This week I was a guest on Chicago Tonight to discuss the Wisconsin budget crisis and standoff that has made national headlines over the past month. Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause joined me on the panel.

The debate in Wisconsin distills and highlights two crucial issues that weren’t fully fleshed out during this segment: the involvement of money in politics and the new class warfare. Common Cause, Mr. Edgar’s organization, is a highly vocal critic of political activists and philanthropists David and Charles Koch. The brothers have invested millions over the years in various charities and public policy organizations. They believe in certain causes (as do most people) and invest in them to educate and empower people in the democratic process. Billionaire George Soros and wealthy liberals fund Common Cause and other like-minded groups and they, too, have the right to do this in our wonderful democracy. There is plenty of money on both sides of the political spectrum. There is an important difference, however, between free market activism and groups like Common Cause: the latter seeks change not by choice, but change by coercion.

The Wisconsin debate also brings into focus the new class warfare, one we’re seeing right here in Illinois. On one side of the issue are the public employee unions that advocate for unaccountable, unsustainable government. On the other, hardworking taxpayers who subsidize these public employees’ lavish compensation and pension packages. Too often what’s lost in these discussions is that for every public employee complaining about having to forgo a raise or pay a little bit more for their health care benefits, there are thousands of private sector workers who haven’t had raises in years, have always paid much more than public sector workers for their health care benefits, and whose hard work and wages pay for government. It is time for someone to advocate for taxpayers at the negotiating table.

Mr. Edgar brought up a great point last night.  He mentioned that he came from a working class neighborhood and that we need to look out for citizens with all income levels, not just the wealthy and well-connected.  I couldn’t agree more. My father grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood – in Wisconsin, in fact.  Whether it is in Wisconsin, Illinois, or on the federal level, we simply cannot continue to expand government and subsidize outrageous public employee salaries and pensions on the backs of the working class and poor.

Let’s be very upfront about this. It isn’t the wealthy that are hurt the most by tax hikes and irresponsible spending. It is the single mother who can’t get a job because doing business in Illinois, for example, is made prohibitive by decades of bad public policy and worse governance. It is the private sector worker who has to work overtime and into his 60’s subsidizing his public employee neighbor’s millionaire pension. This is unsustainable and immoral, and it needs to change.

In the context of many congressional seats being up for grabs in what pundits and prognosticators are predicting to be a GOP wave election, Obama stated that many of his allies in Congress voted for politically tough bills because they believed “it was the right thing to so” despite being in conservative-leaning districts.

On the surface, what the President says sounds so noble. These politicians are doing what they think is right. They’re standing up despite outside pressure! Except they aren’t standing up for the right people: their constituents. “Doing what they think is right” is warm and fuzzy code for “what Nancy Pelosi / President Obama tells them is right.”

Elected officials aren’t supposed to vote for what is right in their minds alone. What seems right in the halls of power amidst meetings with tax-eater special interests and arm-twisting White House political hacks is quite likely not what’s right for the people elected officials are supposed to represent. This sort of backwards thinking, internalized even by the President, is exactly why the American electorate is upset with the political status quo. Elected officials are supposed to vote for what is right in the minds of their constituents for whom they work.

This concept is a foreign notion to the political class, particularly the liberals who currently have the reins and are, to borrow an analogy from the President and funny-guy-turned-scary Senator Al Franken, driving our country off a cliff.  They believe that it is their job to determine what is right and then “communicate” it to the ignorant, confused masses, which is why they are already selling the likely losses in the upcoming election as PR issues. But it isn’t. It’s the policy, stupid.

If, as President Obama states, members of Congress are making “tough” votes that are tough because they are in sharp contrast to the will of their constituents, then these members are, by definition, not doing their jobs. Hopefully voters will keep this in mind as they exercise their right next Tuesday to make some serious personnel changes.

Some call it a homophobic slur; others, an obscure sexual fetish.  For the President of the United States, however, the term “tea bagger” is just another tool to marginalize opponents of his radical agenda.  As John Kartch of Americans for Tax Reform reported today, President Obama is quoted in a new book using this derogatory term to describe concerned citizens that make up the mainstream, nonpartisan tea party movement:

President Barack Obama, known for his lectures to others on civility, saw fit to use the obscene and derogatory term “tea-baggers” in a book interview with author Jonathan Alter.

Below is an excerpt from Alter’s new book The Promise: President Obama, Year One, to be released May 18:

“Obama said that the unanimous House vote against the Recovery Act ‘set the tenor for the whole year’: ‘That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.’  For Obama this was the greatest surprise of 2009.”

