy infiltration and the finely dressed attendants were on the lookout. One man, wearing a cowboy hat and wielding a digital camera approached a police officer outside, "have you seen any occupiers?" he asked. "No," the officer responded.

Around noon I was sitting in a chair near the VIP room. Rick Perry was scheduled to speak at 1:20 p.m. in the Marriott ballroom. Three tall white men wearing suits and earbuds were seated across from me. One was standing. They briefly discussed security.

"I asked him if he wanted a walkthrough... and he said, 'I'm drunk, I don't care,'" said the older looking gentleman, who had apparently talked to the person he was securing.

Another one said, "Thanks for taking one for the team Rick."

After Perry gave his speech I attempted to ask him if he preferred bourbon or scotch, but he ignored me.

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At the beginning of the day, I started off at an event called "How to raise money... the easy way" put on by the Leadership Institute, a Republican training organization.

The speaker, Joel Mowbray, told the audience of mostly young men that "You make up a lot of ground with one $10,000 donation."

He said that there's no such thing as altruism and when a big donor cuts a big check the donor is looking for access.

"Asking for money bestows a level of credibility onto the campaign," said Mowbry, "It says I believe in my campaign." He told the audience the only two things a candidate should be doing is asking for money or asking for votes. Noted.

From there, I went to the massive Marriott Ballroom, which has been adorned with giant television screens, a huge stage and thousands of chairs, all filled, for Marco Rubio's speech.

The Florida Senator took the stage to loud applause. He made a speech about American Exceptionalism, how important it is that the U.S. remains the most powerful country in the world, a point Republicans often make.

"What happens if we diminish because we can no longer be the greatest country in the world?" asked Rubio.

"The greatest thing we can do for the world is be America," said Rubio. He added that we have to be an example for other countries, "the shining city on the Hill" he said, quoting Reagan, who took the line "city on a hill" from the Bible and made it shiny.

Reagan symbolism is all over CPAC. Pictures of him hang in the main lobby, stickers of his face are handed out and many speakers tied their speeches back to him.

Male CPAC attendees almost universally wore suits and females wore dresses. There were booths for ALEC, Tea Party.net, Hot Air, the NRA, Citizens United Productions, the Washington Examiner and Newt 2012, among others. One booth was selling Santorum sweaters. Surprisingly, I didn't see any Ron Paul supporters, despite the fact that his fans rushed the event last year to give him a strong victory in the 2011 CPAC straw poll.

I saw a number of people sporting Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum stickers, but I didn't see one person outwardly supporting Mitt Romney. In fact, during one speech in the Marriott Ballroom a speaker mentioned Mitt Romney and a female in the audience yelled out, "Mexican!"

In another room, much smaller than the Marriott Ballroom, I attended a panel discussion on labor unions. At this one, four men discussed the repeal of SB5 in Ohio, Scott Walker's actions in Wisconsin and heaped praise on Chris Christie. I arrived a little late, but I caught the gist of the conversation.

"I don't think revolution is too big of a word to use to describe what Chris Christie is doing," said Kevin Mooney, a reporter for the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, 'the leading voice for free markets in Louisiana.'

F. Vincent Vernuccio, a speaker from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that after the repeal of SB5, an-anti collective bargaining bill, Ohio would have to build a Berlin-style wall to keep people in. He said they'd flock to Indiana and Wisconsin, two states that have fought unions.

He said the failure in Ohio was the messaging, "We have to get our messaging together, we have to get our funding together and we have to break up the bills."

I walked out and went up the escalator to get a late afternoon lunch. As I rode the escalator up, Hot Air was interviewing Michelle Bachmann. She was in an all white dress.

As I was leaving I caught this guy talking about the tea party:

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Donald Trump says he doesn't "get" Rick Santorum. Which makes me like Santorum -- the man, not the frothy stuff -- all the more.

BeggarsCanBeChoosers: Ronald Reagan and the death of capitalism.

Archy: Rick Santorum and the coming of the Antichrist.

Infidel753: Mitt Romney and the coming of a more extremist GOP.

Booman Tribune: Mitt Romney and the prospect of epic collapse.

Muddy Politics: Barack Obama and the language of average Americans.

Round-up by Michael J.W. Stickings of The Reaction. I'll be here through the weekend.

Send tips to mbru@crooksandliars.com.

Sh*t Mitt Says. Open thread below....

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Fox News just cannot leave this alone. First of all, they loathe American car companies, especially American car companies who were part of the auto industry rescue. Those companies would be General Motors and Chrysler. Never mind that the first piece of the bailout was in December 2008 before Barack Obama took office. It was nevertheless a grievous socialist sin visited upon us by That Guy in the White House.

Fox News', and by extension, Roger Ailes', hate for these two companies is large and consuming. Every Friday, a very large segment of the day is spent trashing the Chevy Volt as much as they possibly can. I don't really know why they chose Friday, but I know they do it. They hate the Volt with a passion and General Motors even more.

Enter Chrysler, with a commercial made by a staunch Republican with a simple message: It's halftime in America, and we've clawed our way back from the brink of collapse. It is not a partisan message. It is a celebration of success and overcoming, something that everyone should celebrate. Unless, of course, your political fortunes might turn on America's decline. There is that.

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The Federal government and the Attorneys General from 49 states have signed a deal with five major banks over charges of fraud, including reported acts of widespread perjury and forgery, in the so-called “robo-signing” scandal.

A few days ago we suggested that any deal be scored against five basic principles: openness, justice, restitution, deterrence, and reconciliation. It's clear that this deal falls short in every category. The best thing that can be said about it is that, thanks to a few tough holdouts led by New York AG Eric Schneiderman, it now allows additional civil and criminal investigations to proceed.

