Compelling. But let’s fact check, line by line.

When our economy crashed, small investors were left behind. Congress bailed out the Wall Street banks that caused the collapse with your money.

So far, so good. When the economy crashed, the government did prop up the Wall Street banks with cash infusions and bailouts via Congress and the Federal Reserve. By “small investors,” I presume the ad means “small businesses,” which certainly have not benefited much from Washington’s efforts. Either way, yes, the little guy was on the hook for the big fishes’ losses.

Now Congress is considering so-called “financial reform” that gives the government unlimited executive bailout authority – unlimited bailouts for big banks, paid for by you and me.

I’m not sure what “unlimited executive bailout authority” means — though it is a nice, menacing turn of phrase. Dodd’s bill does not at all provide the executive branch with the authority to bail out firms willy-nilly; the whole point of the bill is to prevent the government from having to rescue the financial sector again by forcibly shutting down and breaking up dangerous firms, and creating a slew of provisions to stop them from becoming dangerous in the first place.

The Republican counterproposal does precisely the same thing — but actually puts taxpayers on the hook first. The Dodd bill forces banks to create a $50 billion fund for the government to use in the process of “resolving” — that is, liquidating — a failing or dangerous firm. The Republican proposal makes the government liquidate the firm first and then recoup any losses.

Who supports this phony reform? The big banks. The CEO of Goldman Sachs, a bank under investigation, says, quote, “The biggest beneficiary of reform is Wall Street itself.” And after receiving billions in taxpayer bailouts, Citigroup’s CEO says, quote, “You can count on Citigroup to support these efforts.”

No, financial firms do not support the reform bill. Provisions such as the ban on proprietary trading and regulation of derivatives will make their businesses less lucrative. Thus, they have spent millions of dollars lobbying against the bill.

And of course Wall Street does not announce its opposition to reform. It would hardly be politic to argue, “We would like to remain unregulated and capable of taking risks that might destroy the world economy but will certainly enrich us,” in Congressional testimony.

When big banks line up to support phony reform, it’s like, well, you know…

Accompanying this text is footage of oinking pigs. I guess that this implies pork, or greed, or something. I really have no idea.

And there’s the ad, as brought to you by Consumers for Competitive Choice, an astroturf lobbying firm. For more on them, see TPM’s excellent reporting here.

And later I met Chris Wim from Lubbock, Texas, who said he’d come up because “these guys are firing the second shot heard round the round. First Scott Brown wins here, then we bring this to Texas.” Informed that he was from Texas, some of the Massachusetts activists gently ribbed Wim and told him to find an ACORN volunteer and get registered.

Inside the overflow room where supporters watched a choppy video feed of the rally, organizers kept up enthusiasm by letting supporters say who they were and where they were from. A good proportion were from out of state–Michigan, Connecticut, Rhode Island. And this wasn’t frowned upon at all.

“I’m one of the people who worked on the ‘Dump Dodd’ campaign,” said Jim, a FreeRepublic blogger from Hartford, Conn. “You guys have hope.” He told supporters to click onto his FreeRepublic thread to see photos of their rally.

“I’m here today because I want to stop the bribery in D.C.” said Mary, an activist from Darien, Conn. “I want a two-party system. I want to restart the real medical economy. I invite you all to go to my Website, www.PaytheDoctor.com. I’m a citizen who’s writing her own health care plan. It took me six months!”

These people were welcomed with open arms. No, they can’t vote on Tuesday. And their effort won’t be as polished as the efforts of Democratic activists and unions inside Massachusetts. But Brown supporters have embraced their role as the possible doom-bringers of health care reform and “the Obama machine,” and the arrival of out-of-staters who are in awe of what they’re doing is raising their spirits.

Our petition now has more than 90,000 supporters, which you can see by clicking here and here. We are asking you again, before it is too late, to do all you can to stop this imminent threat and avoid war.

But clicking through that link to take a closer look at those signatories raises substantial questions about their authenticity. For instance, signatories 84,854 through 85,071 are all named “Vince Vince” — although the Israel Project claims that all those different Vince Vinces are from different states. Well, sort of. Some of them are from states listed by recognizable acronyms like MN or AZ or PA. Others, however, are from the great states of GU and AA and XX.

Click to enlarge

Nor does the curious reader even have to examine the list that far down. Signatory number five is listed as Comfylovely ……. — and no, those aren’t ellipses I’ve placed in for dramatic effect; that’s Comfylovely’s listed last name — from the proud city of Davao in the historic state of XX.

That’s not even the most disturbing part of the signatories. The Israel Project lists the following as enthusiastic supporters of sanctioning Iran: Viagra Kaufen Viagra Kaufen, London, N.Y. (signatory #84,570); Porn Sex Video from London, N.Y. (signatory #62,751-62,756); Stupidwhiteman V, who declined to list an address (signatory #83,780); and Xbox 360 accessories — that’s a first and last name — from New York, N.Y. (signatory #90,046).

