Bonus points (and in case any sane person doubted the connection to the birthers):
“I don’t think that’s the way to unite people. You might have thoughts about some things, but some things are better left unsaid,” said Lisa Mei Norton, a defense contractor by day who moonlights as a singer-songwriter of tea party pop inspired by talk radio.
Norton opted to perform her song “A Revolution’s Brewing” on Thursday night, instead of her version of “Where Were You Born?” — a country-infused song questioning the president’s birthplace.
The first quote does not appear to be meant ironically.
Please share widely!
huh says
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p>Check out the crowd. I’ll never mock the GOP for lacking ethnic diversity, again.
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p>It IS amusing that Michelle Bachman and Marsha Blackburn withdrew over ethical concerns.
kirth says
Because of the guy in the kilt?
huh says
I’m still trying to figure that one out, but yes, in that crowd, he added diversity. đŸ˜‰
amberpaw says
President Obama may be a “compassionate centrist” if anything…barely even a progressive, and definitely no socialist! He is also displaying strong, consistent leadership and holding the “reins” himself. No one is ever “ready” for the Presidency. Somehow I suspect even President Grant and President Eisenhower would both agree with me as to that.
huh says
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p>Here she is on video, putting words together randomly:
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p>
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p>Brain washing through mass communication, indeed!
obroadhurst says
But pay close attention to the context of their remarks.
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p>Seems to me their beef with Obama relates far less to his being a “socialist” (I’ve gotta tell you — if he WAS a socialist, I would have voted for him. I voted instead for McKinney) – then his being an African- American.
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p>”Socialist” seems a code word in the Tea Party movement.
huh says
The best guess I’ve heard is “anything we want to drown in a bathtub” i.e. government that does anything except provide an army.
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p>The description of these folks as neo-anarchists seems very apt.
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p>Palin, on the other hand, is clearly trying to co-opt these folks to fuel a run for President.
mr-lynne says
… put to the prominent place in there speech that it occupies because it polled well for them (negatively).
joets says
I think she’s trying to turn herself into something more of a person of revered status and extreme influence without being in office a la Al Gore.
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p>I think everyone knows she would be skewered in a primary. Absolutely skewered.
huh says
Either way, her goals are not theirs, per se.
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p>More power to her for figuring out how to ride the wave.
obroadhurst says
The white supremacist character to the Tea Party movement could not be more blatant. From Tancredo’s speech to the most horrible caricatures of the President that I have ever seen, and the “birther” phenonmenon to the screams of “welfare queen”, its racist character is quite transparent.
dhammer says
This is a red scare. The right wing in this country (and that includes the American Federation of Labor in the case of Red Scares) have always used socialist, red or pinko to stir people up. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. Socialist means socialists, but it also means anti-american, jew, black, keynesian, catholic, atheist or homosexual, things it’s always meant. Unfortunately, in this administration, the socialist tag never applies and the keynesian only a few times and not for anyone at the Treasury…
alexswill says
Is the same guy who suggested bombing Mecca in retaliation for another terrorist attack. Classy individual.
alexswill says
potroast says
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p>I don’t think this would have the effect they think it would.
lynne says
I was thinking the same thing…”I dunna think it means wha’ you think it means” as the saying goes.
kbusch says
I don’t think the thing that holds these guys together is ideas. It’s narrative.
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p>For example, our diarist’s second blockquote describes a narrative of academic, formerly hippie elitists taking over our country (hoodwinking the media, getting “normal” Americans to vote for a socialist). The populist narrative that has circulated on the right — at least since Spiro Agnew’s polysyllabic anti-intellectualism — has been of a country taken over from plain folk like the wholesome farmers that founded the country and replaced by elitists in love with social experimentation and spending money on those who don’t deserve it.
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p>This is a narrative. It is not theory of governance. Look for coherent ideas and you will look in vain.
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p>You defeat it by telling a better story.
huh says
I just got off the phone with a childhood friend. He recently moved home to take over his parent’s dairy farm. He says whoever the teabaggers are, they’re not farmers of any stripe (liberal or conservative). None of their concerns are farmer’s concerns.
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p>He views the tea baggers as angry suburbanites. People that live in places without a core or center and want to blame anyone but themselves for it.
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p>Real small town America isn’t that boring… I know, I grew up in it.
lightiris says
Junot Diaz explores Obama’s narrative issue in The New Yorker here and does a good job:
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p>
huh says
They’re also very good at mocking and attacking. Here are a couple of excerpts from Sarah Palin’s speech:
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p>
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p>And here I thought she was paid over $100,000 to appear. That buys a heck of a lot of copies of her book.
