Tea Party

[High Lord Tolkien]

I wanted to start a new Tea Party thread because I think it's moved beyond the "what if they were purple?" or other silly(imo) threads.

Interesting Republican race in a Delaware primary.
It's the first time I've heard about the Tea Party and the GOP running against each other, so to speak, for a Republican seat.
In my mind I thought the Tea Party would be a the new "Independent" party of some sort. A third party. If it's actually going to fight the GOP for a Repub seat I can see it becoming a significant power in the future.




www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/13/odo ... oll-shows/


TeaParty-backed candidate Christine O'Donnell has taken the lead over Rep. Mike Castle in the bare-knuckle race for the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware, according to a new poll.

The survey released by Public Policy Polling shows the race within the margin of error. O'Donnell leads Castle 47-44 percent.

The surge comes just at the right time for O'Donnell, with Delaware's primary set for Tuesday along with contests in six other states. The Republican establishment in Delaware has engaged in a tough and personal battle with O'Donnell, criticizing her history of financial troubles while O'Donnell has described Castle as too moderate and gone so far as to question his manhood in a radio interview.

O'Donnell, in an interview Monday with Fox News, said her opponent is making "baseless" accusations against her -- including claims last week that she violated campaign finance rules. She expressed confidence in her chances Tuesday.

"There's a wave, a tidal wave coming to Delaware. We're riding it -- my opponent is drowning in it," she said. "No one thought that we could get this far."
Related Video

Tea Party Candidate Shakes Up GOP Primary in Delaware

O'Donnell holds slim lead in primary

The candidates are vying for an open Senate seat, the one previously held by Vice President Biden, and will likely face Democrat Chris Coons in November.

Castle suggested Republicans would be making a big mistake if they elect his opponent in the primary. He said she's got personal baggage and "no governmental experience whatsoever."

"In the general election, she has virtually no chance of getting elected," Castle said.

The election comes after Tea Party-backed candidate Joe Miller knocked off Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Alaska Senate primary last month. Like Miller, O'Donnell has the support of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express.

The PPP poll showed about a third of Republican voters viewed the Palin endorsement as a plus, while about a quarter viewed it as a negative.

Castle enjoys overwhelming support from moderate voters in his party, but O'Donnell leads among the conservative wing. Among conservatives, the poll showed O'Donnell leading 62-31 percent.

"The poll also showed 55 percent of likely Republican voters think Mike Castle is 'too liberal' which echoes the message the Tea Party Express has delivered via hundreds of thousands of dollars
in TV, radio, newspaper and online ads -- as well as 80,000 mailers delivered to Delaware Republican households," said Tea Party Express spokesman Levi Russell.

The poll of 668 likely GOP primary voters was conducted Sept. 11-12. The margin of error was 3.8 percentage points

[wayfriend]

I thought the Tea Party was supposed to include Democratic and Independent voters, not just Republicans. If the Tea Party runs in the Republican primary, doesn't that make them Republicans?

[SerScot]

wayfriend,

I thought the Tea Party was supposed to include Democratic and Independent voters, not just Republicans. If the Tea Party runs in the Republican primary, doesn't that make them Republicans?

No, it simply means the Tea Party believes it will have more success in attempting to suborn the Republican Party machine than it will with the Democratic Party Machine.

Personally, I think they are closer to Libertarians than anyone else.

[High Lord Tolkien]

I'm very excited about a fiscal conservative party that isn't bogged down with the whole abortion issue. If that's what has kept many people Dems in the past it makes switching very attractive to them I bet.

[Zarathustra]

If the Tea Party is successful in bringing the Reps back to the right (on fiscal issues, not social), then I fully support their role in our political landscape. The general dissatisfaction with Congress isn't only about the Dems. The Reps in Congress are nearly as unpopular--and deservedly so.

I don't like having to throw my vote away all the time. I'd like to have Republicans I can vote for with pride. If the Libertarians use the Tea Party to take over control of the GOP, I think it would be a winning strategy. This seems to be happening around the country. Here in Kentucky, we elected Rand Paul (who is more Libertarian than Republican) over the Mitch McConnel-backed GOP candidate. And it looks like Paul is poised to beat his Democratic opponent.

I don't particularly like Palin or Beck, and I hate how they have become the public faces of the Tea Party. But the true power of this movement is in the groundswell of dissatisfaction for the GOP status quo and the extremism of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Left. I've never seen anything like it. A perfect storm, carrying the potential for meaningful Change.

[High Lord Tolkien]

I don't particularly like Palin or Beck, and I hate how they have become the public faces of the Tea Party. But the true power of this movement is in the groundswell of dissatisfaction for the GOP status quo and the extremism of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Left. I've never seen anything like it. A perfect storm, carrying the potential for meaningful Change.