This has long been the modus operandi of the far left, from the likes of actress Janeane Garofalo to the commentators on MSNBC and CNN.  Yet for the President of the United States to invoke this term is simply stunning, particularly in light of the recently delivered commencement speech in which he heavily critiqued the tenor of political discourse in our age.

His disrespect of the tea party movement is also quite odd given his roots in community organizing.  Apparently that line of work is only respectable if it involves advancing far left causes or aiding folks in conspiring to evade taxes while smuggling underage girls into the country for a sex ring.  As regular readers know, these were the mission and downfall, respectively, of ACORN, an organization with which Mr. Obama worked closely early on in his career.

The tea party movement consists of a wide range of Americans who, according to recent polls, have a more mainstream vision for the country than the President himself.  Shame on you, Mr. President, for denigrating concerned citizens you were elected to serve.  Shame on you.

At the genesis of the movement, David Axelrod couched criticism of the Obama agenda as “unhealthy” on national television.  Last April, the infamous “right-wing extremism” report released the week before the tax day tea parties by the Department of Homeland Security.  The report referenced “disgruntled veterans” and lumped those that believed in states’ rights in with white supremacists and militia members.  It was an embarrassment to the Department of Homeland Security and the administration.  Public apologies to veterans and regrets regarding the extremely broad language were issued.

A while back, “Law and Order” ran a ridiculous episode where a lawyer declared that Rush, Beck, and O’Reilly drive people to commit violent hate crimes.  Before that, there was an episode referencing a tea party in the context of discussing extremists. In February of this year, Marvel Comics issued an apology after a comic implicitly painted tea parties in a racist, violent light.

Countless guests have appeared on Keith Olbermann’s show to dissect the tea party movement psyche.  Most notable was budding amateur psychologist Janeane Garofalo who erroneously dismissed tea partiers as intellectually deficient violent racists.  More recently a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show, talking about the recent Midwest militia arrests, conflated the tea party movement and right-wing militant extremists and implied that the nation is somehow in danger of the tea party splintering into militia terror cells.

In recent days, the violence claim has been invoked in conjunction with the equally baseless racism claim to discredit those that oppose ObamaCare.  Yet, as John Steele recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal in a piece entitled “As Peaceful as a Tea Party,” “the only person arrested in recent days for threatening violence against a politician was held for threatening Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House.”  Last week, news broke that a man was arrested after threatening the life of Representative Eric Cantor and his family. The suspect, Norman Leboon, is an anti-Semite and an Obama donor.

As Mr. Steele accurately points out, the tea parties aren’t immune to odd sign bearers:

“To be sure, tea partiers have carried signs saying such things as “If [newly elected Massachusetts Senator Scott] Brown can’t do it, a Browning can,” referring to the American firearms manufacturer. But how do those differ from the signs regularly seen—if seldom reported on by the mainstream media—during the previous administration calling for President Bush to be tried for war crimes and shot as a traitor?”

They don’t.  The only difference is, these kooks wandered into a tea party and not a Code Pink rally, so they got an abnormal share of the spotlight from the leftist media.

Such messages are rare at tea parties and an inherent hazard of hosting an event in a public arena for both the left and the right.  It would hardly be fair to extrapolate from the Cantor threat that all Obama supporters are violent anti-Semites taking marching orders from the propagandists on MSNBC.  Yet such perverse logic is invoked to form the shoddy foundation of the left’s constant tea party attacks.  One odd sign somehow translates into a movement-wide sentiment linked to orders from Fox News.  Worse, these attacks typically don’t even invoke an actual incident or individual to reach the perpetrators’ unreasonable generalization.  Claims of racism and violence arise regularly with virtually zero supporting evidence.

In fact, from the St. Louis SEIU racist beating of tea party participant Keith Gladney to the recent Nevada bus attack and threats against Andrew Breitbart, the tea party opposition has perpetrated every instance of actual violence at tea parties over the past year.  Yet, time and time again, politicians intimate and media hacks declare that the tea partiers are the violent fringe. It is simply stunning.

It is often said that the best way to lead is by example.  Hatred and violence have no place in political discourse or civil society as a whole.  That’s why they have no place in the mainstream, non-violent grassroots movement exhibited in the tea parties. Period.  As tax day tea parties kick off this month, let’s hope that the tea party opposition comes around to the same way of thinking.

In his State of the Union Address Wednesday night, President Obama called on folks to let him know if there are better health care solutions he and congress should be considering:

As temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we’ve proposed…

…But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.

He echoed this sentiment at today’s House GOP retreat.  Some might say he was being sarcastic, reminding us of how hard it is to govern (especially in light of all he has inherited from you-know-who.)  But that would be cynical, particularly in this post-partisan era.