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p>Another attack:
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p>
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p>She goes on to say that terrorists aren’t “worthy of our U.S. constitutional rights.” It fits into a right wing pattern — identify your oppositions strengths and try to destroy them. It reminds me of the systematic attack on Al Gore’s credibility (e.g. How many people know he didn’t claim to have invented the internet).
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p>The best part for me: she wrote notes for her post-speech interview on HER HAND.
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p>
kathy says
Teleprompters be damned! Sarah doesn’t need no steenking teleprompters. Besides writing notes on her palm is very mavericky.
lynne says
There’s been a lot of talk about what happens when a suicide happens in a high school…you will often see a pattern of this horrible event setting off several more. It’s a terrible pattern and the way you stop this from happening is by mourning the person, but also by doing everything you can do to not glorify the tragedy in the eyes of other teens contemplating it. This has been enacted with apparently a lot of success, where school officials keep this in mind when enacting policy.
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p>The same principle can be applied to suicide bombers. If you treat them like the common criminals they are, you lessen the glorification of these people in the eyes of their peers thinking of following them in their footsteps. If we glorify them by elevating them to some sort of “special case” requiring a more fear-induced reaction from our government, this only serves to help the extremists in their recruiting of these individuals willing to die for this cause.
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p>One can argue, the overreaction of the British in Boston was the very seed for outright revolution. For a long time, the British colonies were just looking for some better treatment. If they had gotten it, instead of a blockade and soldiers occupying Boston homes, we might not be a separate country today.
christopher says
…but I really like that British in Boston analogy, but not only troops in Boston but also British MPs in Westminster. Apparently this crowd also missed the memo that the Christmas bomber is now talking, and he was convinced to do so after family intervention resulted in getting the US to treat him constitutionally.
lightiris says
this is how she made it through high school and college.
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p>Unbelievable.
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p>Can’t wait for the Jon Stewart “analysis.” lol. She truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
couves says
She says in the speech that she will return any compensation for her speech back to the movement. No word on wether that will be accomplished by check or the Hand of God. đŸ˜‰
huh says
lightiris says
she is not even close to discreet in reading her palm.
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p>I love it. The HandPrompter. Ha!
kathy says
I can see it now-Tina Fey pitching it on SNL. LOL.
lightiris says
The Telepalmpter. đŸ˜‰
huh says
Or, more accurately, palmimpsest
justin-credible says
It has limited memory and storage capacity.
kathy says
Sarah is no more a redneck than me. Republicans just like to play it up while they go shopping at Neiman’s and Bergdorf’s. Let them eat cake indeed.
christopher says
…but your last line begs the question what is our story. By that I mean overall narrative because it seems countless stories HAVE been told about people with no health coverage or coverage that disappears when they need it most, but those very personal outrages don’t seem to be doing the job. Definitely a subject for a brainstorming session.
kbusch says
That might be an interesting discussion, but it’s a discussion that has to start with the assumption (or presumption!) that the Democratic position is correct and just needs better communication. We’d end up with a massive We Won’t Always Play With You event.
christopher says
…not only that the Dem position is correct, but that most of this community (including you) believes that as well. Now I feel like I’m missing something. I basically agree with the comment you linked to. Are you saying we shouldn’t bother with this exercise for some reason, because otherwise how will we get to the point where OUR narrative is what prevails?
kbusch says
Not quite. What I’m saying is that it’s difficult to have the occasional discussion on BMG that starts and stays with the position that the Dem position is correct.
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p>Maybe we need a blog annex for that.
jconway says
The GOP won elections where it ran conservative candidates pretending to be moderates making vague enough statements to win over independents and moderates who were angry at the lackluster Democratic candidates. Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, and Scott Brown all fit that mold. Where they ran tea party backed candidates, like in the NY-23 they lost.
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p>If that party wants to govern and not just oppose they can’t look like the party of angry white people. Sadly thats what these tea parties look like. Less talk about policy objections and more talk about how ‘evil’ dare we say ‘dark’ our President is. More talk about how ‘our’ country was ‘taken’ and how ‘we’ need to take it ‘back’. talk about how the President, in spite of all logical evidence and proof, is not a citizen. Still talk about how he is a Muslim (while simultaneously being an atheist communist as well). When an established Republican for 30 years like Mike Castle can’t even say Barack Obama is a citizen without angering this crowd, that says something about them. Is it any surprise there are no black people in the room?
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p>By 2020 this country will be less than 50% white, and the party that currently is winning 90% of the black vote and 70% of the hispanic vote is the Democratic party. Frankly because of that, there is no region that’s not in play by then. The Dixiecrats will be dead replaced by hispanic immigrants and blacks who have higher rates of growth than whites in the south. The Latinos put the west in play as well. Yet at least for the next two cycles, it will be the angry white vote that determines who runs the Republican party. Maybe the Scott Brown celebration was a bit premature guys?
peter-porcupine says
huh says
Did you watch the video?
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p>Quick check: how many Democrats were invited to speak?
af says
why the tea party group talked about some 20 odd conservative candidates that they are backing for the next elections. There’s a good reason why it is only Republican politicians that are wrapping themselves in the tea party movement.
smadin says
That’s completely false, as you know perfectly well.
smadin says
Teabaggers “hate” the GOP the way Greens “hate” the Democrats*: for holding a too-moderate version of the same views, and not pushing the ideological agenda far enough.
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p>Teabaggers hate the Democrats the way Greens hate the Republicans: because they are deeply (in the teabag case violently; I don’t think a lot of death threats get shouted by attendees at Green rallies) opposed to everything about their philosophical underpinnings, principles, tactics and goals.
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p>*this is probably not an ideal analogy, as it draws a false equivalence between Greens and ‘Baggers. The Republican party’s mainstream, of course, is much closer to its extreme than the Democratic party’s is, and while the Greens have the moral advantage of not being motivated by greed, selfishness, xenophobia and racism, they also have no appreciable influence on Democratic policy positions.
obroadhurst says
I really must disagree.
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p>There are real ideological differences that we have even with the most extreme left wing of the Democrats. I suspect it also might amaze you how many Republican candidates I have backed (at least at the local level).
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p>Now, to be sure, there is a significant portion of the Greens regarding whom your remarks ring true — we do have what may be characterized as a “right wing” more closely equivalent to the left wing of the Democrats:
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p>and it is true that this “right wing” endeavors to influence and “reform” the Democrats. For several of us “deeper” Greens, however, the Democratic Party constitutes a necessarily lost cause as a neo-liberal institution.
stomv says
They certainly don’t.
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p>But, if they stick to their so-called “guns” and don’t vote for GOPers who aren’t as crazy as the teabaggers are, then they may cause more harm to the GOP in that the GOP will lose a bit of their base. Either the candidate moves farther right (and may lose the middle) or stays in the middle (and doesn’t get the teabaggers).
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p>Alternatively, if they prop up primary challengers, particularly to incumbent GOPers, they may force the GOPer to move right or lose.
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p>The Dems are in the same boat. Progressives want to challenge Dems who are more moderate than their district suggests. Maybe that means they pick up a more liberal congressman (Sestak v. Specter has made Specter more liberal) or maybe that means they push a moderate rightward (Lieberman vs. Lamont). It’s tough to get this stuff quite right, and all the more reason to have IRV I suppose.
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p>
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p>On a side note, I wonder what the Teabaggers really want. They rally around taxes, and yet I suspect that they would not widely support a proper libertarian (small government, including small taxes and small services and gov’t not intruding on people’s lifestyles or interacting with religion). It’s too bad really — if they would, they’d force the GOP to ease up on social issues and /or force the Dems to figure out how to please wider bases with their social programs.
patrick says
Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of Palin’s speech and the Tea Party is pretty spot on.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/g…
kathy says
(Props to Molly Ivins).
christopher says
Technically in NY-23 the GOP ran someone who was in many ways a RINO, but the candidate more in tune with this crowd got the public backing of many would-be candidates for the 2012 presidential nomination.
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p>As far as Obama’s religion, don’t forget that in addition to being a secret Muslim he is simultaneously a radical Christian whose pastor preaches “God Damn America!”:)
ray-m says
One of the greatest Presidents that EVER LIVED, Thomas Jefferson, taxation needs to be progressive,”another means of silently lessening the inequality of proerty is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of proerty in geometrical progression as they rise.” 1784-85 letter to James Madison when Jefferson was in France after speaking with a poor laborer women.
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p>In today’s society and after 30 years of conservative leadership we have seen just the opposite. The more you make the less you pay. CBO study 2007
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p>Simple economics,which has worked until 1981, was the more money the middle class had, the more money was infused into our economy, thrusting demand up and forcing comapnies to expand and hire due to that influx of demand.
