Conservatives

It's the willful ignorance: No, tea baggers believe stupid shit because they want to. It's willful ignorance. They spin outrageous theories because they know that the naked truth about what they believe would make them look like giant bigots and big meanies. So, instead of saying, "I don't want health care reform because I like a system where poor people are shut out because that means I don't have to see them in my doctor's office," they start yelling about the slide into socialism. Instead of saying, "I'm an incredibly selfish person who wants to keep my government-funded Medicare, but…

Maybe I should have worn this hat? I was going to write a magnus opus about the Tea Bugger rally on the Boston Common on Wednesday. But, as we used to say in more civilized times, meh. Basically, there was an hour of some really schlocky pseudo-patriotic music, wherein every third word was freedom (FREEE-DOM! Gives the whole notion of freedom a bad name). Then between 'songs', we would be regaled with stories of heroic sacrifices by soldiers, followed by other sentences that were heavy with "freedom" and "amen." Because opposing taxes on the wealthiest is just like storming the beaches…

I'll have more to say about the rally tomorrow (short version: as was said in more civilized times, meh.). But I think it's worth noting that the Tea Partyers are even more wingnutty than Digby thinks: 1) The NY Times poll graphic compares Tea Buggers with all respondents. But keep in mind that the real Americans Tea Buggers are 18 percent of the total sample. So.... 2) Race, not in the form of lynching, but in the belief that blacks are social parasites is a huge difference. When asked, "In recent years, has too much been made of the problems facing black people?", 52% of Tea Buggers…

Having just returned from the Tea Bugger/Palin rally on the Boston Common (abridged version: It's just the same shitheads that have been making the rest of us miserable for the last thirty years, only with a new name), I came across this superb post by Lance Mannion (italics original, boldface mine): Grammer doesn't live as if he believes in his own political views.... Grammer doesn't live anything like a Republican-approved lifestyle. He lives the life of the sort of big city liberal Republicans affect to despise. And as far as I know he's quite happy with that life and has no plans to…

Digby brilliantly snarks what I've been trying to describe for a while about the Tea Buggers: ...if you just remove the poor blacks from the equation it would be clear to everyone that America doesn't like Obama. Now, this isn't about race, mind you, not at all. It's about resistance to all these lazy blacks living off the dole which their black socialist President is funding by stealing money from hardworking whites. Why everyone has to bring race into it all the time is beyond me. You have to understand that African Americans aren't loyal to Obama because of his history making role as the…

If you haven't heard by now, a Fulton, Mississippi high school student who wanted to bring her same-sex date to the high school prom was tricked and 'invited' to a 'special event': McMillen tells The Advocate that a parent-organized prom happened behind her back -- she and her date were sent to a Friday night event at a country club in Fulton, Miss., that attracted only five other students. Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn't much to keep an eye on. "They had two proms and I was only invited to one of them," McMillen says. "The one that I went to…

Republicans are in a bit of a bind regarding the U.S. Census. In the past, they have opposed "statistical sampling", which would readjust the Census results to account for undersampled groups, such as the poor and minorities, which typically vote Democratic. In fact, congressional Republicans made Obama's Census director pinky-swear not to do this, and he did: Robert Groves, director of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center and a former Census Bureau official, is an expert on statistical sampling, the practice of extrapolating a larger population from a smaller slice of it.…

Since healthcare is temporarily off the radar screen, despite Republican attempts to have Romneycare declared unconstitutional (how Romneycare would be unconstitutional, but Medicare wouldn't, well, that would be fun...), we can now return to the never-ending attempt by conservatives to gut Social Security. One of the key figures and bankrollers in that attempt is financier Peter Peterson. By key, I mean that he has spent around one billion dollars financing the Peterson Foundation, which advocates various 'fiscal responsibility' measures (i.e., making Granny eat cat food) and slashing…

Granted, the healthcare reform bill is an improvement, at least for the poor Republican welfare states of the South (and they're 'real' Americans too!), but, as I've said before, this is a conservative, not centrist, healthcare plan. Brad DeLong: ...the essence of the reform -- which is that the insurance market has been restructured to remove those adverse-selection and moral-hazard problems that have broken our private insurance-based health-financing system.... The conservative DNA of ObamaCare is hardly a secret. "The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's…

There's nothing like the prospect of a black person receiving a government service to rile up the Republican base. Anyone who has spent extended time in the South, when listening to the Tea Partyers, has heard this ugly, racist dogwhistle. But with the possible passage of Romneycare--for people who aren't white, too!--which apparently portends The Demise of Western Civilization As We Know It, all bets are off (italics mine): Abusive, derogatory and even racist behavior directed at House Democrats by Tea Party protesters on Saturday left several lawmakers in shock. Preceding the president's…

Right wing TV bloviators oppose scientific research. And in other news, dog bites man. By way of Bug Girl, I came across this story about Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson opposing the use of $187,632 of stimulus money to buy storage cabinets for Michigan State University's Albert J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection which houses over 1 million insects collected over 143 years: Fox News host Sean Hannity launched a series of "investigative" reports this week, in which he claims he will reveal oodles of wasteful stimulus spending by the Obama administration. In his first report, Hannity and…

Friday, The NY Times reported on Greece's ongoing financial troubles. There is something to be said for discussing whether pensions should begin at age 50--it touches on economics, social values, and so on. But then the reporter refers to some 'analysis' by the Cato Institute: According to research by Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, bringing Greece's pension obligations onto its balance sheet would show that the government's debt is in reality equal to 875 percent of its gross domestic product, which is the broadest measure of a nation's economic output…

I don't know what's worse: that Republican congressman Paul Ryan is viewed as intelligent, or that if the Democrats lose the House, he could be driving economic policy. Not surprisingly, Congressman Ryan has proposed a tax plan that would lower revenues overall (Republicans talk about lower deficits--in practice, they do the opposite); the plan slashes income taxes and institutes a value-added tax (VAT). What is remarkable is that, for 80% of the country, individual tax burdens would increase. You'll never guess which end of the income spectrum those eighty percent fall into: Leaving…

One of Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown's campaign gimmicks was to drive everywhere in a pickup truck, thereby 'proving' that he's a regular guy (never mind that he's very wealthy). One wonders what would have happened to Scott's image had the Coakley campaign stumbled across this little sartorial tidbit (by way of Rumproast; italics mine): Arianna told me that he showed up for his first real date with her mother, Gail Huff, a TV newscaster to whom he has been married for more than 23 years, in pink leather shorts. It's family lore. The pinkish color drained from his face when I…

By way of Brad DeLong, I came across this post by Adam Samwick that expresses puzzlement over why Republican healthcare obstructionism hasn't hurt Republicans (or so it would seem; italics mine): You don't succeed as a political party by denying other political parties the opportunity to craft policy that serves their constituents. You succeed as a political party when you craft policy that serves your constituents. Actually, for the Palinist Right, which has taken over the Republican Party, that's not true at all. For the Palinists, politics is never about policy, but a politics of…

It would appear that the Coalition of the Sane is beginning to reassert itself--if only by a one percent margin (italics mine): The surprising result of the night came from the State Board of Education District 9 Republican primary, as Thomas Ratliff defeated incumbent and former SBOE Chairman Don McLeroy. This particular campaign actually received national attention, as McLeroy received notoriety criticizing evolution and comprehensive sex education. During the campaign Ratliff presented himself as a moderate alternative, and McLeroy actually used that term as why the constituents of…

A couple of weeks ago, The Washington Post ran a piece by Gerard Alexander about how liberals are condescending towards conservative ideas, because those ideas suck ass. With that, by way of Digby, I give you a speaker from CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference): At CPAC this morning, Young America's Foundation spokesman Jason Mattera kicked off his speech by suggesting progressives are ugly, rambling, druggies: MATTERA: It's always a delight to participate in CPAC. This is like our Woodstock. Except, unlike the left gathering, our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences…

I guess this is what a libertarian paradise looks like: COLORADO SPRINGS -- This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric. More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops -- dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled. The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack…

...the money. Over at Pandagon, Jesse Taylor, on the subject of the Focus on the Family anti-legal and safe abortion ad, asks (italics mine): The question is instead this: if the anti-choice position is so true, so mainstream and so critical to the future of our nation, why did Focus on the Family spend $2.5 million to avoid saying anything whatsoever about it? Pam Tebow's lines were all oblique references to her choice not to have an abortion, but if FotF felt the need to couch her story in such coded and oblique terms that it could have been an ad for Wii Family, doesn't that say…

A recent question posed by NY Times columnist demonstrates just how far to the Palinist right our political and social discourse has shifted: I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to…