Month: May 2010

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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Verbatim

Trish

People gave to a good cause, and we’re going to spend it on a good cause. That’s why I’m going to keep it.

— Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, shortly after changing his voter registration to “No Party Affiliation,” explaining why he won’t return money to Republicans who donated to his Senate campaign.

Some Idiot Bought Charlie Crist’s Portrait on ebay

Buck Banks

Gov-Charlie-Crist

Hard to believe, but some anonymous someone (Charlie’s mom maybe? Charlie?) bought Charlie Crist’s portrait on ebay for $7,700. That’s $200 more than the Republican Party of Florida paid for the thing, which was one-tenth of 1 percent of the $7 million Florida Republicans — from Chairman Jim Greer to former House Speaker Marco Rubio — ran up on their party credit cards.

And it’s not even a good likeness — it’s not nearly tan enough and the head shape is all wrong in kind of a rectangular Frankensteiny way.

The RPOF is trying to make hay out of the painting’s origins, but, funny enough, the party didn’t pay for it — at least not directly. Here’s an excerpt from today’s RPOF Trash Charlie e-mail (I get at least one a day):

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Verbatim

Jon Ponder

Ms. Kagan is likewise a surprising choice because she lacks judicial experience. Most Americans believe that prior judicial experience is a necessary credential for a Supreme Court Justice.

– Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, May 12, 2010

I mean, one reason I felt so strongly about Harriet Miers’s qualifications is I thought she would fill some very important gaps in the Supreme Court. Because right now you have people who’ve been federal judges, circuit judges most of their lives, or academicians. And what you see is a lack of grounding in reality and common sense that I think would be very beneficial.

– Sen. Cornyn, Oct. 27, 2005

Verbatim

Buck Banks

I’ve honestly only seen upside at this point. Wherever we go people say that my grandfather was their favorite president.

— Christopher Nixon Cox (R), quoted by the Washington Post, on using “his family’s political legacy as a springboard to political office.”

Your Stimulus Dollars At Work: The Sunset Strip Is Being Resurfaced for the First Time in 75 Years

Jon Ponder

Sunset Strip at Laurel Ave. Left: Venerable strip joint, Body Shop
Sunset Strip at Laurel Ave.; at left, the Body Shop
The Sunset Strip is one of the most famous streets on the planet, so you might assume it has been resurfaced every now and then over the 104 years it has existed — but you would be wrong.

Thanks to federal stimulus funding, the Strip — the 12 blocks of Sunset Boulevard that traverse the city of West Hollywood — is being repaved for the first time since the mid-1930s, when the dusty dirt road first graded in 1906 was paved using poured cement.

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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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