Doug Henwood on liberal reaction to Tea Party

Liberals have done their fair share of puffing up the Tea Party. They love nothing more than getting hot and bothered over the fascist threat as a way of scaring people into voting for Democrats as our last line of defense against the brownshirts. Yeah, the TP is awful, and a lot of people hate [...]

Oregon state panel probes teacher wanting to ‘demolish’ Tea Party

[the teacher] has said he would seek to embarrass Tea Partiers by attending their rallies dressed as Adolf Hitler, carrying signs bearing racist, sexist and anti-gay epithets, and acting as offensively as possible — anything short of throwing punches.

Why is it any business of a state school board what a teacher does in [...]

NYT / CBS Tea Party poll results not reliable

The poll said Tea Partiers were wealthier and better educated than the populace in general. But their poll methods were unreliable. In other words, they basically just polled Republicans.

If you look at the actual the survey results and methods, you’ll see that these “Tea Party supporters” are just people who answered affirmatively to the [...]

Special army unit to be deployed on U.S. soil before Nov. elections

80,000 US troops “may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” say Army Times. Of course, their deployment might be quite innocent too. But doesn’t the Constitution say something about no US troops used against US citizens? or have we forgotten about that?

A conservative columnist at Examiner, Anthony G. Martin, [...]

Noam Chomsky: The Tea Party is a sign of the failure of the Left

Starts at 39 seconds

“Most of them [The Tea Partiers] are those who want to be organized by the left, these are people with real grievances… Those are the things the left ought to be organizing them around… But the left is not offering them anything. [The Tea Partiers] aren’t talking about abortion [...]

A platform many may agree on

Bob, a self-described radical, has in recent weeks proposed the novel idea that Left and Right have a great deal in common. His discussion was recently joined by a tea partier, who had specific suggestions. Which leads me to speculate about a platform that most Americans would agree on. Here’s a proposed starting point:

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On Tea Partiers

Sue freaked when she read the previous post because she thought I agreed with the majority of the Tea Party’s positions. No, I do not agree with everything he said. Not hardly. But on some things, sure.

Right now the Tea Partiers are mostly inchoate with a right-wing slant. Sooner or later they will probably [...]

The Tea Party 600: Canaries in the political coal mine?

HuffPo

Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is ugly. Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is race-based. Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is being bankrolled by conservative political groups — and all of it promoted by Fox News. But focusing only on those elements obscures the fact that some of [...]

Tea Partiers as open source political movement and open source warfare

Excerpts from Global Guerrillas. Lots more in the full post including how the Republican Party will fight back and try to co-opt it and if it could morph into a real insurgency. Read the whole thing.

The Tea Party movement in the US is an open source political protest. It emerged due to a substantial [...]

The Masked Political Consultant on Tea Partiers (and progressives)

Joe Bageant asks his Masked Political Consultant about the Tea Partiers, who responds anonymously with three points.

The first is the general political incoherence of their lines of attack and in what they claim to be for and what they claim to be against.

Yeah, it is difficult for Obama to be a Nazi [...]