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Are we allowed to take tax-payer funded roads to get to the tea parties?

You mean the potholed roads b/c w/all the tax revenue they received, it was still not enough money to buy some asphalt?

I thought the tea parties were about taxation without representation... i.e. the Federal Reserve printing money.

As much as our representatives are failing us, the sales tax increase was not taxation without representation.

I think the tea parties are meant to express outrage about more than sales taxes - and more specifically, they are intended to oppose taxpayer funded bailouts and the plethora of other pork in the trillion dolalr "stimulus" package. As the majority of taxpayers vehemently oppose the use of such funds and the accrual of this level of debt, any tax levied to support these expenditures DOES represent taxation without representation.

They were also about expressing outrage that their guy lost the election.

GOP in 2000/2004: "Elections have consequences!"
GOP in 2008: "Tyranny! Socialism! Fascism! Kenyan! Muslim! Guns! Succession!"

Afx114, in the midst of EVERYTHING that is happening - as we watch Obama incur the biggest deficit in American history and pass the fruits of that deficit to banks (just as Bush began to do with TARP) - how do you possibly come to the conclusion that these protesters are simply angry Republicans? Seriously, do you think that a Democrat should not be fed up with what is happening? I've never voted GOP, and if I hadn't been on a 3-hour feeding and diapering schedule with my son I would have gladly attended a tea party.

If you think this is just about "right wing" extremists, you're fooling yourself. This video of the Chicago tea party makes it clear that this is NOT about partisan politics; this is about rage against the machine owned by BOTH parties. Don't believe me? Check out the sign clearly displayed halfway through the video: "REPUBLICANS SUCK, TOO!"

Stop playing into the hands of the Establishment and educate yourself about what's really happening here. Do not be fooled and do not be misled.

Our country is about to be ripped apart at the seams. We can hardly afford ignorance now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd2tg8gxC...

Amen, partypup!

I'm pretty left-leaning, as most here know, but am 100% opposed to these bailouts and the way Obama's handling the situation.

We DO need some sort of stimulus, but this does NOT mean we should bail out the banks. Obama seemed to have the right idea when he was talking about infrastucture, healthcare, and transportaion technologies. We need jobs, and money needs to go to the lower and middle-classes (via jobs) where the pain is being felt most. Bailing out the banks is even worse than doing nothing, IMO.

Paul Krugman has the right idea WRT nationalizing the banks, IMHO, and he's no right-wing freak.

Obama talks a good talk, but his political appointments and policies thus far show where his loyalty really lies.

I'm opposed to the bailouts too, but let's have some intellectual honesty here -- which administration started TARP? Where was all the outrage over the last 8 years when the deficit was doubled? Where was all the outrage at spending 12 billion a month for six years on an unecessary war? The point is that everyone is to blame. Can you explain all of the "Impeach the Kenyan" and "Monkey see, monkey spend" signs too?

Why now? Why not 6 months ago or 6 years ago? The answer is that taxes are a convnient excuse to complain about losing an election. How many of the protesters make over $250k? Since when is a 3% tax increase -- to what it was under Clinton and still lower than it was under Reagan -- socialism and "taxation without representation?" Was Reagan a socialist? Who was it that said deficits don't matter? Why were protesters of Bush v. Gore considered whiners and sore losers while tea protesters are "true Americans?"

I'm all for protesing and dissent -- but at least be honest about what you're protesting. You're pissed that you lost -- and that's fine. I was pissed when I lost in 2000/2004, so I feel your pain. But at least man up and realize that elections have consequences. And if you don't like those consequnces you can make your voice heard -- where it counts -- in four years.

The opposition has blown their load way too prematurely. What are they going to do when Obama proposes health care? What are they going to do when he proposes energy reform? How about stem cells? What about social security reform? Will there be any heads left to explode?

Or maybe you're right and it's all the fraudulent socialist Muslim Kenyan's fault. Or maybe I've just had one too many Lost Abbey Judgement Day ales.

And nothing in this post addresses the fact that large numbers of tea party protesters are actually Democrats.

Regardless of whether you make 250K/yr or 30K/yr, you are being SCREWED by a Fed that prints endless reams of fiat money, courtesy of Bush AND Obama. And a $600 so-called tax "reduction" isn't going to make the screwing more palatable.

You are correct: Bush started the TARP thievery.

And Obama is finishing it.

Blame Americans for being naive and slow on the uptake. Common sense should have told them 5 years ago that the country was on the path to destruction. But silly monkeys that they are, they failed to realize the train was hurtling over the cliff until the economic hit home in a very personal way. You know how it goes: when your neighbor loses his job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression.

You ask which administration started TARP? That would be Bush, yes. But you're only looking at one frame of a movie that has been playing for nearly 100 years. The better question to ask is which administration permitted the creation of the Federal Reserve that ENABLED Bush's TARP.

And that, my friend, would be Woodrow Wilson - a Democrat.

No one on this board is placing the blame for our current predicament squarely at Obama's feet. Only a fool would do that. But Bush and Obama are simply mouthpieces for a two-headed, one-party political system. Just because one thief passes the goods along to another thief, let's not overlook the fact that they are both thieves.

You recommend that we make out voice heard -- where it counts -- in four years. Afx114, we don't have that kind of time. This country is going to be toast in half that time if we don't stand up and take action, and sashaying to the ballot box to install another career criminal working for the Fed is not exactly going to "make our voice heard".

Good, then we agree! Although I still think you're deluding yourself if you think that the tea parties were some sort of bi-partisan effort. They may have started out that way, but were quickly hijacked by the GOP and Fox News as a convenient excuse to vent their frustrations over their loss of the election and power. Sure there were maybe a few Dems there, but there were a few Repubs at the war protests too -- would you call those bipartisan then?

Screw tea, let's go have a beer.

You should add, partypup, that repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was signed into law by *cough* Bill Clinton with a Republican Congress.

The funny thing about that, and I am not partisan at all, is that it was done under the Republican manta of "deregulation for the free market", that's how they sold it. See what happens when the work together.

The bill that ultimately repealed the Act was introduced in the Senate by Phil Gramm (Republican of Texas) and in the House of Representatives by Jim Leach (R-Iowa) in 1999. The bills were passed by Republican majorities on party lines by a 54-44 vote in the Senate[12] and by a 343-86 vote in the House of Representatives[13]. After passing both the Senate and House the bill was moved to a conference committee to work out the differences between the Senate and House versions. The final bill resolving the differences was passed in the Senate 90-8 (1 not voting) and in the House: 362-57 (15 not voting).

Arraya: It's interesting, and I don't know if you've noticed it, but the rightists on the board (Partypup, me) are finding more and more in common with the leftists/left leaning (you, Afx) as of late.

I'm attributing this to an awakening as to what the real threat in this country is and it isn't each other. Nor is it gay marriage or gun control or any of those other wedge issues that Carville, Rove and Co. have thrown in front of us in the last 20 years to deflect us from the real problems we're facing.

People are waking up to reality and at some point, societally speaking, this shit is going to hit critical mass. Then the fun starts.

Mainstream media gets schooled in ratings again, I kinda feel sorry for GE shareholders, as the CEO's own personal beliefs are costing them $$$...
FOX RATINGS SURGE ON PROTEST COVERAGE
8-11 PM ET

FOXNEWS 3,390,000
MSNBC 1,210,000
CNN 1,070,000
CNN HEADLINE 909,000

FOXNEWS O'REILLY 3,980,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 3,239,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 2,947,000
FOXNEWS BECK 2,740,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 2,401,000
FOXNEWS SHEP 2,185,000
COMEDY DAILY SHOW 1,777,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,499,000
COMEDY COLBERT 1,446,000
CNNHN GRACE 1,336,000
CNN KING 1,292,000
MSNBC MADDOW 1,149,000
CNN COOPER 1,021,000

I've definitely noticed this. I've had constant political and philosophical battles with my dad over the past 8 years. He's always been a Bush 18%'er and originally belonged to the "Obama's a Muslim" crowd. However, something these past few months has changed, and my dad has actually approached me on a few issues and we actually came away agreeing on a lot of things. I thought this would never happen. He still doesn't like Obama, but now he's criticizing Bush and the GOP -- basically everyone in power. When I start agreeing with my dad on political issues, you know something is afoot.

This is how the mainstream covered it.. Disclaimer: per fox news for all the naysayers.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/...

Cable Anchors, Guests Use Tea Parties as Platform for Frat House Humor
Cable anchors and guests covered the anti-tax tea party protests by cracking a litany of barely concealed sexual references.

For thousands of Americans, Tax Day was a moment to protest what they see as bloated budgets and a pile of debt being passed on to their children.

For CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use the word "teabagging" in a sentence.

Teabagging, for those who don't live in a frat house, refers to a sexual act involving part of the male genitalia and a second person's face or mouth.

So when the anti-tax "tea party" protests were held Wednesday across the country, cable anchors and guests -- who for weeks had all but ignored the story -- covered the protests by cracking a litany of barely concealed sexual references.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interspersed "teabagging" references with analyst David Gergen's more staid commentary on how Republicans are still "searching for their voice."

"It's hard to talk when you're teabagging," Cooper explained. Gergen laughed, but Cooper kept a straight face.

MSNBC's David Shuster weaved a tapestry of "Animal House" humor Monday as he filled in for Countdown host Keith Olbermann.

The protests, he explained, amount to "Teabagging day for the right wing and they are going nuts for it."

He described the parties as simultaneously "full-throated" and "toothless," and continued: "They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending." Shuster also noted how the protesters "whipped out" the demonstrations this past weekend.

Click here to join a discussion on teabagging.

Tea Party participants were not amused. The events were held in dozens of cities across the country, and while some demonstrators were criticized for wielding off-topic and sometimes insensitive protest signs, most took to the streets to speak out against government spending.

Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center, said the media coverage was "insulting," reacting specifically to CNN reporter Susan Roesgen's combative interviews with Illinois demonstrators in which she declared that the protests were "anti-CNN" and supported by FOX News. She left the teabagging jokes to her colleagues, though.

"I've never seen anything like it," Bozell said. "The oral sex jokes on (CNN) and particularly MSNBC on teabagging ... they had them by the dozens. That's how insulting they were toward people who believe they're being taxed too highly."

Max Pappas, public policy vice president at FreedomWorks -- a small-government group which promoted the tea parties -- said it's a "shame" media outlets cracked jokes at a genuine "grassroots uprising."

"I think what that reveals is how worried they are that this might actually be something serious. You make fun of things you're afraid of, I'd say," Pappas said.

If anyone thinks the orally charged remarks on mainstream cable were just a coincidence, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's segments over the past week with guest, Air America's Ana Marie Cox, would dissolve all doubt. Their on-air gymnastics, dancing around the double entendre of the week, looked like live-action Beavis and Butthead.

By one count, the two of them used the word "teabag" more than 50 times on one show. And on Monday, Cox even let the viewers in on their joke -- referencing Urbandictionary.com, a site which offers a number of colorful definitions for the term "teabagging."

"Well, there is a lot of love in teabagging," Cox said. "It is curious, though, as you point out, they do not use the verb 'teabag.' It might be because they're less enthusiastic about teabagging than some of the more corporate conservatives who seem to have taken to it quite easily."

Jenny Beth Martin, a Republican activist who helped organize one protest in Atlanta, said she's not too worried about the protests being dismissed by some media outlets. She estimated 750,000 people attended more than 800 protests in all 50 states, and that at the very least the local media and community newspapers documented it.

"Our message definitely got out where it needed to get," she said.

"Cons[ervatives are] finding out why I generally don't like protests on my side," Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsos said in a post-tea party tweet. "[T]hey bring out the wackos."

I would have to agree with that.

Have you seen the photos of the signs held by the teabaggers? Yikes.

My favorite line was by Schuster:

If you are planning simultaneous tea bagging all around the country, you're going to need a Dick Armey.

Comments by Ann Coulter re: Tax Protests

I had no idea how important this week's nationwide anti-tax tea parties were until hearing liberals denounce them with such ferocity. The New York Times' Paul Krugman wrote a column attacking the tea parties, apologizing for making fun of "crazy people." It's OK, Paul, you're allowed to do that for the same reason Jews can make fun of Jews.

On MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been tittering over the similarity of the name "tea parties" to an obscure homosexual sexual practice known as "tea bagging." Night after night, they sneer at Republicans for being so stupid as to call their rallies "tea bagging."

Every host on Air America and every unbathed, basement-dwelling loser on the left wing blogosphere has spent the last week making jokes about tea bagging, a practice they show a surprising degree of familiarity with.

Except no one is calling the tea parties "tea bagging" -- except Olbermann and Maddow. Republicans call them "tea parties."

But if the Republicans were calling them "tea-bagging parties," the MSNBC hosts would have a fantastically hilarious segment for viewers in San Francisco and the West Village and not anyplace else in the rest of the country. On the other hand, they're not called "tea-bagging parties." (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour at Barney Frank's condo in Georgetown.)

You know what else would be hilarious? It would be hilarious if Hillary Clinton's name were "Ima Douche." Unfortunately, it's not. It was just a dream. Most people would wake up, realize it was just a dream and scrap the joke. Not MSNBC hosts.

Continued: http://www.anncoulter.com/

COPYRIGHT 2009 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
1130 Walnut, Kansas City, MO 64106

Since when is teabagging just a homosexual activity? Coulter needs to get laid more often. I won't volunteer though.

It would sort of be emotional masochism.

I consider teabagging to be more of a sport than a an activity.

However, that defense did me little good with the cops at balboa park.

Here's a great article by Matt Taibbi that really says it better than I could have. Plus it's got a couple of lines that sent green tea spewing out of my nostrils:

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/15/teabagging-michelle-malkin/

Some excerpts:

Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.

...

So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off. What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.

In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!

I recommend reading the entire article (link above). Taibbi's a great writer.

I just like the idea that the way to protest government waste is to buy thousands of dollars of tea you intend to throw away.

Did I miss where Sam Adams and crew spent all day shopping in the tea salon?

If you are going to have some genuine insurgent activity then grab some sack and steal the shit.

Don't drive your SUV to Costco or Whole Foods and buy a few boxes and then pick up your 1700's costume and chant "ditto" at an engineer with a mike.

It just feels like a giant exercise in irony. Almost like Michael Palin is going to step out at any moment and say something about the inquisition.

It is rather funny to watch though.

Its just kind of sad that so many don't realize they are being laughed at.

Amen, Allan. This is the point I've been trying to make. The outrage that we are seeing now is really beginning to cross party lines. And the Powers that Be are using a divide-and-conquer strategy that I believe is going to backfire. If blacks unite with whites and the left wing unites with the right wing, God help our "elected" officials. Obama was intended to be the linchpin of that divide and conquer strategy - an oblique effort to use racism to pit us against one another. But as you say, this shit is going to hit critical mass - this year.

Critical mass.
Like voting a black man in as president?
Like firing a bunch of elected officials?

Like bombing gov't bldgs?

What are you seeing exactly?

Critical mass? I'm seeing a bunch of people on bicicles cruising around town.

critical-mass.info

I think MLK said it best..."We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."

Oh, give me a break! If you don't believe it was the Republicans driving this teabagging party, then you're extremely gullible!

And the last time I checked, babies were portable...they can be moved from place to place in strollers and car seats.

I just have to wonder where these folks were when Republicans were creating a massive deficit like drunken sailors the last eight years. Not a peep then. Geez how people only see what they want to see.

And to sit here and bitch "Socialism" and "Tyranny" when we have no choice but to loan money in attempts to get us out of the biggest pickle we've been in since the Great Depression - which was created while the Republicans fiddled and turned a blind eye - absolutely flabberghasts me.

It's just like when these folks impeached Gray Davis but now that a Republican Terminator is raising fees shortly after re-election, NOT A PEEP.

What a crock.

Svelte: You think the shit we're in is simply a result of just the last eight years? No way. Bush was simply finishing what others had started long before he took office, Republican AND Democrat.

You think Barney Frank's hands are cleaner than Phil Gramm's? Or Chris Dodd's, for that matter?

No politician on either side of the aisle wants to step up and tell the American people the truth about the true state of this country. You think this shit is a mess? Wait until you catch a whiff of the biggest unfunded liability on the planet: Medicare and Social Security. You're talking $80Trn to $100Trn; numbers that absolutely dwarf the present crisis, both in terms of sheer magnitude and societal impact.

Have you heard anything about that? Nope. Think you will? Nope. It's political suicide.

I do not think partypup is gullible any more than TG is a priest. I think the political fabric contains numerous fibers from both Republicans and Democrats, so entertwined together that neither one wants the truth to be known. A third party would be a big mistake. That is how we inherited Clinton. I think what will be best is to find out who did what and let the chips fall where they may. There is a lot of room for improvement all around. Quit looking for the fall guy to blame. George Bush and the straw man arguments are getting old. Weed out the unfit to represent us regardless of the party. We need a fresh start. Don't think the tea party is about Obama, it is about incompetent government starting with the bailouts under Bush that are continuing under Obama.