Some speculate that we are drifting closer and closer to, er, ‘civil war’ (which is what the deniers of ‘class war’ would have you believe.)
Again, it’s difficult to determine which is more disturbing, the ‘cluelessness’ of the Tea Party movement or the MSM, which persists in providing them with a stage?
ONE OF the rallying cries of the original ‘revolution’ was ‘taxation without representation’…why nobody notices that once we got representation, nothing changed, nor will anything ‘change’ should the ‘Tea Partier’s get their mis-guided way! (Which is the likely the best explanation for why the MSM provides this idiotic movement with so much ‘free play’.)
One need only look as far as the badly crippled ‘Golden State’ (California) for a modern example of what happens if you allow the, er, ignorant electorate to ‘control’ the tax structure.
Sidebar: I’m as ‘anti-tax’ as they come, taxes merely provide the ‘owners’ (of resources) with an income stream for what is free from nature! Claiming you ‘own’ something does not entitle you to payment for it! Nobody can produce a ‘Bill of Sale’ countersigned by Mother Nature or her partner/alias God…but that’s not how the court system established by the ‘owners’ themselves sees it.
There are no taxes under ‘A Simple Plan’…because there is no ‘ownership’ of resources, this cuts the greedy (who masquerade as our ‘betters’) out of the loop from the outset. The other half of the ‘tax’ rip-off is to pay for that which can’t be done ‘profitably’…this ‘lack of profitability’ issue is closely related to the ‘unjustified enrichment’ of those who would exploit that which is free from nature (for their personal benefit, of course!)
Part of the reason you are forced to pay for as many things as possible is to mask the fact that three quarters of them are rip-offs!
So, what is more pathetic here, the ‘touching’ personal back story or the level of ignorance on display for the reading public?
Let’s see what you think about tonight’s offering
Unlikely Activist Who Got to the Tea Party Early
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: February 27, 2010
SEATTLE — Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You might mistake her for the kind of young person whose vote powered President Obama to the White House. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type but leaders of the Tea Party movement credit her with being the first.
A year ago, frustrated that every time she called her senators to urge them to vote against the $787 billion stimulus bill their mailboxes were full, and tired of wearing out the ear of her Obama-voting fiancé, Ms. Carender decided to hold a protest against what she called the “porkulus.” [Geez Louise, you don’t suppose everybody who was ever ‘frustrated’ with politicians who ignored their constituents should become ‘Tea Partier’s’, should they?]
“I basically thought to myself: ‘I have two courses. I can give up, go home, crawl into bed and be really depressed and let it happen,’ ” she said this month while driving home from a protest at the State Capitol in Olympia. “Or I can do something different, and I can find a new avenue to have my voice get out.” [Left to our imaginations here good citizen is what, precisely, it is that is different about the Tea Party movement? What are they doing that the anti-war protesters aren’t, or perhaps the marchers for ‘civil rights’? What the hell is ‘different’ about the ‘Tea Party’ movement?]
This weekend, as Tea Party members observe the anniversary of the first mass protests nationwide, Ms. Carender’s path to activism offers a lens into how the movement has grown, taking many people who were not politically active — it is not uncommon to meet Tea Party advocates who say they have never voted — and turning them into a force that is rattling both parties as they look toward the midterm elections in the fall. [I think a more accurate descriptor here would be ‘Right-wing circus act’, with the Tea Partier’s cast in the role of the clowns! What are they ‘protesting’? They are ‘protesting’ against efforts to pull our economy out of a nose-dive we entered because of political ideas, THEY ENDORSED!]
Ms. Carender’s first rally drew only 120 people. A week later, she had 300, and six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tax Day Tea Party. Last month, she was among about 60 Tea Party leaders flown to Washington to be trained in election activism by FreedomWorks, the conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey , the former House Republican leader. [(Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)]
This month, a year to the day of her first protest, Ms. Carender stood among a crowd of about 600 on the steps of the State Capitol, acknowledging the thanks from a speaker who cited her as the original Tea Party advocate. Around her were the now-familiar signs: “Can you hear us now?” “Is it 2012 yet?” “Tea Party: the party of now.” [More telling is the fact that NONE of the slogans tells you anything! ‘The Party of Now…What ‘now’? Can we hear them? Maybe we could if they were saying something other than ‘no’…]
Jenny Beth Martin, a national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella organization of local groups that Ms. Carender has joined, calls her an unlikely avatar of the movement but an ideal one. She puts a fresh, idealistic face on a movement often dismissed as a bunch of angry extremists.
“She’s not your typical conservative,” she said. “She’s an actress. She’s got a nose ring. I think it’s the thing that’s so amazing about our movement.” [What a novel idea, the Party of No has a movement about Nothing! (or are they REALLY blown away by ‘nose rings?’)]
The daughter of Democrats who became disaffected in the Clinton years, Ms. Carender, 30, began paying attention to politics during the 2008 campaign, but none of the candidates appealed to her. She had studied math at Western Washington University before earning a teaching certificate at Oxford — she teaches basic math to adult learners — and began reading more on economics, particularly the writings of Thomas Sowell, the libertarian economist, and National Review. [Gee, who is surprised about this revelation? There used to be a saying about communists that we could substitute the word ‘Libertarian’ for, it would go like this, “If you’re not a Libertarian at 20, you have no heart…but, if you’re still a Libertarian at 40, you have no brain!]
Reading about the stimulus, she said, “it didn’t make any sense to me to be spending all this money when we don’t have it.” [So the alternative would be ‘what’ precisely? This is perhaps the most baffling aspect of this whole ‘movement’, they aren’t ‘for’ anything…all they have are nebulous ideas like the one stated below:]
“It seems more logical to me that we create an atmosphere where private industry can start to grow again and create jobs,” she said. [Gee, what a great idea! Maybe we should hand her Timmy’s or Ben’s magic wands so she can make it happen! (Not that she’d do any worse than either Timmy or Ben…)]
Her fiancé, Conor McNassar, urged her to channel her complaints into a blog, which she called Liberty Belle. [Ain’t that cute! You can almost see Disney paying her a few million for the movie rights!]
