Battle Hymn of the Republic, updated for the Tea Party and Sarah Palin

I was thinking that the Tea Party needed some songs.



The smugness of the comments at Youtube must be seen to be believed.

Update: I see there is some discussion at Althouse.

Refined, erudite, nuanced BS at NY Times

J.M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, goes on at considerable length to demonstrate that he has no idea what the Tea Party people are talking about, but he thinks they are just awful! Angry! Scary!

A type specimen of academic bafflegab. Many of the commenters say they agree with him, and herein lies the danger of this kind of claptrap. Bernstein presents his strawman in so persuasive a way that those leaning in his direction feel that they have been provided with logical, intellectual proof for the gut feelings they already had.

Part 1: The Very Angry Tea Party

Part 2: The Usefulness of Anger: A Response

Hey there, Professor Bernstein: who is it that's angry?



Tea Party people are upset about the spending. (This graphic is old; numbers are much bigger now, with Obamacare in the mix.)



Democrats are angry that anyone dares question their authoritah.

Instapundit:

ALEX LIGHTMAN ON FACEBOOK: “After researching the issue carefully and interviewing people in a position to know, I can now reveal that the current primary purpose of the United State government is to bankrupt the United States. It comes as a relief to know this. So many things now make sense.” Least hypothesis, and all that.

Doing everything possible to allow the oil blowout in the Gulf to go on fits right in with that. Golf on, Obama.

Bad language warning

I put that language warning right in the title so it would not be missed. This is ugly stuff.

Alternate title: Democrats are such lovely people.

At Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion:

Voices of Hate

There are many voices of hate, but the voices most ignored by the mainstream media come not from Tea Parties or maligned conservative groups, but from the intolerant left.

After someone who did commercial voice-overs for Geico was fired for leaving threatening messages at FreedomWorks (which has supported the Tea Parties), a call went out for others to leave threatening messages.

As a result, FreedomWorks has been inundated with threatening phone calls, leading blogger Tabitha Hale, who also works at FreedomWorks, to put together this video (via Right Wing News):

In light of GeicoGate and the recent accusations from the media regarding the violent rhetoric of the conservative movement, I've taken the liberty of editing together the voicemails and emails we've received as a result of DC Douglas' call to contact FreedomWorks. Here's the result.

WARNING: This is intense. Violent language is an understatement. I haven't censored - only edited to remove names and phone numbers.

Video at the link. When they say that the Tea Partiers are racist and violent, it's projection. And, of course, deflection, distraction, and deception.

Real live troll

Those of us who are "aware of all Internet traditions" have seen trolling before, on plenty of websites. What does it look like in Real Life^TM? What did this fool expect, that the group gathered to express their opposition to the message on his banner would ask him to take the stage and speak?



Charles Johnson is channeling Maureen Dowd here, when he says, "He had a police escort, and obviously needed them. Imagine what would have happened if the police weren’t there." Imagine, indeed. Let the imagination run wild. As the video shows, there was considerable jeering, but no violence, nor anything close to an attempt at violence.

Nobody bit his finger off.

Big show in Washington

The September 12 Tea Party. Stephen Green rounds up some reports. Biggest D.C. demo ever? Maybe, but WaPo and NYT won't report it that way.

CNN, this afternoon, was focused on Obama's speech in Minneapolis. Since he was out of town, and did not see it with his own eyes, he will be able to pretend that the reports stating "tens of thousands" that are already appearing in the MSM are accurate. "Tens of thousands," that's, like, what, twenty thousand? Small potatoes. He will go on living in his own fantasy as long as he can sustain it. As long as it's "sustainable."

Update: Claudia Rosett has something to say about Obama's fantastic imagination.

Another update: A video report with not enough of Mary Katharine Ham, at Ace of Spades HQ. She's riffing in her introduction, referring to, among others, "political terrorists," a term coined by Rep. Baron Hill of Indiana.

Bit his finger off

That's some rational debate. Or national conversation about health care.

The way to demonstrate the superiority of your argument is to bite off appendages of your opponent. This serves to elevate the level of discourse. If you're a lobster!

Dammit, we used to be mammals. Have 8 months of Obama reduced some of his supporters to the level of arthropods?

Spending cuts, drop from the bucket style

So if the bucket is too heavy to carry, and you take one drop out of it, well, that's gonna make a difference. And then if you take another drop out of it, sooner or later, that adds up to …

The Heritage Foundation has come up with another of these great graphics, similar in impact to the one in the tea party post. They did not get it from the WaPo this time, either. It's by John Fleming of their staff:



(If that link doesn't work, there is an archived copy at Iterasi.)

Can you see the proposed cuts? The tiny black dot way up at the top.

The WaPo article linked by Heritage quotes Obama:

"None of these things alone are going to make a difference. But cumulatively they make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone. And so what we are going to do is, line by line, page by page, $100 million there, $100 million here, pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money."

It also quotes Greg Mankiw:

Just to be clear: $100 million represents .003 percent of $3.5 trillion.

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

Paul Krugman does some arithmetic:

Let’s say the administration finds $100 million in efficiencies every working day for the rest of the Obama administration’s first term. That’s still around $80 billion, or around 2% of one year’s federal spending.

This amount is no more than "ground noise and static." So who does the President think he's kidding?

