Sarah Palin Smackdown! Elites Run for Cover

Update: Those not yet convinced of the brilliance of this magnificent woman can see the video below.

Sarah Palin's address at the Tea Party Nation (TPN) convention in Nashville and follow-up Fox News interview broadcast Sunday morning dealt a crippling blow to the political hopes of American liberals, elitists, socialists, and all manner of Wiccans.

Such elitist luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Jeff Gates, Uri Avnery, Gordon Duff and Mr. Know-it-all Glenn Greenwald over at Salon were schooled Palin-style, as she reportedly "bounded onstage to cries of 'run, Sarah, run' and then delivered a stinging rebuke of President Obama while striking a populist, even folksy tone. Serving up fiery rhetoric with a broad smile, she attacked the administration's policies on the economy and on national security, assailing in particular the decision to read Miranda rights to the man accused of attempting to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day," the birthday of the Lord (Philip Rucker and Ann Gerhart, Washington Post, Feb. 7, 2010).

Five years after Palin's church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, launched a crash spiritual project protecting Palin from “the spirit of witchcraft,”—ultimately seeing her elected as governor of Alaska where she served a brief tenure while also running as the 2008 vice-presidential nominee for the Republican Party—Palin's paid speech at TPN sent Israeli critic, Jeff Gates, fleeing out of the country to Pakistan where Gates reportedly will be meeting with elements of the American ally's large Islamic population, planning the next caliphate.

Assuming the national political stage after her wildly successful book tour ended in December, Palin brandished on her lapel a small pin composed of two flags, those of Israel and the United States, as she offered advice and a warning to President Obama on the policy of not waging war against Iran in support of Israeli militarism.

Reports Mike Madden (Salon):

'Say [Pres. Obama] played the war card,' she said, casually name-checking Pat Buchanan, whose column apparently inspired this bit of analysis. 'Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided to really come out and do whatever he could do to support Israel -- which I'd like him to do. That changes the dynamics and what we can assume is gonna happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today, I do not think Obama would be elected.'

It's not so much that Palin thinks Obama would declare war on the 17th most populous country in the world just to win re-election. It's more that if he did do something like that, it would give people second thoughts about his failed presidency.

Another noted critic of Israeli militarism and the apocalyptic-Christian rapture alliance, Gordon Duff, a combat Marine Vietnam War veteran and senior editor of Veterans Today, was unreachable by phone this morning.

Duff went into hiding where he is "reconsidering his anti-American ideology" and asking himself why he "hates America" after viewing the Palin address on C-Span's Recent Programs, said a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

In a related development, an examination of the comments on a recent piece at Veterans Today, Christians Desecrate Wiccan Religious Site at Air Force Academy, reveals that commenting Wiccans and humanists' e-mail suffixes often end in "edu," demonstrating that many readers of the popular site's Wiccan piece are elitists.

Meanwhile, another snotty female elitist living in DC, Wonkette, was largely silent on her site, apparently cowed by Palin's address that was delivered just months after the elitist had derided Palin as "Clown Moose" and "Noted Dingbat."

Said a Palin supporter living in Wisconsin who refused to give his name to a "liberal-looking" questioner, "You elitists can take your fancy footnotes and your rules of inference and stick 'em in northern Alaska when all the Sun does is shine and shine."

- via mal contends

John McCain: Straight-up, He's a Crook and Liar

Sure, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is corrupt, self-important, and narcissistic. Most politicians are.

But few in politics have so successfully hyped the maverick-reformer brand from which reality is at such absolute variance with the cultivated image.

Mainstream political columnists are now figuring out the truth about McCain the Petulant One, the kind of guy whose best friend could be Joe Lieberman.

A quick review: McCain has been dead-wrong (he lied) on major foreign policy areas that he presented to the nation as evidence of his wisdom in his run for president.

As outlined by NYT columnist Frank Rich last year:

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war ‘easily.’ Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would ‘probably get along’ in post-Saddam Iraq because there was ‘not a history of clashes‘ between them.

