I was hoping for something funny or relevant. Try a Colbert or Stewart clip. Almost everybody loves those guys...or that Susan Boyle "I Had a Dream" song, which was very inspiring.
I am so saddened that you did not like my video clip since you were the only person on this BBS I was targeting.
Surprising effects from the tea parties already are perking. I couldn't keep up with my emails last night from Alamo tea party participants. Organizational hubs are emerging, complete with strategies for email campaigns. It's like working your block but the block stretches from coast to coast, and one doesn't have to be eloquent to be effective. I haven't been this excited in years. This may be analogous to the abolitionist Republican Party emerging from the increasingly out of touch Whigs in the 1850s. The rallying cry then was "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men" -- still sounds good.
I think the problem is that nobody seems to be clear what these people are really protesting. Most of their taxes are lower under Obama. So why use the tea party that was about protesting unfair higher taxes? I'm not surprised that even basic interest in American history isn't big on a lot of the protesters lists, but still... There is some talk about protesting about greed. So it's good to protest to keep the wealthy folks tax lower, which would erase the tax breaks most of these folks got. Is that really fighting greed? There is some talk about fighting government spending. So why wait to protest government spending now? I mean we weren't in the financial crises before when government spending started going nuts. Yet there weren't these protests. Now that history in our nation and others has shown that government spending is an actual benefit to stave off and help with the kinds of economic problems we face, they decide to protest? The protests make no sense, and what is even being protested isn't clear.
Ah but what it does do is give the people who support these protests a false sense of becoming relevant. Why focus on how Amerce can improve healthcare, education and energy independence. Rebuilding our infrastructure and creating a sane foreign policy when you can focus on Obama is a bad president/teabag issues (whatever those are), that only serve as an opiate to the ignorant. Instead of rallying people to take back their own party and come up with alternatives they spend their time crying about wedge issues. Tea bagging has become the new God, Guns & Gays….
FranchiseBlade / mc mark -- I love bandying ideas with you guys. Sometimes I push ideas way farther than where I actually draw the line, but you can't discover the flaws and achieve fresh perspective without stretching debate, sometimes into the theater of the absurd, as I once explained to glynch. The first mistake of NOT understanding the tea party rationale is wanting to put the movement into a neat, little box. There's a diversity of ideas that keeps spilling over. There are so many factors in play. For example, if the Rockets win a game 100 - 99, whose two points won the game? The first two? The last two? Barry's two off the bench? No, it was all the points contributed by an entire team comprised of players with different abilities. This is a movement borne of frustration ranging from tax issues, ACORN's nefarious voter practices, Geithner's flirting with putting U.S. currency under the authority of the International Monetary Fund, the bailouts without accounting, rushing to pass a huge budget without even reading it, Nancy Pelosi's imperialism, the double standard demonstrated in political appointments, the greed and arrogance of Wall Street, the idiocy of Barney Frank, the blatant corruption as demonstrated by countless members of the Congress, the ineptitude and philosophical corruption of the Republican Party .... I could go on all day. Shortly, the nitpickers will be responding to each of these reasons, and they will miss the entire point of trying to elaborate some of the subset pieces that comprise the whole ball of frustration. These are the ones that are too blind or too lazy to understand the roots rather than individual leaves. Middle Americans like me feel violated and dismissed. Big mistake. These aren't fringies. We are do-ers, and now we are energized and motivated. Again, I'm trying to shed some light for those posters in here, like ya'll, that deserve the respect of an answer and an attempt at an explanation.
You should be, the harsh augur of reality and your disastrous failures of the last 8 years is now plumbing your canals, resulting in fissures and lesions caused by the bitter potion of truth and facts - your only defense for which are lies, exaggeration, revisionism, and the good ol' ostrich technique. You are dismissed because you people failed - that is why you are now regionalized and marginalized...for the good of us all (or at least the 60% of the country who don't harbor your viewpoint which is hindered by the surrounding arse cavities). Enjoy your cage losers. Oh and if you come to my town, please confine yourselves to the vicinity surrounding Times Square - you pollute the rest of us with your banal penetration.
I won't nitpick the issues you mentioned, though there is plenty there to pick apart. The idea of lumping dozens of ideas into one protest that uses the tea party symbol as its name doesn't seem effective. Using your Rockets analogy, let's look at a practice after a Rockets game. There were problems defending the fast break, running the plays correctly, and they couldn't hit the open 3. Practice would not be effective if they tried to work on everything all at once. It wouldn't make sense to practice defending the fast break if every trip the other scrimmage unit is just shooting 3's because they have to work on the 3's. Also they don't get to practice running other plays. The practice should be broken down into separate issues, and then a scrimmage game at the end where elements can be brought together. Now back to the protests in question... You mention a list of issues, and claim that there are many more that could go on the list. Are you saying that everyone there agrees with every issue? Really? How can the media cover it if they can't go into depth about an issue that is being protested? Why use a tax symbol from the colonial days to represent all of those issues, especially since the taxes of most participants have been cut? Spreading the focus out over so many different things, makes it so diluted that almost no attention is brought to what you are upset about. If you want to protest and bring attention to the issue, than put the issue out front. It is curious that now all of a sudden all of these issues need serious protesting, when much existed and were worse prior to this administration. There is just so much about the faux movement that doesn't make sense, or is ineffective.
without an economy--and that is what I think is the true source of these frustrations (they just say taxes because that is what they are programmed to say)--none of those issues you mention will matter. I think the real issue is most of these people don't think the economic stimulus is going to work at all, but don't know how to express it without saying lower taxes.
As their proposed solution (tax cuts) would make their new-found problem (the deficit) worse, this necessarily belies a fundamental lack of understanding of why their viewpoint is correct or even logically formed - and leads one (correctly) to dismiss them as know-nothing bleaters.
The whole Tea Party thing was so screwed up to begin with but how ironic is it that Rick Perry, basically the poster child for what's wrong with the country, has thrust himself into the forefront of the tea baggers. You just can't script stuff like that.
listening to the right yesterday, i heard the same old theme from a few hosts and a few callers, they are taking my tax dollars and giving it to people who don't work hard. I wonder what tea party participation was like in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania where a lot of conservative dems voted for Obama due to the economic situation in those states.
yea, except the government's budget isn't the economy. Its a part of the economy. People want to SAVE, but the government isn't letting them. very much on purpose.
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Unintentional humor is the best kind. Remind me, who came out of that to be the leader of the new Republican Party? Wasn't it a guy who had these quaint ideas about preserving the Union?
