That Was Then, This Is Now

I posted that picture almost a year and a half ago.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head Saturday.
Here's an excerpt from that post:

Yelling and screaming is counterproductive,” (Giffords) told the Sierra Vista Herald at a Congress on Your Corner event last week. There, one visitor dropped a gun at the meet n’ greet held in a Douglas Safeway, her staff says.

That has aides, who called police to the event, concerned for her safety.

“We have never felt the need before to notify law enforcement when we hold these events,” said spokesman C.J. Karamargin.

Such activists are showing-up at Democratic events coast to coast, including a recent one held by Northern Arizona congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick.

But the leader of the Tucson movement, Trent Humphries, a former legislative candidate, says Giffords is lying. He says his followers have no intention of hurting her. And they’re not racists, he said.

Today, Pima Country Sheriff Clarence Dupnik called it as he saw it:

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," said the sheriff. "And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

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There Is No Such Thing As 'Truth In Advertising' On Fox News.

We all know that Fox News is bullshit and not news at all. But I've never been much of a Rick Sanchez fan, either. Still, he does call a liar a liar here, and the last minute-and-a-half is actually pretty good:

Gawker Covers The News So The MSM Doesn't Have To!

Why is it that a site like Gawker can come up with a piece that explains more about the inner workings and methodology of teabaggers via snark and an errant e-mail than actual news organizations can?

Like this:

"Tea Party Patriots" National Coordinator Jenny Beth Martin got a friendly little "media request" from CNBC: could you crazies maybe go crazy up a town hall somewhere? Sure, a 'Bagger says: how bout the guy who got the swastika?

Martin emailed the Tea Party listserve explaining that CNBC needed "lots of energy and lots of anger." She asked: "where are the big events this week and where can TPP best be represented on the news?"

Patriot and Teabagger Pat Wayman responded with a great suggestion: let's throw a riot at a health fair sponsored by Rep. David Scott (D-GA), the Congressman who got a swastika painted on his office sign last night!

Martin explained to TPM Muckraker that the Teabaggers would not be protesting that particular health fair, but the bit about CNBC specifically asking Tea Baggers to display "lot of anger" for their cameras was not disputed.

Gawker's securing and posting of the 'bagger e-mail shows us the symbiosis between that fake "grass-roots movement" and certain cable outlets, as well as exposes the manufactured "reality TV" aspect behind their schtick. It's also a nifty little piece of journalism--smart-ass or not.

Let's hope Gawker can get their hands on those promotional planning missives that surely exist between the teabagger hierarchy and FOX News--Your Complete Source of Tea Party Outrage; We Teabag So You Don't Have To!©

Monkee Wench.

To hear the tea party crowd tell it, we are headed for a government take-over and totalitarian tyranny, and the good-for-nothin' government is to blame. For one tea party-promoting, D-list celebrity's wife, however, it seems the government is good enough to defraud.

From the AP:

The wife of Monkees vocalist Micky Dolenz has been arrested on charges that she defrauded a housing program in New York City.

Authorities in the city's Department of Investigation say Donna Quinter illegally received nearly $137,000 in government rental subsidies for her Manhattan apartment.

The subsidies were supposed to go to middle-income families.

Investigators say Quinter didn't disclose that she was sharing the apartment with a friend. They say she also did not disclose that she had married Dolenz and was living primarily in a gated community outside Los Angeles.

Micky Dolenz was a performer at "America's Tea Party," the right-wing, FOX News-promoted anti-everything gathering in Dallas on July 4th. I don't know if his wife shares his teabagging ways. But maybe the event's speakers--which included tea bag queen Michelle Malkin--advocated defrauding the government as pay-back for all that damn socialism.

WARNING! Those Wacky Teabaggers Are Bored Again!

...or as the reliably paranoiac Michelle Malkin says, "Hands Off Our Health Care."

"Hands off?" Interesting wording, Michelle; that's the same thing health insurers say to those of us with pre-existing conditions!

Killing Time Between Tea Parties.

It's His Tea Party And He'll Kill If He Wants To.

From blog.wired.com with a h/t to Christie Keith:

An Oklahoma City man who announced on Twitter that he would turn an April 15 tax protest into a bloodbath was hit with a federal charge of making interstate threats last week, in what appears to be first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site.

Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, was arrested by FBI agents who identified him as the Twitter user CitizenQuasar. In a series of tweets beginning April 11, CitizenQuasar vowed to start a "war" against the government on the steps of the Oklahoma City Capitol building, the site of that city's version of the national "Tea Party" protests promoted by the conservative-leaning Fox News.

"START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!," read a tweet at 8:01 PM that day. "After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!," he added five minutes later. Then: "Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps."

Hayden's MySpace page is a breathtaking gallery of right wing memes about the "New World Order," gun control as Nazi fascism, and Barack Obama's covert use of television hypnosis, among many others.

Hmm. Didn't the right-wing echo chamber take offense to the recent Department of Homeland Security report warning of this type of threat, even though the report never uses the word "conservative"? 

Michelle Malkin: By contrast, the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives. And the intent is clear. As the two spokespeople I talked with on the phone today made clear: They both pinpointed the recent “economic downturn” and the “general state of the economy” for stoking “rightwing extremism.” One of the spokespeople said he was told that the report has been in the works for a year. My b.s. detector went off the chart, and yours will, too, if you read through the entire report — which asserts with no evidence that an unquantified “resurgence in rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalizations activity” is due to home foreclosures, job losses, and…the historical presidential election.

Glenn Beck: Well, now we have the report from DHS on rightwing extremists. You will see in this report why I didn't run to get this on the air because this report is extremist. This report will show you the things to come. It is phenomenal that this is a government document. 