Even rightwingers didn't trust McCain though he embraced the Rev. John 'Hitler Was God's Will' Hagee, brought us the brilliance of Sarah Palin, and has been a champion of Israeli militarism along with the odious Lieberman.

In the 2008 campaign George Will blasted McCain writing, "It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. (September 23, 2008)."

In the mid-1990s McCain jumped on a first-term Sen. Russ Feingold's (D-WI) crusade for campaign finance reform because McCain had rightfully been branded as corrupt by the Keating Five scandal.

When the Supreme Court issued its outrageous decision in Citizens Unitedeffectively eviscerating McCain-Feingold—McCain's signature credential as a reformer—and legalizing corruption and the foreign purchase of American elections, what was McCain's reaction? Whatever, "I respect their decision." I bet you do.

Dana Milbank's column in the Post this weekend well reflects the establishment's disenchantment with McCain's bs which veterans and progressive commentators have been blasting for years.

From Milbank (Feb. 5, 2010):

I miss John McCain.

I miss the McCain I sat with on a flight from San Diego to Phoenix back in 1999, when he defended his oft-ridiculed belief that campaign finance was the most important issue in America: because the corrupting influence of money in politics was preventing all other issues -- taxes, abortion, you name it -- from being solved.

'Until I draw my last breath, I will fight for it,' he liked to say back then.

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued a rulingthat gutted the McCain Feingold campaign-finance legislation, essentially destroying the cause that had been so dear to McCain. His response: Whatever.

'I don't think there's much that can be done, to tell you the truth,' he told CBS's Bob Schieffer. 'It is what it is,' he added.

'Reform is dead?' Schieffer asked.

‘Oh, I think so,’ McCain answered, at least for now. ‘The Supreme Court has spoken. I respect their decision.’ So much for that bit about ‘last breath.’ ...

When he endorsed his former rival George W. Bush in 2004 and when he spoke at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in 2006, I chalked it up to the exigencies of Republican politics.

I convinced myself that his lurch to the right and his fear mongering in the 2008 presidential campaign was really the work of his Bush-trained handlers.

When he continued on his hard-right course after the election, I figured he was bitter about the loss.

Now, the most generous explanation is that McCain needs to protect his right flank because he's facing a primary challenge in Arizona from a ‘birther’ Republican, the radio broadcaster and former congressman J.D. Hayworth.

But each time it gets harder to hold on to the hope that there's still an iconoclast in there somewhere. ...

Last week, it was time for McCain to shed his views on gays in the military. A few years ago, he had said of the ‘don't ask, don't tell’ policy: ‘The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.’

At Tuesday's hearing, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen did just that, saying he thought lifting the ban was the ‘right thing to do.’ Colin Powell later said the same.

But McCain was enraged, hectoring the admiral at the witness table and challenging his integrity.

A week earlier, the topic was the national debt, another traditional McCain issue. He had been a co-sponsor of a bipartisan plan for a debt commission. But just before it came up for a vote, he pulled out and aligned himself against the proposal.

On a full range of issues, McCain has switched to reflexive opposition. His presidential campaign expressed ‘full confidence’ in Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; McCain voted against confirming Bernanke to another term. During the Bush years, former POW McCain fought against abusive interrogations; last week he scolded the Obama administration for inadequate interrogation of the underwear bomber.

On immigration reform, another signature McCain issue, the senator has lost his tongue. Back in Arizona, McCain's bombastic buffoon of a primary opponent has been attacking him for his ‘Washington agenda’ and as somebody who has ‘been in Washington too long.’

But it is Hayworth whose political career far more closely fits the current fashion in political Washington: constant partisan warfare, scorched-earth politics and legislative paralysis.

The John McCain that I miss was a refreshing antidote to that Washington, one of very few in this town who could be the transformational leader we need to get out of this stalemate.

Before writing this column, I reached out to many of McCain's closest aides from the 2000 campaign to see whether they thought there still was such a man inside McCain. Most of them begged off, some saying they had lost contact with him or become estranged.

I may be the last one who still holds some hope that McCain, long before he draws his last breath, may yet rejoin the fight.

Dana Milbank will be online to chat with readers Monday, Feb. 8 at 1 p.m. ET. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.

For more background on McCain, see also:

- The Horrors of John McCain

- Douglas Valentine: McCain, War Hero or Go-To Collaborator?

- Alexander Cockburn:McCain, What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

- William P. O'Connor: The Legend of John McCain

US Senate Defends Doing Nothing

In the United States Senate, doing nothing is protected as a point of historical pride. It is the privilege of a U.S. Senator to do nothing and the do-nothing gang does not want this august legislative body to lose its harrowed privilege.

As Gail Collins puts it this morning: "There is a stupendous lack of real enthusiasm in the Senate for doing anything as dramatic as eliminating the senators’ right to stop things."

“It’s beyond the breaking point,” said Senator Tom Harkin, referring to the U.S. Senate's obstruction-as-usual, holds on nominations, filibusters, the whole paralysis of a sick legislative body. Harkin will introduce a bill to eliminate the Senate filibuster next week.

Even reformers like Sen. Russ Feingold defend the filibuster. Maybe Feingold and the Senate will have a change a heart, feeling that the problems facing Americans are so serious that a decaying institution's relics and undemocratic rules must change for the good of the citizens of our republic.

Will Feingold's GOP opponents this year, Terrence Wall and Dave Westlake [who otherwise do not stand a chance], challenge Feingold's on his defense of doing nothing? That would be ironic as the GOP employs the filibuster so often in its attempt to see the Senate do nothing. Even more ironic as the Senate Democrats are the GOP's allies is preserving this tool of obstruction.

Nothing like arming your opponents in defense of an undemocratic body. Welcome to the Democratic Party. Maybe the Democrats will finally kill the filibuster.

And then maybe the Republican Party will come out in favor of teaching evolution, and empowering the rights of American citizens [even black people] to vote, slash the American empire and slap the military-industrial complex. Right.

-via mal contends

Russ Feingold's Corner of Madness

Update: Please note response of the office of Sen. Feingold in the comments section.

George Wagner's MJS column last month reporting Sen. Russ Feingold defended the filibuster at a listening session in Milwaukee reveals a problem of Feingold's that progressives know about but rarely speak: What Bertrand Russell would describe as Feingold's "corner of madness."

That would be Feingold's tendency to take utterly insupportable positions in the name of polishing his brand as a political maverick. Certainly, it's not Feingold's intellect that leads him to the absurd.

Examples:

- Defending the filibuster in the name of deliberation
- Voting for the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts because Roberts assured the Judiciary Committee that he was committed to the jurisprudence of an "umpire" and not that a rightwing activist, Roberts' past ideology apparently notwithstanding in Feingold's mind

Feingold has accomplished much in his tenure in the Senate, but he will never be a great Senator like Robert M. LaFollette because of his tendency to veer into the political idiosyncratic and irrational.

One can go on: Feingold's fighting against retraining funds for out-of-work Janesville autoworkers, raving against stimulus spending in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, supporting the Republican crazies in the impeachment of Bill Clinton and other nonsense.

Liberals [Emily Mills, for example] won't call Feingold out on these preposterous positions because of Feingold's lonely voice of opposition to the worst of the Bush-Cheney nightmare.

But if Feingold's views had prevailed, we would have Senate obstruction, an ultra-activist Roberts Court, out-of-work Americans in need of training, and an insufficiently large fiscal stimulus ... . Ohhh, yeah. This is the type of maverick whom Sarah Palin supports, and Feingold knows this to be true so, really: Knock it off, man.

Tommy Thompson Joins Capital Fund Firm as Adviser, Office Run Unlikely

Situation clarifies that a Tommy Thompson run is unlikely.

Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson was announced as the newest advisor to a Peak Ridge Capital Group venture capital fund.

