Sarah Palin, who recently endorsed Texas senate candidate Ted Cruz in a competitive GOP primary, has started to make robocalls for the Tea Party-backed challenger -- and, reportedly, some of those calls are going out in the wrong state.

According to the Topeka Capital-Journal's Tim Carpenter, Palin's recorded calls have been dispatched in Kansas. While the call begins with a cheerful "Hello, Texas!" greeting from Palin, Carpenter reported Sunday that he had received the message while at his office at the Topeka newspaper, hundreds of miles from the Lone Star State's border.

The call, excerpted in the above video, highlights Cruz's Tea Party affiliation and commitment to conservatism.

Palin endorsed Cruz, the former Texas Solicitor General, earlier this month. HuffPost reported:

"We’re proud to join conservatives in Texas and throughout the nation in supporting your campaign to become the next senator from the Lone Star State," Palin wrote in response to a letter from Cruz, according to his campaign. “Your conservative principles, passionate defense of our Constitution and our free market system come at a time when these cornerstones of our freedom and prosperity are under attack. Our shared goal isn’t just to change the majority in control of the Senate, but to assure principled conservatives like you are there to fight for us.”

Cruz, who also won endorsements from Ron and Rand Paul, said he was honored to have Palin's support, calling her an inspiration to conservatives nationwide.

The former Alaska governor's support of Cruz is the latest in a string of endorsements she has made in tough Republican primaries. Palin made a similar statement of support for Nebraska's Deb Fischer, who won the GOP nomination to the surprise of many last week.

Texas' primary is on Tuesday, May 29. The crowded GOP nomination field includes frontrunner Lt. Governor David Dewhurst and former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert. Cruz and his competitors are vying to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchinson, the Republican senator who announced plans to retire last year.

Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
At first blush, it looked so deftly orchestrated on Tuesday"”Mitt Romney giving his blistering "prairie fire" speech on the debt, and John Boehner telling Pete Peterson and crowd that he relishes forcing another debt-ceiling showdown. The old one-two. Dominated the headlines. The speeches appeared to reflect a shift in focus to debts and deficits. But is this really where Romney wants to go? And in the company of Boehner? What's next, an ethnic sensitivity speech at Mel Gibson's place? Chip Somodevilla / Getty ImagesFirst of all, Romney's...

Hackers managed to seize the reins of a Tea Party PAC's website this week, replacing existing material with a variety of offensive messages, before it appeared to be taken offline altogether.

According to TechEye.net, users of the popular 4chan community gained access to administrator privileges for the website of the Independence Hall Tea Party PAC at some point on Thursday after guessing the website's password, which was reportedly "p9ssw0rd."

TechEye reports that the website at one point "flashed a vertical row of animated gifs of an animal appearing to rub its genitals, before redirecting to a Facebook user called 'Dillon Tilly.'" According to the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, the hackers also posted racist and anti-semitic messages, as well as child pornography for a period of time.

Beyond the digital vandalism, TechEye also notes that hackers had obtained and released a full list of the PAC's private donors.

At the time of publishing, the website appeared to be down entirely.

Independence Hall Tea Party PAC is a small organization covering Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania that has endorsed GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It's unlikely to be a huge financial help for the Republican frontrunner, however, considering it has only raised around $300 in the 2012 election cycle.

PAC President Don Adams tells the New Times that he's now planning legal action.

"I really don't know if I want to make a comment about it," Adams said. "We're an all-volunteer organization, and our goal is to try to limit government, lower taxes and promote free enterprise. And if that's such an awful thing, there's obviously something wrong."

Click over to the New Times Broward-Palm Beach for screenshots of the various stages of hacker havoc, most of which are not safe for work.

Sean Sullivan, National Journal
The tea party, an unsteady movement that was beginning to resemble a wayward ship in 2012, found its north star in Indiana on Tuesday night. State Treasurer Richard Mourdock defeated six-term Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary, a victory owing to the incumbent's inept campaign, the outside groups that lashed him on the air, and a story about his out-of-state residency that would not go away. But well before those issues got a foothold, a grassroots-driven, local movement to unseat Lugar was well under way.

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- We know there are coffee lovers and tea lovers, as well as lovers of baseball, football, art, literature, music and cars. But many years ago, Father Richard John Neuhaus, a hero to conservatives who earlier was a guide to religious radicals, identified a category to which I proudly belong: He said there were lovers of opinions.I do love opinions -- those I agree with, certainly, but often enough, even some I disagree with. Having grown up in a politically diverse extended family that spent a great deal of time arguing (fiercely but mostly amiably) about the world, I have always...

Believe that, as President, Mitt Romney would revert to his days as a "Massachusetts Moderate?" Think again.

Every bit of evidence indicates that if he were President, the Far Right would lead Romney around by a ring in his nose.

Just last week, we saw it clearly on display. It didn't take but two weeks for the Far Right to force the Romney campaign to sever its ties with openly gay Richard Grinnell, who it had hired as its foreign policy spokesman. The campaign itself argued that it had begged Grinnell to stay. But right wing talk show host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association, who had led the drive to force Grinnell's resignation, declared it a major victory.

On his radio show, Fischer bragged that Romney had learned his lesson and would never again hire a gay or lesbian in a major campaign role. And you certainly didn't see Romney contesting that assessment.

Instead we've seen Romney lined up shoulder to shoulder on TV with Tea Party icon Michelle Bachmann, and Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell - a potential Romney VP pick and a champion of "trans-vaginal ultrasounds."

The reason why there is not a chance that Romney will ever reinvent himself once again as a "moderate" is that he wasn't really a "moderate" in the first place. He's always practiced one version or the other of ultra right wing, "let Wall Street run wild" Romney economics. And he's never given one thought to firing workers, cutting pensions, loading companies with debt and bleeding them dry of millions of dollars.

But you can't really say that he is a committed believer in any economic principle or political value. Mitt Romney is committed to one thing and one thing alone - his own success. He has shown he has no core values whatsoever.

That's why it wasn't hard at all for Romney to shed his "moderate" past positions on issues like abortion rights, contraception, gay rights and immigration and to become what he himself calls a "severe conservative."

Why will he remain a "severe conservative" if he is elected President? Because people who have no core values have no backbone. You won't find Mitt Romney taking a stand against the dyed-in-the-wool ideologues that dominate the Republican caucus in Congress.

Those Republican ideologues may be way out of the mainstream, but they definitely have core values. Some of them were so committed to those values that they were willing to take our country to the brink of bankruptcy last year due to their unwillingness to give an inch of compromise.

The plain fact is that people with no core values never stand up to people who have core values. The fact is that Mitt Romney has the backbone of a jelly fish and that is precisely why the first time the ultra right wing pulls his chain and demands that he heel, he will fall right into line.

Even if he decided he wanted to challenge the right wing agenda propounded by the committed minions of the Tea Party, in a confrontation he would fold in an instant. When you have no core values, it's always much easier to go along with the demands of passionate, committed true-believers than it is to stand your ground.

And the Far Right knows this is true. Last week, right wing icon Grover Norquist was very clear. He said he was not looking for Presidential leadership from Romney. He believes that the leadership of the Republican Party will continue to come from right wing Republicans in Congress. All he asked of a President, he added, was enough digits on his hand to hold a pen to sign the bills embodying Congress' right wing agenda.

Watch how Romney behaves when he delivers the commencement speech at far right Liberty University on May 12th. Liberty University was founded by the late Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell. Now it's run by his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr.

After the 9/11 attacks, Falwell Sr. said that "abortionists," "feminists," and "the gays and the lesbians" helped cause the September 11th attacks. According to CNN, "On the broadcast of the Christian television program 'The 700 Club,' Falwell made the following statement: 'I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"

Until recently, Liberty University banned inter-racial marriages between its students. Today it requires parental permission.

As recently as 2010, Liberty University Law School withdrew as a co-sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference in protest after the conference allowed the homosexual group GOProud to co-sponsor the event.

