Tea Parties Spread across Nation

Discussion in 'Politics' started by madanthonywayne, Apr 16, 2009.

  1. Roman Banned Banned

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    Bolded your problem.
     
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  3. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    Would you Republicans please learn how to organize/participate in a sincere populist movement? Lamer amatuer teabagging noobs.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    He was re-elected in '04 after his agenda had become perfectly clear to anyone who actually believed the assertions in any of the speeches written for him, who couldn't be bothered to peruse his career accomplishments and consistent lifelong record of behavior prior to '00.

    And this Fox Party teabagging crowd, apparently even now not encumbered with archaic notions of dignity or aspirations to adult political thought, eight years later unable to release their grip on their ankles, voted for him both times.
     
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  7. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    I don't see how anyone could be opposed to the tea parties. Unless, of course, they oppose freedom.
     
  8. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

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    The tea parties sort of remind me of protests in North Korea organized by "Dear leader" Kim Jong-il.

    When Fox organizes a protest and pretends that it is a grass roots led protest the phonyness of the event creates the backlash against it.

    Fox and the Republicans want to sucker the weaker thinking among Libertarians, and Democrats and independents with Libertarian tendencies back into their coalition.

    These Tea Parties are not about freedom. They are about trying to win power back for the Republicans by building a new and improved coalition of Dittohead zombies.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2009
  9. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    "I don't see how anyone could be opposed to the tea parties. Unless, of course, they oppose freedom."

    Don't leave out "Commies" (we could be commies).
     
  10. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    And state communism is anti-freedom. Marxism is compatible with the free market (if free individuals voluntarily choose to pool their resources and do this and that, that's fine)

    State communism is forced on everyone, though, and that's not voluntary or free.


    And we need the Republican party........to go away!

    They are NOT free market, not even close. They are corporatists. We need the Libertarian party.
     
  11. Repo Man Valued Senior Member

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  12. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    You can be opposed to the tea parties without being against the right of the people to have them. That people have the right to speak doesn't make everything they have to say a good idea. Criticizing the teas parties' message is not the same as opposing people's freedom to have them. The fact is that even otherwise intelligent people are making allusions to the American Revolution and suggesting that there is "taxation without representation" going on and that the government spending they disagree with is "tyranny." It suggests that they do not understand the American Revolution, and what was meant by those terms in that conflict. The governor of South Carolina was talking about "watering the tree of liberty", which alludes to Jefferson's line that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots. I have to assume he understands that he was suggesting an armed conflict with the United States government (since the alternative is that he is not very well educated, or is well educated and not very bright).

    I can understand why people were up in crazy arms over the Iraq War. As over the top as those protesters were, people were dying in that conflict, so passion in the face of that disagreement made sense. Here, the passion is all about a conflict between economic ideologies (that in the grand scheme of things are not all that far apart), and conservatives are frequently using metaphors that suggest a life or death struggle or a conflict "for the soul of America."

    Sorry, but passion in this context makes them sound overwrought and silly, if not outright stupid.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2009
  13. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    I was referring to being opposed to what they are saying

    What are they saying? No more nonsense. No more theft. No more government butting in. Bailouts at every corner; new layers of new taxes. It's ridiculous. Time to let us decide and interact on our own.

    Marxism is where everyone is equal. Equally poor. It is where all people share....in the poverty.
     
  14. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    No, they are saying that this spending is bad, but spending on things they like (such as the Iraq War) never moved their asses off the couch. Their complaint is about how money being spend, not merely that it is being spent. As to your specific points:

    Could you be less specific? This is meaningless without specifics and likely subsumed entirely by your other points.

    There is no theft involved in the things they are protesting, unless one counts all taxation as theft (and even then taxes are not going up yet, so they must be protesting future theft).

    I assume you mean in the economy. That's fine, save that most economists disagree and would tell you that that is the road to severe economic downturns that make the current problems look pretty cushy. These people don't want the government involved and that is a fair point for them to make, however, they lost the election. People who do want government involvement won the election. There will be a new election in two years.

    Many stated that we can't spend our way our of the recession, but they seem to not understand that the recession was not caused by the existing deficit, and that standard economic theory suggests that one can in fact spend one's way out of a recession. Having the tea party attendees tell you how to fix the economy is like asking my grandmother's knitting circle how to build a nuclear reactor. They may have subjective opinions, but they have no training or experience that renders those opinions credible or the advice useful. Meanwhile, they are *not* saying how to fix the economy...not really...they are just whining that they don't want to pay for it.

