Tag: Tea Baggers

GOP Operative: Paul Campaign ‘Messed Up’ By Allowing Candidate to State True Positions on Maddow Show

Jon Ponder

HuffPost reports that Beltway Republican operatives are parachuting in to try to save tea bagger Rand Paul’s campaign for the Kentucky U.S. Senate. According to the pros, Paul’s big mistake was not lying about his true position on the Civil Rights Act:

A Washington-based Republican official, who has spoken with Paul’s campaign advisers, said the harsh national reaction to the nominee’s MSNBC interview on Wednesday “was like a wake-up call” to his inner circle.

“They know they messed up” by allowing liberal show host Rachel Maddow to draw out Paul’s thoughts on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the official said. Paul told Maddow he abhors racial discrimination, but he also suggested the federal government shouldn’t have the power to force restaurants to admit minorities against their will…

“There’s lots of chatter, ‘we’ve got to get this guy some help,'” the official said, adding that he’s not convinced Paul realizes the danger of saying yes to so many interview requests.

Washington-based Republican strategists hope to strike a balance. They’d like to persuade Paul to be more selective and disciplined in his remarks but not lose the freshness and candor that appeal to voters seeking a change in Washington.

Conservatives Show They are Anything But

Trish

ultrasoundBeing a conservative is more challenging since mass hysteria, aka, the Tea Party, entered the picture in the wake of the election of America’s first African-American president. If limited government whose purpose is not to foster social agendas was ever really what conservatism was about, it isn’t now.

Take a new law, currently on the governor’s desk to be signed (or hopefully, vetoed) in Florida. Demonstrating what happens when you get too many Republican men in a room together, the so-called conservative bill requires that women considering abortions must first schedule an ultrasound test in which the doctor describes to her the contents of her uterus, whether she wants to know about that yolk sac or not. Touting ultrasounds as non-invasive and therefore harmless led the National Institutes of Health to release this statement: “Ultrasound examination in pregnancy should be performed for a specific medical indication.”

Election after election, the “hard-working white people”* vote for the guy or gal spouting the most extreme platitudes, and then wonder why nothing gets done in Washington, why our elected officials don’t work together better

If the faux-conservative legislature gets its way, not only must the woman wait, with the clock ticking, for an appointment for a test she doesn’t want, she must also foot the bill for all this herself. Is it possible for government to be more intrusive in people’s private lives than this?

Marco Rubio, the so-called tea bagger candidate in the Florida Senate race, demonstrated a further failure of rhetoric with the recent announcement of his “policy committee.” Rubio, running on the outsider platform but squarely on the Republican ticket, is tapping entrenched Washington insiders Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) as honorary committee chairs. No doubt they will bring fresh ideas on how to take our country back from…themselves. What’s wrong with this picture?

People who are against progressive initiatives like choice and a positive role for government are being played, again. Candidates pandering to tea bagger fears know what to say and do to appear to offer the answers, which are always both simple and vague. And election after election, the “hard-working white people”* vote for the guy or gal spouting the most extreme platitudes, and then wonder why nothing gets done in Washington, why our elected officials don’t work together better.

We as progressives have to figure out how to wake up our neighbors in this country that we all share, and get them to question the slogans and lies directed at them. If anyone out there knows a good way to do that, I’d love to hear it.

* Hillary Clinton, campaigning for president in 2008 in Pennsylvania

KY Sen: Turnout Among Dems About a Third Higher Than GOP, Yet ‘Liberal’ Media Hands Night to Tea Bagger Rand Paul

Jon Ponder

Paul, left, and Conway
Paul, left, and Conway
Rand Paul’s win in the Republican primary yesterday has dominated the headlines coming out of Kentucky, in part because he is the first avowed tea bagger candidate to win a race (Sen. Scott Brown disavowed tea partiers’ support after he won in Massachusetts last year) and because he is the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a folk hero among libertarians.

Paul’s libertarian opposition to farm subsidies and overseas entanglements, including the Iraq war, may put him at odds with the war-mongering, big-government loving GOP base.

Paul handily defeated Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who had the strong support of Kentucky’s own Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 58.8 percent to 35.4 percent. On the Democratic side, Attorney General Jack Conway bested Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo in a squeaker, 44.1 percent to 43.0 percent. (Numbers are based on results at 5:10 a.m. Pacific, on May 19, 2010, with 99.5 percent of precincts counted.)

Just about anything tea baggers do makes headlines, so it is not surprising that the Beltway punditocracy and “liberal” media have all but anointed Rand Paul as the frontrunner in the general election. Maybe so, but voter turnout tallies suggest weak support for libertarian Paul among his party’s traditional Republican base.

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Tea Bagger Sen. DeMint Single-Handedly Killed Bipartisan Bill to Increase Senate Transparency

Jon Ponder

Sen. DeMint
Sen. DeMint
Back in the days of Republican one-party rule, today’s tea partiers were silent about the breath-taking secrecy and lack of transparency under George Bush, Dick Cheney and the GOP-controlled Congress. That makes their complaints about Democrats’ purported lack of openness now more than a little suspicious, and now one of their leaders in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, has revealed through his actions where tea partiers’ actually stand on the issue:

Secret holds allow senators to indefinitely prevent a presidential nominee from coming up for a vote, without ever having to provide a reason or identify themselves. Senate Republicans have used secret holds to an unprecedented degree under President Obama, and are currently anonymously blocking at least 52 nominees, all of whom were “noncontroversial in committee debate.”

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed new rules to rein in secret holds, but “Republicans thwarted” the bipartisan effort yesterday when Sen. Jim DeMint attached a poison pill amendment.

The usually mild-mannered Wyden was apoplectic:

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Tea Baggers Hate Name-Calling, Except When They Do It

Jon Ponder

art-tea-bag-hats

As we all learned in kindergarten, one consistent characteristic of bullies is that they can dish it out but they can’t take it.

Case in point: Grover Norquist, the self-appointed commandant of the right-wing thought police, was outraged recently when he learned that in an upcoming book by Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, Pres. Obama refers to members of the tea party protest mobs as “tea baggers.”

In a spleen vent to a columnist for the Washington Times, the right-wing propaganda sheet published by the Unification Church, a South Korean Christian cult, Norquist compared use of the term “tea bagger” to the epithet “nigger”:

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Despite Tea Bagger Propaganda, U.S. Tax Burden Is Lowest Since 1950

Jon Ponder

chart-tax-burden-since-1950Tea baggers like to say their group’s name stands for “Taxed Enough Already.” But as is the case with just about everything related to this corporate-funded, astroturfed protest mob phenomenon, even the name is wrong:

Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.

Some conservative political movements such as the “Tea Party” have criticized federal spending as being out of control. While spending is up, taxes have fallen to exceptionally low levels.

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2 percent of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12 percent for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8. percent of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

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If Tea Baggers Were Black…

Trish

WhiteSlaveSmSometimes it’s hard to improve on the original, and Eric Effron’s editorial in a recent issue of The Week is such a case. What if, Effron asked, tea baggers were black?

It’s a provocative thought experiment: “Imagine,” writes author and self-described anti-racism activist Tim Wise, “if the Tea Party were black.” In reality, of course, the Tea Party is virtually all white, but for the sake of this exercise, imagine that members of Congress in March had been surrounded by thousands of angry African-Americans, yelling insults at white, Southern politicians and talking about “revolution” and “taking the country back.” Or, imagine that the hundreds of gun-rights activists who recently descended on the nation’s capital, many armed with AK-47s and handguns, were black. Would admirers of the Tea Party view such protesters as patriotic Americans entitled to voice their heartfelt opinions, or as a dangerous mob that the police and the FBI should closely watch? And what if there were a black Glenn Beck, with millions of devoted followers, calling for a public uprising against a tyrannical U.S. government? Would he be seen as an entertainer—or as a threat to public safety? “To ask any of these questions,” Wise concludes, “is to answer them.”

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Palin: Watch Out for Foreign Oil Companies – Like BP, Which Todd Palin Worked For

Trish

HuffPo: Today, Sarah Inc. took to its Twitter account to offer some lessons about What The Gulf Oil Spill Teaches Us. Her bottom line: don’t trust the foreign oils! And many thanks to an emailer named Ben, who reminds me that for eighteen long years, that dodgy, not-to-be-trusted foreign oil company known as British Petroleum employed one Todd Palin.