Al Jazeera English, posted this documentary today about wealth inequality in America. The highlight of the clip above is Congressman Paul Ryan being asked if his budget plan isn't undemocratic because the majority of Americans don't like it. He bolts from the reporter and tells her, her question is "rude."

Al Jazeera English does some good work. The piece also features economist Jeffrey Sachs stating flatly, "The rich not only became richer they became politically more powerful."

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You'd think there was no news out there if you were a Daily Caller reader. Because the Really Big News on the Daily Caller concerns a Heritage Foundation guy by the name of Rob Bluey. Rob is upset, and claims that Jesse Lee, the White House new media guy, is 'bullying' people on Twitter. Note: that link goes to Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson's whine cellar.

One such example happened last week in a dispute over the budget.

Eder posted this tweet: “Hmm…it can’t be true that @SenateDems haven’t passed a budget in 790 days and the only plan Obama has is a speech. Right, @jesseclee44?”

To which Lee responded: “@keder @SenateDems Plan is keep negotiating w/ Rs & Ds, not default & trash economy, not voucherize Medicare to fund more tax cuts for rich.”

Give me a break. If this is bullying, I'm writing this upside down while hanging from a tree in upside-down land, where everything right side up is upside down. Compare and contrast Jesse Lee's response with this one from Andrew Breitbart:

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Well, maybe not bullying. Maybe more like flaming someone. But whatever. I debated even writing about this, except that the point of Mr. Bluey's whine is so disingenuous. First, he whines about Jesse Lee, and then likens that to White House bullying of the press. Only, the three examples he gives of this alleged bullying have nothing to do with Jesse Lee or Twitter or the White House. Maybe he could actually take aim at the guy responsible for two of them -- Jay Carney, and then tell the truth about the White House response to Mark Halperin's stupidity on the air last week.

Bullying online is real and it's scary when it happens. Trivializing it this way for political whine points is yet another cynical effort to pin the tail on the white house donkey when it's still stuck to the elephant. While I expect little more from the likes of Tucker Carlson, I thought the esteemed Heritage Foundation was above such idiocy.

Oh, wait. Here's why, via Jason Linkins on the Huffington Post:

"The Heritage Foundation was on the receiving end last week from both Lee and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, both of whom maintain official White House accounts on Twitter that are subject to archival under the Presidential Records Act," writes the article's author, Rob Bluey, who is also the director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation. So, basically, this whole article is just a complicated way of asking Lee to please stop criticizing the Heritage Foundation on Twitter. What a world!

Aw, Tuckie. Get the bad bully for Rob Bluey, pretty please?

(h/t ThinkTanked Blog)

Just in case you didn't see it coming, here's the opening salvo in the Great Bush Tax Hike Cut Battle, courtesy of the Heritage Foundation, that non-partisan think tank that just happens to wrap itself around every conservative value out there.

It's a fantasy, just like every other fiscal policy the Republicans think is gospel. They cue the tax cut fairies and ignore David Stockman, Alan Greenspan, Paul Krugman, and just about every economist on the planet while catering to the few and starving the many.

Reassure the children. The Tax Cut Monster is a big red greedy thing, but it's easy to kill. Do nothing, and the tax cuts vanish! Just like that. The tax cut fairies will cry and stomp, but it'll be all right. We'll all be better off for it, even if the richest 400 people in the country have to pay something more like their fair share.

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It's nice up there in the right-wing ivory tower... In this Hardball segment, Chris Matthews cracks up after James Sherk, a Heritage Foundation analyst, explains that the unemployment checks keep people from packing up and moving to find work -- you know, like in the Dust Bowl days? (I know people who can't afford to pack up and move across town, let alone across the country.)

So Tweety asks him if he has any friends who are unemployed. Sherk says yes, he does. Tweety asks if he's encouraging his friends to pack up and move elsewhere to look for work, and the look on the guy's face is priceless.

You see, his friends are looking for specific work in their field, as he quickly explains.

Just watch.

The Daily Dish: Michael Mukasey's secret plot to aid the New Black Panthers

Wonkette: Rep Ciro Rodriguez doesn't like being called a liar

Religion Dispatches: Why is the Economy Stuck: Market Theology for Nonbelievers

Modoweiss: Whitewash encounters skepticism

Lawyers, Guns & Money: Heritage Foundation ideologues who would have been laughed out of the Reagan administration find themselves in command of the foreign policy statements of several major GOP presidential aspirants.

Mad Kane’s Political Madness: David Vitter's Traylor Travails

Kind of funny when the GOP is so extreme, they're pushing NJ Gov. Chris Christie (a real wingnut) to be more of a right-winger!

Gov. Christie says he has not decided whether to sign on to a 20-state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the health-care law signed in March by President Obama. That makes New Jersey one of seven Republican-led states that have not joined the largely partisan fight.

Interest groups on both sides of the debate are lobbying the governor, but some of his advisers say he should not join the suit. Capping property taxes and managing a difficult budget have rightly been his top priorities, they say, and New Jersey residents are more open than people in other parts of the country to health-care regulation.

With 16 of 23 states led by GOP governors fighting the new law, at least one national expert said Christie faced the risk of becoming an "outlier through inaction."

"He's going to have to explain why he has stood out among his colleagues in his own party by not doing something they've all done," said Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy group in Washington.

