You know, for a party that likes to wrap themselves in the Constitution, they sure do seem to want to obliterate it. We had the "Tenthers" screaming about state sovereignty. And the Tea Parties have called for the repeal of the 16th and 17th Amendment and a new 13th Amendment.

Now, the Republicans have decided the key to electoral success this year is to take aim against the 14th Amendment. Let's just call them The Dred Scott Republicans:

First Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), then Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), now Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is calling for congressional hearings on rescinding part of the 14th amendment to prevent anyone who is born in the U.S. from automatically becoming a U.S. citizen. The intention of such a radical move is to block the American-born children of undocumented immigrants from becoming citizens.

Mitch McConnell initially openly supported this hearing and then backtracked:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell sought today to characterize his push for hearings on birthright citizenship as an educational exercise aimed solely at a small subset of wealy parents who enter the United States for the express purpose of having a child -- a practice known as birth tourism.

In an interview with The Hill yesterday, McConnell said that a 14th Amendment provision granting citizenship to all infants born in the United States should be reviewed. "I haven't made a final decision about it, but that's something that we clearly need to look at," he said. "Regardless of how you feel about the various aspects of immigration reform, I don't think anybody thinks that's something they're comfortable with." An aide to McConnell confirmed this with the Huffington Post. But today, McConnell denied that he was talking about all children born in the United States.

Today, McConnell told reporters at his weekly press conference that his comments were interpreted too broadly. "I read an article in the, I think, the Washington Post just about the business that's been created overseas to acquire citizenship for newborns," he said. "And I think having a hearing on that would be a good idea. I don't know what the potential solution to it is. Obviously it's a rather unseemly business and I think we ought to...take a look at it."

Sure, Mitch. There's a huge, unchecked industry of "birth tourism" that's killing the country. Yeah, and if you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you.

Make no mistake, this is just more of the Republican tactic of pointing to some other victimized subset of the population as the reason why your life isn't all that it could be. Now those wicked little anchor babies--and not the Republican policies of corporatism, favoring the top 5% of the population, dismantling social safety nets, deregulated markets and union busting--are keeping you from magically being one of those elites who actually stand to gain from the elimination of estate and capital gains taxes. They are not just saying we need a re-examination of the fundamental idea of birthright - but a repeal of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution which includes our right to due process and equal protection. They truly do want to take us back to 1868.

And when Lou Dobbs thinks you've gone too far in your hate and suspicion against the Other to still be within the law, you have to know you're in real trouble.

UPDATED: Chuck Grassley of Iowa adds his name to the list of old white guys afraid of babies. And Alan Keyes says some things about the Republican Party are too crazy even for him.

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Nicholas Phillips at the Riverfront Times takes note of this YouTube video from a Tea Party/Patriot movement outfit calling itself Don't Tread On Me, which apparently is planning a movie documenting the "Patriot uprising" against President Obama and the eeeeeeevil Marxist/socialist/fascist Democrats.

Among the featured guests on the video are a couple of Missouri Republican House legislators: Rep. Cynthia Davis, who you may remember for her proclamation that "hunger can be a motivating force", which is why we shouldn't give kids school lunches; and Rep. Brian Nieves, who got some attention earlier this month for his goofy political demanding Obama and Muslims "leave us alone".

The theme of the video is that eventually, "patriots" are going to have to take up arms against the eeeeeevil Democrats. Nieves, for instance, intones:

Thirty years from now, somebody's going to ask you what you did during the patriot uprising.

Davis adds:

We're drawing the line in the sand and saying, 'This is our territory.'

But hey, those Tea Partiers are just normal, sane people who only want to advocate for fiscal restraint. Right? Right?

Digby has more.

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Mark Williams -- having seen his Tea Party Express booted from the National Tea Party Foundation for his nakedly racist screed about "coloreds" -- went on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon yesterday and announced he was stepping down as the TPE spokesman. In the process, demonstrated exactly why the Tea Parties cannot distance themselves from their racists within quite as easily as they'd like:

LEMON: So I want to ask you, why did you resign from the Tea Party Express?

WILLIAMS: To take the spotlight off of me. It's a movement. It's not about me. It's not about my ego. It's not about my fat head. I did succeed in getting the NAACP to the table. And by the way this tea party federation which represents exactly 40 groups out of 5,000, I was never a member of. I have no idea who they are, but they threw me out.

Hmmmm. This is most peculiar, since the press release announcing the formation of the National Tea Party Foundation in April 2009 lists the Tea Party Express as one of its founding member organizations. And I can't find any indication the Tea Party Express ever indicated that this listing was in error.

In any event, Williams then went on to explain that he was still very much a Tea Party activist:

LEMON: OK. So listen, if you say that you wanted to take the spotlight off of you, I have to ask you then why did you accept this interview if you don't want to be in the spotlight?

WILLIAMS: I weaselled on you last time. The reason why I canceled last time was because the day before David Webb went on TV and did all this nonsense about kicking me out of a group I never belonged to, I had sat down with the Urban League, the NAACP, Reverend Al and a bunch of other people and we reached an agreement to put all the rancor behind us and find common ground.

This guy Webb, looking for headlines, cashing in, whatever it was, decided he would chime in. That makes me the issue when the issue should really be America and what we're working to save.

LEMON: OK.

WILLIAMS: I am still a Tea Partier. I just don't speak officially for the Tea Party Express.

And then he demonstrated exactly the kind of racist ignorance that is embedded deeply in the movement he formerly represented:

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Dadgummit, once again, the right wing noise machine has framed the debate and the Democrats are forced to play defense. Of course, the Shirley Sherrod smear by Andrew Breitbart would be a topic of discussion on the Sunday shows.

But will they take a hard look at the responsibility of news organizations to fact check and contextualize before just blindly repeating a partisan smear from a known liar and smear merchant? Surely, you jest. Stop playing the blame game, you liberals.

Instead, we're treated to these false equivalencies and ridiculous Broderisms by David Brooks with a clear candidate for The Jayson Blair Project:

There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of tactics, too. That happens, as well. Listen, I was out jogging, you wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging (LAUGH) you wouldn’t know it to look at me, I was out jogging on the mall. I was at a Tea Party rally, Tea Party rally. Also there was a group called the Back-- Black Family Reunion, celebration of African American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle. Sitting at the same table, eating-- watching concerts together. Among most of those people, there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on-- on a warm Sunday afternoon.

And so, there are people, but I-- I was struck by a story of progress. A story of progress, that we're making some progress to this. And this whole week, that speech was about progress. We now have a gotcha culture that punishes people that say terrible things. So, I think overall, it's slow, steady--

Any one actually believe that anything like this actually happened? If so, I got a bridge to sell you...cheap.

But ultimately, it's entirely beside the point.

The issue is not nor ever has been whether ALL tea baggers are racist. It's an intellectually dishonest argument to paint any group of people with such a broad brush, and it was never done by anyone on the left. But since the right has grabbed hold of the narrative, they can dismiss any and all discussion by such a straw man.

Remember the timeline of events: The NAACP asked the tea party organizers to disavow the racist element that showed up at every tea party event. Not every tea bagger. But it's hard to argue that they didn't exist, especially with the preponderance of pictures proving so.

It's not an unheard of request. The Republican Party disavowed the fascist McCarthyites and also the extremist John Birchers at one point in time. Democrats were asked to disavow MoveOn for the Gen. Betrayus debacle.

But that doesn't work for polemicist and unabashed hater Andrew Breitbart. He instead decides that the way to respond to a call for civility and respect is to counter-attack with a smear, even if he has to make one up. And his thesis? If the tea party is racist, so is the NAACP. And to prove it, he shows an edited video of a 24 year old incident involving an African-American mid-level bureaucrat and a white farmer. So in Breitbart's Bizarro-World logic, NAACP = white racism = black government bureaucrat singly discriminating against white farmer (she didn't, but go along with the analogy)= ? Is Breitbart insinuating that a single incident 24 years ago is enough to indict the entire NAACP of white racism? And is Sherrod even a member of the NAACP? She's not an officer of the organization.

And don't think for a moment that the choice of a government employee who works to support the poor and needy is an accident either. This is just more serving of the oligarchy, a fact that the media conveniently lets slide down the memory hole.

If Breitbart--and the media enabling him and accepting his framing-- is going to use the analogy that one act condemns an entire group, why can't we call all tea baggers racist?

Let's see David Brooks answer THAT one.

John and I have been wandering the halls at Netroots Nation here in Vegas this week, having a blast hanging out with our blogospheric friends. But we also led one of the conference's first panels yesterday morning, titled "Right Wing Populism and the Tea Parties".

It also featured our friend Adele Stan of AlterNet and the amazing Hugh Jackson of the Las Vegas Gleaner. Of course, I'm a little biased, but I thought the ensuing discussion was very good, the room was pretty full and the questions very thoughtful.

Turns out that some folks from rightward publications were there too. Susan Davis of the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire was there and filed a pretty balanced story.

