More than a handul of Teabaggers!

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First reports from AP and NY Times indicate 'thousands' at DC protest? (Updated with crowd estimate)

What else would you expect? Both the Times and AP are equating the crowds turning out in DC to protest Obama's policies with crowds turning out to see the president later today at a town hall meeting.

Here's AP's and the Times notion of "thousands:

According to CNN, the event got underway an hour and a half early because so many people showed up at the bottom of Pennsylvania avenue, there was simply no more room for new arrivals.

Pictures supplied by Fox and CNN appeared to me to show a crowd stretching all the way from the Capitol steps, back many, many blocks, stretching off into the distance.

By any stretch of the imagination, such a crowd should have been indentified in "the hundreds of thousands." And yet. here's the Times report by Jeff Zeleny:

As President Obama flew to Minnesota on Saturday to rally support for his health care plan, thousands of protestors from around the country arrived here to demonstrate against the White House and Congress for what they say is an ever-expanding intrusion of government.

On a cloudy and cool September morning, scores of people waved flags and carried signs as they arrived in Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington for a march to the capital. The event was being billed as the culmination of summer protests at town meetings, where opposition to the president's health care plan boiled over.

"Scores of people...?" Are you kidding me?

The DC Park Police stopped trying to estimate crowds years ago. But given the over the top estimate for Obama's inauguration by some ("more than a million people"), I would say the number of people out today come close to matching the number on January 20.

Could you post the link to this piece?

Thanks!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32811199/ns/politics-more_politics/

...any more?

No, that's cool. I was looking for the link to the original commentary, which was from "American Thinker"... Thanks for posting it. I always like to see how everybody is reporting an event like this.

LoisLane wrote:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/12/tea.party.rally/index.html

Here's a quote from one of the protesters in Washington.

Teabagger wrote:

"We're here to let the government know that we do not want government involvement in our health care, nor do we want the higher taxation that comes along with such a proposal."

Apparently, this guy has never heard of Medicare. The fastest way to lose an election is to suggest making cuts to either Medicare or Social Security. Both of those programs faced strong opposition when they were proposed, yet they have become some of the most popular programs the federal government has created. I'm glad the protesters are becoming involved in this debate, but at the end of the day, health care reform is going to be passed.

Teabaggers aren't good at math

Possibly because LBJ or Carter or Clinton tried to address them at school when they were kids, their parents kept them out, and they missed an important lesson. Who knows? But while down by the Capitol, I heard all kinds of crowd estimates, anywhere from 250,000 to over a million.

Teabaggers aren't good at math Possibly because LBJ or Carter or Clinton tried to address them at school when they were kids, their parents kept them out, and they missed an important lesson. Who knows? But while down by the Capitol, I heard all kinds of crowd estimates, anywhere from 250,000 to over a million. Michelle Malkin is actually claiming two million, which would mean Glenn Beck has somehow mastered space and time itself, and managed to fit a crowd larger than the one that attended Obama's inauguration into an area a fraction of the size of the one the crowd from January took up.

In actuality:]This photo was taken around noon, when the event was in full swing. There was no crowd behind me. In fact, at one point, one of the organizers had to tell everyone to move in closer, because the rally didn't have a permit to be on the Mall.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/12/781186/-Things-I-learned-about-teabaggers-today

Interesting article that points out that a lot of these "teabaggers" dislike Repubs too....

Protests present GOP with tricky task

Artie60438 wrote:

"Tea Party" Leader Melts Down On CNN: Obama Is An "Indonesian Muslim Turned Welfare Thug"

"Tea Party" leader Mark Williams appeared on a CNN panel on "Anderson Cooper 360" last night and promptly set to work discrediting himself and his movement. Williams denounced those carrying blatantly racist signs against President Obama during the tea parties as "no more part of the mainstream of America than the hippies who wear nipple clips and feather boas in San Francisco streets during so-called peace demonstrations."

Cooper had done his homework, however, and caught Williams blatantly misrepresenting himself: "What you're saying makes sense to me here when I'm hearing what you say but then I read on your blog, you say, you call the President an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief."

Williams shrugs and responds, "Yeah, that's the way he's behaving." An incredulous Cooper asks Williams if he really believes Obama is an Indonesian Muslim and a welfare thug. The tea party leader digs the hole a little deeper: "He's certainly acting like it. Until he embraces the whole country what else can I conclude."

BTW - For those who haven't seen this yet, here is the sign that Carville was referring to...



It was distributed to the 9/12 wackos, including kids. Isn't that special?

George's Bottom Line - "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy"???

Stay classy, Republicans!

And a Twoofer in a pear tree...

I ran across this really interesting op-ed piece by a psychologist who attempts to answer a question that has run across my mind many times... namely "What the hell is wrong with these people?" The author gives what seems to be at least a plausible explanation for the irrational views held by conspiracy groups like the teabaggers, the truthers and the denialist groups.

Here's an excerpt, but I highly recommend reading this entire piece. He goes on to explain how easy it is to use the process he is describing as a strategy to advance an agenda. I generally take such "psycho-babble" with a grain of salt, and in that respect, this piece is no different from other explanations that I have encountered. But it is the first time that I have encountered this specific theory, so I found it to be noteworthy, and might be of interest to some of you.

Why Obama Had to Have Been Born in Kenya

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We take our sense of what is real and what is not real for granted. We shouldn't. We each actually form our own unique "reality sense" with our mind that assimilates an infinitely complex bombardment of stimuli from outside us and from within. It is no simple task, and the most miraculous part of the human mind is that it is able to create a coherent reality at all.

The problem is that in times of extreme uncertainty the mind has a hard time creating this reality sense. The mind becomes confused. This can be caused by external events in our world, such as rapid change or inner psychological states -- for example, when we are experiencing strong emotions like paranoia, envy, or challenges to our sexual identity.

In this state of confusion, the mind does not do very well at all. When it feels sufficiently uncertain about what is real and what is not real, it panics. Ultimately the mind will fragment if it is not able to create a cohesive reality sense with a reassuring sense of what is real and what is not real. The breakdown in this ability to form a coherent reality sense is the primary difference between sanity and madness. Thus, it is not too surprising that for many people it is more important to have some reality sense than it is to have a correct reality sense. Of course, people differ greatly in their ability to tolerate ambiguity and in their ability to create a reality sense in times of stress. But for someone in an acute state of uncertainty, it is any port in a storm when it comes to reality formation.

And this is where things go awry. Current right-wing politics is an art form that is designed to re-define reality for a class of people who are increasingly unable to establish their own sense of reality. Instead, they succumb and become increasingly dependent on someone else to tell them what is real and what is not real. In their regressed psychological state, under certain conditions, many people will accept as real whatever they are told by an authoritative sounding figure be it Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Bill O'Reilly.

And the more people lean on these people to provide that function, the more dependent they become on them, and the less able they are to think for themselves. As this process continues people will accept ever more outrageous ideas. Death squads in health care? Obama secretly born in Kenya? Okay.

More on the right's ridiculous fear mongering:

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The Left Should Reclaim 'Freedom'

There are few things in politics more annoying than the right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word "freedom" that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.

I wonder if some of them really understand the word. Consider one of the stupidest statements ever uttered by a President: "They hate us for our freedom."

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Conservatives of the 1930s, led by an upper-crust outfit called the American Liberty League, certainly felt that way. "That Roosevelt was a dictator there was no doubt; but Liberty Leaguers were not quite sure what kind," wrote the historian George Wolfskill in "The Revolt of the Conservatives," a 1962 study of that organization. "Some thought he was a fascist, others believed him a socialist or Communist, while others, to be absolutely sure, said he was both."

Today, of course, we know that the right's tyranny-fears were nonsense. Most of Roosevelt's innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.

Even such pits of statism as Britain and Canada remain free societies, generally speaking, despite having gone skipping blithely down the universal-health-care road to serfdom decades ago.

For the sort of people who gathered on the Mall last weekend, however, I doubt that such observations would matter in the least. Their conception of freedom soars on by a force all its own, carried aloft on the wings of pure abstract reasoning: Government intervention equals tyranny. Liberalism is forever a form of despotism-in-waiting.

The reality of misgovernment, meanwhile, is not something you can grasp simply by donning a tricorn hat and musing on the majesty of Lady Liberty. It requires, among other things, close attention to the following irony: That many of the most destructive and even corrupt policies of the past few decades were engineered by exactly the sort of people who claim to be motivated by freedom and liberty. Our friends on the Mall no doubt imagine themselves as guiltless accusers, but if they really want to understand how our country got to this sorry state, they need to take a long hard look in the mirror.

Anyone see this? I don't even know what to say about a "news" organization engaging in conduct like this...



Fox News Producer Caught Rallying 9/12 Protest Crowd In Behind-The-Scenes Video

They were corporate sponsors anyway, weren't they?

"What the hell is wrong with these people?" The author gives what seems to be at least a plausible explanation for the irrational views held by conspiracy groups like the teabaggers, the truthers and the denialist groups.

It's clear the Marxist-prone either do not understand or else they simply refuse to acknowledge the the core issue here is that many Americans (and many more than they wish to admit, and not merely so-called right-wingers) are opposed to the government having so much power to control their lives and are really ticked at the growing number of taxes to support these growing government intrusions.

I doubt anybody with a functioning brain will deny that while Federal income tax may not yet have increased on those making under $250, 000 (which is a debatable point but may soon become an undisputed unkept promise soon anyway) all these new and proposed little piece by piece taxes are eroding disposable income with the subtly of the death of a thousand cuts. If the Cap in Trade taxes are approved that extra $1,000+ on your NIPSCO bill is most definitely a tax on the poor. And how would Federally taxing soda and other soft drinks do anything besides hurt the poor for the sake of nabbing just a few bucks more?

Further, we have unelected people dictating things like imposing Federal penalties of up to $100,000 on a single offense for a thrift shop or even a garage sale offering items on recall lists. While such regulation may or may not be exercised on garage sales (unless someone in government really has it in for you to watch your every single move perhaps) it will be devastating to resale shops which cater to the poor which often work on a shoestring budget anyway. Several are operated mostly by volunteers. Can you imagine the problem of having to check each & every item donated against a government list that may or may not even be up to date and still run the risk of hefty fines for inadvertently selling a dictated contraband item?

And need I bring up several proposals intended to control the internet? Some would give the President authority to even shut down the internet while others apparently seek to shield cable companies from competing with programming via the web.

This resistance to troubling trends in the US is not exclusive to so-called right-wing Republicans. Democrats and Independents are being converted more and more. What kills me is the Obamacrats (because I'm not sure you can really call them Democrats) are already making excuses for a possible loss of House seats in next year's election. I only hope we can survive another year of oppression under the current leadership trends.