If you want a classic example of the way Establishment Democrats are perfectly tone-deaf when it comes to the concerns of the working families they like to flatter themselves as representing, take a look at how the race in Washington's brand-spanking-new First District is shaping up, particularly on the Democratic side.

Because instead of backing Darcy Burner, the progressive candidate with far and away the greatest name recognition and a record of working for working-class families and their interests -- particularly when it comes to things like protecting Medicare and Social Security, and getting their children out of war zones -- the state's establishment Dems seem to be lining up behind Susan DelBene, a pro-business faux-progressive Dem with little popular support but very deep pockets.

Evidently, it's all about the money. In a year when Democrats should be listening to the anger of their constituents at the failure of Washington politicians to take care of the interests of ordinary people, these dimbulbs are going back to politics as usual and backing the candidate with the deepest pockets, not the deepest support among voters.

On the Republican side, Tea Party nutter John Koster is running largely unopposed and leads in early polling -- largely because it's a six-way race on the Democratic side right now. Things will be different in the fall, when his far-right record and rhetoric will come front and center.

A weekend Seattle Times story laid out the contours:

The Democratic establishment is coalescing behind Suzan DelBene, a former Microsoft vice president who largely self-funded her losing 2010 campaign against U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, who represents the 8th District.

But in this year of economic anxiety and the noise surrounding the Occupy movement, DelBene's opponents are taking jabs at her wealth, to appeal to struggling families.

As Darcy Burner, a progressive activist who twice lost to Reichert, says: "There's already an overrepresentation of the 1 percent in Washington, D.C."

You may notice something important missing from this story. There's plenty here touting DelBene's candidacy, for instance, but nothing telling readers how the candidates actually stack up in terms of support:

DelBene's résumé looms largest. She was appointed Gov. Chris Gregoire's Department of Revenue director after an executive career at Microsoft and Drugstore.com, among others. She and her husband, Kurt, a Microsoft president, live in a $4.8 million Lake Washington waterfront home and said she would, like last time, put her own money into her campaign.

"We talk about the American dream, yet we're in a place where we're making it harder and harder. I don't know if I would be able to tell my same story if I were growing up today," she said.

In an apparent effort to trim the field, Gregoire and Larsen endorsed DelBene, as did the state Washington State Labor Council.

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If you don't care for tea, you could at least make polite conversation!

Well! The Republicans and their corporate paymasters wanted their little Mad Hatter's Tea Party, and they certainly got it. The thing is, when you hand over the keys to the crazy people, they do things that give the "adults" conniptions. This is just one example of Austerians Gone Wild.

Now the Senate will have to see if they can untangle this mess.

On May 9 the House voted to kill the American Community Survey, which collects data on some 3 million households each year and is the largest survey next to the decennial census. The ACS—which has a long bipartisan history, including its funding in the mid-1990s and full implementation in 2005—provides data that help determine how more than $400 billion in federal and state funds are spent annually. Businesses also rely heavily on it to do such things as decide where to build new stores, hire new employees, and get valuable insights on consumer spending habits.

Initially, it looked like the House might simply repeal the survey’s mandatory requirement, something the Census Bureau has said would just make it more expensive since they’d have to send more agents into the field to collect the data manually, rather than being able to legally require people who receive the survey to fill it out. Representative Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) went a step further, leading the charge to dismantle the ACS entirely on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.

Webster gained his seat as part of the 2010 Tea Party revolution that won Republicans control of the House. A press release on his website criticizes the ACS for invading people’s privacy by requiring them to answer questions such as what time they leave for work, how long their commute is, and whether they need help going shopping. Those who receive a survey and fail to respond are subject to fines of as much as $5,000.

The fight over cutting funds for data-gathering agencies has opened up a rift in the deficit-hawk crowd. A handful of organizations that generally support big fiscal spending cuts have voiced their support for fully funding the three main data-gathering agencies: Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The Chamber of Commerce, for example, strongly advocates funding them, since its members rely so much on the information they provide on basic things such as household spending, per capita income, and population estimates. The ACS is of particular value to them, says Martin Regalia, Commerce’s chief economist. “It is especially important to some of our bigger members for trying to understand geographic distinctions and other granularity in the economy.”