However, I noticed that she also truncated not only the title of our book, Over the Cliff -- she omitted the subtitle, How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane, though that in fact was a significant theme of the panel as well -- she also truncated the quote from me as well:

“After the 2008 election we were all celebrating, but we also became complacent,” said liberal blogger David Neiwert. “The right never gives up.”

“The answer to the tea party is to activate the populist wing of the progressive movement,” he said. “We need to seize on [the public’s frustration] ourselves and channel it to our movement.”

What I actually said in full was this:

"After the 2008 election we were all celebrating, but we also became complacent. But having studied the right for many years, I can tell you: They never, ever, give up. They are relentless. Even after their ideology has been completely discredited by eight years of conservative rule, even after they have driven the country into an economic abyss, they keep going -- even if it means going insane in the process."

Oh well.

And then there was Chris Moody of the Daily Caller, who couldn't take the time to talk to any of us afterward, and wrote an even more distorted account headlined "Liberals warn: Don’t write off the Tea Party (even if they’re crazy)".

You'll note, if you read the piece, that Moody omits my explanation for why we call the Right "insane," namely this, which I said:

"We say that they've gone insane a little bit facetiously, but really, we say it because they believe things -- lots of things -- that are provably untrue. And that really is a kind of insanity. It's why we sometimes just say these people are nuts."

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[WARNING: Audio not safe for work.]

It's obvious why Andrew Breitbart successfully smeared Shirley Sherrod on utterly fake grounds -- he wants desperately to prove that it's the NAACP is actually a racist organization, after its condemnation of racism within the Tea Parties. Indeed, this has been a long-running schtick of Breitbart's -- that the "real" racists are not white people, but people of color.

He was even on CNN yesterday whining that "It is un-American" that the NAACP accused the Tea Party movement of racism "absent evidence".

Um, actually, Andrew, the NAACP provided plenty of evidence of racism within its ranks.

And then, as if to prove the point, a caller who clearly is an angry Tea Partier left the following message at NAACP's Hollywood bureau:

Caller: Of course you won't answer the phone yourself. Because you're chickens--t racist n---ers. The entire black race is nothing but a have-not bunch of bums. You can't work for yourselves. All you do is suck off the white man. F--k you, motherf---er! F--k you! You want a race war, you got it, motherf---er! You want to f---ing kill our babies, and kill white people? You, you're gonna f---in' -- the streets will run red with blood. The streets will run red with your blood. F--k you!

Not only was this caller severely lacking in the logical consistency department -- first he calls the NAACP racist, then embarks on a rant about "the entire black race" (in this regard, he's a lot like the typical Fox pundit). But the reference to "kill our babies" and "kill white people" was also an obvious reference to that incendiary video Fox News ran as a way of ginning up racial hatred and resentment among its white audience.

In other words, they fully succeeded. They should be so proud.

And is it just me, or does this guy actually sound a lot like Breitbart himself? Hmmmmmmm.

[H/t Common Dreams.]

Last week, some Tea Partiers in Iowa put up the above billboard comparing President Obama to Hitler and Lenin. Apparently passing health-care reform is now the moral equivalent of mass genocide.

(Of course, anyone familiar with the immortal works of Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck knows exactly where they're getting this from.)

The next day, amid a national furor, the Tea Partiers abjectly retreated, papering over the billboard with a new one featuring a Founding Father. These guys do watch Glenn Beck a lot, don't they?

The Tea Partiers tried pretty much the same papering over this weekend when they announced they were giving Mark Williams and his Tea Party Express the boot for having revealed themselves as the rather unreconstituted racists they in fact are.

But it doesn't work that way. Because the Tea Party simply can't just paper over the movement's already clearly established record of condoning racism in its attacks on Obama -- not to mention its clear record of attracting and including and promoting not just racists but far-right extremists of all types, from tax nuts to religious nuts to gun nuts. A bunch of nuts all around, any way you cut it.

Judy Thomas has a terrific examination of this phenomenon in the Kansas City Star:

Billy Roper is a write-in candidate for governor of Arkansas and an unapologetic white nationalist.

“I don’t want non-whites in my country in any form or fashion or any status,” he says.

Roper also is a tea party member who says he has been gathering support for his cause by attending tea party rallies.

“We go to these tea parties all over the country,” Roper said. “We’re looking for the younger, potentially more radical people.”

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Oh, I just love Tea Parties, don't you? On Countdown last night, Keith Olbermann featured Michele Bachmann's newest bid for attention and concerned stares.

OLBERMANN: It's not just that there isn't much racism in the Tea Party. The contention is there's none, zero. Thats next in worsts. First, no, that's not your water coming to a boil. It's our nightly checkup on the something for nothing crowd. It's Tea Time.