Can you imagine? When Christie goes to the men's room, does he have to say "Mother, may I?"

Bipartisan Budget Woes Rear Window Ethics

The conservative Heritage Foundation and the more liberal Brookings Institute sat down jointly yesterday to explain that in less than 40 years, if taxes are not raised and spending is not cut, the United States economy will near collapse as the country will be only capable of paying interest on the growing federal debt.

Meanwhile the White House has been touting the fact that the deficit will shrink in the next year. What both groups that spoke yesterday agree on is the fact that after the few years of possible deficit shrinkage (for lack of a better word), it will skyrocket after that.

What ever happened to worrying about future generations? Didn't leadership in both parties talk about that a lot in the not too distant past? Just a few years later all they seem to be able to do is worry about Terri Schiavo and a handful of judges, while they happen to pass a pork-filled highway bill without anyone noticing. Washington Post: Almost Unnoticed, Bipartisan Budget Anxiety

The New face of the Moral Majority!

If anyone doubts the insanity of the right, this should convince you. Eric Cantor gives a speech to the Heritage Foundation bashing the Obama administration's record on national security, particularly the nonproliferation strategy and ends to a rousing chorus of booes and disapproval.

Cantor went wild over the White House’s nonproliferation agenda, vowing to “turn back harmful treaties like START.” What I'm sure Cantor doesn't realize is that eliminating a pillar of the nonproliferation regime would be tantamount to turning over what has historically been a major conservative rallying cry, led by none other than President Reagan himself (whom Cantor reverently invokes in the preamble of this speech). As Reagan’s own Secretary of State, George Schultz recently said, “[President Obama] is doing an excellent job. He has put the vision out there and keeps it out there. The nuclear posture review shows he is being careful about American national security at every step. The conference of world leaders on securing fissile material is the right thing to do. Who is going to disagree with that?” Eric Cantor, apparently. Read more...

After Cantor stirred these neocons into a froth over nukes, Iran, Muslim-hate and the kitchen sink, the Q&A session was spirited.

Steve Benen:

The seriousness of Cantor's event at the Heritage Foundation was captured nicely by an exchange during the Q&A. An attendee asked why the president should not be considered a "domestic enemy," to the delight of the assembled far-right crowd.

Cantor smiled, but responded that "no one thinks the President is a domestic enemy." The comment generated boos from the Heritage audience.

I'd like to thank Eric Cantor, the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife for confirmation that they have all lost their minds. The problem, of course, is that they want to take a good chunk of the electorate with them and will stop at virtually nothing in this 2010 cycle to do exactly that.

The Koch PAC, defense PACs, health, pharma and financial PACs are smoking with the smell of big bucks being spread over Republican PACs. They like insanity. It puts them in control, or so they think. They will stoop as low as they need to and stop at nothing to defeat our current President. But "domestic enemy"? Give me a break.

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[H/t Heather.]

Haiti was a nation of farmers, but thanks to the strings attached to U.S. aid, government policies made profitable farming impossible. So the farmers were pushed to the cities to provide a cheap manufacturing labor force. All those people you see on the TV in their shattered shantytowns? We helped put them there. With exploitative loans and yes, even a classic CIA-backed coup, we helped create this mess.

Here's Naomi Klein, the author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," speaking Wednesday night at the Ethical Culture Society to warn us against it happening again:

But as I write about in The Shock Doctrine, crises are often used now as the pretext for pushing through policies that you cannot push through under times of stability. Countries in periods of extreme crisis are desperate for any kind of aid, any kind of money, and are not in a position to negotiate fairly the terms of that exchange.

And I just want to pause for a second and read you something, which is pretty extraordinary. I just put this up on my website. The headline is “Haiti: Stop Them Before They Shock Again.” This went up a few hours ago, three hours ago, I believe, on the Heritage Foundation website.

“Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S. In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the image of the United States in the region.” And then goes on.

Now, I don’t know whether things are improving or not, because it took the Heritage Foundation thirteen days before they issued thirty-two free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. We put that document up on our website, as well. It was close down the housing projects, turn the Gulf Coast into a tax-free free enterprise zone, get rid of the labor laws that forces contractors to pay a living wage. Yeah, so it took them thirteen days before they did that in the case of Katrina. In the case of Haiti, they didn’t even wait twenty-four hours.

Now, why I say I don’t know whether it’s improving or not is that two hours ago they took this down. So somebody told them that it wasn’t couth. And then they put up something that was much more delicate. Fortunately, the investigative reporters at Democracy Now! managed to find that earlier document in a Google cache. But what you’ll find now is a much gentler “Things to Remember While Helping Haiti.” And buried down there, it says, “Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.”

But the point is, we need to make sure that the aid that goes to Haiti is, one, grants, not loans. This is absolutely crucial. This is an already heavily indebted country. This is a disaster that, as Amy said, on the one hand is nature, is, you know, an earthquake; on the other hand is the creation, is worsened by the poverty that our governments have been so complicit in deepening. Crises—natural disasters are so much worse in countries like Haiti, because you have soil erosion because the poverty means people are building in very, very precarious ways, so houses just slide down because they are built in places where they shouldn’t be built. All of this is interconnected. But we have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy, which is part natural, part unnatural, must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti, and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interests of our corporations. And this is not a conspiracy theory. They have done it again and again.