If it works, break it.
I would become farts of flowers, farts of weeds, farts of trees,
bubbling farts of stagnant ponds.
Seoul. Chicago. Denver.
reader(s)
we hear the broken electorate voices of liberty checked by the executive privilege of a president who has not enough respect for the free market individuals and our prosperity and we will do what we can to stop it, god bless america.
This is pretty funny. The Tea Party Nation claims to be the authentic TEA Party movement in order to distance themselves from Tea Party Express, which is funded by wealthy capitalists. Since tumblr is dildos today, I thought it was appropriate to post their recent call to action. It’s a hoot.
“I’m on strike!” - Ellis Wyatt, from the end of the movie “Atlas Shrugged, Part 1”, based on the novel by Ayn Rand
Resolved that: The Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate, in alliance with a global Progressive socialist movement, have participated in what appears to be a globalist socialist agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic’s heritage of individual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism.
Resolved that: President Obama has seized what amount to dictatorial powers to bypass our Congress, and that because the Congress is controlled by a Progressive socialist Senate that will not impeach one of their kind, they have allowed this and yielded what are rightfully congressional powers to this new dictator.
Resolved that: By their agenda and actions, those in our government who swore oaths to protect and defend our Constitution have committed treason against the United States.
Resolved that: The current administration and Democrat majority in the Senate, in conjunction with Progressive socialists from all around the country, especially those from Hollywood and the left leaning news media ( Indeed, most of the news media. ) have worked in unison to advance an anti-business, an anti-free market, and an anti-capitalist ( anti-individual rights and property ownership ) agenda.
Resolved that: These same factions expect that, by carrying out a radical anti-business agenda, which includes the passage and inflicting of Obama”Care” on our nation, class warfare and redistribution of wealth, and expanding the government, while killing businesses in this country with an environment hostile to business, including excessive regulations ( the average business must now spend about $11,700 per year per employee to comply with government regulations! ), and by borrowing and wasting more money than has been spent in the entire previous existence of our republic, that they will “create jobs”, when in fact all they have “created” have been government jobs that consume wealth, and don’t “create” it.
Resolved that: Our President, the Democrats-Socialists, most of the media, and most of those from Hollywood, have now encouraged and supported “Occupy” demonstrations in our streets, which are now being perpetrated across the globe, and which are being populated by various marxists, socialists and even communists, and are protesting against business, private property ownership and capitalism, something I thought I’d never see in my country, in my lifetime.
I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.
I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased.
“I’m on strike!”
VIP State Health Care Exposed, or “GOP Tea Party Hypocrisy of the Day”
Last year, political neophyte Rick Scott spent $73 million of his own money to bring the tea party’s anti-government, pro-privatization agenda to the Florida governor’s office. Today, the former executive pays just $30 a month for health care—and lets taxpayers cover the rest…
Scott and his dependents pay one-fifth what a janitor in the state Capitol pays for health insurance… and less than 3 percent of what a retired state trooper pays for life-saving coverage.
(Source: Mother Jones)
I wonder if the American right wing has any idea what they mean by entitlements.
I don’t think they understand what happens if we continue to strip the substance from social security, medicare and medicaid (among all the other “entitlement” programs.) Who is going to take care of the costs the elderly, sick and unemployed create when the government ceases to provide money for them to spend on necessary services? Their families and closest friends will bear the responsibility. In other words, we’ll create another problem: younger Americans will have less money to save for their own future retirements, less money to spend on housing and home improvement, less money to spend on travel and in cafes and restaurants, less money to spend on automobiles, less money to spend on textiles like clothing.
The Republicans should be a little more honest. Entitlement spending is a distraction. American conservatives and capitalist Libertarians want to shift the burden to individual tax payers from the government. So the tax is never really lessened because the costs are actually still there. But these costs we argue about cost less for the wealthy and more for the poor. That’s a fact.
Conservatives only have two ideas: reduce taxes and shrink government. When you reduce taxes you decrease spending on welfare and infrastructure without reducing the demand for either. Who, then, must bear the burden of the cost for both?
This is where conservative policy fails to think, purposefully misleads and is stupid and unproductive. Liberal policy is not much better, but liberals are never going to dismantle social welfare under the guise of creating greater freedom.
Freedom Works’ Tea Party sponsor and all around happy, healthy and satisfied rich man, Dick Armey, wants you to know he supports dismantling Medicare because “[he’s] perfectly capable of having my own health insurance, that which [he’s] had all [his] life.”
Go figure! Right? Another rich, white guy on a TV show proclaiming “I’m Satisfied! What’s all the complaining about?!” After all, Armey has the liberty to buy the things he needs to be happy and healthy without government interference. We should all want that, shouldn’t we? It’s just common sense. Afford, you say? Whatever do you mean? That word isn’t in his American Libertarian Heritage Dictionary of The Liberal Social Order.
Libertarian rhetoric about state coercion should fail to impress anybody with half a brain. It’s a rhetoric willfully unable to observe everyday life in a market because it’s fundamentally unwilling to permit critical thought about states of being. The entire libertarian foundation is built on an ideal individual who has never existed, can never exist. It’s a dogmatic view that denies paradox and difference. (You know, it’s no wonder that their always calling their opposition communists. They’re simply projecting.) In addition, coercion is one dimensional. But that’s capitalism, isn’t it? A one-dimensional market that socially organizes one-dimensional human beings without producing space for feedback that informs it’s actions.
Free market reality under capitalist order assumes being poor means incorrect being—assigns the flawed state of being to an individual’s character and habit. The reality is that being poor means being without choice. Poverty, in this way, is coercion. American Libertarians—I guess Armey wants people to believe he’s a libertarian now—aren’t interested in this and write it out of their constitution of liberty. In the libertarian utopia, poverty is a result of poor choices and weakness, not coercive market forces concentrating wealth among the property and business owners.
Check out this clip and discuss.
Apparently they are taxed enough already.
to tax (verb) to lay a burden on; make serious demands on: to tax one’s resources.
Tea Party Rallies Significantly Smaller. from Think Progress.
– Albuquerque, NM: From “thousands” in 2010 to “dozens” in 2011.
– Boston, MA: From “several thousand” in 2010 to 300 in 2011. While last year’s rally featured Sarah Palin, this year’s featured Tim Pawlenty.
– Chicago, IL: From “at least 1,500” in 2010 to “[s]everal hundred” in 2011.
– Columbia, SC: From “more than 1,000” in 2010 to “a paltry 300” in 2011, even though this year’s rally featured Tea Party favorite Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) while last year’s featured disgraced former governor Mark Sanford.
– Denver, CO: From 2,000 in 2010 to “hundreds” in 2011. Friday’s rally was “nothing like the thousands who mobbed the Capitol lawn in previous years,” the AP noted.
– Des Moines, IA: From 700 in 2010 to 340 in 2011. 2009′s rally drew 3,000.
– Hartford, CT: From 1,200 in 2010 to 700 in 2011, even though Hartford was the only city hosting rallies this year, while there were rallies in three Connecticut cities last year.
– Indianapolis, IN: From 2,000 in 2010 to “hundreds” in 2011.
– Lansing, MI: From “more than 1,000” in 2010 to 300 in 2011 in front of Michigan’s Capitol. In 2009, a rally at the same spot drew 4,000.
– Pittsburgh, PA: From 2,000 in 2010 to 500 in 2011.
– Sacramento, CA: From “2,000 to 3,000” in 2010 to a “light turnout” of several dozen. 2009′s tax day rally at the Capitol brought out 5,000.
– St. Paul, MN: From “more than 500” in 2010 to “dozens” in 2011.
– Tulsa, OK: From “several thousand” in 2010 to “less than 30” in 2011. “The turnout was a far cry from the 5,000 who showed up to a similar event on April 15 two years ago outside the Capitol,” the Tulsa World notes.
Notes from my reading of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty:
Hayek would be outraged at the Tea Party and its constituents.
I’m not at all comfortable with Hayek’s introduction to the book, which reads like he set-up the discussion to prove liberalism flawed rather than to honestly explore liberty and freedom.
In particular, I don’t like the transition between points 4 and 5 in Chapter One, “Liberty and Liberties”. He writes:
4. … Such recognized intellectual leaders of the “progressives” as J.R. Commons and John Dewey have spread an ideology in which “liberty is power, effective power to do specific things” and the “demand of liberty is the demand for power,” while the absence of coercion is merely “the negative side of freedom” and “is to be prized only as a means to Freedom which is power.”
5. This confusion of liberty as power with liberty in its original meaning inevitably leads to the identification of liberty with wealth; and this makes it possible to exploit all the appeal which the word “liberty” carries in the support for a demand for the redistribution of wealth.
This transition permits him to assign left wing association of liberty and power to a desire to accumulate wealth. In my opinion, this is Hayek at his least self-critical, least self-aware. His desire to denigrate the left wing (often hidden as a critique of liberalism and/or progressives) is apparent as he implements insipid anti-progressive propaganda in the important foundations of his argument. Built-in to his definitions is the implicature that liberalism is wealth obsessed, that what the left actually wants is the wealth, that what progressives do is radically redistribute wealth, that what liberals will do, if liberalism is heeded, is to come for your money.
When I go on about how libertarianism is horseshit, this is what I’m talking about. I find Hayek to be utterly insincere here. His arguments are so well-composed, I cannot think that this was a mistake. It’s one thing to criticize liberalism. Indeed his observations about the way we think about and use the words free, freedom and liberty are instructive and useful. But this uncritical transition from liberty as power to the identification of liberty with wealth is problematic. Not because it hasn’t ever been the case, but because of how it permits him to suggest that it leads to a call for redistribution of wealth. Never mind the use of a very old trope about radicalized poor people organizing to come for your money, what we can say of the left wing is that any calls to redistribute wealth result from a poorly defined sense of liberty.
It seems wrong to me. And I think he knew it.
The Tea Party: They’re mad as hell and their not letting Andrew Breitbart take it any more for them.
What’s hilarious about a guy like Andrew Breitbart is his fans. Nobody with a brain and an ounce of now-how would permit a douchebag like Breitbart to scream meaningless, hateful, paranoid shit at his opponents and on their behalf. WTF, Tea Party!? A bunch of clowns. And their rallies get smaller and smaller. Still full of old people, apparently.
Andrew Breitbart to Wisconsin Labor Activists: “Go to hell. No serious. Go to hell. Go to hell.”
You first, buddy.
(via pantslessprogressive)
When you watch the news about the tea bagger rally labor protest in Wisconsin, remember that things always sound better when you get the audio from the soundboard.
When you’re in the crowd, reality is often less kind than media represents. Leave it to the Tea Party to claim victory when they’ve only become further marginalized. Andrew Breitbart sure can polish a white power turd, can’t he.
Glenn Beck & Sarah Palin - Live (REMIX) (by 1librarian1)
Don’t be misled. The Paul Ryan Presents Ayn Rand’s Path to Prosperity is what we might call an ideal benchmark for the corporatist conservatives in the GOP. It’s meant to fuse the wishlists of idiot Tea Party members with asshole Libertarians. As bad as it is, it will be used to make the poorly received Deficit Commission proposal look moderate—sane, even.
That’s what’s up. How do you make the changes the Deficit Commission suggested look good so soon after the Commission’s report was so poorly received? Paul Ryan’s plan makes it look good.
The entire discourse gets to shift right. Obama has a strong base of Democrats that support everything he does. He has a habit of ignoring his progressive supporters. When was the last time you heard anything about our Progressive Caucus? And you’re not likely to hear from them either. The media won’t cover it. The President won’t address it.
I don’t know what we can call Democrats liberal. Yeah, in the sense that liberal means being willing to work within the traditional social and governmental framework to achieve change and transformation, I guess liberal applies. On the other hand, we might consider referring to Democrats as members of America’s liberal conservative party. I like how it sounds contradictory. Suits them.
When I’m asked, “What’s wrong with Sarah Palin?” My answer is always the same. “Who gives a shit?”
In the end, you cannot take her seriously. Nobody should. She’s entertaining, though. She sells books. She’s profitable.
Don’t drink the Kool Aid on the Palin Matter. The mainstream liberal movement loves to complain that we shouldn’t dismiss her. Well, now they’re talking Bachmann. Regardless, the conservative movement already has dismissed her. She’s being used merely to wrangle the far right, to remind them of the bargain they’ve made with the mainstream conservative movement.
If you want to know a conservative to worry about, you might want to look closer to home—at somebody like President Obama. There’s a dangerous conservative, for you. He’s a guy who can convince the liberal establishment that shitty cuts in the budget are the most historic thing ever!
UPDATED:
Here’s something of a warrant for my claim. The right wing disagrees with everything Obama does. Not for smart reasons, necessarily, and mostly because he’s a Democrat. That’s the right for you. Similarly, Obama can always depend on the majority of his base and independents to support him. You might think about this for a minute. It takes a minute or two to sink in, but once you get it and see it, you won’t see him or the base in the same way ever again.
Stumped? Well, Obama’s base is just about as unthinking as the right wing that knee-jerks disagreement with the first black socialist President of the United States. And Obama knows it. Counts on it. Banks on it. Votes on it. Likely, bargains with it, since Republicans certainly understand it. And the thing is, there are more in Obama’s base than there are in the Republicans far right peanut gallery, which is why they invest so much in it—see the tea party and FoxNews and most of AM radio.
My question is: WHERE IS THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT? Well, we’re hear, we’re just ignored. Obama doesn’t like us, nor does his party. Never has. We’re tolerated.
Anyway, here’s the Yglesias blog on Think Progress with the numbers, and my warrant:
Barack Obama continues to deliver results that his electoral base likes:
“A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday indicates that the budget agreement that prevented a government shutdown is popular, with Americans supporting it by a 58 to 38 percent margin. But there’s a partisan divide, with two-thirds of Democrats and a majority of independent voters backing the deal, and Republicans divided.”
It’s important for people to be clear on the asymmetries of American politics. Strongly identified conservatives are the base of the Republican Party, in a way that strongly identified progressives just aren’t the base of the Democratic Party. My guess is that just about anything Barack Obama does will be met with approval by most Democrats. Naturally that ends up skewing the landscape in terms of outcomes.