“He didn’t mind hearing it,” she said. “He just couldn’t hear it all the time.”
It was not enough. [Um, aren’t we dancing dangerously close to a ‘character flaw’ here…shouldn’t somebody be telling Conor to ‘run for his life’?]
So she called the city parks department, which suggested a location and gave her a permit. She still did not know if any other protesters would show up.
She put out the word to some friends from the Young Republicans,which she had joined in late 2008, but it was not a big group. She called Michael Medved, the Seattle-based conservative radio host, but he did not put her on the air. She scanned a list of economics professors who had signed a Cato Institute letter opposing the stimulus and found two locally, but they could not make it.
She also called someone she had met at an election results watch party, who agreed to spread the word among Republicans. She called a conservative local radio host, who put in a plug. And she sent an e-mail message to the conservative writer Michelle Malkin, who agreed to announce the protest on her blog and even sent some pulled pork to feed the crowd. [Understand that the Republicans pissed through more than 5 trillion dollars during the Bush Presidency alone…(doubling the national debt) a feat matched only by St. Ronnie himself! So, ain’t they got big balls calling their ‘protest’ Porkulus? But that’s the hallmark of conservatism, isn’t it? Huge balls but no brains!]
The porkulus protest did not draw enough people to finish the pulled pork, which Ms. Carender took to a homeless shelter. [Which, naturally, makes it all good!] But she collected e-mail addresses, remembering that Senator Barack Obama had done that at events as he prepared to run for president. [Gee, did she have to get a tetanus shot after she stole ideas from a ‘liberal’?]
The “tea party” label came three days later, from a rant the CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli delivered from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the nationwide protests followed. [Whatever happened to Santilli? Haven’t seen him around lately…]
Six weeks later, Ms. Carender’s e-mail list had grown to 1,000 — it is now 1,500 — allowing her to summon protesters on short notice and making her the model child of the Tea Party Patriots, which has since become a driving force for advocates nationwide with its weekly conference calls to coordinate Tea Party activity. [Um, did I miss something here or do these people actually stand for something other than being stupid?]
In her activism, Ms. Carender has also drawn on her theatrical experience. Discovering that advocates of a health care overhaul were marching in the city last summer, she staged a “funeral for health care,” with protesters wearing black and bagpipers playing. For her first Tea Party event, she dressed as Liberty Belle (newspaper accounts mistook her for Little Bo Peep). [Um, I’d have paid to see that! Kind of ironic though, what were people supposed to think with all of those Republican ‘sheep’ hanging around!]
In a video viewed 68,000 times on YouTube, she confronted Representative Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington, at a town-hall-style meeting on health care. “If you believe that it is absolutely moral to take my money and give it to someone else based on their supposed needs,” she said, waving a $20 bill to boos and cheers, “then you come and take this $20 and use it as a down payment on this health care plan.” [Um, this is just too rich! And the Republican proposal is what precisely? Do NOTHING! What does boo-boo think $20 is going to accomplish?]
Ms. Carender is less certain when it comes to explaining, for instance, how to cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare.
“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.” [Um, why do you suppose she ‘vacillates’ between making healthcare a ‘charitable’ institution or a State supported entity? Is this due her mind acknowledging that someday she’ll need this service herself while acknowledging that if health care were supported by charitable contributions, it may be reduced to somebody coming in and ‘praying’ for your improved health…]
She, like many Tea Party members, resists the idea of a Tea Party leader — “there are a thousand leaders,” she says. [Um, could this be an admission that they are collectively too stupid to lead?]
Glenn Beck? “He can be a Tea Partier, but it’s not like the movement bends to him.”
Sarah Palin? She will have to campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support, Ms. Carender said, adding, “And if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired.” [Obviously she’s not clear on how this whole election boondoggle works! Once Sarah Baby gets elected, she no longer has to listen to the voters…all she has to do is kowtow to the corporate sponsors.]
Ms. Carender herself has become a Tea Party leader, even a celebrity.
At the Olympia rally, she did a television interview and accepted a hug from Kirby Wilbur, the radio host who first publicized her porkulus protest. “This is the future of the conservative movement!” he declared upon seeing her.
Her biggest goal now, Ms. Carender said, is replacing Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat elected three times by wide margins, in November. [From what we’ve seen here, her chances are as good as Sarah Palin’s White House ambitions…]
So Ms. Carender held a small anniversary rally on Saturday at a local mall. But her focus is on vetting candidates and using the contacts she has established over the last year to get out the vote. [Yuppers! All 1,500 of ‘em!]
“There is no way we will out-fund-raise the liberals,” she said. “The only weapon we have is energy and time.”
Um, can’t help but admire her modesty, she discounted her other ‘big asset’, her ‘Bo Peep’ ness.
Every State is just languishing to be represented by Lil’ Bo Peep in the US Senate!
Sadly, there aren’t a lot of stalwart girls like Bo Peep around. That said, isn’t it nice of the New York Times to run a story about this particular ‘founder’ of the Tea Party movement, not that she knew that was what she was doing at the time…
Which makes this a story about what, good citizen? A ‘good girl’ turned Republican, or was that just the inevitable outcome of being lobotomized?
What are the Tea Partier’s fighting for?
We didn’t know before we read this article and it’s not likely we’ll find out afterwards either…which makes this article a piece of fluff, just like the ‘movement’ it exemplifies.
Thanks for letting me (and not them) inside your head,
Gegner
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