Category: “tea parties”

Why I am sick of the right, and why I probably will not be voting this year

Why? Because I am sick of the right and all the noise and bluster coming out of the right this year. It is not that I agree at all with President Obama’s policies, but I am so sick of the now that I see no reason I should bother to support — or even give the illusion of support — by voting for a Republican.

Why am I sick of the right? Well, consider the following:

The three antis

The following three items have essentially come to make up 95% of the noise coming out of the right this year, with all the noise being demagogic and disgusting:

Anti-immigration

Illustrated perfectly by the recent law enacted by the state of Arizona and the lies propagated by its supporters:

Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona has stated their police have found many decapitated bodies in the Arizona desert, with the implication that it is a result of illegal immigrants.
Fact: Multiple medical examiners in Arizona have stated there have been no reports of immigration-related decapitated bodies.

Crime is at record levels on the U.S. side of the United States-Mexican border.
Fact: Crime in most places on the border is at a four-year low.

Citizens on the border don’t feel safe.
Fact: According to a recent poll, 87% of border residents said that they felt safe.

And then add in stuff like claims that  so-called “anchor babies” are part of some massive Islamic terrorist plot, politicians calling for illegal immigrant interment camps, and a proposal by a Florida GOP gubernatorial hopeful that any non-citizen carry papers or be thrown in jail.

It’s nice to see that the party that calls Obama a “communist”, a “socialist”, and a “Marxist”, is trying to turn the United States into the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

Anti-Muslim bigotry

While the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” has been in the news a lot, there is a much larger problem.

On the “Ground Zero mosque”, which is two blocks away from Ground Zero, Republicans have yet again shown themselves to be this country’s biggest enemy of private-property rights (something that I have known to be true locally for years). Republicans railed against the Kelo decision, but now you have a GOP gubernatorial candidate in New York promising to use eminent domain to seize the property that the proposed mosque is to be built on.

But anti-Muslim protests have expanded into Connecticut, Tennessee, California, and Wisconsin. And now we have the head of the American Family Association saying that no mosques should be allowed to be built anywhere in the country and the GOP Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee referring to Islam as a “cult”.

The Republican Party, including its leaders like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, want to shred the Constitution, along with its protections of freedom of religion and private property.

Anti-gay bigotry

If you have followed the response to the Prop. 8, you know what I’m talking about: Prop. 8 proponents talking about how gay marriage is going to destroy the country (people have seriously said that).

So, let me get this straight: This country has survived for over 200 years, through its revolutionary war, a civil war, two World Wars, a 40+ year Cold War, miscellaneous wars, conflicts, and interventions, and letting a couple thousand gay couples marry is going to the destroy the country? Uh, yeah, right. Anyone else not buying that?

In addition, you have the proponents of Prop. 8, and opponents of the federal court ruling, that are intentionally misrepresenting the case. They keep claiming that the court ruling will compel churches to do ceremonies for gay couples. And I, for one, do not believe that these people are so stupid they cannot understand the difference between a court ruling saying a state government cannot discriminate against someone versus the a ruling saying a church cannot. They are categorically misrepresenting the decision by Judge Walker in California to fearmonger and demagogue. Or, you can draw the conclusion that they think the church is the state and vice versa. Pick your poison.

And these are the same people that want to recriminalize sodomy, think that “Hitler used gay soldiers because they ‘basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after'”, and God only knows what else.

But these folks actually believe it. How scary is that? And Republicans constantly claim to be the party of limited government (ad nauseam), but they think they should have the power to throw gays — or any other group that has the slightest difference in their ‘moral’ outlook — in jail. You are either for limited government or not, you cannot call yourself an advocate for limited government on the fiscal side, and then propose using the government to persecute people who do not follow your exact opinion on ‘social’ issues, but have committed no crime.

The rhetoric

In part, this is an extension of some of the stuff mentioned before. You cannot go five minutes without someone calling Obama a “Marxist”, “socialist”, “Nazi”, etc. Throw in the rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, and gays, and you have a trifecta of demagoguery that makes me want to vomit when I hear it. And why should I support people who engage in and use this rhetoric and act as though they are speaking for me?

The anti-intellectualism

How else do I describe people who believe anything that gets posted on the internet or forwarded to them an e-mail? These people believe that the federal court ruling on Arizona’s immigration law was unconstitutional because some idiot on the internet doesn’t know the difference between a court having original jurisdiction and exclusive jurisdiction.

And then there’s the tea-party websites that are believe anything e-mail to them and too lazy to do a Google Search to see if something is true or could be easily refuted with five minutes of looking.

The crazies

And then there’s the crazies out there that have become one with the Republican Party. This past Tuesday illustrated this perfectly: Nathan Deal, a Birther who has made comments about “ghetto grandmothers”, was nominated as the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Georgia. In Colorado, Dan Maes, who thinks that bicycling is a United Nations plot to take over local governments in the United States, was nominated as the Republican gubernatorial nominee.

And then there is Sharron Angle (Republican nominee for Senate in Nevada), who by all indications, may be a Christian Fundamentalist.

And you can throw in the other hard-right social-cons into this group too. And I’m talking about the people who literally believe that the United Nations is coming to take their kids, who will give them to gay couples that will molest them. And that’s not an exaggeration, there are people in the Republican Party that believe that.

Locally

And then we turn to the local candidate for me, Congressman Rob Wittman. I supported Wittman during the primary, in part because he was running against that nut Catherine Crabill.

But, now, I see no reason to bother to vote for him this November. Wittman talked constantly during the primary season about how he was all for cutting the size of government and reducing government inefficiency.

But, like every other “fiscal” conservative or Republican out there, while they talk about reducing the size of government, when it comes to cutting something that is inside their district, or may affect their district, all their talk goes out the window. I’m speaking of Wittman’s various and repeated comments about SecDef Robert Gates’s plans to disband the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

Supposedly, Wittman’s a huge fan of reducing the size, scope, and extraneous redundancy in government, right? But, like every other politician out there, he doesn’t have the fortitude to actually follow through and do it.

Why the tea-party “movement” is a joke, part the first in an occasional series.

What is an organization or movement other than a sum of its parts, in this case, its members?

Herman Cain, a business leader and radio host; and Tea Party Patriot co-founder Jenny Beth Martin have joined the roster of speakers for the Virginia Tea Party Convention.

Organizers have invited about two dozen speakers, mostly prominent conservatives, to address the convention Oct. 8-9 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

[…]

Martin, who lives in suburban Atlanta, helped launch the Tea Party Patriots organization in early 2009. This year Time Magazine named her to the “Time 100” list of “people who most affect our world.”

Other keynote speakers who have confirmed so far are former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs; Bishop E.W. Jackson Sr., founder of Exodus Faith Ministries International and president of a group that promotes Judeo-Christian values; political strategist Dick Morris, and John Fund, a conservative author and columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Jenny Beth Martin? A woman, who along with her husband, declared bankruptcy with over $680,000 in tax debts alone.

Yet SecTreas Timothy Geithner is the devil incarnate to the tea-party folks because he owned the federal government a mere $35,000 by comparison.

Lou Dobbs? Birther.

Bishop E.W. Jackson Sr.? A person that espouses a Christian Theological view that this country was founded on Christian values (apparently he never heard of The Enlightenment), rants about the “homosexual political lobby”, supports a total ban on gays serving in the military, and supports a federal marriage amendment to the United States Constitution.

Wait, I thought this whole tea-party think was about fiscal conservatism and limited government? I guess that’s the case until the Christian Fundamentalists on the far-right, who have become part and parcel with the tea-party “movement”, want to impose their beliefs on the whole nation, the Constitution be damned.

Dick Morris? A former Clintonista (you know, the original President that proposed “socialized” health care) who got fired because he was messing around with a prostitute.

“Tea partiers” in the 5th against Eric Cantor before they were for him?

Last week, the various far-righters in the 5th Congressional District were incensed that Eric Cantor would dare to contribute $7,000 (through his campaign committee and his personal funds) to the Congressional campaign of State Senator Robert Hurt. These little tirades included throwing around words like “RINO” and whatnot with allegations that Cantor was not a ‘true conservative’ and so on and so forth (for an example, check out the 5th District blog).

Then came news today that certain “tea party” leaders were attempting to recruit former Representative Virgil Goode to run against Perriello, notwithstanding Goode’s lost to Perriello in 2008.

Now, I’m far from a fan of Eric Cantor (and there are posts to prove that), but maybe these “tea party” folks should go take a look at Virgil Goode’s own campaign contributions. According to Virgil Goode’s campaign finance reports (through September 30, 2009), Virgil Goode’s campaign committee has contributed a total of $1,500 to Cantor for Congress ($500 to Cantor for Congress on March 31, 2009, and an additional $1,000 on July 21, 2009).

So, what’s worse, receiving money from Cantor or giving Cantor money?

Cross-posted at On The Right and Virginia Virtucon.

Crazy teabaggers unite! (part 2)

Remember Anne Yeisley? Well, here’s another great example of intellect sent under the subject “Are Americans beings turned into Zombies?”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWqD_VOympU

This video is very sobering.  Are Americans being turned into zombies?

Um, right, zombies. And what post about zombies would be right without some Bruce Campbell?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-wj-vuNm88

Crazy teabaggers unite!

The following is a letter from Anna Yeisley, a member (or head?) of the “Spotsylvania County Campaign for Liberty” (the Ron Paul offshoot groups) and “Spotsylvania Patriots”; she’s also a member of that nut group, founded by Herb Lux, the “American Patriots Committee”:

Dear Senator Warner [same letter sent to Senator Webb]

Please vote NO on Senate version of Health Care bill.

What should worry every American and you, Senator [Warner/Webb] as our Virginia senator, are how chronic illnesses and cancers are increasing despite alleged advances in medical science.

There is a growing voice of common sense that links our diet with the rise and increasing incurrence of cancer and life threatening illnesses. Our medical establishment disparages the illness and cancer reversing benefits of changing our diets from animal product based to plant based. This simple inexpensive change has been reversing countless cases of chronic disease and cancer, yet the American Medical Association (backed by pharmaceutical, surgical equipment corporations and the meat and dairy industry) refuse to release statistics that show that dietary changes can be as effective (and for some people, more effective) than standard toxic drugs and body deforming surgeries to treat cancer and other life threatening diseases.

Our Congress and government have allowed the AMA to stifle evidence and confuse statistics to force our nation’s physicians to treat all disease and illness with toxic drug treatments. Do you realize it is illegal to treat cancer with any other treatment other than surgery and/or chemotherapy? Many physicians are speaking out against the ineffectiveness of treating dietary caused cancers and illnesses with toxic drugs and deforming surgeries that many of our physicians KNOW will never cure, but instead create more illness and chronic ailments and more likelihood for cancers to return.

The AMA is behind this push for governmental involvement in health care. If they had their way, there would be no cancer prevention taught to anyone so they and the corporations they represent can continue to make billions of dollars in revenue in aggressive and toxic and body deforming treatments and surgeries. At the same time, more and more physicians are waking up to the realization that lack of nutrients and toxic chemicals in our food, air and water is what is causing the majority of cancers and chronic illnesses.

You can’t treat toxicity with more toxicity!! With chemotherapy treatments costing anywhere from $800 a day to $80,000 a week – can you see the lucrative incentive in making it illegal to treat cancer with anything but toxic drug treatments? Particularly considering that 1 in 2 people will get cancer in their lifetime?

If our established medical establishment cannot see the connection between a high fat non nutritional diet and cancer and chronic disease, and relate dietary changes to reversing a good majority of life threatening cancers and illnesses; then what good is this medical establishment???? What do they know? They are ignorant and so consumed with making billions of dollars from established medical treatments that they refuse to see the death and disability caused by their ignorance.

Pushing health care upon this nation is AMA’s way of using government to continue to cover up the importance of a plant based diet to health and recovery. They are determined to use government to force Americans to be treated by invasive aggressive and often unnecessary surgeries (for our own good?) NO! For the good of the out of control and ever more powerful pharmaceutical and medical establishment.

Our nation must return to an agricultural commodity base where food is grown on our soil, free of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, steroids, growth hormones, petroleum products and governmental intervention. We must return to a state of balance and health that will only come from returning to our agricultural roots where the family farm was the norm and not just a memory.

The decisions you are making every day will affect our future as no other decade. Your most important work as every other senator is to return this state to an agricultural commodity base by encouraging our citizens to consume a plant based diet to help us regain our strength, balance and health economically, physically and spiritually.

God created this planet to care for human beings. Pure food and water is elementary important to the health and life of human beings, to Americans, to Virginians and to every individual created by God.

Governmental health care will continue to move our nation away from health and towards a nation of a sick and weak citizens dependent upon drugs and tax payer funded health care in order to function.

Please vote down the Senate version of this health care bill and view with suspicion those who are pushing for it.

I urge you to view the documentary called, “Healing Cancer” available from Netflix. There is indisputable evidence all over the world that a plant based diet reverses disease and cancer. Countries all over the world accept this premise but it is rejected by our American medical establishment.

We are not safe in the hands of physicians who cannot connect high fat non nutritional diets to ever increasing incidents of illness and cancer. We are not safe with governmental mandated health care particularly if it as heavily influenced by the traditional medical establishment as is this Senate version ‘health’ care bill.

Common sense is crucially important in this nation. The Senate health bill is all about the money to be made by the traditional medical establishment that is doing so little in restoring this nation’s health.

Anna Yeisley

There’s so much good (i.e., crazy) stuff there you have to read the whole thing.

And would you be supposed to hear that she also endorsed Catherine Crabill’s candidacy in the 99th District? Shocker, right?

Some of my brethren on the right and in the small-l libertarians are annoyed at the rampant anti-intellectualism being displayed by both the GOP and their “friends” in the teabagger coalition. While I agree with them — to an extent — after all, who finds a claim that “[t]he federal government is gang-raping the people” to be a persuasive argument?

A bigger issue I see is the rampant neo-Luddism and anti-science sentiment being displayed by the crazies on the far-right: “Vaccines are bad!1!” “They caused autism!!1!” “We don’t care if dozens and dozens of studies say otherwise!!1!”, etc. And this is just another perfect example.

Jim Spiess, a convicted felon and Catherine Crabill supporter, is a “liaison” for the “Virginia Tea Party Patriots Foundation”.

From an e-mail that someone else received and forwarded to me:

Hi, my name is Jim and I am one of the two liaison officers of the Virginia Tea Party Patriot Federation. We formed a little over 6 months ago. Right now I believe we have around 30 Tea Party/912 groups in our Federation. We believe that by showing the Commonwealth of Virginia that we are becoming more organized that they will pay more attention to us, and it is starting to pay off. All groups still act autonomously, but we now have a group to bounce ideas off of and we can help each other in other ways too. Let me know if you are interested in joining up with us, you can call me or email me. Hope to hear from you soon.

Merry Christmas,
Jim Spiess
Virginia’s 99th District Tea Party

Those tea party folks are making themselves look oh-so-brilliant. Lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas.

And once again, my agnosticism towards the tea party “movement” has been validated.

Cross-posted at On The Right and Virginia Virtucon.

My agnosticism towards the tea party movement validated once again.

Does anyone consider this rhetoric attractive? (The Free Lance–Star):

Members of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party and questions about health care greeted Rep. Robert J. Wittman (R-Montross) at a gathering Tuesday night in his hometown.

“Where in the Constitution is government charged with protecting people’s health?” asked Catherine T. Crabill, a maverick Republican who, despite being shunned by Wittman and state GOP leaders, came close last month to winning the seat Wittman once held in the House of Delegates.

“My frustration is that we don’t want any government-run health care. The Constitution is the only thing that will save us from this death spiral that the country is in,” Crabill said.

“Some elected officials are committing treason by not upholding their sacred oaths. Do you intend to uphold your oath of office and fight to make sure that your elected colleagues uphold theirs?” she asked Wittman, who promised he would.

I’m still laughing about how the constitutional scholar, Catherine Crabill, is making comments about what’s in the United States Constitution when she’s apparently unfamiliar with the Article III, where the founders went to the trouble of specifically defining the crime of treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

And why did Madison et al. decide to be that specific regarding the crime of treason? Consult Federalist No. 43:

As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.

But that nut Catherine Crabill wants to prosecute people for political disagreements (and probably execute them). This is the same thing that the crazies on the left wanted to do for George Bush et al. for the Iraq War and the USA PATRIOT Act.

And then we have this one:

“The federal government is gang-raping the people,” said Mark Carpenter of Acorn, a Westmoreland County community–not the controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Do I need to expand how absurd, vulgar, and bordering on obscene that comment is? Does this idiot need someone to explain to him what the crime of rape is, much less the crime of gang-rape?

Various nuts at “tea party” call digital converter boxes for televisions “brain-washing devices” and for book burnings…

How sad. Check it out at Below the Beltway…

UPDATE: How could I forget this great quote? “Goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.”

Is anyone else sick of this “tea party” junk?

Seriously guys, get a life. You’re not Samuel Adams or the Sons of Liberty.

As Shaun Kenney pointed out, when you have a “tea party” organizer apologizing to the EPA after the EPA told them not to dump tea into a river because it would affect the river water’s color, you’re a joke. If someone had told Samuel Adams that, he — after someone explained to him who and what the EPA is — would have tarred and feathered the EPA bureaucrat.

You people are not living under a constant threat of a dictatorial government’s control. You don’t have soldiers boarded in your house, you don’t have soldiers shooting people in the street for throwing snowballs (the Boston “Massacre”), and you’re not freezing to death at Valley Forge in the winter. And by acting like you do, you’re mocking and trivializing everything that the founding fathers suffered, fought, and died for.

And the same goes to the folks on the other side of aisle with their antiwar protests. You’re not getting shot at and killed by National Guardsmen at a college campus like happened in the ’70s (Kent State shootings), so stop acting like you are. And the same can be said about certain civil rights protests nowadays. This isn’t the ’60s and the country isn’t Selma, Alabama anymore.

And for those attending these “tea party” protests claiming that they’re fighting against government expansion and the national debt…where have you guys been for the past 10 years? Not to bring up Bush, but where the hell were you guys when that first economic stimulus bill in 2008 that cost $158,000,000,000, and was not a tax cut, but government handouts to everyone? And where were you guys when Republicans supported a $290,000,000,000 “farm bill”, which was nothing more than a corporate welfare bill?

And where were you guys last year in recruiting candidates that would oppose increases in government spending and actually try to cut spending? Where were you guys before the November election helping to get someone besides Barack Obama elected? And better yet, where the hell were you guys when John McCain was in process of being nominated as the Republican candidate for President? A bunch of the people going to and promoting these tea parties are the same people that supported John McCain last year. You know, John McCain, that same guy that voted for that first economic stimulus bill and the first bailout bill.

So, maybe instead of you guys sitting in a park for a couple hours on the 15th, you should go find a political candidate that you like somewhere (I suggest Bill Bolling or Ken Cuccinelli), and go door-to-door trying to get people to support the candidate.