When Romney speaks at Liberty University will he speak out against that kind of intolerance? Or, true to form, will he instead worship at the altar of ultra-right wing ideology and say just what the leadership of Liberty University wants to hear? I might be wrong, but I'll bet that not one critical word escapes his lips.

Romney's unwillingness to challenge the far right does not pertain solely to the social conservative right. It also goes for economic right wingers like Grover Norquist, who want to return America to the bad old days of more Bush-like tax cuts for the wealthy, and the deregulation of Wall Street that did such damage to the middle class and led to the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs.

And it also goes for the Neo-Con foreign policy right. Seventy percent of the 40 individuals identified by the Romney campaign as its foreign policy advisers served in the Bush administration and were responsible for the catastrophic Neo-Con foreign policy.

No, in exchange for the Republican nomination, Romney has sold his soul to the extreme right. He has willingly walked into the right wing inner sanctum, and even if he wanted to, he doesn't have the backbone to escape.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Republican Richard Lugar has shown through a lengthy Senate career that he can broker compromises on international and domestic issues, and avoid the acrimony that often brings Washington to a halt.

It's those qualities that may end up costing the former Rhodes Scholar and Indianapolis mayor the seat he first won in 1976.

Lugar, one of the longest-serving senators, is facing perhaps his toughest GOP challenger ever in tea party-backed state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who hopes to end the incumbent's 36-year Capitol Hill career with a victory in Tuesday's primary.

Mourdock has spent months arguing that Lugar is not conservative enough for the right-leaning state, and he hopes to benefit from the split between the party's establishment and conservative wings. The challenger, aided by outside groups, also has tried to make the anti-incumbent argument, portraying Lugar as nothing more than a Washington insider.

"When Dick Lugar moved to Washington, he left behind his conservative Hoosier values," Mourdock said in a recent ad.

The attacks have taken a toll. Public polls show a close race, though internal surveys by several Republicans show Mourdock with a slight edge.

Lugar, 80, has "had his turn," said Judy Young of Brooklyn.

Lugar and his supporters have tried to turn his Washington career into an asset by arguing that his deep relationships in the capital make him best positioned to represent Indiana Republicans.

"I'm not for Dick Lugar for what he's done, but for what he can do," Gov. Mitch Daniels said in a recent campaign ad. "Our point of view gets heard and has a better chance to win out with Dick Lugar."

If Lugar loses, the seat probably will become a top target of national Democrats hoping to retain a narrow Senate majority. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said President Barack Obama's campaign and independent groups would be expected to rally behind U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly.

That's less likely if Lugar, who's seen as a strong general election candidate because of his bipartisan record, prevails Tuesday.

Friends and foes alike say while Lugar had the backing of much of the state's establishment, including Daniels, he was slow to recognize the threat that Mourdock posed. They point to warning signs nationally from the 2010 primaries that severely divided the GOP. Tea party-supported candidates beat incumbents such as Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and establishment hopefuls in primaries in Colorado, Delaware and elsewhere.

Lugar has given critics fodder to assail him as out of touch with Indiana and Midwestern values.

He sold his Indianapolis home in 1977, and Democrats are now using that against him. Democrats and tea partyers mocked the fact that he lived in McLean, Va., near Washington, and raised the residency issue with Indiana authorities. Lugar briefly was ruled ineligible to vote in Indiana and later was forced to change his voter registration to his family farm in Indianapolis.

He also had to pay the Senate for more than $14,000 spent on hotel stays for weekend visits to Indiana.

One Mourdock supporter, 49-year-old Alan Horton of Mooresville, asked, "How does a man who doesn't live in this state vote for himself?" Many others have the same question.

Lugar hasn't done much to woo the tea party. In fact, he blamed the tea party for keeping the Senate in Democratic hands after the 2010 elections by nominating candidates who were too conservative to win general elections in a few critical states.

He also struggled to find a message that would appeal to the tea party-infused Indiana GOP.

