Showing posts with label Tea Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tea Party. Show all posts

Sunday, March 23, 2025

A new party of violence in the making?

 "They hate us": Democrats confront their own Tea Party

Various observations after Democrat town halls:

 "Among the things I got [at a town hall] were: 'Will you call for Chuck Schumer to resign?'" the lawmaker said. "Last week I got: 'You need to tell your leadership they had no right rebuking Democrats for being strong at'" Trump's speech to a joint session of Congress.

"Another thing I got was: 'Democrats are too nice. Nice and civility doesn't work. Are you prepared for violence?'"

"The level of exasperation is comparable [to the Tea Party] for sure, even if the issues and policies are very different," said [Jared] Huffman [CA-2]. 

"The base has been pissed off for a while." ...  it "seems to be more widespread" now.

"My constituents have passionately said they are not happy with Democratic leadership. ... They expect more from me and from Democrats in Congress."

"If near unanimity against the Republican CR is not definitive evidence of a party unified in opposition to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, then I am not sure what would be," said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.).

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) told Axios that "no one expressed displeasure with Democrats" during his last two-hour town hall. People are "back to focusing on Musk and Trump," he said.

"All I know is that most folks are pissed, and scared, and they hate this chaos and the blatant corruption of Trump and Musk," said Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio). "Democrats absolutely want leaders who are going to fight back and fix what's broken."

Clueless Ed Kilgore today post-mid-March thinks angry Democrats are in the minority based on a Gallup poll from late January

But this simply ignores everything Trump has flooded the zone with since January 27. That's a backward-looking poll.

Trump's has been a non-stop roll out of actions designed to alienate everyone in every arena.

Republicans are angry, too.

Has Ed been living under a rock?

Ed Kilgore here in "Today’s Angry Democrats Are Not Tomorrow’s Tea Party of the Left":

... it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:

Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.

I think it's way too early to say this is or is not like the Tea Party period. It was 21 months from Santelli's Rant to Election 2010, so it's still very early innings, the beginning of the game. We're not even two months in. 

The energy I've seen in the interim directed against office holders does resemble the Tea Party movement in some ways, which was a maelstrom of angst for its time, sucking rich and poor and everyone in between into its vortex. Its energy reverberated long after into the November 2010 election and later into the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The violence against Tesla does not resemble the Tea Party. But it is energy. And it is ideological. Elon Musk is a traitor to the green energy movement, making the prospect of climate doom more probable to them. The left is most definitely aroused.

I can still remember my congressman warning me that unless he voted for TARP in September 2008 my credit card might stop working. Politicians like him then weren't focused on ordinary people and their views, same as today at Republican town halls where one tone-deaf politician after another is greeted with derision by people upset about losing their government jobs and in fear of losing benefits they've earned.

The Tesla protesters think climate doom is near, just as the craziest factions of the Tea Party movement were sure another Great Depression was just around the corner.

No, the politicians in 2008 were focused on the big money failures of investment banking like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, which were outside the FDIC system, not on the people whose traditional banks and jobs were in actual peril.

Civilian employment fell by 3.5 million just from December 2008 to March 2009. 24 banks failed during this period alone, after 22 failures already in 2008 up to that point.

And what the politicians did subsequently fixed nothing.

461 more FDIC banks went on to fail by the end of 2014. Civilian employment crashed by 10.05 million from July 2008 to January 2010, and did not recover its July 2007 level until October of 2014. Between 2006 and 2014 there were approximately 9.3 million real estate foreclosure filings or the equivalent.

Millions were badly hurt. Many never recovered. They and their children voted for Trump in 2016.

People getting hurt is the standard of comparison in these things.

Putting 600,000 government workers out of a job all of a sudden in 2025 is really bad, stupid, and downright mean, but not on the same level as the Great Financial Crisis. But start missing Social Security checks or disappearing your neighbor in the middle of the night because something was wrong on his immigration paperwork and things might get spicy. A shooting war with Canadians or Mexicans, or Panamanians or Danes, would be next level.

American tourists or workers or residents abroad incarcerated in a tit-for-tat with the Trump administration might start to focus even more minds.

Who knows what's next?

Like I said, early innings, the energy is building, but Kilgore isn't here.


