Ninja Monkie Bacchanal

From today’s NYT:

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Scary stuff…

This woman is insane. The resident’s of Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District must be so proud.

"As a matter of fact, President Obama spent so much money that if you took all the debt that we accumulated from George Washington, every president up until Barack Obama, President Obama accumulated more debt in eight months than all previous presidents combined. Combined. That gives you context for the times we’re living in.”

Simply put, none of this is true or even bears much of a resemblance to the facts.

From The Daily Beast:

At a time when some people confuse losing an election with living under tyranny, it’s perhaps no surprise that a day set aside for marking past presidents’ birth has become, for some, a day for praying for the current president’s death.

This is a very long piece in the NYT (but very good reading):

Last week, a month before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.

Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.

This is from Allan Powell, professor emeritus of philosophy at Hagerstown Community College:

Just before the Civil War, a political movement emerged and then quickly dissipated. This unusual and interesting party then splintered and many of its members joined the newly forming Republican Party.

Charles and Mary Beard, two seasoned historians, describe this political aggregate as a “cabal,” or secretive group of plotters. “The Know- Nothing, or American Party, sprung up in the current opposition to foreigners, the papacy, infidelity and socialism. Combining the functions of a party and a fraternal order, it nominated candidates for office and adopted secret rites, dark mysteries, grips and passwords which gave it an atmosphere of uncertain vitality. Members were admitted by solemn ceremony into full membership with the ‘Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner,’ whose ‘daily horror and nightly specter was the pope.’ When asked about their principles, they replied mysteriously, ‘I know nothing.’”

More on the Know-Nothing (or American) Party can be found here:

The Know Nothing movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1840s and 1850s. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to U.S. values and controlled by the Pope in Rome. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, it strove to curb immigration and naturalization, though its efforts met with little success. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class and entirely Protestant membership fragmented over the issue of slavery. Most ended up joining the Republican Party by the time of the 1860 presidential election.[1][2]

The movement originated in New York in 1843 as the American Republican Party. It spread to other states as the Native American Party and became a national party in 1845. In 1855 it renamed itself the American Party.[3] The origin of the “Know Nothing” term was in the semi-secret organization of the party. When a member was asked about its activities, he was supposed to reply, “I know nothing."[4]

Your history lesson for the day is complete.

Joel Stein on the Prius:

Prius owners act as if for every mile they drive, they prevent a coral reef from turning into a tidal wave that will hit Manhattan. (Most of my knowledge about global warming comes from The Day After Tomorrow.) Even though I drive a tiny Mini Cooper, I have been subtly shamed by all my friends in Los Angeles, a town that is one big river of Priuses. On Friday, I was shocked when a friend came over to dinner and he wasn’t driving a Prius. It turned out he was driving his converted 1980s Mercedes that runs on vegetable oil and had left his wife’s Prius at home. Nearly every time we drive Cassandra’s metallic-green Prius, at some point we are either behind or in front of another metallic-green Prius. There are three Priuses on my tiny cul-de-sac. If this brake problem isn’t repaired quickly, my neighborhood is about to be jammed up by some ugly Prius-on-Prius violence.

I can hear the evildoers now: “Bomb? Check! Martyr? Check? Registered with SC’s Secretary of State? No? Shit! Plan is aborted!”

Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions—or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States ... shall register with the Secretary of State."

OMG! This is a beauty…

From my hero, Professor Reich:

My health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. When I first opted for it, it was just called Blue Cross. Then, a year or so back, I was notified that an entity called “Anthem” would now be running my insurance policy. I didn’t think much about it at the time. I’ve had the usual problems most people have with their health insurers – confusing bills, co-payments and deductibles that never seem to add up, a bureaucracy that gives every impression of being more interested in fighting me than helping me — but nothing more.

Now, Anthem Blue Cross is going a step further. It’s raising rates for individual policyholders by as much as 39 percent. That’s fifteen times faster than inflation. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected but I’m expecting the worst.

Hell yeah baby!

And people wonder why they are called Wingnuts...

The Bible can be historically verified and contains hundreds of fulfilled predictive prophecies. There is no other “revelation” with the same marks of divine authorship.

This is an awesome piece by Jacob Weisburg in Slate.com:

[A] lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state’s bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya’s), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?