Initially, he focused on Obama, blaming him for not supporting construction of a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline. Later, he turned his sights on Mourdock, attacking him as "untrustworthy" in a series of negative ads. Lugar's campaign spent at least $2.5 million on advertising to answer Mourdock's charges and cut him down. Republicans say that effort backfired because the attacks undercut Lugar's reputation as a statesman.

"Personally he's just not mean, but his campaign has been so mean that once Mourdock became quasi-credible and people listened to him, the negatives began backfiring," said former U.S. Rep. Mark Souder, who is neutral in the race.

Lugar acknowledges hiccups but insists he's pleased with his campaign's effort.

"Obviously you can always think back over things that could have been done better," Lugar said. "You never have 100 percent."

Mourdock, a former geologist and two-term treasurer, spent more than $2 million to press his message. He got help from the anti-tax Club for Growth, which has spent about $1.7 million assailing Lugar.

He has been a fixture in GOP circles for some time but had struggled to win an election until his 2006 run for treasurer. That office catapulted him into the national spotlight when he challenged the Chrysler bankruptcy in a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and endeared him to tea party activists looking for a change.

He may be rewarded Tuesday.

___

Embattled Indiana Republican Sen. Dick Lugar has fallen behind his Tea Party challenger in a new poll that finds the veteran legislator in danger of losing after 36 years in office.

The Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll released Friday puts Lugar a stunning 10 points behind state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, trailing 38 percent to 48 percent.

Voters go to the polls Tuesday.

Lugar has been one of Indiana's most popular political figures for decades, and had a reputation as a statesman, running clean, positive campaigns. But with Mourdock riding the Tea Party's enthusiasm and putting Lugar's political life in jeopardy for perhaps the first time, Lugar fired off a string of negative attacks.

They don't appear to have worked, and on Friday Lugar was trying a more positive approach in a new TV ad aimed at getting out the vote and stemming Mourdock's surge.

"America faces serious challenges, but Hoosiers' courage and determination are unbreakable," Lugar says in the spot. "It's this spirit that guides me every day in the Senate."

He goes on to list the conservative agenda points that Mourdock has said he has failed on, arguing that he's worked hard to "overturn Obamacare," to protect "our energy security" and to "destroy and keep from terrorists thousands of rogue nuclear and biological weapons."

Tuesday will tell if the reminder of what Hoosiers liked about Lugar for so many years will be enough.

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly False | Ad says stimulus tax credits funded traffic lights in China

Is our stimulus money paying for traffic lights on Chinese streets? A TV ad running in eight states blames President Barack Obama for sending stimulus money overseas while Americans are out of work. "Tell President Obama, American tax dollars should help American taxpayers," the narrator says. Instead, $2.3 billion in tax credits funded jobs in Mexico, Finland and China, the ad claims. Americans for Prosperity, a group dedicated to "educating citizens about economic policy" that works closely with tea party activists and has been funded ...

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Michele Bachmann discussed her endorsement plans in the 2012 presidential race on Thursday, telling CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she would endorse presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney soon.

"As the line says in the 'Wizard of Oz,' 'All in good time, my pretty,'" Bachmann said of her coming endorsement. "It will happen."

Bachmann, who dropped out of the race following a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, also discussed her post-campaign role in the Republican party.

"What I'm doing is working behind the scenes, bringing together all factions of our party," Bachmann said. "Don't forget, when there was the dust-up between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, there were 18 million women who had backed Hillary Clinton. They wanted no part of backing Barack Obama. It took time to get them to come over. I'm working behind the scenes to knit together the tea party, the evangelicals, to come together with the conservatives and back our nominee."

The Minnesota congresswoman made similar comments on Mike Huckabee's radio show earlier Thursday. During that interview, she predicted that Romney would listen to conservatives and the tea party.

"We will see an open ear from Mitt Romney," Bachmann said. "So far, he has proved to be a person who listens. That's what we need, a nominee who listens."

Bachmann is the latest prominent Republican to admit that Romney will almost certainly be their nominee, but have hesitated before throwing full support behind him. Rick Santorum, who left the race earlier this month, also stopped short of a full-fledged endorsement of the former Massachusetts governor.