That's far from nothing, and it could be a big deal. But it will only be a big deal if the Administration stops coddling banks and devotes a lot more resources to helping homeowners and upholding justice.

Up to now, the fight has been to prevent the Administration from doing another cushy bank deal. Now that the door's been left open to further action, there's a new fight: to demand that they devote the Federal government's resources to investigating Wall Street crime.

Our own scoring of the agreement follows, based on the criteria we set out last week. Others may have a different opinion. But now that the deal's done, the way forward is clear. To paraphrase Joe Hill, don't mourn or celebrate: Organize.

The Score

Openness: Has the truth been brought to light? Do we finally understand what happened to us, why it happened, and who's responsible?

The agreement trades away the leverage that investigators gained by essentially catching bankers dead-to-rights as they broke laws on a mass scale through robo-signing. That means they can't use that leverage to “sweat” more information out of the banks.

We wrote in our scorecard that “there's a lot we don't know about bank malfeasance,” including the guilt or innocence of individual bankers. Sadly, we may never know. This deal appears to end ongoing investigations into “robo-signing.” If you see a bank CEO whining on television about his industry's bad reputation, we're not likely to ever learn if he ever personally signed off on criminal behavior. (Which would make him a criminal too, of course.)

There is, however, an upside. We wrote that “any settlement which closes the door to further investigations gets a much lower score.” This settlement does allow investigations to move forward in other areas. As the Washington Post notes, it “leaves open the possibility of other lawsuits regarding fair housing and fair lending laws, civil rights claims, and claims dealing with how loans were packaged and sold, a process known as securitization. In addition, it does not shield the banks from any criminal violations that arise.”

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On the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I asked Andrew Breitbart and film director Steve Bannon what would make their upcoming video "exposing" Occupy Wall Street successful despite being panned by critics and audiences for their previous work, "The Undefeated" by about Sarah Palin.

Breitbart immediately went off.

Breitbart: Who's Andrew Metcalf, I want to see, this is always a fun gesture, is that your name?

Me: Yes that's my name, I just checked IMDB and ["The Undefeated"] got a 1.7; on Rotten Tomatoes it got a 0 percent.

Breitbart: Who do you work for?

Lady sitting next to me: Crooks and Liars!

Breitbart: Crooks and Liars, that's it, it's a radical left-wing website, he can answer for himself, the way you've presented yourself you represent Occupy very well.

Me: I'm actually asking a legitimate question, about one of your previous movies being panned by both critics and audiences. What's going to make this one any different?

At that point, Steve Bannon took over and notified me that the Sarah Palin flick did have a broad audience in DVD sales and pay-per-view orders. He said the movie was well-received by conservative critics and there wasn't one factual error in it.

Bannon: Professional entertainment critics, yes, they went after the film quite harshly, just like they did her... I showed the... the useful idiots of the entertainment business that completely vilified and eviscerated a woman that has a track record as a performer that actually stands for a populist agenda... you kind of asked it in a snarky way, but it is a legitimate question.

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The latest stories from the front lines of the labor fight across the country...

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The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Thursday to ban insider trading by members of Congress and to impose new ethics requirements on lawmakers and federal agency officials.

(Let's pause a moment to note that Congress had to pass a law that bans them from doing something illegal. Crickey.)

Now the bad news:

Democrats said that House Republican leaders had weakened the Senate-passed bill by stripping out a provision that would, for the first time, regulate firms that collect “political intelligence” for hedge funds, mutual funds and other investors. Under the Senate bill, such firms would have to register and report their activities, as lobbyists do.

Nothing like giving the hedge funds a little kickback in a bill that's supposed to create a firewall from members of Congress and Wall Street.

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In the wake of Rick Santorum's recent three-peat, he's drawing more scrutiny, and the results are predictably awesome.

Check out this completely ahistorical take on the French Revolution.

SANTORUM: They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.

If a junior high student had written this gibberish in an essay on the French Revolution, he'd deserve an F.

Santorum has this exactly backwards, of course. It was under the French absolute monarchy and the Ancien Régime that one had no "unalienable rights" and had a government that could tell you "what you'll do and when you'll do it."

And the Revolutionaries, inspired by Enlightenment figures like Rousseau and the American Revolution, wrote and signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which

...defines a single set of individual and collective rights for all men. Influenced by the doctrine of natural rights, these rights are held to be universal and valid in all times and places.

The first of these include:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

Obviously, none of these rights existed under King Louis, and unfortunately for Santorum, the Catholic Church stood in direct opposition to the French Revolution and in support of the Ancien Régime.

Of course, this is all an aside to the fact that the notion President Robespierre Obama is about to unleash a Reign of Terror and start beheading clergy is well beyond insane.

Keith Rivers, an organizer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in North Carolina, is fighting to build union strength in one of the toughest anti-labor states in the union. North Carolina is a right-to-work (for less) state with the lowest percentage (only 2 percent) of unionized workers in the United States. In a video released Wednesday, Rivers describes the challenges he and other organizers face in the state, and while he describes it as very challenging, but is happy to say that they've had some success in recent years.

IBEW in North Carolina's mission is to:

Ensuring our member electricians and linemen receive the representation they need and the wages and benefits they deserve; and

Recruiting capable apprentices and furnishing them with top-quality, certified career educational programs in state-of-the-art training facilities.

Rivers works on letting North Carolina electricians and linemen know what IBEW stands for and trying to get people to join the union.