When we at USDemocrazy heard about a upsurge in teaparties around the nation, we were delighted!
We love tea! Lipton tea, green tea… oh, hold on. Not that kind of tea party you say? Oh dear…
Well, apparently these tea parties are protest parties. Angry citizens lined up on good ol’ tax day, coast to coast, to convey their dismay over the Obama administration’s stimulus plan. The NYT tells us here, that…
On a day when the government deadline for filing income tax returns offered some Americans a timely excuse to vent their frustrations over the sagging economy and ride a metaphor two centuries in the making, 773 Tax Day tea parties were scheduled in cities from Boston to Washington, East Hampton, N.Y., to Yakima, Wash., to protest government spending — namely the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package and $3 trillion budget.
Uh, huh. So… a bunch of people dressing up in 18th century garb talking about the politics of today. Sounds kind of curious. So what are the pundits making of the Tax Day Protests?
Glenn Harlan Reynolds at the WSJ says here that the impact is somewhat unique, as it involves “ordinary folks.”
So who’s behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing “flash crowds” — groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month.
Speaking of pillow fights… Paul Krugman at the NYT takes a bash at the Republican Party, saying here that…
Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.
Even though the protests are pretty wide spread, The Caucus politics blog at the NYT says that Obama has nothing to fear from the tee’d-off Tea Bag demonstrations. In fact, the Caucus says Tea Parties? Obama Passes the Sugar.
This is all pretty crazy stuff. We here at USDemocrazy want to know what YOU think about all this. In the mean time, we’ve put the kettle on for some Earl Gray…
Faux News hijacked the Tea Parties from legitimate grassroots protesters who have been doing these for over a year now. CNN and the other corporate media jumped in also to turn it into another ‘us’ vs ‘them’ Democrat vs Republican bickering contest. It’s called controlled dissent and divide and conquer. The message was distorted and turned away from the real issues re. the central bank, imperialism, domestic welfare, etc…
Neither ‘party’ has any credibility and I laugh at the dupes who associate with one or the other and think they are any different when the very actions they accuse one another of apply to them as well. They actually think the people they ‘elect’ care about them…