Yesterday, President Obama named DOJ lawyer Tom Perez as his choice for Labor Secretary. Perez is a strong progressive choice for that position, and one who will surely make right wing heads explode across the country.

MSNBC's background piece on Perez reveals him to be someone who doesn't back down and stands up for the rights of ordinary people:

Senate Republicans are expected to strongly oppose Perez’s nomination, having previously held up his appointment to the Justice Department for over seven months.

In his time as assistant attorney general in charge of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, Perez became known for his aggressive, high-profile investigations into allegations of discrimination. For example, he investigated Pennsylvania’s controversial voter ID law to determine whether it was in violation of the Voting Rights Act, and used Section five of the Voting Rights Act to block a similar law from being enacted in Texas.

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There have been reams of analysis over why Mitt Romney's campaign seems to be fading in the stretch, and we're no exception. I could list many, going back a year to when he said "corporations are people, too" to his off-the-cuff "I don't care about poor people" to his "I like to fire people" to his most recent 47 percent comments.

You could argue that Mitt Romney's own statements are enough to disqualify him from being president. But lately, I've seen another argument floating around that warrants discussion, too. George Zornick, writing for The Nation, framed it this way:

Romney seems to have outsourced a substantial part of his communications operation and opposition research to right-wing blogs—and keeps getting burned for it. Will he learn to stop?

Media Matters published an in-depth study of how closely Romney's campaign tracks with right-wing blog memes just after The Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve took a look at four primary Romney campaign themes and tied them back to right-wing blogs and blog comments.

Reeve makes the case that Romney is exactly the candidate conservatives wanted, and that candidate is losing the election.

There's a pattern emerging to Mitt Romney's worst gaffes: his biggest political missteps come whenever he repeats something the conservative opinion complex has already repeated endlessly. Instead of being the candidate that conservative bloggers feared as a moderate, he's been exactly the candidate they wanted. And he's losing. The most recent example, of course, is Romney's comment to donors that 47 percent of Americans are voting for President Obama because they're getting a government handout -- which has been a meme on conservative blogs for months. In December 2011, RedState editor Erick Erickson, who is the creator of that meme, wrote a widely-noted post titled "Mitt Romney as the Nominee: Conservatism Dies and Barack Obama Wins." He predicted Romney's candidacy would be "an utter disaster for conservatives" because Romney was "a guy who keeps selling out the very principles conservatives claim to hold dear" and who won't "seriously take conservatives seriously." If the polls don't change in the next 49 days, Erickson will have been only half right. Obama will have won, but not because Romney ran as a moderate. It will be in part because he adopted conservative bloggers' memes as critical parts of his campaign message.

Media Matters' analysis includes this indictment:

But in the past, when national candidates needed to learn a political language they sought out experts in the field, and respected opinion-makers. They didn't rely on half-witted bloggers, cable TV wake-up personalities, and talk show hosts who push sludge in the form of 'debate.' (i.e. Obama's allegiance is to the Quran!)

I think this is a dangerous argument to make as broadly as it has been made. Possibly my perspective might come from the fact that someone on the right might view me as a "half-witted blogger" and discount anything I might write as unworthy of consideration, so there might be a bit of a self-serving reaction there. Take it for what you will.

My problem with the assertion that Romney is spewing right-wing memes originated by "half-witted bloggers" is that it assumes those ideas began with bloggers. As you can see from the round-robin of email published last week between Foster Friess, James O'Keefe, and John Fund, the right wing message machine tightly integrated with think tanks, high-profile journalists, and the money boys who fund them.

There is absolutely no daylight between Fox News and any online group. In fact, Fox News routinely uses people from right-wing web sites as "commentators," right alongside their think tank folks and of course, the shadow Romney campaign advisors. It's a symbiotic relationship which blends online with broadcast with the man-on-the-street opinionators. All of this is true.

This is very different than the structures on the left. Lefty bloggers aren't funded by anyone but their readers. Cue request for donations.