Tom Beers, executive director of the National Association of Business Economists, says that without good economic data, businesses would be “flying blind.” He adds: “You end up in a guessing game about what’s going on in the economy. The types of losses that result are far worse than what you end up spending to fund these surveys.”

Don't they see what they're doing?

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

Contacted last week, economists at conservative think tanks Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation all expressed support for the data-gathering agencies since all three rely heavily on the statistics they produce to study the economy. “Those agencies are essential,” says Phillip Swagel, an economist and nonresident scholar at AEI. “The data they provide really tell us what’s going on in the economy. This shouldn’t be a political issue.”

Ah, but when you give sharp knives to children, you have to expect these things.

Following a theme we recently heard from NJ Gov. Chris Christie, Maine's Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage tells the unemployed to "get off the couch." Of course, there are plenty of jobs out there - if you can work for minimum wage and only get 20 hours a week!

WASHINGTON -- At the Maine GOP convention on Sunday, Gov. Paul LePage (R) received an enthusiastic standing ovation from his fellow Republicans for saying that all able-bodied out-of-work Americans need to "get off the couch" and go find employment.

LePage called on the state legislature to pass structural changes to welfare, saying, "Maine's welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government. To all you able-bodied people out there: "Get off the couch and get yourself a job."

"I understand welfare because I lived it," he added. "I understand the difference between a want and a need. The Republican Party promised to bring welfare change. We must deliver on this promise."

LePage has been pushing so-called welfare reform for months, although Democrats have argued that his definition of the term is too broad, encompassing "everything from disability to MaineCare (Medicaid), which isn't welfare."

Mike Tipping, communications director for the Maine People's Alliance, said LePage's comments were "downright offensive to Maine people searching for work in a difficult economy, especially considering his embarrassing record of failing to invest in programs that create jobs and cutting assistance for the unemployed while at the same time giving massive new tax breaks to the wealthy."

Christine Hastedt, public policy director at Maine Equal Justice Partners, called them "a gross insult to working people who get up every day and become discouraged by the end of the day, because there's not a job for them."

"We talk to people every day," said Hastedt. "There are not enough jobs for the people who want them. There aren't enough hours in the jobs for people who need them. These are jobs that don't provide health care, and certainly don't provide child care. Those are services that people need to get even the jobs that they could get. Nevertheless, he's cutting those safety net benefits that make it possible for people to work."

This is classic. At last month's tea party protests during the Supreme Court arguments on the Affordable Care Act, tea partiers were asked what specific constitutional provisions were being violated.

Despite having their pocket constitutions firmly at hand, they couldn't seem to articulate their constitutional objections to the Affordable Care Act at all. Among the responses were some truly ignorant ones, like "the commerce clause was added to the Constitution" (it wasn't), or that the Constitution didn't specifically mention health care. Hey, it doesn't specifically mention nuclear weapons either, but I don't see them out there protesting against those.

The response that chuffed me the most was the lady who, when confronted with the facts about the commerce clause, said "Well, we probably shouldn't argue about that anyway, since neither of us really knows." Hey, lady! Yes, one of us knows, and anyone who cares to know can easily find the answer by going to look at the images of the original constitution and looking carefully for traces of 18th century correction fluid. Hint: there isn't any.

What this video proves is what we've been saying all along. There is no "Tea Party," per se. There are just lots of Republicans who respond to fearmongering and manufactured nonsense in order to fight anything, even if they don't know what they're fighting. I'm sure they're trying to be good citizens and participate in their democracy, but really, it does help to do that armed with something besides the feeling that it's a bad thing because a Democrat did it.

Can we stop referring to this group as something legitimate and simply acknowledge they represent the easily-led group of card-carrying Republicans?

There was a time when there were statesmen among the GOP's elected and appointed officials. Men of academic and intellectual accomplishment, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller and yes, George H.W. Bush. Men and women who didn't brag about not having a passport (the estimable Dick Armey), misunderstand how birth control works or think French kissing was invented in Gaul.

