Last night on the GOP Tea party debate on CNN, the assembled crowd of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Neanderthalsfucking assholes dumb old white people cheered like braying assholes asses at the notion that someone uninsured should be left to die.
Here’s just one idiotic comment left on YouTube by a moron using the handle “nicpag9”:
Whoever posted this video needs to off themselves. People like you are what is wrong with this country and the reason it’s in the shape it is in now. No doubt you’ll be voting for Obama again. Too bad we can’t divide the country up into the idiot section run by Communists such as your self and the rest that just want to be left the hell alone for everyone with a damn brain. I’m sure the founding fathers would have no problem with that whatsoever.
No, my fren’ this country is in the state it is because of people like you… too damned dumb to understand the world around them.
“Tea Party Zombies Must Die” is a new first-person shooter game from StarvingEyes Advergaming, a company set up to make viral Internet games. Looks like they’ve got a winner in that department with this in-house produced game:
DON’T GET TEA-BAGGED! The Tea Party zombies are walking the streets of America. Grab your weapons and bash their rotten brains to bits! Destroy zombie Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, the Koch Brothers, and many more!
Apparently the way this works is that the shooter, er, player, blasts their way into the Fox News studio encountering “Factory-made Blonde Fox News Barbie Who Has Never Had a Problem in Her Life Zombie” and then moves through the levels encountering the “Koch industries Koch Whore lobbyist pig zombie,” “Generic Pissed Off Old White Guy Zombie,” the “Pissed Off Stupid White Trash Redneck Birther Zombie” and the “Climate Change Denying Zombie.”
Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Brit Hume, Mike Huckabee and the ever hapless Rick Santorum also provide “undead” fodder for the game.
Cue Fox News making a huge controversy over this, and blaming Obama for it somehow…
Some words of wisdom for the Republican Party from last night’s Rachel Maddow Show:
“If you were the Republican Party, and you were going to give one of these groups of Americans veto power over who was going to be your presidential nominee…which of these groups would you [choose]? I mean, really? You’d give that power to the one at the very, very bottom, underneath the atheists? Really?”
In their hearts, they know she’s right…
But how does this explain why the Obama administration kowtows to the Tea party?
Over at Talking Points Memo they’ve got the summary of a very interesting new academic study done recently at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Cultures of the Tea Party,” as the study is titled, uses polling data, and interviews with Tea party supporters at a gathering held in the state to provide a snapshot of the overall cultural attitudes of the movement.
The findings, represented on Monday at the American Sociological Association, purport that the defining attitudes of the Tea party sympathizers are “Authoritarianism, ontological insecurity (fear of change), libertarianism and nativism.” From TPM:
The study used polling of North Carolina and Tennessee, conducted by Public Policy Polling (D) in the Summer of 2010, and determined the cultural dispositions by measuring the responses of tea partiers to set questions. After PPP surveyed over 2,000 voters who were sympathetic to the Tea Party, researchers then reinterviewed almost 600 in the fall of 2010. Those interviews included everything from personality based queries like “Would you say it is more important that a child obeys his parents, or that he is responsible for his own actions?” to more political ones, like “Do you think immigrants who came into this country illegally but pay taxes and have not been arrested should be given the opportunity to become permanent legal residents?” The study also incudes interviews and short responses with ten participants at a Tea Party rally in Washington, NC.
“American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration,” a statement accompanying the report reads, as the findings themselves point out a few disconnects between the what self-described members of the Tea Party say and their actual policy stances.
The report quotes one Tea Party activist as saying, “We don’t want the big government that’s taking over everything we worked so hard for…the government’s becoming too powerful… we want to take back what our Constitution said. You read the Constitution. Those values - that’s what we stand for,” but that sentiment is not reflected in the polling data from the surveys. From the report:
In our follow-up poll, 84% of those positive towards the TPM [Tea Party members] said the Constitution should be interpreted “as the Founders intended,” compared to only 34% of other respondents. Other respondents were also three times more likely not to have an opinion on the issue, highlighting the salience of the question for TPM supporters. Support for Constitutional principles is not absolute. TPM supporters were twice as likely than others to favor a constitutional amendment banning flag burning; many also support efforts to overturn citizenship as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment. That TPM supporters simultaneously want to honor the founders’ Constitution and alter that same document highlights the political flexibility of the cultural symbols they draw on.
