“Folks we are here today forcing this issue because America is at risk,” said Brooks. “We are at risk of insolvency and bankruptcy because the socialist members of this body choose to spend money that we do not have. They believe in wealth transfer programs.”

Rep. Ellison interrupted. “Point of order. My point of order is I would like the gentleman’s words taken down referencing members of this body as socialists.”

After some discussion, Ellison asked, “Does the gentleman withdraw his word or not?”

Brooks did, but he didn’t do so without some complaint.

“Ladies and gentlemen of America, we all know what we are talking about here and we all know the what the definitional terms are, and I’m more than happy to resume this discussion off the House floor, but for whatever reason I’m not permitted to use one word,” he said.

Friday was a day of budget battles on Capitol Hill. The Republicans put forward their budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, with massive changes to Medicare, deep cuts to social safety net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, and lower taxes on the wealthy and corporations through reforms the tax code.

Progressive Democrats put forward the People’s Budget which would raise taxes on the wealthy and propose deep cuts to defense and military spending mainly be ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After backing off his socialist claim, Brooks slammed the progressive budget proposal. “To the United States of America now, this progressive People’s Budget I submit to you is nothing more than a Trojan house. Why should anyone believe that the folks who have wracked up these massive deficit that is put America at risk are now going to change their stripes?”

California Rep. Maxine Waters of California had a different view of history.

“The gentleman from Alabama evidently has amnesia,” he said. “The Clinton administration eliminated the deficit and left a balanced budget; it was the Bush administration that created the deficit. I rise in strong support for this the Progressive Caucus’ alternative balanced People’s Budget.

She continued, “During the last administration, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle maxed out our nation’s credit card for wars and tax cuts for the rich all while saying that deficits don’t matter. Now they are in an identity crisis as a rationale to undermine programs they have never supported and push a divisive social agenda that’s a sideshow to our budget debate.”

Ellison and McCollum were the only two member of the Minnesota delegation to vote in favor of the People’s Budget, which failed with only 77 votes.

Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget passed the House 235-193 with no Democrats voted for it. The Minnesota delegation was split between the state’s four Democrats and four Republicans.

What does Hayek’s book, which was written as a direct response to British wartime debates over the future of the planned economy, have to say about America in 2010? TWI recently put the question to Bruce Caldwell, director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University, as well as the general editor of “The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek,” which includes the definitive edition of “The Road to Serfdom.”

Watching Fox News, where hosts have revived at least a superficial popular interest in Hayek, you’d think that the mild-mannered economist was a sort of Tea Party hell-raiser in his day. But one of the things you bring out in your work on Hayek is the extent to which he was well-received across the spectrum.

At the particular point in time in which the book appeared, his arguments were perceived as a reasonable presentation of a specific position, respectfully received by British socialists at the time. In America, the response was much more partisan.

Keynes himself was a fan of the book. At that point in time, both Hayek and Keynes were both liberals who opposed fascism and totalitarianism. They simply differed on what the optimal liberal state should look like. Keynes was a “new” liberal, where Hayek was more of a classical liberal. Both opposed price controls. Neither wanted to go full-hog with regard to central planning, which was on offer in the 1930s.

But since no one is really proposing full-hog central planning today, to what extent has the book become an anachronism?

It’s true the book focuses on the problem of central planning. It was written in response to the British Labor Party platform of the time, which used the term “socialism.” But some of the book’s arguments are applicable today. For example, the nationalization, or socialization, of losses. Hayek was among the first to use the term “too big to fail.” And in general, he was talking about Liberty.

A careful reader, when they get to some of his policy recommendations, will notice that he often sounds like a standard economist of today. He recognizes problems of “externality” and a “social minimum.”

In the Tea Party scene and on Fox News, you sometimes see the book in the context of opposition to any and all government intervention in the economy. Is “The Road to Serfdom” a proto-libertarian tract?

I hear some of the Tea Party people say they don’t want big government, but that they like Medicare. So I don’t necessarily think there’s a consistent philosophy that’s out there that’s embracing this book.

It’s important to note that “The Road to Serfdom” is a full-fledged attack on socialism and totalitarianism. I don’t see it as a libertarian handbook. Hayek never wrote anything that could be conceived as anything like that. He always was writing at a very high level of generality. Even if you look at the last third of the “Constitution of Liberty,” where he talks about Social Security and price controls, he keeps things at a really high level of generality. Hayek was a founder of the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1940s, which was home to a range of liberals in the European sense. I’ve yet to be able to find Hayek’s views on antitrust laws, and this could not be a more important topic. He is not a policy wonk; you can’t study his work and get a blueprint for how to organize society.

People from both the left and the right have always found things to like and dislike in Hayek. To this day, there are people associated with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute who consider him a social democrat, which is not a term of endearment coming from the Von Mises Institute.

If Blackburn had attended, she would have shared a stage with Ana Puig, a Tea Party activist whose expertise is on how the Democrats are turning America into a “Banana Republic.”

From the schedule:

Speaker, ANA PUIG-“Correlations between the current Administration and Marxist Dictators of Latin America & MARSHA BLACKBURN, “Leadership” 9:00-10:00am

Here’s Puig making the argument at a 2009 Tea Party.

T. Boone Pickens and Van Jones at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas. (Getty Images)

The descent of Van Jones from a powerful job in Barack Obama’s administration to career-sinking political controversy happened at a stunning pace. On Aug. 10, the White House’s ousted special adviser for green jobs appeared at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas, sharing a stage with Republican billionaire-turned wind power evangelist T. Boone Pickens. The next day, The Washington Post ran a warm, brief profile on Jones, calling him “a leader in a growing movement that aims to hit two major social and policy challenges — the struggling economy and environmental quality — with one boulder.” That was how the mainstream media and the business-friendly side of the environmental movement handled Jones, as a preternaturally gifted advocate for an everyone-wins green campaign.

After midnight on Sept. 6, 2009, on one of the slowest news days of the year, Jones buckled under a multi-pronged assault on his record and associations, the most damaging being his 2002 and 2004 flirtations with the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement. He resigned from his post. “Opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones said in a statement. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide … [but] I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past.”

What Jones might have said, but did not, was that his downfall represented a crucial and possibly educational victory for the wing of the conservative and libertarian movement that has tried, without much success, to paint environmental activists like Jones as anti-capitalist radicals less interested in the health of the planet than in a well-disguised radical agenda.

For years, Jones had been viewed by the conservative movement as a scam artist, a purveyor of what the libertarian economist and occasional Rush Limbaugh radio show guest-host Walter E. Williams once called “watermelon environmentalism.” The green movement, Williams argued, was socialism in disguise: green on the outside, red on the inside. (Williams, like Jones, is African American.) That critique has been repeated by conservative and libertarians for more than a decade, and it has found powerful advocates. In 2007, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus claimed that “the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants,” but “the threat of ambitious environmentalism.” Later that year, Klaus’s arguments were translated and published in a book by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank funded, in part, by the energy industry. And Klaus gave the keynote address at the think tank’s 2008 gala dinner. But in recent months, the “watermelon” attack had made it onto Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.

“Do you like watermelon?” Beck asked sarcastically on the June 26 episode of his program.

“I love watermelon,” responded Phil Kerpen, the director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

“I think this is a watermelon bill,” said Beck.

“I think you’re exactly right,” said Kerpen. “This bill is green on the outside, the thinnest green on the outside. And inside, it’s deep communist red.”

Still, before the Jones controversy, the “watermelon environmentalism” attack had been a relatively hard sell. In March, the conservative-libertarian City Journal ran a piece labeling Jones a “green hustler” and “[Jesse] Jackson version 2.0, eco-upgraded for the Great Warming.” In April, the popular right-wing Website WorldNetDaily ran the first in a series of Jones exposes asking whether a “red” would “help blacks go green.” Attacks on Jones remained obscure enough in May that Meg Whitman, a policy adviser to both Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns, gushed to reporters about how she “loved” what Jones was doing.

