Tea Party Wins

[Brad Sallows]

It was a political issue before it became a media issue.  The whole point was to raise an issue which would reflect adversely on Republicans/conservatives and favourably on Democrats/progressives and distract some attention from the ongoing economic situation which does not favour Democratic candidates for the 2008 elections.  It backfired when the freedom of conscience theme overtook the SSM theme.

 

[Edward Campbell]

C'mon, Brad, the politics of rights for gays (and all the assorted variants thereto and hangers on) is settled. Courts and legislatures are all marching in the same direction, albeit at different speeds. What's left is the US culture wars and they are, in the main, a media event. I know a tiny handful of Americans who are committed Tea Party types and an equally tiny handful who are pretty far left - they might even be Dippers if they were Canadians. But most of the Americans I have met over the past several years are independents or uncommitted and that includes several who are registered Democrats or Republicans who have, at least once, crossed party lines. If Mike Huckabee and his ilk, on both sides of the issue, could make a living without fanning the flames of the nonsensical but, ultimately, destructive, culture wars then Americans could focus on what matters: the economy.

 

[cupper]

The only thing left to be settled WRT equal marriage rights for same sex couples is spousal rights and benefits. And it's working it's way through the courts now. A recent state appeals court case declared the "Defense of Marriage Act" unconstitutional. Combined with the current Administration's stated practice of not defending DOMA, it will be a short period of time before same sex marriage is recognized at the Federal level. And at that point, we are no longer at the thin edge of the wedge issue.

All that will remain is striking down restricting benefits to heterosexual couples only. I predict that once the Supreme Court rules on DOMA and Prop 8, Congress will see the light and move ahead with legislation ensuring Federal benefit rights, but the states may need to ge dragged kicking and screaming, especially in the more conservative south and west.

Gay rights stopped being an issue in this election when Congress repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell. Both campaigns avoided the "Hate Chicken" controversy like nutritionists and trans fats. And the media did try several times to link the Romney Campaign to it. But no one took a bite.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79363.html?hp=f1

(Sorry for the puns, I couldn't help myself  > )

 

[Brad Sallows]

I do not mean that it is a political "rights" issue.  I mean it is a political "election shiny thing" issue meant to distract people from the chief issue (economy) and the floundering Obama campaign.  Any of the red herrings and sidebars "blue team" politicians and supporters throw up between now and Nov, either hoping to motivate "blue team" or initiate a self-destructive feeding frenzy by "red team", also has the potential to become a media issue since media tend to side with "blue team".

The stunt backfired: people chose to emphasize the freedom-of-conscience issue that was at stake. The counter-protest also backfired - it failed to provoke bad behaviour on the part of "red team"* and in fact provoked some bad behaviour on the part of media and a handful of supporters of "blue team".

*I assume the media would have seized desperately on the slightest rumour of bad behaviour from "red team", and I haven't seen any such rumours yet.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

I like the Red/Blue analysis.  This whole argument reminds me of this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BAM9fgV-ts

 

[a_majoor]

Once again, I will suggest everyone is distracted by the real point of all this; despite attempts to hijack it to fit various agendas, provoke reactions from the Red and/or Blue teams etc., the real story is that a huge number of normally apolitical Americans came out to protest the behaviour of the political class who attempted to use their position and the implied threat of State power to intimidate and bully an American businessman who chose to express himself.

I predict that you will see similar events in the future to remind politicians (and I will stipulate that political figures from every party are quite capable of putting their foot in their mouths) who they really work for. Buycotts and other expressions of solidarity fall within the TEA Party movement philosophy even if the participants do not explicitly belong to the TEA Party. This is why Glenn Reynolds said these movements provoke fear in the political class; they are spontaneous and grass roots, and indicate a large divergence between the desires of the voters and the actions of the political class. Politicians ignore these movements at their peril.

 

[cupper]

Pure and simple, it was a media manufactured tempest in the Tea Party.

Until Mike Huckabee stepped up with his call for Chick-Fil-A appreciation day, this news item would have died a quick and painless death within one short news cycle.

A statement by the Mayor of San Francisco on this subject is almost obligatory. A statement by the Mayor of Boston, center of one of the first states to allow same sex marriage is no big stretch. Rahm Emanuel just likes sticking his nose in. Mayor Gray from DC calling it hate chicken was just comic relief, since no one can take him seriously in his current political situation.

