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Memo to Justices Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Kennedy: Your Citizens United chickens are coming home to roost in 22 major markets, starting tomorrow.

Los Angeles Times:

A conservative advocacy group Monday will kick off a huge ad campaign in 11 states and two dozen of the most competitive congressional races, slamming "wasteful federal spending."

The $4.1-million ad buy from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation does not mention individual candidates in the November election. The script attacks Washington policies, describing the economic stimulus program as a failure and declaring that "wasteful spending must stop."

Well, of course it doesn't mention individual candidates. That would mean they'd have to report independent expenditures to the FEC, but since it's an issues campaign that simply happens to dovetail with the teabaggers' lament, they can hide behind the curtain and never let the public know whose message this really is.

Americans for Prosperity. Such a misleading name. Rich Americans for Prosperity might be more apt. Americans for Prosperity is, of course, the Koch mouthpiece that funded last summer's town hall protests, the Sarah Palin bus tour, partners with every teabag operation out there, and lays astroturf in every town with a sidewalk.

And lest we forget, AFPs Tim Phillips got his start with Century Strategies, Ralph Reed's lobbying firm and close ally of Jack Abramoff. Rachel Maddow peeled that onion last year during health care reform.

So they're going to saturate key markets with claims of pork and waste in the stimulus bill, eh? Here's a suggestion for the DCCC and other groups getting ready to put ads up: Start with this list of Republicans who denounced the stimulus bill with righteous outrage while skulking back with their hands out for a second bite at the apple. Rapid-fire it at the viewer with a few key names. That ought to be an appropriate beginning.

I hope the Billionaire Boys' Club at Americans for Prosperity spends lots of money on their ads and stimulates the economy even more while their agenda goes down in flames.

Gosh, I'm pretty sure that Angle never took that Dale Carnegie course. If this is the kind of crazy she says in front of questionably "friendly press", I can't imagine what she says without the presence of media at all.

A press release from Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle today goes after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for voting in favor of the economic stimulus package. The release features the headline: "Harry Reid's Plan to Save the Nevada Economy: Coked-up Stimulus Monkeys."

The release cites a Republican Senate report that details some of the more attention-grabbing line-items in the stimulus bill:

Harry Reid says 'no one can do more' for Nevada. We had no idea Harry's plan of 'more' meant spending millions on coked-up monkeys and exotic ants while our state is ravaged by the worst foreclosure rate and highest unemployment rate in the nation," said Jerry Stacy, spokesman for U.S. Senatorial [candidate] Sharron Angle.

The release cites reports from ABC News and CNBC, The Bureau of Labor Statistics and Reid's own website.

A full read of the ABC News report features a quote from the recipient of the 'coked-up stimulus monkeys' grant. Bonnie Davis, a spokeswoman for The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, told ABC the "small grant has helped protect very important research that will have significant impact on public health in regards to cocaine addiction and the issue of relapse."

You'd think they'd learn after Bobby Jindal came across as so ignorant with his volcanoes study slam. I'm guessing that Angle doesn't spend a lot of time in Las Vegas, otherwise she might see the need for cocaine abuse studies. But what's even better is the woman who believes that small aliens were launched from a volcano and are infecting her body and inhibiting her perfection bashed Reid and Obama for making government our "false god."

Nevada journalist Jon Ralston unearths an interview that Sharron Angle did with Christian radio that is perhaps her most eyebrow-raising contribution to the conversation yet. In it, she says that government expansion under Obama and Dems is an effort to make government into our "God."

In case you're tempted to dismiss this as a figure of speech, Angle makes it clear that she's being literal, adding that our dependence on government is "idolatry" and that this is a "violation of the First Commandment." Here's the key bit:

"And these programs that you mentioned -- that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward -- are all entitlement programs built to make government our God. And that's really what's happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We're supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government."

Oy vey. Seriously, there's no cure for that level of teh stupid.

