During an all-day interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody, Sharron Angle admitted that she likes to appear on Fox News to directly raise money for her race against Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). Politico’s Ben Smith highlighted a portion of the interview, released today, that reveals how Angle avoids mainstream media outlets because she thinks they won’t let her raise funds on air:

BRODY: When you’re on Fox News or talking to more conservative outlets but maybe not going on “Meet the Press” or a “This Week”, those type of news shows, then the perception and the narrative starts to be like you are avoiding those mainstream media outlets.

ANGLE: Well, in that audience will they let me say I need $25 dollars from a million people go to Sharron Angle.com send money? Will they let me say that? Will I get a bump on my website and you can watch whenever I go on to a show like that we get an immediate bump. You can see the little spinners. People say ‘Oh, I heard that. I am going and I’m going to help Sharron out because they realize this is a national effort and that I need people from all around the nation. They may not be able to vote for me but they can certainly help.”

Watch it:

As Smith says, “The suggestion here, among other things, is that Fox is more open to her fundraising pitch.” Indeed, Angle has been repeatedly allowed to explicitly appeal for campaign money. When she first appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on June 14, shortly after winning the Republican primary, she offered a similarly phrased statement on her interview fundraising strategy and asked for donations on the spot:

HANNITY: It’s obvious the media wants to attack you just like Rand Paul, who was on this program last week. Are you going to give them what they want? Are you going to go on their shows or are you going to run your campaign locally in the state? What are — what are your plans media-wise for this campaign?

ANGLE: You may have heard that I’ve been dodging the media. But I actually I’ve been doing five to seven interviews with folks that can really help me, everyday I’m — I’m on somebody’s talk show.

HANNITY: Right.

ANGLE: And the message is — you may not be able to vote for me, Sean but you can send money to SharronAngle.com.

HANNITY: Oh you’re good at the Web site.

When Angle stopped by Fox’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” two days ago, she began the interview with a fundraising pitch that exactly mirrors the one she told Brody she’d be making in friendly media appearances:

CAVUTO: What do you make of this, an attack from — from Senator Bennett out of the blue?

ANGLE: Well, first of all, Neil, it’s great to be on your show to talk about this campaign against Harry Reid or these 25 million — and I have been saying I only need a million people to send $25 to SharronAngle.com.

When Angle outlined this strategy with Brody, she mentioned “the little spinners” who “may not be able to vote for me” because they don’t live in Nevada but “can certainly help.” She may have been thinking of Fox News commentator Dick Morris, who appeared on Hannity on June 28 saying, “It is crucial in the next week or two that everybody do everything they can to — help Sharron Angle. Doesn’t matter if you live in Nevada, you can help her anyway.”

Last month, KOLOTV reported how “in the first hour following her interview” with a Rush Limbaugh guest host, “her site reported more than 100 thousand dollars in new contributions,” which “more than doubled the total raised since she won the primary” two days earlier.

Although Angle is now hyping this strategy, it hasn’t been as lucrative as she might have hoped. Her finance chair admitted to the Las Vegas Review-Journal today that the campaign “fell short of a $1.4 million fund-raising goal by the June 30 deadline.”

-William Tomasko

After months of racist incidents and rallies filled with hateful signs disparaging President Obama’s ethnicity and other minorities, the NAACP has passed a resolution officially condemning racism in the Tea Party movement. This morning, Tea Party leader Mark Williams — who has been paid over $20,000 by the Tea Party Express political action committee — attacked the NAACP’s resolution, charging that the NAACP makes “more money off of race than any slave trader ever.” Other Tea Party leaders have criticized the resolution and claimed that there is no racism within their movement. Phillip Dennis, the leader of the Dallas area Tea Party, told Fox News that the Tea Party never focuses “on the pigment of people’s skin.” However, ThinkProgress has produced a short video demonstrating the vile racism that has been exhibited at some Tea Party events:

DENNIS: The Tea Party does not focus on the pigment of people’s skin. [...]

TEA PARTY ACTIVIST1: He’s too black to be President.

TEA PARTY ACTIVIST2: I’m a proud racist, I’m white.

TEA PARTY ACTIVIST3: Afro-Leninism! Coming to you on a silver platter, Barack Hussein Obama!

Watch it:

Video produced with help from CAPAF interns Nina Bhattacharya, Ariel Powell, Arielle Humphries and Tara Kutz.

Last Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) caused quite a stir when he claimed that the government should “never” offset tax cuts, yet unemployment insurance extensions must be paid for. “You should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans,” he said.

Today on C-Span, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) circled the wagons around his Senate colleague. When host Greta Brawner asked Coburn about a Washington Post editorial mocking Kyl’s statement, Coburn conceded that tax cuts cost money, but he claimed that extending the Bush tax cuts won’t cost anything, because, according to Coburn’s logic, they’ve already been enacted at one point in the past:

COBURN: Continuing the [Bush] tax cuts isn’t a cost, if you added new taxes, new tax cuts, I would agree that’s a cost. It’s not a cost. That’s where we are today. That’s the baseline. It doesn’t score anything to continue them. It costs money if we increase, which I would be willing to do. I think we ought to cut corporate taxes.

Watch it:

Other Republicans such as California Senate candidate Carlie Fiorina have jumped on the “tax cuts don’t cost anything” bandwagon. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) came to Kyl’s defense yesterday, laughably arguing that there is “no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue.” “They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy,” he said. Except, there is evidence that tax cuts diminish revenue, as the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein noted:

[H]ow about the Congressional Budget Office’s estimations? “The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for almost half — 48 percent — of this $539 billion in increased costs.” How about the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget? Their budget calculator shows that the tax cuts will cost $3.28 trillion between 2011 and 2018.

Indeed, various independent analyses have found that extending the Bush tax cuts would cost the federal government anywhere between $678 billion and $3 trillion over the next ten years. And the simple fact is tax cuts don’t “increase revenue” as McConnell claimed, even many of the Minority Leader’s conservative colleagues agree — such as former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Bush Council on Economic Advisers chairs Edward Lazear and Greg Mankiw. Tax cuts only “partially offset the losses in revenues,” Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has said.