Just before Christmas my colleague Peter Fotos and I penned a “wish list” of simple policy proposals that constitute substantive health care reform – and it didn’t even take 1,000 pages! The health care snitch line was disabled, so we’ll give the President the benefit of the doubt that it ended up in his spam folder.

President Obama and his Congressional allies talk a lot about the need to control health care costs and avoid pressure from special interests.  Unfortunately, neither the House nor the Senate versions of “ObamaCare” that he called upon congress to reconsider withstand either litmus test.

Health care industry lobbyists have enjoyed unprecedented access to this White House during the crafting of both the House and Senate bills. Contrary to the President’s claim of upholding a standard of ultimate transparency, his White House fought tooth and nail to conceal the visitor logs that list these very guests. Despite his anti-industry rhetoric, President Obama has actually raked in record numbers of campaign contributions from the health care sector.

As a recent WellPoint study indicates, costs are expected to increase, not decrease, for most individuals and families well beyond forecast increases under the status quo. What’s more, there’s no shortage of political giveaways in the Senate bill—bribes for “on the fence” legislators to bring cloture to the bill, such as Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback” and Mary Landrieu’s “Louisiana Purchase.”

Here’s a short wish list of three things not in any ObamaCare proposal that are absolutely essential for real health care reform:

Cross-State Purchasing

Obama and others have touted a “public option,” government health insurance, as a competitor that would “keep insurance companies honest.” One additional player in the market will do nothing, however, unless of course it has a competitive advantage, a claim these proponents adamantly dismiss as “fear-mongering.” In any case, the new player is unnecessary.

A loose interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause currently prevents the purchase of health insurance across state lines. Virtually all other forms of insurance—car, life, home—can be purchased by customers in a national, wide-open marketplace. If health care consumers were afforded the same freedom, individuals and families who reside in one state would be able to purchase more affordable health insurance domiciled or licensed in another state. Americans would no longer be restricted to the anti-competitive, counterproductive regulations and mandates governing the health insurance markets in many states.

This simple fix would multiply the markets consumers could access by a factor of fifty, allowing consumers to choose policies that fit their needs and budgets.

Tax Reform

It’s time to spread the health around. The federal tax code creates a bias favoring third-party payers of health insurance and puts individual purchasers at a disadvantage. This results in health care being owned by the federal government and employers instead of by individuals. Our health care system should empower people to make their own health care decisions, not subjugate them to HR managers and government bureaucrats. A system of refundable tax credits would remove third-party payers from the equation, leaving health insurance and health care decisions to individual consumers.

Tort Reform

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean famously admitted medical malpractice reform was left out of the health care reform debate because the authors “did not want to take on the trial lawyers.” But medical malpractice abuse is a primary driver of our nation’s skyrocketing health care costs.  There isn’t a single provision in Democrat’s health care bills to address this.

Malpractice insurance and the need for “defensive medicine” make the practice of medicine unappealing and costly, reducing the number of primary care physicians and increasing costs to consumers. According to the American Medical Association, defensive medicine costs our health care system between $84 and $151 billion every year. In another AMA report, 45 percent of hospitals reported concerns over liability resulted in the loss of physicians or reduced coverage in emergency departments.

The regulatory and spending proposals currently on the table will at best avoid (though more likely exacerbate) the underlying problems of our current health care system. No amount of bureaucratic shell games or grandstanding against special interests will change that.

It needn’t take thousands of words and bitter, partisan battles to enact significant change that will help millions of Americans get affordable health insurance. If the President and his allies in Congress are serious about health care reform, they should start from scratch and consider serious solutions.

The tea party movement seems to perpetually be in the crosshairs of the Left’s most insidious propaganda artists.  A post on taxpayer subsidized NPR’s blog that’s getting some attention this week features a video by Mark Fiore entitled “Learn to Speak Tea Bag.”  The cartoon gives mock step-by-step instructions on what Fiore believes is the modus operandi of tea party activists.  Fiore unintentionally serves up a nearly all-inclusive package on all that is dishonest and malicious about the Left’s continued campaign to discredit this wildly popular grassroots force.

Fiore’s isn’t the first and likely won’t be the last tea party hit job.  Everyone from the President to “mainstream” media commentators have joined in since the movement’s inception in February 2009.  This multifaceted attack on the tea party movement has revealed an interesting trend that mirrors the evolving tactics of a maladjusted, intellectual deficient schoolboy bully.

Kindergarten: Don’t like what someone has to say? Call them stupid! A central theme of Fiore’s video is that those that make up the movement are uneducated.  I’ve collectively seen hundreds of thousands of attendees at the various tea party events I’ve been to.  While degrees aren’t required for admittance, I think it is safe to say that there are a few smart folks in this large, popular movement.   Furthermore, how Fiore and others can simultaneously deride the movement as dumb yet high-tech GOP “Astroturf” is beyond me.

