So it should be repeated over and over again to prove what? That politicians are hypocrites? Including those who brand themselves Tea Partiers? Again, this is brand new information! If people don't already get it, then no amount of Rolling Stone articles, especially ones that can't get their owe personal biases out aren't going to do anything. It's not like this was written as an OpEd in the Picayune Times where the dude with the "moran" sign is going to see it and go "hey you know what this makes sense, I hate the TP."

But at the end of the day I could give two ****s about the article. Is it mostly accurate? Probably, but like has been mentioned a couple of times if you take the most vocal segment of any political group you are going to get the crazy. So in that respect it isn't "interesting" or "ground breaking" or any other superlatives you guys want to throw on it. It is just a dude with an agenda supporting that angle. So...cool story bro?

for someone that doesn't give two ****s about the article, thou doth protest too much

You coulda had a nice one-liner, like "Didn't know FlyWf wrote for Rolling Stone" and left it at that. If it's really cool starry bra why waste paragraphs on it? hmm

coolstorybro.jpg

This is a much better negative take on a fringe right-wing personality.

Neo-Nazi Couple Find Out They're Jewish

"I'm not saying that I don't have regrets but it's not something that I walk around and lash myself over... I feel sorry for those that I beat up," Pawel said. "But I don't hold a grudge against myself."

How wonderful that they've been able to forgive themselves.

More like LOL News, amirite?

I could say the same thing about Keynesianophiles like yourself who think the solution to a crisis caused by too much borrowing and spending is still more borrowing and spending.

I would pay attention to this if there were in fact a candidate for any position of government who I think has any credibility on reducing borrowing and spending in a non-trivial way.

Chris Christie is about the only guy I see out there right now who looks like he's serious. You've made this point before iirc, to which I replied it is precisely the same reason that, for the first time pretty much ever, that I won't be voting in the midterms.

So, yeah, as long as we're going to get ****ed over by big government types no matter what we do, I'll keep on preferring the social liberals.

Yeah, you could, except it would make literally no sense. We have a good faith disagreement about the causes of a recession and the best government response to it. There are serious arguments for both sides, important academics differ on it, and while I know you're very very sure you're right, Paul Krugman seems very very sure he's right. I don't think you wanted a smaller stimulus for the worst possible motivations, though. Do you really think Krugman wanted a bigger stimulus in hopes of bankrupting the country?

You can't really say the same concerning the merits of slavery, women's suffrage, Prohibition, Jim Crow, and gay rights. The Tea Party demographic of Southern old white religious landowners was on the losing side of all of those, and history doesn't regard them as "having made, in retrospect, suboptimal decisions".

People who choose poor economic policies are arguably stupid, people who prefer bigoted and draconian social policies are inarguably evil. This isn't making a poor choice, this is being wrong. **** them. They're as wrong on Ground Zero mosque as they were about whether to hang witches in Salem.

It's this.

Mugabe's monetary policies are ******ed, but what makes him a terrible leader is the repression, corruption, and racism. The inflation is simple incompetence, the rest is actively being a bad person.

For once I gotta agree with fly here. And his generalization of tea partiers is getting more and more correct as the rational people jump ship (assuming there are any rational people left).

I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand taxes. Most lower-middle class and middle class people are imo rightfully outraged about taxation levels, but they lump all taxes together in their mind and do not understand that they pay little or no or even negative federal income tax.

People get a $400 red light ticket from a camera installed by the local PD and are rightfully pissed at the transparent revenue generation. They go to register their car and have to pay $500 to the state DMV. They go to a restaurant and at the bottom of the check they see that sales tax is 10%. They get their tax bill and they owe thousands in property taxes. But at the end of the day, many of these same folks think the answer to the overtaxation problem, which is for them a local problem, is to give more, not less, authority to state and local governments. Which makes no sense given where their tax dollars actually go. While the numbers are way bigger and therefore scarier at the federal level, efficiency is actually much higher. More importantly for most people, the federal income tax is very progressive.

who of note has jumped ship ?

This I have to disagree with. Good intentions don't make up for terrible results. In fact good intentions have probably resulted in far more terrible results than simple greed and power lust. (I'm including religious fanaticism, communism, etc in this).

I think that a lot of the original Ron Paul Revolution types who were more anti-war and social libertarians have to be rightfully appalled at where the tea parties have gone. I think that even Ron Paul himself has almost disowned the tea party movement in its current incarnation.

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what poboy said

Remember when TomVeil et al insisted that the Tea Party wasn't being taken over by lunatics? Good times.

Ron Paul '12 I guess.

You certainly won't hear me defending socially reactionary points of view--I thought your Ground Zero Mosque posts were among your most tightly argued on the forum, for example. If a segment of the tea party population happen to hold these views (numbers are debatable of course), however, that doesn't change the fact that their visceral awareness of running federal deficits north of 10% in perpetuity not ending well is dead on. Thus while I'll grant that race/the President's heritage/otherness may motivate some tea partiers to protest, this fact doesn't make null their ostensible beef that our country is on a fiscally unsustainable trajectory.

All great libertarian causes!

The problem with people like Taibbi is that they almost entirely ignore this group, because it is more convenient to just call all the Tea Partiers dumb creationist hicks. Ron Paul has a better record on anti war and civil liberties than all but a small number of Democrats, most of whom are anti war and pro civil liberties in name only... yet he is a minor footnote in these articles despite the fact that his presidential campaign which led to the first "tea parties", which were then co opted by attention whores like Beck and Palin.