The first person I saw on the Hill tonight was Senator Joe Lieberman. He was exiting the House side of the Capitol and looking for his driver.

I tried to press him a little on his non-committal answer re: filibustering health care over the public option. Maybe I’m inclined toward optimism, but I’m thinking he’s hoping he doesn’t have to make that decision.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? There are too many marginally Democratic Senators that don’t have to face their constituents in 2010. Bill Nelson, Ben Nelson, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad… Any one of these guys could join with Republicans in a filibuster.

I know there is a movement afoot to pressure Harry Reid to threaten Senators that take the unprecedented step of breaking with their caucus to join a minority filibuster… but shit…

This is the same Harry Reid that led the caucus in a standing ovation when Joe Lieberman returned to the Senate after defeating the Democrat in the 2006 Connecticut election. It’s the same guy that allowed Lieberman to keep his gavel after criss-crossing the country to campaign for John McCain and Sarah Palin for much of 2008.

eh… Maybe I’m not so inclined toward optimism after all…

I’ve been holding back on reporting about this, but there comes a time…

Over the last three months, I’ve been detained by Capitol Police between six and ten times. Each time was the result of a complaint filed by a lawmaker.

A coupla posts back, you’ll find video of me asking Virginia Foxx if she wanted to take the opportunity to denounce Rush Limbaugh’s Nazi rhetoric. She soldiered on past me, head bowed and silent. Less than ten minutes later, I was accosted by the omnipresent Capitol Police. I susected Foxx had complained, but the police wouldn’t say.

They checked my ID, ran a background check and talked to me for about 40 minutes or so. Because I have enormous respect for the folks wearing the uniform and the gravity of the job they’ve chosen, I allowed them to look at the video on my camera so they could see for themselves that any complaints filed against me were unfounded. At the end of the process, I was turned loose.

I went home and called the offices of the Capitol Police and the House Sergeant at Arms. A week later, I got a call back from the Sgt. At Arms counsel’s office. I told them that after repeatedly being stopped and detained on the basis of malicious and unfounded complaints, I wanted to find a solution. I’m still waiting for resolution.

See, the thing is, you cannot move on Capitol Hill without being observed and recorded. There are security cameras everywhere. I’m not certain, but I suspect the the thirty minute delay between being detained and let go involves more than a background check for warrants. I suspect they are running the film to see if I’ve done anything wrong. And they let me go only after they determine I’ve not broken any laws. Specifically,

• I’m not allowed to intentionally impede anyone’s progress
• as anywhere else, unwanted touching constitutes assault
• there are restricted areas that I am barred from entering.

I’ve been scrupulous in following the law. I’m constantly aware of where I am and who I’m talking to… I know the police are, by necessity, on hair-trigger. And they are armed with big fucking guns. I’m not reckless or stupid when it comes to collecting these videos.

Anyway, it happened again tonight, only this time I don’t have to wonder who made the call.

You’ll see in the video below that I approached Virginia Foxx as she was walking with another Congresswoman. I asked them if they’d comment on Rush Limbaugh’s difficulty purchasing a football team. All of a sudden, Foxx took off running. She ran over to the Capitol Police manning a barricade. I made a joke about this little old lady making a bee-line across the street – I thought she just wanted to get away from the camera. Alas, her aim was not so benign.

She told the Police I was bothering her and once again I was detained for a decent chunk of time – enough that I was unable to do my job – to talk to additional Representatives as they made their way to the Capitol to vote.

I will be filing a formal complaint with the Sergeant at Arms. I’m not sure Foxx would have the temerity to complain if I had Capitol Press credentials draped around my neck, but these folks need to learn that there is no “official” press. In fact, I’m pretty sure I do the job better than many of the stenographers with credentials.

As far as I can tell, the “veal pen” is a metaphor first described by Jane Hamsher in this memorable post.

From Jane:

The veal crate is a wooden restraining device that is the veal calf’s permanent home. It is so small (22″ x 54″) that the calves cannot turn around or even lie down and stretch and is the ultimate in high-profit, confinement animal agriculture.(1) Designed to prevent movement (exercise), the crate does its job of atrophying the calves’ muscles, thus producing tender “gourmet” veal.

[...]

About 14 weeks after their birth, the calves are slaughtered. The quality of this “food,” laden with chemicals, lacking in fiber and other nutrients, diseased and processed, is another matter. The real issue is the calves’ experience. During their brief lives, they never see the sun or touch the Earth. They never see or taste the grass. Their anemic bodies crave proper sustenance. Their muscles ache for freedom and exercise. They long for maternal care. They are kept in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes.

Soon after the election, the Administration began corralling the big liberal DC interest groups into a variety of organizations and communication networks through which they telegraphed their wishes — into a virtual veal pen. The 8:45 am morning call co-hosted by the “liberal” Center for American Progress, Unity 09, and Common Purpose are just a few of the overt ways that the White House controls its left flank and maintains discipline.

