Jane Hamsher: 'I'm a tea-partier too!'  Hamsher, citing Ed Kilgore , spots a "transpartisan consensus":

[T]he "lazy progressive bloggers" and the tea party activists are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill.

There's clearly something to this, as in the '60s (when unsuccessful left-wing critiques of liberals previewed successful conservative critiques of liberals). Today's left and right anti-Reid activists have a common enemy in corporatism, the easy alliance between Big Government and entrenched, favored too-big-to-fail businesses (Aetna, AIG .... ) that threatens to combine the inequality of capitalism with the dynamic innovation of socialism. But Hamsher should maybe pass on this insight to her friends in Big Labor--which has almost always pursued corporatism as a way to guarantee its power in the collective bargaining process. Most obviously, unions love it when government can require protected pet corporations to do favors for unions (as in the Detroit bailout), because unions tend to have disproprtionate influence over government.  Quite apart from government, unions tend to favor oligopolistic economic structures (like Detroit, before the Japanese imports) where you can organize a few, stable "competitors," establish a bargaining "pattern," and keep out upstart rivals who might want to rock the boat on work rules or save money on wages and benefits. ... The Wagner Act was written for an oligpolistic post-WWII economy, where layers of rigid work rules were seen as a positive triumph of benevolent bureaucratic precision. ... 

Update: Some tea-partiers are not being very welcoming ...  11:00 P.M.

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Those Clinton holdovers at the IRS are still on the job: First, Sinbad undercuts Hillary Clinton's landing-in-Bosnia-under-fire story. Now the IRS is going after him for a mere $8.5 million in back taxes . Coincidence, I ask you? Tell it to Elizabeth Ward Gracen ! .... 10:59 P.M.

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