Inspire Political Discourse

The Morons er Tea Partiers Are Gonna Love This

Hahahahaha.........I am still laughing over the history lesson I came across on Cesca's blog. An excerpt:

Now here’s the part Sarah Palin loves about George Washington, her favorite Founding Father: Agreeing with Hamilton that some serious taxation was necessary to pay for the ass-kicking we’d just handed Britain and to “secure the power of the new federal government,” Washington did what any freedom-loving anti-tax Teabagging historical Super-Patriot would have done. He got the fuck on his horse and – in the first real test of Federal Authority – led a massive army against these tax-dodging pricks.

Let me repeat this for our Teabagging friends who don’t read so good, or can’t understand “irony”: In the first real crisis of the new Federal Government, Sarah Palin’s bestest Founding Father Figure (you know, the one she loves because he’s the one she remembers from all the crisp one dollar bills she feeds into the Fox News Mountain Dew machine) personally horsed up and led a federalized army into battle against protesters bitching about high federal taxation. And he kicked the shit out of them, which wasn’t difficult because most were – much like today’s Teabaggers – drunken or retarded.

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Tea Party Protesting LOWER Taxes in Washington Today

From Pro-Obama protesters at a Tea Party Rally in Washington D.C. today. Via HuffPost.

"The American people need to be reminded that 98 percent of Americans got a tax cut last year," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday.

Reid was referring to the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus -- essentially, the only Obama policy to really impact people's 2009 tax returns. In fact, tax refunds reached an all-time high this year in part because of the stimulus, the president said in his weekly address on Saturday. Meanwhile, taxes are at their lowest levels in 60 years, according to William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution.

"The relation between what is said in the tax debate and what is true about tax policy is often quite tenuous," Gale told Hotsheet. "The rise of the Tea Party at at time when taxes are literally at their lowest in decades is really hard to understand." […..]

Not really hard to understand, Mr. Gale. The Tea Party is about race, Obama’s race, not taxes.

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Faux Populist GOP Tax Day Tea Parties Are Anti-Obama In Spite of Their Claims to the Contrary

Although the Tea Party protesters are currently claiming that their protests are non-partisan (since they were busted for having no real talking points, and the organizers imbued them with a few), are not “anti-Obama” (meaning anti-brown skin), both the lack of brown people at their protests and their signage, begs to differ. Say what they like, they are protesting for 3 reasons.

1. They HATE Obama because most of them are right at home in white sheets.

2. They lost the election, and they feel the next one slipping away from them. They are big whiney crybabies aka very sore losers.

3. Rush, Fox News, and Freedom Works have been drilling them re “wealth destruction”. These pathetic dupes are protesting because those people earning over $250,000 annually will see a slight tax increase, or a return to Clinton-era taxes. Really. I know it’s hard to fathom. Think of sheep. Bahhhhhhhh……..

               Click an image below to view at a larger size.

In an excellent article by Bob Cesca, he notes:

Whether intentional or not, the talkers and bloggers who appear to be driving the post-Bush crazy train, have, intentionally or not, opened up the conservative tent to some pretty unsavory and dangerous characters. And in light of what happened in Pittsburgh, are they really so sure that deliberately conflating conservatism with the radical, violent end of the ideological spectrum is such a wise strategy? Beck and the others were so shocked and disturbed that their rhetoric was being partly blamed for Pittsburgh. But that was last week. This week, they definitely seem to be sharing their tea bags with the psychotics. And such behavior can cause a serious infection. Political infection. Is what I meant.

Arianna Huffington today on the tea parties:

Those pathetic, corporate lobbyist-backed tea parties clearly didn't do the trick. They were steeped in desperation. A bitter brew of misguided outrage and good-old-fashioned hate mongering.

It's what people do when the only two ideas they have -- tax cuts and deregulation -- have been given full expression for the last 8 years and failed. Miserably.

The GOP is so devoid of any actual solutions to the many crises we are facing they find themselves grasping at the vaguest hint of a talking point or, failing that, making stuff up out of thin air. So we get Rep. Spencer Bachus saying there are 17 socialists in Congress, and Michele Bachmann warning about "re-education camps for young people," and a Fox reporter "covering" a tea party saying we need to "wake up and start fighting the fascism permeating this country."

Silly name or not, the right wingers have made this in to something that portends more than just wingnutty chatter and parties, but rather something that smells like violence.

For more info on the teabaggers, read my previous articles:

:: The Unfortunate Implications of the Teabagging Revolution

:: Krugman on Faux-Populist Tea Parties, Republicans, and Democrats…..

IPD Political News Summary: Monday, April 13, 2009

Political News Summary: Friday, April 10 – Sunday, April 12, 2009

| The hostage crisis near the Somali coast was resolved on Sunday, when Navy Seals engaged in a brief firefight with the pirates, killing 3  of them, and wounding one. The hostage, Captain Richard Phillips, has been rescued, and is not injured. Thanks to President Obama who managed the crisis, and to the Navy Seals who accomplished it. It is so nice to have an adult once again in charge.  AP article:

[Unlike Bush] “Obama didn't go before the cameras Sunday to trumpet the success, instead releasing a written statement that saluted the bravery of the military and Phillips but claimed no credit for himself.”

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| The “teabagging” insanity continues, generating massive sales in related merchandise, and demagoguery: Tea Party Insanity: "Burn The Books!" (VIDEO)

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| Mayor Bloomberg will seek re-election to a third term this fall by running as a Republican.

