im all for a "tea party" movement, HOWEVER, the one we have now consists of religious, ignorant, stupid people that focus their energy on ridiculous "issues" when they should be focusing on the REAL problems that are fucking up this country such as big business, banks, and government corruption/inefficiency.
I completely agree. The tea partiers need a "constitutional convention" of sorts, but it already may be too late. The way I remember it, the tea partiers formed (or at least became notably significant) in the early days of the Wall Street meltdown. People had a lot of anger that the architects of that greed had, with the help of lobbyists and politicians, rigged the system to make unbelievable amounts of money with no cosequences. When it all bombed, average taxpayers bailed them out. They never even said thank you. They just told us that if we didn't give them a trillion dollars, without even an accounting of how they'd spend any of it, we were all doomed.
I think that the tea partiers, at their core, are really grappling with the realization that the boy scout and Norman Rockwell notions of America that they were raised on, and fully want to believe still matter, may really just be a quaint notion for suckers. The real America they now see appears to be much more gangster after all. They are frustrated at the realization that such honest truths as pledging allegiance the flag, learning about our founding fathers, working hard, voting, etc may really be just for the "little people" who haven't figured out what it's really all about. So, for now, and after being compromised by political elements who want to make sure that the tea party's energy remains aimed at the wrong targets, tea partiers revolt against big government (with an undercurrent of probable racism, homophobia, etc -- you know, the usual distractions). I hope they can pull themselves together and figure out what really ails them.
the issue was, you know, foreign taxation without representation. and that's what the real Boston tea party was actually about, not domestic taxation with representation. but whatever. it's just history.[/B]
until this movement comes out and explains just where they were under 8 years of Bush/GOP spending as well as a comprehensive plan to reduce spending on entitlements and especially defense, i'm just going to continue to assume that they're ignorant racist crybabies who just want another damn $300 a month.
And with the new editions of the Texas school books out there, I can only imagine how much more skewed that history will be .
Texas has often proved the testing ground and standard for text book changes. This fact alone scares me.
This literally scares the shit out of me.
I grew up in this state, and as backwards as we come off to the rest of the country, and I admit we are very backwards at times socially. We're not nearly as bad as we come off, and we're not nearly as bad as some of the "true" southern states.
We actually have a pretty stellar record, or at least did when it came to education, so much in the sense that Texas has often proved the testing ground and standard for text book changes. This fact alone scares me.
I don't blame you for that . I feel bad for you that those sorts of stories are what people think of when they think of Texas, that's not fair to people like yourself that don't agree with that sort of thing. Is there anything being done or anything that can be done to try and stop that, to fix that?
I know what it's like to live in a state that gets misunderstood by the rest of the country. People make jokes and stereotypes about Iowa all the time, too. Not nearly as bad as the kind Texas gets, but still...
Angela
“Socialism and fascism,” the author writes in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, “have been on the rise for two administrations now.” Beck’s book Arguing with Idiots contains a list of the “Top Ten Bastards of All Time,” on which Pol Pot (No. 10), Adolf Hitler (No. 6), and Pontius Pilate (No. 4) all rank lower than FDR (No. 3) and Woodrow Wilson (No. 1). In Glenn Beck’s Common Sense Beck writes, “With a few notable exceptions, our political leaders have become nothing more than parasites who feed off our sweat and blood.”
This is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin. The philosophical foundations of progressivism may be wrong. The policies that progressivism generates may be counterproductive. Its view of the Constitution may betray the Founders’. Nevertheless, progressivism is a distinctly American tradition that partly came into being as a way to prevent ideologies like communism and fascism from taking root in the United States. And not even the stupidest American liberal shares the morality of the totalitarian monsters whom Beck analogizes to American politics so flippantly.
Read and watch enough Glenn Beck, and you realize that he is not only introducing new authors and ideas into public life, he is reintroducing old ideas. Some very old ideas. The notion that America’s leaders are indistinguishable from America’s enemies has a long and sorry history. In the 1950s it led Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, to proclaim that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer. For this, William F. Buckley Jr. famously denounced Welch and severed the Birchers’ ties to mainstream conservatism. The group was ostracized for decades.
But not everyone denounced Welch. One author, the Mormon autodidact W. Cleon Skousen, continued to support the Birchers as he penned books on politics and the American founding. And Skousen continued to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that American political, social, and economic elites were working with the Communists to foist a world government on the United States.
Glenn Beck is a Skousenite. During the “We Surround Them” program, he urged his audience to read Skousen’s 5000 Year Leap (1981), for which he has written a foreword, and The Real George Washington (1991). “The 5000 Year Leap is essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did,” the author writes in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense. More controversially, Beck has recommended Skousen’s Naked Communist (1958) and Naked Capitalist (1970), which lay out the writer’s paranoid scenarios in detail. The latter book, for example, draws on Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope (1966), which argues that the history of the 20th century is the product of secret societies in conflict. “Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in Tragedy and Hope,” says a character in Beck’s new novel, The Overton Window. “The only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace.”
Where's another Buckley to put these clowns back into the dredges of history where they belong?
Buckley's vocabulary and complex sentence structures marked him as aneducated manelitist. Not only would no Tea Party clown be able to understand him, they would deride him and his multi-syllabic commentaries as socialist/fascist.
4th black Republican congressman ... ever.
Does that include the ones from the Reconstruction era?
i believe so. that's what i remember NPR telling me this morning.
just GOP congresspeople. the Dems have had plenty more.
Hard to believe that there was a time when the Republican party was THE party of black folks (not that it mattered post-Reconstruction when it came to elected officials).