But the media pushed harder than they needed to, and the media whores that make up the Fox News punditry picked up the ball and ran with it.

What have we heard since the protests? Nada. New news cycle.

Pure and simple, it was a media manufactured tempest in the Tea Party.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Yes, yes; "blue team" is always the voice of reason with compelling reasons for whatever they do; "red team" is always just a bunch of sh!t-disturbers.  The mayors were, after all, just kidding around.

 

[a_majoor]

Cupper, you really need to ask yourself why all these apolitical Americans (most of whom had no dog in this fight) would go out and stand in kine for a chicken sandwich by a relatively obscure chain?

Are people really that mesmerized by Mike Huckabee? (And if they were, why isn't he standing behind the podium where Governor Romney is now?). You seem to believe that the news media has some sort of magical powers, forgetting that the news media is actually dying a slow and painful death (instapundit noted that almost half a million Americans cancelled their cable subscriptions last year alone, and he has published numerous articles where the motivation behind cancellations was viewers being tired of paying for shows they found offensive, or BS newscasts). Print is suffering from the same erosion of readership, and part of this is due to a diminished amount of credibility. Even broadcast news (the other part of the Legacy media) is being thrashed by dropped ratings, and since people are dropping other forms of media at the same time, it is not a case of switching from ABC to CNN; indeed CNN is taking the hardest hit in terms of lost viewers.

The other issue is the story of "Things that are seen and not seen". While Frederic Bastiat was writing about economics, the fact that things are "not seen" on the news can indicate that the Media isn't looking for it, or avoiding the issue. In the case of the TEA Party movement and their various affiliates (such as the one we just saw), the idea of apolitical Americans taking a stand is alien to the way the political class, academia and the legacy media think, so they will try to ignore the issue. The idea that movements need large public displays (like the "Occupy" movement) is also a big part of the thinking of the politicians, academics and media, so when they don't see public displays they imagine the movement has disappeared. They then scramble to explain how long serving politicians are knocked off during primaries by relative unknowns, or how the House and may State Houses and Governorships were swept in 2010.

So the story still is that apolitical Americans came together to take a stand against the political class. I expect to see more of this behaviour in the future, since the underlying cause isn't the media, but the mismatch between people's expectations and the behaviours of the political class and their enablers

 

[cupper]

I'm sorry, but the mere act of making some sort of stand is in itself a political act, therefore they lost the label of apolitical.

And I believe that the masses wouldn't have spontaneously shown up all on the same day if someone hadn't made the suggestion in the first place.

 

[DBA]

I'm sorry, but the mere act of making some sort of stand is in itself a political act, therefore they lost the label of apolitical.

And I believe that the masses wouldn't have spontaneously shown up all on the same day if someone hadn't made the suggestion in the first place.

Apolitical in this context means apathy or disinterest towards political affiliations. It doesn't mean they don't have an opinion on political issues or that they don't express them.

Not sure what your second point is as all it does is state the obvious about all such events. The success or lack thereof is generally measured by the size of the response which for this event was rather large.

 

[cupper]

Apolitical in this context means apathy or disinterest towards political affiliations. It doesn't mean they don't have an opinion on political issues or that they don't express them.

If they are apathetic or have no interest in a political issue they are apolitical. If they have no interest in a particular partyor affiliation, they are non-partisan.

Not sure what your second point is as all it does is state the obvious about all such events.

It was in response to this:

Are people really that mesmerized by Mike Huckabee? (And if they were, why isn't he standing behind the podium where Governor Romney is now?). You seem to believe that the news media has some sort of magical powers,

As for success or failure of the event in question, I made no specific comment on that.

 

[a_majoor]

The first half of the article is the take away. The current political and economic system is in an unstable equilibrium as the foundations of the Progressive project crumble under mountains of debt, failure to achieve the stated objectives and moral failure. Glenn Reynolds has predicted a "preference cascade" as people begin to realise they are not the only ones who think this way, and there have been several interesting articles (look up Walter Russel Mead in the "American Interest" for some of the most consise) speculating on what the post Progressive future would look like.

