"Tea Party! America Thanks You!" Video

Do you want fries with your sugar-coated Satan sandwich?

You want fries with that?
Via the examiner.com:

While the president seemed to breathe a deep sigh of relief that a deal was struck, members of the Democratic caucus were less than enthusiastic about the plan. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver dismissed the deal as “a sugar-coated Satan sandwich” and “a shady bill.”

Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said, “This deal trades people’s livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals,” adding that “the lesson today is that Republicans can hold their breath long enough to get what they want.”

Dick Armey Credits Toomey With Sparking 'Conception' Of Tea Party

Via The Philadelphia Inquirer's Commonwealth Confidential:

Former Rep. Dick Armey (R.,Tex.), whose Freedom Works organization has helped the Tea Party grow, said Tuesday in Philadelphia that the movement was conceived the moment President George W. Bush endorsed Sen. Arlen Specter (then-R, now D) over Pat Toomey in the 2004 Republican primary.

[snip]

Naturally, Democrats would like to hang responsibility for some the more - er, unusual - Tea Party candidates around Toomey's neck. After all, he was head of the Club for Growth, a powerful advocacy group that has spent a decade pushing from the GOP candidates and officeholders deemed insufficiently pure in their conservatism.

Sestak's campaign said in a statement that Toomey and O'Donnell would be a "perfect match" in the Senate...

[snip]

"Congressman Toomey may not be a witch, but his policies are just as scary," said Sestak spokeswoman April Mellody. "Eliminating all corporate taxes, privatizing Social Security and shipping jobs to China are so out of touch with Pennsylvanians that if you didn't have a private plane, you'd need a broomstick to reach them."

Rick Barber: Taxation Equals Slavery & The Holocaust

Alabama Congressional candidate Rick Barber is at it again.

This time he drags in "Abe" (That's "President Lincoln" to you, Rick) to make his point that taxation equals slavery and includes images from The Holocaust.

What a sick, twisted, little fuck.

Here's the ad:


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Whiskey Rebellion

Set aside for a moment the call for President Obama's impeachment which starts the ad and the call to insurrection which ends it and focus for a minute on the middle wherein Alabama Congressional candidate Rick Barber seems to have never to have heard of the Whiskey Rebellion:


You'd think as he had George Washington right there, our first president could have updated him on it.

I wonder if a tea-bagger candidate here in the home of that rebellion could have gotten away with such an ad?

UPDATE: See The Bread Line Blog. Great minds think alike. :-D
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Tea Party NY Gov Candidate's Racist & Hardcore Porn Emails

Meet Carl Paladino. He's the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York. You can see from his campaign website masthead above that he's "for the people," but if you read his emails you'll see he's not for all the people.

WNYmedia obtained dozens of emails either sent by Paladino or forwarded by him that contain outrageous racism, hardcore pornography and bestiality.

Here's a small sample:

(This is only a snapshot of the video as the original has beenbanned from YouTube. It shows African tribesmendancing (get it!). WNYmedia notes that it was popular atthe skinhead website Stormfront.org. You may recallthat cop-killer RichardPoplawski kept an account there.)


(This one needs no comment. He also sent an emailembedded with a video entitled “Miss France 2008 fucking”)
According to Talking Points Memo:

Paladino's campaign manager, Michael Caputo, would not comment on specific emails, but acknowledged to TPMmuckraker that Paladino had sent emails that were "off-color" and "politically incorrect," saying that few such emails represented the candidate's own opinion. Caputo accused Democrats of wanting to change the subject from substantive issues to "having sex with horses."

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Paladino is anti choice and anti same-sex marriage. Also, according to TPM, Paladino considers himself "the only Republican in the race who agrees 100 percent with conservative values." (OK, you can stop laughing/weeping now.)

Additionally WNYmedia notes, he "even counted Governor Paterson’s admitted affair as evidence of Albany corruption – until the media found out about his own extramarital affair and child birthed out of wedlock."

Apropos of nothing, The Pittsburgh Tea Party Movement will hold its second annual Tax Day Tea Party on April 15th in Mellon Square Park and the Southwest PA T.E.A. Party will hold their "Let It Begin Here!" tea party on Saturday April 17th at the Greensburg-Jeannette Regional Airport. (Hey, guys! Never let it be said that I ignore your events.)

Teabonics!

Flickr group devoted to the fine art of Teabonics here.

(h/t to Pam Spaulding & JoeMyGod)
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Facts: They Should Matter

First, I received a Facebook message from Fred Honsberger yesterday claiming:

"A million people march in the DC tea party….see much about that in the MSM?"

Then later that same morning, I heard Chris Moore repeating ridiculously overblown attendance figures of 1.7 to 2 million for this event on PCNC's "Pittsburgh Now."

Moore seemed to be unaware of any controversy with the numbers, but I'm betting Fred knows the real story. Of course this is exactly how the right operates -- they repeat a lie over and over until it becomes "the truth" in the MSM.

In case you missed it, there was a FreedomWorks/Glenn Beck 9-12 Project hootenanny/tea-bagger party on Saturday in DC. The president of FreedomWorks, Matt Kibbe, announced on stage at the rally that ABC News had reported that 1 - 1.5 million people were at the event. That got tweeted/blogged around the right side of the Internet. Problem was, it wasn't true. According to ABC News:

At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as "tens of thousands."

The figure kept getting bumped up on the right until they were claiming attendance of 1.7 - 2 million -- 30 times more than reliable crowd estimates -- and akin to me claiming that I'm 162 feet tall.

Moreover, they tried to pass off an at least five-year old photo of the mall as being from this past Saturday's protest. How do we know it's an old photograph? Because the photo is missing the National Museum of the American Indian which opened in 2004.

It also turns out that there was another group on the mall last Saturday. One might be tempted to forgive the tea-baggers for confusing that group with their own, except for the fact that the group was the National Council of Negro Women Black Family Reunion Celebration. And, if you look at pictures from the tea-bagger party on Saturday (or any other day) you'll notice that the attendees are not only overwhelmingly white, but also the kind of crowd where someone would fell comfortable carrying a Confederate flag or explaining how Obama will oppress "white America."


I'm happy to report that I was able to call-in to the Pittsburgh Now show and let Chris know the real deal.
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For the Teabaggers

From Crooks and Liars and my inbox:


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Mad Hatters at the Tea Party

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could.

`At any rate I'll never go there again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'

"Tea Parties" were held yesterday across the nation and Pittsburgh was no exception (despite the fact that there already was a Tea Party here just last Saturday). The Other Political Junkie has posted on this phenomenon but I thought now was a good time for a review.

The Message

Ostensibly these Tea Parties are protests against taxation and big government spending. Their basis is the Boston Tea Party of 1773 which was of course a protest against taxation without representation. The participants in these Tea Parties are protesting taxation with representation. It's just the wrong representation I guess as there were no nationwide Tea Parties while Bush squandered Clinton's $236 billion surplus in his first year in office and then managed to leave a $482 billion deficit in his wake and a broken economy.

Then there's the irony of people protesting taxes who just got a tax cut -- how many of these folks do you really think make $250,000+ a year? And, how angry do they get when faced with reality?

The Tea Parties are also being presented as bipartisan events ("was neutral in any perceived attack on a particular party or politician"). Perhaps that's why Robert Baehr (Founder/Coordinator of PennsylvaniaTeaParty.com ) felt it necessary to recently take down the Obama morphing into The Terminator graphic (complete with terminator theme music) from his web site. Fortunately, I captured a screen shot of it only two days ago:


Bipartisan, my ass!

The Players

While I'm sure there were many genuine grassroots-type anti-tax activists in attendance, there is no doubt that "the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests."

On top of that, you have FOX News which both heavily promoted the events and participated in them:





The Subtext

So no one really likes to pay taxes and most folks dislike "big" government and have some reservation about the bailouts (though the Left would define "big" with such actions as, say, spying on the citizenry and denying women autonomy over their own bodies and the Right with things like taxation and gun control) so what's the problem?

