Category Archives: Tea Party

March 31, 2011 · 8:09 pm

Suppose They Gave a Tea Party and No One Came…

Except mainly the press…

The Usual Suspects from Congress came and almost outnumbered the attendees….

Best news I’ve had all week…

This thing finally seems to be fading out- now if only the press will report that fact more…

This is a start.  From the Washington Post:

A sparse crowd of tea party activists gathered beneath the U.S. Capitol on Thursday to urge Congress to cut more spending from the current federal budget and to cheer on some of their favorite politicians, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Steve King (R-Iowa).

One organizer estimated that a couple of hundred protesters had gathered near the Robert A. Taft bell tower north of the Capitol at lunchtime Thursday. According to a media sign-in sheet, at least 50 of those present were journalists documenting the latest tea party rally in Washington.

via Tea party activists rally for deeper spending cuts at Capitol – The Washington Post.

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March 31, 2011 · 6:20 pm

Before Bachmann: The 5 craziest GOP candidates of the modern era – 2012 Elections – Salon.com

The GOP Presidential nominating process really is going to be a circus…

Or a freak show….

Your call…

Here is how Steve Kornacki at Salon.com calls it:

For respectable Republicans, the embarrassment potential may be at an all-time high. The party is a year away from picking its next presidential candidate and never in the modern era has it faced a vacuum like this.

Sure, the odds are still strong that the GOP will ultimately settle on a “harmless enough” general election candidate — someone sufficiently generic and inoffensive to ensure that the party doesn’t fall far below its natural level of support in the fall of 2012. But the road from here to the convention looks unusually — and, if you’re a Democrat, comically — rocky for Republicans.

The party’s base — which nominated several utterly unelectable candidates in several high-stakes Senate races last year — is in revolt, thirsting for purity and likely to accede to a Romney or Pawlenty nomination only with reluctance. Before then, it figures to be tempted by an atypically large collection of red meat-spouting long shots: Michele Bachman, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Rick Santorum, maybe even Sarah Palin or (why not?) Herman Cain — personally and politically polarizing extremists who validate a damaging stereotype of the Obama-era GOP. It’s not impossible that one of these ideologues will fare surprisingly well in one or more of the early nominating contests next year (most likely activist-dominated Iowa).

It is this possibility that makes 2012 potentially different from previous Republican contests, in which the party has generally — but not always — succeeded in keeping the embarrassments to a minimum. Here’s a look at the most embarrassing Republican candidates to be taken (at least somewhat) seriously by the media since 1980:

MORE:   Before Bachmann: The 5 craziest GOP candidates of the modern era – 2012 Elections – Salon.com.

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March 30, 2011 · 7:10 pm

Poll: Americans Cooling on Tea Party – POLITICO.com

I knew people would eventually get tire of these lunatics….

Now, if only the press will recognize and accurately report that they are just a fringe group of Republicans…

From Jennifer Epstein at Politico.com

 

The tea party might be running out of steam.

The approval rating for the 2-year-old movement fell to 32 percent in a CNN/Opinion Research corporation poll released Wednesday, the lowest it’s been since CNN first polled on the tea party in January 2010.

Forty-seven percent of Americans, meanwhile, said they have an unfavorable view of the movement, a higher negative percentage than ever. An additional 7 percent said they’d never heard of the movement, and 14 percent said they had no opinion.

In December, 37 percent of the sample surveyed by CNN said they view the tea party favorably, while 43 percent said they view it unfavorably. The group’s favorability rating hovered at36 percent to 38 percent throughout 2010.

The biggest drop in the tea party movement’s favorability came among people who make less than $50,000 a year. In October, 30 percent in that income group said they had unfavorable views of the tea party. Now, 45 percent say the same.

via Poll: Americans cooling on tea party – Jennifer Epstein – POLITICO.com.

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March 28, 2011 · 8:05 pm

GOP Puts AARP in its Sights

Now the GOP is going after the AARP…

This could be fun– and it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the Republicans….

The elderly are the most dedicated voters out there and have predominately supported Republican Candidates lately…

The elderly and southern white men are about the only base the GOP has outside of Religious Conservatives and the Rich…

I truly hope the Republicans stick to their guns and go after the AARP…

Whatever issues I may have with the AARP, they will not go down without a fight and they can really rally the older Americans against the GOP if the GOP pushes them too hard…

They aren’t Acorn….

They will fight back and they have the resources to do it….

Let’s just hope the GOP thoroughly pisses off the AARP Members….

They can’t win elections without them…

The Republican chairmen of the House Ways and Means Health and Oversight subcommittees have trained their sites on AARP, the nation’s largest advocacy group for older Americans.

Health Subcommittee Chairman Wally Herger, R-Calif., and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., R-La., said they plan to press AARP over its insurance products, revenues, governance, and lobbying expenditures.

