Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.

“Down the road, this data will be used against you,” warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.

Local officials say they would dismiss such notions except that the growing and often heated protests are having an effect.

In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom a high-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions…

[continues in the New York Times]

Their politics may differ. But both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have laid claim to representing the interests of the middle class, whose economic frustrations helped spur the groups’ establishment and growth.

So which side’s congressional lawmakers come closest to embodying that wide swath of the U.S. population? Or, in Occupy terms, which side is closer to the 99 percent?

Neither the members of the House Tea Party Caucus nor those of the House Progressive Caucus — whose views most closely align with the Occupy Wall Street movement — are remotely middle class, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of congressional personal financial disclosure forms covering 2010, the most recently available data.

The members of the House Tea Party Caucus are especially wealthy, the Center’s research shows.

The median average net worth of a member of the House Tea Party Caucus was $1.8 million in 2010. (Financial disclosure forms require lawmakers to value their assets and liabilities only in ranges, so it’s impossible to know exactly how wealthy a particular elected official is. However, it’s possible to calculate an average net worth for each member of Congress.)

That’s significantly higher than the comparable number for the median House member: $755,000. It’s also more than 130 percent above the $774,280 average net worth of the median, non-Tea Party Caucus House Republican.

Furthermore, the caucus, a group of 60 House members founded by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), includes 33 millionaires and six members worth more than $20 million, according to the Center’s research. That means a member of the group is more likely to be a millionaire than the average Republican who isn’t in the caucus…

Read more here.

In 2006, long before costume shops first began selling tri-corner hats to early adopters of the tea party movement, professors David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam “interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans” about their “political attitudes.” By re-interviewing many of the same people this summer, they were able to determine what type of person eventually became a tea partier. Some of what they found is about as shocking as an episode of Full House: Current tea-party supporters were likely to have been “highly partisan Republicans,” and “even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president.” One finding that is actually revealing, though:

Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

It’s no coincidence that Rick “I’ll Have God Fix All of Our Problems” Perry and Michele “I’ll Have God Pick My Campaign Staff” Bachmann combined captured 60 percent of the tea party movement’s support in the latest GOP primary poll. Of course, “more God” and “less government” are hardly mutually exclusive — in fact, some tea partiers, like Jim DeMint, see them as one in the same…

[continues at New York Magazine's Daily Intel]

Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

So only a crackpot would question hypocrisy? Looks like the Tea Party is projecting a bit. CNN reports:

They’re hard-charging, compromise-damning members of Congress, and they’ve changed the debate in Washington over the size and spending of the government.

In recent days, Republican hard-liners in the debt ceiling talks have been vociferous in their rhetoric.

At a tea party rally, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said his faction needs to push forward a balanced budget amendment and other measures “… in order to save our country from a Congress that for decades has been burying our children and our grandchildren, both born and unborn, under a mountain of debt.”

But according to recently released disclosure forms, Lee and others in his caucus have some significant personal debt of their own.

The documents — annual personal financial disclosure forms that were released in June — show that Lee had amassed at least $15,000 in credit card debt and had a $50,000 line of credit at a Utah bank as of late last year.

Read more here.

Some Tennessee tea partiers are in hot water with a Las Vegas gambling resort that’s accusing them of skipping out on a big hotel bill.

On Monday Venetian Casino Resort, LLC., filed suit against Tea Party Nation Corporation of Franklin, Tenn., alleging the group owes $642,144 for canceling a conservative conclave last year. The event, which had been scheduled for July 14–18, 2010, was first postponed until October and ultimately canceled.

The Daily Caller reported at the time there was a lack of people willing to pay $399 for a weekend pass or $125 per day to hear speakers such as conservative commentator Laura Ingraham or politician Sharron Angle, who at the time was in the midst of a failed campaign to oust Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Las Vegas.

The lawsuit covers the dates for the proposed July event. Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation said he hasn’t seen the lawsuit and wouldn’t comment on the accusations. Las Vegas Sands spokesman Ron Reese said the company would have no comment on the case.

Read More in the Las Vegas Review-Journal

Those who belong to the conservative movement known as the Tea Party are acutely aware of the power of popular culture, so they have been cautiously delving into the creation of entertainment that promotes their values. It usually manifests itself in snippets of online political parody. Coming Sunday, though, is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet: A “TV show” created by a couple of Tea Partiers who have formed their own production company.

The one-hour drama is called Courage, New Hampshire, and it premiers Sunday at a movie theater in Monrovia, Calif. Co-hosting the red carpet activities are Saturday Night Live alumna Victoria Jackson and radio personality Tony Katz, both of whom regularly speak at Tea Party rallies.

Courage has the pacing and feel of a soap opera, though its set in Colonial America. While its creators are making it as a TV show, there’s no distribution partner, so it’s going straight to DVD after the premiere. The company, Colony Bay, is also trying to strike deals with conservative online TV outlets, like Glenn Beck’s GBTV and Kelsey Grammer’s Right Network, and are seeking a television VOD partner…

[continues in the Hollywood Reporter]

In April 2009, Barry Cole attended the Tax Day Tea Party in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas. An entrepreneur whose ventures include a company that calibrates police radar guns, he immediately “saw there’s a potential market developing here.” Within a week, he’d applied for a trademark (PDF) for the name “Teaparty Patriot” and arranged to sell T-shirts, flags, pins, license plates, and other gear on eBay and another website.

Eight months later, he got a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer representing Tea Party Patriots—a group that now claims to be one of the largest tea party groups in the country—who accused Cole of committing a trademark violation.

“I laughed,” says Cole. “It was absurd. I filed for a Teaparty Patriot trademark three months before they did.” After a year of legal wrangling—during which Tea Party Patriots failed to respond to numerous requests for documents—TPP abruptly dropped the matter (PDF) in late November. Cole, meanwhile, is still awaiting word on his “Teaparty Patriot” (no “s”) trademark application. TPP, whose site also has a full line of swag including golf towels and cigars, is still seeking approval (PDF) to own the term “Tea Party Patriots.”

The Cole/TPP battle is not the only fight over control of the Tea Party Patriots brand. TPP has sought to wrest domain names away from a radio host in Orlando (teapartypatriots.com) and a motorcycle-riding multi-media producer in Washington state (teaparty-patriots.com). It has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Zazzle, a website whose users can make and sell personalized merchandise, because a Georgia tea party group was selling its gear there. And the organization is embroiled in a thicket of legal actions against former board member Amy Kremer, who now chairs Tea Party Express. In 2009, TPP won a restraining order (PDF) barring Kremer from using the Tea Party Patriots name, trademark, domain name, and especially its most valuable asset—its email list. She has countersued (PDF) for slander and also opposed TPP’s trademark application, on the grounds that she put the term into circulation months before TPP was incorporated.

All these cases likely have cost TPP a fair amount of time, bandwidth, and money—money, its critics say, that could otherwise be used to spread the gospel of smaller government. Cole blames TPP national coordinator Mark Meckler, a self-described “internet marketing attorney” who was previously a distributor for the multilevel-marketing company Herbalife.

“I am conservative,” notes Cole, “but you know, you just want to think that an organization that’s supposed to be like that would be more representative of the people.”

Check out these two news reports. Hypocrisy, politics, or both?

Simmi Aujla reports in the Politico:

Top House Democrats pounced on Republicans’ mishandling of a routine vote Tuesday evening, which caused a bill to extend provisions of the Patriot Act go down in defeat.

The Democrats said Wednesday morning that the failed vote is a sign that Republican leaders aren’t prepared to handle the practical difficulties of governing.

“I don’t think they’ve found their center yet,” Democratic Caucus conference chair Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) said. “It seems they’re coming apart at the seams.”

Rank-and-file Republicans threw off Republican leaders’ plans for the measure, which was expected to pass easily, when a large enough number bucked their party and voted no. The measure fell short of the two-thirds vote it needed by 13 votes.

But Greg Sargent reports in the Washington Post:

Yesterday, a vote on reauthorizing three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act failed after most Democrats and a few Republicans voted against it. So does the vote represent a new Tea Party revolt against big government? Hardly. Republicans hate the welfare state, not the surveillance state.

Only 26 Republicans voted against the bill, and there are 52 members of the Republican Tea Party Caucus, whose chairperson, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn)  voted for reauthorization along with most of the rest of her caucus. As Slate’s Dave Weigel  points out, only eight of the 26 were Republican freshmen elected last November. One hundred and twenty-two Democrats voted against reauthorization, I suspect most of them just because they could.

So how did the bill fail? Basically Republicans were trying to pass the bill under “suspension of the rules,” which is considered the process for passing “noncontroversial” legislation.  You need a two thirds majority of those present to pass bills that way. For one brief night, Republicans in the House learned what it was like to be a Democrat in the Senate.

Sadly, the revolt probably won’t last, as there are more than the 218 votes needed to pass reauthorization under normal procedures. What’s uncertain is whether the reauthorization will contain mild oversight provisions, and when the provisions will actually sunset. As Cato’s Julian Sanchez notes, there are two Democratic Senate versions that reauthorize these provisions for three years, but the Republican House version sunsets them until December 2011, while the Republican Senate proposal makes them permanent. Democratic Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s  version of the bill would reign in Section 215 orders and provide some key oversight over the use of the widely abused National Security Letters, but those modest reforms were too much for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), so she introduced an alternate bill without them.

Rand Paul. Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC)

Senator Rand Paul, extreme tea partier from Kentucky, has a controversial opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, claiming that his spending cuts would keep 85% of government funding and not touch Social Security or Medicare:

After Republicans swept into office in 1994, Bill Clinton famously said in his State of the Union address that the era of big government was over. Nearly $10 trillion of federal debt later, the era of big government is at its zenith.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this will be the third consecutive year in which the federal government is running a deficit near or greater than $1 trillion. The solution to the government’s fiscal crisis must begin by cutting spending in all areas, particularly in those that can be better run at the state or local level. Last month I introduced legislation to do just that. And though it seems extreme to some—containing over $500 billion in spending cuts enacted over one year—it is a necessary first step toward ending our fiscal crisis.

My proposal would first roll back almost all federal spending to 2008 levels, then initiate reductions at various levels nearly across the board. Cuts to the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation would create over $42 billion in savings each, while cuts to the Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development would save about $50 billion each. Removing education from the federal government’s jurisdiction would create almost $80 billion in savings alone. Add to that my proposed reductions in international aid, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and other federal agencies, and we arrive at over $500 billion.

My proposal, not surprisingly, has been greeted skeptically in Washington, where serious spending cuts are a rarity. But it is a modest proposal when measured against the size of our mounting debt. It would keep 85% of our government funding in place and not touch Social Security or Medicare. But by reducing wasteful spending and shuttering departments that are beyond the constitutional role of the federal government, such as the Department of Education, we can cut nearly 40% of our projected deficit and at the same time remove thousands of big-government bureaucrats who stand in the way of efficiency…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

TUCSON — A victim of the shooting spree here that severely injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was taken into custody on Saturday after the police and witnesses said the man spoke threateningly at a televised forum intended to help this stricken city heal.

Tucson, AZ. Photo: Motorrad-67

Eric Fuller, 63, a military veteran who was passionate about liberal causes and who had supported Ms. Giffords, was “involuntarily committed for mental health evaluation,” according to Jason Ogan, a spokesman for the Pima County Sheriff’s office.

Mr. Fuller, who was shot in the left knee and the back on Jan. 8, was among several victims, medical personnel and others who attended a special forum televised by ABC and hosted by Christiane Amanpour.

State Representative Terri Proud, a Republican, was sitting two rows behind Mr. Fuller. The topic of gun control had come up in the forum, she said, and a comment was made by one of the speakers about a bill that was introduced recently in Arizona that would allow staff members on college campuses with concealed weapons permits to carry guns.

Ms. Proud said she spoke up to clarify the exact language of the bill. At that point, Trent Humphries, the founder of the Tucson Tea Party, who was sitting one row behind her, rose to speak and suggested that discussion about gun legislation be postponed until after the funerals. He started to explain that he, too, had been affected by the tragedy through a neighbor who was a victim.

That was, according to Ms. Proud, when Mr. Fuller blurted out to Mr. Humphries: “You’re dead.”

Mr. Fuller then began to “behave in a very odd manner,” she said. “He was making inappropriate comments.”

After the forum wrapped up, Ms. Proud said she went to one of the police officers providing security at the event and asked him if he would file a report about the threat to Mr. Humphries. The officer told her they were already on it.

About five police officers surrounded Mr. Fuller and escorted him from the event. As he was leaving, said Ms. Proud, he turned and yelled, “You’re all whores,” before walking out.

Read more here.

Interestingly, the “conservative” Human Events published an article by John Hayward on Friday that began, “You might be seeing a lot of Eric Fuller over the weekend.”   Read more of that memo from the You Spot It You Got It Department here.

As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less — right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical — the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called “A Superpower in Decline,” which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at “balance” found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties…

Read More in Alternet

Congress has passed, a two year renewal of the Bush tax cuts. The bill is a nice extra Christmas bonus for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, and it will only amplify the monumental US budget deficit.

The logic behind the bill goes against, not only common sense but also against the global trend, notably in Europe, to cut spending and increase taxation in order to address a spreading budget crisis.

The governments of countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are pushing for unpopular austerity measures, and richer countries such as the UK and France are trying to implement the same type of economic policies often by cutting social benefits and programs.

If austerity is the trend in Europe, it is certainly not the case in the United States. The US political and financial ruling class, which can be credited for starting the global financial meltdown of 2008, is still betting on the “virtues” of shock capitalism by cutting taxes and not cutting spending. What Congress did last night is quite simple: Our politicians made the decision to charge our common national credit card with a $700 billion gift to themselves and their real constituents, which are the wealthiest 2 percent Americans. And, once again, future generations will have to pick-up the astronomic tab. That is, of course, unless the United States goes completely bankrupt from 30 years of reckless financial and economic policies.

However, Americans, especially Democrats, should not be surprised at all. The new documentary “Inside Job” exposed how the same players, often switching jobs from top Wall Street executives to “public servants” rigged the system, and are still running the show. By giving Wall Street full license to operate like a Ponzi scheme, we have allowed this very dangerous symbiosis between Wall Street and Congress, where the financial sector is truly in charge of the electoral American process.

Before he became president, Barack Obama was denouncing the “Fat Cats” of Wall Street. Two years later, this hypocritical populist stand has been exposed as a lie. President Obama has, in his own economic team, some of the worst fat cats he was denouncing a while back. The de-regulators or former Wall Street executives such as Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke etc are behind all financial and economic decisions in the Obama administration, and they fully qualify as fat cats.

Read More on News Junkie Post

As virtually all of Washington was declaring WikiLeaks’s disclosures of secret diplomatic cables an act of treason, Representative Ron Paul was applauding the organization for exposing the United States’ “delusional foreign policy.”

For this, the conservative blog RedState dubbed him “Al Qaeda’s favorite member of Congress.”

It was hardly the first time that Mr. Paul had marched to his own beat. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he was best remembered for declaring in a debate that the 9/11 attacks were the Muslim world’s response to American military intervention around the globe. A fellow candidate, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, interrupted and demanded that he take back the words — a request that Mr. Paul refused.

During his 20 years in Congress, Mr. Paul has staked out the lonely end of 434-to-1 votes against legislation that he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed him “Dr. No,” but his wife will insist that they have the spelling wrong: he is really Dr. Know.

Now it appears others are beginning to credit him with some wisdom — or at least acknowledging his passionate following.

After years of blocking him from a leadership position, Mr. Paul’s fellow Republicans have named him chairman of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the currency and the valuation of the dollar.

Mr. Paul has strong views on those issues. He has written a book called “End the Fed”; he embraces Austrian economic thought, which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy; and he advocates a return to the gold standard.

Many of the new Republicans in the next Congress campaigned on precisely the issues that Mr. Paul has been talking about for 40 years: forbidding Congress from any action not explicitly authorized in the Constitution, eliminating entire federal departments as unconstitutional and checking the power of the Fed.

He has been called the “intellectual godfather of the Tea Party,” but he also is the real father of the Tea Party movement’s most high-profile winner, Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky. (The two will be roommates in Ron Paul’s Virginia condominium. “I told him as long as he didn’t expect me to cook,” the elder Mr. Paul said. “I’m not going to take care of him the way his mother did.”)…

[continues in the New York Times]

'The First Thanksgiving' by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

This ought to get conversation at your dinner table fired up! Kate Zernike fuels that fire in the New York Times:

Ah, Thanksgiving. A celebration regardless of creed; a time for all Americans to come together after a divisive election year.

But why take a holiday from argument? In these fractious times, even the meaning of Thanksgiving is subject to political debate.

Forget what you learned about the first Thanksgiving being a celebration of a bountiful harvest, or an expression of gratitude to the Indians who helped the Pilgrims through those harsh first months in an unfamiliar land. In the Tea Party view of the holiday, the first settlers were actually early socialists. They realized the error of their collectivist ways and embraced capitalism, producing a bumper year, upon which they decided that it was only right to celebrate the glory of the free market and private property.

Historians quibble with this interpretation. But the story, related by libertarians and conservatives for years, has taken on new life over the last year among Tea Party audiences, who revere early American history, and hunger for any argument against what they believe is the big-government takeover of the United States.

It has made Thanksgiving another proxy in the debate over health care and entitlement spending, and placed it alongside the New Deal and the Constitution on the platter of historical items picked apart by competing narratives.

There are other debates about Thanksgiving — whether the first was in Jamestown, Va., or Plymouth, Mass.; whether it was intended as a religious holiday or not. But broadly, the version passed on to generations of American schoolchildren holds that the settlers who had arrived in the New World on the Mayflower in 1620 were celebrating the next year’s good harvest, sharing in the bounty with Squanto and their other Indian friends, who had taught them how to hunt and farm on new terrain.

All very kumbaya, say Tea Party historians, but missing the economics lesson within.

In one common telling, the pilgrims who came to Plymouth established a communal system, where all had to pool whatever they hunted or grew on their lands. Because they could not reap the fruits of their labors, no one had any incentive to work, and the system failed — confusion, thievery and famine ensued.

Finally, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, abolished this system and gave each household a parcel of land. With private property to call their own, the Pilgrims were suddenly very industrious and found themselves with more corn than they knew what to do with. So they invited the Indians over to celebrate. (In some other versions, the first Thanksgiving is not a feast but a brief respite from famine. But the moral is always the same: socialism doesn’t work.) The same commune-to-capitalism, famine-to-feast story is told of Jamestown, the first English settlement, in 1607. Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and Texas congressman who has become a Tea Party promoter, related it as a cautionary tale in a speech to the National Press Club earlier this year.

Rush Limbaugh repeats the Thanksgiving story of Plymouth every year…

[continues in the New York Times]

While still popular among party loyalists, the president has become radioactive among independents–the critical group of “swing voters” who have fled Camp Obama en masse frustrated with both the lack of audacity and/or change. No one figured they were electing George W. Bush to a third term in office when they cast their vote for the inspiring senator from Illinois two years ago. But that’s what they got. To say that supporters are disappointed in Obama’s performance, is a gross understatement of the pessimism that’s spread like Kudzu among the party faithful. People have become increasingly cynical as they realize that neither party provides a path to real structural change. The system is broken; Obama has merely exposed the rot at the heart of American democracy.

Why I don’t Trust the Tea Party

I don’t trust the Tea Party. I’m distrustful of new movements and remember how for eight years of Bush II, people who once had smaller government views suddenly abandoned those views in blind devotion of the president. I realize that it’s easy to believe in freedom for just a few years. My distrust is aided by the fact that the idea of freedom is a momentarily politically expedient idea to some…

Let me tell you a little story. Perhaps it won’t be very compelling or important, and perhaps the opinion of one slightly unhinged free lance writer means nothing, but the truth is I never voted in my life until 2008.

I got caught up in the idea of ushering in some kind of enlightenment via a black president, not because I thought racial harmony would dawn or that Barack Obama was anything more than a politician, but because I thought that his election was a sign of things to come, i.e. people finally coming to their senses and abandoning all the nonsense ideas about the completely bullshit concept of race. Also, Sarah Palin scared the fuck out of me.

Boy, was I wrong. I was gloriously, spectacularly wrong. I have never in my 30 years on this earth seen anything like like what I’ve seen since Obama has been president. Never mind the racism, nor the laughable candidates and movements, nor the legions of white people who seem to think Armageddon is looming, nor the bullshit arguments and accusations leveled at the party in power, accusations that make no fucking sense. Never mind that both parties are virtually the same, that both are beholden to the same corporate interests and no matter who is in power the same stupid, frustrating shit occurs.

Read More at the First Church of Mutterhals

Saturn Devouring His Son (de Goya).

Around 11:00 p.m. CNN called the U.S. senate race in Wisconsin for Tea Party favorite Ron Johnson, finally ending a nail-biter that saw incumbent Democrat Russ Feingold projected at within one half of one percentage point of Johnson shortly before polls closed at 8:00 p.m. local time.

During that three-hour window of opportunity we held a breathless deathgrip around that slender hope over at one of Russ’s suburban canvassing centers.

The crew had literally worked their asses off for Russ — at 17 calories per minute, our 12-hour shifts of non-stop door-to-door troop rallying, we’d shed about a pound each day.

I figure that I alone must have knocked on over a thousand doors during this election cycle, reminding folks not only of what Russ has done for Wisconsin, but what Johnson’s Tea Party threatened to do to it, and why it all added up to an unequivocal imperative to support Russ.

And with many votes yet to be counted,* and rumours that those were concentrated within the most traditionally Democratic districts in the state, we seemed to have good reason to hope.

Russ rejected the TARP bailout. He voted ‘No’ to the Iraq war. He opposed the Bush-era glad-handing of the U.S. Treasury to the wealthiest 2%. He supported legislation against predatory recission against premium payers by Big Insurance. Russ is a True Progressive Hero.

And what has Johnson done? What’s HIS track record of public service? Well, he doesn’t really have one. He essentially inherited his business, directly deriving more than a quarter of all its revenues** from his in-laws megacorps. That and licensure as a certified public accountant provided him with the thin plastic veneer of economic authority to curry the patronage of Big Finance, the Koch brothers, Club for Growth, and the state AICPA. Essentially Ron Johnson is a millionaire dilettante.

More at The Great Amateur Hour

The brain behind the event is Alicia Hayes-Roberts, sister of Tea Party presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, who explains the mission on the Miss Liberty America website:

MISS LIBERTY AMERICA is dedicated to discovering America’s elite feminine patriots and giving them the opportunity on a national stage to showcase their patriotism, intelligence, talent, and beauty. The contestants will be judged in categories of personal interview, swimsuit, evening gown, beauty, talent, questions regarding the documents of
America’s founding fathers, and Marksmanship!

It’s 2am on a balmy August morning in Lexington, Kentucky, and the hotel car park is a flurry of activity as people arrive in cars and scurry on board two hired coaches, which rev up their engines in expectation of a long drive through the night. There is excitement in the air but also some apprehension: these are ordinary folk from the American heartland on a mission that will take them into the heart of enemy territory – Washington DC. America’s Tea Party is on the move.

Soon we’re gliding in the dark through bluegrass country. On the coach, the talk is of retaking the country from those who currently run it, taking an axe to big government and returning to constitutional basics, when federal government was limited and power resided largely with the states. It’s all said with an evangelical fervour.

“America needs a spiritual renewal,” says a genial man everybody calls Mario because of his spectacular handlebar moustache. “Amen to that,” says an elegant, middle-aged woman sitting next to me. Cutting government down to size will clearly be God’s work.

Like almost everyone else on the bus, both are political novices. Never much thought about politics or even much cared. Now they’re riled up and fully signed up to the Tea Party. They’ve been summoned to the nation’s capital by, of all people, a TV presenter called Glenn Beck who hosts a daily show on Fox News, which has become, in effect, the broadcasting arm of the Tea Party.

He has urged them to flock to a rally to “Restore Honour” to America and my fellow passengers are committed enough to oblige, even if they have to lose a night’s sleep and pay their own way. It’s been billed as a non-political gathering, just a tribute to patriotism and Christianity. Nobody’s much fooled by that.

On the coach, everybody seems an expert on the US constitution. One man, a blue-collar worker, points me to the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to [the federal government] … are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Another takes me to Article 1, Section 8, which delineates the powers of the federal government. On a strict interpretation, they are pretty limited: largely tax, defence and foreign affairs, though it also tasks the federal government with providing for the “general welfare”, which would seem a get-out-of-jail card for those who think the constitution does sanction big government.

Tea Party activists approach the constitution the same fundamentalist way they approach the Bible: literally…

[continues in the Guardian]

What to do if you’re courageous enough to admit the Obama administration and Democrats are full of shit and the Tea Party and Republicans are dangerous and stupid?

Barack Obama the messenger

President Barack Obama soared into the public consciousness with a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He then took Howard Dean’s example and used the power of the Internet to create a fundraising juggernaut for his historic 2008 Presidential run. With a swiftness not seen since JFK’s political ascendancy, Obama became president and claimed broad power to affect “change” across the country. But Kennedy only had to surmount his Irish Catholic background — Barack Obama had to transcend the fact that he is African-American.

But appearances are, in the final analysis, immaterial. Just as a magician uses scenery and sleight-of-hand to divert the audience’s attention, Barack Obama has used his background, intellect, perceived worldliness and powers of speech to distort the reality field, as I call it (to repurpose Steve Jobs’ “reality-distortion field”).  To get Americans thinking about a certain reality, while another is at work behind the scenes.

Maybe you — an Obama voter — have asked yourself, “What happened to the man for whom I voted?” I would argue nothing. Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama is a masterful political manipulator.  And if one is able to let dissolve mental distinctions of party — Democrat, Republican — then Obama can be seen for what he really is: a trojan horse.

I am not a religious man. I am not a Republican and I am not a Democrat. A Jeffersonian Democrat might be more on point. But labels are so inelegant and ultimately rather pointless. And, I must admit, I erred most spectacularly in my vote for Barack Obama. There I sat front and center in the Obama Magic Show: my reason lobotomized by my desire—no, need—to see a man of great intellect inhabit the office after the devolutionary presidency of George W. Bush.

This was Obama’s greatest trick: the lobotomization of man’s capacity to reason. The wolf hadn’t come in sheep’s clothing — he’d used the alchemy of television and print to transmogrify himself into a saint. All were not fooled by the illusionist, however; but just enough were dazzled in the end to give Obama the presidency and the Democrats control of Congress, where they continued the Bush policy of caving to corporate masters and of American political and economic hegemony.

The Koch Brothers-funded Tea Party reactionaries, however, aren’t as into illusion as Obama and the Democrats, unless of course you examine the sugar daddies behind the Tea Party apparatus, flush with corporate dollars. Look into Robert Rowling and Trever Rees-Jones of American Crossroads (a 527 organization led by Karl Rove), or more prominently Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, his perpetual motion machine of corporate pitch men.

The answer for them is limited government but robust national defense policy. Translation: unimpeded corporate dominance in the U.S. economy and muscular foreign policy in the Reagan and Bush 43 tradition, which will benefit defense contractors. Two different but ultimately convergent streams to enrich corporate entities. The openness of this method is startling in its brazenness.

The Tea Party has some sensible ideas in the limited government platform, but the reality of their vision would be an approximation of the Reagan and Bush presidencies: secrecy, hawkish military maneuvering, corporate welfare, rapacious capitalism and so forth. That is the endpoint of the limited government espoused by the Tea Party reactionaries. Defense contractors and corporations benefit markedly, and maybe some benefit will be seen elsewhere, but certainly not in middle-class bank accounts. Limited government, in fact, is devoid of meaning because the master remains the same: big business.

President Obama revealed his true colors when he had a unique moment in American history to effectively punish Wall Street and the banking system that brought the nation and the world to its knees, but did not. Wall Street’s banks went unpunished. Why? Obama’s economic team, populated by ex-Goldman Sachs bankers, continues to let the Federal Reserve act as Wall Street’s visible hand in the nation and world’s economy. What, I ask, has really changed from President Bush’s presidency to Obama’s?

When it comes to the treatment of big business, we can’t tell the difference, either

Obama’s pulling the military out of Iraq finally (though advisors will remain) but escalating our Afghan campaign. He lords over the largest intelligence services in the world in the CIA and NSA, who continue their culture of violating civil liberties. And Obama will be given the power to essentially “kill” the internet by way of the Senator Joseph Lieberman-sponsored “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA).”  The bill would allow the President to shut down all or portions of the internet in the event of a cyber attack, but this is all scenery because the potentialities of such power should be downright frightening to all Americans.

In the event that our government becomes outwardly oppressive in the future — a fundamentalist, crusading religious state, for example — the President would be able to shut down the Internet. The President, in effect, would be able to effectively control the flow of information; control the message in any critical moment; dissent would be crippled; mobilization of protests eliminated, or at least rendered more manageable. It would make a mockery of the American right of free speech and assembly, and mark us as no freer than the Chinese people.

And, as Dylan Ratigan noted last week with his well-articulated rant on “Morning Joe,” Obama is maintaining the U.S. policy of not going after the source of radical Islamic terrorism–Saudi Arabian funding of Wahabi schools.  Schools that gave birth to the men who have visited terror on the U.S. and the world for decades now, including the 9/11 attacks.

What is an informed voter to do when presented with the illusionary tactics of Obama and the Democrats and the oligarchical platform of the Tea Party Republicans?

I might be courting controversy here, but it occurs to me the only gesture that makes any sense is: Don’t vote.

Voting in past elections has continually given us two options — one  found in the open contempt for common people (Republicans) and the other in the two-faced champion of the people (Democrats).

Your vote tethers you to the machine. It absorbs the last bit of freedom you possess: the freedom to resist your ownership by the mechanisms of power.  We can never fully escape the political reality that a minority, cloaked in the illusion of majority rule (Democrats or Republicans), manages our lives in one form or another from the moment of our birth to our very last breath.

Vote and you endorse one unfair political system over another. You legitimize its existence. You may vote for Democrats in the mid-terms because you don’t want to hand power over to the Tea Party reactionaries (a legitimate concern), but you are endorsing an apparatus (the Democratic party) that is still dominated by big business.

Do not let others saddle you with guilt for exercising your right of refusal. Instead of voting, why not take a more direct path of action in your community by volunteering your time by helping a literacy organization, for instance. Teach creative writing so a generation will rise who can speak truth to power. Educate others about the real stories behind history that our education system cannot and will not (by government sanction) teach.  Volunteer your time at a food pantry. Work for lower rent in your neighborhood, like James Sullivan would have you do. Organize with others to combat racial or other social injustices in your neighborhood.

As Professor Brian Martin of University of Wollongong, Australia, writes:

“[T]he founding of the modern state a few centuries ago was met with great resistance: people would refuse to pay taxes, to be conscripted or to obey laws passed by national governments. The introduction of voting and the expanded suffrage have greatly aided the expansion of state power. Rather than seeing the system as one of ruler and ruled, people see at least the possibility of using state power to serve themselves. As electoral participation has increased, the degree of resistance to taxation, military service, and the immense variety of laws regulating behaviour, has been greatly attenuated.”

There are other ways of exercising your civic duty to your fellow citizens.

Don’t vote. Do something.

Less than two years ago, Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin were 30-something suburbanites in metro Atlanta, frustrated by recession, dismayed by the election of Barack Obama and waiting for the next chapter of their lives.

Ms. Kremer, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant, had quit her career to raise her daughter. The child had grown up and just moved out, and now Ms. Kremer was filling her time with two blogs—one on gardening, one on politics.

“I had this empty space in my life,” Ms. Kremer recalls.

Ms. Martin, a software manager by training and part-time blogger, was cleaning houses to help pay the bills after her husband’s temporary-staffing business collapsed. They were in danger of losing their home.

As her family’s fortunes crumbled, Congress—including Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), for whose campaign Ms. Martin had volunteered—voted for President George Bush’s bill to bail out the big Wall Street banks.

Ms. Martin was enraged. “It wasn’t because the government didn’t bail my husband’s business out,” she says. “Sometimes it stinks when your business goes bad. But it’s part of our system.… The government doesn’t need to come in and hold a business up and keep it from failing.”

In the span of a few weeks in February and March 2009, the two women met on a conference call and helped found the first major national organization in the tea-party movement. Within months, they became two of the central figures in the most dynamic force in American politics this year.

Ms. Kremer, 39, currently chairs the political action committee known as the Tea Party Express. It has raised millions of dollars for upstart candidates and engineered the campaign that threatens Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Once shy about public speaking, today she crisscrosses the country addressing thousands at a time. “Are you ready to fire Harry Reid?” Ms. Kremer bellowed to a crowd of 2,000 in Reno, Nev., this month.

Ms. Martin, 40, is national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group claiming affiliation with nearly 3,000 local groups around the U.S. …

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

“This story is just another example of the sexism and slander that female candidates are forced to deal with. From Secretary Clinton, to Governor Palin, to soon-to-be Governor Haley, Christine’s political opponents have been willing to engage in appalling and baseless attacks — all with the aim of distracting the press from covering the real issues in this race. Even the National Organization for Women gets it, but Christine’s opponent disturbingly does not. As Chris Coons said on September 16th he would not condone personal attacks against Christine. Classless Coons goons have proven yet again to have no sense of common decency or common sense with their desperate attacks to get another rubber stamp for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda. Such attacks are truly shameful, but they will not distract us from making our case to Delaware voters — and keeping the focus on Chris Coons’ record of higher taxes, increased spending, and as he has done again here, breaking his promises to the voters.”

(that statement was issued by O’Donnell’s Communications Director Doug Sachtleben.)

The Velvet Underground in 1966, with Tucker pictured on bottom-right.

Noted percussionist and original member of the Velvet Underground, Moe Tucker has recently been pursued by mainstream media for “her support of the Tea Party movement”. Left-wing and right-wing media and politicians have seized upon her statements and a brief appearance on a local news broadcast (a year and a half later) to celebrate or decry her positions and use her as a pawn in their respective arguments, but both sides are ignoring the truth of her message, which is the pressing need for a true third party option in the United States.

She does, in fact support the Georgia politicians that comprise the local Tea Party, but with a close parsing of her comments and viewpoints what you find is a very straightforward approach to reforming the bloated government and endemic corruption the American people are seeking today.

Moe Tucker is not a right-winger, just looking for representative democracy (from the news video clip):

My anger stems from the unbelievable (criminal!) waste of money on pork and earmarks. It drives me nuts to see that X millions are being allocated to build a turtle tunnel, a donkey museum, a salamander crossing, etc, etc, etc. Billions spent every friggin’ year on totally unnecessary crap so that these Congressbums can tell their constituents that they “brought home the bacon” and get re-elected. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to pay for any Congress SOB’s vote buying, and sure as hell not in these very very worrisome times!

This election cycle has passed without any development of another alternative to the Democrats/Republicans and the Tea Party as defined by mainstream media, which has painted all of the splinter groups trying to gain members and who oppose the two main parties with the simple broad brush of “Tea Party = Right Wing Nutcases”, but as more and more individuals come forward with their own solutions to the problems facing the United States and it’s populace, the closer we can get to the establishment of a legitimate third option to what is now essentially a one-party oligarchy dominated by corporate interests. It will soon become clear that the left and right’s attacks on the “Tea Partiers” are not in fact their fearless defense of our liberties, but are in fact a shrewd hedge against ANY party siphoning potential votes from their campaigns.

Ilario Pantano (Ilario Pantano personal collection, CC)

The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja.

The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons.Pantano ordered the two men to search the car for a second time and then, with no other US soldiers in view, unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine at them – some 60 rounds in total.

Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: “No better friend, No worse enemy.”

Six years later Pantano is on the verge of a stunning electoral victory that could send him to the US Congress in Washington. He is standing as Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 7th congressional district, which was last represented by his party in 1871.

With the help of the right-wing Tea Party movement, and with the benefit of his image as a war hero acquired from what happened on that fateful day in 2004, he has raised almost $1m (£630,000) in donations and is now level-pegging with his Democratic opponent, Mike McIntyre.

“We are in complete contention. We are certainly neck-and-neck. And we are feeling terrific,” he said at a Tea Party rally outside Wilmington.

Pantano is one of the new breed of hardline Republicans thrown up by the turmoil of the economic meltdown and the ensuing Tea Party explosion. He served in the first Gulf war, then worked for Goldman Sachs before rejoining the marines days after the 9/11 attacks.

A few months after he killed the two unarmed Iraqis, a member of his unit reported him to senior officers and he was charged with premeditated murder. At a pre-trial military hearing, prosecution witnesses testified that the detainees, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were unthreatening and that their bodies were found in a kneeling position having apparently been shot in the back.

You’ll have to forgive me if I disbelieve the defense.  Read more here.

BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe’s biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: “The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people.”

Obama and Democrats have accused corporate interests and anonymous donors of trying to hijack the midterms by funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce and to conservative Tea Party groups. The Chamber of Commerce reportedly has raised $75m (£47m) for pro-business, mainly Republican candidates.

Read more here.