[...]
When the White House met with bankers after the AIG scandal and they said they didn’t want to be criticized for getting huge bonuses paid for by taxpayers, the White House complied and “cooled their rhetoric.” The President told the public that Timothy Geithner had been instructed to do everything in his power to claw back those bonuses, and the House passed a bill doing just that. But it died in the Senate.

You remember all those campaigns by the unions, by the online groups, by liberal economics and finance organizations pushing the Senate to take it up?

Yeah, me either.

Which means that the teabaggers were in perfect position to harvest all of the discontent over the bank bailout, and no coherent liberal critique was offered. I heard it over and over again — if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn’t the last time something like that happened — just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.

And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent. They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out. How many have openly pushed back against the Administration on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or DOMA? Well, not many. Most tried to satisfy their LGBT members by outsourcing activism to other organizations, or proving their bona fides by getting involved in the Prop 8 battle that is not directly toxic to the White House. It’s a chickenshit sidestep that betrays their members in the interest of personal gain, which they justify with feeble self-serving palliatives about the importance of “maintaining a seat at the table.”

(Emphasis added)

Jane’s “veal pen” is principally a criticism of the liberal organizations that crave access to power more than the mandate they are given by their members and contributors. I think her criticism is valid, but overvalued.

The real criticism should be reserved for the funders that pull support from the “veal penned” advocacy organizations when they break containment.

The idea here is that you shouldn’t blame liberal organizations for their sense of self-preservation any more than you should blame the calf kept in the veal pen. And in keeping with the metaphor, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to drop a ton of blame at the farmer’s (Obama’s) feet either… To an extent, both the farmer and Obama can be seen as pursuing their own self-preservation… The root of the problem lies with those that buy the veal.

The real blame – the lion’s share of it – should be assigned to the “institutional funders”.

So who are the mysterious “institutional funders” that cut off Fund for America? And how do we extract our pound of flesh from them? Are they susceptible to embarrassment? Can bloggers “out” them? Are there enough “insiders” willing to leak names of these “institutional funders” and their demands? Are their identities an open secret?

Maybe it’s time we start looking at the big money behind the curtain and asking a few tough questions.

UPDATE: I think the “veal pen” metaphor is particularly apt and meaningful, especially today. Jane deserves the credit she’s getting for recognizing its utility and mainstreaming the concept.

With that in mind, as a blogger, I think it important to give credit to the metaphor’s originator, FireDogLake’s hilarious wordsmith,TRex. Way back in 2007, he crafted this devastating Megan McCardle takedown which contained this nugget:

Unfortunately, that helpful older person never intervened in McArdle’s case. From her writing, it appears that she was dumped straight from her gilt-edged creche into some gold plated veal-pen of a preparatory school, from whence her parents’ money wafted her into the rarefied airs of the Ivy League, which summarily spat her into her current sinecure at the Atlantic. Presumably all without her ever scrubbing a toilet, waiting a table, or doing anything that would spoil her manicure or muss her boarding-school bob.

I just wanted to get this up again since it scrolled off the front page:

I’m just going to go ahead and apologize right now. For many of you, this blog will get to be repetitious and, perhaps, boring.

But here’s the thing: the Republican Party is in a really crazy place right now. Virtually every member is beholden to the lunatic fringe of the right-wing. The real leaders of American conservativism are Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. There may have been a time when the Buckley’s and Hayek’s added something of value to the political conversation, at least to the extent that they challenged liberal orthodoxies and forced us to sharpen our policy arguments. But now, the country’s most powerful elected Republicans are led by vacuous entertainers, bereft of any serious intellectual heft. Limbaugh, Beck and the second and third tiers (Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Hewitt, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc.) of Republican leadership are meticulous when it comes to ignoring realities they don’t like and creating false realities that serve their agenda: building their audiences.

it is all so transparent. These folks are peddling lies and making a mint. Elected Republicans, sensing electoral peril, look more and more to the Idiocracy that is right-wing talk radio for policy direction.

There are only two viable political parties in this country. And one of them is nuts.

It may get boring, but I’m determined to memorialize the era in the most unproduced and unfiltered means possible. When the history of our time is written, I don’t want to allow future revisionists room for varnish or apologies. The plain fact is that – at the very highest levels of American government – elected Republicans are irresponsible, loony, and dangerous.

Our kids are going to want to know why we couldn’t address global warming, chronic disease, environmental catastrophe and gross inequality. Hopefully this blog will be useful to those looking for explanations.

So yeah, you’re gonna see several videos where the content is the same, only the faces change. Sorry if it gets boring for you.

More high-profile Republicans that refuse to denounce irresponsible and insanely offensive Nazi rhetoric from Rush Limbaugh.

