The Humane Society's radical agenda

And Cass Sunstein is a communazi who hates dogs.

I am so thoroughly sick of these people.

"I don't care. I want the true conservative"

The shame of all of this, of course, is that Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for NY governor and insane slumlord, is flying under the radar.

The dog that catches the car

If the GOP loses conservatives who also want government to...ya know...work, then what will become of the party. Rep. Bob Inglis -- the six term Congressman who told his North Carolina constituents that they shouldn't watch so much Glen Beck only to lose his primary by 50 points -- may be the canary in that coal mine (dogs, canaries...it's a metaphor salad!).

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.

[...]

The week after that meeting with his past funders—whom he failed to bring back into the fold—Inglis asked House Republican leader John Boehner what he would have told this group of Obama-bashers. Inglis recalls what happened:

[Boehner] said, "I would have told them that it's not quite that bad. We disagree with him on the issues." I said, "Hold on Boehner, that doesn't work. Let me tell you, I tried that and it did not work." I said [to Boehner], "If you're going to lead these people and the fearful stampede to the cliff that they're heading to, you have to turn around and say over your shoulder, 'Hey, you don't know the half of it.'"

In other words, feed and fuel the anger and paranoia of the right.

[...]

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

Inglis thinks the party's credibility will be damaged by following the "hot microphones" of Beck, Limbaugh, and Palin and fueling the angry misinformation of the far right of his party. The result, he thinks will be long-term weakness for the GOP, but it may also mean short term success, and if they win back the House in October -- unlikely but not impossible -- he says Democrats will have "an enjoyable couple of years watching that dog deal with the car it's caught."

Teabaggin fraud

The ignorance of this so-called "founder of the Tea Party Movement," as the Post refers to him, is pretty self-evident. "Cutting taxes always works" to reduce the deficit. Um, no. "Cut entitlements," when "keep your hands off of my Medicare" was almost a mantra during the health care protests. It's instructive to see his approach to reasoned debate.

Sidney, N.Y.: Many Tea Party supporters I know in Upstate New York receive federal single payer health benefits from VA, Medicare and Medicaid, which they profess to support while vehemently arguing against the still most private market health-care insurance reform. Please help me make sense of this.

Judson Phillips: And I know liberals who believe in the tooth fairy.

In that spirit, I respond, "Fuck you."

That sound you hear are crickets

I expect any second now an entire squad of tea baggers conservatives will descend upon Arizona to protest the very idea of having to show authorities one's papers.

...any second now...

FreedomJerks

The Tea Party "movement" exults in their God-given freedom of speech to fire slurs at members of Congress protest the governing policies of Democrats the majority party, but citizens who dare to protest against the Tea Partiers' astroturf HQ -- they are harassed out of a job.

Dumbocracy

Yes, Duncan is right, it would be nice if our most preeminent source of news and opinion would allow us to ignore these idiots. But while The Times is going to bring national prominence to what is, basically, the muttings of a crank at closing time, at least they provide some insight into just how confused these people are.

SEATTLE — Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You might mistake her for the kind of young person whose vote powered President Obama to the White House. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type.

But leaders of the Tea Party movement credit her with being the first.

A year ago, frustrated that every time she called her senators to urge them to vote against the $787 billion stimulus bill their mailboxes were full, and tired of wearing out the ear of her Obama-voting fiancé, Ms. Carender decided to hold a protest against what she called the “porkulus.”

“I basically thought to myself: ‘I have two courses. I can give up, go home, crawl into bed and be really depressed and let it happen,’ ” she said this month while driving home from a protest at the State Capitol in Olympia. “Or I can do something different, and I can find a new avenue to have my voice get out.”

This weekend, as Tea Party members observe the anniversary of the first mass protests nationwide, Ms. Carender’s path to activism offers a lens into how the movement has grown, taking many people who were not politically active — it is not uncommon to meet Tea Party advocates who say they have never voted — and turning them into a force that is rattling both parties as they look toward the midterm elections in the fall.

Ms. Carender’s first rally drew only 120 people. A week later, she had 300, and six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tax Day Tea Party. Last month, she was among about 60 Tea Party leaders flown to Washington to be trained in election activism by FreedomWorks, the conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader.

[...]

The daughter of Democrats who became disaffected in the Clinton years, Ms. Carender, 30, began paying attention to politics during the 2008 campaign, but none of the candidates appealed to her. She had studied math at Western Washington University before earning a teaching certificate at Oxford — she teaches basic math to adult learners — and began reading more on economics, particularly the writings of Thomas Sowell, the libertarian economist, and National Review.

Reading about the stimulus, she said, “it didn’t make any sense to me to be spending all this money when we don’t have it.”

“It seems more logical to me that we create an atmosphere where private industry can start to grow again and create jobs,” she said.

[...]

Ms. Carender is less certain when it comes to explaining, for instance, how to cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare.

“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”

Although it would be even more helpful if The Times added some context to the ravings of these fools and the con-men they follow.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The $800 billion federal stimulus bill has boosted employment by 1 million to 2.1 million and helped the economy grow about 1.5% to 3.5% larger than it would have without the stimulus, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

Those estimates are in line with the CBO's previous estimates, and those of other economists who've looked at the economic impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was passed about one year ago.

There were few surprises in the CBO analysis, which was based largely on general equilibrium models of the economy that use economic theory and historical data to estimate how the economy would perform under different scenarios. Read the full report on the CBO website.

What's new in the latest CBO report is an attempt to push back at critics who have argued against the stimulus from a number of theoretical vantage points.

In a special appendix, the CBO answered those critics and justified its own approach.

[...]

The CBO replies: The theory that government spending will crowd out private spending is based on "unrealistic" assumptions. "This type of model generally assumes that people are fully rational and forward-looking, based their current decisions on a full lifetime plan." These models assume that people "have full access to credit markets" to maintain their desired level of lifetime consumption, even if they lose their job temporarily. These theories also assume that involuntary unemployment is impossible.

None of those assumptions are realistic. If the government were crowding out the private-sector, interest rates would rise to reflect less private investment in the future. Interest rates aren't rising, CBO said.

I know there is a small but emphatic group of people who think "the elites" are imposing some form of economic and political oppression on them, but it does tend to be helpful to understand the subject on which one is ranting.

John Birch Society

A self-proclaimed conservative (albeit one from Canada) goes to Nashville and doesn't like what he's hearing.

Many of the tea-party organizers I spoke with at this conference described the event as a critical step in their ascendancy to the status of mainstream political movement. Yet with rare exceptions, such as blogger Breitbart, who was reportedly overheard protesting Farah's birther propaganda, none of them seems to realize how off-putting the toxic fantasies being spewed from the podium were.

Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin's Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room.

That doesn't say much for the state of the right in America. The tea partiers' tricornered hat is supposed to be a symbol of patriotism and constitutional first principles. But when you take a closer look, all you find is a helmet made of tin foil.

No, it doesn't. But it says even less about a press corps more interested in Sarah Palin's hand then in documenting how fucked up these people are and what their ideas say about their vision of America.

Merry Christmas

Don't go Gault on your Christmas decorations, please!

A tea bagger's prayer

If this were satire it would be deemed as just too implausible.

UPDATE: Perhaps so.

Keep guvmint outta my public transportation system

John Cole is right, stuff like this makes blogging very hard.

9/12

I am so sorry I'm not at the 9/12 rally in Washington. The feeling of unity and warmth towards the rallyers' fellow Americans and support for our leaders must be a beautiful thing.

The real Boston tea party

Now, that is grass roots.

The only organization in Boston re-enacting the original tea party — a gay rights group — was not associated with the other demonstrations.