I can't help but think there were some more aggressive tactics Obama could have used, like threatening to run ads in each state explaining how their senator helped destroy the economy. Hell, he could have come up with better messaging, too -- like this: "You know how when your child has a strep throat, and the doctor says he has to take antibiotics for a full ten days, or the infection will get even worse? Passing half a stimulus package is like that. It may be cheaper now, but you're only going to make things worse later":

In an EXCLUSIVE interview on "This Week," host Jake Tapper asked Biden whether, in retrospect, the stimulus was too small given the dismal jobs situation in the country.

“There's a lot of people at the time argued it was too small,” he said. “A lot of people in our administration…even some Republican economists and some Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too small.”

“But, you know,” Biden told Tapper, “there was a reality. In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes. And we found three. And we finally got it passed,” Biden said.

But if it wasn’t for the legislative reality, Biden explained, “I think it would have been bigger. I think it would have been bigger. In fact, what we offered was slightly bigger than that. But the truth of the matter is that the recovery package, everybody's talking about it [like] it's over. The truth is now, we're spending more now this summer than we -- I'm calling this…the summer of recovery,” the Vice President said.

So. In response to a Politico piece in which the authors and White House whine about the left wing blogosphere not being happy with all of Obama's "wins" and not caring about potential losses in 2010, Kevin Drum writes:

Here's the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here's the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Here's the thing. What matters is whether policy works. It does not matter if what Obama did was more left wing than anything that's been done in a while (though in absolute terms I would argue it mostly wasn't left wing, the health care plan, for example, was essentially a Republican plan from the 90s), what matters is if it was left wing enough (big enough stimulus, smart enough health care plan) to improve people's lives enough that they noticed.

It wasn't, and that's all that matters. Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn't even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.

Sometimes half doesn't work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama's half assed "left wing" policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a "socialist" this means that Obama's policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.

I don't want Obama doing anything I agree with, because he will screw it up and discredit it. In this respect he is like Bush. He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.

As for the original Politico post, the hysterical ranting at the peanut gallery the authors clearly don't even read, says more about them and the White House than it does about the left wing blogosphere they try to blame for Democrats own failures.

But where are the jobs, Neil?

After whipping his caucus into uniformly opposing the stimulus, Cantor has been the lead spokesman decrying the program as a failure. Ignoring evidence that that the stimulus is helping to turn around the economy, Cantor repeatedly says that it is “failing” to “create jobs.”

As ThinkProgress reported last year, despite his withering attacks on the stimulus, Cantor hosted two job fairs filled with employers hiring directly because of stimulus grants and programs. Tomorrow, Cantor intends to again host a job fair stimulated by jobs made possible through the Recovery Act.

Nothing like a little two-faced hypocrisy to keep one in office, huh? According to ThinkProgress, the employers scheduled to be at Cantor's job fair have collected more than $50,000,000 in stimulus funds. And this puts the lie to whole "the stimulus hasn't worked--where are the jobs?" meme. Anyone with an ounce of sense (or honesty) understands that employment is a lagging indicator and that the early part of this recovery would appear to be "jobless". But that doesn't get you on the air at Fox News, does it, Cantor?

Let's add Cantor with the other 113 lawmakers who wanted to kill the stimulus and yet try to take credit for it too. (h/t ThinkProgress)

Why are Republicans so consistently morally bereft? (And why do so many Democrats take their cue from them?) Thank heavens for senators like Sheldon Whitehouse, who speak so powerfully about the plight of the unemployed:

A trio of Senate Democrats took the floor Tuesday evening to denounce the Republican party for its unwillingness to add the cost of extended unemployment benefits to the deficit. Extended unemployment benefits put in place by the stimulus bill expired on June 1, interrupting checks for some 903,000 people so far.

"I understand the point about the debt and the deficit and the spending," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). "But to me, that doesn't have an enormous amount of credibility, because when President Clinton left office, he left an annual surplus... At the end of [George W. Bush's] term, we had $9 trillion in debt."

"We would have none of this if it hadn't been for the Republican debt orgy that they went through," Whitehouse said.