"I will support the nominee of our party," Santorum said during an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan on Tuesday. "If he's the nominee, I'm going to do anything I can to help him win."

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer defended his remarks on Mitt Romney's Mormon heritage, saying his comment that Romney's father had grown up on a "polygamy commune" was taken the wrong way.

"People are taking this far away from where I was discussing," Schweitzer, a Democrat, said in an interview Monday with CNN. "I was saying that Mitt Romney currently has a problem with Latino voters. And it is ironic that his father had come from Mexico. You could think he could embrace his Latino roots."

Recent polls have shown Mitt Romney trailing President Barack Obama among Hispanic voters. The former Massachusetts governor has moved to increase his appeal to Latinos, including campaign appearances Monday with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) a Hispanic popular with Tea Pary voters, and reaching out to Hispanic voters in states like Arizona.

Schweitzer told CNN he didn't intend his remarks as an attack on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"I didn't say anything about religion," Schweitzer said. "The Mormon religion hasn't accepted polygamy in 120 years. As I said before, Mitt Romney, or his family that I know of, doesn't accept polygamy today."

The governor's original comments came during an interview last week with the Daily Beast. While discussing Romney's difficulty connecting with Hispanic voters, Schweitzer said it was "ironic" because "his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico."

In that interview, Schweitzer clarified that he was "not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle."

Romney quickly responded to the Montana governor's comments.

"My dad's dad was not a polygamist," Romney said in an interview with Fox News. "My dad grew up in a family with a mom and a dad and a few brothers and one sister. They lived in Mexico and lived a very nice life there from what I understand and then when he was 5 or 6 years old there was a revolution in Mexico. They escaped."

Allysia Finley, Wall St. Journal
'You can't beat up on Grandpa. You shouldn't beat up on Grandpa. But still, there comes a time when it's time." So declares Richard Mourdock, the Indiana treasurer who is trying to unseat 80-year-old Sen. Dick Lugar in the May 8 GOP primary.It's hard to find a better symbol of the "Washington establishment" than Mr. Lugar, who has lived in D.C. since he was first sworn into office in 1977. But the avuncular senator is beloved by many Hoosiers"”and for the very reason that tea partiers want to send him home: He's a statesman, not...

Heir apparent GOP nominee Mitt Romney wants to govern a country that he doesn't completely trust with his money, and he represents a religion many in the Religious Right believe isn't Christian. Add in other "put out the fire" challenges including strapping the family pet to the roof of his car for a 12-hour joy ride, and one soon realizes that the Grand Old Party will need to pull out all of the stops if the Party hopes to get Mitt elected in November.

As reported by The Huffington Post and other news outlets, Mitt Romney has a Swiss bank account. Why he has one (or more, for all we know), is a mystery to us Average Janes and Joes. Is it that American banks aren't reliable enough for Mitt, and he feels that his American money is safer in Switzerland? Maybe he just likes the view of the Alps outside of his European bank, or maybe there's a really nice personal Swiss Miss banker who has caught his eye. As a marketer, I certainly wouldn't want to have to defend a "Made in America, Banked in Switzerland" tag line.

Whatever his motivation, Mitt's Swiss account doesn't seem very American. The vast majority of us keep our much smaller sums of money in the U.S. Only the rich can afford hide and seek their cash in places that provide safe haven from our tax laws, protection from U.S. economic instability and/or a run on our banks. One would think that if you're vying for the highest office in the land, you might feel an obligation to support American banking systems, our economy and pay any and all taxes so that our union and its freedoms are protected.

Like most Americans believe (I sincerely hope and pray), honesty and integrity are important to our society's welfare. Unfortunately, our politicians of recent haven't set much of an example for the rest of us. Many take money to speak by special interest groups, wine and dine with lobbyists, become lobbyists themselves and then tell the American people they're in it for us average citizens. And, for reasons that are devoid of any real logic, Americans root for these same politicians like they're cheering for high school football teams on a Friday night in Texas. We say, "I'm a Republican" or "I'm a Democrat" rather than "I'm an American, and I care about health care reform, taxes, unemployment, Social Security" and whatever else you'd like to throw on the heap. Giving political parties our undying gratitude without considering the actions of their politicians simply gives them more power.