 

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Ann Coulter goes off the rails, blames the Tea Party for Obamacare

 She forgets that Obamacare was passed in March 2010, months before the "Tea Party" swept the US House in an historic win with the help of Freedom Works & Co.

. . . the Tea Party candidates lost us a lot of races and Senate seats. We would not have Obamacare if it weren't for a lot of the Tea Party candidates running against incumbent candidates. 

Here.


Hello. Republicans won the US House in 2010, and the US Senate in 2014, the year Obamacare went live.

Methinks Ann is jealous that Republicans actually won that 2010 election because of indignation over mortgage bailouts instead of over something else. The Tea Party's origin was in 2009 after all, not 2010.

Recall that Rush Limbaugh blamed the faceless conservative "base", too, when McCain lost. But Ann names names, calling out Trump himself over and over (he has deserved it), Mitch McConnell (perennially), and now the Tea Party. Yeah, the Tea Party got co-opted for sure, but she's rewriting history here because she's pissed so many Trump aligned candidates have won their primaries, believing (hoping?) they will lose in November, you know, like they "lost" in 2010.

Well I sure hope so.


Ann spent years saying Obamacare was the number one issue before coming to prioritize immigration, maintaining as she did that illegal aliens were the number one beneficiaries of Obamacare. Now she blames everyone else for saying so, too.

Her irrational outbursts and ad hominem arguments are her own best case for repeal of the 19th Amendment.

Make up your mind, woman.







Saturday, September 21, 2019

Libertarian Mike Lee of Utah, author of get out of jail crime bill, is also author of American job-stealer bill stalled in Senate

There was a reason Americans drove Mormons out to the west, but obviously Utah has proven to be a stop too short.



Tuesday, July 23, 2019

10 years after Santelli's rant against Obama's proposed bailout of your neighbor's mortgage, National Review pretends it was about deficit spending

You will search in vain in this article for the word "mortgage".

If the Tea Party had been about any one thing, it was about the moral hazard of bailouts. A sizeable minority of the American people perceived that bailouts made them chumps, dutifully following the rules and accepting their obligations while bankrupt businesses and bankrupt homeowners did neither. 

By Brian Riedl, long-time research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the article illustrates better than anything how the interests of establishment conservatism co-opted the Tea Party movement in 2011, just as establishment Republicanism co-opted Trumpism in 2017.

"Let's steal this energy and make it about something else".

Every. Damn. Time. 


Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Matthew Continetti is delusional, imagines Republicans after 2010 "overreached", thinks Democrats might after 2018

Here, when in reality the so-called Tea Party Congress utterly capitulated.

It continued to ratify the new level of Obama's spending from fiscal 2009 onward, increased 25% overnight and kept there through the end of his presidency.

The Congress wasn't supine just in respect of the spending, either. John Boehner explicitly ceded the agenda to Obama after his reelection in 2012. Congress did nothing to hamstring an imperial president bent on ruling by decree. It was the Supreme Court which had to repeatedly rebuke the Obama administration, which simply ignored the court and kept on doing it.  

One can only wonder what Continetti would call it if Congress had actually exercised its constitutional power of the purse instead of lining up at the hog trough to lap it up with the rest of the pigs. Probably something about the tyranny of the legislative, or some such rot.

Friday, July 13, 2018

Ann Coulter: The point isn't being made enough that the Russia investigation began because of Peter Strzok


It was the hubris and political animus of a single high-level FBI functionary, Peter Strzok, which sought to stymie the political will of the American people who elected Trump by presenting a phony dossier as credible evidence to a FISA court in order to surveil a presidential candidate.

The whole thing is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Lois Lerner affair, when one person in The Swamp used her position to curtail the free-speech rights of The Tea Party during the 2010 revolt against Obamacare and government bailouts of all and sundry except the taxpayers.

   

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Alabama US Senate race to replace Sessions shows how divided is "conservatism"

Trump has endorsed Luther Strange (all those promises to pick the very best people should have been a warning).

Mo Brooks is endorsed by Hannity, Ingraham and the Tea Party Patriots.

Judge Roy "10 Commandments" Moore, endorsed by Chuck Norris, has a 10-point lead.

Story here.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Monday, May 8, 2017

Tea Party darling Sen. Ron Johnson of WI introduces massive guest worker/amnesty: 500k annually

The Tea Party was one half open-borders-libertarian from the beginning. That's why it went no farther than it did.

