I'm sure Lawrence O'Donnell will be crowing over this, since he led the charge to shine light on how the word "exclusively" was transformed into the now-famous "51 percent" test. Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Tuesday that he and two campaign finance watchdog groups would sue the IRS, challenging regulations that allow nonprofit groups to be involved in politics if they're "primarily" devoted to a social welfare purpose.

Van Hollen said he and watchdog groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 would sue to clarify an IRS regulation that he said was at odds with the law, which requires certain groups to "exclusively" engage in social welfare to earn nonprofit status. The IRS regulation permitting groups “primarily” engaged in social welfare allows the organizations to participate in an undefined amount of political activity, said the congressman, a leading advocate of campaign finance reform and ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

The 1959 IRS regulation has become an issue since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision opened the door for nonprofit groups organized under section 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) of the tax code to raise and spend corporate and union money on elections without disclosing donors. The scandal involving the agency's singling out conservative groups applying for nonprofit status has increased attention to the regulation, especially among Democratic lawmakers.

"The statute is very clear," Van Hollen said during the keynote address at a conference on money and politics held by the Brennan Center for Justice. "It says that a 501(c)(4) organization is reserved for entities that are engaged 'exclusively' in social welfare activities, and it's not clear to me what part of 'exclusive' the writers of the regulation didn't get when it came to this particular provision of the law."

What a mess this could make, unless lawmakers step up and deal with it before it winds its way through the courts. Every 501c4 organization going back to 1959 could be open to scrutiny. I understand why this approach is being undertaken, but I hope some leverage to actually change the law is the outcome. The hairball this would leave to untangle would be huge and take decades to sort out.

Meanwhile, the Kochs et al have abandoned the 501c4 approach and are going with the 501c6 model, which allows their bogus trade associations to engage in the same activities as previous groups with even less transparency. Think US Chamber of Commerce on steroids. Frightening!

Many of the cost-saving measures of the Affordable Care Act were modeled after the Swedish health care system, which has proven itself to be efficient and cost-effective. Robert H. Frank wrote a great NYT column outlining how these provisions could streamline and ultimately reign in our out-of-control health spending here, if it scales properly. That's a big "if", and one that won't be answered for years to come. Here are the highlights:

But when illness strikes, the Swedish health care system responds efficiently. Managers have exploited economies of scale by consolidating services into fewer but larger hospitals. The American system has also gone through consolidation, but, by contrast, boutique hospitals are also more common here — partly in response to demands from patients with very high-cost health plans. In large hospitals, CT scanners and other expensive diagnostic and treatment machines are in nearly constant use, versus only a few hours of weekly use in some small ones.

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Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach doesn't like brown people very much at all, and he dislikes immigration reform even more. That didn't stop Sunflower Community Action from paying a visit to his home and inviting him to stop spreading his hate.

Kobach declined and ramped up the hate meter a few notches in the process:

Kobach told Fox News radio host Todd Starnes that he and his family had been out of town at the time, but he was “just appalled” because “they don’t have a right to enter someone’s private property and engage in this kind of intimidation.”

“If we had been in the home and not been armed, I would have felt very afraid – because it took the police 15 minutes to show up,” he explained. “It’s important we recognize there’s a reason we have the Second Amendment. There are situations like this where you have a mob and you do need to be able to protect yourself.”

“The Second Amendment is the private property owner’s last resort.”

Kobach vowed not to let the “illegal aliens” change his mind about opposing comprehensive immigration reform.

Kris, show me in the video where the brown people touched you. It'll be ok. They weren't there to hurt you, just to show you they're people too.

The next time Kobach claims he's not racist, please remember his reaction to this incident of peaceful people doing peaceful, lawful things.

Now we get the usual baloney argument over immigration reform. OH NOES, we'll have to have a national identification card!!! This time, it's coming from Democrats who have concerns about E-Verify.

New York Times:

Driver’s license photographs and biographic information of most Americans would be accessible through an expanded Department of Homeland Security nationwide computer network if the immigration legislation pending before the Senate becomes law.

The proposed expansion is part of an effort to crack down on illegal immigration by requiring all employers to confirm the identity and legal status of any new workers by tapping into a Homeland Security Department system called E-Verify, which is now used voluntarily by about 7 percent of employers in the United States.

