Day: August 2, 2011

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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Hix in Stix Nix Palin Pix

Jon Ponder

$5,080

Gross box-office receipts for the third (and probably final) weekend of the theatrical release of “The Undefeated,” the deceptively titled, nearly two-hour long propaganda piece on the tea-baggers’ Dear Leader, Sarah Palin. The right-wing filmmakers were hoping to build boffo box office by appealing to Palin’s fan base of millions of dumbasses in suburbs and rural towns. Apparently, however, the movie was so bad that even idiocrats stayed away in droves. The movie opened in 10 theatres during its first weekend (July 15-17), peaked at 14 theatres the next weekend (July 22-24) and was down to four theatres last weekend (July 29-31). It will now go straight to video — offering more proof, as if any were needed, that conservative movies always suck.

Taibbi: Democrats ‘Took a Dive’

Buck Banks

The Democrats aren’t failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there’s political hay to be made moving to the right. They’re doing it because they do not represent any actual voters. I know I’ve said this before, but they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television. For evidence, all you have to do is look at this latest fiasco. … The Republicans in this debt debate fought like wolves or alley thugs, biting and scratching and using blades and rocks and shards of glass and every weapon they could reach. The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn’t fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time — as fixed fights go, you don’t see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did — but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive.

— Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone magazine.

Raw Deal: 28 Tea Party Caucus Members Voted Against Debt Ceiling Bill

Jon Ponder

As has been noted here before, one of the tea partyists’ sacred campaign pledges — along with not raising taxes or voting for debt ceiling increases — was that they would “fight efforts to use a national crisis for political gain.”

But that was 2010. In 2011, they broke that pledge — big time — when they created a bogus national crisis over raising the debt ceiling, despite the fact that the ceiling had to be raised in order to borrow the funds to cover the billions in new spending in the budget they voted for.

By choosing to negotiate with them, and then by giving into their demands over and over, Pres. Obama enabled the tea baggers’ extortion politics. In doing so, he handed them a big political win, in the short term at least.

That did not stop them from turning the weeks of negotiations into one long temper tantrum. And even after all that, even after they cowed the president of the United States into giving into their demands and agreeing to their Raw Deal, 28 tea partyists voted “no” against the final bill in the House yesterday:

Here’s a list of the economic terrorists who held the U.S. economy hostage and then voted against taking the ransom they had extorted from the American people because it wasn’t enough:

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Giffords’ Surprise Appearance on House Floor Was a Moment of Grand Political Theatre

Jon Ponder

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I was watching the House vote on the debt-ceiling “Raw Deal” live on C-SPAN yesterday when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Democrat, made a surprise appearance to cast her vote. Giffords was shot in the head by a crazed gunman last January, as everyone knows, and few people expected her to return to work, ever.

It is telling that she returned to vote for the deficit-ceiling deal that Pres. Obama struck with the tea bagger faction in the House — even though many, if not most of 28 of the baggers, did not vote for it themselves. Giffords is one of the few remaining Blue Dogs in the Democratic caucus. Her appearance yesterday is likely a sign that, while she probably won’t run for the Senate next year, as had been widely speculated before she was shot, she will seek reelection to the House. If so, she will need the votes of right-leaning independents in her district.

Giffords’ unexpected appearance on the House floor at a moment of high political drama was no accident. It was carefully stage-managed political theatre for which Giffords’ friends, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, among others, are likely responsible.

Without Giffords’ appearance, the Raw Deal’s passage would have been a moment of unmitigated triumph for the tea party GOP and for Speaker Boehner. Instead, Pelosi et al stepped all over Boehner’s victory and rewrote the headlines about the vote that you are reading today.