And Wisconsin narrowly reelected Johnson in 2016 why? It was the price we paid for the very narrow Trump victory there.

Story here.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

7 years later IRS tells Albuquerque Tea Party FU after federal judge orders action

The story is here.

Friday, January 20, 2017 can't come soon enough.

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Loretta Lynch would never say to the Tea Party what she said to her precious protesters: "Don't be discouraged"


[S]he urged peaceful protesters not to give up.

“I want you to know that your voice is important,” Lynch said Friday during a news conference at the Justice Department. “Do not be discouraged by those who would use your lawful actions as cover for their heinous violence. We will continue to safeguard your constitutional rights and to work with you in the difficult mission of building a better nation and a brighter future.”

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Despicable Paul Ryan, Congress and Obama stiff-arm Puerto Rico bondholders who will end up fronting the inevitable taxpayer bailout

Paul Ryan is the establishment all the way. And he hasn't changed since 2008. He is not Tea Party, he is not Freedom Caucus, he is not for the taxpayer, period.

From the story here:

In essence, the bondholders will front the money for the bailout while taxpayers would have to pay them back for this cash advance.

This is something that Speaker Ryan and his allies, including the Obama Administration, don't want you to know. 

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Tea Party class action against the IRS certified, goes to discovery stage

From the story here:

Certifying the class allows any of the more than 200 groups that were subjected to the criteria to join the lawsuit. But until the IRS complies with the appeals court’s ruling this week, the list of those groups is secret.

Now that the class has been certified, the case moves to the discovery stage, where the tea party groups’ lawyers will ask for all of the agency’s documents related to the targeting and will depose IRS employees about their actions.

The lawyers hope they’ll be able to learn details Congress was unable to shake free in its own investigations.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Tea Party Patriots pat themselves on the back at CPAC in Maryland while Trump heads to Kansas to talk to the people

Noted here:

Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin said the businessman "has no business thinking he is Tea Party. Trump is about love of himself," she said. "But the Tea Party is about love of country and the love of our constitution."

The Tea Party in South Carolina begs to differ, giving about equal love to Trump and Cruz.


Friday, February 19, 2016

The division in the Tea Party between religious conservatives and libertarians is starkly evident in South Carolina

Data from the SC House GOP poll of 3,500 likely voters shown tonight at Real Clear Politics indicates the Tea Party in South Carolina is evenly divided between religious supporters of Ted Cruz and nationalist supporters of Donald Trump (establishment candidates Bush and Kasich hardly register):


Sunday, January 31, 2016

Former editor of National Review thinks Ted Cruz is the leader of the Tea Party: Sarah Palin would beg to differ


'Mr. Obama’s conservative opponents, on the other hand, have responded to his bold assertion of executive prerogative in two quite different ways. Some cite it as an argument for stronger checks on presidential power; others plainly believe that this unchecked power would be a fine thing if only it were exercised in pursuit of their interests.

'The first of those reactions produced the Tea Party movement, which advocated fiscal discipline, limited government and fidelity to the Constitution. Half of it joined the conservative wing of the GOP and fought elections with mixed success; the other half became an independent conservative faction out of frustration with a Republican leadership they believe has betrayed them. Many Tea Partiers now tell pollsters that they are “independents.” But the obvious leader of the entire movement is Sen. Ted Cruz.'

The Hegelian dialectic was never so useful for so little.

Friday, April 24, 2015

The 10 Idiot Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Loretta Lynch as Attorney General

The 10 Republicans who think being in the majority is a sin:

Ayotte (R-NH) oh yes she votes. just. like. a. woman.
Cochran (R-MS) senile old codger
Collins (R-ME) gender before party
Flake (R-AZ) aptly named
Graham (R-SC) McCain's errand boy
Hatch (R-UT) competing with Harry Reid for Mormon infamy
Johnson (R-WI) used to be the Tea Party's Senator! Go Feingold! Go Feingold! Go Feingold!
Kirk (R-IL) soon to be replaced by another disabled person of the same political party
McConnell (R-KY) recently had unsuccessful testicle transplant surgery
Portman (R-OH) has never had any testicles according to anonymous sources 

The roll call vote is here.