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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (108607)	4/13/2009 2:26:29 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540882

TEA PARTIES: REAL GRASSROOTS April 13, 2009 A kind of energy our politics hasn't seen lately. AROUND America, taxpayers have had enough. Fed up with excessive spending, planned tax increases and a federal government that first caused the financial bubble through misregulation, and then grabbed power in order to "fix" it, they're hitting the streets to protest. The first march came in Seattle, where a couple of mom-bloggers organized a rally on Feb. 16. Rallies followed in Denver and Mesa, Ariz., on the 17th. Then CNBC talker Rick Santelli delivered his "rant heard 'round the world," calling for a "tea party" protest in Chicago on July 4. The name stuck, and further Tea Parties began popping up around the nation. Some -- like those in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Orlando and Fullerton, Calif. -- drew thousands; others, more modest, saw hundreds. But new rallies popped up every week. Then organizers -- really, just people discussing things on Twitter, blogs and chatboards -- decided that Tax Day, April 15, would be the perfect day for a coordinated national day of protest. Online lists of protests (such as taxdayteaparty.com) predict 300 to 500 marches on Wednesday all across the country. Now that the movement looks likely to be big and successful, various established groups (mostly on the right, though a lefty counterpart will march this weekend) are getting involved. But its genesis and enthusiasm are pure grassroots: a lot of people who've had enough, brought together by the power of the Web. No doubt they'll be dismissed by chin-pullers in the Big Media (the same folks who sent more reporters than there were protesters to a staged ACORN protest over AIG bonuses), but these Tea Party protests aren't the same old rituals with the same old marchers. These aren't the usual semiprofessional protesters who attend antiwar and pro-union marches. These are people with real jobs; most have never attended a protest march before. They represent a kind of energy that our politics hasn't seen lately, and an influx of new activists. Many in the punditocracy will ignore this week's protests, to the extent possible, this week. But, thanks to alternative media and talk radio, they'll still get noticed -- in particular, by the members of Congress in whose districts they take place. In the short run, this is likely to provide at least a bit of resistance to the borrow-and-spend-like-there's-no-tomorrow approach that now governs Washington. In the longer run, they're likely to be a source of new energy and enthusiasm in politics -- bringing in a lot of voters, organizers and even candidates from among those who were previously on the sidelines. Instead of the "astroturf" that has marked the ACORN-organized AIG protests, this movement is real grassroots. So if you've had enough, consider visiting a Tea Party protest in your area -- there's bound to be one. It's your chance to be part of an authentic popular protest movement, one that just might save America from the greed and ineptitude of the folks who have been running it into the ground. nypost.com

To: JohnM who wrote (108607)	4/13/2009 2:28:34 PM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540882

Oh Paul! And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people This is as ugly and degrading as the crap republicans pull. So now it is helpful to crawl into the pus infected slime too? 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. Again it looks to me that Krugman forgot to take his meds. Obama isn't being called a socialist because of his tax policy - he is being called a socialist as the American government increasingly inserts itself into the private workings of struggling companies. I have news for Krugman - that is Socialism Krugman would get more respect from some of us if he didn't go off on these weird tangents that make him look more like a fruitcake than a serious economist. steve

To: JohnM who wrote (108607)	4/13/2009 5:42:28 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 540882

Ew, John, I didn't care for that article at all-- it was like reading a mirror of the far right in terms of condescension and insulting language. He writes, "Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. " Well, I find anyone who writes like equally embarrassing to watch. He sure lost me as a reader.

To: JohnM who wrote (108607)	4/13/2009 7:57:52 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 540882

Tea Parties Never? David Henderson I've decided not to go to any of the tea parties this Wednesday. My reason is that some of the people who have been advertising them don't agree with me on everything. And some of the people who will be going there didn't protest high government spending when George W. Bush was the perpetrator. I must keep myself pure. I will go only to events that are sponsored by, and attended by, people who are as purely libertarian as I. So what if that means we can meet in a small living room and accomplish zero. And, since I'm after purity, I'd better stop attending bi-monthly meetings of the Peace Coalition of Monterey County. Although most of the members treat my organization, Libertarians for Peace, quite fairly and the vast majority of them are very nice people, I, horror of horrors, heard some of them say the other day that they favor single-payer health care. Just being around those views might corrupt me. And while I'm at it, I'd better cancel my memberships in the ACLU and the NAACP. They aren't very libertarian either. Let's face it. Paul Krugman knows best. After all, he won the Nobel prize and we never hear anything foolish or misleading or disingenuous come out of the mouth or off the pen of someone who won the Nobel prize, do we? econlog.econlib.org