The TPM supporters’ inconsistent views of the Constitution suggests that their nostalgic embrace of the document is animated more by a network of cultural associations than a thorough commitment to the original text. In fact, such inconsistencies around policy, whether on the right or left, highlight what many sociologists see as the growing importance of culture in political life. The Constitution - and Tea Party more generally - take on heightened symbolic value and come to represent a ‘way of life’ or a “world view” rather than a specific set of laws or policy positions.
This reminds me a lot of Canadian psychology professor Bob Altemeyer’s long-term study of cultural attitudes of conservatives, The Authoritarians, which is online in pdf format. Altemeyer’s studies reveal rightwing double standards, inconsistent beliefs, willful ignorance, misrepresentation of historical and scientific facts and bizarre justifications. It, too, is absolutely worth reading.
Quoting Altemeyer:
The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence. Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives, and conservatives have stereotypes about liberals. Moderates have stereotypes about both. Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound. But arguing never seems to get anywhere. Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion. And if you keep finding the same thing experiment after experiment, and other people do too, then that’s a body of facts that demands attention.3 Some people, we have seen to our dismay, don’t care a hoot what scientific investigation reveals; but most people do. If the data were fairly gathered and we let them do the talking, we should be on a higher plane than the current, “Sez you!”
Happy 5th of July! I hope everyone had a nice weekend. We certainly did, but then again, we weren’t anywhere near Lexington, Kentucky and this idiotic vendor of (patriotic?) racist tee-shirts.
The other tee this Tea partier sells reads: “INFIDEL: Everything I Need to Know About Islam I Learned on 9/11.” Charming.
This is how serious the birth control situation is in Kentucky, because broken condoms result in tragedies like this man, selling apparel to people who want to honor America’s founding dressed like hobo Klansmen.
This photo works on so many levels. It deserves a Pulitzer prize. So heavy meta. Someone who lives in the area should do a documentary about this guy. He’s such a ONE-MAN SYMBOL OF AMERICA TODAY.
I wonder how many of these tee-shirts he sold?
(With apologies to Wonkette for heisting their post, but this one is too good not to reblog.)
If a picture paints a thousand words, A.L. and Louise Geddings were lonesome representatives of the laughably low turnout yesterday when SC governor Nikki Haley spoke at a Tea Party rally at the Statehouse in Columbia
Organizers for the event said they were expecting 2000 people to show up, but just 30 attended. They blamed the pathetic turnout on Donald Trump canceling his threatened presidential bid (Trump had been scheduled to appear at the event).
I don’t know, but If 1970 Teabaggers who would have otherwise shown up for a rally, but didn’t bother once Donald Trump bolted from political life, is anything to go by—and I think it is—then. rut roh, the Republicans are going to have a much, much bigger problem on their hands in 2012 than I think they anticipated.
Has the Tea party movement burned itself out, save for all but the most fanatical types? It’s difficult to draw definitive conclusions from the attendance of just one (very) poorly populated event, but when the event in question is in Florida and they can’t even find the requisite number of cranky, dumb old Republicans to fill the seats for something called the “Save America Convention,” you can’t really help but wonder if something’s gone seriously off the boil:
With Fox News host Glenn Beck’s ratings down and the biggest tea party rally eclipsed by a recent pro-labor rally in Wisconsin, could the tea party be losing steam? One new sign: a big tea party convention in Tampa, FL this weekend — headlined by such conservative favorites as Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), Fox News Judge Andrew Napolitano, and former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo — attracted only about 300 people. The Save America Convention’s website lists 25 guest speakers, meaning there was one speaker for every 12 attendees. If one includes the 13 musicians and other performers listed as entertainment, that ratio drops to one for every 7 and a half.
Probably because they desperately didn’t want images like the above pic getting out. A videotape would only have made this wingnut micro-gathering seem even more pathetic. If a picture paints a thousand words, what would you title this one?
File this under “Take with a grain of salt”: Tea Party Nation founder, Judson Phillips claims that ‘Anonymous’ is harassing his group by asking supporters to register at the their website and post porn and offensive images culled from Encyclopædia Dramatica. In an “urgent message” Phillips told members:
So far, Anonymous’ attacks have been mostly of the juvenile nature. They have been coming online, posing as Tea Party members and posting racist messages. Those are being deleted quickly. Two nights ago, one of them posted extremely graphic and disturbing pornographic pictures. We discovered it and quickly deleted them. They then sent a suspended message saying, “expect us.”