Not until late July, when Fox’s Glenn Beck started warning his viewers about Jones with some of the same evidence produced by WorldNetDaily, did the long-term campaign against “watermelon environmentalism” go viral. Beck’s reports on Jones leaned heavily on a sympathetic 2005 profile from the East Bay Express, an Oakland, Calif. alternative weekly paper, in which Jones said he became a “communist” after the Rodney King verdict, and detailed his days at the head of a radical chic organization called STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement). This was a history Jones had been open about for years. But in July, and especially after Color of Change — a civil rights group co-founded by Jones — began pressuring advertisers to drop Beck’s show, Beck and other Fox News personalities ran story after story on how communism was at the root of Jones’s environmentalism. One moment on the Sept. 3 episode of Sean Hannity’s prime time news show, with a small panel, including Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle and conservative pundit S.E. Cupp, digging into the story, was typical of the coverage:

SEAN HANNITY: He’s a communist. I mean avowed.

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE: Yes.

S.E. CUPP: Self-avowed. Yes.

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE: Self-avowed communist.

Reached on Sunday by TWI, some of the people who’d been in the trenches making the case against “watermelon environmentalism” were not yet sure if the Jones story was a one-time incident, a self-inflicted injury on the green movement, or the kick-off of a wave of new attention on the environmental movement.

“I think the Jones case is a great example of the green outside-red inside phenomenon,” said Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center who has appeared on Beck’s Fox News show and wrote more than a dozen items about Jones for the American Spectator. “With the exception of the 9/11 trutherism, I don’t think Van Jones’s views are much different from those in the environmentalist movement as a whole. Environmentalism isn’t about saving the planet: It’s about controlling the behavior of people.”

Vadum was not sure about the long-term impact of Jones’s downfall, as some early media coverage of the controversy has honed in on an early 2009 video of Jones calling Republicans who didn’t support climate change legislation “assholes,” which came to light hours before the 9/11 papers. “The mainstream media ignored this throughout and even now is characterizing his departure as based on calling Republicans nasty names, which is but a smidgeon of the whole story.”

Kerpen, who appeared on Beck’s show many times to provide more analysis of the socialism-environmentalism connection, was happy to see Jones go. But he worried that the “watermelon” issue was gaining less traction than the generic issue of “czars,” policy advisers given executive branch jobs without Senate approval.

“It’s more important to follow through on the politics of ‘green jobs’ and use the Van Jones affair to fight that concept and cap-and-trade than to pursue other czars,” said Kerpen. “My primary interest has always been using this to win policy fights.”

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The full statement, bolded for emphasis:

Barack Obama will deliver a nation-wide address to students this coming Tuesday, September 8th. This will be the first day of classes for many children across the country. The White House plans to broadcast the address live from its website. Principals were notified of the plan in a letter addressed to them by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The White House claims that Obama will “challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning.” He will also say that it is a “shared responsibility” among parents, students, and educators to make the learning experience as successful as possible. That may seem harmless enough, but is it appropriate? How would the media have reacted if President Bush had been beamed into classrooms coast-to-coast?

The Department of Education has offered educators “classroom activities” to go along with Obama’s message. Younger students in grades K-6 are encouraged to learn about the background of the President of the United States by reading books about former presidents and Obama. For students in grades 7-12 teachers are urged to utilize quotes from Obama’s speeches regarding education so that the students can understand the president’s message. Some of the questions they should ask themselves include: “How will President Obama inspire us? How will he challenge us? And why did he want to speak to us today?”

Once again, the Obama Administration is using its power in unprecedented ways, this time injecting itself into the nation’s classrooms. Tuesday may be a good day to sit in on your child’s classes.