Thanks once again to Glenn Reynolds, and to Mark Hemingway for the Krugman quote.

Update: Ezra Klein thinks the President is kidding the voters, who are too dense to figure out the numbers. And this is a good thing, because it's a smart way to get headlines. Lefties do these things for the benefit of The People, who are so thick that they must be deceived for their own good. Revolting, and revealing.

XKCD hits the news media on the same kind of thing.

"Night of the Living Government"

Sissy Willis picked this line for her post title: "Let me devour your flesh because I know how to use it better than you do."

There. Can you not go read that, now? Don't neglect to watch the video while you're over there. No, not the embedded one, the linked one, this one. If you'd rather YouTube, then this one at Andrew Klavan's blog at PJ Media. At one point, Klavan refers to "insatiable hunger for power," which reminded me of a post by Shannon Love a couple of days ago, Don’t Be Preedy.

Via Glenn Reynolds.

Katrina Pierson at the Dallas Tea Party

Could be inspirational.



Linked by Delia in a comment at PJ Media.

Missed the Tea Party ...

… because I was still wrangling the taxes! Got the e-file in at about 3:30 pm, too late to go up to Providence as I had something at home at 6.

It was a good turnout, considering how blue a state Rhode Island is.

There's some pretty fair coverage of the local event at the Providence Journal: Stimulated to protest. The video in that story is better here. There's even a slideshow. This is better coverage than the NY or Boston papers gave to events in their cities.

Glenn Reynolds has plenty of pictures and links. Blake has a post with more links, including some to Twitter, which, well, I'll understand it better by and by.

Doing a little channel-hopping around the networks, between CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, to see what the coverage would be like, I found the bias so blatant it was shocking. (Oh, yes, "I'm shocked, shocked, to find bias going on here.")

One of the (many) things that bugs me about today's lefties is their faux naiveté, or you might say disingenuousness. They pretend that they don't know what you're talking about, seize on some little turn of phrase, and proceed to argue against that, as if it were really the main point. That they continue to use this tactic shows that they are arguing in bad faith. And the obscenities, and the flood-the-zone. These so-called reporters are acting like comment trolls.

This CNN newsbabe, Susan Roesgen, in particular is exemplary, but really, the teabagging jokes are enough to demonstrate that the media elites are, uh, in the bag for the administration. Malkin writes on this effort by the no-longer-remotely-respectable media to turn this dissent into a dirty joke. This is rank stuff. Anderson Cooper and the rest who used this term, teabagging, in the sex-play sense have disgraced their networks. This is not sophisticated wit, it's Beavis and Butthead, snickering. No thought was taken for the many, a majority, I'd guess, who had never heard of this practice. I feel a little dirtier now, and I was a fairly dirty old man already. To Cooper, Shuster, the rest of the tv talkers who commented in this vein, I say, don't be doing blue comedy on the news, or, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Ed Driscoll has a roundup post on early coverage, with more than I really wanted to read on the obscenities, and a link to a Nazi comparison.

Update: Speaking of disgusting lefties, here's an example: Teabag Fox News dot com. (I don't want to link this thing.) I was looking for the Janeane Garofolo clip as an example of fluorescent idiocy: here it is, posted proudly, along with much else that should be marked as not for the young or easily squicked.

More: Ed Driscoll has Jon Stewart taking a Cody Willard quote out of context. (It's dangerous to use terms, in this case "fascism," that have a real meaning known to some, and are used by others as invective.) Driscoll links to Stephen Green, who shows how the "teabag" shtick comes straight out of the Alinsky rulebook. In a comment on Green's piece, CraigZ clarifies the point that Jon Stewart used to make trouble for Cody Willard:

Calling Obama a Fascist is NOT to compare him to Hitler. It is an honest question whether the economic, repeat economic policies of this Administration are similar to those pursued by Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the ’30s. The “firing” of the CEO of GM seemed too similar for my tastes to the relationship between Krupp and the German government of 1938.

Though CraigZ is talking about something else, the general point applies. Did I take this quote out of context? Unlike viewers of The Daily Show, the reader here can click the link and decide for him- or herself.

Another update: To end, for now, on a more pleasant note, C-Span has a collection of Tea Party "videos submitted by C-SPAN viewers from across the nation," 14 in all, each from a different place.

Added: Why the tea parties? Why so suddenly? That "Taxed Enough Already" retronym is unfortunate, as it's allowing critics to say things about current taxes and tax breaks. I think the reason that hundreds of tea parties took place last week is that the significance of this

is being noticed by more people. The taxes that the tea partiers are complaining about are not necessarily the current taxes, but the taxes that will be required to meet the budgets that Pelosi, Obama, and Reid have promised. Especially since tax revenue is dropping like a stone. Democrats appear to believe the Laffer Curve is a figment of the imagination, so their prescription will be to raise the rates on the "rich," which will lead to revenue falling further, and so on. You've seen it over and over with municipal transit: when there are too few fare-paying riders to pay the cost of drivers, fuel, maintenance on the equipment, the authority will raise the fare. Except on the ever-increasing number of those who have bus passes. Compare Ari Fleischer: Everyone Should Pay Income Taxes.

As you might say on a sign, "It's the spending, stupid!"