Phillips posted the above graphic as “proof” that the attacks were emanating from the Anonymous hive, but so far AnonNews has mentioned nothing of the supposed attack or of a “Project Reaganomics.” Not saying it didn’t happen, but this could just as well be a PR ploy by Tea partiers looking to gin up a fight. With the unrest in Wisconsin and the catastrophe in Japan, maybe Phillips and his Teabagger crew are just feeling forgotten and trolling for some attention like famewhore weirdos, the Westboro Baptist Church were recently exposed doing? How very UN-original.
Phillips would not reveal his sources in an interview with TPM, but says he had heard that ‘Anonymous’ was planning to target Tea Party Nation - when he saw the graphic he says it seemed to confirm his suspicions.
He allowed that the graphic could have been fake, but added that it’s from a “source I trust,” and that “based on other information we had, we don’t think so.”
“My belief based on information we have received is that this comes from somebody associated with that group,” Phillips said. He added: “If they believe in free speech, why are they trying to shut down those who disagree with them?”
‘Anonymous’ has taken down other conservative, supposedly grassroots websites. This month, they attacked Club For Growth and Americans For Prosperity in response to the Wisconsin protests.
Look at this face, look at this ridiculously stupid, Republican-looking face, the most Republican-looking face I have ever seen.
When I look at Scott Walker’s wimpy, goofy face, he’s like an ICON of idiocy to me. He’s a GOP Alfred E. Neuman. As if his DNA was CAST by fate itself for the role of a GOP *fool* for the national stage.
Scott Walker is labor’s BEST FRIEND since Jimmy Hoffa, in a perverse sense. He’s going to go down in history as the guy who broke the glass and pulled the alarm on all out class war in America.
A war the people are going to win this time.
The Democrats should trademark his stupid face and have it etched on urinal cakes and distributed nationwide…
Look at the face of this delusional man whose misguided, strong-arm tactics will help end the Republican party in America for good this time.
Gov. Scott Walker seems intent on pouring gasoline on the class war, but it’s only going to burn his own political career to the ground, bring his political party into a fight with its own fucking citizenry—that it can’t possibly win!—and see him go down in history as one of America’s single biggest assholes…
In a surprise move late Wednesday, Senate Republicans voted to move forward with the governor’s controversial budget repair bill, sending the measure to a Senate-Assembly conference committee, which quickly adopted a version of the bill that both houses will vote on.
It was unclear how the Senate, which has been deadlocked after the body’s 14 Democrats fled the state last month denying it the quorum needed to vote on a fiscal bill, was able to advance the legislation to this point.
Republican leaders would only say the Senate bill differed from the Assembly bill and, after voting to take up a couple of Assembly amendments, indicated it was possible that lawmakers could strip fiscal elements from the proposal and pass only measures dealing with collective bargaining.
Such a move could allow Republicans to pass the governor’s bill without the 20 Senate members needed to vote on fiscal matters. Currently 14 Democratic senators remain in Illinois, hiding out in an effort to deny the quorum and stall the vote.
If the Republicans move forward with their plans, it would be a major reversal for Gov. Scott Walker and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau. Both have contended that the bill is fiscal in nature and thus the collective bargaining could not be stripped from the measure.
Democratic Senators on Wednesday immediately criticized the move and said there was a possibility they would come back Wednesday night to fight the bill on the floor. The senators said the Republicans maneuver proves their goal has had more to do with ending collective bargaining for public employees and less to do with balancing the budget.
“They have been saying all along that this is a fiscal item; we’ve been saying it is not,” said Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Waunakee, from Illinois. “They have been lying. Their goal is to bust up the unions.”
Sen. Bob Jauch, D-Poplar, called the maneuver undemocratic and “almost barbaric.”
“There’s going to be a public hanging of public employee unions at the Capitol tomorrow if it comes out as I expect,” he said, referring to the provisions meant to strip most collective bargaining rights from public employee unions.
Groups that have been protesting the bill for more than three weeks began issuing urgent appeals Wednesday evening for supporters to come to the Capitol to oppose the move.
It’s gonna be a party tonight in Madison!
Viva the people of Wisconsin! America is behind you!
There was a fascinating article in The Dever Post yesterday—it’s practically just a list—examining how certain extremely wealthy people pay very, very little in Colorado property taxes. Familiar names and faces like Tom Cruise, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Dick Ebersol of NBC and his wife actress Susan St. James and others pay far, far less in property taxes than most home-owning, God-fearing, rank and file tea-bagging Americans do. What’s a close-minded wingnut to make of this? It’s not what Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin want for America is it??? Or is it?
Hey, wait a minute, Brad Reed writes at Crooks & Liars, this could serve as an effective meme for making those amongst us who are totally impervious to “facts” and “reality” (I’m looking at you, teabaggers) understand how the rich often screw the rest of us over. It might even be a way of persuading the un-persuadable that they are actually acting against their own economic self-interests by their politically unsophisticated participation in far-right advocacy groups. From “How we can convince Tea Partiers to raise taxes on rich people”:
So The Denver Post has done us an extremely useful service today by highlighting just one of many ways that rich people in the United States get away with paying practically zero taxes. I think this could be useful because many of the rich people featured in the story happen to be Hollywood celebrities, who are often the bane of our conservative brethren on a great many issues. Let’s take a look:
Actors, captains of industry, an Ivy League astrologer, sports figures, politicians, energy giants, schoolteachers from Pasadena, Calif. All these are also considered farmers or ranchers for tax purposes in Colorado. They have secured low property taxes through agricultural designations on land they own even though they personally have little or nothing to do with producing food — the reason state legislators originally created a low property-tax rate for the agriculture sector.
In some cases, the properties where they have second, third or fourth homes were traditional working ranches before they were sold to the wealthy and became what, in real-estate lingo, are termed “gentleman ranches” or “recreational ranches.”
You can see where this is going, can’t you? And once you get into the gory details, things get really ugly:
Actor Tom Cruise owns five parcels of land on a scenic mesa northwest of Telluride that has become an enclave of high-end vacation homes. Sheep graze around the mansions for brief periods each year, according to the assessor’s office. Cruise pays just more than $400 in taxes for 248 acres for which he paid nearly $18 million between 1994 and 2002. He pays $11,380 in residential property taxes for the land where his $9.7 million home is located.
Yes, this is how poorly our tax systems across the country are designed: Tom Bleeping Cruise can get away with paying $400 a year in taxes for property that’s worth around $18 million, all because he occasionally allows sheep to walk through it.
Want another ugly detail? Check out this one:
David Tresemer, an astrologer and Harvard-educated psychologist, owns 191 acres and four structures that are listed as farm buildings or residences in the foothills west of Boulder where he operates the StarHouse. It is advertised as a spiritual and cultural space for celebrations of the seasons, the lunar cycles and rituals from ancient and indigenous cultures.
He pays $11.48 in taxes for 38 of the vacant acres and $3,699 for the remainder of the land with the buildings.
OK, even if Ma and Pa Tea Party are still Tom Cruise fans, there ain’t no way they’re happy that a Harvard-educated astrologer is paying just over $11 in taxes for 38 vacant acres of land. And remember, these are only two examples that demonstrate how the rich and their accountants have completely gamed the tax code to their advantage. A more thorough audit of other rich people in other states would no doubt unveil countless other horrors.
Hey, have you got time for another one? Sure you do:
Dick Ebersol and Susan Saint James own a 35-acre lot in the upscale West Meadows subdivision near Telluride. They purchased the land for $1.8 million in 1996 and pay $123 in property taxes on it annually because there is hay on it. They also own an $11 million home in the Mountain Village.
How many Fox News-watching slobs would feel good about themselves if they ever saw THAT story discussed on their favorite rightwing Republican propaganda network? It’ll never happen of course, but it’s worth daydreaming about…
Read more: In Colorado, some famous faces, names get ag-land tax breaks, too (The Denver Post)
By now, we’ve all probably seen the video of the anti-Muslim hate rally in Orange County, CA. These REPUBLICAN idiots should be ashamed of themselves, but chances are of course, that they feel completely self-satisfied about their actions. Why allow them this pleasure?
Each of these REPUBLICAN politicians who spoke at the anti-Muslim hate rally should resign, effective immediately, so as not to bring any more shame on the great state of California. Why not exercise YOUR right of free speech and let these folks know exactly how you feel about their disgusting behavior? Last time I checked, this was still America and these folks DESERVE SOME FREE SPEECH, don’t ya think?