“This hearing is about getting to the bottom of how AARP’s financial interests affect their self-stated mission of enhancing seniors’ quality of life,” Herger said in a written statement. “It is important to better understand how AARP’s insurance business overlaps with its advocacy efforts and whether such overlap is appropriate.”

In 2010, AARP spent $22.05 million on lobbying efforts, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The hearing, set for April 1, comes a little more than a year after the group helped Democrats pass the expansive health care reform legislation, and just weeks before Congress is expected to begin in earnest a debate over entitlement spending.

Over the years, the group has ticked off lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. In 2003, its support of then-President George W. Bush’s effort to create a drug benefit in the Medicare program angered some Democrats who were opposed to the structure. It was the Republicans’ turn in 2005, when AARP lobbied hard against efforts to privatize Social Security.

“AARP is committed to transparency, and the hearing will provide us yet another opportunity to answer any questions as we continue to be a champion for the wants and needs of Americans” older than 50, said AARP spokesman Drew Nannis.

via NationalJournal.com – GOP Puts AARP in its Sights – Friday, March 25, 2011.

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March 24, 2011 · 8:35 pm

Race and the 2012 election – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post

Glad to see the re-elect numbers so high…

And the race issue with White People doesn’t surprise me.  The whole Tea Party thing is really just a cover for racism.

There are a lot of White People who just can’t deal with the fact that we have a Black/African American President.  And they have a lot of trouble admitting it-even to themselves.

The good news is that we are well on our way to being a multi-racial society and in less than 50 years, White People will be a minority.  Hispanics are the fastest growing demographic group.  That’s something else that scares them…

Demographics and trends continue to support a growing Democratic Party and a dying Republican Party in the long run…

If we can just survive the short run without the GOP destroying everything…

Dave Weigel notes that Barack Obama’s poll numbers are higher than George W. Bush’s or Bill Clinton’s were at this point in the political cycle. You can come up with a lot of reasons for that, but the big one seems to be “ninety-two percent of black voters want to re-elect Obama, as do 66 percent of Hispanics. Only one percent of blacks (!) and 16 percent of Hispanics want to vote against Obama. That’s the source of the positive re-elect number — break it down to white voters, and only 36 percent of them want to re-elect him.”

In “Obama’s Race,” Michael Tesler and David Sears mount a strong case: Far from ushering in a “post-racial period” in American politics, Obama’s election “was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record and, perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to to and racially liberal support for Obama.”

Another way to say this is that far from marking the end of us-vs.-them elections associated with Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern strategy, the 2008 election was arguably the beginning of its inverse: an electoral campaign where race, because of the skin color of the Democratic nominee, was a central issue, but this time, the “racially progressive” coalition proved larger than the racially conservative coalition. Call it the Northern strategy.

What’s interesting, though, is that the racial polarization has continued into Obama’s presidency.

via Race and the 2012 election – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post.

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March 24, 2011 · 8:02 pm

Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet | | AlterNet

This is a glaring truth that too many people still are ignoring…

The sad thing is, campaigns are so expensive now you almost have to be a millionaire to run for office.

And this crowd currently in DC is not about to change campaign finance laws to correct the situation…

While the great majority of workaday Americans are struggling to make it on about $30,000 a year — and having, at best, puny pensions and iffy health coverage — these incoming lawmakers tend to be sitting pretty on hundreds of thousands of dollars each in accumulated wealth. Their financial reports show them holding extensive personal investments in such outfits as Wall Street banks, oil giants and drug makers.

Their wealth and financial ties might help explain the rush by the new Republican House majority to coddle these very same corporate powers. From gutting EPA’s anti-pollution restrictions on Big Oil to undoing the restraints on Wall Street greed, they’re pushing for a return to the same laissez-fairyland ideology of the past 20 years that got our country in massive messes.

At the same time, they’re out to kill a green-jobs program, bust unions, cut Social Security, defund Head Start and generally stomp on the fingers of working families trying to hold onto the middle class rungs of the economic ladder.

The change in Congress is taking America backward, not forward, for the new majority literally is the voice of millionaires. That’s not progress.

via Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet | | AlterNet.

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March 22, 2011 · 10:53 pm

Glenn Beck Contemplates Starting His Own Channel – NYTimes.com

Please, Please, Please!

It would be so much easier to isolate him and avoid him…

I wouldn’t be forced to watch him on any of the 75 TV’s at the gym as no one could call the Beck Network “News”….

And no one– I mean no one– could be exposed to him 24/7 without either going insane or postal….

The possibility that Glenn Beck will exit the Fox News Channel at the end of the year has prompted a big question in media circles: if he leaves, how will he bring his considerable audience with him?

Two of the options Mr. Beck has contemplated, according to people who have spoken about it with him, are a partial or wholesale takeover of a cable channel, or an expansion of his subscription video service on the Web.