Thompson will be relied upon at Peak Ridge for his expertise in agriculture and agribusiness. The firm is currently investing its agricultural technology fund, having announced its first investment from the vehicle. Rapid Diagnostek is a Wisconsin-based company developing a hand-held device to test for illness or disease in 60 seconds. The fund is designed to invest in agricultural technology companies providing solutions for food supply, lowering the cost of production and improving efficiencies in the supply chain. The fund also invests in clean technologies, as well as chemicals, systems and biofuels processes.

Rush: Bin Laden Tape Is "Democrat Talking Points," Sounds Like "Russ Feingold"

Seems Rush Limbaugh, de facto head of the GOP, can't tell the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Democrats; and Rush singled out Sen. Russ Feingold.

Specifically, Limbaugh said the al Qaeda leader's most recent audio tape: "sounds like this could easily be [said by] Russ Feingold, the Senator from Wisconsin."

Wonder how Wisconsin Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, Terrence Wall and Dave Westlake, feel about this. Will they condemn this trash?

Sen. Feingold writes to supporters: "This isn't the first time Limbaugh has crossed the line and it won't be the last, but this is the sort of slash and burn politics that we are up against. Extremists and corporate special interests are going to do everything they can do to attack Russ's character."

Anti-ACORN Activist Attended Racist Conference

The anti-racism group One People's Project has a blockbuster that rightwing rising star James O’Keefe, attended a white supremacists' conference in 2006 held at a satellite building for the Georgetown University Law School in Claredon, Virgina, and O'Keefe manned a literature table full of anti-black, anti-Latino, and anti-Semitic literature.

"The truth shall set me free," said O'Keefe in a federal courthouse after being arrested for the attempted bugging of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-Louisiana) office. Guess again O'Keefe, now even the GOP won't have you though Fox News seems to have taken a shine to your ways.

From the One People's Project:

Interesting what could have been - or not have been - had we caught this four years ago. Back then, there was this white supremacist forum that we had called attention to and eventually attended that featured American Renaissance's Jared Taylor and National Review's homophobe extraordinaire John Derbyshire.

Max Blumenthal picks up the O'Keefe-outed-as racist story at Salon:

Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him was one of the all-time ‘great journalists’ and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a ‘congressional medal.’

His right-wing admirers don't seem to mind that O’Keefe's short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006 conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People's Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O'Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

On the Israeli Massacre in Gaza

Mil Brass: Won't Enforce Ban Against Gays and Lesbians

The year, 1960: It had been over a decade since that damn Harry Truman integrated the armed forces when the Greenboro Four decided to desegregate an all-white Woolworth’s in the famous sit-ins.

Not only did white U.S. troops have to serve with them, now civilians had to eat with 'em too. And these guys were as black as midnight.

Now, fifty years later, it looks like another uppity bunch—and elitists hope for the amateur and professional jurists among us that this particular band passes strict scrutiny by the federal Court system—seek to openly serve in the military, and it looks like the brass and the black guy who stole our country are going to let them get away wiht it.

And some of you leebrals wonder why the Tea Party and the GOPers say: "We want our country back." [A warning: Anyone who goes along with this outrage will find themselves boiled down in a 200-mile long river of blood after Jesus comes back and sees what the cultural elitists have done to our shining house on a hill. See Rod Parsley and the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio for an idea of what awaits.]

'Don't ask, don't tell' policy on gays in military to change
By Craig Whitlock and Michael D. Shear

President Obama's top defense officials will tell the Senate on Tuesday that the military will no longer aggressively pursue disciplinary action against gay service members whose orientation is revealed against their will by third parties, sources say.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen also are expected to announce the creation of a group to assess how to carry out a full repeal of the decades-old ‘don't ask, don't tell’ policy, which requires gay soldiers to keep their sexual orientation secret.

But Gates and Mullen are also expected to tell senators that it could take years to integrate gay men and lesbians fully into the military, defense officials said. Two appointees will be named to oversee a group that will draw up plans for integrating the armed forces, according to sources familiar with the Pentagon's deliberations on the subject. The planning effort is expected to take up to a year.