Fifty percent of life really is an imitation of a Monty Python sketch. From Washington and the Committee on House Administration there comes this letter.

"I would like to register the House Tea Party Caucus as a congressional member organization. The 111th Congress has Tea Party Caucus, will serve as an informal group of members dedicated to promote America's call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution" -- . Michele Bachmann, Chairwoman

Michele Bachmann, Chairwoman Michele Bachmann of the House Tea Party Caucus. Chairwoman Michele Bachmann of the House Tea Party Caucus, consisting of the following members: Michele Bachmann.

Meantime in Kentucky, Rand Paul has vowed to start a Senate Tea Party Caucus. He bets on Paul not blowing what remains of his once big lead or about his only potential other member, Sharron Angle, when she out- Tea Partied the chicken lady, Sue Lowden, to get the Republican nomination in Nevada.

She led Reid by three points in the Mason-Dixon poll. The new Mason-Dixon poll is now out, Reid by seven, a ten-point swing in six weeks.

It is one thing to believe America agrees with you and your regressive, narrow-minded, prejudiced politics. Go ahead. Have a good time. But to think you are winning when you are getting your asses kicked, that takes us back to the Monty Python sketch. Or more correctly, the Eric Idol spoof of the Beatles called " The Ruttles."

The band was suddenly influenced by the spiritual teachings of an Indian Yogi, who turns them on to a new hallucinogenic drug. A new hallucinogenic drug is obviously a metaphor for LSD. The new hallucinogenic drug is TEA, tea. I think we just found out what the stuff is that Michele Bachmann drinks."

According to Bachmann's official Congressional website:

"The American people are speaking out loud and clear. They have had enough of the spending, the bureaucracy, and the government knows best mentality running rampant today throughout the halls of Congress. This caucus will espouse the timeless principles of our founding, principles that all Members of Congress have sworn to uphold," Bachmann stated. "The American people are doing their part and making their voices heard and this caucus will prove that there are some here in Washington willing to listen."

I guess that means the only Americans worth listening to are those folks with the signs out to 'take their country back'? Would that be most of the mainstream Republican party, perhaps?

I was going to poke fun at the staffer assigned to coordinate the new caucus, but it's not nice to make fun of folks saddled with the last name "Looser" who also work for Michele Bachmann, so I won't.

Teabaggers are a legend in their own minds, and Michele Bachmann is trying to keep a 'movement that was never a movement' afloat long enough to flog it through November. What will she do when she, Rand Paul and Sharron Angle all lose? Maybe we'll get lucky and she'll toss her hat in the GOP primary ring.

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Yesterday's media heroine has to be Patricia Murphy of Politics Daily, who yesterday on Fox managed to make Sean Hannity look like buffoon and a tool. Of course, Hannity does this to himself every day, but Murphy gave it a little extra edge.

First, she flatly knocked down Hannity's little right-wing talking point about Elena Kagan purportedly "kicked the military off campus" at Harvard (she of course did did no such thing).

But the most delicious moment was this one:

Murphy: Let's be really, really honest here. There are members of the Tea Party -- it's a tiny, tiny minority -- members of the Tea Party, and I've seen them, who compare President Obama to Hitler. I've been there and seen it, I've been on this show --

Hannity: I've not seen it.

Murphy: He's been compared to the Khmer Rouge, and to Nazism, while I've been here, this is just common cultural --

Hannity: Whom compared him to that?

Murphy: Tucker Carlson! When I was sitting right here, on this show!

Hannity: [red-faced] Did you disagree with him?

Murphy: I did disagree with him.

Of course, if you go back and look at that clip now, it's worth noting that Hannity did not.

Yes, I'm going to a great conference hosted by Campaign for America's Future this week. I'm flying to DC Sunday.

David Neiwert and Susie Madrak will be there also so we can have a little C&L powwow. Progressive politics is the life blood of our country and I'm down for participating in the process and trying to get together with the people that feel the same way. CFAF has some of the most talented people in politics and I couldn't be more excited to be part of it.

I'll be on a cool panel with some very progressives minds at the AFN:

Tuesday, 9:30AM Ends 10:40AM Tea Parties, Beck, Bachman and Blarney

Tea Parties, Beck, Bachman and Blarney

Palladian Room

Eric Burns
John Atlas
Alex Zaitchik
John Amato
Digby
James Rucker

I've had a short video made to illustrate how right wing extremism has found its way from talk radio, radical religious figures and paranoid militia groups into the halls of Congress.

After the panel David and I will be doing a book signing which should be very different. David has done this a few times, but for me it's a first so...

I hope I see you there if you happen to be in DC.