There are currently five jobseekers for every available opening, but a major obstacle to reauthorizing currently-expired extended benefits has been deficit concerns supplemented by the suspicion that the benefits discourage people from looking for work. Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.) called the benefits, which average $320 per week, "too much of an allure." Democrats in both the House and Senate, too, have said business owners tell them they're having trouble hiring because of extended benefits.

Whitehouse confronted that argument.

"The notion that you're going to cut off somebody's unemployment insurance and have them go out and find a job is just plain nuts," said Whitehouse. "There aren't a lot of people lying around enjoying the luxury of unemployment insurance payments. They want to be getting to work."

In normal times, states provide six months of benefits to people laid off through no fault of their own, but to fight the stimulus bill and subsequent measures to fight the recession provided the unemployed 99 weeks of benefits in some states. The House passed a bill to reauthorize the benefits, along with several other now-expired domestic aid programs, but the bill is stalled in the Senate, as unified Republicans and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson withhold their support.

This has occasioned some comment:

The fact that many of them joined the Tea Party after losing their jobs raises questions of whether the movement can survive an improvement in the economy, with people trading protest signs for paychecks.

The economy is not going to recover enough to put most of these people back to work. The administration's own figures show they expect this year's job gains to be barely at the rate necessary to keep up with population increases. Indeed, it is extremely that employment will not recover before the end of this economic cycle.

This wasn't necessary. A real, properly put together stimulus bill would have got them back to work. For example, a program to make every building in America be at least energy neutral and preferably creating energy, would have kept them usefully employed.

The bottom line in America today is that while everyone who isn't paid not to know, knows how to fix what's wrong with America (for example, instead of Health Care Reform, pass single payer), nothing that really fixes anything fundamental will be allowed to occur.

America is controlled by what economists call rent-seeking behaviour. Virtually everyone important has a revenue stream, and they don't want anyone to take that revenue stream away. So pharma and insurance companies, who would have been damaged badly by single payer (they would have lost hundreds of billions) made sure that a plan to provide everyone with better health care for a third less than current costs was never even considered.

The most important game in America today is the contest for control of government, so that government can directly or indirectly give you money. Health care "reform" in which the government decided to force Americans to buy private health insurance or be fined is merely the latest (and most blatant) example. Virtually every industry, from finance to telecom to agriculture is involved in this game. It is in all their interests to make sure the game continues, but they do fight amongst each other for the spoils.

This game will continue until the US can no longer afford it. Indeed, even now, some industries are taking it on the chin, loosing out to their better connected cousins. For example, the current downturn has seen the prison-industrial complex taking losing out. They get most of their money from State governments, and the States simply cannot afford to keep locking up so many people at so much cost.

This is the downward spiral of a great power in senescence. It ends in collapse, reformation or revolution, when it becomes clear that the rents of the Ancien Regime can no longer be afforded, and too many of those who were bought off are thrown off their dole.

The Tea Partiers, however misguided they may be in many respects, have been thrown off the dole. Whatever they are called, they will not be going away.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Even though the turnout was less than expected, as Rachel Maddow put it, what they lacked in bodies, they made up for in exclamation points. One of those politicos responsible for a quite a bit of the punctuation of the day was Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX). Gohmert, who you'll remember has previously insisted that private health insurance would be taken away from Americans with the passing of this bill and promised to cancel the stimulus bill if the Republicans retook the majority in 2010, had to ratchet up the crazy in order to keep up with Michelle Bachmann. And boy, did he go over the cliff into Crazy Town:

Gohmert elicited cheers from the crowd when he made a graphic and disturbing claim about the bill:

GOHMERT: I brought the bill that’s being talking about. Now I don’t want to offend anybody, I’m sure that there are people here who think abortion is okay, and I don’t want to make you sick, but I brought an abortion to show you today. [...]

There’s a whole lot of demons going on. There’s a lot of demons around here apparently.

Going along with my theory that everything Republicans accuse Democrats of generally is a projection of their own guilt, I think it's safe to assume that Gohmert is actually admitting to his own demonic possession. It's the only explanation that I can think of for his bombastic, lying, disgusting rhetoric.