When I called Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the Israel Project’s founder and president, she told me that the group “emailed people who support our issues” and asked them to sign; those people then recruited contacts and colleagues to do the same. Asked if the Project took any measures to verify that the names on the petition were genuine, Mizrahi replied, “They’re activists and they go through a secure thing. We have 140,000 activists who work with us, so yes. A lot of them have similar names, because they’re related.”

But when I read Mizrahi some of the dirtier signatories listed on her petition, she replied, “Oh yuck,” and said, “I didn’t personally go through all of them, but they go through the system, so if they got in like that with that kind of email name, that’s pretty horrible.” She elaborated, “It’s not like we called every person and verified ‘are you the person.’ But we emailed it through our usual activists.” Asked what this suggests about the Israel Project’s vetting procedures, she replied, “It suggests this is America and that in any country, there are always some people who are inappropriate.”

Mizrahi subsequently emailed and called me to say that the Israel Project “accidentally posted the wrong file” and is in the process of replacing it with the correct one. A bright spot for the organization? Mizrahi added that the petition itself has yet to be physically released to elected officials and religious leaders — the press release announcing the petition’s large volume of signatories was sent first. She thanked TWI for alerting her to the error.

Rachel Rose Hartman and Hannah Dreier provided research assistance for this post.

Presenters at the premiere of "Tea Party: The Documentary Film" Wednesday in Washington (Photo: David Weigel)

Getting into Wednesday’s Washington, D.C., premiere of “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” meant walking through a steady rain into the Ronald Reagan building, a sprawling downtown trade and convention center where the economic conservative group FreedomWorks, which helped organize a number of Tea Party protests, had rented a foyer and a sizable auditorium. The stars of the film relaxed and talked with former House Majority Leader and FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) handed out business cards to a steady stream of well-wishers. All of the guests made their way into the auditorium on the FreedomWorks version of a red carpet — a strip of green astroturf.

“We’re goofing on Hollywood,” said FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, dressed in evening wear alongside his wife Terry. “It was [producer] Luke Livingston’s idea.”

[GOP1]The award show trappings were the only tongue-in-cheek part of the evening. “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” is, according to its stars and filmmakers, an attempt to celebrate — and correct — the history of what Armey called a movement to “fulfill the destiny of this land.” Livingston said he and his volunteers paid for the movie, “maxing out our credit cards,” for a total of around $500,000. Two more members of Congress, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), joined the proceedings to pay tribute to the activists who organized the 9/12 “taxpayer march on Washington,” which drew an estimated 60,000 people to the Capitol to protest the Democrats’ economic agenda. In remarks before the start of the film, Blackburn made a spirited pitch for Tea Partiers to come down to Nashville for February’s national Tea Party Convention.

“When you come to Tennessee,” said Blackburn, “they’ll be sure in telling you — like my husband likes to say — when it comes to taxes, if 10 percent is good enough for God on Sunday, it’s good enough for the government on Monday.”

Price, the sponsor of a resolution paying tribute to the 9/12 march, credited Tea Party activists with giving Republicans “the courage to do what we need to do.” After his short remarks, he asked more than a dozen activists to join him onstage to accept framed copies of the resolution, which has been sponsored by 148 members of the Republican conference but has not come up for a vote.

“It’s not like you haven’t seen one of these before,” Price said, passing off a copy to Armey, “but I don’t think you’ve seen one that truly recognizes freedom and liberty.”

For the activists, makers, and stars of the movie, it was all a bit overwhelming. The movie hadn’t been finished, said director Pritchett Cotten, until three days before the premiere. He and a small group of volunteers spent a month of 17-hour days editing the film with Apple’s Final Cut Pro software, stopping only for Thanksgiving. The finished product elicited many moments of spontaneous applause from the audience, as well as some tears, and a final standing ovation.

“Tea Party: The Documentary Film” is part tribute, part “official” history, and part human interest story. Cotten, who cut his teeth on commercials and corporate training films, has the most success with the human drama.

“I didn’t want to make a policy movie,” said Cotten.

Focusing on six people who participated in the 9/12 march at various levels, the film presents them — and, by extension, all Tea Partiers — as average Americans less concerned with partisanship or economics than with a government that, according to all six of the subjects, “doesn’t listen.”

In the film’s telling, the movement began with anger at President George W. Bush. His voice, announcing the September 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 with warnings of what will happen “if the free market is allowed to work,” is the first sound viewers hear at the start of the movie. Price, the member of Congress featured most often in the film, later argues that Tea Party anger goes back to the March 2008 collapse of BearStearns, and the government’s corresponding rescue package.

From there, the Tea Party movement is portrayed as a natural next step in America’s history of peaceful rebellion against the government. William, a minister and Revolutionary War re-enactor, explains how the movement is in step with the original Boston Tea Party. (The film’s footage depicting colonial America was filmed at Colonial Williamsburg, Va., according to one note in the credits.) Painstakingly, Cotten and his stars make the case against charges of “racism” in the movement, relying on William’s membership in a mostly African-American church and through the testimony of Nate, an African-American activist who is deeply apologetic about his 2008 vote for the Obama-Biden ticket.