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p>Conservatives believe corporations will invest in a company if they have more money to spend, the problem with that thought process is, they are not going to invest anywhere if their isn’t any demand.
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p>Over the last 30 years company CEOs have kept their tax cuts instead of letting it trickle down to the workers and building factories but converted them into an automatic profit. This forced the stockmarket to begin it’s upward tick at astronomical pace. The stock markets rise was not based on increased demand, because the middle class doesn’t have anymore money NOW than it did 30 years ago according to the CBO study 2007. It was based on tax cuts, which ultimately are subsidized or covered by our social security trust fund,as pointed out in Ravi Batra’s book “the greenspan fraud” and increased taxation of the middle class.
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p>The illusion of the stable economy of 2003-2006 was due to the negative interest rate instated by Alan Greenspan. Families and households used the low interst rates to refinance and use their homes as personal savings accounts. They used the equity in their homes to increase demand, but the problem was that it wasn’t earned money, it was borrowed money. If interest rates stood at higher levels the economy would have sunk into what we have today.
lynne says
we’re back in the 50s and the McCarthy era. My god.
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p>Then again, these people are likely those who admire McCarthy’s witch hunts, and would institute them again (Bachmann anyone?)
goldsteingonewild says
This is a conservative blogger, and he HATED Sarah Palin up there. I thought he nails it in this post.
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p>
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p>He describes the original Tea Party this way:
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p>You should read the whole thing. Bottom line is that Tea Party just lost its affiliation with some of its centrists terrified of the deficits (which include me, centrist fearful of deficit), and got the equivalent of a Daily Kos convention.
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p>Relevance now is zero, just another name for far right, which it was NOT until now.
smadin says
Not even a little bit. It was created almost out of whole cloth by Glenn Beck and Fox News, and has served as a platform for far-right talking points (not to mention paranoia and conspiracy theories) from Day One.
goldsteingonewild says
Nor did I.
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p>He says Tea Party events included some centrists.
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p>Just like Scott Brown’s voters included some centrists who had voted for Obama.
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p>Before Glenn Beck and Fox got involved (April 2009), it was mostly blog-driven.
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p>
smadin says
And that’s really not true.
goldsteingonewild says
how?
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p>ie, some people who were at some of these rallies claim centrists were part of it. they may be wrong, but what is the basis of your counterclaim?
smadin says
I’m saying that the conservative blogger you cite mischaracterizes the Tea Party movement. It was never nonpartisan, and it was never anything other than far-right-wing. Maybe some “centrists” subscribed to its message (though I would argue that it’s impossible to substantially agree with the ‘bagger ethos and be a moderate, which is not the same thing as centrist), and certainly the Tea Partiers claim to be nonpartisan, but if you judge by the content of their complaints and demands, by the circumstances of their appearance as a political force, and by the politicians with whom they align themselves, it is an explicitly right-wing movement. Always has been.
goldsteingonewild says
you don’t make any citations though.
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p>here’s a WSJ piece from last april. it’s written by glenn reynolds. i think his blog is the most widely read conservative blog.
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p>
christopher says
“An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.”
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p>Where were these people when Bush was still President, and if it is Wall Street bailouts that is their primary objection why aren’t they more sympathetic to Democrats?
couves says
There’s an obvious and nasty anti-Obama partisan edge to all this. But I think it’s obvious why Tea Party people are upset with him – he strongly supported the bailouts and began massive spending of his own as soon as he was in office.
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p>It’s interesting to imagine where we’d be if McCain had won – a bitterly divided GOP? More anti-war budget hawk Democrats competing for these votes?
sabutai says
But I gotta take issue with anyone who would call a bunch of reactionaries with bullhorns the “original Tea Party”. Some guy in Nashville could be understandably in clueless, but we in New England know what the real original Tea Party was.
kathy says
Makes me ill-using the legacy of these brave men and women to perpetrate hate and racism.
mark-bail says
is a political temper tantrum. Coherence is not necessary.
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p>Network (1976) was prescient. Glenn Beck is Howard Beale, and these folks are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more:
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p>
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p>As ideologically incoherent and bereft of ideas as the tea partiers are, don’t underestimate their ability to influence things. Ideas don’t move most people, emotions do.
huh says
I just watched all of Sarah’s speech. Her attacks on Obama mostly come off like a mean girl taking down an uppity nerd. They’re funny, but nastily personal.
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p>It’s like revenge of the nerds 2010: the C students strike back!