Maybe that's why GOP voters can look at Mitt Romney and his off shore accounts and think it's okay he might not trust the very government he wants to run. Maybe that's why Conservative Christians, many of whom firmly believe Mormons are not followers of Christ and therefore the enemy, can support Mitt in the election. He is, after all, a Republican and the Religious Right votes GOP. Even if voting for Mitt means conservative voters have to compromise what they believe in most, their Christian value system. The emotional need to align with a political party far too often trumps personal judgments and beliefs.

To win in November, Mitt Romney will have to hide behind the shield of the Grand Old Party and hope that none of the Religious Righters wake up from their GOP-induced dream state. Mitt will need millions of voters to pull straight Republican tickets, without considering his overseas bank accounts or Mormonism or poor track record with Seamus the dog. It takes courage to stand on principles and fight for issues rather than blindly follow GOPers, Dems, Tea Partiers, Libertarians or the like.

It would be a truly wonderful world if all Americans could stop hiding behind party-constructed political agendas to carefully consider and vote their truths. Choose representatives based on what issues are most important to you personally, and refuse to hand over your vote to a party that doesn't care about you, personally. We are not watching a game of red states vs. blue states on ESPN. We're selecting people to govern our nation.

Does it seem honest and just for a presidential nominee to keep some of his millions in off shore accounts? oes it show faith in our nation or is it an unpatriotic act? If you believe that a certain religion is morally and spiritually wrong, do you think it's wise to put your Jesus aside and elect someone from it to run the country? Every politician seeking any office should be asked questions that are important to voters, and those voters must want to do what's best for a nation rather than simply join the cool kids at the party.

When we start voting our conscious rather than blindly follow behind a donkey or an elephant or a tea bag, we'll become the more perfect union we are meant to be.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Sen. Richard Lugar sounded wistful in his gratitude when he thanked supporters packed in the skybox of the Indiana Pacers' home court, as though he could see the approaching end of a political career that has spanned nearly half a century.

"I thank all of you, the 50 or 60 of you who are co-sponsors of the rally. We appreciate very much your willingness to put your own names on the line and be helpful in bringing together this assembly," said the 80-year-old Indiana Republican who was first elected to the Senate in 1976.

That characteristically understated demeanor has endeared Lugar to generations of Hoosier voters. It belies the fierce battle in Republican circles over whether to retire him now or give him six more years in Washington.

Lugar and Utah's Orrin Hatch, 78 and sent to Capitol Hill in the same year as Lugar, are tea partyers' top Senate Republican targets for defeat this year, portrayed as old bulls out of touch with today's conservatives. They are the GOP's two most senior members in the Senate.

Both have come out swinging, a lesson learned when Hatch's fellow Utah senator, Robert Bennett, had his re-election bid derailed two years ago by the fledgling tea party movement in the state GOP's nominating convention.

Hatch has shored up his support, furiously courting delegates to this year's convention on April 21. He has emphasized his seniority and covered his flank with more conservative stances and votes.

Lugar also started early, hiring a full-time campaign manager in the fall of 2010. He built an extensive network of campaign volunteers and by the first of this year had amassed a 10-1 cash advantage over his tea party challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock.

Lugar, however, has had to play a frantic defense heading into the May 8 primary after tea partyers, joined by Democrats, turned the incumbent's residency outside the state into a dominant campaign issue.

He fumbled questions about the address on his driver's license: an Indianapolis home he sold in 1977. He had to switch his voter ID to his farm in Indianapolis after the local election board ruled last month that he couldn't vote using the 1977 address. Lugar, who owns a home in Virginia, also repaid the U.S. Treasury $14,700 last month that his Senate office paid for his hotel stays in Indiana.