Among the issues to be addressed by the group: whether gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines will face any restrictions on exhibiting their sexual orientation on the job; whether the Pentagon will be obligated to provide for their domestic partners; and whether straight military personnel could be compelled to share quarters with gays.

‘I don't think anyone is underestimating the seriousness of the issue, or the complexity of it,’ said a senior military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Gates and Mullen had yet to testify.

The remarks before the committee are part of the administration's effort to follow through on Obama's pledge in last week's State of the Union address to end the policy.

‘This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are,’ Obama said.

Last summer, Gates asked the Pentagon's legal counsel whether the military could ignore allegations made by snitches, civilians or other third parties. Under such a scenario, gay military personnel would face discharge only if they themselves declare their sexual orientation.

Despite persistent objections in some corners, the Pentagon's senior leaders have largely come to terms with Obama's stance on the issue and are operating under the assumption that the law banning gays from serving in the military will be repealed, Pentagon officials said.

But leaders of some gay rights groups said they fear that the Pentagon will drag its heels and insist on a years-long grace period for making any changes.

‘I believe Gates and Mullen will announce a protracted process,’ said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a District-based group that advocates for an end to ‘don't ask, don't tell.’ ‘Will this just be the old, classic Washington way of doing business?’

Gay rights groups have also complained that the Pentagon is moving too slowly to ease enforcement of the third-party dismissals, noting that Gates asked the Defense Department lawyers for advice last summer but has not acted since then.

White House and Pentagon officials declined to comment about Tuesday's testimony. ‘Stay tuned,’ Gates told reporters.

Figures released Monday show that 428 people were discharged from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines last year for violating the ‘don't ask, don't tell’ policy, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. The total is about one-third lower than in 2008, when 619 people were discharged.

Tuesday's testimony will represent the first significant hearing on the 1993 policy in more than a decade, officials said. Congressional sources said the debate on the issue this year could come as part of the overall defense authorization bill that lawmakers will consider this spring.

With Obama's declaration that he wants legislation this year, Democrats on Capitol Hill are under pressure from gay advocacy groups to confront the divisive policy. One source close to Senate Democrats said repealing the policy as part of the larger defense bill would make it more difficult for opponents to defeat.

A spokesman for Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), Armed Services Committee chairman, said there is no firm plan to use the authorization bill as a vehicle for the change.

As a candidate for president, Obama said repeatedly that he would end ‘don't ask, don't tell.’ But his decision to pursue congressional legislation has angered some activists, who had urged him to take unilateral action.

Even before Obama took office last year, his administration's top officials were signaling that would not happen while the president was focused on the country's economic collapse. But even then, they reiterated that the president would make good on his promise.

‘You don't hear politicians give a one-word answer much. But it's 'Yes,' ‘ press secretary Robert Gibbs said in January of last year.

Obama Address to Shadowy Christian Group Draws Notice

Update: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) urges President Obama to skip rightwing religious fete; group runs infamous C Street House.

"[T]oo bad Muslims, too bad, Jews -- this event is not for you," writer Jeff Sharlet said. It's a private gathering attended by every American president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

President Obama’s address to the annual National Prayer Breakfast Thursday for the first time in this rite’s history is drawing widespread condemnation in the wake of revelations over the last two years that aggressive political programs by the religious right have targeted the liberties of the American people and entire religions that refuse to be affiliated with religious right groups such as Focus on the Family, the American Family Association and the super-secret The Family.

Though the religious right is scandal-plagued of late, it’s been a long time since the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, Republican nominee for president in 1964, said of Jerry Falwell, "Every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell's ass." That was in 1981.

No major GOP figure today feels empowered to offer a similar criticism of religious right figures, no matter the depths of inanity to which a Pat Robertson or James Dobson, for example, regularly sink.