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Buzzfeed has published the most bizarre set of emails between right wing operatives freaking out during the Scott Brown/Martha Coakley race in January of 2010 that I've ever seen.

The plot, hatched by a strange alliance of high-profile conservatives, was to have James O'Keefe and his "crew" catch the SEIU in some kind of voter fraud similar to what O'Keefe has tried to commit in various states around the nation in order to claim that voter ID laws are necessary.

Let's note for the record that the entire right wing has been curiously silent about the voter registration fraud schemes bought and paid for by the Republican National Committee. You would think concerned conservatives like Fund, Fox and Friess would be very, very concerned, but instead, silence fills the hole where outrage should be.

The Players
John Fund is a conservative champion of Voter ID laws, and senior editor for The American Spectator. Fund also writes for the Wall Street Journal.. Steve Friess is the son of right-wing moneybags Foster Friess, of "aspirin between her knees" fame. And of course, James O'Keefe is the Breitbart disciple who loves to edit video to make it look like people are doing things they aren't in order to destroy organizations like ACORN.

Others involved include Heather Higgins, pundit and president of Independent Women's Voices. Higgins is also affiliated with the Hoover Institution.

The Plot

It begins with a tip that appears to have come via neocon radio host John Batchelor. The tip says that the SEIU is contracting for buses to take voters to the polls, asserting that "if you're black or brown they'll rope you in and take you to the polls, registration can be worked out."

That tip went to John Fund, who then forwarded it to Heather Higgins, who forwarded it to Foster Friess. Out of this, comes the plan from Steve Friess to make an "ACORN sting video." Oh, the paranoia just shines through. Also the racism.

Some black /Latina conservatives could be wired for video, and get picked up on one of these busses, and show what goes on. My guess -they are offering cash, (which I am pretty sure is illegal), and I also would wager that at least some of these busses are making more than one stop with the same people - ie getting them to vote twice -though I don't know the mechanics of that.

Perhaps some private detective types would be needed to help track down the busses, and a block or two ahead of them to drop our cameramen off...

Too much to dream? Imagine pulling this off - legal / image problems for SEIU would be a good thing... think there's upside to this?

Brietbart would know, and Fund would know - 'if we catch them doing X, it could mean Y' - I just don't know what the stakes are...

The most interesting part of the Steve Friess email was right at the end, where he asks his dad to 'bounce this off Breitbart.' At the time, O'Keefe hadn't been arrested for his attempted bugging of Mary Landrieu's office and was still widely hailed as a conservative hero. Evidently O'Keefe was also still part of the Breitbart inner circle, too.

O'Keefe forwarded on the email to Nadia Naffe, who worked for O'Keefe for awhile before there was a break and she accused him of harassment.

The End

Evidently they did try to get something, but never used it. Buzzfeed reports:

Reached by email, Naffe said the emails were authentic: "Fund and Steve Friess, the son of billionaire Foster Friess, introduced the idea to O'keefe that SEIU would fraudulently register anyone with brown skin to vote."

"James flew me out to Boston to find the SEIU busses, just days after that email was sent," Naffe said. She claimed that "Congressman Steve King from Iowa was waiting at the hotel when we arrived to take us to dinner. He gave us a pep talk about illegal voting."

"O'keefe has the footage, though I'm doubtful he would share any of it. Since, he was arrested a week later in New Orleans while attempting to wire tap Senator Mary Landrieu," Naffe said.

This may not rise to the level of blockbuster reporting, but I did think it was interesting to see how intertwined the networks are. John Fund, Andrew Breitbart and Foster Friess, all huddled together to make sure those nasty black and brown people didn't vote in Massachusetts.

Meanwhile in other pockets of RepublicanLand, they're fraudulently changing voter registrations, tossing Democratic registrations in the trash, and otherwise working on rigging elections. What a bunch of poseurs.

I am soooooo disappointed. I can't tell you how disappointed. Because, alas and alack, I'm going to have to miss next week's gathering of tea-partying wingnuts down in Oregon, aka the "Gathering of Eagles".