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| First she was for it, then she was against it. Last Tuesday, Texas lawmaker, State Rep. Betty Brown (R), set herself up for an enormous amount of criticism when she said that Asian-Americans should change their names because they’re too hard to pronounce:

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” source

She was called upon to apologize or to resign, and up until a couple of days ago, she resisted either course of action, . Her spokesman suggested that Democrats “want this to just be about race.”. Ahem.
Brown finally issued an apology, saying that “the remark came during a conversation on the difficulty of translating names and that she was referring to transliteration issues when she asked a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans whether Asian-Americans could adopt names that "we could deal with more readily here."”

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| Certain news organizations have intentionally mischaracterized President Obama’s stance on supplemental spending bills having to do with the Iraq War, claiming that his war funding request is the same type of supplemental war spending that he [Obama] opposed during the Bush administration. In point of fact, in 2007, when Obama opposed those spending bills, he made the statement then that he opposed them because they contained NO timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. source
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| John McCain’s former economic adviser, and ex-CBO director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, flipped re his stance on the Bush tax cuts. Throughout the presidential campaign, not only was Eakin very vocally in favor of McCain’s plan to retain the Bush tax cuts, he wanted to double these cuts for the very wealthy. He has now said that he believes the tax cuts should be allowed to expire in 2010 for fear of a fiscal meltdown, and rising deficits. Said Holtz-Eakin:

"If you ask: 'Who pays the taxes?', it's the first step toward not having the answer be: 'Our kids.”

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| MEDIA MATTERS log, April 13 - April 19, 2009

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The Unfortunate Implications of the Teabagging Revolution

Okay. I am supposed to be working on my taxes right now, due to my BAD BAD BAD habit of procrastination, but I couldn’t resist stopping to check out the news reports on the latest folly wrought by the GOP.
I did a search and came up with a variety of articles, but in all honesty, the two videos posted below really say it all . Well, almost all. A few points to keep in mind.

1. Our forefathers protested taxation without representation.
2. The teabagging GOP is protesting a return to the tax tables of the Clinton years, which means that 95% of American taxpayers will receive a tax cut.
3. The protests are being paid for by corporate lobbyists, and Fox Faux News is providing free publicity, which makes perfect sense when you consider that most of these dumb protesters will benefit from a tax cut while the lobbyists and Fox Faux News will pay additional taxes. Ah, the perils of idiocy.
4. I have never, until this year, seen a protest complaining about tax cuts.
5. Best and funniest of all, is the unfortunate name choice made by the GOP.  The actual definition of “teabagging”. (Try really hard not to picture John McCain teabagging Michael Steele.)   

In the first video, Rachel Maddow struggles mightily to keep a straight face as she discusses the various “tea parties”.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The second video is Andy Cobb elaborating upon the meaning of “teabagging”. FYI, this video contains cartoonish pics of genitals, so be forewarned, it is not for children.

And from Andrew Sullivan, who always says it best:

As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

This whole thing just screams “we are the uncoolest losers in the world” and “we have no clue what the fuck we are doing” and “we are complete and utter assholes”.  *sigh* Back to my taxes…….

UPDATE: As if the teabagging thing is not funny enough, the religious right nutjobs have named their anti-gay anti-marriage campaign after a gay sex acronym/call-sign, 2M4M (M4M=male seeking male 4 relationships/sex in personal ads, and is also the name given to online gay chat rooms).

Conservative Anti-Gay Marriage Group Launches "2M4M" Campaign

UPDATE: “Before any media covering these events accept the idea that this is just a grass roots outpouring of populist sentiment, they ought to take a look behind the curtain -- where Dick Armey is laughing and counting his cash.” source

My thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link-back.

Related articles:

Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests

The Corporate Lobbyists Behind the Tea Parties

Dick Armey Fighting Obama On Health Care Reform

Fox's Cavuto Claims Network Covered Protests Before Network Was Founded

Cavuto: Tea Party Protests To Be "Infiltrated" By Diabolical Liberals (VIDEO)

Swiss Accounts May No Longer Be a Haven for Tax Cheats

:: On Wednesday, the largest bank in Switzerland agreed to divulge the names of American account holders suspected of using Swiss accounts to defraud the IRS. From NY Times:

UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed on Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities.
It is unclear how many of its clients’ names UBS will divulge. Federal prosecutors have been examining about 19,000 accounts at the bank, but UBS ultimately may disclose the identities of only a few hundred customers.

Image source: AP.
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Obama Transportation Secretary Considering Mileage Tax

UPDATE NO. 1 10:30pm: Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs told reporters that Obama has stated that this will never be policy in his administration.

:: The mileage tax would be in lieu of the current federal gasoline tax
For the most part, I could get behind this. The problem is, you would then be punishing those who drive more efficient vehicles, as well as rewarding those who drive gas guzzlers. And, what about people who drive electric vehicles?

What do you think? From HUFFPOST:

WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says he wants to consider taxing motorists based on how many miles they drive rather than how much gasoline they burn _ an idea that has angered drivers in some states where it has been proposed.
Gasoline taxes that for nearly half a century have paid for the federal share of highway and bridge construction can no longer be counted on to raise enough money to keep the nation's transportation system moving, LaHood said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Image source Volvo.
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