The TEA Party movement is probably the most visible manifestation of the preference cascade, but no one has (yet) really defined the outlines of what a post progressive society would look like or operate. If this author is correct, the election results will be totally "unexpected" by the conventional punditry. What the ultimate fallout will be will be ours to discover in the years to come:

http://www.ricochet.com/main-feed/Landslide-on-the-Horizon

Landslide on the Horizon
Paul A. Rahe · Aug 9 at 4:52am

When I read Nate Silver, Sean Trende, Charlie Cook, Jay Cost, and the others who make a profession of political prognostication, I pay close attention to their attempts to dissect the polling data and predict what is to come. But I also take everything that they say with a considerable grain of salt. You see, I lived through the 1980 election, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was struck at the time by the fact that next to no one among the political scientists who made a living out of studying presidential elections, communism in eastern Europe, and Sovietology saw any of these upheavals coming. Virtually all of them were caught flat-footed.

This is, in fact, what you would expect. They were all expert in the ordinary operations of a particular system, and within that framework they were pretty good at prognostication. But the apparent stability of the system had lured them into a species of false confidence – not unlike the false confidence that fairly often besets students of the stock market.

There were others, less expert in the particulars of these systems, who had a bit more distance and a bit more historical perspective and who saw it coming. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a prescient book entitled Can the Soviet Union Survive 1984? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn predicted communism’s imminent collapse, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan suspected that the Soviet Union would soon face a fatal crisis. They were aware that institutions and outlooks that are highly dysfunctional will eventually and unexpectedly dissolve.

In my opinion, none of the psephologists mentioned above has  reflected on the degree to which the administrative entitlements state – envisaged by Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and expanded by their successors – has entered a crisis, and none of them is sensitive to the manner in which Barack Obama, in his audacity, has unmasked that state’s tyrannical propensities and its bankruptcy. In consequence, none of these psephologists has reflected adequately on the significance of the emergence of the Tea-Party Movement, on the meaning of Scott Brown’s election and the particular context within which he was elected, on the election of Chris Christie as Governor of New Jersey and of Bob McDonnell as Governor of Virginia, and on the political earthquake that took place in November, 2010. That earthquake, which gave the Republicans a strength at the state and local level that they have not enjoyed since 1928, is a harbinger of what we will see this November.

Yes, Barack Obama is ahead in some polls. And, yes, it looks like a neck-and-neck race. But that is because the President is spending everything that he has right now in a desperate attempt to demonize Mitt Romney, and it is because Americans are not yet paying attention. Obama’s support is a mile wide and a quarter of an inch deep.

Of course, if Romney were a corpse as yet unburied on the model of Bob Dole and John McCain, he would lose. If you do not all that much care whether you win or not, you will lose. But Romney wants to win. He is a man of vigor, and he has a wonderful case to make. He is a turn-around artist, and this country desperately needs turning around. Barack Obama has no argument to make. He can only promise more of the same -- yet another stimulus and higher taxes on the investing class. All that Romney has to do if he wants to win is to make himself presentable, and that should not be hard. He is handsome, tolerably well-spoken, and accomplished. If, in the debates, he stands up to the President, he will seem the more presidential of the two – and that will do the trick, as it did in 1980.

The question that everyone will pose to himself on the first Tuesday in November is this: “Do I want four more years of this?” And Romney can drive it home: “Do you want four more years of massive unemployment? Do you want four more years of food stamps? Do you want to lose the job that you have? Do you want to be out of work when you get out of college? Or do you want to see this country get moving again? Barack Obama took his shot – the stimulus bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank. And where has it left us? With the most anemic recovery in the history of this country!”

Romney can go on to speak of Obamacare. He can point to the corruption that Barack Obama brought from Chicago to Washington. He need only mention Solyndra and sound the theme of crony capitalism. Romney can also point to the President’s systematic misuse of the executive power – to defraud the salaried employees of Delphi and the bondholders of General Motors and Chrysler, to gut the welfare reform passed by New Gingrich and adopted by Bill Clinton, to let school systems out of No Child Left Behind, to sick the IRS on political enemies, to force people into unions, to encourage voter fraud, to deprive Catholics and other Christians of the free exercise of their religion. The list is long.

When the American people pause to pay attention, they will not vote for four more years of misery, four more years of corruption, four more years of lawlessness, four more years of race-baiting, and they will certainly not vote to embrace Obamacare.

If Romney wants to win really, really big, there are three things that he needs to do. First, he needs to tie his argument for paring back the administrative entitlements state back to first principles – back to the origins and purpose of government – and he needs to assert the necessity to return to limited government. What I am saying here is that he needs to occupy the moral high ground, to defend free enterprise not only as efficient but as right and just, and to criticize "spreading the wealth around" and taking from Peter to pay Paul as shameful and unjust. Politics is ultimately about justice, and justice should be his theme.

