Tea Parties Forever

Paul Krugman is great today:

One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.

But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.

Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

Delusions moving to center

This recent column from Gene Lyons discusses how nutty some of the right-wingers have become. Definitely worth a read.

The worldwide financial crisis coinciding with the election of an African American president with an odd name appears to have driven a noisy minority clear around the bend. The kinds of delusional themes once featured in semi-underground videos like "The Clinton Chronicles" peddled by necromancers like the late Rev. Jerry Falwell have gone "mainstream."

President Bill Clinton was merely portrayed as a rapist, drug smuggler and murderer - comparatively private vices. Paranoid fears about U.N. "black helicopters" and the surrender of American sovereignty to "one-world" government of the kind that motivated Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh were limited to crackpot militias on the fringes of society.

Not anymore. No less an eminence than former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris made it official on FOX News recently. He opined: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over'? Well, they're beginning to have a case."

Geoff Davis: Hypocrite

Today's Enquirer points out the hypocrisy of Geoff Davis:

...Davis - a Northern Kentucky Republican who has criticized government spending - requested $99.1 million for 60 different projects - sewer lines, roads, even replacing a hospital roof in Nicholas County.

Those requests come after Davis, in a March 31 column, accused Democrats of "taking Congress on a spending spree with the taxpayer credit card."

Davis's local projects include $1.5 million to repair the area around the airport's Concourse B, and $2.8 million to repair I-471 between I-275 and the Ohio River so that it can be used as an alternate route when work begins on the Brent Spence Bridge.

The Daily Show: Baracknophobia

Jon Stewart was on fire last night. Check it out!

Tell the Party of No - Yes We Can

A great new ad from Americans United for Change:

We betrayed the rule of law for 'fool's gold'

Today's column by Leonard Pitts Jr is great. Here's an excerpt:

According to a March 29 report in The Washington Post, U.S. officials were convinced they had themselves a real, live al Qaeda leader in [Abu] Zubayda, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Under pressure from the Bush White House to get something out of him, they resorted to waterboarding and other coercive measures.

Out came a flood of names and plots and details. Security was tightened, millions were spent chasing it all down, and all of it was for nothing. Every investigation launched as a result of Abu Zubayda's revelations fizzled. It turned out that, far from being an al Qaeda leader, he was a mid-level associate. The Post says most of the information he gave that proved in any way useful came during ordinary interrogation. The things he said while being tortured by the nation that does not torture were apparently just to make the pain stop.

The Post report is but the latest in a litany of revelations all suggesting the same thing: that in the wake of Sept. 11, a frightened nation betrayed one of its core principles -- the rule of law -- for the fool's gold of security.

President Obama's weekly address

Death of a Cliché

Be sure to check out today's column from Mark Shields:

Alan Ginsburg, a historian friend of mine, pointed out that it's been some time now since we have heard one of the most previously oft-repeated Republican applause lines — the candidate's or officeholder's solemn pledge "to run government like a business."

The reasons are obvious why this cliche has disappeared. The villains in American politics have in a single generation gone from "welfare queens in designer jeans" to "corporate welfare kings in chauffered limos," from the public spotlight on "the deserving poor" to public outrage against "the undeserving rich."

...The inconsistencies of the business world and its partisan apologists have been monumental. When profits were sky-high, corporate chiefs and the office-seekers whom they underwrote relentlessly extolled the genius of private enterprise and the untold damage any government regulation could do to it. But when profits go so far south that all the ink is red, business sings a much different tune. "Public-private partnerships " (aka bail-outs) are not only inspired, they are imperative.

Obama and the cry of ‘socialism’

Today's column by Froma Harrop is a must-read:

MANY CONSERVATIVES think they’ve found a winner in tarring President Obama and his allies as “socialists.” Earnest attempts to explain why “it isn’t so” are futile, as is asking people what the heck they mean when they say raising taxes is “socialism.”

In a heroic effort to force a definition into the exchange, Princeton economist Alan Blinder reasons: “Socialism means public ownership and control of business, right? So which industries does the president propose to nationalize?”

None that anyone has noticed. Obama’s economic team won’t even nationalize the broken banks. But that doesn’t matter. The S-word can signify anything conservatives want it to.

Stephen Colbert parodies Glenn Beck

Hilarious stuff from The Colbert Report: