TEA Parties: They Look So Innocent

"...One evening in the spring of ’89, Hendrickson and his girlfriend, Doreen Wright (they met while working on Paul’s campaign), were at a barbecue at her house in suburban Detroit with some fellow members of the Metro Detroit Libertarians. Eventually, the conversation turned to that old Libertarian bugaboo, the income tax. Like many people of his ideological persuasion, Hendrickson was familiar with a book titled “The Great Income Tax Hoax,” written by a former insurance broker named Irwin Schiff, which argued that, among other things, the tax was unconstitutional. In order to “raise the consciousness” about the evil of the income tax, Hendrickson proposed to the Metro Detroit Libertarians an audacious act of protest, something different from passing out fliers and holding up signs — something that, as he later recalled, “could not be kept quiet.” His idea found some takers and, over the course of the next year, Hendrickson, Wright and a married couple, Scott and Karen Scarborough, devised and carried out a plan to build a firebomb and mail it to the I.R.S.

On tax day, Hendrickson and the Scarboroughs drove a parcel containing the bomb to the post office in Royal Oak, Mich., where Scott Scarborough placed it in a mail bin outside. Hendrickson had wrapped a Bigelow tea bag around the bomb’s tubing — in homage to the Boston Tea Party, America’s founding act of tax protest — and addressed the package to “The Tax Thieves.” The return address read, “Freedom Loving Americans...”

Jason Zengerle
Hell Nay, We Won’t Pay!
New York Times Magazine
March 27, 2009

The Pitchforks of Populism

"Our founding fathers knew that when the rights of the people get trampled, we must become a torch- and ptichfork-wielding mob empty of all thought."

Stephen Colbert

Socialist Bogeyman Sighted In 1912

"These ambitions revealed, Taft and his fellow conservatives deemed Roosevelt a dangerous radical. Once in power for a third term, they said, Roosevelt would be a perpetual chief executive. Roosevelt had become the most dangerous man in American history, said Taft, "because of his hold upon the less intelligent voters and the discontented." The social justice that Roosevelt sought involved, in Taft's opinion, "a forced division of property, and that means socialism.'"

Lewis L. Gould
Return of the Rough Rider
Smithsonian Magazine
August 2008

Liberalsim v Socialism

"Liberalism is not socialism, and never will be... Liberalism has its own history and its own tradition. Socialism has its own formulas and aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly."

Winston Churchill

Republicans: The Doofs Of Haphazard

Let's see, between 2000 and 2006 we kept hearing about the death of the Democratic Party. Looks like the imminent demise of the Republican Party will be a major talking head conversation piece leading up to the 2010 elections. More proof of the "free market of ideas"...as in free to invert the previous talking points and point them at the minority party...

"Anyone who tells you the Republican Party is on its way back is smoking grass. For the party to win, they have to have a broad base. They've lost the broad base."

Frank Luntz
Gop Strategist


"...The conversation dominating Republican politics is how to rebuild. There are no neatly distinct schools of thought in this inchoate debate. In an important sense, though, the argument in Republican circles is the same one that preoccupied Democrats in 2005 — that is, whether the party’s priority should be to retrench ideologically or whether it is more important to fan out in search of a broader message and audience. These aren’t really mutually exclusive schools of thought — most influential Republicans will tell you they need to do both — but which approach you emphasize says a lot about what kind of Republican Party you would like to emerge from the ruins of Bushism.


The retrenchers see the Bush era principally as a cautionary tale in forgetting where you came from. In their view, Bush and the Republican Congress proved to be about as grounded in conservative principle, fiscally and internationally, as Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill — spending the nation into debt with patronage projects, going soft on immigration, passing a massive entitlement program for prescription drugs, piling up indictments and mismanaging the military. Republicans lost the public not because their ideology became less relevant or less credible, the retrenchers argue, but because it was twisted in the morass of governing. The only way back, then, is for the party to rededicate itself either to fiscal conservatism or social conservatism or some combination of the two, which means, first and foremost, exposing Obama and Democrats on the Hill for the elitist liberals they really are.


As a broad generalization, most of those talking the loudest about retrenchment and confrontation are in the activist wing of the party; they’re the death-before-taxes conservatives or the picket-abortion-clinics conservatives or the online conservatives who incline, like their liberal counterparts, toward ideological purity..."

by Matt Bai
New York Times
Read Newt Again

"The changing demography is not on the side of the Republican Party. Republicans seen to be waiting for the single to get married and the young to get old."

Kellyanne Conway
Republican Pollster

Did It Really Start In Mexico?

"On Friday, the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak containing this nugget, dated April 6 (major tip of the hat to Paula Hay, who alerted me to the Smithfield link on the Comfood listserv and has written about it on her blog, Peak Oil Entrepreneur):

'Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.'

...the possible link to Smithfield has not been reported in the U.S. press. Searches of Google News and the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all came up empty. The link is being made in the Mexican media, however. “Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria,” declared a headline in the Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha. No need to translate that, except to point out that La Gloria is the village where the outbreak seems to have started. Judging from the article, Mexican authorities treat hog CAFOs with just as much if not more indulgence than their peers north of the border, to the detriment of surrounding communities and the general public health."

Read more @ Grist.