That figure for Bush does not include his 2008 budget with the TARP bail-out that Tea Party organizer Newt Gingrich says he would have voted for. There are some valid criticisms of the particulars of the economic bail-outs under both Bush and Obama, but Gingrich acknowledged in that same interview that something had to be done – say ing the drying up of credit would have tremendous detrimental consequences. Something we’re not likely to hear again because it would undermine his support for the relatively mindless crude populism driving the tea parties of the Right. Glenn Reynolds and some other tea smokers are trying to claim that Fox and its various spokespersons are not promoting the tea smokers, What Part of “FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES” Don’t You Understand?
Media Matters:
TaxDayTeaParty.com lists Fox News contributors Michelle Malkin and Tammy Bruce as “Tea Party Sponsors.” The sponsors section also lists American Solutions for Winning the Future, whose general chairman is Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich. Gingrich filmed a video “invitation” to attend the April 15 protests.
Does Newt remind his audience that he supported the bail-out.
Throwing in a little conspiratorial aspect to it’s appeals is always a crowd pleaser with the Right, Fox News Supports Potentially Violent Tea Party Goers and Business Guru Neil Cavuto Warns of Infiltrators
If there was ever any question that Fair and Balanced Fox News is in bed with the organizers of the Tea Party movement, consider this statement by the Executive Director of DontGo Movement, Eric Odom: “I will likely be on the Glenn Beck TV program this week or next to discuss the effort on Fox News. We’ve also been on countless radio programs and the Nationwide Movement is really starting to heat up . . . So what does this mean for the DontGo Movement? Well, it means that we, along with Smart Girl Politics and TCOT (Top Conservatives On Twitter), were able to pull off something that multi-million dollar organizations have tried to do for years but failed at . . . Eric Odom”
Fox, Odom, Newt, DontGo might be the new definition of grass roots, but only if the roots are plastic. Beck to attend $500 a plate fundraiser for ‘tea party’ protests.
Beck isn’t just helping with turnout. Discussing his participation in the upcoming protest at the Alamo in San Antonio on his syndicated radio program, Beck announced, “I’m going to do a fundraiser for them” to help defray costs. “So you can come and you can have lunch with me. … I don’t know any of the details, but I’ve heard it’s like $500 a plate or something like that.”
$500 hundred bucks for one plate of food to support a allegedly populist movement when $500 would still buy a lot of groceries for struggling families.
Thank goodness that the far Right Redstate is on the net to explain alway the corporate sponsorships, the $500 dinners, the record deficits of Republican administrations, the trillion dollar occupation of Iraq, That Redstate supported Bush and Republican Congress critters largely responsible for the debt and deregulation fever that lead to our current crisis, Why Go To a TEA Party? Why Go Now?
And that is what the Tea Parties are all about: continuing Reagan’s revolution of people power against the growing, total state. Republicans lost their way when they tried to work with the statists who only want to make the government ever more powerful and remove power and responsibilities from the people, whom statists do not trust. Republicans were also infiltrated by statists who saw a winning political side and decided to join it.
Yea, those stink’n statists. The only positive aspect of the Reagan legacy was a liberal one, where he woke up one morning and saw that his slash and burn policies were leading the country off a cliff so started to make concessions to those that saw huge deficits and a recession coming – and remember that the last big economic crisis the country faced was Reagan’s S&L debacle.
No, the time for protesting excessive and irresponsible management saw no astroturf Redtstates in 2005, when the Congressional Budget Office released this report, CBO Confirms Republican Policies Make Deficits Even Worse
Over the ten-year period 2002-2011, the $5.6 trillion projected surplus inherited by this Administration when it took office has been replaced by a deficit of $2.6 trillion, a reversal of $8.2 trillion. Over the 2006- 2015 window, CBO projects a deficit of $855 billion. These figures do not include any new supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan for 2005 and beyond, nor do they reflect the cost of a number of expensive Bush Administration policy proposals discussed below. When adjusted for these policies and the associated interest costs, the 2002-2011 deficit grows to $4.6 trillion (a $10.2 trillion reversal) and the 2006-2015 deficit grows to $6.1 trillion. (See chart,“Surplus Declines $10.2 Trillion Under Republican Leadership.”)
If we had a Republican controlled Congress and a McCain presidency those policies plus the economic crisis, the future deficit would be worse then currently projected. Yet we wouldn’t be seeing any tea smokers ranting in the streets. Big Gov’mint has way of becoming justified under Republican rule. When Democrats try to pull us out of the mess, as Bill Clinton did after Reagan and Bush 41, the gov’mint is out of control and must be stopped.
If I want to read some generally rational critiques of where Obama is going wrong I can always read Paul Krugman or Glenn Greenwald, Obama and habeas corpus — then and now.
Back in February, the Obama administration shocked many civil libertarians by filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue — the Obama DOJ argued, as The New York Times’s Charlie Savage put it, “that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.” Remember: these are not prisoners captured in Afghanistan on a battlefield. Many of them have nothing to do with Afghanistan and were captured far, far away from that country — abducted from their homes and workplaces — and then flown to Bagram to be imprisoned. Indeed, the Bagram detainees in the particular case in which the Obama DOJ filed its brief were Yemenis and Tunisians captured outside of Afghanistan (in Thailand or the UAE, for instance) and then flown to Bagram and locked away there as much as six years without any charges. That is what the Obama DOJ defended, and they argued that those individuals can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind — as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo.
The Long Goodbye 