‘Tea Party in DC’ (courtesy ‘skye820’)
In addition to Tax Day, today is the official Fox News/Freedom Works “Tea Party” Day, when thousands, nay, millions of outraged conservatives who do not know what teabagging really means will descend on DC to protest taxes, because a Keynesian stimulus package and a ~3% increase in the marginal tax rate for the super-rich marks the end of the Republic as we know it. Updates and pics after the jump:
@rkref is on the scene at Lafayette Park with pictures.
CP and WaPo inform us that they were originally planning to dump a million tea bags in the Potomac, but that wasn’t allowed, so they updated their plans to truck the tea bags to Lafayette Park, but their permit for that was cancelled. (Deliberate littering of a park not allowed? Unpossible!)
Photos from the Washington Independent: Part 1, 2.
Flickr photoset from Nathan Coffey. I remember seeing the AYN RAND WAS RIGHT sign at last year’s Ron Paul March, too.
(Added by Tiffany Bridge) Lori Goldberg’s got a Flickr photoset too.
Update, 2:30PM – Apparently someone just threw a box of tea over the White House fence, prompting an evacuation. Secret Service escorting people off Lafayette Park now.
Dear Tea-Party Usurpers, please read this wikipedia article and learn about the Boston Tea Party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
did you hear about what one of the tea party people did in New Hampshire? Instead of sending labels, they sent tea leaves. Enter Hazmat Team:
http://scottahb.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/new-hampshire-protests/
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It’s really amazing how deficits magically became bad again on Jan 20th. Where were these people when I was gnashing my teeth about the costs of the Iraq war?
I love the freedom from partisan positions that being an independent provides me, but hating 99% of the population is exhausting.
What a waste.
Don:
The Iraq was too costly but considering what the Government spent in one (Stimulus) bill matches the total cost of the two wars since they began in 2002.
Bownpau:
Before we blame Fox News; remember that MSNBC gave everyone the idea in Feb.
The main theme of the protest is that Taxes and Bailouts will not solve our problems.
brownpau, you obviously have no interest in figuring out how these tea parties came to be. Fox News may have promoted them, as did FreedomWorks and several other organizations, but almost all of these have been organized by local citizens who are pissed off at the out of control spending, both of this administration and the previous.
Don, not everyone all of a sudden got upset about deficits. But when we go from under 500 billion in 2008 to over 1.5 trillion in one year, yeah, we are going to get a little upset.
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It may have started out as “grass roots” at first but “FNC Tax Day Tea Party” sounds like a pretty official brand takeover move to me.
Hope you enjoyed your Fox News Tea Party.
It should be noted that Fox covers news stories. Considering the same event was held in hundreds if not thousands of cities across the US; I would think it would be newsworthy. Maybe Fox went a little overboard with the coverage, but CNN and MSNBC barely reported on it. Also, CNN covered the G20 summit extensively; should we rename that the “CNN G20 Summit”?
Fox is biased in the sense that they put America First in their coverage. CNN puts the US on an even platform with France, and MSNBC puts the left agenda first.
Did anyone notice a CNN reporter verbally attacked a Tea Party attendee while he had his child in his hands?
CNN didn’t rename it the “CNN G20 Summit,” but FOX sure was eager to slap “FNC” onto the tea parties.
Fat lot of help it did them, of course: a few hundred people in DC, cleared out because someone threw tea over the fence. Go go “Silent Majority!”
Each of the four FNC people that were at tea parties are commentators, not journalists. They have never tried to be “unbiased.” You did not see any of their news people speaking at tea parties.
And brownpau, estimtates have it at 3,000 at the DC party and about 2,000 when things had to be cleared out because of one idiot.
Re: bailout expense vs Iraq costs.
(I’m ignoring the costs of Afghanistan because it’s a fractional percentage and, in my opinion, one of the most just conflicts we’ve entered into in a long time, as well as the result of a direct attack vs an ‘optional’ war.)
I am skeptical about the potential effectiveness of bailout spending and highly unhappy about the transparency of the money spend in both the previous and current administration. If I’m going to pick or complain, however, I am MUCH more tolerant of spending money to solve demonstrable domestic problems (and the intra-bank lending seize-up was a serious problem, if a hard one to understand) than I am providing regime change for other countries. Since the threat from Iraq turned out to be complete nonsense, the only purpose of the tremendous expenditure was to overturn a repulsive dictator, of which many more remain in the world and the replacement of any is not a good use of my money.
Also in the bailout’s favor is that it has thus far not taken the lives of several thousand American soldiers.
Let’s also consider whether that’s an apples to apples comparison: the stimulus was, thus far, a single appropriation. The Iraq conflict is an ongoing expense, and this year’s just-proposed expenditure is about 10% of the actual stimulus cost once you remove the 82b in tax cuts (vs cuts & payments). Entering into Iraq was, to anyone who is not a complete chump, an obvious start to an ongoing expenditure. The bailout has a finite commitment.
Re: 500b vs 1500b deficits.
It’s simply disingenuous to claim that there’s some magical tipping point here where these people out in Lafayette Square yesterday were home and disgruntled for the first trillion but suddenly were moved to public protest after that point. There’s an obvious partisan connection here and the majority of these voices were happy enough to keep voting for people who, through their six-year control of both branches, engaged in deficit spending.
They’re welcome to make their voices heard, but if they don’t have an answer to the question “why was this okay when a Republican did it?” then they should be prepared to take their lumps. Claims that they had no choice simply don’t hold water; during the Clinton administration the Republican congress was more than prepared to shut down the entire government over budgets. Assertions that they somehow lacked the ability to do the same thing when they controlled the White House as well are simply ridiculous.
Additionally, between 2000 and 2001 there was a shift from a 128B surplus to a 158B deficit, a one-year move of 386B. Where were the public protests over that?
Shout all you want, but claiming that there’s no partisanship or hypocrisy is a bold-faced lie.