(Check out Roy Blunt's hypocrisy)

We've been watching these Republican hypocrites for exactly a year now attack Obama's stimulus bill and then take credit for the cash it brought into their states.

Think Progress documents the atrocities.

Last month, President Obama admonished Republicans for going to “ribbon cuttings for the same projects that you voted against.” It’s true: Last year, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) appeared at a ribbon cutting event for GetAbout Columbia’s MKT Plaza, a pedestrian walking and recreation area funded by the stimulus. (See picture at top right.)

ThinkProgress has investigated opponents of the Recovery Act, reporting throughout the year that many of the lawmakers who tried to kill the legislation have been returning to their home states to claim credit for popular stimulus programs. In a new research report, ThinkProgress finds that over half of the GOP caucus, 110 lawmakers — from the House and Senate — are guilty of stimulus hypocrisy. Among some of the key findings:

– Top Republican Senate Recruits Are Stimulus Hypocrites: As ThinkProgress reported, Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), a candidate for Senate, touted over $5 million in stimulus programs he voted to kill. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), the GOP nominee for Senate in Illinois, signed a letter urging Gov. Pat Quinn to provide “Recovery Act (ARRA) funding to expand the Illinois Community College Sustainability Network.”

– GOP Leadership Leads The Way In Hypocrisy: Although he regularly slams the stimulus as a waste while in DC, McConnell has returned to Kentucky to take credit for stimulus programs, even taking time to request more funds. ThinkProgress attended two job fairs held by Cantor, where we found dozens of employers able to hire directly because of the stimulus. Indeed, even Boehner’s office released a statement boasting that the stimulus will create “much needed jobs.”

– The Audacity Of Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds: Many opponents of the stimulus have been quite brazen with their ability to try to claim credit for the program. For instance, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) spent the morning of July 28th railing against the stimulus, yelling “Where’s the stimulus package? Where’s the jobs?” on the House floor. On the same day of his rant, Kingston’s office sent out multiple press releases bragging that he had secured hundreds of thousands in stimulus funds to hire additional police officers in his district. Other stimulus opponents, like Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) — who has called the stimulus a “trillion dollar debt bill” — have printed out jumbo-sized ceremonial stimulus checks to present to local communities to try to garner positive press.

Individually, over half of the entire Republican caucus has hailed nearly every aspect of the stimulus as a success — from infrastructure funds, to food programs, to education grants. But politically, admitting its success might harm the GOP’s chances in November. So with Republicans fixated on winning politically, they have focused on deceiving the public by calling the stimulus a failure, while pretending successful programs aren’t stimulus funded.

[Sanford's weird press conference]

Mark "Lover Boy" Sanford of South Carolina once called the stimulus "fiscal child abuse. Now he's flying to D.C. to beg for it.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) waged a high-profile war against the economic stimulus package last spring, claiming that accepting the $700 million for which his state was eligible would lead to “a thing called slavery.” Even as his state’s unemployment rate climbed above the national average, Sanford maintained his partisan and politically motivated refusal to take the funds.

But yesterday, Sanford flew to Washington to demand $300 million in stimulus money for education, the State newspaper reports:

Sanford, who spent much of last year fighting parts of the Obama administration’s stimulus plan, now wants S.C. to have a piece of $4 billion in “Race to the Top” education money. [...]

Sanford met with [Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan to learn more about a charter school program Duncan started in Chicago, said Ben Fox, the governor’s spokesman. Sanford also took the trip to urge Duncan to support more charter school grants, Fox said. [...]

Sanford’s trip — which did not appear on his official calendar — is especially hypocritical because the majority of stimulus money destined for South Carolina was to fund education and save thousands of teachers’ jobs. Yet, in March, Sanford told Fox News host Glenn Beck that taking the money would be akin to “fiscal child abuse.”

This is typical conservative behavior. Attack a Democratic initiative relentlessly -- and then after you get your fifteen minutes of fame, change your mind because you know the media will never hold you accountable. Sanford actually had an extra 15 minutes of fame, thanks to his love of long hikes in the Appalachians Brazil.