Are a waste of time.
I would no more go to a tea party, than I would to an anti-war demonstration. I’ll fight stupidity through the ballot box, thank you very much.
The teabaggers are acting like they are some holy crusade, however they don’t really have a coherent message to put out. What is it they are protesting exactly?
Higher Taxes? There have not yet been any tax hikes. Yes, some are on the table, which encompass the moving of the top marginal bracket to previous levels. Further, I would wager that, that the vast majority of people protesting will get tax cuts if Obama’s plan passes Congress. If these people love tax cuts so much-they ought to be happy with this year’ s plan. Most folks making over 250 K don’t have time to carry signs anyway-they are out making money.
Government Spending? “It isn’t as if the spending just started–it has been going on for some time. Indeed, whether it is massive social expenditures (the Medicare prescription drug benefit) or bailouts (TARP, loans to Chrysler and GM, bailout money for AIG, etc.), not to mention war spending, it all started under the previous administration, and some of it has been going on for years. ” So while I understand at some point enough is enough, it is difficult for me to take seriously all of this outrage on this topic right now. Want to save some real money? get the hell out of Iraq-tomorrow.
But, if Sean Hannity and the rest of the slobbering horde is to be believed, Americans are more than willing to spend billions for worthless Arabs, but not one damn cent for real Americans. And evidently, they have no beef with starting a renewed war for the Somali coast without backing out of any of the the other four we are in.
However government spends too much.
As is noted here-all this tea baggery makes for an odd brew:
If nothing else, the conservative movement is an irony producing machine. Aided and abetted by their echo chamber at Fox News, on Tax Day next week members of the raging right will gather at so-called Tea Parties around the country. There, the protesters, at least 95% of whom received a tax cut courtesy of President Obama and Democrats in Congress, will in essence decry “no taxation with representation.” And if their misunderstanding of the Boston Tea Party wasn’t bad enough, their choice of tea bagging as metaphor is more unfortunate still.
To be sure, what theoretically began as a protest against profligate government has morphed into a Rorschach Test of right-wing political grievance. (For examples, see this video collection from Huffington Post.) Glenn Beck’s astro-turf acolytes decry saboteurs and “communists,” evolution and “brainwashing machines.” The tea baggers’ strange brew of Birthers and Birchers proclaim Barack Obama foreign-born while issuing calls to “burn the books.” In the end, the far-right foaming at the mouth (starting around the 1:58 mark above) was enough for the renegade conservative blog Little Green Footballs:
“This is some really deranged stuff, and the audience is eating it up.”
As Jon Stewart rightly pointed out to the beaten and battered, furious and frothing minions of the right, “I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.” While President Obama has proposed returning the tax rate for the 2% of taxpayers earning over $250,000 to the Clinton-era levels of the booming 1990’s, the Tea Baggers apparently believe King George III is still oppressing his colonial subjects under the yoke of the Townshend and Tea Acts:
If you ask me the Tea Parties are a celebration of selfishness. Protesting a problem that does not really exist yet-and not offering a coherent solution for a non-existent problem. They can however-tell you who is to blame for it: Any one but them.
Because part of the tea party movement-which was not much of a movement at all-until Fox News, Freedom Works, and other patron saints of the conservative movement decided to up the ante and bankroll the movement. Enlisting the usual suspects of the right to help talk it up.
Which is what makes Republican politicians showing up to support them, as Paul Krugman asserts, more than a little unseemly:
Everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.
Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
What I find most disturbing about the tea parties is the attitude of those who praise them. If you argue that maybe, just maybe, the previous administration had something to do with increased government spending, you will be greeted with a rolling of the eyes and that quick eye glance around, ” Don’t you get it? It is all the fault of the One!” No thought of trying to work together to fix problems as a nation together-rather the same tired old logic of: ” We are better than them”. Them who? Someone who disagrees with you? To hell with the tea bags -make your case to the electorate.
Plus there is always the undercurrent of fear lurking just around the corner:
“Get ready for the anti-Tea Party sabotage and smear campaign”For the next 9 days, the left-wing blogosphere and left-wing clueless pundits will hammer away with their unreality-based Tea Party smears.
And on the ground, the tax-subsidized and Soros-subsidized troops are going to try and wreak havoc every way they can. Many readers and fellow bloggers have seen signs that ACORN may send in ringers and saboteurs to usurp the anti-tax, anti-reckless spending, anti-bailout message.
Always, of course, this message is delivered with a patented sneer-such as only the truly converted can deliver. They go home in the calm self assurance of knowing somehow that their protests are better than someone elses:
No stilt puppets, and precious few kettle drums, so far as I can tell. Everyone fully dressed. And lots of American flags. Most of which were flown right-side up, and all of which were untrampled upon and unburned.
Conclusions are left to the reader.
Which is the important part-the message doesn’t work without that self assurance. I mean God forbid they might just be barking up the wrong tree. Namely-that in the aggregate Americans are not the most heavily taxed society and Stalin is not lurking around the corner. The notion that Obama is “driving up the debt several times whatever Bush did” doesn’t make any sense.
Take the biggest tranch of the future debt – $32 trillion of a new Medicare drug entitlement – Obama gets blamed. Except for the fact that Obama inherited that commitment, with no provision for funding it, from the Republicans. To blame Obama for it is like blaming him for the future costs of the Iraq war. Yes, they will be incurred after Obama took office – but they decided long ago.
And for anyone who was actually paying attention, instead of being blinded by silliness-you knew that already.
Oh and in case you guys never heard-you might have picked a better name.
Have fun in the park today.
Certainly, Bush was no friend to fiscal responsibility, but Obama’s continued government intervention into the banking sector as well as his belief that further accruing debt through spending is necessary to sustain the unsustainable (he talked about at his speech yesterday at GeorgeTown) is something to at least be concerned about, if not protest. Adopting rhetoric that all these people are douchebags (or treasonous as some liberals have stated) shows a mentality of belittling the minority opposition in order to prevent any criticism of the current administration’s policies. It’s very transparent.
But that’s just the point-the two sides are more alike than they are different. Just a few years ago people who were rightly opposed to the war were considered treasonous. Plus I have not seen that any where. Misinformed yes-but I’ve seen no one call them treasonous.
However-some of the rhetoric is beyond the pale. Texas is going to secede? I thought we settle that already.
And for the banks-what are you going to do let them fail? Obama is right when he says every dollar invested there has the potential to come back to us ten-fold if we do it right. China has been doing that for years.
“Higher Taxes? There have not yet been any tax hikes.”
Congress raised the tax on tobacco!
BTW I could not respond to the thread on RTKABA, for some reason when you get many responces to a thread my puter will not show the bottom content. It gets blocked over by the
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ISSUES?
Problem is most likely on my end.
Again, Skippy, well stated. I looked around yesterday for some of those “Tea Baggers” just because. There were a few (less than 10) outside the main postal facility. There were about 100 gathered around the local single A baseball stadium, which is kind of funny because it is in the middle of nowhere.
Generally speaking, I am concerned about out of control government spending like almost everyone else, however, that train was placed on its track a long time ago and we seem to be just going along for the ride. The best we can hope for, as I see it, is some form of controlled crash when the world looses confidence in the US dollar/banking system/government.
One other thing that stands out:
The issue is adding a trillion dollars to the national deficit on wooly-headed social schemes that will do very little to stimulate the economy but will require our children to slave away like automatons for their entire lives.
Verses adding trillions of dollars to the national deficit on wooly-headed war schemes that benefit few except the defense contractors providing the hardware.
Oh. Right. We are safer.
Skippy,
Since you asked, here’s loudmouth Amato calling people treasonous for suggesting “succession”. Yeah, he spelled it like that. As for bank bailouts, I’m sure the plutocrats running this country are glad they can always fall back on the American taxpayer for their terrible decisions.
We had over 6,000 people attend the tea party here where I live and the local media actually covered it. The people are pissed off that Obama is spending worse than a drunken sailor.
How can one project to spend 11 trillion dollars over the next 10 years and think it is good for the economy? We have enough unfunded debt that every person would have to pay more than $75,000 for the next 75 years in order to fund medicare, medicade, and social security and Obama wants to add even more debt? W for all of his faults, had a yearly deficiet of less than $440billion, Obama’s budget deficiet is going to be more than 4 times W’s. (about $1.2 trillion) That’s just this year. If Bush spent like a drunken sailor, then Obama is spending like a drunken fleet.
But he has not spent it yet. Plus I’ll be blunt-he’s never going to be allowed to spend 11 trillion dollars and he knows it. His goal is to get here this year-get through the worst of the recession.
At the midterms he will lose seats and the blue dog Democrats will keep him check as will the Senate seats the Republicans pick up. The Republic is funny that way.
If McCain had won-do you not think there would have been a stimulus? You bet there would have.
The problem with the tea parties is that they are the kind of simplistic image that makes the right look stupid. Imagine how much more effective the whole thing might have been if the Republicans actually had a real budget plan that made sense to look up to-but they don’t.
Just tax cuts. For rich people. Something that I can really get behind…………Me not being rich and all.
The difference between the Bush budget and the Obama budget is about 500 billion-about half the cost of the IRAQ war. Cut the war in Iraq and there are your savings. Might even save American lives to boot.
How is talk of succession not a bad thing? Amato did not call the Tea Parties treasonus-he called the talk of Texas leaving the Union treasonous. Uh the Civil War kind of pointed out that it is.
Is secession legal?
on money et al:
http://www.freakonomics.blog.nytimes.com
“The Tyrannny of Dead Ideas”
Thinking outside the proverbial box.
Skippy, the problem is that most people have no clue as to how things really happen out in the real world. A tax cut for the masses is well and good, but it does nothing for the folks that create the jobs, those vile evil rich people. People making more than $100,000 a year are by the masses, rich. Most business owners make more than $100k and some make billions each and every year. In order to grow the economy, one needs to make the taxes on the job creators as low as possible while having enough income coming in to take care of the annual budget.
Every time taxes have been cut from Kennedy to W Bush, the actual amount of revenue the government collects is more than was projected, why? Because simply people that have money can now invest without getting taken to the cleaners by the government. Would you invest in anything when the government takes out 70% of any profit you make? Hell no, you would find an investment that the government couldn’t touch or one where the taxes taken out are minimised. The more people invest, the more capital a business has to expand and to hire new workers. More workers creates more ancillary jobs which adds even more money to the federal coffers. The US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world and people wonder why jobs are the US in droves?
People will argue that during the Clinton years, taxes were a bit higher than during Reagan’s time, but the economy was rocking. While that is true, one needs to remember that under Reagan the top marginal tax rate was 70%. He cut that rate down to about 25% to 30%. Clinton only raised the rates slightly as he knew that if he raised them too much, money would stop flowing into the economy.
Please understand that the Democrats come from a mindset of Government is the only one to solve problems and they are here to take care of the masses. Republicans believe that Government involvement should be as small as possible and let the free market be able to inovate and create jobs.