News-Record.com

Since you are such a big fan of taxes, how about a nice article on why we should not have sales tax on newspapers? Since your paper has never seen a tax they did not like, you should be jumping up and down for this tax.

Dog: Not sure how you take away from this post or the linked article that I or anyone else is a "fan" of taxes, but maybe you can explain it to me. Is there Facebook page for that sort of thing yet?

"A Tea Bag without any punch"

It seems to me the Tea Parties failed to deliver any coherent or consistent message; therefore, it was easy for the Left and the pro-state media to marginalize and denounce the protestors. Unless and until people renounce and repudiate Bush and the Republican party utterly and entirely, it's easy to dismiss them as kooks, racists, religious zealots, etc.

After all, what is the protestors' message? We want to go back to Bush? We want less spending but agitate to expand insanely expensive wars? We want a "fair" tax? We're against bailouts of Wall Street, even though the public (correctly) perceives the political right as bought and paid for by Wall Street? We're for states rights and the Constitution? Laughable. We're pro-life? Laughable--even ignoring the pro-war killing mentality, the GOP has done zero to stop abortion.

Conservatives by conscious choice have tied their fortunes to politics in general and the GOP in particular. Politics is nothing more than gang violence over turf. The turf is us. The winner gets to control and loot the American people. So now the other gang controls the turf, and conservatives don't like it.

Cetainly most media outlets prefer the Obama gang to the Bush gang, and shade their "reporting" accordingly. But there is truth in the criticism that the Tea Parties represent nothing more than sour grapes. The public senses, quite correctly, that conservatives only "rebel" when their preferred gang is not in power.

The Rightwing's A.N.S.W.E.R To Tea with the Mad Hatter?

The grassroots spirit at the tea parties was great, but it seems many, many were hijacked by organized conservatives, Republican partisans, and Fox News-style corporate interests. Most of the many speakers were exclusively of the red-state fascist persuasion, thanks to the sectarian organizers.

This reminds me of an analog in the antiwar movement. At many peace protests, often the organizers, especially such Marxist groups like A.N.S.W.E.R and Progressive Democrats., do their best to keep non-socialist speakers out of the fray. They thus water down the appeal of the peace message, while packaging it with calls for domestic state power. Similarly, the Tea Party Bushies want to control the message and keep it in line with their own statist agenda. Rush Limbaugh warns, for example, not to let the Tea Parties encourage any effort in third parties -- the GOP plantation is where all resentful of Obama belong.

There is a difference, however, between the antiwar sectarian commies and the anti-tax sectarian neocons – the latter has had more than a chance with power in this country, and we already know what their program brings: endless wars, lies, torture, inflation, and the world's biggest bubble.