Have they though?
The Tea Party is still mainly small regional startups I think.
The Tea Party sites I've frequented don't even mention them.

[Avatar]

Y'know, you fiscal conservatives should really visit the MMT thread.

--A

[SerScot]

Avatar,

Recognize that even Brinn in the MMT thread admits that profligate spending without some fiscal discipline leads down very dark roads. He claims MMT allows for more spending but he does not say it allows for unlimited party time. I'm sure Robert Mugabe and the Serbian government that dealt with Hyperinflation in the last twenty years believed in MMT. It not a salve for all ills.

[aliantha]

We're nowhere near hyperinflation, SerScot, and yet the Republicans don't want to spend any more "taxpayer dollars" to put Americans back to work. We're not talking about "unlimited party time," we're talking about keeping the US out of a double-dip recession.

Anyway, Av is right. Y'all should check out the MMT thread.

[High Lord Tolkien]

I have checked that thread out. I agree with many of his points. But spending money on stupid stuff that makes no impact is bad for the economy and has also been mentioned by Brinn several times too.
Which is all Obama has done.
I'm not sure why you both equate the Tea Party with NOT spending money.
Just spending it wisely is all I've read about.

[SerScot]

aliantha,

We're nowhere near hyperinflation, SerScot, and yet the Republicans don't want to spend any more "taxpayer dollars" to put Americans back to work. We're not talking about "unlimited party time," we're talking about keeping the US out of a double-dip recession.

Anyway, Av is right. Y'all should check out the MMT thread.

I understand your point. I simply don't believe in making individuals or businesses that dependent upon the public teet. It's a very bad precident to maintain.

[Vraith]

I simply don't believe in making individuals or businesses that dependent upon the public teet. It's a very bad precident to maintain.

If that's what you think MMT means, you've misunderstood it.
And Mugabe, and Serbia, whether they believed in MMT or not, did not act according to MMT.

And, a rare---maybe even unique---occurence, I agree with an HLT point...the cash that Congress/President spent was mostly spent in the wrong places.

[Avatar]

I'm not sure why you both equate the Tea Party with NOT spending money.
Just spending it wisely is all I've read about.

Dunno about the Tea Party. But to me, fiscal conservatism means an aversion to spending, on the premise that it's bad for the country, and that increasing the budget deficit is going to somehow harm it.

--A

[Cail]

The Tea Party is going to gut the GOP. The Tea Party is run by far-right religious fanatics (Palin, Beck, Gingritch) who are antithetical to Libertarian principles, and seemingly exist only to attack everyone who doesn't march in lock-step with them.

[Cybrweez]

The 'pubs don't want to spend "tax payer" dollars (a clear signal they don't get MMT), and the dems want to tax certain groups (not just rich, but energy for ex), another signal they don't get it either. Either one of those approaches won't help this recession, combined, we're screwed. (that's my new motto BTW)

But yea, spend the money wisely, as has been mentioned, the health care disaster is an example of not doing that. I think the infrastructure money is a good example though. I'm also beginning to wonder if the feds paying off a lot of people's debt is the way to go. Maybe that's for MMT thread.

[High Lord Tolkien]

The Tea Party is going to gut the GOP. The Tea Party is run by far-right religious fanatics (Palin, Beck, Gingritch) who are antithetical to Libertarian principles, and seemingly exist only to attack everyone who doesn't march in lock-step with them.

We must be reading different things.

This is the Tea Party I'm familiar with.
Makes little mention of what you said.
I thought it was all about taxes and spending.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement

[sindatur]

The 'pubs don't want to spend "tax payer" dollars (a clear signal they don't get MMT), and the dems want to tax certain groups (not just rich, but energy for ex), another signal they don't get it either. Either one of those approaches won't help this recession, combined, we're screwed. (that's my new motto BTW)

But yea, spend the money wisely, as has been mentioned, the health care disaster is an example of not doing that. I think the infrastructure money is a good example though. I'm also beginning to wonder if the feds paying off a lot of people's debt is the way to go. Maybe that's for MMT thread.

Yea, I've thought for a long time, if Congress had helped the little people to stay out of Foreclosre, before the meltdown, the meltdown might not have occurred, and it probably would've been cheaper than the Bank bailout

[Cail]

The Tea Party is going to gut the GOP. The Tea Party is run by far-right religious fanatics (Palin, Beck, Gingritch) who are antithetical to Libertarian principles, and seemingly exist only to attack everyone who doesn't march in lock-step with them.