    Again, that is fair enough, and in two years they can go to the polls and turn their free-riding opinions into votes, that might squelch economic reforms.

    What you are not mentioning is talk of secession from the United States, talk of "revolution" (which sounds better than 'rebellion' and a lot better than 'treason') and of this being the last chance to avoid "tyranny." You are not mentioning the people who talk of fearing for the continued existence of the United States, as if it may evaporate in the next four years, or those who suggested that their fear that freedom will be lost. Several times I have seen people quoting Thomas Paine. Whtat they fail to note was that the British was (to engage in tremendous understatement) *way fucking worse* than what is going on now. The British were closing off ports were there was dissent, trying people without juries, breaking into people's homes, taking their stuff, forbidding them to assebl;e or speak out in ways that opposed the crown and generally making life hard for people. If nothing else, the Administration clearly wants to do right by people, which was not the case with the British.

    So, because these people are (willfully or not) ignorant of history, they liken this to the American Revolution and you have them taking odd positions like warrantless wiretaps being run against Americans *not* threatening liberty, but their believing that spending money on automakers does.

    Some, mostly libertarians, were against both, but in the case of GOP elements in the crowd, it's just political sour grapes because they wish they had won last November.
     
  15. stereologist Escapee from Dr Moreau Registered Senior Member

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    I heard a good joke on the radio today. It says Obama is teaching his dog to beg, to beg for a trillion dollars!
     
  16. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    The Iraq war was supported by the vast majority of the American people at its inception. It's not too surprising that, having supported the war initially, not too many people complained about its funding. To do so would have been hypocritical. Furthermore, at least at the war's inception, our deficit wasn't too bad. However, after years of war and now an economic crisis, Obama is doubling down on the spending leading to unprecented deficits as far as the eye can see. His projected deficit for this year alone is equal to the entire debt for the US up to about 1985 (that's more than halfway thru the much lamented deficit spending of the Reagan administration, plus all other preceeding administrations). How can that be substainable?

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    While it's true that most tea party attendee's lack a degree in economics and may have no understanding of Keynesian economics, they do have an intuitive understanding of the fact that you simply can't continually spend more than you produce. And no matter what fancy economic terms or jargon you use, you can't escape that fact.
    Jefferson said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. These people are letting Obama et al know that they're watching his ass. That they don't trust him. That they are suspicious of his motives and his methods.

    Kind of how the left treated Bush these last several years. This is how our nation is supposed to work. Ambition working against ambition. The party out of party watches the party in power (although, of course, the founding fathers didn't really favor parties).
    Give me a fuckin' break. How in the hell can you know what's in Obama's heart? Or King George's? And, regardless of their intentions, we all know what the road to hell is paved with.
    So what? Is is somehow now a sin for different political groups to join forces when they all (for whatever reason) share a common goal? Is it now a crime for such coalitions to attend rallies to have their combined voices heard?
     
  17. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    No fucking breaks will be given for irrational fears. How can I know their hearts, I can't, but I can draw inferences from their policies. If you think the American people today are living with the same level of oppression that they were in 1774, then that is just irrational.

    Never said it was, BUT the right to free speech is not the right to "free speech and no criticism." When people freely open up their mouths they can't recoil when other people make fun of them for what they say. You want free speech for the tea party goers, and I support that, I also want free speech for their critics. Some who support the tea parties want to demonize critics as being anti-free speech. Oh the irony.

    A disproportionate number of the speakers I have seen (which may not be a representative sample) say things that sggest either an attempt to distort American history, or a woeful ignorance of it. Worse, they abandon all rationality, both claiming to want to support the troops and love the United States and to want to rebel against it and not pay their taxes. We established long ago that you do not get to pick and choose which government programs your tax dollars support, save through elections. If they want to get together and say that our spending priorities are wrong, have at it, but that hardly the same as "OMG, America is teh fascist!"

    They should expect criticism for spewing crap like that, just like International ANSWER deserved at its rallies.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2009
  18. Repo Man Valued Senior Member

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  19. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

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    Revenues are down. Obama is not hiding as much spending off budget as Bush did, but even so real budget deficits bigger than ever. Keynes would have had us build surpluses so that we could deficit spend in a time like this but that did not happen. I give up; Reaganomics wins, deficits don't matter because we are just going to print them away in 2020.

    shadowstats.com/article/gaap-based-federal-deficit
     
  20. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Let 'em claw each other's eyes out?

    Source: Drawing Power
    Link: http://blog.seattlepi.com/davidhorsey/archives/166572.asp
    Title: "The illogic of Hannity and the tea party protesters", by David Horsey
    Date: April 15, 2009

    There are essentially two competing views on the recent teabagging orgy. One casts the event as one of those great, mythical moments in American history, invoking the Founding Fathers and recalling, obviously, the original Boston Tea Party. The other sees a bunch of Republicans attempting to co-opt a Libertarian idea, and the result is a nonsensical wolf in sheep's clothing, a feel-good rally to depict Barney Frank as a Nazi, complain about Barack Obama, and demand that our political leaders let the United States go straight to Hell, and don't pass Go.

    And while the truth probably lies somewhere in between, the attempt to depict an institutionally-organized pep rally as a grassroots movement and the entire "Give us what we want, and damn the consequences!" attitude strongly suggest that it's farther from the glorious myth than cynical one.

    I can't blame the tea party demonstrators for being uneasy about the current state of the nation. The looming $10 trillion national debt is frightening and incomprehensible. The financiers who wrecked the economy while grabbing billions of dollars for themselves are vile and greedy creatures who ought to be set up in a perpetual dunking tank, if not in jail. And the fact I have to pay about a third of my income in taxes doesn't make me all that happy, considering that so much of that money will be spent to undo the damage that has been done by those vile and greedy billionaires.

    However, I can't subscribe to the logic of the protesters because it is... well, illogical. They are looking for simple answers and somebody to blame. Hannity and his crowd have supplied the answer -- cut taxes -- and the blame target -- Barack Obama. But, unless you live in a world of right-wing paranoia, neither explanation makes much sense.

    Who would benefit most from a tax cut? Not the tea party protesters. They may be struggling to pay taxes right now, but that is likely because they are struggling to pay for everything, thanks to an economic system that, over the last couple of decades, has been skewed in favor of the wealthy. While middle class earnings have stagnated or fallen, a few people have enjoyed enormous gains -- people like the pirates on Wall Street, along with celebrity commentators like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. They would be the real beneficiaries of any major decrease in taxation ....

    .... The truth is, there are very few government services we would happily give up because they have made our country a more civilized place.

    But, dang it, we just don't like having to pay for it. And, these days, when we are shelling out enormous amounts to try to climb out of a deep financial hole that someone else put us in, it's natural for those on the right to blame it all on the people on the left. Having lost the last election, it's no surpise to hear a conservative woman at the tea party in Sacramento declare on FOX TV, "We want our country back!"

    Hey, we all want our country back. But I just don't think it was taken away by Barack Obama or any secret socialists. It was taken away by greedy fools who built a Ponzi scheme in which we all got trapped. And they didn't build it last week or last month. They built it during the pre-Obama, anti-tax, anti-regulatory era -- a time, oddly enough, during which Sean Hannity built a lucrative career by saying government is always bad and markets are always good.


    (Horsey)

    So while the illogical invoke Jefferson or the Boston Tea Party, it's quite clear that many of them don't give a damn what is actually being said, or the consequences of giving over to the idea that we should let everything fail. Sure, conservatives will complain about jobs, for instance, but they don't seem to care that their anti-Obama paranoia advocates outcomes that would see unemployment skyrocket.

    While I am generally critical of libertarianism for its delusional and selfish extremity, I can only imagine the frustration of the sincerely faithful: Their movement, which wasn't especially effective but felt good nonetheless, has been turned into an utterly shameful circus that will stigmatize the genuine tea partygoers for a generation.

    Of course, they shouldn't complain. Conservative teabaggers are simply invoking their liberty to be utter and complete sleazebags.

    And, hey, that's the way liberty works, especially in a society with no genuine commitment to good faith. So on that count, libertarians should celebrate this defilement of their political movement.

    Two cats from Kilkenny? If only we were so lucky.
     
  21. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    That's them. Most of them are hypocrites and republicans just pissed off

    I am talking about the philosophical core of the protest against taxation, which is a protest against theft and the idea that government knows how to spend your money better than you.

    Personally, I not only oppose the Iraq War, but also the ridiculous military spending of today (in the US totaling nearly $1 trillion)

    Absolutely ridiculous. If we're going to have a military, then make it a barebones extremely light defensive force only, without monopolizing the industry. Bring the $1 trillion down the drain on the military down to levels, perhaps, in the few millions (which would mean a tax of no more than a few bucks on every citizen)

    My complaint is against even money being spent, as well as how it is spent if it is going to be spent.

    The government growing larger and larger and intruding more and more into the personal lives and property of the people. That is not what government was founded to do. No where does it mention welfare (as in the welfare state) or education or healthcare or any such provision in the constitution.

    I count taxation as theft because it is theft, no matter how you justify it, you ignore the fact that often it is against the will of the individual.

    Why can't everyone be happy?

    If you want to give half your income to government, by all means, feel free to do it. You do it, and I'll choose not to. Then we're both happy; you wanna give your money to government? I'm not going to stop you. But why must you force me to?

    It's kind of like with conservatives: you don't like homosexuality? Don't do it. But why must you ban it for everyone?


    Elections are tyranny of the majority.

    And totally useless considering that everyone can be happy; again, people who want ridiculous spending can fund it with their money and not everyone else's. Everyone wins.

    We treat politics like a boxing ring when we don't have to.

    Perhaps (although I doubt it)

    However you miss the point. I am not arguing over the practicality of government; it's more about the ethics. Even if government can provide and control and tax and spend on everything, it shouldn't. Even if we can bailout and spend our way out, we shouldn't; a) it's paid for with stolen money and b) it comletely distorts the market and c) it is not voluntary

    If YOU want to bailout GM then you do it with YOUR money. Government isn't needed and isn't just

    See my point above.

    I, for instance, don't have a brilliant understanding of economics. I understand some of the fundamental basics like supply and demand, credit, etc, but probably not as much as you understand.

    However, I do understand the core principle behind libertarianism: voluntary interaction and association. Including the associating of socialists among each other on their legitimate property and completely consensually, if it is what they want.


    Frankly, I don't know how to argue this with you. I am, at core, an anarchist and so this argument doesn't concern me as I neither side with the states states or the federal state.

    Again, that is them. And as I said, most are just pissed off republicans.

    The Libertarian party is a party with real integrity. Republicans are a sham and their recent term has gone against everything they supposedly believe in. Libertarian.

    Don't think I am a conservative or republican; I am a libertarian.

    I am not a Republican. They contradict themselves just like Democrats

    Republicans want a free market (free interaction) but want to legislate behaviors and moral and support so-called "patriotism". This is contradictory as the free market is anarchist in nature

    Democrats want individual liberty, supposedly, but then they want government intrusion into private property and voluntary interaction. Private property is a huge and key component of individual liberty
     
  22. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    To the extent that you want to argue that there is a subset of the tea party protestors that have strongly felt honest opinions that oppose the current fiscal regime and are worthy of debate, I agree. Their positions arre not my own and they are certainly not inarguably correct, but there is a core group of rational dissenters that I'm sure identifies with the tea party movement.

    Again, as with the protests against the Iraq War, where ANSWER distorted the reasonable message in favor of looneyism, it is just too bad that those reasonable people are being drowned out by the waves of those with questionable motives and rhetoric that makes them seem overwrought and irrational. Glenn Beck cried, multiple times, on the air on his show because he is just so afraid for his country. For me, the Beckians are the face of the tea party movement, not the Kellen Guidas of the world.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    You' ve got to be kidding - or amnesiac: it was the biggest ever, and growing

    btw: the lefties had the a good share of current deficit predicted from W's second full budget year, just by looking at W's accounting maneuvers used to hide the effects of his tax cuts for rich people:
    One of the odd things about this current crisis is how many people seem to have forgotten the unprecedented financial mess W had cooked up by 2005 without any of this financial collapse figured in. He would be recognized by now as probably the worst President ever, from a financial management pov, without a single bank failure on his watch - we'd be running bigger deficits than Reagan's worst, year after year. At the time, a good many lefties thought he was deliberately destroying the Federal economic structure, as a preliminary to a planned cancellation of the debt the rich owed to the Social Security system and a pre=emptive undermining of any hope of socialized medical care stepping in when the ongoing medical cost spiral hit the inevitable wall around 2014 (as was predicted then).
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2009

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