Second, he needs to force Obama to make errors. To this end, he needs to get under the President’s skin. He did this to Newt Gingrich in Florida, and it worked like a charm. Obama is even vainer than Newt, and he cannot stand mockery. Moreover, he hates Romney with all the resentment that phony intellectuals ordinarily harbor for successful businessmen. The gentler the mockery in this case, the lighter the touch, the more devastating it will be. Romney’s theme should be that the poor fellow is just not up to the job and that he should be left free to spend all of his time doing what he really enjoys -- playing golf. The SuperPACs may be able to carry the ball on this.

Third, when the debates come, he should do a Newt Gingrich. When one of the pundits asks a really stupid question that is of interest only to the credentialed elite (and this is inevitable), he should disembowel the man, asking him how he could waste the time of the American people on a matter of this sort when we are on the verge of a second recession and millions are looking for work. In the debates, the trick is to show strength – and nothing shows strength like a dramatic gesture of this sort. He might even find an opportunity to do this to Obama himself. It would be a knock-out blow. At some point, Romney needs to set aside his natural caution and timidity and go for the jugular.

In the meantime, you should not be afraid. This is going to be fun, and our margin of victory is going to be large.

 

[Jed]

So, Is the selection of Ryan as Romney's running mate considered a 'Tea Party Win' ?

 

[Edward Campbell]

So, Is the selection of Ryan as Romney's running mate considered a 'Tea Party Win' ?

In a way, yes.

According to what I have read/heard, the independent and, more importantly undecided share of the US electorate continues to shrink. That means that the loyalist, committed "base" is more important for each party. That's not a real problem for Obama: he is fairly left and so is his base. But Romney is still the subject of some mistrust, I think by the Tea Party folks and their fellow travelers. Paul Ryan is a Tea Party darling so he should help secure and, again more importantly, energize the GOP's base.

So, to the degree that Romney is pandering to the Tea Party types then, yes, it's a win for them.

 

[a_majoor]

The Republican Party establishment still has to come to grips with the meaning and nature of the TEA Party movement, and it seems they are still not on board. This article suggests the TEA Party movement activists will be expending most of their energy in the downline elections, working to get more TEA Party endorsed Senators, Congressmen, State representatives and Governors elected. While a very useful exercise in of itself (the turnaround of the newly Red states after 2010 is instructive), it also has the potential to set up discord between the presumptive Romney Administration and the Congress. Should President Obama win another term, a solid Republican Congress and a phalanx of Republican state houses will work to undo the effects of the first term and limit the "flexibility" he wants to exhibit in his presumptive second term.

As for the movement, I suspect they will continue to take over riding associations (or whatever the correct term in the United States is) and remove incumbents to replace them with their own choices. The Republican Party establishment needs to either align themselves more closely with the movement to build on the strength being exhibited, or close ranks and engage in a fight to the death (political scuicide, but the only way to maintain control of the GOP if that is their true goal).

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/08/12/Republican-Convention-Will-Be-No-Tea-Party.aspx#page1

Republican Convention Will Be No Tea Party

By SAMUEL P. JACOBS, Reuters
August 12, 2012

Since attorney Ted Cruz's victory in the Texas Republican primary for a Senate seat last week, Tea Party members across the country have been touting the strength of their conservative movement and its influence on the Republican Party. But don't expect much of a Tea Party celebration this month in Tampa, Florida, where beginning August 27 Republicans will hold their four-day national convention and formally recognize Mitt Romney as the party's presidential nominee.

Despite the continuing prominence of the loosely organized anti-tax, small-government movement that helped Republicans take over the U.S. House of Representatives two years ago, Tea Party activists and leaders say they are preparing for what amounts to a snub in Tampa.

The Tea Party continues to be a force in congressional and state elections, particularly in the South and Midwest. But Republicans' pending nomination of Romney – whose conservative credentials are questioned by many Tea Partiers – has led many in the movement to shift their focus from the presidential race. So when the nation's eyes are on Tampa this month, many Tea Party activists say their attention will be elsewhere, at dozens of state-level races where they say they can make a difference without having to hold their noses.

RELATED: 9 Tea Party Politicians Who Could Change the Senate

Some Tea Party members see the convention as an exhibition of the Republican Party at its back-scratching, favor-dealing worst. "The Tea Party is not about cool cocktail parties with (Republican Party) chairmen," said Adam Brandon, executive vice president of FreedomWorks, a Washington-based Tea Party group.

That the convention will seek to enhance Romney's credibility makes matters worse for some Tea Partiers, whose suspicions of the former Massachusetts governor revolve largely around his signing a healthcare overhaul in his state that became a model for the program that Democrat Barack Obama put into place nationally as president. "Obamacare," as it became known, requires most Americans to buy health insurance, and is a policy that most Tea Partiers view as a budget-busting violation of individual rights.

So even as Romney declared himself to be "severely conservative" in front of a Tea Party-infused crowd in Washington in February, Tea Party members spent most of the presidential primary season backing Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, and Newt Gingrich, former House of Representatives speaker, as more conservative alternatives.
While they prefer him to Obama, many Tea Partiers will not vote for Romney, said Judson Phillips, a Tea Party leader from Nashville, Tennessee, who puts that figure as high as "one-third to one-half" of Tea Party activists. He warns that such people could vote for other conservatives on their November 6 ballots but skip Romney. "He's got a real activist gap that he needs to make up."

LUKEWARM TOWARD ROMNEY

The Tea Party scored another win in a high-profile race on Tuesday when one of its candidates, Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, defeated two other Republicans for the right to face Democratic Senator Claire in November. Akin's victory, and Cruz's success in Texas, highlighted the Tea Party's ability to influence statewide races – a success it has not yet attained in a race for national office.

So in effect, Akin and Cruz have given some conservative activists a reason to channel-surf when the Republican convention is on TV this month.
Tea Party members say they will be investing most of their energy on state and local races this fall, gravitating toward Republicans such as Cruz, Akin, Indiana U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, and Nebraska U.S. Senate candidate Deb Fischer.

Read more at http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/08/12/Republican-Convention-Will-Be-No-Tea-Party.aspx#cFltQ4m9pEC0slKj.99

 

[Edward Campbell]

Indeed, and it is quite interesting to follow the rapid evolution of the TEA Party movement. The initial street protests against massive government spending was initially ignored, then slurred. TEA Party protesters attempting to engage their elected officials in "town hall" meetings rapidly discovered their elected officials were not interested in listening, and watching various tactics like filling the "town halls" by invitation only, bussing SEIU members to fill the halls, cancelling townhalls or moveing them to inconveinient locations (along with the endless slurring by the Legacy Media) convinced many that they needed to take over the process themselves. The 2010 midterms were totally amazing in the speed at which TEA Party movments took over various Republican "riding associations" (sorry, forgot the American term) and ejected sitting incumbents in some cases, and rolled establishment candidates for nomination in other cases, culminating in a remarkable victory not only in the House, but also a great many downline races at the State level.

The movement has now had three years to organize and grow, and from what I have read and heard, the movement is busy attempting to repeat its success, only they [the Tea Party folks] are now trying to win the entire electoral process from POTUS to the city dogcatcher. Simple time/space/distance considerations suggest this is not possible all the way up and downline, but the determined effort being put in place is changing the electoral landscape, and it is very possible the TEA Party movement will have elected enough people in enough jurisdictions to make a real and substancial change (the Newly Red states swept in the 2010 elections are seeing economic recovery due to the new Governor and State legislators enacting a TEA Party like economic platform of lower spending and freezing or reducing taxes and regulation, success should breed a certain momentum as well).

The American analogy which I liken this to is the raid eclipse of the Whig Party in the mid 1800's and its replacement by the Republican Party. The Whig establishment had no answers to the economic and political issues of the time, and were seemingly not too interested in what their supporters had to say about the issue. The end result was a rush of former supporters to the new party. The GOP in its current form is in a similar state, and the GOP "establishment" may find itself swept away for the same reasons.

Well, here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail is an ... interesting is, I guess, the right word ... report on one conservative candidate in one local race:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/worldview/texas-judge-warns-of-civil-war-if-obama-re-elected/article4504647/

Texas judge warns of ‘civil war’ if Obama re-elected

PAUL KORING
Washington — The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Aug. 28 2012

Not many Republicans call for tax hikes.

But County Judge Tom Head, the senior elected official in Lubbock, Texas, has a very good reason.

The city, he says, needs more armed police to back the judge when he takes on the hordes of United Nations troops poised to invade America.

Judge Head, a police veteran himself, is girding for war. “I’ll stand in front of their personnel carriers and say, ‘You’re not coming in here,’” he told a local television station, igniting a furor that has spread like a Texas grass fire.

