Personal ResponsibiliTEA

..."Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs (TEA Partyers)—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?..."

Read My Country, Tis of Me at the Atlantic.

Fringe On The Right

"...What most animates the tea partiers, it seems, is their fear and loathing of the federal government, a government they believe taxes and spends too much, and is trending under President Obama toward “socialism.” No surprise there, given the rhetoric emanating from their rallies. More particularly, the tea-party faithful are angry about Democratic Washington’s supposed excessive concern with helping racial minorities (especially blacks) and the poor, who neither need nor deserve help, and with its wasteful and unnecessary efforts to create jobs and expand health care. The tea types self-righteously view such actions as running counter to their own moral imperative: cutting the budget and reducing the size of government...



One inconvenient truth revealed by the Times survey is that the broad groundswell of national indignation the doting mass media see in the tea-party uprising just doesn’t exist. Americans who identify as tea-party supporters make up, according to the polling data, only 18% of the population (barely one person in five), and only 4% of our fellow citizens have either contributed to the cause or attended its rallies. Moreover, those who have imbibed the Kool- Aid, so to speak, are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Republican party. Interviews reveal three-quarters of the tea partiers to be self-described conservatives who regularly vote for the GOP; contrary to the media-generated image, only a minority are independents, and only a tiny minority are Democrats. Most telling, fully 57% hold a favorable view of George W. Bush, nearly the exact percentage of the general public holding an unfavorable view of the former president. Based on their political views, tea partiers are essentially the far-right fringe of the Republican base..."

Read more @ Progressive Populist.

Oh Yes...The Good Old Days!

“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”

Doug Larson

Is That A Poll In Your Pants or...

"...A Times/CBS poll of Tea Party supporters confirmed what we all suspected — two-thirds of them admit to getting all or most of their “news” from Fox News. These are true ‘people of the bubble” who are genuinely surprised if we laugh at them for believing that the president was born in Kenya. Inside their bubble it’s a twilight world of distemper, paranoia, and rumor where the warm light of reason (or even the dim light of neutrality) will never fall. Where did the Tea Party get the dizzy notion that health care reform was some kind of communist plot? Fox personality Glenn Beck, the unstable caveman now routinely described as “the guru of the new right wing,” was monitored by the Politico website for his use of inflammatory buzzwords while America debated health care. Its log showed Beck saying “Marxist” 127 times, “communist” 330 times and “socialist” 404 times. This kind of demagoguery leaves nothing to chance. Herding the uncomprehending for the enrichment of the cynical won’t win you a place in heaven, but it’s highly lucrative. In his first year tracking communists for Fox, Beck increased his audience by more than 50% and became the hottest property on cable TV, with an eight-figure salary...

Still, Beck is a special head case. Testing his limits, he’s pressing boldly into unmapped territory on the Outer Right, out where few public figures have ventured since Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare or Father Coughlin’s pro-Nazi broadcasts of the ‘30s. (Though Father Coughlin, no whore to Wall Street, called capitalism and communism the two horns of Satan, which is still worth considering.) In a recent outburst Beck warned his radio audience to boycott any church that preaches social justice — code words for Communism and Nazism, he declared — and was quickly repudiated by his own Mormon Church. Last week he denounced Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” as subversive, un-American music. If Beck had stumbled onto Dan Pollitt’s memorial service in Chapel Hill, he would have called the FBI. Even his on-camera colleagues at Fox, solemn purveyors of audience-tested right-wing bombast, have been eyeing Beck uneasily. Just as the Republican Party grows increasingly wary of the Tea Party—-what kind of woolly-wild candidate might it take to win their votes, how far right is there before you fall off the edge of the American mind?—-smug corporate reactionaries are beginning to suspect that Glenn Beck really means it, and that he may be inconveniently deranged..."

Read more @ Progressive Populist.

Media Rare

“…every time one of my concrete-pouring pals tells me the country is headed to hell in a hand basket thanks to drug-addled media lesbians soft on crime, I am tempted to reply, in my best third-grade-recess voice, ‘I know you are, but what is Rush?’ There are the standard targets, but I swear to your, the scariest thing I heard on my car radio all year aired on a station that had recently switched to a liberal talk format and was running promotional liners one of which featured a female caller saying, ‘I used to listen to NPR, but now I listen to Air America in the morning, because they make me laugh.’ I was pouring hot coffee in my lap at the time, and may have misheard.”

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

TEA and Fantasy

"Many people live in information cocoons in which they talk only to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect."

David Brooks
NY Time columnist


"They come with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality...and create a world in which their consumers have a reality presented to them that is completely at odds with the reality the rest of us live in."

Michael Tomasky
New York Review of Books

Still thinking small...

The biggest science machine ever built has begun churning out the smallest known bits of matter in the universe. Its goal is to uncover some of the deepest, long-hidden secrets of nature.

This enormously ambitious device is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, a 17-mile-long ring-shaped tunnel 300 feet under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It began operations on March 30 and has been called the greatest scientific undertaking since the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb during World War II...


"... The proton collisions produce a spray of even tinier particles, mostly "quarks,'' which are the smallest, most fundamental building blocks of matter so far discovered. According to CERN, protons are 100,000 times smaller than the simplest atom, hydrogen, and quarks are 10,000 times smaller than protons. For comparison, if a hydrogen atom were 6 miles across, a quark would still measure less than four thousandths of an inch..."

Read more @ McClatchy Newspapers.

Think small...what's in a nonmillion.

"...What ocean microbes lack in size they make up for in numbers. Marine census researchers calculate there are a "nonillion" of them.

Never heard of nonillion? Well, it's a lot. It's 1,000 times 1 billion, times 1 billion, times 1 billion.

Of course no one can really envision a number like that, so the researchers turned to the popular comparison measure — the African elephant.

A nonillion microbe cells, they say, is about the same weight as 240 billion African elephants — or the equivalent of 35 elephants for every person on Earth.

And that's just the microbes."

Read more...

Spill Baby Spill

What's It All Mean?

“To be sure, there were times you needed tall, tall boots, and every once in a while, if things got too bloated, or someone overreached, Taylor would rare back in his chair and – his one hand triple-tasking a whiskey glass, cigarette, and a pointer finger simultaneously – would direct our attention across the barroom to the opposite wall and say, ‘Hey. Hey. Hey.” Until everyone was looking at the photo-enlarged R. Crumb comic book cover just up the wall from the jukebox and beside the bulletin board with the postcards, bumper stickers, and headline ephemera. On the cover, Mr. Natural – in his robe and wingtips – is riding the sidewalk on a kick scooter. Flakey Foont and Big Baby are peeping over a wooden fence, and Flakey Foont says, “Mr. Natural! What does it all MEAN??’

And Mr. Natural, just cruising on that scooter, says “Don’t mean sheeit…”

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

Racism On The Ropes

You Only Have To Drink The Kool Aid

James Bopp Jr, a Republican National Committee member from Indiana and author of a "purity" resolution that will receive consideration among committee members this week, said the resolution is about bringing conservatives back into the GOP fold :

"It's the difference between success and defeat," Bopp said. "It's counter productive for us to moderate our conservative message. We've tried that and it failed... We nominated the moderate's poster child, John McCain, for president. It's a prescription for defeat. What we have to do is be faithful to our conservative principles and when we do we will win."


"There is significant opposition on the RNC to any sort of litmus test or resolution that would take power away from the state parties or even primary voters as this proposed resolution would do," said Henry Barbour, a committee member from Mississippi. "We need to stick to our conservative principles without telling folks in the Massachusetts GOP that their choice for a U.S. Senate nominee cannot receive funding because of some litmus test."

Barbour, a nephew of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), said the meeting should focus instead on the "blocking and tackling of elections."

Read more @Washington Post

Textbook Fundementals

“There are two basic facts about man. He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

Don McLeroy
Texas Board of Education


“Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict. But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

Don McLeroy

"I'm a dentist, not a historian. But I'm fascinated by history, so I've read a lot."

Don McLeroy

Read How Cristian Were Our founders @ New York Times Magazine

Hee Haw

“Democrats give away their old clothes; Republicans wear theirs. Republicans employ exterminators; Democrats step on the bugs. Democrats eat the fish they catch; Republicans stuff 'em and hang 'em on the wall.”

Sean Donlon

Not Too Big To Fail: Blockbuster

"The increasingly competitive industry conditions under which we operate has negatively impacted our results of operations and cash flows and may continue to in the future. These factors raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern."

Blockbuster Video
Press Release


NEW YORK (AP) - Shares of Blockbuster Inc. sank 30 percent Wednesday after the video rental chain warned that it may have to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Competition from DVD-by-mail company Netflix Inc. and DVD vending machines operated by Coinstar Inc. have eroded the Dallas company's revenue even as it staggers under a heavy debt load.

Blockbuster Inc. said in a regulatory filing late Tuesday that it was suffering "significant liquidity constraints," and could have to file for bankruptcy protection if it was unable to convince creditors to restructure a big chunk of its debt or its business continued to deteriorate.

Read more...

This Is Wisconsin...

"I can't say the cows ever appeared overly distressed by what certainly had to be a disruption in their day. They would pause in chewing their cud, kinda freezing in a "hunh?" sorta pose, and their eyes would bulge a tad, about like yours would at the point of realizing your taxes were due yesterday. Occasionally one would engage in a little do-si-do (who wouldn't), but all things considered, their reaction to having a stranger's arm up the rectum was positively restrained."

Michael Perry
Coop: A year of poultry, pigs and parenting (2009)

What If FOX News Is Wrong About Global Climate Change? #3

Death of world's coral reefs could wreak global chaos


"Whole nations will be threatened in terms of their existence!"
Carl Gustaf Lundin
International Union for the Conservation of Nature

"Fish will become a luxury good. You already have a billion people who are facing hunger, and this is just going to aggravate the situation," she added. "We will not be able to maintain food security around the world."
Cassandra deYoung
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

By Brian Skoloff
Associated Press

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — Coral reefs are dying, and scientists and governments around the world are contemplating what will happen if they disappear altogether.
The idea positively scares them.

Coral reefs are part of the foundation of the ocean food chain. Nearly half the fish the world eats make their homes around them. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide — by some estimates, 1 billion across Asia alone — depend on them for their food and their livelihoods.

If the reefs vanished, experts say, hunger, poverty and political instability could ensue....

Read more at USA Today

"Global warming skeptics are usually depicted as knuckle-dragging, Fox News-watching rubes who are too unsophisticated to understand the scientific complexities that irrefutably support climate change."

Dave Fedorchak
FOX News viewer from King George, VA

What's New Under Your Sun?

The John Birch Society meets The Republican TEA Party...

"...It was more than 50 years ago that disgruntled conservatives organized themselves into the John Birch Society. Mocked mercilessly for being against fluoridation, the John Birch Society is also famous for imagining a communist under every rock, going so far as accusing even Republican President Eisenhower of being a communist agent. Conservative extremists in 1960 were also virulently anti-Catholic and with the Irish-Catholic John Kennedy atop the Democratic ticket, the 1960 presidential election was marred with overheated rhetoric and violent activities. Like many conservative extremists today with President Obama, members of the John Birch Society never accepted the legitimacy of the Kennedy presidency and continued their delusional and dangerous rhetoric..."

Michael Mullaley
Hingham Journal

Read more...

"Noise and Rampant Fractionalization"

“Dialogue has waxed and waned ever since Socrates took the hemlock, and you know you could always find some grump down at the end of the Athenian coffee bar who would tell you this chowder head Socrates was no Anaxagoras. And whenever my ears purse at the sound of my own bemoaning, I make it a policy to recall that the halcyon days of yore included the Harding administration. It’s just that the two powers currently ascendant are noise and rampant fractionalization. Agents’ provocateurs aimming to tweak the squares (most of whom are otherwise occupied with paying their rent and fixing your furnace) or marchers on the square still draw cameras and microphones, but a sense of diminishing returns prevails. Give your local mechanic a headline and he can tell you how to spin it, left or right. Your hairdresser is a pundit. The plumber arrives with talking points. The yield curve or babble is approaching the perpendicular. Among the piquant conundrums due to face the nation is: How do you whip the folks into meaningful action when everyone is cocooning in like-minded corners of the Web, rather than synthesizing some sort of national unity through the late-lamented mainstream media, which no matter how you tilt the screen, has had it? The corpse will be wrapped in unsold newsprint, and the viewing will take place online in downloadable form. As a guy who types for a living, I intend to diversify, perhaps into goats, perhaps survivalist chinchillas, but certainly into chickens. I am told there is no longer money to be made in llamas. Additionally, I am pricing solar panels, sawing off my shotgun, and trolling the Y2K sites of yesterday."

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

It's Still Profits Over Safety

"...Why won't the USDA require testing? The Times quoted Dr. Kenneth Petersen, assistant administrator of the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service: "I have to look at the entire industry," Petersen said, "not just what is best for public health." That quote perfectly encapsulates the belief system that has spread like a virus for 30 years in our society--that nothing can be allowed to get in the way of driving down the prices of raw materials to fatten profit margins...

...What would happen if we returned to a world in which hamburger was just a ground-up piece of beef? It would cost about 30 cents more per pound, or 7.5 cents more for a Quarter Pounder from McDonald's. Imagine two lines of burgers, one labeled "ground chuck, fully tested" and the other "assorted beef byproducts from untested facilities known to routinely violate safety standards." Would you pay a few pennies extra for the former?..."

Carl Pope
Corporate profits still trump public safety
Sierra January/February 2010

What If FOX News Is Wrong About Global Climate Change? #2

Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists


WASHINGTON — Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas — in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans — appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline...

Read more @ McClatchy News.


A Fox News memo posted by FishbowlDC on November 23 acknowledged "a series of mistakes on FNC in recent months" and stated that in the future, "there is zero tolerance for on-screen errors" and "[m]istakes by any member of the show team that end up on air may result in immediate disciplinary action against those who played significant roles in the 'mistake chain,' and those who supervise them ... up to and including termination":

Read the memo...

What's Your Definetion Of Courage?

"I'm not that courageous. I do what I do because I'm afraid to not do what I do. That's not courage...."


"I shudder to think of what I might have been if I had not been born with cerebral palsy."

Art Honeyman
1940-2008

Read more...

The Politics Of "Concern"

"I'm concerned for the global population, for everyone. No one is really paying enough attention. It's hard to make everyone aware of what's going on because of our unsustainable ways. Africa's tallest mountain, Kilimanjaro, now has no snow."

Hannah Teter
Gold-medal Snowboarder


"...Environmentalists are keen to establish a new energy order, but they don't have a whole lot of allies. At the DWP solar workshop, for instance, the only other identifiable constituency was workers from the union halls who wanted to make sure they got in on the action of building all that solar infrastructure. But labor is far from unified on the issue. In March 2009 a bond measure for solar projects was defeated after other unions opposed the monopoly on jobs it would have given to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Getting the West off coal this decade is an enormous undertaking. It will require politicians following up on their lofty pronouncements; relentless, informed organizing by grassroots activists; constant legal pressure; and (two words not often seen together) bureaucratic creativity..."

Paul Tullis
The West Without Coal
Sierra January/February 2010

No Bees In "Anarchy"?

“Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope.”

Mick Jagger
"Anarchism, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.”

Emma Goldman

“…And lest my friend the anarchist grow hopeful, I once responded to an emergency call at an underground music event at which a woman had been stung by a wasp and was going into anaphylactic shock. As we crested the rise in the ambulance, we spotted a barefooted man clad in dust, dreadlocks, and a T-shirt emblazoned with the classic circle-A. ‘Over here! Over here!’ he hollered, urging us to hurry it up with our state-sponsored gear and our syringe full of evil corporate epinephrine. The woman had stopped breathing and when the bagging and adrenaline took effect halfway to the hospital and she roused, I had this teachable moment where I realized the trouble with anarchy is that it is allergic to bees..."

Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story

“Our government teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

Louis D. Brandeis

Smells Like A TEA Party...

"I know for a fact that many of the leading figures in the field read the blogs, but so do high-school science students. The scary thing is that frequently you can’t tell which is which.”

Peter Woit
Columbia mathematician


"...In recent years, as science reporters and interested amateurs have turned to the arXiv – and as some physics personalities have started blogs – the audience for physics has both expanded and fragmented. “I know for a fact that many of the leading figures in the field read the blogs, but so do high-school science students,” Woit, the Columbia mathematician and string-theory critic, said. “The scary thing is that frequently you can’t tell which is which.” The leading blogs have readerships that, while including some loud dissenters, tend to align with the perspectives of their authors – Distler, of the University of Texas, has a blog that attracts many string theorists and enthusiasts, while Woit’s blog draws more skeptics. It works somewhat in the way the blogosphere operates in politics. Andreas Albrecht, a physics professor at the University of California at Davis, said that the blogs had opened physics to a new sort of populism, one that the academic establishment had to figure out how to manage. “It just pushes thoses buttons,” Albrecht said. “There’s some really good stuff, but a lot of really sloppy stuff.” What you have, in other words, is the erosion of the referee and the rise of a scientific underclass..."

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Surfing The Universe
The New Yorker
July 12, 2008


"In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Jolting Uncle Milton With The Shock Doctrine

"...The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government..."

Lariss MacFarquhar

Read more @ The New Yorker

What If FOX News Is Wrong? #1

Those eco-freaks who have been proven wrong about global warming say a sign of global warming in an increase in the release of methane gas. Of course, some of the greatest scientific experts of today -- like Shaun Hannity of FOX News -- have debunked these global warming charlatans of the great fraud they are foisting on the innocents of this Earth.

Wouldn't it be funny if FOX News turned out to be wrong and the Earth experience rapid warming that costs citizens untold trillions of dollars to combat the impacts and it quickly became obvious that billions spend in the first two decades of the second millennium could have significantly slowed the warming?

"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans. Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

Natalia Shakhova
University of Alaska
International Arctic Research Center




A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

Read more @ Science Daily

Reagan Rides Again?

“I’ve been at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one feels. It is thrilling. And it’s churlish not to allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it’s a bleak life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.”

Avi Lewis
Canadian political talk show host

Thoughts On Obama

“I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s. The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center. It’s the job of the left to move the center. Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.”

Naomi Klein
Author

It Doesn't Say Why

OSHKOSH — Along the most heavily traveled highway in northeastern Wisconsin, giant bold, red letters stretch across two-thirds of a 14-by-48-foot sign that juts some 15 feet in the air.

(Note: This sign is only 20.1 miles from the grave site of Joe McCarthy.)


"IMPEACH OBAMA," the letters spell out, with a photo of a fluttering American flag to the left and the words "America's Small Businesses Are Failing. Help Us Spread the Message." in black stacked in two decks underneath.

It's hard to miss.

Depending on the political persuasion of the person doing the looking, the now familiar "Impeach Obama billboard" next to the Oshkosh Correctional Institution on U.S. 41 might be an honest and brave expression of frustration by a democratic citizenry or a baseless and unpatriotic attack on America's top leader.

To other observers, the sign is merely the latest example of rancor and unrest pervading the nation's political system by those exercising their rights to free speech.

Read more...

TEA Party -- Eating Their Own

The march to 2012...

Feb. 6, 2010

“I am a supporter of this movement. I believe in this movement. America is ready for another revolution.”

Sarah Palin


Feb. 19, 2010:

Tea Party 'Revolution' Targets Ron Paul in GOP Primary

The Texas congressman who rattled the Republican establishment with his libertarian-leaning outsider run for president has suddenly found himself the target of the anti-incumbent Tea Party movement some say he helped inspire.

Though Ron Paul may be the model of the grassroots-backed conservative candidate that Tea Party groups are looking for, the candidates challenging him in the Republican primary this year say the good doctor brought it on himself -- by spending too much time running for president and not enough time tending to his district, and being so prickly with congressional colleagues as to render himself obsolete.

"He's not being involved in his district," said Gerald Wall, one of three Tea Party-connected candidates running against Paul in the primary.

"He's unwilling to work with others, and people are unwilling to work with him, and so we have no voice in Congress," said candidate Tim Graney, calling Paul one of the most "ineffective" members on Capitol Hill.




Feb. 20, 2010

Ron Paul wins conservative straw poll

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Ron Paul won the most support for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination in an unofficial straw poll of conservative activists attending an annual conference.

A libertarian from Texas who has railed against spending and the Federal Reserve, Paul won the Saturday contest at the Conservative Political Action Conference with 31 percent backing. He has sought the presidential nomination in the past and attracted a following among a segment of voters frustrated with Washington.

Participants cheered as their favored candidates' names were announced. Some members of the audience cheered while others booed loudly when event organizers announced Paul as the winner.

Paul spoke at the conference along with potential presidential candidates former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. Romney won second with 22 percent, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin came in third with 7 percent and Pawlenty finished with 6 percent.