Those were the days.

For the past generation, Republican leaders, talk-show hosts and elected officials have made it their mission to mock anyone of serious intellectual import (liberal elitist!), attack the professional class and wonder aloud about proven science on about as constant a loop as Sex In The City reruns on E!. They have fed at the trough of what the late historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed Anti-intellectualism In American Life.

These decisions have had their consequences. One of the most loyal groups to emerge among what Ruy Teixeira has called The Emerging Democratic Majority are professionals located among "Ideopolis" clusters around the country, usually major cities or college towns and their suburbs. Those who make their living with creativity that requires advanced education, such as software developers, architects and nurses, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves. For some reason, seeing gravity as part of suspiciously Semitic War on Christmas, or the principle of inertia as a left-wing plot to grow welfare rolls, just doesn't hold the same chant-"USA"-three-times-and don-an-American-flag-bikini cache for those post-GED.

So it should be no surprise that if you're conservative and you chew your own food, or are willing to try three syllables on for size, you might just become what Paul Krugman refers to as "a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like."

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CREDO SuperPac has announced the eighth member of its 'Tea Party Ten' members of Congress that it will seek to defeat in the 2012 elections, Dan Lungren of California. The 10 are chosen on the basis of their extreme positions and rhetoric and the fact that they are vulnerable. Most of them were elected in the 'wave' election of 2010 and could easily lose in 2012 if they have strong challengers.

Sometimes the actions of elected representatives become so odious that urgent action is required. Many of the Tea Party-affiliated House Republicans were elected in 2010 on a wave of concern about a very troubled economy and with millions of dollars in expenditures by political groups associated with Karl Rove or the Koch brothers. Their actions in Congress have been beyond the pale.

They voted to deny the science on global warming, to change the very definition of rape, to deny funds to Planned Parenthood for the provision of contraception, to expand tax breaks for the top 1%, and to eliminate Medicare and leave seniors and the disabled at the mercy of the insurance industry.

Lungren was announced Wednesday as the latest Republican added to the campaign. His headline reads "California's Rick Santorum":

For more than 30 years, Dan Lungren has stood for Tea Party extremism and radical assaults on equality. When the Obama Administration refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, Dan Lungren was happy to sink $1.5 million of our tax dollars into a contract with a former Bush Administration official to uphold this discriminatory law. But denying equal rights to lesbian and gay couples is about the only thing Lungren wants to fund. He voted for the Ryan budget to slash social services and end Medicare as we know it. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood, cut Pell Grants for one third of University of California undergraduates, cut $125 million from K-12 education in California, and eliminate Headstart funding for 14,000 low income children in his district. His position on women's issues are even more extreme: Lungren has sponsored legislation that would have outlawed abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and is so anti-woman that he called the Obama Administration's new regulations on no-cost birth control an "assault" on the First Amendment.

Lungren joins Mike Fitzpatrick (PA), Joe Walsh (IL), Frank Guinta (NH), Sean Duffy (WI), Steve King (IA), Chip Cravaack (MN) and Allen West (FL) on the list. Two members of the Tea Party Ten remain to be unveiled.

Those interested in getting Lungren and the rest of the Tea Party Ten out of office can sign the CREDO pledge or contribute.

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Anyone who knows anything about professional sports knows that, first and foremost, it's a bottom-line business. Players who put up numbers get paid and players who don't perform, don't. It's really that simple.

So it was amusing to watch the wingnut weeping over Tim Tebow being traded to New York. Whether it was Pat Robertson issuing a fatwa on Peyton Manning or Matt Lewis pretending he knows more about the quarterback position than John Elway — or Sean Hannity saying Elway traded Tebow because he was "shaking things up" — it's been fun to watch wingers display their new-found support for affirmative action.

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He's baaaaack. As I suspected, letting Glenn Beck loose from Fox News didn't keep him from stirring the pot, and this time it's on a global basis. Here's his plan, via Gather.com:

Beck met with Cardinals, Monsignors, Archbishops and other Catholic leaders and officials at the Vatican. Beck's website says, "They discussed the importance of freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, as well as standing against the rise of secularism and the rise of anti-Semitism." Fans will have to wait until later today when Glenn is back to discuss his trip. Anything that can help to bring peace between religions and work towards solidarity against secular attacks will be welcome by many.

Mr. Beck also spoke with Tea Party leaders from Serbia, Georgia, Milan, Rome, Germany, Austria, London, and Israel. Who knew there was a Tea Party overseas? The meeting was put together by FreedomWorks and Mercury One. The website says they discussed the peace movement overseas and "...an integrated global effort to champion Tea Party ideals." On his Monday radio show, Beck will talk about his "...vision for a multi-faith coalition that stands in support of religious liberty." Last night on his Twitter, Beck posted, "I'm back from "special assignment" with amazing news.

Yeah. Amazing news. I found this snippet from his interview about the Grand Plan with Bill O'Reilly to be pretty interesting, at about 50 seconds in:

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Credit: New York Times

The American social safety net is back in the news, and not just because Mitt Romney acknowledged, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." This week, the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University revealed that a third of Americans now receive Medicaid, food stamps or other means-based government assistance, a number that climbs to 148 million when Social Security, Medicare and unemployment benefits are factored in. The next day, the conservative Heritage Foundation fretted that its "Index of Dependence on Government" rose 8.1 percent last year. Then on Sunday, the New York Times detailed that the so-called safety net now delivers most its benefits to middle class Americans, including many who denounce the very government programs which now sustain them.

But while the torrent of new reports provides fodder for partisans of all stripes (myself included), the picture of the frayed U.S. safety net is a complex one. What conservatives routinely decry as government largesse for the undeserving poor is a hodge-podge of programs which increasingly support the middle class and, above all, the elderly.

Here, then, are five things I found caught in the safety net.

1. Universal Programs vs. Means-Tested Benefits

Eager to reinforce their narrative, conservatives tend to play fast and loose with what's actually in the safety net. As this Politico summary of the Heritage Foundation 2012 government dependency index shows, safety net critics intentionally conflate universal programs like Social Security and Medicare with means-tested aide like food stamps, housing assistance and welfare payments:

Since the 2008 index, the American people's dependence on government has grown a whopping 23 percent.

One in five Americans -- or slightly more than 67 million -- now relies on federal assistance...Overall, about 70 percent of the federal government's budget is directed to individual assistance programs. And nearly half of the population, or 49.5 percent, don't pay any federal income taxes, according to the survey.

Of course, virtually all working Americans pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes; programs whose growth accounts for most of the expansion of federal domestic spending. Since 1965, Social Security and Medicare have helped reduce poverty among the elderly by two-thirds. (Just as important, bipartisan support for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax credits have trimmed the numbers of working Americans who owe Uncle Sam each year.) That's why it was so refreshing to see at least one right-wing blogger react to Sunday's New York Times piece by complaining, "Wait - Medicare is now a "safety net" program? I thought that, like Social Security, it was an earned benefit - we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible."

2. Complain and Ye Shall Receive

To be sure, the conservative commentariat is none too happy to see The New York Times once again highlight the hypocrisy of government spending critics happily (or often, unknowingly) receiving payments from Washington. For example, there's the case of Ki Gulbranson, a Minnesotan who earns $39,000 a year and, The Times claims, "wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government":

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region's long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

Gulbranson has plenty of company within the ranks of the Tea Party. 2009 data from Public Policy Polling revealed that while 39 percent of all Americans responded that the government should "stay out of Medicare," 59 percent of self-identified conservatives and 62 percent of McCain voters hold that oxymoronic view. As The New York Times reported on its joint survey with CBS of Tea Party members in April 2010, "Despite their push for smaller government, they think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers." 62-year-old Tea Party supporter Jodine White acknowledged to The Times what her desire to slash government spending would produce:

"That's a conundrum, isn't it? I don't know what to say. Maybe I don't want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security." She added, "I didn't look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I've changed my mind."

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This is Tea Party Reporter Susie Sampson with her latest report on Mitt Romney. "Stay in the oven, Mitt!"