“You have to understand how that played with the psyche of a black man or a black woman,” Nate says, “to see the highest seat of power, and it’s held by a black man.” The film shows Nate making the case to black men in Detroit that “black people we never really had a political voice.” He also admits that he stands out in the mostly-white Tea Party crowds of which he’s been a part. There is a “voice in my head,” he says, that tells him one day he’ll be less alone.

The race issue surfaces a few more times in “Tea Party,” most jarringly when a group of doctors, participating in the Sept. 10, 2009 mass lobbying effort in Congress, engage Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in a back-and-forth about health care reform. “It went well until he pulled the race card,” says Dr. Robert Shessell , another one of the film’s subjects, “and said the only reason they did it was to embarrass the first black president.” All of this, argue the filmmakers, is the height of irony. The music played during the march itself, titled “It’s Time to Party,” puts the march into a rich and multi-racial context: “in the spirit of Martin, of Gandhi, of Jesus.”

Another goal of the film is to challenge 10 months of media coverage while subtly deciding who does and does not speak for the movement. The role of FreedomWorks in helping to organize the 9/12 march is fully covered, down to a scene where Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots takes notes and talks on a conference call led by FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe. The closest the film gets to a suspense scene is a real-time account of a bomb threat against FreedomWorks, which occurs while Martin is in the office. “We’re going to come out twice as strong tomorrow,” Kibbe says to cheers from other activists. Notably less present in the movie — although there are images from some of its events — is Americans for Prosperity, the rival group which, unlike FreedomWorks , supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out Wall Street firms. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), an avid early endorser of the Tea Parties, does not appear in the film at all. But Livingston said he scrambled to include a shot of a sign reading “Thank You Glenn Beck,” hoping to grab the attention of the talk radio and Fox News star. That moment drew some of the screening’s loudest, rowdiest cheers.

The film, like Price’s resolution, also pushes forward the idea that turnout for the 9/12 march was larger than the media reported. Time lapse footage shows the 9/12 crowd at its maximum size. “The park service said this was the largest event that D.C. has ever had,” argues Jack, one of the organizers that Cotten’s camera followed to Washington. That isn’t true, but the controversial statement is followed quickly by emotional footage of Jack visiting the Vietnam War Memorial with other activists, eyes wet with tears. The film ends with a slow-motion shot of the flags at the World War II memorial. “I need you to stand up for our freedom!” says one of the rally’s African-American speakers. “Patriots! Stand up! Stand up! Stand up! Stand up!”

Inside the Reagan building, there was just as much enthusiasm, and just as much disinterest, with how the media was covering the movement. Armey joked from the stage about “liberal interlopers” in the room who could stick around and learn something. As he introduced Wilson, DeMint used the uproar over Wilson’s “you lie” outburst during President Obama’s joint speech to Congress in September to teach a lesson.

“When I heard this ‘you lie’ comment, the president turned and looked at me and I said ‘Oh no, they think it’s me,’” said DeMint. “The next day when I found it was Joe, I said ‘Oh no, he’s dead meat, they’re gonna get him.’ And a couple days later, I was saying — after he raised a few million dollars off of it — I was saying, ‘why didn’t I say that?” The lesson, he said, was to provide some “passion and anger.”

“The only reason we don’t have national health care right now,” said DeMint to the audience, “is you.”

Mocking the “AstroTurf” and “Brooks Brothers” and “angry mob” memes was a theme of nearly every speech at the rally, and many of the pre-made signs had small “AFP” markers on them. This isn’t a PR battle that AFP and its organizers think they’re losing; AfP President Tim Phillips told me that the campaign to “expose” the town hall protesters as “corporate plants” is backfiring on the Democrats.

Esko and Rebecca Polvi.

The signs on the stage.

Another sign, with a proud AFP stamp.

Much like we saw at the McCain-Palin rallies last year where crowds were baited with cries of ‘socialist,’ ‘communist,’ and where the birthers movement was born – these mobs of extremists are not interested in having a thoughtful discussion about the issues –  but like some Republican leaders have said – they are interested in ‘breaking’ the President and destroying his Presidency.

The NRCC, via spokesman Ken Spain, fired back:

What Democrats call ‘mob rule’ the average American calls “democracy” … These kinds of despicable characterizations of middle class Americans, who oppose trillions in mounting government debt, as elements of the partisan ‘fringe’ smacks of elitism.

This begs the question: if town hall applause-o-meter contests are “democracy,” what are elections for? Undeterred, based on the friendly-fire interviews that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) gave to The Huffington Post, it sounds like Democrats are trying to define the coming wave of made-for-TV town hall outbursts as fringe lunacy along the lines of the Code Pink protests that dogged Republicans in the Bush years.