Earlier today, Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer blasted the president for trying to “indoctrinate” children in “socialism.”

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In Virginia, insurance premiums have jumped 3.4 times faster than earnings since 2000, according to a report to be released tomorrow by Families USA, an advocate for health care consumers. The group is tracking similar trends in states coast to coast. North Dakota, for example, has seen insurance premiums jump 94 percent since 2000, while earnings have risen only 35 percent, the group found. In Florida, median incomes increased just 27 percent this decade while the cost of health coverage skyrocketed 98 percent. The list goes on.

“Quite simply, America’s families are being priced out of health coverage,” Families USA warns.

The White House has said that the reform model matters much less than its ultimate effectiveness in providing competition and reining in coverage costs. Families USA has made a good case why the task shouldn’t be left to the voluntary efforts of the for-profit companies.

“Let’s let Obama and his foreign bank handlers know that we’re aware of their criminal activities,” says Jones, taking a meme that began on the Drudge Report and taking it way into the political badlands.

It gets angrier from there:

- “the DNC is running insidious advertisements and the White House has launched its “Great American Snitch” program at flag@whitehouse.com.”

- “dare you speak of the anointed one and you are a racist.”

- “Left wing blogs attack Governor Sarah Palin and made allegations that her young Son Trig is not hers.”

- “No one is questioning the law license inactive status of First Lady Michele Obama. And what is up with twenty-two staffers for the First Lady Michele?”

- “The Bush twins were regularly part of media attacks, dare no one speak of the Obama daughters who attend wonderful — and very expensive — Sidwell Friends private school.”

- “As a 22 year US Army combat veteran I can tell you when I smell fear, and the left wing liberal socialists are stinking up the place.”

Now, the district that West is trying to take for the GOP is a classic swing seat; it voted only 52-48 for Obama in 2008, and West lost an underdog campaign to Rep. Klein by only 10 points. It’s saying something that West would eschew an under-the-radar moderate campaign and instead breath fire on a national conservative Website in order to gin up support from the party’s base. Was there any successful 2006 Democratic challenger who launched a campaign by asking why no one was investigating First Lady Laura Bush’s scandals?

Declaring that resistance from Republicans and conservatives in the coming months would determine whether the nation continues as a “beacon of freedom” or is instead “swallowed in an avalanche of socialism,” Pence observed what he called a “great awakening,” as Republicans return to core values and fiscal discipline.

“For our movement and our party to go forward, I believe it is essential for us to learn the right lessons of the recent past,” he said.

On Election Day in 2008, according to Pence, despite the fact that only 22 percent of American described themselves as liberal, voters sent “the most liberal one-party government in the history of the country” to Washington, D.C.

“So, what happened?” he asked. “Some blame the war in Iraq. Others blame scandals in Washington, D.C. But I say the real scandal in Washington, D.C. was run-away federal spending under Republican control. The truth is that Republicans didn’t just lose a few elections, we lost our way. We walked away from our principles … and the American people walked away from us.”

After his remarks, Pence told The Iowa Independent that he has “no plans to run for president.” Nevertheless, Pence has officially joined former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on the growing list of prominent Republicans who have made public appearances in Iowa — often an early sign of a pending presidential bid — in recent weeks.

They understand socialism. They understand tyrants. But none of us have ever had it here. We don’t even know what it looks like. Part of what we’re trying to do in “Saving Freedom” is just show that where we are, we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. You still had votes but the votes were just power grabs like you see in Iran, and other places in South America, like Chavez is running down in Venezuela. People become more dependent on the government so that they’re easy to manipulate. And they keep voting for more government because that’s where their security is. When our immigrants get here, they’re worried, because they see it happening here.

DeMint worried that it was the “eleventh hour” for freedom, but he disputed a question from a man who wondered if America was ripe for another revolution. “The reason I’m convinced we can do this in a civilized way is that I’ve seen, on a number of issues, that when people get informed and want to change their government, the government will change.”

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