As Atrios put it today:

All fun aside, there's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of "The Left" have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ("don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq") which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else.

I have to say that I agree with him on the Obama Derangement Syndrome part. Here are some signs from yesterday's protests:


Here's a video of delusional wingnuts from a Cleveland Tea Party a couple of months ago:



And, then there's this bit from the Saturday Pittsburgh Tea Party where Alan Keyes compared the Obama team to Al-Qaeda:

We have had foreign enemies who have sought to terrorize us with attacks, and we have domestic enemies who seek to terrorize us with economic collapse.

And works its way to a vision in which we are being led

happily into the slaughter pens where we shall go from being proud citiziens of the United States, fearing no one but our God, to being the subjects of a government where we must fear its every shadow.

But maybe Philly being far from Pittsburgh, Atrios is too far from seeing the broader picture: the Tea Parties aren't just about hatred and fear of Obama, they are about that deep, dark, ugly strain of America who hates government itself, fears anyone who is not like them, find conspiracies around every corner and see themselves as victims (but who only play at being martyers with their little tea bags vs. colonists who actually put their lives and liberty on the line).

As Chris Potter put it at his Slag Heap blog:

Let's recall that one week to the day before Keyes gave his little pep-talk, three Pittsburgh police officers were gunned down -- apparently by a guy who thought the government was going to take away his guns. It is in this context, in this city, that Keyes chose to praise his audience as a group in which "every individual is an army empowered by their faith in God."

I'm willing to bet that's how many lone gunmen see themselves. Especially the ones who would admire this line from Keyes' speech:

[N]ever as long as we have breath [will we] surrender the instruments with which we can defend [our] liberty against the depradations of a government no longer committed to it.

Make no mistake: I'm not suggesting that Keyes is encouraging people to go shoot cops. (His political program, such as it is, seems to involve "throwing the bums out" -- voting against every incumbent in 2010.) Nor would he be responsible if one of his audience later goes out and does just that. But Keyes talked quite a bit about how "liberty" wasn't all about doing whatever you wanted -- at least not when it applied to things like gay marriage. Maybe a word about the moral obligations of gun ownership would have been in order?

If you're in a city still grieving from a terrible shooting, you might want to think the se things through. If only to show you actually give a damn about the city you happened to parachute into that morning with your rantings. This is almost like Charlton Heston showing up in Littleton, Colorado to do the NRA "not from my cold, dead hands" shtick after the Columbine shootings.

What does it say when you don't have to go to skinhead web sites to hear these rants, when you can hear them at rallies across the country or pimped on FOX News or just listen to the batshit crazy rants of an elected official like Rep. Michele Bachmann who wants people to be "armed and dangerous," who rants about Obama's reducation camps for kids, calls for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America" and feels like she's a "foreign correspondent on enemy lines" when in the nation's Capitol or Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, told a Birmingham paper that there were 17 socialists in Congress?

Undoubtedly, someone can easily Google up a picture of Bush portrayed as Hitler from some Left rally, but there is a difference between the Left and the Right. For one, when the Left claimed that Bush cherry-picked intelligence or spied on citizens or tortured prisoners, they were proven right. More importantly, when they asked for redress, they called for impeachment or war crime trials -- legal remedies. The right is throwing red meat with talk of revolution and some coming storm and the need to keep their AK's.

If there's any doubt just how far they've gone, one only needs to see their mouthpieces willingly self-identify with extremists and terrorists all the way down to local radio personality Fred Honsberger who according to his Facebook message claims that our government thinks that you might be a home grown terrorist if: "you're a returning war vet, you ascribe to "radical" Christian views, you're against abortion, you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car."

The Joke

But before we settle into a deep depression over the ugliness and lies of the Tea Parties, let's remember that wingnuts seem to have never heard of teh google and did not know that teabagging refers to a specific sexual act. So when you see things like this:






Remember that it means this:


And, laugh your ass off at them (but remember to breath through your nose):


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