Reports this week that Joel Cheatwood, a senior Fox News executive, would soon join Mr. Beck’s growing media company, Mercury Radio Arts, were the latest indication that Mr. Beck intended to leave Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, when his contract expired at the end of this year.

Notably, Mr. Beck’s company has been staffing up — making Web shows, some of which have little or nothing to do with Mr. Beck, and charging a monthly subscription for access to the shows.

Were Mr. Beck to set off on his own, it would be a landmark moment for the media industry, reflecting a shift in the balance of power between media institutions and the personal brands of people they employ.

via Glenn Beck Contemplates Starting His Own Channel – NYTimes.com.

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March 22, 2011 · 9:27 pm

How You End Up Bankrolling Fox News: News Corp. and Rupert Murdoch Weasel Out of Paying Taxes | | AlterNet

The GOP is all over NPR…

But what about Fox “News”?

Sounds like they are costing us a lot more than NPR…

But, oh wait, they support the GOP, so they’re safe…

The article goes on to describe how News Corp used a complex network of accounting dodges including as many as 60 shell companies that were incorporated in such tax havens as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Netherlands Antilles and the British Virgin Islands. More recently, an investigation by the New York Times revealed that…

“By taking advantage of a provision in the law that allows expanding companies like Mr. Murdoch’s to defer taxes to future years, the News Corporation paid no federal taxes in two of the last four years, and in the other two it paid only a fraction of what it otherwise would have owed. Du

Fox News has been the beneficiary of government largess for years and it is time stop it and make Fox pay its own way. As far back as 1999, there have been reports documenting how News Corp, Fox’s parent company, exploited loopholes in tax laws that permitted them to avoid levies that all other citizens have to pay. From The Economist:

“…News Corporation and its subsidiaries paid only A$325m ($238m) in corporate taxes worldwide. In the same period, its consolidated pre-tax profits were A$5.4 billion. So News Corporation has paid an effective tax rate of only around 6%. By comparison, Disney, one of the world’s other media empires, paid 31%. Basic corporate-tax rates in Australia, America and Britain, the three main countries in which News Corporation operates, are 36%, 35% and 30% respectively.”

ring that time, Securities and Exchange Commission records show, the News Corporation’s domestic pretax profits topped $9.4 billion.”

via How You End Up Bankrolling Fox News: News Corp. and Rupert Murdoch Weasel Out of Paying Taxes | | AlterNet.

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March 21, 2011 · 8:42 pm

Tea Party At Its Dregs? Major Convention Attracts Few

What will the media do if they don’t have the Tea Party to play up?

They created noise around the Tea Party with their disproportionate coverage of every little thing they did…

Now the Tea Party appears to be fading….along with Glenn Beck….

Will they finally start paying attention to Progressives?

I somehow doubt it…

Lot’s of good stuff up at ThinkProgress.org today….

With Fox News host Glenn Beck’s ratings down and the biggest tea party rally eclipsed by a recent pro-labor rally in Wisconsin, could the tea party be losing steam? One new sign: a big tea party convention in Tampa, FL this weekend — headlined by such conservative favorites as Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), Fox News Judge Andrew Napolitano, and former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo — attracted only about 300 people. The Save America Convention’s website lists 25 guest speakers, meaning there was one speaker for every 12 attendees. If one includes the 13 musicians and other performers listed as entertainment, that ratio drops to one for every 7 and a half.

via ThinkProgress » Tea Party At Its Dregs? Major Convention Attracts Few.

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March 18, 2011 · 8:22 pm

Ann Coulter: ‘Radiation is Actually Good For You’ | TPMDC

This woman isn’t as dumb as she seems.

She knows that saying insane things like this will get her publicity.

She’s not dumb, just evil….

And insensitive…

And a totally self-absorbed, self-promoting opportunist…

I can’t stand the sight of her…

According to conservative columnist Ann Coulter, this whole Japanese nuclear crisis is overblown and “radiation is actually good for you” and the media isn’t reporting its benefits enough.

On The O’Reilly Factor last night, Coulter spoke about her recent column that cites a number of articles in the New York Times and “a stunning number of physicists” showing radiation has a positive effect on cancer patients.

A skeptical O’Reilly retorted Coulter’s evidence with this, “by your account we should all be heading for the nuclear reactor leaking and kind of sunbathing out there in front of — come on.”

Coulter responded by citing a study, mentioned by the Times , held in Canada finding that tuberculosis patients subjected to multiple chest X-rays had much lower rates of breast cancer than the general population. “There may be some doses of radiation in the human body can ward off infection,” she said.

Joking aside, O’Reilly wanted Coulter to be “responsible” and admit that “some radiation will kill you.” Coulter refused.

via Ann Coulter: ‘Radiation is Actually Good For You’ (Video) | TPMDC.

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