Recent groundbreaking works by Jeff Sharlet (The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power); Max Blumenthal (Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party); Tom Krattenmaker (Onward Christain Athletes); and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have shed light on the scope of the contemporary religious right that exercises veto power over major policy spheres of the Republican Party, seeks to control foreign policy and the American military, and in all seriousness wants to transform American society into an only-through-Christ country under their God. The movement is known as Christian Dominionism.

So the questions remain: What is Pres. Obama doing at this exclusive, private gathering this Thursday? And will he challenge these anti-Semitic, bigoted whacks?

Adele M. Stan reports:

At National Prayer Breakfast, Obama to Address Shadowy Christian Group Tied to Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill

The National Prayer Breakfast, an annual Washington exercise attended by politicians of all stripes who wish to demonstrate their piety, is one of those must-go events for the U.S. president, or so the conventional wisdom has it. Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has attended.

But the prayer breakfast, however benign it may seem on the surface, is really a display of power for an underground religious group that often shapes U.S. foreign policy in ways not easy to see, and sometimes at odds the policy goals of the government itself. This Thursday, President Barack Obama is expected to address the gathering, as he did last year. But if there was ever a year for the president to back out, to have a sudden scheduling conflict, it's this one.

The breakfast draws leaders from all sectors of society, including a hefty contingent from the military. It's a coveted invitation.The event is usually the only public sighting of its sponsor,.the shadowy right-wing religious network known as the Family. Around the periphery of the event, the Family does what it does best: bringing together leaders from developing countries of special concern to U.S. business interests with members of Congress and people in government who hold the keys to the foreign aid kingdom.

'This is the bullying tactics of banality,' said Jeff Sharlet, author of the definitive book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, in an interview with AlterNet. 'This is not about a banality of evil, but the evil of banality. The breakfast itself is a very bland event, but it's surrounded by this week-long lobbying festival which isn't visible.'

Introductions are made and meetings arranged for foreign dignitaries through the auspices of a the Family, led for the past 40 years by Washington insider Doug Coe and comprising powerful men from all over the world, including a number of prominent members of Congress.

That group of powerful men also includes two behind a controversial anti-gay law in Uganda, proposed by two politicians with strong ties to the Family. The law carries the death penalty for something called 'aggravated homosexuality.'

The Prayer Breakfast is closed to the media, except for those in the press corps that travels with the president. 'It's a private event,' explained Joe Mitchell of the National Prayer Breakfast Committee via a voice mail left in response to AlterNet's request for access. Invitations to the Prayer Breakfast go out on congressional letterhead, Sharlet said, even though the stated purpose of the gathering is distinctly Christian and not ecumenical -- a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. 'So, too bad Muslims, too bad, Jews -- this event is not for you,' Sharlet said.

So why does the president feel he must give his props to a group that often works against the national interest, and whose most prominent congressional members -- Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; Sen. James Inhofe, R Okla., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to name a few -- have acted as his nemeses? Power. It's all about the group's perceived power in the very structure of the U.S. government. 'You don't want to alienate them,' one religious right leader explained to Sharlet.

Obama will seek to keep his own participation in the event low-key, Sharlet told AlterNet when he sat down with us in December. 'He'll give a bland, kind of useless address,' Sharlet predicted. Yet a spate of recent scandals and exposes of the group's coddling of anti-democratic heads of state makes this the perfect time for a U.S. president to step off the Familiy's bandwagon. Indeed, his very presence lends legitimacy to a group that enacts its goals through informal lobbying and back-room deals, all knitted together through 'prayer cells' of people with the power to effect the Family's right-wing, free-market agenda.

In his State of the Union speech, Obama decried the outsized roll of lobbyists in U.S. policy. But while the Family lobbies and lobbies hard, it does so without a license, so to speak. Because its influence is conducted through an underground network of people who hold positions of power in the government, its 'lobbyists' never have to register as such. They're just 'followers of Jesus,' in the group's own parlance, who have big jobs.

'I hope there will be defections at the edges,' Sharlet said -- at least in the private dinner parties and prayer meetings arranged with Congress members for the Family's key men.