While Fiore mockingly encourages viewers to “learn to speak tea bag,” he could use some lessons on the English language.  His presumably self-penned biography contains a glaring redundancy: “[Fiore]…creates political animation from an undisclosed location somewhere in San Francisco.”  [Emphasis added] As Michelle Malkin recently wrote, obscure cartoonists like Fiore aren’t the only ones trying to tally IQs.  In a piece that reads at best as a backhanded compliment to the movement’s influence, David Brooks of the New York Times recently juxtaposed the tea party movement with…Democrats?  No! He contrasted them with the educated class.  Ah!  The Left’s agenda is not only inherently progressive, but intellectually informed and fact based!

High School: When the pesky protestors just won’t go away, make a sex joke and call them gay! Fiore invokes “tea bag,” a reference to “teabagging,” a sexual act invoked to mock the tea party movement – an implicitly homoerotic joke.  This is a staple in the Left’s anti-tea party propaganda campaign lexicon. (See other slurs from Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olbermann, to name a few.)

College: If simple name calling just won’t work, it’s time to break out the big guns – something politically charged and completely unfounded that just sucks the air out of the room.  Drop the racism card! This is a very common (and very effective) tactic invoked by intellectually frustrated leftist students, aging hippy professors, and university administrators on campuses across the country. Chris Matthews isn’t the first to invoke it, but he recently revived this move in a double whammy sexual/racist slur.

Graduate School: When the racist card gets old, it’s time to get to undermine the foundation of the issue at hand.  Fudge the facts!  Fiore isn’t the only one guilty of this of course, but his video has one real whopper.  In it, he implies that tea party activists are being dishonest about the health care debate because many Republicans have received money from health care industries.  This is a great trick.  For one, it implies a necessary link between the movement and the GOP – a fallacy. While the principles of the tea party movement – fiscal conservatism, individual responsibility, limited government – are more often than not going to be advanced by the Republican Party, there is no intrinsic link.  For example, at the event I ran on tax day 2009 in Chicago, Michael Steele was publicly turned down as a speaker.  (Not surprisingly, this received little press coverage and certainly wasn’t weighed as hard evidence of the movement’s nonpartisanship.)

Nor is there a responsibility of all tea party activists to answer for the political contributions of a handful of Republicans.  It is, of course, fair game to dig into the political contributions of politicians opposing and pushing ObamaCare.  Sure, many Republicans have and will continue to receive money from “special interest groups” including those related to the health care industry.

So do Democrats, though.  In fact, Barack Obama received more money from health industry lobbyists than any presidential candidate in history. Not only did he receive more than his opponent John McCain, but more than George W. Bush in both of his campaigns combined.

Does this impact President Obama’s allies’ votes or closed-door House-Senate reconciliation for a final ObamaCare bill? How about the President’s policy stances?  What about his decision to renege on his promise to televise health care debates and to instead hold closed-door meetings with these very same special interests in the West Wing?  (For more “odd alliances” exposed, see my review of Tim Carney’s Obamanomics.)

Dropout: When none of these more “cerebral” attempts work, many on the Left drop the attempt at any semblance of reasonable discourse and turn to threats. Tea party activists regularly receive threatening emails and phone calls.  Others are at the receiving end of actual violence.  Take Kenneth Gladney, who had racial slurs, fists, and feet hurled upon him by SEIU thugs at a tea party protest.

While these transparent attempts to undermine this movement are frustrating, I encourage my tea party compatriots to take heart and stick to the high road.  These superficial tactics and inaccurate claims will lose their effectiveness in the long-run.  As with the bullies you may have encountered in the buses and hallways of your school years, these attacks reveal deep emotional and intellectual voids in the hearts and minds of those that perpetrate them.  Finally, if your mere involvement in the political process is triggering this much vitriol from politicians and members of the media big and small, you’ve got to be doing something right.

Despite the soiling of the term “lobbyist,” particularly following the fall of Jack Abramoff, these activities are protected under the First Amendment – and rightfully so.  If it weren’t for second amendment groups, Chicago, where I currently dwell, would not have a powerful coalition challenging the city’s irrational, unconstitutional handgun ban in the Supreme Court. The majority of Americans own stock – stock in corporations.  In today’s legislative environment, corporations would do a disservice to their shareholders not to go to bat for their interests in the Beltway ball game.