Sean Hannity: “I'm not Ron Paul's biggest fan but if you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker, you might be viewed as a radical by the government...(w)hat do you think of that interpretation, especially coming from a guy that started his political career in the home of an unrepentant terrorist who bombed our Pentagon and Capitol and sat in Rev. Wright's church for 20 years?”

Rush Limbaugh: I had a report, I got this at 2:30 yesterday afternoon.  I just didn't have a chance to work it in yesterday.  It's this Department of Homeland Security report, it's nine pages, I've got the PDF here, and, by the way, this speech of Obama's and the DHS report yesterday are timed for one reason and that's the tea parties tomorrow.  This speech, the primary purpose of this speech is to take any glow off the tea parties.  The media is going to report on this speech later this afternoon and tell you about how great the economy is doing, how on top of it Obama is, how it's going to be a little while before it rebounds but it's coming back, and in having used that as the setup, they'll then go to videotape of the tea parties where they'll try to mock what's going on with these people, just agitators with no real reason behind what they're doing.  So this speech is designed to totally blunt the tea parties, which are grassroots affairs that will happen all over America tomorrow.  The DHS report, this comes from the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.  Now, when you read this whole thing, and it doesn't take long to read it, it's only nine pages, you can go to various places and read summaries of it as well.  For example, there is no proof here, no proof offered, no evidence offered that anything they project is true. 

Is a pissed-off teabagger tweeting death threats proof enough for you, fat ass?

Hey, Gov. Perry: Make Like Nike And Just Do It!

Signs Of The (Tea) Times.

Click here to see a cross-section of mouth-breathing teabaggers putting their divisive stupidity in writing. 

Nate Silver Spells It Out.

     Nate Silver at 538.com built a stellar reputation during the 2008 presidential campaign for his savvy interpretations of statistics and polls. What do you expect from a guy who invented a system to predict the performance of major league baseball players?

     I've seen various estimates of crowd sizes at yesterday's tea parties, including video of FOX News' Neil Cavuto blatantly making shit up. Cavuto evidently can't handle the truth, as he was caught in another lie just last week, crowing about FOX News's coverage of 1995's Million Man March even though FOX News didn't exist in 1995. 

     I'll choose Silver's estimates as something resembling reality, as he has established a trustworthy track record and wasn't one of the tea party sponsors, as, you know, FOX News was:

      This is an update and probably the last one. Those of you who are interested in extending the analysis (there are undoubtedly many events missing, although most of the major ones should now be covered) are encouraged to do so at Wikipedia or elsewhere.

      But, based on news accounts of 306 "Tea Party" protests in different cities across the country yesterday, I get a cumulative attendance of 262,025, with a fair number of (probably mostly smaller) events still unaccounted for.

      These figures, wherever possible, are drawn from objective attempts to estimate crowd sizes, such as police accounts or estimates made by reporters. Organizers of these events have strong incentives to exaggerate crowd sizes. Participants in them may have some of the same incentives, and it is notoriously difficult for people to accurately estimate crowd sizes once attendance has reached more than a few dozen individuals.

      Considering that these gatherings were hyped relentlessly for weeks on FOX News and throughout the right-wing echo chamber of talk radio and conservative blogs, is that all the pissed-off white people the organizers could round up?

Blowhards In The Windy City.

LIVE! "Teabaggin' With FOX News!"©

These People Walk Among Us.

I loves me some crazy 'mericans!

From DailyKos:

Seriously, this guy is the ultimate teabagger: He's not only got tea bag earrings, but he's posing next to a "Join the Patriotic Resistance" bumper sticker. How cool is that? 

This teabagger was at the DC protest site, about which a reader reports:

I just went to the Lafayette Square "Tea Party." It was a joke. There were around 500 people there. Very little energy. Many of the signs didn't even make sense. One child was holding a sign, "Obama took away my trip to Disney World." It seems that many parents removed their kids from school to attend. The PA wasn't even loud enough to be heard from 40 yards away. Very poorly organized.

Teabaggers Are In Their Cups.

     From Robert L. Borosage, Co-Director of the Campaign for America's Future on HuffPo:

     In 1980, as "Gilded Age Taxation," a study by the Institute for America's Future shows, the richest 1% of Americans captured fully 7.7% of the nation's after-tax income. The middle sixty percent captured about 50.9%. By 2006, the latest CBO figures show the opulent 1% -- making an average $1.3 million -- captured a staggering 16.3% of the nation's income after all that tax code redistribution. While the middle sixty percent garnered only 44.1%. If class war is being waged, the rich are on the march.

     The Institute for Policy Studies details the staggering contrast to the Eisenhower years. In 1955, the top 400 taxpayers averaged about $12.3 million in income (2006 dollars) and paid, after exploiting every loophole imaginable, 51.2% of that in federal income tax. A half century later, the richest 400 average a breath-taking $263.3 million in income each, and pay a mere 17.2% of that in federal income taxes. (A lower tax rate than paid by most of their secretaries).

     If those 400 taxpayers had paid at the same rate in 2006 as a half century earlier, the federal treasury would have collected $35.9 billion more in revenue, or enough to double the energy and transportation budget combined. No wonder Ike, clearly a stealth "socialist", could afford to build the interstate transport system.

     Read more here, here, and here. 

The Nuts Will Be Out On National Tea Party Day--Make Sure They're Not Yours!

Fake Patriot Games.

Don't Protest With Your Mouth Full.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Teabaggin' Bandwagon.

More teabaggin' hijinks here.