Tough Year: Sex Scandals and Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill

It's been a tough year for the Family (also known as the Fellowship). First, there were the very public sex scandals of powerful lawmakers involved in the Family -- South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi, all of whom lived, at one time or another, in the Family's infamous C Street house in Washington, DC.

Just as the noise about the sex scandals began to die down came word of Uganda's proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, a proposal introduced in the Ugandan parliament that would criminalize the advocacy of LGBT rights and punish certain acts by gays with death. The foremost advocates for the bill, which is still under consideration, are two politicians that Family members refer to as 'key men.' A key man is believed to occupy a position of worldly power because he was anointed by God to actualize the Family's socially conservative, pro business theology, which hangs on the notion of a supply-side Jesus. It doesn't matter if he's a murderous dictator or known adulterer: what matters is his power.

In the U.S., Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 has become known as the 'Kill the Gays' bill. Thanks to the persistence of bloggers like Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches, Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin and Christian psychologist Warren Throckmorton, and the platform given the issue by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, leaders of the Family have been forced to distance themselves, at least publicly, from the two Ugandan key men behind the bill: MP David Bahati and James Nsaba Buturo, minister of state for ethics and integrity.

When Bahati told a Ugandan newspaper that he would attend and speak at the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, the Family's Bob Hunter issued a statement saying that Bahati was not invited to the breakfast, and that he had declined an earlier invitation, issued before he introduced the bill, to attend as a volunteer. In response to a query from AlterNet, Hunter said Buturo 'has never been on any list and has no invitation.' However, Hunter could not confirm whether or not Buturo planned to be in the U.S. for the Family's lobbying fest during the week of the prayer breakfast, saying he'd had no communication with the Ugandan official and had never met him.

'I think if the Family could make that bill go away, they would. It's too extreme,' said Jeff Sharlet, who sat down with AlterNet last month to discuss where the shadowy network, now the focus of more attention than its leaders ever wished it to have, finds itself in the age of Obama.

Indeed, the unwanted light the Uganda bill has cast on the Family has forced the group to respond in the open; Bob Hunter has become a de facto spokesperson for the group on the issue, even appearing on 'TheRachel Maddow Show' (in an appearance Sharlet helped to arrange) to distance the Family from what Sharlet calls 'this genocidal bill.'

In essence, Sharlet explained, the situation with Uganda and the anti-gay bill is a case of the Family's own power getting away from it. Uganda has long been a special project of the group, which conducts its own ad hoc foreign policy through the influence of its members.

Uganda's present dictator, Yoweri Museveni, is another of the Family's key men, Sharlet said. Museveni introduced the Family to the formerSomalian dictator Siad Barre, winning him American aid and arms, which he used, according to Sharlet, to 'lay his country to waste.'

'And recently now, I've noticed that Museveni's becoming sort of an American proxy for dealing with Somalia, which is a big problem for us,' Sharlet said. 'Somalia is a haven for al Qaeda; it's a lawless state.'

The Family's presence in Uganda likely helped pave the way for other U.S. conservative Christian evangelical groups, such as Pastor Rick Warren's 'Purpose-Driven' group, and the anti-gay ministries of Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, whose anti-gay rhetoric at a Ugandan seminar influenced the authors of the 'Kill the Gays' bill.

'I think the Family opened the doors to Uganda for what they consider [to be] an evangelical revival, and the result was to make this country sort of a guinea pig for experiments in the American culture war,' Sharlet said. 'This is a way foreign policy often works; political experiments happen at the fringes and policies that can't be implemented here at home are tried out there.'

The outrage over Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality bill is affecting official U.S. foreign policy.The State Department issued a statement decrying the bill, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who, during her Senate term, participated in the Family's Senate prayer group) expressed her concern during a 45-minute telephone call with Ugandan President Museveni, after which he directed parliament to suspend action on the bill -- stopping short of killing it. President Obama has also condemned the legislation.

The Uganda bill, Sharlet said, is just one example of how the Family's off-the-shelf foreign policy impacts the U.S. national interest. 'From what my inside sources tell me, they drive the State Department crazy. This is a constant pain in the neck for the State Department -- you know, you've got a senator just sort of dropping in on a foreign leader without clearing it.'

The Family and the Tea Party Movement

Though the Family itself is non-partisan, its ideology appeals most strongly to conservative Republicans, a handful of whom have emerged as favorites of the Tea Party crowd: Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, to name a few of the Family's better-known congressional members. (Democrats in the news associated with the Family include Rep. Bart Stupak of Ohio and Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida; for more on the Family's influence on the health care debate, see AlterNet's October report here.)

'That's an interesting overlap. That's an interesting convergence of social movements,' Sharlet told AlterNet. 'The Family represents, as they have put it in the past, the avant-garde of American fundamentalism. They're an elite -- Tea Parties [as in Tea Party protests] are not their style. Doug Coe probably finds this the tackiest, most galling -- you know, just, oh, terrible.' Nonetheless, Sharlet said, 'You've got to look at the way these two movements work together. And when I say work together, I don't mean that they're getting together in a back room and coming up with a plan; I'm talking about a social movement. The left doesn't want to admit that over on the right they have social movements, too.'

Successful social movements find their strength in the 'convergence' of various streams of activism, Sharlet said. 'And those moments of convergence are where you see social movements sometimes making great strides. You go back to the 1960s, civil rights, you have a convergence between radicals, between people who have been in the trenches of civil rights forever, and white, middle-class liberals.' The right-wing elites of the Family, Sharlet explained, 'are going for that convergence.'

As evidence, Sharlet cited the Manhattan Declaration, a sort of right-wing Christian manifesto whose signers range from Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals to such populist Protestant evangelical figures as Harry Jackson, the right's point man on opposing same-sex marriage, and convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, founder and leader of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Transparency -- Not Conspiracy -- Is the issue

While it's tempting to view the Family as a conspiracy of master manipulators who direct the every move of those affiliated with the group, Sharlet strongly cautions against taking this view. 'I get so frustrated with people on the left who want to look at the right as one great big Borg. Basically they think Shell Oil is sitting in their back room pulling all the strings, and that it's all related to one scheme. It's not.'

The Family's influence simply doesn't work that way, he said. And there are times when the Family's intervention may actually prevent bad things from happening to people in the nations led by the Family's key men. The real problem is the organization's lack of transparency.

'I think this really goes to the sore spot or the touchy nerve, which is the utilitarianism of American political thought, so that someone like Senator Coburn or Senator Inhofe -- they feel if they're over in Africa or the Middle East and trying to help these people, that one, they should be given tremendous credit for their good intentions,' Sharlet explained. 'And, two, if they do manage to avert a conflict through this kind of backroom dealing and rogue foreign policy, then the ends justify the means.

'Frankly, that's an idea that's seductive to a lot of people in the United States -- and not just on the right,' he continued. 'And we sort of forget about the whole conversation about democracy. We forget, as theFamily goes and works behind the scenes and works through its 'God-chosen elites' and 'anointed leaders' -- every time they do that, they are breaking down the democratic process.

'What if they're not the puppet masters?' he asked. 'What if their intentions really are good? And in fact, they have accomplished, here and there, some good things. They have averted a conflict. Do we then just drop our questions? Or do we say, you know what, good intentions are not enough, democratic process is what we need. And do we dig into the export of American political and economic religion? Because that's what it is. Free-market gospel. And say, look, what are the costs and consequences of that? Those are harder questions for us to deal with -- the more important questions.'

Embodied in the First Amendment are several complementary but competitive concepts: freedom of religion, freedom from government involvement in religion, and freedom of expression. The Family has every right to have its members express their religious views, and to act within the law as their faith informs them to do. But its insidious existence, at a cellular level, in the very muscle of American might infects U.S. policy with a theology shared by only a very few citizens. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, the cliche goes. Until the Family chooses to wield its power in the light of day, no president should grant it the glow of legitimacy.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.