My friend Carla at Blue Oregon tipped me off about this shindig. Seems they held the GOE last year at the same rural ranch outside of Turner, and everyone had such a grand time they decided to hold it there again.

You remember the "Gathering of Eagles." These were the pre-Tea Party Cro-Magnons who organized back in 2008 to create a right-wing counter-protest intended to "protect" the Vietnam Veterans memorial in D.C. One of their Fearless Leaders raised eyebrows a couple of years back by telling Chris Dodd to go kill himself.

Just for fun, you can go read belief system, which really can just be summed up with the penultimate entry:

Together we will fight liberalism, socialism, progressivism, and communism and bring back our individual freedoms to choose our own destiny.

Here's the PDF. I dunno about you, but I'm just all verklempt to miss out on this prime opportunity to hobnob with both Tom DeLay and John Fund. The conversations we could have!

FWIW, the host is a genial fellow who sells roofing compound and ran for Oregon governor back in 2010 (not so successfully).

Among the guests, besides DeLay and Fund, will be Bob Basso, who got famous pretending to be Thomas Paine on a few episodes of the Glenn Beck show, which he then parlayed into a swinging career on the right-wing chicken-dinner (or eagle-gathering, or what have you) circuit. You can tell that none of these morons ever bothered to actually read Paine, especially not "Agrarian Justice" -- else they would know that "income redistribution" not only well preceded Karl Marx, it was adamantly advocated by their hero!

We especially recall the time Basso called for an armed "Second Revolution" to take back the country from the evil Obamaites:

Basso: Join the grassroots movement of the Second American Revolution -- not of guns and violence, but of pressure, pressure, pressure. ...

Take back America now! Choose to be part of the Second American Revolution! Pressure, pressure, pressure! No presidential candidate, no political party can save you now. Only an aroused citizenry will turn this uncommon sense around. And he or she who does nothing now is helping them to destroy America!

One can hardly wait to see the eagles soaring. Darn.

I have to be off camping and watching whales again. What a bummer.

John Fund is very, very upset over the FCC's weaksauce Net Neutrality declarations and he's aiming at 'wealthy left-wing' organizations as the culprits. This makes me happy. When a winger can only squirm over something so weak and toothless as to be useless, it's a good day. But look at who he aims at! Paranoid, much?

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that "more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government." The poll went on to say that since "currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly" to prevent a "centrally controlled Internet."

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

Wow. Openly activist? The Berkman Center? Here's the Berkman Center's Berkman@10 page, with some of their research projects and discussions posted online. Such terribly activist things. Open innovation, The Dilemma of Games, The Musician and the Scientist, and yes, Network Neutrality (not Internet Neutrality, by the way), as well as one called The Battle for the Web. Hardly activist.

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Barney Frank took the gloves off on the floor and called John Fund out for making up a story about a phony bill and then he outlined how the right wing noise machine works as a propaganda arm of the republicans to push that narrative into the mainstream.

Frank: You are entirely wrong about me and in the absence of your being able to show any basis which you made such a statement to ask you to acknowledge that fact. He's not only a liar, he's a coward. He wouldn't do it. My staff member asked him, called him up and said, what was this based on? Well, I made a mistake. Well, have you made a retraction? Oh, yeah, he said. Can we see it? "I told a couple of people." Mr. Fund makes it up. It's a lie, it's a myth. There was nothing there and it's to discredit all democrats.

His right-wing cohorts echo it and echo it. The next thing is it will be on the floor in the next two weeks. This is the democrat disregard for the electoral process. And when we call Mr. Fund's attention to the fact that this was a lie, what does he say? Whoops. but he's not going to tell anybody about it. Mr. Speaker, this is not the only case of this and I know this has happened before. But because I was directly involved here, I was in position to document this. It begins with a lie from this editorial writer from "the Wall street journal." it is then a lie repeated by his right-ring colleagues. He refuses to do anything about.

It doesn't get any clearer than that. Frank posted the entire story on the web.

