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The Tea Party is coming to town. Yesterday, Sarah Palin--Kelly Ayotte's biggest supporter--kicked off the Tea Party Express' national tour.
The Tea Party's final stop on their tour will be on the steps of our state house in Concord the night before the election.
Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck and their friends on the Tea Party Express are working hard on Kelly Ayotte's behalf. Ayotte proudly accepted Palin's endorsement and groups like Karl Rove's American Crossroads and the Glenn Beck-backed Chamber of Commerce have spent millions of dollars to boost her campaign
In the space of a few hours last night, I heard a hate radio personality infer that the Hutaree were a bunch of buffoons essentially set up by the government to appear to be dangerous, Sean Hannity casually refer to the Tea People as "Tim McVeigh wannabes" (to applause), and read this from Glenn Beck about the passage of health care reform:
Get down on your knees and pray. Pray. It's September 11th all over again, except that we didn't have the collapsing buildings.
I think it's time to get serious about the 24/7 Hate-Tainment industry. It plays on the easily victimized, the fearful, and the uninformed. And it's dangerous to the safety and well-being of the Grand Experiment of our democracy.
I'm not interested in using this frightening violence-baiting as a partisan exercise to bring people over to our team.
Rather, I would like to know what we as a country can do to prevent the Hate-Tainment industry from contributing to a real tragedy.
What can we do to counter the well-funded, morally vacuous puppeteers of this hate?
Today, Beck returned to the subject, insisting that the notion of social justice is "a perversion of the Gospel," and "not what Jesus would say." He wasn't kidding.
He went on to say that Americans should be skeptical of religious leaders who are "basing their religion on social justice," and explained his fear that concern for social justice is a problem "infecting all" faith traditions.
While there's certainly been a deepening of the chasm between basic Christian beliefs and whatever the unholy alliance of the GOP and the Religious Right think Christianity is, the above lunacy represents the furthest break yet.
This is without doubt one of the most offensive, ignorant, and pernicious statements I've ever heard about the followers of Jesus Christ. And I'm an agnostic!
UPDATE: Looks like the pushback from actual Christians has already begun, starting with a call to a boycott of Beck:
Religious bloggers, from the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the liberal Jesuit magazine America, to Joe Carter, at the conservative magazine First Things, took Mr. Beck's decree as possibly an attack on Catholic teaching, and definitely an affront to Christianity.
And the aforementioned Father Martin:
...Glenn Beck is saying something else: "Leave Christianity." Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus mentions our responsibility to care for the poor, to work on their behalf, to stand with them. In fact, when asked how his followers would be judged he doesn't say that it will be based on where you worship, or how you pray, or how often you go to church, or even what political party you believe in. He says something quite different: It depends on how you treat the poor.
The Tea People have found their leader, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Kimball.
And Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Kimball has found his, too:
He said Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck was "an American hero" and that everyone should watch his show, on which Kimball will be advertising his campaign beginning today.
Republicans, he said, are "not going to win elections without the Tea Party movement so with me you get two for the price of one."
There have been valiant debates here and elsewhere as to the difference in meaning between "liberal" and "progressive."
But I've never been able to articulate just why I prefer the latter term. Until now:
We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition." -- Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS)
and
"We call them progressives now, but back in Samuel Adams' day, they used to call them tyrants," said Beck. "A little later, I think they were also called slave owners."
In the first despicable quote, Harper relies on a well-worn image of a "liberal" as some sort of weak animal to be hunted. Replace "liberal" with "conservative" there, and it fails to make American pop cultural "sense."
For the latter despicable quote, Glenn Beck just looks like a moron, flailing about. It's an epic framing fail. Progressives, tyrants, slave-owners? Somebody call Lakoff - sad clown entertainer Beck needs some serious training!
So, in a nutshell, that's why I prefer "progressive." The wingnuts may have tried to ruin America during the last eight years, but they haven't ruined that word yet.
This is too funny not to post, thought it's also sad.
The local Tea Party event that was scheduled for Saturday at the Claremont Moose Lodge has been moved or canceled. Turns out the local Tea Baggers/Tax Cappers lied to the Lodge about the event. When the space had been signed for, the would be Tea Baggers said that it was a fundraiser for Crohn's and Colitis. They made no mention of the partisan 9/12 project nor did they mention that the guest speakers would be current and prospective councilors that support the Tax Cap gimmick ballot initiative.
Said Linda Stankevich with the Women of The Moose, "The Lodge had no idea what they were planning. It was underhanded and deceitful."
The judge has ruled on the tax gimmick case in Claremont. It appears that since the City took no definitive stance on cap itself and the Attorney General's office did the same, the Judge ruled that there was no aggrieved party. It is my understanding that it is not allowed in NH to use the courts time to get an 'advisory opinion'. This is what the City asked for when it was moved to the Superior Court.
(Civil Rights Leader Kevin Smith is at it again. - promoted by Dean Barker)
Notorious anti-civil rights crusader Kevin Smith of Cornerstone Policy Research (and sadly, a member of the NH Advisory Board to the US Civil Rights Commission) did his best Glenn Beck impersonation this week when he issued a press release wondering if Governor Lynch intended to take all the money held by non-profit organizations in this state, and asking the Governor to pinky-promise he wouldn't it. Seriously.
Both the Governor and Speaker's comments raise a significant concern that they each believe that if an organization has a tax-exempt status, the state has the right to 'steal' any surplus balance that they own. This belief would be of concern to any tax-exempt non-profit, such as a church or charitable organization with "excess" money in the bank.
The reasoning behind notorious anti-civil rights crusader Smith's "concern" is purportedly the Governor's statement about the court decision on the JUA malpractice insurance issue. The Governor's remarks to which Smith takes umbrage were:
These surplus funds belong to the citizens of New Hampshire, who created the Joint Underwriting Association and gave it tax-exempt status.
Why, exactly? So we can usher in another Republican president who will drop the ball on finding bin Laden a second time?
But more to the point: do John H. Sununu, Judd Gregg, Jennifer Horn, Frank Guinta, Kelly Ayotte, Charlie Bass, and John E. Sununu agree with this? Since FOX is basically the GOP media organ, and this statement was thrown out with no real counterpoint, it would be nice to know if this is a legitimate goal of the GOP these days.
NB: Title changed to "new" b/c of the original WTC attack in the 90's as well as the embassy attacks, which in a way, are the US. So "2nd" doesn't really cut it.
This clip has it all - Villagers obsessed with Villagers, Glenn Beck as Sad Clown, uncontrollable laughter, careful sucking up at the end just in case. It's why I don't get my news from the TeeVee in 5 short minutes:
