This seems pretty mild.

BTW which Tea Party event did you attend?

Let me put things in perspective. I am a Tea Partier. I belong to two local (near my home base) Tea Party groups and two nationally semi-organized groups. However, as you may know I am currently stationed in Suckistan. Many of the left-wing media (sorry for the redundancy) and liberal politicians (including the Vice-Prez Joe “The Gaffe” Biden) have referred to Tea Party people as terrorists. Do you agree with that characterization? Furthermore how do you think it makes me feel, a Tea Party member, fighting real terrorists (or jihadists if you prefer) to be referred to as a terrorist? This is rhetoric gone amok and offends a great many of us over here.

when all the Republican bloggers went around pointing at the liberals in attendance to make sure no one talked to them? Yeah, my friends who attended with video cameras said it got a little tense.

and every family gathering I have to explain to them that the electoral college does not maintain states equality…that’s the senate….sigh.

Does she want the mustache on or off?

Health care, as a product unto itself, is skyrocketing in cost. It is the single biggest driver of future cost estimates, both private and public. What will cost more: raising the age of Medicare and SSA and letting people go at it on their own or pooling broad resources? Regardless of ideology, I think we’ll eventually reach a point where the money aspects of the health care problem become too big to ignore without the largest possible insurance pool.

so can move “back” and get a cut of that oil money? I’d fit right in, blond hair and everything. (I’d need to work on the language and a desire to eat smoked salmon and lutefisk.)

Here’s a list of the current members of the Tea Party caucus. Here’s how they break down by region:

Here’s an academic paper that builds on the regional breakdown of the party.

While less than one in five (19.4%) minority non-Southerners and about 36% of Anglo non-Southerners report supporting the movement, almost half of white Southerners (47.1%) express support….

In fact, the role that antigovernment sentiment in the South plays in Tea Party movement support is the strongest in our analysis.

Here’s the abstract:

The Tea Party movement has gained much support and media attention over the past several years.
Debate rages, however, about the sources of support for the movement. Some argue that supporters are
drawn to the movement by concerns about the state of the U.S. economy. Others believe the movement
attracts those who are most disgruntled with the size and direction of the national government. Further,
charges of racism and anti-immigrant attitudes among movement supporters continue to arise. Finally,
some wonder what role moral issues that have been so prominent in national politics for more than a
decade play in this movement, if any. We believe that much of this debate results from the varied
attraction of the Tea Party movement across the nation. While supporters in one region might be drawn to
the Tea Party by economic or size of government concerns, supporters in other areas are likely drawn to
the movement by concerns more particular to their region.

Using data from a June, 2010, nationwide USA Today/Gallup Poll, we investigate the sources of Tea
Party support, with a particular eye toward whether the basis of support varies by geographic region. We
find that traditional, moral values play no role in increasing support for the movement, further
substantiating claims that the movement formed in reaction to the Republican Party’s shift toward its neoconservative wing over the past three decades. Counter to much popular sentiment, we find that racism
plays no role in movement support either. Though Tea Party supporters are more likely to be white
Southerners and to express more racist attitudes, these attitudes do not appear to cause a person to support
the movement. We do find that economic concerns, anti-government sentiment, and views about illegal
immigration play important, but varied roles in movement support across the nation. Viewing illegal
immigration as a threat to the nation increases support for the Tea Party movement, but only in the West.
Economic concerns are the key factor increasing movement support in the East, while anti-government
sentiment boosts support in the Midwest and both play key roles in the South where anti-government
sentiment drives support more than economic concerns.

In other words, we’ve seen this party before and they are not a bolt out of the blue; rather, they are saying the same things this particular constituency have always said. Hardly a group that brings something newly into focus.

Here’s what I find incredibly disjointed about your statement. You applaud the Tea Party for making an issue of government spending and then in the next sentence say that you think House GOPers need to get real about giving up a little on tax revenues. That’s not going to happen with the Tea Party increasing in both numbers and influence. That is oil and water and why I said that they seem to be the primary obstacle to a balanced approach. President Obama’s original grand bargain was something like 87/13 split between cuts and revenue increases/loophole closures. That couldn’t even pass muster and it seems that one of the reasons it could not was because of pressure from either the Tea Party caucus or House GOP members whose voting record, public statements, policy history and overall worldview just happen to line up with their Tea Party peers. (BTW: This is another argument altogether: How exactly is a group driven by long-standing GOP policy and that was originally backed by Dick Armey and the same dollars that back GOP/conservative candidates something new altogether?)

please list examples

don’t you think we’d still have computers? I think you confuse financing with invention.

Simply because we do things in certain ways does not invest those things with any special virtue. In a world without VCs, you’d still see start ups, but maybe they’d all be smaller and — like the free market fans claim — only the best would survive. Instead we have a system where the small are bigfooted by the large simply because the larger outfits get Congress to give them special breaks.

Being good at something is no longer that important. Recent business history is rife with examples of superior products being done in by large companies, bad laws, and the ability of well-financed manufacturers of shoddy products to outmarket the often under-financed companies that produce quality products.

Right now in the grocery industry, paid product placement keeps local products off the shelves of chain grocery stores. It’s next to impossible to get distribution of new food products unless you sell out to General Mills or Diageo or one of the other giants. New software companies are all but doomed thanks to countless patent trolls (this could change, a case coming up before the Supreme Court could invalidate ALL software patents and that would be a very good thing).

I don’t mean to be argumentative, but it seems to me the only way to make money in this country today is to start out with a lot of money. Talent, genius or what have you really doesn’t seem to be part of it.

if you think the folks that own 42% of America’s wealth but pay an effective tax rate of about 20% aren’t sharping all of us. Yes, they tell you OVER AND OVER again about how much taxes they pay, but they don’t like to talk about how much they made. The top .1% averages over $1.6 million a year in income. Half of all Americans are in the workforce, so .1% of half of all Americans is 154,000 people. Multiply by $1.6 million and you get $246 billion. A year. Divide that into our national debt sometime.

I didn’t call for a 100% tax rate. That’s a straw man. But if the extremely wealthy paid a slightly higher rate instead of a LOWER rate than the rest of us, we wouldn’t be in this hole. It’s simple math, but if you try to google the numbers on this you’ll find that it’s very tough to find all the numbers in one place in easy to digest formats and that’s not accidental.

Look at this article about the Bush tax cuts by a guy at the Brookings Institute. In point 2, he writes:

One of the most common objections to letting the cuts expire for those in the highest tax brackets is that it would hurt small businesses. As Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) recently put it, allowing the cuts to lapse would amount to ‘a job-killing tax hike on small business during tough economic times.’

This claim is misleading. If, as proposed, the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire for the highest earners, the vast majority of small businesses will be unaffected. Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets — individuals earning more than about $170,000 a year and families earning more than about $210,000 a year.

And just as most small businesses aren’t owned by people in the top income brackets, most people in the top income brackets don’t rely mainly on small-business income: According to the Tax Policy Center, such proceeds make up a majority of income for about 40 percent of households in the top income bracket and a third of households in the second-highest bracket. If the objective is to help small businesses, continuing the Bush tax cuts on high-income taxpayers isn’t the way to go — it would miss more than 98 percent of small-business owners and would primarily help people who don’t make most of their money off those businesses.

this Republican dodge of only seeing “income” taxes while ignoring sales taxes, state income taxes, fees, property taxes, etc., IS REALLY GETTING TIRESOME. Everyone’s caught on to that rhetorical nonsense so please stop trotting it out as if it had some kind of meaning other than playing games with numbers to trick people into seeing a world that simply is not there. The poor pay more of their income in taxes than the rich. Period. End of debate. Get a clue.

Do you seriously think we can operate with budget deficits indefinitely? What I’m talking about has nothing to do with partisan politics. If our country spends more than the revenue we take in every year, bad things will happen. There’s no way around that, as far as I’m aware…

to the years he spent on the yacht with all those young teenaged girls wearing tight white hot pants.

who never have to pay anything back, and who, if the right had their way, would never have to cough anything up when they die, assuring us of a permanent monied class at the top, just like the old kings and queens fa la la.

RF, if you really listened to the rest of us, I think you’d see we want everyone treated the same, but you’re listening to the folks who make most of the money and do nothing but gripe about paying some of the taxes.

with kid gloves.