Frank responded to fabricated accounts of his supposed plans to introduce a bill on “universal voter registration.” The story began in November at the conservative Restoration Weekend conference in Palm Beach, Florida, where for $1,700 per person activists were able to hear talks by conservative opinion leaders on the theme, “Defending our Country and Culture.” At one session, John Fund, a writer for the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, claimed that Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chuck Schumer had hatched a plan to game the election system by registering felons, illegal aliens and others to vote:

Democrats were very rattled by the November 3rd election results. What do liberals do when they lose elections? They change the rules. In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration.

What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states, “Take everyone on every list of welfare recipients you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders, and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be.”

The allegation against Congressman Frank is absolutely false and has no basis in reality. The Congressman in fact heard about it for the first time after the story was launched in the conservative media.

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John Fund went on Glenn Beck's show last night to help Beck with his characterization of the Obama White House as a nest of fist-bumping terrorist radicals, mostly by underscoring its supposed connection to ACORN and the SEIU. (According to Beck, SEIU's Andy Stern is "really controlling our country.")

At the end of the segment, Fund began describing the ways ACORN's nefarious activists are supposedly engaged in voter fraud in the New Jersey election:

Fund: People are going door to door in parts of Camden with Hispanics that don't have very much knowledge of English, and they're saying, "We have a new way for you to vote, la nueva forma de votar; just fill out these papers."

But as Media Matters noticed, he's actually describing something that happened in 1993 in Philadelphia. Indeed, he accurately described it in his Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he tried to claim that fraud was occurring in New Jersey:

There are additional reports from Camden that Hispanic voters have been misled into voting absentee ballots. So-called bearers who are allowed to collect and carry absentee ballots are said to have encouraged voters to fill out applications for absentee ballots. A few days later, the bearers reportedly return with the actual ballots, which they offer "assistance" in filling out.

Authorities in nearby Philadelphia know about such scams. In one infamous case, a key 1993 race that determined which party would control the Pennsylvania state senate was thrown out by a federal judge after massive evidence that hundreds of voters had been pressured into casting improper absentee ballots. Voters were told by "bearers" that it was all part of "la nueva forma de votar" -- the new way to vote. Local politicos tell me Philly operatives associated in the past with Acorn may now be advising their Jersey cousins on how to perform such vote harvesting.

Notice that in this version of events, there's no mention of the "la nueva forma de votar" ruse being used in Camden -- just the use of absentee ballots. And despite Fund's claims, there is no evidence of actual fraud yet even in this absentee-ballot operation -- just the potential for it.

Conservatives like Fund have long pinned their electoral hopes on reducing voter turnout, because encouraging large numbers of voters is a certain recipe to right-wing defeat. The Right succeeds most when voter turnout is suppressed -- and absentee-ballot efforts are part of reversing that trend.

They also like having handy excuses when they lose. It's clear that Fund, Beck, and the rest of the Right is setting themselves up with a way to claim that an electoral loss in New Jersey was illegitimate. Because that's what they're best at -- tearing down liberals after they beat them at the polls.

[H/t Dave]

Well, at least Howard Kurtz -- unlike Bill O'Reilly -- didn't completely sucker for Lou Dobbs' wildly overblown tale of someone taking a shot at his home.

In fact, on yesterday's "Reliable Sources" show on CNN, Kurtz hosted a pretty frank discussion of the likelihood that Dobbs was trying to martyr himself and attack his critics by claiming they were shooting at him -- when there's extremely high likelihood that this was a stray bullet from a rifle shot by a hunter in the nearby woods.

Most of the frank talk can be credited to Margaret Carlson, who was in Feisty mode. Unfortunately, she was counterbalanced by Lyin' John Fund, who managed to completely obfuscate why Dobbs is in trouble for the way he discussed immigration:

KURTZ: Margaret, if some nut was actually taking a shot at Lou Dobbs and his wife, is it fair for him to then blame it on the media climate surrounding his fervent opposition to illegal immigration?

CARLSON: No, but he loves doing it. Speak of your own publicity machine, Lou Dobbs generates so much about his own self. And he takes extreme views in part for ratings.