You can reach REPUBLICAN Congressman Ed Royce here (I just called both offices, it was fun!)
1110 E. Chapman Ave, Suite 207
Orange, CA 92866
T (714) 744-4130 F (714) 744-4056
2185 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
T (202) 225-4111 F (202) 226-03
Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly, also a REPUBLICAN, said this at the hate rally: “I know quite a few marines who would be happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise.” Was she implying that our marines should be put in service of killing the people who were attending the charity event???
How I wish I had a phone number for her, but so far, no luck… Deborah Pauly is also the first pol in the OC to call for CA following Arizona’s plans for illegal immigrants!
You can contact her fellow members of the Villa Park city council here. Why not cc them on anything you send? Can’t hurt!
Send your love to Rep. Miller at one (or all three) of the following addresses:
2349 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: 202-225-3201
Fax: 202-226-6962
1800 E. Lambert Road
Suite 150
Brea, CA 92821
Phone: 714-257-1142
Fax: 714-257-9242
200 Civic Center
Mission Viejo, CA 92691
Phone: 949-470-8484
Go get ‘em. They NEED to hear from you!
Also among the non-elected protesters were Rabbi Dov Fischer of Young Israel of Orange County, Irvine Jewish activist Dee Sterling and Chapman University adjunct professor of law Karen Lugo. It was Karen Lugo (a pal of Michele Bachmann) who said “This is not about hate [...] We are not hatemongers. The word ‘Islamophobia’ is an effort to chill us. The Constitution was never meant to allow a tyranny of a minority.”
She’s a freakin’ LAW PROFESSOR and she makes a statement like that in this context! Lugo must have a severe irony deficiency, eh? (Or else she’s just a flaming idiot). Best of all? Lugo is a member on the California Advisory Committee to the US Civil Rights Commission!!!
Unfortunately, here’s that vile video again if you want to psych yourself up for the task:
“Hello, Anonymous calling for the enemies of democracy. Are the Koch Brothers in?”
This warms my Trotskyite heart: After posting the following “open letter” to Koch Industries, effectively putting them on notice and asking the American and European population to stop buying their products, the politically motivated hackers of “Anonymous” have already begun to make good on their threat, as last night and this morning the Koch-supported rightwing political organization, Americans for Prosperity’s website was knocked offline several times. If an elite hacker was able to get into the intranet of Koch Industries, they could probably really disrupt their business for a few days. Let’s hope they cause maximum chaos for these evil bloodsuckers. (I hope Fox News is next. THAT would be the best thing ever, wouldn’t it?)
Here is the text of the letter:
Dear Citizens of the United States of America,
It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch—the billionaire owners of Koch Industries—have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.
Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most recently started to manipulate the political agenda in Wisconsin. Governor Walker’s union-busting budget plan contains a clause that went nearly un-noticed. This clause would allow the sale of publicly owned utility plants in Wisconsin to private parties (specifically, Koch Industries) at any price, no matter how low, without a public bidding process. The Koch’s have helped to fuel the unrest in Wisconsin and the drive behind the bill to eliminate the collective bargaining power of unions in a bid to gain a monopoly over the state’s power supplies.
The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating ‘grassroots’ organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers’ political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.
Anonymous hears the voice of the downtrodden American people, whose rights and liberties are being systematically removed one by one, even when their own government refuses to listen or worse - is complicit in these attacks. We are actively seeking vulnerabilities, but in the mean time we are calling for all supporters of true Democracy, and Freedom of The People, to boycott all Koch Industries’ paper products. We welcome unions across the globe to join us in this boycott to show that you will not allow big business to dictate your freedom.
U.S. Product Boycott List
Vanity Fair [not the magazine, the napkins and “classy” paper plates -RM]
Quilted Northern
Angel Soft
Sparkle
Brawny
Mardi Gras
Dixie
European Product Boycott List
Demak’Up
Kitten Soft
Lotus / Lotus Soft
Tenderly
Nouvelle Soft
Okay Ktchen Towels
Colhogar
Delica
Inversoft
Tutto
To identify these brands, please look for the following logo anywhere on the packaging:
Anonymous.
We are Legion I We do not forgive I We do not forget I Expect us
Happy to say that I don’t think I’ve ever bought any products manufactured by Koch Industries. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with them. Literally!