But the proposal already faces objections from some civil liberties lawyers and certain members of Congress, who worry about the potential for another sprawling data network that could ultimately be the equivalent of a national ID system.

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James O'Keefe has a book release coming up on Tuesday and so he's dropping new video wherever he can in anticipation of it, I guess. But this one had me laughing because of the title he chose for his book chapter and the way he let his hurt feelings flow all over the 'interview' with New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Richard Head.

O'Keefe, you may recall, scammed some poll workers in New Hampshire and in the process, committed voter fraud in order to prove there might be voter fraud happening. That made officials angry, and an investigation was launched, which seems to have hurt O'Keefe's feelings.

Never one to forgive and forget, O'Keefe grills Mr. Head about law enforcement activities undertaken in furtherance of the state investigation of him, including a search of the property where he lived and interviews with his family.

But what really has O'Keefe steamed is that Mr. Head demanded the emails Nadia Naffe had in her possession showing that O'Keefe had conspired to frame Rep. Maxine Waters and run other operations. He's definitely not happy about that, and so he ambushes Mr. Richard Head in his office.

The video is just hilarious. Trust me, I wouldn't bother except that it really is funny. First, O'Keefe offers Mr. Head a copy of his book, which is refused because its value exceeds the limit on acceptable gifts to state officials. Then he turns to the chapter he has written about his adventures with Richard Head, which he has entitled "The Rise of Richard Head."

No lie, that's the title of the chapter. Maybe a cheap shot, a low blow, but I am having trouble writing this post with a straight face because really, I'm surprised he didn't entitle it "The Rise of Dick Head". That would be much more in line with Mr. Frat Boy's attitude toward officials who object to his games, right?

Watch the video. It's funny in a pathetic kind of way.

Philadelphia public schools are the victim of a weird and evil set of priorities. In this interview, Philadelphia Mayor Nutter attempts to explain why public schools are being closed due to state cuts at the same time the state has found $400 million to build yet another prison.

Nutter argued that Philadelphia’s school system would not suffer from the closures because of the expansion of charter schools in the city, which he insisted were still public schools. He dismissed the argument that charter schools have often been criticized for their lack of accountability, and added, “My job is to make sure we have a system of great schools all across the city of Philadelphia…and that the election officials are providing the proper funding for a high-quality education regardless of what school a parent decides to send their child to.”

About those charter schools, Mayor Nutter...Let's talk about one charter operator in particular -- ASPIRA. The ASPIRA network boasts of building Latino leaders for the future. It is a charter school network which claims to reduce gang affiliation and dropout rates, while encouraging students to serve their communities. These are admirable goals, particularly for a charter school operator which is public, more or less.

ASPIRA runs one high school in Philadelphia. The teachers in that school are trying to organize and join the American Federation of Teachers. This is partly in order to do battle with those who think closing schools and building prisons is a good thing. It is also because there should be a counterweight to the corporate-think endemic in charter schools. If education is the goal of ASPIRA and other charter operators, allowing teachers to organize should not be a problem, right?

Wrong. ASPIRA, a non-profit organization, has committed $400,000 to fight back against any effort on the part of teachers to organize in the schools they manage. In a climate where schools in Philadelphia are closing on a daily basis, a not-for-profit charter school operator is committing nearly half a million dollars? That raises a couple of key questions for me. Who is funding that battle on behalf of ASPIRA and why aren't they spending those funds on educating children?

Teachers aren't bending under the threat. You can help them by signing the petition at MoveOn.org. Here is their statement:

A teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions. In order to make improvements in schools, teachers must be free to speak out, to advocate for their students, and to work together to ensure an environment that promotes learning. All school staff and students deserve security and consistency.

That's why staff at Olney Charter High School have come together to form a union. The dedicated Olney staff are committed to building a strong voice to advocate for important improvements for themselves and their students. It is shameful that ASPIRA, which receives public tax dollars, has decided to spend education resources on anti-union lawyers and delay tactics. Join us now in telling ASPIRA to stop spending education dollars to interfere with staff's right to form a union, and start working with staff to create the best possible education for students.

Schools, not prisons. Books, not union-busting. This is not rocket science. It's sound social policy.

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I'll bet you're thinking this is another post about bizarre Republican public statements, like Rep. Steve King's claim Democrats knew what websites Republicans were surfing. Or what Glenn Beck said about living in the end times.

Or maybe it's a post about another one of Rand Paul's or Louie Gohmert's Islamophobic rants. It's not.

It's not about the stupid idiots who go on Fox News and rant, either. Or Rush Limbaugh.

It's not about any of them, but it is about all of them. I surrender. Sarah Palin's speech this weekend at the Ralph Reed Faith and Freedom Conference did me in. Who can top someone who says this about Syria?

“Until we have a commander in chief who knows what he is doing... let Allah sort it out!” Palin told the conservative crowd, according to The Hill.

I'm sick of that crap. I could write fifteen new posts about stupid, ugly things Republicans say, but on some level, that's really what they want. As long as I'm talking about stupid things they say, I'm not talking about things like immigration reform or how women are more marginalized than ever or repealing the sequester (which is causing real harm to real people) or income inequality or anything else that actually matters to people who have to live life without the luxury of dropping a word bomb into a room full of friendly people and receiving a large donation for it.

Conservatives left the planet years ago. After 2012, they burst out of planetary orbit into deep bizarro space where they fling large word turds into the public sphere like we should give a damn, yet they still splatter all over the front pages of the Big Newspapers and Media Outlets. Then we're supposed to wave our hands around and talk about how stupid they are (and we do), while we also wave our hands around and yell at the president for whatever it is he did or didn't do that day while giving Congress a pass on their utter uselessness.

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Whatever else Jan Brewer is, no one can say she isn't hard-nosed and calculating. When she decided the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act was good for Arizona, she also decided to steamroll the Tea Party, forging a strong bipartisan coalition while sending the extremists to a dark, dusty corner.

First, she threatened a veto of every single bill sent to her by the legislature until they approved the Medicaid expansion. They thought she was joking, so they sent up five bills, and Brewer returned five vetoes.

Then things got very interesting.

Brewer’s surprise move came after House Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, adjourned the lower chamber until Thursday, stalling efforts by a bipartisan House coalition to pass Brewer’s 2014 budget and Medicaid expansion.

Many legislators were on their way home when Brewer called key lawmakers to a meeting in her offices, where the special-session plans were hatched. They agreed to unseat the speaker and Senate president, if necessary, to get Medicaid expansion and the budget passed.

Brewer issued a special-session proclamation at 5 p.m., and by then, Democrats and the expansion-friendly Republicans were already gathering on the House floor.

This is the first time in memory that a governor has called a special session with the intention of going around her own party’s leadership and without notifying them.

Brewer was playing for high stakes, too:

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This video from White House staffers tells stories I hear repeated across all different pathways on a near-daily basis. I hear other stories, too. Stories about suffering because hard-working family people can't step out of the shadows of their undocumented status and get in line to become a legal resident and ultimately a citizen.

The good news is that some form of comprehensive immigration reform is moving forward in the Senate. The bad news is that the nativist right has awoken and is roaring at the prospect of letting brown people become citizens. Never mind that the process will be grueling and take about ten years to actually happen. Never mind that while they wait, they're working for too little pay and at risk of deportation over something as trivial as a parking ticket.

Never mind all that, because people like Ted Cruz, the son of an immigrant, think it's just a terrible idea to allow more immigration. Cruz told The Fine Print that any pathway to citizenship will kill the bill.

Echoing Steve Benen, I can't think of why Cruz can't see that the whole point of the bill is to create a pathway to citizenship.

Greg Sargent sees Cruz' resistance as being all about opposing Barack Obama:

What’s more, immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship is also supported by many major GOP stakeholders and GOP-aligned special interests, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to prominent members of the GOP consultant/strategist establishment. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the belief among many that modernizing the party’s position on immigration is essential to repairing the party’s relations with Latinos.

And yet, in the reality inhabited by the new Senator from Texas, the path to citizenship is a threat to the bill primarily because President Obama wants it. Thank you, Senator, for clarifying exactly what this is really all about.

I don't agree with that. Cruz is certainly a classic example of the "I've got mine, so screw you" conservative mindset. But I listened to what seemed like an endless rant on the Senate floor yesterday and came to the conclusion that Cruz is a bigot who is guided by nativist impulses.

In the debate to come, we're going to hear all about how allowing undocumented workers to get in line for legal status will mean stripping them of any and all benefits. No Obamacare. No Social Security. And God forbid those underpaid, overworked field workers should file tax returns and qualify for the EITC. We can't have that, no sir, no how. They will try and make it as difficult as possible to even allow those workers to step forward, and they will definitely try to force them into an endless holding pattern.

Still, the fact remains that Republicans need immigration reform to stay alive as a viable political party. They need it more right now than the Democrats do, and that leaves the door open for something meaningful to happen, despite Ted Cruz. Here's another doozy from him, by the way:

“The path the White House is going down, I believe, is designed for this bill to fail,” Cruz says. “It is designed for it to sail through the Senate and then crash in the House to let the president go and campaign in 2014 on this issue.”

Cruz' compatriots are mostly in the House of Representatives, with just a couple of exceptions. It seems to me what he was really saying was that the Senate will actually make an honest effort to get something done but the Tea Party-infested rat's nest we call the House of Representatives will kill it, and along with it, the Republican Party.

One might imagine that if there is one thing Democrats have learned by now, it is that derivatives are fresh hell for the economy, but I guess not. It's bad enough that Republicans wanted to gut Dodd-Frank by destroying most oversight measures and handing control back to the SEC, which has proven itself incompetent and without a care in the world about our economy. But no, it wasn't just Republicans.

Seventy-three Democrats. That's SEVENTY-THREE, people. That's how many joined hands and played nice with the Republican tools in the House of Representatives to gut key provisions of Dodd-Frank.

The Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act, or--as former Golden Sachs programmer and current Occupy Wall Street activist called it---the "Intimidate the CFTC ACT"--changes how derivatives are regulated. One should immediately see warning lights by the word "certainty" with its echoes of the language that banks and polluters always use when they want to gut regulations--in the name of certainty, never self-interest. The bill first would force the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to "harmonize" their rules governing derivatives, i.e., adopt the weaker rules of the SEC. However, there's more danger in the bill because it would exempt foreign trades from regulation. In an article this morning in the Washington Post, Goldstein explains,

It makes a crucial, and dangerous, blanket assumption: If a U.S. bank does derivatives trading in one of the nine largest swaps markets, that country’s rules are assumed to be as strong as the United States’, so the U.S. rules need not apply.This is a ridiculous assumption, because if the rules were truly equivalent, there would be no need for this bill in the first place. In fact, this would allow U.S. banks to dodge U.S. rules in favor of weaker rules overseas. Yet as the last crisis showed, even when banks attempt to hide the risk overseas, that risk remains at home. AIG failed because of derivatives traded out of their London office. More recently, JPMorgan Chase lost more than $6 billion last year due to their infamous “London Whale” trades, which were the subject of a devastating report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Really, this does need an explanation and soon, because it wasn't just Blue Dogs who voted for it. It was New Dems and even a couple of members of the Progressive Caucus:

Now, let's move to "name and shame" time. Which 73 Democrats voted with Wall Street and put taxpayers at risk for future bailouts? Almost all of the conservative Blue Dogs and corporatist New Dems voted for the bill. Unfortunately, a few members of the Progressive Caucus (including Raul Grijalva?!) also voted for it. Some of the Democrats in this list are pursuing higher office, e.g. Allyson Schwartz in the 2014 PA gubernatorial race, Gary Peters in the 2014 Michigan senatorial race.

Raul Grijalva is a friend of this site, a true progressive, and fights hard for progressive principles. It's hard to understand why he would have voted for this, unless there's some kind of a tradeoff in the works for votes on immigration reform? I do not believe for a minute he would cast a vote for this unless he knew it was guaranteed to be stopped somewhere else, like right at Elizabeth Warren's door.

Still, it sends the wrong message. Democrats should not be voting to "intimidate the CFTC" or weaken Dodd-Frank. Hopefully someone will explain what appears to be a very strange, unproductive strategy.