KURTZ: But that suggests he doesn't believe what he's saying.

CARLSON: You know, I think like Glenn Beck and some of these others, you come to believe when you're saying because it is so satisfying to you in terms of ratings and income. Listen, the police who investigated this said that it's hunting season, and there was a bullet mark in the attic on the third floor of his house. That he and his wife were in the same place at the same time, there's no evidence of that.

I mean, it sounds to me from the evidence that he was blowing this up into -- to be a victim -- to be a victim of the media when there's absolutely no, just no evidence that somebody was shooting at him or his wife.

KURTZ: John Fund, we don't know exactly what happened, but it is true that New Jersey state police did kind of play down this incident.

Did Dobbs go too far in trying to tie this to his stance on immigration?

FUND: I think, look, my brother was in law enforcement, and it's always a close call, because if you talk about people threatening you or possibly taking a shot at you, that can encourage other people to go after you. So I probably would have stayed away from it simply for reasons of security. But this issue of what his views are...

KURTZ: Just briefly.

FUND: ... "The Wall Street Journal" is very pro-legal immigration. But Lou Dobbs' views are not that extreme. He basically says we should enforce the laws we have on the books involving illegal immigration. Characterizing it as extreme, I think mischaracterizes his position.

KURTZ: That is a debate for another day. We'll have you back.

Actually, Dobbs' "position" on immigration sounds reasonable when he starts talking about how he thinks we ought to increase immigration levels. But that was after he started getting called out for his incessant extremism. Before that, it's true he didn't explicitly call for mass deportations -- rather, he frequently argued for an aggressive policy of rounding up illegal immigrants and making their lives so miserable they left on their own. Basically an attrition-by-oppression plan. (And he has in fact expressed his avid support for deportation.)

But the reason Dobbs is viewed as an extremist on immigration has much less to do with his stated "position" on immigration, and everythign to do with his "reportage" on immigration and its outrageous and racially incendiary content -- the effects of which are felt in such real-world phenomena as an outbreak of anti-Latino hate crimes:

As for the claim that the Latino-bashing is something else -- the neutral and completely benign criticism of illegal immigration generally -- we've known this is nonsense for some time, especially Lou Dobbs' case. If Dobbs and cohorts like FAIR (an SPLC-designated hate group) really were only concerned about only illegal immigration, then Dobbs needs to explain:

* Why he makes up phony statistics connecting immigration generically with a supposed increase in diseases like leprosy.

* Why he broadcasts white-supremacist mythology about a Hispanic “Aztlan” conspiracy to return the Southwest to Mexico.

* Why he continually claims that Latino immigration is responsible for an increase in crime.

* Why he once said that this wave of immigration is turning America into “a third world cesspool” (a remark that has since been removed from the CNN website).

* Why he constantly promotes the notion of making English the official U.S. language.

* Why he regularly refers to this wave of immigration as an “invasion.”

* Why he regularly hosts anti-immigrant voices from white-supremacist groups and vigilante scam artists like the Minutemen and yet neglects to explain his guests' troubling backgrounds.

That, and much more, constitute the reasons Dobbs is viewed as an extremist on immigration.

John Fund can sugarcoat it and hope everyone forgets about Dobbs' real record of race-baiting on immigration. It's a common right-wing tactic to whine that all they want to talk about is immigration and yet doing so brings reflexive accusations of racism, and that's so unfair. But the fact is, we'd all love to talk about immigration with dealing with racism -- but right-wingers like Lou Dobbs do their best to make sure we have to.

John Fund:

"Republicans claim to be confident that Ms. Busby won't reach the 50% barrier and eventually will lose a runoff to the top GOP vote-getter. But they said the same thing just before Democrat almost won a special House election for what should have been a safe seat in Ohio. Should Ms. Busby win in a district where only 30% of registered voters are Democrats, it "would set off political shock waves," says GOP pollster Bill McInturff.

Indeed, even a Busby showing in the 45% range could touch off panicked responses from Republicans--

Let's go Francine...

John Fund goes after Juan Cole in the Opinion Journal.