In a nutshell, here’s what worries Judge Head, who also leads Lubbock’s emergency preparedness unit and must plan for everything from tornadoes to civil strife: Should President Barack Obama win another four years in the Oval Office, the president will “hand over sovereignty of the United Sates to the UN,” Judge Head explained in a televised interview. And like any forward-thinking emergency planner, Judge Head wants to be ready for the ensuing bloodbath.

“I’m thinking worst-case scenario – civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe,” as U.S. citizens rise up to defend the nation, the judge continued. “And we’re not talking just a few riots here and demonstrations. We’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy,” he added. At that point, in Judge Head’s scenario, the beleaguered president will “send in UN troops” to crush American (and Texan) patriots.

Which brings us back to the tax hike and the looming risk of armed confrontation on the outskirts of Lubbock.

“I don’t want them in Lubbock County,” Judge Head said of the foreign invaders. But nor does he want to face the blue-helmeted hordes alone. “I don’t want a bunch of rookies back there who have no training and little equipment. I want seasoned, veteran people who are trained that have got equipment,” which, he said, justifies the need for a sales tax hike.

Even the addition of some tough Texas lawmen may not be enough. “You know, we may have two or three hundred deputies facing maybe a thousand UN troops. We may have to call out the militia,” Judge Head warned.

Democrats, fairly rare in West Texas, called on the judge to stand down, claiming his impartiality had been compromised. But Judge Head, who has had a long public service career, dismissed suggestions that he should quit. However, the former PTA president whose biography says he serves on the “Board of Elders at Church on the Rock,” attempted to quell the brouhaha, saying his comments had been taken out of context.

He was, he insisted, talking only of worst-case scenarios.

Still in New York, headquarters of the troop-less United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman Martin Nesirky said it was “absolutely ridiculous” when asked about invasion plans.

Gilbert Flores, one of the few elected Democrats in Lubbock, lampooned Judge Head, told CNN: “He’s a six-pack short of a full case of beer, if you know what I mean.” The Texas Democratic Party was only slightly more polite. “This nonsense is what passes for mainstream in today’s Republican Party,” it said in a statement.

But the judge has plenty of backers.

“I support Tom Head and the worst-case scenario he spoke of,” wrote Carol Williams in a letter to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, where a spirited debate continues. “President Obama has already allowed the government to take over the auto industry, the banking industry, the medical industry, regulating Wall Street, and has defied the Constitution several times with executive orders .... if he wins a second term he will be unleashed to do whatever he wants.”

Meanwhile, some have delighted in poking fun at the discomfort felt by many in Lubbock.

“Judge Tom Head’s keen insights have brought unwanted attention to our operations, so we will have to accelerate the plans,” warned an alien commander posing as a Patrick Anderson of San Francisco in another letter ruefully published by the Avalanche-Journal.

“He only got part of it right. Even as you read this, a number of fighter craft are fanning out from our Mother Ship, which is orbiting Earth under the cover of an anti-radar shield. We had planned to swoop down to conquer the U.S. the moment Obama’s re-election was certified. (He’s one of us, you know; we planted that birth certificate in Honolulu decades ago in preparation for this moment.) But now we can’t wait until November.”

Good luck with that.

 

[cupper]

Poll: Tea Party Less Popular Than Muslims, Atheists, 21 Other Groups

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/17/297731/poll-tea-party-muslims/?mobile=nc

The debt ceiling deal has left the Tea Party more disliked than ever, as a recent New York Times poll shows. In April, 2010, 21 percent of Americans approved of the Tea Party while 18 percent disapproved of it. Now, 20 percent approve while a stunning 40 percent disapprove of it. Ironically, the conservative movement is now more unpopular than two often-marginalized groups it sometimes rails against — Muslims and atheists — and is the least popular of the 23 groups the poll asked about:

    The Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I suppose with about 40% of the electorate identifying as "Democrat", you'd get at least 40% disapproving of the Tea Party.

Does anyone run through such sh!t in their own minds to give it a "sniff test" before triumphantly posting it?

 

[cupper]

I suppose with about 40% of the electorate identifying as "Democrat", you'd get at least 40% disapproving of the Tea Party.

Does anyone run through such sh!t in their own minds to give it a "sniff test" before triumphantly posting it?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/17/the-most-unpopular-group-in-america.html

Apparently not.  :nana: