Tag: Tea Party
Federal Deficit Is Shrinking Even Faster Than Had Been Projected – But Fox Reports It As Bad News
There is good news about the economy — the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that the federal budget deficit is reducing even more quickly than had been projected– so, naturally, it is being spun by Fox News as bad news:
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade reacted to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report showing the 2013 deficit dropping by $200 billion by lamenting that the report might discourage further austerity measures…
Kilmeade reacted to this news with calls for increased austerity, lamenting that the “positive news” in the CBO report might lead away from a mindset of “fiscal discipline.” Kilmeade concluded, “I just hope we still feel the urgency to get our budget in order.”
Rachel Maddow’s report follows:
The Case for the IRS Targeting the Tea Party
It seemed to come as a great shock when it was recently revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examines some taxpayers more closely than others.
Really? Because no one has ever objected to the IRS targeting some tax returns for audit. Among them:
- Millionaires (in fiscal 2011, the IRS audited 12.5% of them)
- People reporting more than $200,000 in income
- People claiming confusing tax breaks like the first-time homebuyer credit
- Home office workers
- Small business and self-employed people generally
- Very low income filers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
I’m not saying the IRS should target according to ideology. I’m saying it should target according to likelihood that tax laws are being flouted and circumvented.
So why, in the wild west of the first election years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allowing political action groups, many with questionable funding, to mushroom and proliferate…why should anyone be surprised the IRS would exercise scrutiny on these here today, gone tomorrow groups? Why, in fact, would they not demand that the IRS do precisely that before granting tax-exempt status to whoever applies for it?
And why not specifically take a hard, cold look at tea party groups?
Obama Piles on IRS
You don’t want the IRS ever being perceived to be biased and anything less than neutral in terms of how they operate. I’ve got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it and we will make sure we find out exactly what happened on this.
— President Obama, at a news conference.
Thank You, IRS, for Giving the Tea Party What It Needs Most: Victimhood
CBS News headline: “Recharged tea party demands justice in IRS targeting scandal”
In public, tea party activists and pundits and the lobbyists who fund them may be expressing outrage over the admission by the IRS that it has targeted tea party groups over their claims of nonprofit status, but away from the cameras and microphones, the movement’s members and the corporatists who back them are surely dancing the happy dance. Miracles do happen. A purportedly anti-tax movement has been resurrected — by the IRS.
Before the scandal broke last week, the tea party was at its lowest point nationally since its inception four years ago. Now it’s alive again and surely to be increasingly reinvigorated as the scandal drags out over the next weeks and months into next year — just in time to give it the power and influence to tilt the 2014 midterm elections to the extreme right, just as it did in the in 2010 midterms.
In fact, the lobbyists who run the tea party couldn’t have asked for a better scandal. By targeting the tea party, the IRS has played into the movement’s key motivator: the victimhood of conservatives in general and of white right-wingers specifically.
The fundamental paranoia of the movement is evident in its foundational myths:
Chootzpah: Mired in Scandal, Rep. Bachmann Re-Launches Tea Party Caucus
The Caucus went dark last summer, in part because Bachmann was preoccupied by her presidential run. After the election, there may have been meager enthusiasm for getting the group together because 10 of its original 60 members lost their seats. As recently as last month, the membership page of the Caucus website was defunct. The movement is also in bad odor with the public. A poll in January from Rasmussen, the GOP pollster, found that just 8 percent of those surveyed would cop to being tea baggers.
And yet the Caucus met this week for the first time since the 113th Congress was sworn in, and Chairwoman Bachmann — who had received the endorsement of just one member of the caucus, Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, during the Republican primaries — was on hand:
GOP N.C. House Leader Says Voting Is among ‘Things You Just Shouldn’t Do on Sundays’
Obama won North Carolina in 2008 with just 14,000 votes. He lost the state in 2012 by 92,000 votes.
The GOP gained control of both houses of the N.C. legislature in 2010 for the first time since the 1870s. In 2012, the party achieved veto-proof majorities, which is all but irrelevant since the newly elected governor, Pat McCrory, the former crypto-moderate mayor of Charlotte, is also a Republican.
In a classic example of Big Government Republican thinking, when asked to defend ending Sunday voting, N.C. GOP House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes explained that there were “some things you just shouldn’t do on Sundays.”
Twitter Not Amused by Rubio’s Ill-Timed Tweet
PR’s own Buck nominated Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (GOP/Tea) for the “Really Trying Way Too Hard” Hall of Fame after Rubio told the gossip site TMZ that his favorite songs of all-time are NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton,” Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and Tupac’s “Killuminati.”
The likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, recently dubbed by Time Magazine the “saviour” of the party, is also brandishing a reputation as the life of the party, and nothing says frat boy quite like this tweet, posted the day the economy-wrecking sequester took effect.
If I put #HarlemShake video 2gether in Senate who should be in it?Taking suggestions now. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?utm_campaign=Fee
Rubio apparently didn’t spend the day trying to figure out how to keep from damaging the economy or how to save American jobs, but instead daydreaming about his own fantasy football-esque dance party. Here were some of the responses to his call for suggestions on his Twitter feed.*
- @jbminn — @marcorubio I’d suggest you stop wasting time and money.
- @haroldpollack — @marcorubio even I am too cool for the Harlem shake.
- @devincf — I suggest you fix the sequester.
- @Brian_Thill — LOL you are so hip!! OMG!!1! wheres my checkbook
Lower Than Low: Gov. Rick Scott’s Absurd Figure for Medicaid
$11,000
Annual income for a family of three that tea party Gov. Rick Scott of Florida considers too high to receive Medicaid assistance. In addition, single people of any income level are automatically excluded.
The Tea Party Seizes Control of North Carolina, Sets Priorities: European Style Austerity And a Felony Ban on Women Exposing Their Nipples
Since then, Democrats and progressive independents have watched in muted horror as the Tar Heel tea party has signaled its determiniation to turn one of the most progressive states in the South — and the tenth largest state in the nation — into a poorly educated, poverty-stricken backwater like South Carolina, Alabama or Mississippi.