It is the existence of this game, and the fact that it is necessary, that frustrates many Americans. The ability of legislators and bureaucrats to change the rules of the game as it is played breeds a cutthroat culture of cloakroom deals.  Too often this doesn’t merely ensure fair treatment of certain interests, it secures beneficial legislative loopholes for the interest with the best lobbyists and unfair treatment for their competitors.  More often than not, this is done to the detriment of small business owners, taxpayers, and consumers alike.

Tim Carney is the lobbying editor of The Washington Examiner and author of the new book Obamanomics. His investigative reporting on the pages of the Examiner regularly digs below the surface of well-known stories like the cash for clunkers boondoggle to reveal the Beltway shenanigans that enables and produces such common-sense defying policies.  In the case of cash for clunkers, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York pushed relentlessly for an increased handout for the middle class car subsidy program.  As Carney reported, it just so happens that Schumer’s state is home to a large steel company that would benefit tremendously from an influx in the cheap scrap metal that the clunkers program was sure to create.  This is a typical example of corporatism, or the profitable nexus of Big Business and Big Government.

Obamanomics reads like an encyclopedia of corporatism in the age of Obama.  As Carney shows, the game’s popularity has increased exponentially under the administration that promised to be the most transparent in history – and cash for clunkers is just one example.  Obama has stacked his administration with industry insiders, political operatives, and former lobbyists – all pros in the game of corporatism.

Take Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.  Writes Carney, “If a Hollywood screenwriter were to invent the prototypical ruthless political operative, he would create Rahm Emanuel – and the producers would probably reject the character as over-the-top.” Carney cites a 2003 Chicago Tribune article describing Emanuel as “A portrait of the often murky, below-the-surface intersection of money and politics.” As Carney puts it “The Obama-Emanuel White House has governed by standing at this intersection, collecting tolls, and paying out favors – and it’s building more entrance ramps into this intersection and multiplying its own power, all of which yields rewards for the most connected businesses.”

Thoroughly researched with Carney’s typical muckraking fervor, Obamanomics shows that these behind-the-scenes alliances are often between players one would not expect to cooperate.  In fact, allegiances are often the exact opposite of what politicians say and the media reports. Republicans are typically maligned as the heartless party of Big Business while Democrats couch themselves as looking out for the little guy (their justification for the constant expansion of Big Government). More often than not, however, Big Business finds itself cozying up with Big Government with Democrats at the reigns.  This relationship often leaves the taxpayer out in the cold.

Take the health care debate. Those on the Left, including President Obama, have cited insurance and pharmaceutical companies time and time again as the main opponents of health care reform.  Keith Olbermann asserted, “the insurance lobby owns the Republican Party.”  As Carney reveals, it is Democrats, not Republicans, that have raked in the most dough from these corporate interests: “In the 2008 election cycle, employees and executives at HMOs gave $5.7 million to Republicans, but $8.6 million to Democrats.”  In the nursing home and hospital sector, Obama brought in over $3 million, “more than four times what McCain brought in and 50 percent more than what George W. Bush raised from these companies in both his elections combined.”

What’s more, the leaders of these industry groups have enjoyed unprecedented access to the Obama White House.  Insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists have met numerous times in the West Wing with the Obama administration. As Carney notes, these discussions were closed-door meetings, not on CSPAN as Obama promised on the campaign trail. Interestingly, the administration attempted suppressing Freedom of Information Act requests as to the attendees at said meetings.  Many journalists have written such discussions off as the industries merely wanting “a seat at the table.”  Both pharmaceutical and insurance companies stand to reap significant profits under ObamaCare.  For example, an individual mandate, a likely component of health insurance “reform,” would increase their respective customer bases significantly. As Carney puts it, these industries don’t just have a seat at the table – many of them have found themselves to be the guests of honor.

The media often writes-off these examples of collusion as “peculiar alliances.” Yet examples abound in today’s prominent policy battles.  The Big Government Left constantly demonizes Big Business on television, only to turn around and buddy up with them at fundraisers and over closed-door legislative drafting sessions.  Carney covers the gambit from energy companies lobbying for cap and trade to the bailouts of labor unions and Wall Street fat cats in the name of “saving main street.”

What’s a concerned citizen to do? Writes Carney, “The appropriate response to Obamanomics is a consistent rejection of government as a solution to our problems.  But it is also a clear-throated attack on the misdeeds of Big Business…frankly, Big Business is not the friend of limited government and low taxes.”

As Carney states, “it’s time to grab the pitchforks.” Consider arming the tea partier on your shopping list this holiday season with a copy of Obamanomics.  Carney names the special interest moochers and their political enablers and offers some great insight into reforming the system that they prop up to benefit from the labor of hard-working Americans. In the age of Obama, it’s a must-read.