We must be reading different things.

This is the Tea Party I'm familiar with.
Makes little mention of what you said.
I thought it was all about taxes and spending.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement

Yeah, that's what they advertise, isn't it. Unfortunately you end up with ideologues like Christine O’Donnell.

At Sunday’s Tea Party rally in Washington, I overheard a few effusive endorsements of Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, the longshot conservative running against the very moderate Republican Congressman Mike Castle for Vice President Joe Biden's old Senate seat. The race was once considered an easy layup for Delaware Republicans, but with the rise of O’Donnell, a crackpot of the first order, it looks increasingly likely that Democrat Chris Coons will be packing the U-Haul for D.C. in November. As stats wizard Nate Silver points out, if O’Donnell wins today’s primary, the Republicans lose the seat in November: “Whereas Mr. Castle is nearly a 95 percent favorite against the Democratic nominee, Chris Coons, according to last week’s FiveThirtyEight forecasting model, Ms. O’Donnell would have just a 17 percent chance of winning a race against Mr. Coons.”

And the intellectual case against O’Donnell is overwhelming. A précis for those who have avoided the Delaware drama: O’Donnell lied about attending a Master’s degree program at Princeton University; claimed that her political enemies are creeping in the bushes outside her house; is opposed to the sinister habit of masturbation; is a supporter of the “ex-gay” movement, despite the inconvenient revelation that her former staffer Wade Richards “returned” to homosexuality and denounced those peddling “cures” for his sexuality; filed a $6 million lawsuit against the conservative group ISI for “gender discrimination"; was denounced by her former campaign manager as a “fraud” who uses campaign donations to pay rent and utility bills; and has implied that her Republican opponent is gay. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

As the former head of the clumsily named Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), O’Donnell was the Tipper Gore of the 1990s, attending lewd and lascivious rock concerts just to tell stoned, Satanist teenagers that they were going to hell. “Walking through the crowd I also noticed more pentagrams than crosses around the teenage necks,” she gasped. At a 1997 music festival in Washington, D.C., the Catholic killjoy “distributed thousands of brochures with information on the failure rate of condoms, on AIDS, on sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, pornography and the movement of former homosexuals.”

In a piece for the Washington Post, O’Donnell told of one emotional breakthrough she made with a young concertgoer: “She was a girl of about 14 wearing cutoffs and a string-bikini top. A boy, hopefully her boyfriend, was draped around her neck absurdly with each hand firmly planted on her breasts. She did not look as if she was enjoying herself. As they passed me, I handed her the brochure, along with another one on "How To Say No." Something must have clicked inside her. She stopped and pushed his hands away.” A true story or an extra feature from the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls DVD? You decide!

Or take this clip from Bill Maher’s old television show Politically Incorrect (which, upon re-watching, one will discover was pretty politically correct), during which the True Conservative Fun Destroyer explains to her fellow panelists that she wouldn’t lie to protect Jews during the Second World War (“Anne Frank? Oh, you mean that girl that lives in the attic?”) because “deception” is immoral. Either way, it’s a moot question, O’Donnell says, because “God would provide a way to do the right thing,” despite not having providing a way to do the right the thing between the years 1941-1945.

But the moderate Mike Castle is unacceptable to many professional Tea Party adherents—radio host Mark Levin, for instance, is accusing all who doubt O’Donnell’s qualifications as David Frum-like deviationists—who would rather a reliably liberal Democrat in the Senate than an insufficiently conservative Republican. They insist that good conservative foot soldiers plump for unqualified (and unstable) candidates because they aren’t “RINOs,” because they wink-and-galvanize but wouldn’t know Milton Friedman from Milton Berle. One protester I spoke with on Sunday, holding a sign adorned with giant photos of Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan (the “Gipper and the Grizz”), said that Palin is the best conservative hope for 2012, pointing out that she was “getting better” at addressing both basic policy issues and the adoring crowds of Tea Party activists. If she can identify a national newspaper by 2012, she’s qualified to run the Western world.

And while the screeching Stalinists and ideological purity tsars of talk radio denounce left-wing magazines and blogs like The Weekly Standard, National Review, and Powerline as sell-out squishes, and as Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer is deemed the moral equivalent of Paul Robeson, O’Donnell trudges forward towards a primary victory. And the Republicans towards a November defeat.

[High Lord Tolkien]

Christine O’Donnell

She does sound like a nut.
Not a good reason to dismiss the Tea Party though, imo.
All parties have fruit loops.

[Cail]

I don't dismiss the Tea Party, I loathe it. People like O'Donnell, Palin, Gingrich, Beck, etc are the norm, not the fringe.