As you’ll hear in the video, I point out that Democrats couldn’t get to a microphone quickly enough to denounce an obscure professor, Ward Churchill, when it came to light that he had called 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns”.

So why do Republicans refuse to denounce similar rhetoric today?

Well, the truth is that they live in fear of Rush Limbaugh. If they lose him, they lose their base. And if you believe the polling, that’s all they have left.

There aren’t very many folks in Congress that I would say this about; I try to keep my criticism tempered… But I truly suspect, considering her age and background, that Virginia Foxx is not offended in the least by Rush Limbaugh’s statements…

Immediately after the press avail, I walked with Culberson as he headed back to his office. At first, I attempted to let him know, informally and off-camera, what I was up to: collecting videos of Republicans unwilling to say that Rush Limbaugh can be over-the-top, damaging to our democracy, and unhelpful to those that wish to govern responsibly. Culberson would have none of it. He seemed genuinely excited at the idea that he could film me and put it up on the internet. If you were to ask me, I’d guess that he has a 12-year old daughter at home showing him all this neat new stuff like YouTube…

Anyway, he came close to denouncing Rush, but wouldn’t cross the line. But from what he did say, you can infer that he doesn’t think Rush Limbaugh is a responsible person in a position of leadership…

And that’s something…

These Republicans, with Democratic tool Brian Baird, were giving a press availability in support of a bill that would require Congress to publish proposed legislation on the internet for a certain period before it could be brought to the floor for a vote. responsible government, right? Well, why couldn’t these “responsible” leaders condemn Rush Limbaugh for his nazi rhetoric? For the record, Limbaugh compared Nancy Pelosi to Adolph Hitler and said nationalized health care is rooted in nazism.

I don’t film everything I do up on the Hill. Sometimes it’s nice to just chat with the folks I’m covering. And sometimes I’m surprised.

That happened twice yesterday. I ran into Rick Santorum and Jean Schmidt.

Each time, I holstered my camera and just talked.

I had met Santorum before; I bird-dogged him when he came to the University of Virginia while I was a student there. He had come to the University to talk about “Islamofascism”; his reception was the left-wing equivalent of this summer’s healthcare townhalls. Of course, there was the obligatory student that made sure everyone in the auditorium knew to google the word “Santorum”.

At the time (November, 2007), I told the ex-Senator that he should run for President – that the Republican field looked weak. Obviously, he ignored my advice.

But now he’s making noises about running again. Or someone is, anyway. So yesterday, I asked him if he was going to do it. He was coy. Again, I told him he should. I was honest with him: I said there are thousands of us on the left that would love to see him run because he’d draw such a clear contrast between the sane and the not so much. Our conversation veered into where America is politically – he thinks it’s conservative; I think it’s not… And we had a fun five or ten minute discussion.

But this was interesting… After being coy about his intentions, and telling me he hadn’t decided yet whether or not he was going to run, when I told him I needed to get back to work, he dropped one of his bags to shake my hand, and with a big smile on his face, said, “See you on the trail!”

Now of course, he could be saying that to mean he’d be campaigning for someone else, or for another office. But I swear the cat had canary feathers stuck in his teeth…

So that was Santorum…

Later in the day, I was hanging outside the NRCC and Capitol Club (the Republican dinner club) when Jean Schmidt walked out. I’ve filmed her refusing to answer several different questions; invariably, she see’s I’m not a friendly and runs for cover.

(an aside: You can see that happen in the YouTube just a few posts back. I didn’t highlight it, but I really get a kick out of it. She had come out of the Capitol, saw me, started out friendly, then recognized me, and then did almost a full 180 to run back into the secure, inaccessible to the public, area of the Capitol. It just tickles me that a video camera can dictate the path of a United States Representative.)

Anyway, on with our story.

Jean Schmidt had earned the blogospheric moniker “Mean Jean”. and that’s the assumption I’ve always operated under.

Well…

This time, like I said, I had holstered my camera. As she passed, I said, “Hi Jean. Nothing to fear today; my camera is in my pocket.” She kept her head down and walked on past me. But she couldn’t get far… She had to stop at the crosswalk and wait for traffic. So I asked, “Still running marathons?”

At that, she lit up. Big smile, glowing personality and then came the deluge… “Every day!”

I said,”26 miles???!!!”

She said, “Oh, lord no. About 6 or seven…”

Me: “On the treadmill”?

JS: “Oh, never, unless I have too…”

Me: “I’ve been thinking about taking up running again, but my knees are getting creaky, so I’ve been doing an elliptical.”

She offered, “Well, how old are your shoes?”

And then we talked about ten minutes about how to minimize joint damage, buy good running shoes, etc.

The point is, she’s actually quite nice, notwithstanding her nutty politics.

Nobody wants to stand up to Rush.

Blunt is running for Senate in Missouri.

Putnam is from Florida – a state well-known for its large (and elderly) Jewish population.