"That's a self-inflicted wound. It just doesn't look good symbolically," said Margaret Ferguson, who heads the political science department at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "Things that have been brushed aside now carry some momentum that they would not have in the past."

Conservatives have rallied around Mourdock, a geologist and quiet campaigner who three years ago challenged the Chrysler bankruptcy terms in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Club For Growth, National Rifle Association, Citizens United, Hoosiers for Conservative Senate and FreedomWorks, a tea party umbrella group, have endorsed him.

The Club for Growth purchased more than $250,000 in airtime over the past two weeks for anti-Lugar ads after spending $160,000 against him last year. FreedomWorks has spent $100,000 in Indiana.

"Lugar is still in control of this race, but it's tight, much tighter than it was six months ago," said Andy Klingenstein, one of a trio of former aides who formed the Indiana Values super political action committee to battle on Lugar's behalf.

Lugar's power in Indiana Republican circles is legend, multiplied by generations of aides and operatives who cut their teeth with him in the 1960s when he was mayor of Indianapolis. He's been insulated from serious challenges within his own party and even Democrats have considered him invincible, choosing in 2006 not to field a challenger.

But a strong anti-incumbent mood and pressure from the right to define who really is a conservative have forced the well-funded Lugar to turn to super PACs like Klingenstein's, which is airing ads attacking Murdock.

Monica Boyer, one of the leaders of Hoosiers for Conservative Senate, said she, like most other Indiana tea partyers, had always voted for Lugar because "he had an `R' in front of his name."

The tipping point, she said, was when Lugar voted to confirm President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. That was a "hard wake-up call," she said, that spurred tea partyers to dig deeper into Lugar's voting record. There, she said, they discovered votes for an assault weapons ban and other moderate stances that have led critics to say Lugar is Obama's "favorite Republican."

"We learned how to use the roll call system. That's probably his worst nightmare right now," Boyer said.

The tightening of the GOP race has left Democrats giddy. Pushing their own candidate, U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, they look at what once was considered a safe Senate seat for Republicans as now in play in the general election.

Hatch, who needs 60 percent of the state GOP convention delegates to win on the first ballot, appears to be faring better in Utah. Supporters have spent more than a year emphasizing the importance of his seniority as the top Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee and his influence on federal land issues and the next round of military base closings.

"I'm in a position that benefits Utah in a fantastic way," Hatch said. "This going to be my last term. I'm committed to that. But it's going to be the best six years you've seen."

That argument has played well with state GOP convention delegates, some of whom said during recent caucus meetings they feared having two first-term senators from the state. It also was underscored in an endorsement by leading Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, who is extremely popular among Utah Republicans.

Dan Liljenquist, a former state senator who seems to be Hatch's strongest challenger, has tried minimize the seniority issue by highlighting the increased debt and spending on benefit programs during Hatch's tenure.

"Is seniority so important that we feel forced to make the same decisions for the same people that got us into this mess? For me, leadership trumps seniority every time. There is a time for new leadership, and that time is now," Liljenquist said.

FreedomWorks director Russ Walker said his group will continue to work for Hatch's "retirement" after spending nearly $650,000 leading up to the March caucus meetings.

But he acknowledged it isn't as easy to paint differences between Hatch and his opponents as it was in 2010, when Bennett was being hammered for supporting the Troubled Assets Relief Program and had co-sponsored a bipartisan health care overhaul.

"It's a little more challenging this cycle because everybody is saying the same things," Walker said. "We have to define the differences."

For Lugar, those differences may boil down to whether Indiana voters think he's conservative enough.

Polling shows Mourdock closing as money flows into the race from both sides. Klingenstein's pro-Lugar group plans to spend upward of $1 million on the race, and Walker said FreedomWorks plans to expand its opposition to Lugar. Another pro-Lugar super PAC, Hoosiers for Economic Growth, is raising $1.75 million in its effort.

Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Lugar protege who has headlined fundraisers for him in Indiana and Washington, said it's been so long since Lugar has had a competitive race that many voters don't have much of an image of him. That has hurt Lugar's efforts to defuse questions about his residency and roots in the state, according to Daniels.

"He was in nothing but tough races, until he wasn't," Daniels said. "There's probably a couple of generations of voters that don't have all the information that people did back then."

___

Associated Press writer Josh Loftin in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

___

Bob Shrum, The Week
Recall the scorn toward health reform dripping from the lips of Injustice Antonin Scalia. Or think of the tight-lipped Clarence Thomas, who could send a mannequin to sit in his place at the court's oral arguments for all the difference his brooding presence makes. Along with the more plausibly judicious Samuel Alito, he too had more than likely made his decision. And so on the nation's highest court, satire replaced stare decisis in a slightly altered version of the Red Queen's jurisprudence in Alice in Wonderland: First the verdict, then the trial.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A rookie Congressman with Tea Party support beat a veteran Republican twice his age on Tuesday in a primary contest between incumbents forced by Democratic gerrymandering of the electoral map designed to gain congressional seats in November. Freshman Republican Adam Kinzinger, 34, declared victory over 20-year Representative Don Manzullo, who turns 68 this month, in the second of 11 primary contests nationwide pitting incumbents against each other. "It's time for a new generation of leadership in Washington, D.C.," Kinzinger said in his victory speech. ...

U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, a 10-term Illinois Republican, lost a grueling primary battle to a freshman congressman on Tuesday, as U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. easily won his Democratic nomination and an Iraq war veteran was chosen to face a tea party firebrand in November.

Republicans are desperate. They can't attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.

Their attack on the administration's rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.

Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.

Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.

Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.

So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.

Call for a tax cut, of course.

It doesn't matter that their new "tax reform" plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.

It doesn't matter than the plan doesn't detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan's original voucher plan -- which would drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.

It doesn't even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans,

All that matters is the headlines.

"House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates," says Bloomberg Businessweek. "Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform," says Reuters. "GOP's Budget Targets Taxes," blares the Wall Street Journal.

Presto. Republicans have gotten what they wanted on the basis of saying absolutely nothing.

Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

David Corn, Mother Jones
As some readers may already know, my new book, Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party (William Morrow) comes out soon. The book is a behind-the-scenes narrative covering the White House from the disastrous 2010 midterm elections until the promising start of 2012. It is a reporting-driven tale of how President Barack Obama got his groove back in time for the reelection campaign. The book chronicles the president's lame-duck session victories (a second stimulus, repealing Don't Ask/Don't Tell) and the subsequent...

An elections board ruled Thursday that U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar can't vote at the Indianapolis home he sold in 1977 but can register elsewhere in the county, a partial victory for tea party activists who allege the Republican incumbent has committed voter fraud for decades.

Do you remember in the days leading up to the Republican electoral victory in 2010, how the Tea Party marched on Washington with signs saying “Birth Control Is Bad”?

Neither do I.

Keep reading this post . . .

On June 14, 2001, Senator Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) voted with 90 of his colleagues to pass the No Child Left Behind Act. Only eight senators voted against it, including that future casualty of the Tea Party, Senator Bob Bennett (R., Utah).

Loath to follow in Bennett’s footsteps (into retirement), Hatch has been defending his right flank as the Utah GOP’s state convention draws near. The Club for Growth had encouraged Congressman Jason Chaffetz to primary Hatch, citing his vote for NCLB as another example of his supporting “policies that have grown government.” Chaffetz ultimately declined, but 36-year-old state senator Dan Liljenquist accepted the challenge. He also is targeting Hatch’s NCLB vote. “Dan’s position is there is no role for the federal government in education,” says Holly Richardson, his campaign chair.

Keep reading this post . . .

Michael Gerson, Washington Post
Having decided on their nominee, Republicans seem determined to humiliate him a few more times.On Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney secured more convention delegates than all his opponents combined, making a good case for his mathematical inevitability. Once again, the candidate who looks like a Boy Scout won a political knife fight.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is in Kansas for two rallies ahead of weekend GOP caucuses that he sees as important to his chances of winning the nomination.