Tag: Tea Party
Saving America From Itself
A lot of hypotheticals made the rounds after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. “What would you do if” questions were a way to process all the horror, as were scenarios of how to go forward.
My boss back then was a young Jewish woman, raised by her Orthodox rabbi grandfather. She had spent time in Israel, where she said the kind of invasive security procedures that eventually became codified as the Patriot Act were necessary to protect the country. “But if it isn’t America after you’re done protecting it,” I asked, “what’s the point?”
At its core, our country changed. The Tea Party of the Flies and its, “There’s not enough for everyone so I’m gonna get mine” scarcity mind-set with racist, homophobic, fundamentalist undertones took hold.
Ten years later, I still wonder about the answer to that question. When Bush suggested that average Americans could best defeat terrorism by going shopping, we responded. We flooded sport utility vehicle show rooms, and gawked as Hummers and Lincoln Navigators attempted to squeeze into parking spots like paunchy football coaches trying to wear their high school uniforms. We distracted ourselves with the antics of second-rate celebrities as they bounced from sex tapes to drug binges to rehab and back. We went along with invasions, with shock and awe, with rigged videos of statues falling and blond female service members being rescued. We were at war but we were never quite sure with whom: Insurgents? Dead-enders? Enemy combatants?
Constituent Arrested for Confronting GOP Rep. Ryan at Town Hall
And Ryan makes a joke about it.
Beginning to Wonder If Republicans Are Right About the Economy?
We’re taking the name of this post at Truth-Out.org, “Three Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law,” as encouragement to share. And since these graphs appeal to our love of accuracy, we will do just that.
For starters, we have the amount that federal spending has increased under Pres. Obama (a barely cost-of-living equivalent 7.2 percent) compared to how much it increased under the two off-the-books wars and one unfunded prescription drug mandate man, Pres. Bush (a whopping 88 percent). Truth-Out noted that the figures do not include recent budget cuts.
But wait, there’s more reality-based number crunching ahead.
Job Growth Has Stalled Since Boehner’s GOP-Tea Party Took Charge
The latest jobs report out today indicates that employment has stalled, with unemployment stuck at 9.1 percent, proving yet again that the GOP tea party’s obstructionism on the economy is paying off. And since their endgame is to saddle the White House with responsibility for the poor growth their own obstructionism creates, their leader, Speaker John Boehner, was quick to blame the president for the weak numbers.
Steve Benen at Washington Monthly has nailed Speaker Boehner and his tea party bosses for first claiming credit for a good jobs report in the early spring, but now trying to blame the White House for the stalled growth ever since.
Who’s Worse, Rick Perry or Rick Scott? You Decide
Vote early and often.
What Was in Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s Conveniently Deleted Emails?
From the moment Floridians heard that the penalties for Gov. Rick Scott (Tea/GOP) “losing” emails sent to and from his transition team ranged from a $500 fine to IMPEACHMENT (yeah, baby!), the story grabbed our attention in the way a big, juicy, limping mouse claims the attention of a cat on a diet.
Now Florida Democrats are starting to have fun with that mouse, launching the Rick Scott Email Recovery Fund to help track down the missing missives.
Here’s what happened. Scott, as is his wont, privatized communication handling during the two months after he bought the election and before he was inaugurated. During this time, he was assembling his cabinet and staff, and determining his administration’s agenda. Almost of these emails concerning the public’s business were deleted in mid-January, immediately after Scott took office.
That’s the short version. The long version has us smelling a rat.
Study: Tea Party Is Least Popular Group
Over the past week or so, there has been considerable coverage of the results of new study on the tea party that tracked the rise of the “movement” from 2006.
The tea party is really nothing more than the same racist social conservatives who have been seeking dominion over American politics since the Reagan era.
The first news that came out of the study, which was introduced by its authors — David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, who are also the co-authors of the book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us” — in a New York Times’ piece titled, “Crashing the Tea Party,” was that they found yet more evidence that the most durable myth about the phenomenon — that it is a grassroots uprising of what Profs. Campbell and Putnam called “nonpartisan political neophytes” — is patently false.
To the contrary, their research underscored what many observers have long-suspected — that the tea party is really nothing more than the same racist social conservatives who have been seeking dominion over American politics since the Reagan era.
But there was another finding from the study that is even more damning of the fake grassroots tea party phenomenon — a factor that makes the tea party’s total domination over Republican Party leaders in Congress even more puzzling:
FOX Begrudges the Poor Their Refrigerators
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| World of Class Warfare – The Poor’s Free Ride Is Over | ||||
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Here is another brilliant summation from Jon Stewart, this one on Republican attempts to shift more of the taxation burden to the middle and poor classes, and keep the rich fat and happy. Hopefully more people will begin to understand that we are being played like violins by the ultra-rich, who know that as long as we buy into the fiction that it’s us (the struggling middle class) versus them (the struggling poor), the rich win.
