Speaking Of Government Teats...

Matt Taibbi kicks over the Tea Party ant nest and discovers...a bunch of ignorant, angry Republican folks who are quite happy to collect benefits and pensions form the government they regard as absolutely tyrannical.

Same goes for Hatriot candidate Sharron Angle in Nevada, who claims government benefits and health care every month, as does her husband.

But of course, this was never about deficits, budgets, fiscal propriety or any of the other bullshit they've been spewing the last two years, it's about who else might be getting a thin dime of "their" tax money. And what's changed? The color of the president's skin and the party in charge. They fear and hate Others so much they are convinced that now, only now, these same government programs that have been humming along for decades are suddenly some sort of free ATM for the poor and non-white.

It really is nuts, but incredibly revealing.

Shock! Tea Party A Republican Retread!

I'm shocked! Shocked! I tell you, to discover that, contrary to gullible mainstream media reportage, the "Tea Party Movement" is not only not new, it's just the same right wing Republicans freaking out because the other guys took Congress and the White House in 2006 and 2008.

Steve Kornacki tells the story:

The main difference between then and now, I've been saying, is that the GOP base's backlash didn't have a catchy name when Clinton was president. But today, it does: The Tea Party.

And now there's even more proof that the terms "Tea Party movement" and "Republican Party base" are interchangeable. A new poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal finds that 27 percent of voters describe themselves as Tea Party supporters. And what do we know about the people that make up that 27 percent? Here's how NBC's First Read put it:

These folks, it turns out, are more conservative and bigger watchers of FOX News than your typical Republican. Per [Bill] McInturff, Tea Party members are simply re-branded conservative GOP primary voters -- not something completely new. “These are conservative Republicans who watch FOX, and who are very ticked off,” he said.

Bill McInturff, by the way, is a longtime Republican pollster. Nor is this the first time the demographic similarities between the Tea Party movement and the GOP base have been documented; we've written about it here before.

But it's impossible to emphasize this crossover enough, given how willing the media has been to treat the Tea Party movement as some unique, non-partisan uprising of the middle class against Obama's governing vision. In reality, it's just the modern (i.e. post-Rockefeller/Eastern Establishment era) Republican base doing what it always does when Democrats run the show in Washington.

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Jebus Is A Small Part Of The Problem

This is exactly right, for those who have any fantasies that the burn-it-down approach of the American right wing is something new or more virulent than in the past:

http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2010/09/its-not-unchecked-christianism-its.html

They are a deeply sickening bunch, and when they have destroyed government and hoovered up all the cash they will stand atop the rubble with a big fucking megaphone and declare victory in all our names, whilst we wander the streets, dazed and shell-shocked, squabbling over scraps from dumpsters and killing one another for control of sodden cardboard boxes to use as shelter.