Tag: Tea Baggers

Tea Party ‘Terrorists’ Hate Name-Calling, Except When They Do It

Jon Ponder

art-tea-bagger-anti-obama-signs

As he shook hands on a rope line during his tour of the upper Midwest, Pres. Obama was accosted by a pair of tea partyists, who berated him because they did not like being called “economic terrorists” during the debt ceiling debacle that their representatives in Congress engineered last month.

Rather than confronting them — “We’ll stop calling you economic terrorists when you stop taking the U.S. economy hostage,” he might have said — the president was much more polite, of course. Via David Weigel, here’s a transcript of the exchange:

TEA BAGGER 1: When you’re talking about civility, how is your vice president calling us terrorists…

OBAMA: Sir, sir…

TEA BAGGER 1: I would like to understand that!

OBAMA: Okay, I will explain right now. He did not call you guys terrorists.

TEA BAGGER 1: He said we were acting like terrorists. Hostage-takers.

OBAMA: No. What he said was that for us to be willing to take the economy to the brink was irresponsible. And it was.

This first tea bagger was referring to an exchange between Vice Pres. Joe Biden and Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania, while the debt-ceiling negotiations were taking place:

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Florida Gov. Rick Scott Unveils New, Faux Human Looking Image

Trish
Old-NewRick
The guy on the left looks familiar but Florida voters can't quite place him

Florida residents could hardly be blamed for gazing at the photo shown on the left and exclaiming, “Hey, I like that guy! He looks a little familiar. Wonder who he is?”

Gone is the gleam of crazy in his eyes. Added is black eyebrow pencil to give the humanoid a less reptilian look.

At least that’s the reaction that Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (Tea/GOP) handlers must have been aiming for when they unveiled the new official portrait of Florida’s chief executive. Scott continues to have the lowest approval numbers of any governor but continues to claim — as do all elected officials with low poll numbers — that he ignores polls and just does what he thinks is right. At the same time, he has launched a massive public campaign that includes enlisting members of the Republican Party of Florida to sign their names to canned letters to the editor about what a great job Scott is doing. He also blitzed voters with robocalls on the same theme and even released a video on YouTube of his mother telling people how proud of him she is.

But apparently Scott was just getting started.

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Rick Scott, Famous Fighter of ‘Obamacare,’ Enrolls Himself and His Wife in Taxpayer-Paid Health Care

Trish

ScottAssinineFlorida’s tea party Republican Gov. Rick Scott has made a point to flaunt the wealth that landed him in office (instead of jail).

One of his first, likely illegal, moves was to sell the state plane that transported his predecessors while on state business. Why? Because Scott didn’t need the taxpayers’ jet, he has his own helicopter and access to his friends’ Lear Jets.

Equally played up was Scott’s decision not to accept a salary. After all, he made so many millions out of defrauding the government on padded Medicare billing in his businesses that he doesn’t need the piddly $130,000 that me and my fellow residents could provide him. Heck, Scott spent $76 million of his “own” money just to buy the office.

But there are some things that even Rick Scott needs help with. Scott, who focused his campaign and every FOX News appearance he’s ever made, on getting rid of the Affordable Healthcare Act which would provide health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans – and Floridians – is accepting our help to pay for his health insurance.

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Bachmann Pushes Corn Dog Envelope

Trish

BachmannCorndog

So I took a fair amount of heat for suggesting that Michele Bachmann might not want to wear a plunging neckline that exposes lots of her chestal area while working crowds. You know, all that leaning forward to shake hands, pinch baby cheeks, and squeeze the shoulders of wheelchair users and what-not.

But we are now entering unimagined territory. A FOOT-LONG CORN DOG? Really, Michele Bachmann? And we are supposed to gaze at this action shot and simply say, “Huh. Looks like a good corn dog. That’s all I see.”

O.K., I’ll try to only see a corn dog and not see a person with a serious lack of imagination about how a foot-long corn dog being inserted into a woman’s open mouth while she reaches to grasp it with two hands might look. I will also try not to see a person who should never, ever, ever be president.

What Should Obama Do? Any Ideas?

Trish

ObamaA lot of people aren’t happy with the state of American government right now and many blame Pres. Obama. On our team, we say that he should be more aggressive, more assertive, more…something.

But the only ideas we came up to win the debt ceiling battle were things that would have fueled the claims of birthers and others that his presidency is illegitimate – things like having the Treasury forge a magic coin that would cover the difference or use the Constitution’s 14th Amendment in a way unsupported by precedent and that would have ensured an impeachment drive from Republicans.

The absence of practical solutions was painfully clear on a recent segment of the Diane Rehm Show that focused on riots in England and related European economic problems. Kenneth Lieberthal of The Brookings Institution and former Clinton administration National Security Council member expressed progressives’ frustrations well but ran out of steam when reminded of Republican realities. So did Scheherazade Rehman, professor of International Business/Finance and International Affairs at George Washington University. Even a caller to the show resorted to the classic political candidate’s move of answering the question you prefer to be asked.

All three fell to Rehm’s query: “What can President Obama do?”

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Rick Scott’s Unintended Consequences

Trish

8,418

Number of Florida public workers filing to enter the five-year phased retirement process known as DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Plan) after Gov. Rick Scott (Tea/GOP) signed a bill requiring them to contribute to their own pension plans. The figure is more than double last year’s, when 4,157 signed up, and means that Florida will lose senior public employees in record amounts in coming years.

A Double Blessing

Trish

Gov. Rick Scott is not only living the idea of being a conservative Republican, but he’s also a blessing to our party.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, introducing Florida’s governor at planning sessions in Tampa for the 2012 RNC convention. Democrats listening to Priebus call the Republican Florida governor – whose latest approval ratings are at 35% – a blessing for his party immediately thought, “And for ours, too.”

Tea Party’s Extortion Politics Is a Southern Tradition

Jon Ponder

In the U.S. House
In the U.S. House
The New America Foundation’s Michael Lind, a fifth generation Texan and a columnist at Salon, suggests that the corporate media has missed something important about the tea party movement: Its Southern character conservative political influence. This factor, says Lind, helps explains the movement’s reflexive impulse to engage in extortion politics:

From the earliest years of the American republic, white Southern conservatives when they have lost elections and found themselves in the political minority have sought to extort concession from national majorities by paralyzing or threatening to destroy the United States.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 asserted the alleged right of states to “nullify” any federal law that state lawmakers considered unconstitutional. This obstructionist mentality led to the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when South Carolina refused to enforce federal tariffs. Civil War was averted only when President Andrew Jackson, a Southerner himself, forced the nullifiers to back down.

In 1820 and 1850 the South used the threat of secession to force the rest of the United States to appease it on the slavery issue. In 1861, the South tried to destroy the United States, rather than accept a legitimately elected president, Abraham Lincoln, whom it did not control.

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