Not sure if the Tea Party needs help on the kook thing

[chunksmediocrites]

A teacher here in Oregon has been attempting to organize people to show up at the next local Tea Party rally (the April 15 tax filing deadline), to help ramp up the crazy (From Portland rag Willamette Week) :

Technology consultant and middle school teacher Jason Levin is inflaming the right wing by urging people to infiltrate the rallies and “exaggerate their least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them.”

I have mixed feelings on this, because unless this is already happening, the Tea Party members appear more than able to discredit themselves, but... then there's this from the Progressive:

Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.

“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.

He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.

“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.

OMG did Chomsky just Godwin?

Or great polls like this, courtesy the Orange County Register: the poll options are in bold type.
Time to change the tax code?

April 13th, 2010, 11:00 am · 5 Comments · posted by Mary Ann Milbourn

As Tax Day approaches on April 15, the discussion once again turns to the U.S. tax system and how to fix it. Should it be a flat tax? Added value tax? No tax?

So tell us ...
Should we change the income tax?

* Yes, we pay too much
* No, any change will be unfair
* It's government that's the problem

View Results

Wow.

This from CBSNews kind of surprised me:

As Tea Partiers gather for today's rally in Boston, home of the original Tea Party protest in 1773, 42 percent of Tea Party supporters think the amount of income taxes they'll pay this year is unfair, according to a new CBS News/ New York Times poll.

Yet while some say the Tea Party stands for "Taxed Enough Already," most Tea Party supporters - 52 percent - say their taxes are fair, the poll shows. Just under one in five Americans say they support the Tea Party movement.

Compared to 62% of Americans generally who think their taxes are fair.


Anyway, part of me loves the idea of going down to the Tea Party Rally in a giant swastika costume and speaking like I was Ben Franklin's nutty pal Wild-Eyed Uber-Patridiot, and demanding an interview with the local media, or otherwise Moran-ing it up.

[Stephen Maturin]

The wingers have been blabbering for a year or more about how we just can't believe any negative imagery about the teabaggers because that alleged nutjob holding a sign that compares affordable health care to Buchenwald might just be a stealth liberal trying to make the teabagger movement look bad. After all, it's happened before. Probably.

Jason Levin's proposal can only add piss to that already-befouled punchbowl.

Unless, of course, Mr. Levin is actually a stealth teabagger POSING as a stealth liberal for the purpose of making it appear that liberals are trying to make the teabagger movement look bad!

Originally Posted by chunksmediocrites

. . . going down to the Tea Party Rally in a giant swastika costume and speaking like I was Ben Franklin's nutty pal Wild-Eyed Uber-Patridiot . . .

If this happens, videotape or gtfo.

[chunksmediocrites]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Unless, of course, Mr. Levin is actually a stealth teabagger POSING as a stealth liberal for the purpose of making it appear that liberals are trying to make the teabagger movement look bad!

That would be a devious plot to the point of incredulity, methinks.

[Brimshack]

You know it'd one thing to make up a fake sign or even to troll a forum, but to stand there for the whole rally, holding that sign and talking to people about it, that would take more guile than I think I could muster. ...and better acting skills than many in the theatre could manage.

[godfry n. glad]

Shit...Going to a local Tea Party gathering would be worse than sitting through a monthly meeting of the Multnomah County Democratic Party Central Committee. Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that there was a significant overlap of attendees.

[Dingfod]

I could strap on my six-gun and hold up a misspelled sign at a rally and fit right in.

[Jug Pilot]

When the Coffee Party folks first posted on youtube there were a bunch of tea party types that were posting under names like CoffeePartyOrg and CoffeePartySupport just to do mis-information.

Going to a Tea Party rally sounds like fun, but I doubt I could stay in character long enough. Making fun of the stupid is much more fun.

[Qingdai]

I have done it, dressed in faux leopard prints and stood outside an Operation Rescue meeting with a sign saying "Save the Sperm."

It's hard to stay crazy enough that the folks you are mocking get freaked out. When you are that far out on a limb....

[Ari]

Doing anything beyond LOLZing at them online seems like giving them too much credit.
But there is always LuLz to be had.

[Qingdai]

In my defense, it was before the interwebs.

Like 1988, dude.

[Dingfod]

[Miisa]

It's a plant!

[livius drusus]

You just hate the sight of people pursuing happiness, Commie.

[Nullifidian]

Here's my favorite, made slightly worse by the fact that they had it professionally printed.



Who knew that there were people who protested the practice of adding commentary to the classical authors?

This guy doesn't even need to go through with his plan now. He can just sit back and wait while the paranoid teabaggers cannibalize each other.

[LadyShea]

Tea party leaders anxious about extremists - Yahoo! News

"We don't want to be misrepresented, whether it's by someone who is not part of the group and has their own agenda, or whether it's by some fringe extremist who may actually be a racist," said Jim Hoft, a political blogger and tea party activist who is one of the speakers for a rally in suburban St. Louis.

The Waco, Texas, tea party started hiring off-duty police officers and renting their venues so that they could keep extremists out of their main events. The change happened after a group showed up with racist signs in a gathering in a public park.

"They tried to insist they were tea party members," said Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco Tea Party. But she added: "Our tea party people would not hold signs like that."

Um, really? Are you really going with the True Teabaggers thing?

[Watser?]

Forty-seven percent of self-identified Tea Partiers say Palin is unqualified

Most Tea Partiers deem Palin unqualified for president: poll | Raw Story

Technically that headline is incorrect, though only 40% think she is qualified. The rest are wishy-washy.

[Dingfod]

Teabaggers in Tulsa

Local Fox station headline reads "Tea Party Rally Draws Thousands" but the text reads hundreds. No bias in their reporting, uh-uh, no way.

[irukandji]

[Stephen Maturin]

Good God. Even the are in on it.

[D. Scarlatti]

"This is the conservative warrior princess Monica Crowley ..."

[Stephen Maturin]

Really, man! One day there's going to be a big ol' throwdown involving that conservative warrior princess and this conservative warrior princess.

[Gonzo]

My favorite sign to work crowds with is the side of a brown cardboard box with the words "GARBAGE ONLY" written in Sharpie. My brothers and I have a routine worked out of going to localized crowded events and protesting something totally irrelevant to the actual subject matter. I don't think acting foolish is as meant to trick others as much as it is to make a point or otherwise crack smiles. The people who can't take the joke are usually at the butt of it.

The funnest was holding up that said sign at a family reunion where a game of Corn-Hole was being played and color commentating on the action.

I really wanted to work the Teabags when they rolled into town a few weeks ago, but I happened to be at school as it happened. I doubt they're all that fun of a crowd to hangout with anyway.

[Caligulette]

That teacher is now on leave or fired, according to the radio the other day.

ETA: On leave.
http://blog.oregonlive.com/mapesonpo...es_invest.html

As usual, the comments are primarily asinine.

[Qingdai]

The comments on Oregon Live are even worse than most other bad comments I see. It's impressive.

[Caligulette]

Salt Lake editorial pages were pretty bad (I moved before comments pages started).