WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

“That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

Uh huh. Read it all.

Not long ago I heard Juan Williams describe the Tea Party as a “spent force” in American politics.

Uh huh, sure.

Joe Scarborough knows better.

“Why is the tea party destroying the Republican Party?”

That’s a leading question that I have been asked repeatedly from media pundits and Democratic politicians over the past three years. Over that time, Democratic politicians and media pundits have almost universally accused the tea party of bringing ruin to the Grand Old Party. According to this skewed narrative, Republican leaders were once bipartisan, rational and almost worthy of getting invitations to Georgetown cocktail parties. Now, they are Manchurian candidates held captive by the right-wing beasts whose only goal is to infect the minds of real-life Nick Brodys who dominate the U.S. House.

Sometimes, mainstream publications and Democratic leaders even go so far as to say kind things about Ronald Reagan as a way to attack the tea party. They speak glowingly of Reagan and contrast him with the barbarians who now run the Republican Party. This, of course, conveniently overlooks the nasty attacks Reagan has endured at the hands of those who now cynically praise the 40th president.

But let’s not get bogged down by history. Instead, we can blow apart this fanciful meme by reviewing the tea party’s short history. Let’s simply review how terrible the tea party has been for the GOP.

— They energized a conservative movement battered by eight years of bloated Republicanism,

— they shocked the political world by taking Ted Kennedy’s seat,

— they put Obama Democrats in a constant defensive crouch,

— they led the resistance against “Obamacare,”

— they helped bring about the largest legislative landslide in U.S. history in 2010,

— they grabbed six seats in the U.S. Senate that year,

— they helped elect six governors,

— they helped win 700 seats in state legislatures, and

— they helped elect a Republican majority that included the largest number of Republicans elected since 1946.

With a track record like that, the Republican Party had better watch their backs. If this trend keeps up, they might just win the White House and the Senate.

Regardless of what happens in the next few weeks, the general theme that the tea party (more…)

Joel Gehrke

ABC News’ Brian Ross speculated this morning that the alleged shooter who attacked a Batman premier in Colorado might be a member of the Tea Party. His suggestion — since retracted by ABC — continues a trend of media figures wrongly tying such tragedies to the Tea Party since 2010.

In February 2010, Joseph Stack became a Tea Partier for purposes of the media after he committed suicide by flying his small airplane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. New York Magazine, after reading his online suicide note/manifesto that day, immediately declared that “a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.”   The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart added that “his alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.”

Neither Capehart or NYMAG mentioned that Stack quoted the Communist Manifesto approvingly and denounced capitalism as a system that teaches, “From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” That would seem to put him at odds with the Tea Partiers, who often attacked Obamacare as a socialist government program.

A few months later, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated that the failed attempt to bomb Times Square was carried out by someone “with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The would-be bomber, a Pakistani immigrant, said in court “If I’m given 1,000 lives I will sacrifice them all for the life of Allah.”Most famously, politicians and media figures attacked Sarah Palin and the Tea Party after the Tucson shooting that wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, R-Ariz., and killed six others. Palin was faulted for having put “crosshairs” over Giffords’ district when she was targeting Democratic seats that might be vulnerable to Republican takeover. Even a year after the shooting, Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., was willing to cite the shooting as proof that politicians need to “tone things down, particularly in light of” the Tucson shooting. “I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement,” she said. In reality, shooter Jared Loughner was  reportedly a mentally ill alcoholic with no coherent political ideology (like Stack, though, he wasn’t above invoking the Communist Manifesto). These cases and others have all been marked by politicians and journalists rushing to connect their political opponents to murder. ABC News, to its credit, (more…)

Niall Ferguson, Scottish-born historian, now lives in the US. His four-hour PBS show “Civilization” should not be missed.

…“It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” he says in an article ahead of the lecture.

He suggests countries pass bills forcing their governments to balance the books and reign in “baby-boomers’ profligacy”, and says that voters are willing to “scapegoat” politicians and financiers but are unwilling to accept they borrowed too far.

He adds: “If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.”

Professor Ferguson argues the true size of government debt in Western democracies is many times larger than “deeply misleading” figures issued in the form of bonds because they do not record unfunded liabilities of social security and health care schemes.

“The last corporation to publish financial statements this misleading was Enron,” he wrote.

“These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure,” he said.

He argues one of the ways out of the current economic “mess” would be for “a heroic effort of leadership” to persuade all generations to “vote for a more responsible fiscal policy.”

One can hope.

In February, Ferguson explained why he adopted the US as his home.

“In general, I have felt more at home in the US than I ever felt in England. When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution. Proper Protestants are more at home in New England than old England.

“I’m over-industrious, so I don’t feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England. The time I spent in England now begins to feel like a detour. I realised last year I was never going to come back here to live.”

Democrats blame corporate money (and the Supreme Court blah blah blah) for losing in Wisconsin.

Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, agreed with that sentiment, saying Democrats learned a similar lesson in 2010, when they lost a slew of seats to Republicans.

“In 2010, we did not lose the House to House Republicans,” Israel told The Hill. “We lost it to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers. In 2012, we did not lose the Wisconsin recall to Gov. Walker, we lost it to an 8-to-1 spending differential, most from out of the state.

“This is a wake-up call,” he said.

To wake up, they must listen to the issues that motivated the turnout in 2010 and Tuesday. But they can’t: their self-righteousness has rendered them deaf.

Money can’t win elections.

Just ask Meg Whitman, who spent a record $160 million in her loss to Jerry Brown. He was outspent 6 to 1 in the campaign for governor of California.

That’s just one example of many.

David Ogilvy was a giant in advertising in the ’50s and ’60s.

When I began writing advertising copy I bought his book, which was short and sweet.

In a memo to his staff, he offered ten writing tips, among them:

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

This is context for a silly article based upon a silly study (they’re a plague) about the level of speech in Congress.

Discourse in the House and Senate has dropped a full grade level — to the equivalent of high school sophomore, according to a new study.

Call this the dumbing down of Congress in a partisan age. Or a shift to plain-spoken populism ignited by the new class of tea party Republicans.

But what has become clear in the new research is that the soaring oratory that once filled the floors of the House and Senate with million-dollar diction and sophisticated syntax is making way for a more modest approach.

“Congress is changing as an institution, and what you see is more and more members gearing their speeches as sound bites or YouTube clips,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, which compiled the study released Monday.

Brace yourself.

In an analysis of floor debates over the last several years, the study found that newer lawmakers tended to speak at a lower grade level than the veterans of congressional speechifying.

And political moderates among both Republicans and Democrats tended to carry on at a higher grade level than those more partisan liberals or conservatives.

With that framework in mind, it should come as no surprise that the lawmakers at the bottom of the list, speaking at the lowest grade level, are among the most ardent tea party Republicans in the freshman class. Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, Rep. Robert Woodall of Georgia and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky were the bottom three — speaking at about an eighth-grade level, the study found.

I bet you saw that coming. Tea Partiers are so dumb they talk simple.

“We look at it as a badge of honor,” said Mulvaney, a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina Law School, who notes that he often speaks on the floor “extemporaneously.”

“It’s a conscious decision on my part. We are trying to be clear and trying to be concise,” he added. He said he and his wife had been known to diagram sentences at the dinner table, a byproduct of having schoolteacher parents.

“I can explain the difference between ‘fewer’ and ‘less,’” Mulvaney said, but he acknowledged that he still stumbled over the difference between “farther” and “further.”

“I don’t think people see the polysyllabic words — or the number of words — in a sentence as a sign of your intelligence,” he said.

Intelligent people don’t.

From Zombie’s report on the San Francisco Tea Party rally. Read it here.

The LA Times has descended into self parody.

A few months ago, realizing that the Occupy “movement” had no coherent message, it offered up a manifesto in an editorial. But they were barking at the moon.

Now, in today’s Times, a plaintive cry:

Whatever happened to Occupy Wall Street? Are you folks still out there? Yes, the economy seems to be improving and thus the power of your message has been slightly blunted. But as a political force that could rally the nation on behalf of the 99%, who tend not to contribute huge sums to campaigns and so have less influence than their numbers deserve, you’re still badly needed.

In Los Angeles and nationwide, there are still sputtering signs that the Occupy movement hasn’t disappeared. Last week, activists held demonstrations on about 30 college campuses in California, including Cal State Los Angeles and Cal State Long Beach, to protest state cuts to higher education. On Monday they moved their act to Sacramento, where assorted student groups and public employee labor unions staged an “Occupy the Capitol” event that attracted thousands of people decrying education cuts and backing a measure slated for the November ballot that would tax millionaires to support state services. Whether such student rallies constitute “genuine” Occupy events is tough to say, because at this point any interest group challenging the status quo can adopt the Occupy label.

Hey, don’t forget Occupy 805, here in my county. A week ago they rounded up 25 fellow clowns to protest at Halliburton’s Oxnard office — an office barely occupied by the company.

And why raise smell hell at Halliburton? Something about fracking, and they’re agin it.

That’s OK — something similar happened to the tea party movement, and that didn’t prevent it from being a force to be reckoned with in the 2010 elections — but it’s still hard to escape the feeling that since Occupy activists were kicked out of their encampments across the country this winter, the group has lost a good deal of momentum as well as what little organizational coherence it possessed.

The Tea Party was successful because it didn’t require a manifesto — it had the Constitution.

An example of the problem cropped up in late February, when attorney Michael Pollok, founder of the 99% Declaration Working Group and a self-appointed movement leader, announced a national Occupy Wall Street conference in Philadelphia the week of July 4 that would pick delegates from 50 states and draft a petition to present to the president and Congress. That idea was speedily pooh-poohed by Han Shan of the Occupy Wall Street public relations working group, who said the movement wasn’t endorsing the conference.

Other Occupy leaders say they’re planning big protests during the Group of Eight economic conference in May. And there are of course splinter groups all over the country holding regular demonstrations at banks and city halls. But 2012 is an election year that presents a sharp contrast between candidates who aim to help level the playing field dominated by the 1% and those who don’t. If the Occupy movement is to have much influence over that contest, it will probably have to do something its leaders have so far resisted: get organized.

I added the bold — it sums up the class envy that pollutes the progressive mind.

To the fretful lefties sitting in the Times’ editorial board room, take comfort: OWS by any name is always there lurking in our political blood stream like the herpes virus.

More ugly eruptions are guaranteed.

Lee Harris writes, at the conservative Hoover Institution no less, about the supposed intellectual emptiness of the Tea Party.

Intellectual critics of the Tea Party movement most often attack it for its lack of ideas, especially new ideas — and these critics have a point. But the point they are making reveals as much about them as it does about the Tea Party. Behind the criticism lies the implicit assumption that comes quite naturally to American intellectuals: Namely, that a political movement ought be motivated by ideas and that a new political movement should provide new ideas.

(Emphasis added for a very debatable point.)

But the Tea Party movement is not about ideas. It is all about attitude, like the attitude expressed by the popular poster seen at all Tea Party rallies. Over the head of a hissing rattlesnake threatening to strike is inscribed the defiant slogan so popular among our revolutionary ancestors: “Don’t tread on me!” The old defiant motto is certainly not a new idea. In fact, it is not an idea at all. It is a warning.

Get this:

First of all, there appears to be no consistent ideology or coherent set of policies behind the movement. Second, when intellectuals turn to examine some of the more radical proposals championed in Tea Party circles, such as the abolition of Social Security or the return to the gold standard, they can only shake their heads in dismay. These crank nostrums are well past their historical expiration date. They may elicit fanatic support from the politically naïve and unsophisticated, but no one who knows how the political world operates will pay them a moment’s notice. Reviving the gold standard in order to solve our economic problems is akin to reviving the horse-and-buggy to reduce our level of carbon emissions. It ain’t gonna happen.

Every spontaneous political movement brings along its share of cranks. But to define the Tea Party as such is shallow and foolish.

The Tea Party was always about reducing the size of government and respecting the Constitution. That this is regarded as radical says more about the establishment than the Tea Party.

No ideas? Here are the Core Principles listed on the Tea Party Patriots website.

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY means not overspending, and not burdening our children and grandchildren with our bills. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity [is] swindling futurity on a large scale.” A more fiscally responsible government will take fewer taxes from our paychecks.

CONSTITUTIONALLY LIMITED GOVERNMENT means power resides with the people and not with the government. Governing should be done at the most local level possible where it can be held accountable. America’s founders believed that government power should be limited, enumerated, and constrained by our Constitution. Tea Party Patriots agree. The American people make this country great, not our government.

FREE MARKET ECONOMICS made America an economic superpower that for at least two centuries provided subsequent generations of Americans more opportunities and higher standards of living. An erosion of our free markets through government intervention is at the heart of America’s current economic decline, stagnating jobs, and spiraling debt and deficits. Failures in government programs and government-controlled financial markets helped spark the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Further government interventions and takeovers have made this Great Recession longer and deeper. A renewed focus on free markets will lead to a more vibrant economy creating jobs and higher standards of living for future generations.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

And why is the OWS crowd given credence for “starting a conversation?” After months of making a stink, can anyone define a coherent OWS platform?

Oh, yeah, they hate Wall Street, whatever that means. And they want their student loans forgiven. And the stock market abolished. And a bunch of other anti-capitalist ideas that ain’t never gonna happen.

And the Tea Party? If there’s such an intellectual vacuum in the Tea Party, how did it manage to hand Obama such a “shellacking” in the midterms?

From today’s LA Times Thanksgiving editorial:

President Obama deserves thanks for a number of reasons, though he has disappointed as well. The administration gave a significant boost to the future economy and environment by approving ambitious fuel-economy standards calling for new-car fleets in 2025 to average 54.5 miles per gallon.

Obama also deserves credit, along with House Speaker John Boehner, for attempting to strike a grand budget deal when intemperate Republicans threatened to drive the United States into default. And Obama’s refusal to countenance waterboarding as an interrogation technique — indeed, barring it as a form of torture — is a defining and admirable feature of his presidency.

No, the “intemperate” Tea Party Republicans used the little leverage they had to prevent the United States from long term default by insisting on reforming the US budget.

Europe is coming unglued as unsustainable welfare state spending ruins their economies. Can’t the LAT and Dem Cong see the iceberg ahead?

Or do they not care enough to make the hard choices?

Thankfully, we have the Tea Party advocates working with everything they have to prevent our nation from drowning in debt.

Glenn Reynolds:

Occupy Wall Street and the movement’s brethren in other cities ranging from Chicago, to Baltimore, to Oakland, to London — has been getting all the press lately.

But it’s the Tea Party movement and its small-government ideology that continues to win elections. Is that a harbinger for 2012? Probably.

There’s no doubt that the Occupy folks have been getting the lion’s share of the ink, and the pixels, over the last month or so. Love them or hate them, their approach is mediagenic, reminding Baby Boomers of protests from their lost (or imagined) youths, and inspiring younger folks who missed the Sixties to take a shot at creating their own protest mythology.

Though they’ve mobilized a fraction of the people who turned out for just one Tea Party rally — the 9/12 rally in Washington, which drew well into the six figures — the Occupy protests have generated far more publicity. And, at least until recently, that publicity has been mostly favorable.

But while lefty share-the-wealth demonstrations have seized the imagination of our nation’s mainstream media, they once again failed to persuade taxpayers to loosen their grips on their pocketbooks.

In Colorado, a tax-increase effort, massively supported (to the tune of about 20 to 1 in terms of spending) by teachers unions, failed miserably. Not only did it lose by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, it failed to carry a majority even in heavily Democratic Denver. (It barely eked out a majority in Colorado’s farthest-left enclave of Boulder County.)

As Colorado talk-radio host Ross Kaminsky blogged, “The wide margin of defeat for Proposition 103 could only happen with a substantial majority — something on the order of two-thirds — of unaffiliated (independent) voters opposing the measure, something which portends well for Republican hopes in 2012 elections.” This despite the fact that Colorado went for Obama in 2008…

Morgan Freeman demonstrated once again why it’s best for actors to be scene and not heard by charging that the Tea Party hates Obama because he’s black.

“Stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term,” he said. “What … underlines that? Screw the country. We’re going to do whatever we do to get this black man … outta here.”

Freeman added: “It just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. ‘Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.’ You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water.”

Meanwhile, Florida GOP straw voters — many of them Tea Partiers — overwhelmingly chose Herman Cain as their choice for president.

Memo to Freeman: Herman Cain is black.

Jonah Goldberg

“Is this a wake-up call to Washington?” NBC’s David Gregory asked Sen. John Kerry on “Meet the Press,” referring to the S&P downgrade.

“Well, it’s a partial wake-up call. I believe this is, without question, the ‘tea party’ downgrade.”

Very shortly after pointing fingers and assigning blame, Kerry went on to lament how Republicans insist on pointing fingers and assigning blame in this national crisis.

Over on the other channel, at least President Obama’s political consigliere, David Axelrod, waited for a while before getting to the same talking point: “The fact of the matter is that this is essentially a tea party downgrade. The tea party brought us to the brink of a default,” he explained on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Many on the right bristle at this, and they have many of the facts on their side. To listen to some liberals, you’d think the downgrade is a direct result of Washington’s failure to raise taxes to pay for the massive increase in federal spending under Obama. But that’s not what it says. “Standard & Poor’s takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.’ finances on a sustainable footing.”

Rather, what offended the fiscal pundits of S&P was the “brinksmanship” in Washington that failed to deliver a $4-trillion dollar budget cut. What’s odd is that if the tea party didn’t exist, there would be no deficit reduction — and little demand for it. Democrats fought spending cuts during the budget showdown last year (remember Harry Reid’s cowboy poet subsidy?) and wanted a “clean” debt-ceiling hike.

And one could go on defending the tea party and the GOP in typical Beltway scoring fashion. The president’s first 2012 budget was a train wreck that would have exploded the deficit more. We’re well past 800 days without a Democratic budget from the Senate while the House (more…)

Being a liberal means never saying you’re sorry.

“I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Sen. John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day that also saw mounting anxieties in world markets over the downgrade among myriad other economic woes worldwide. Some of the world’s top financial ministers issued a joint statement Sunday night committing themselves to preserve the stability of financial markets and their economies.

How about the Dem Cong Downgrade instead?

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, used the exact same phrase in dubbing the credit rating drop the “tea party downgrade,” as Democrats tried to position themselves as reasonable, pragmatic leaders and conservative Republicans as irresponsible ideologues who caused the downgrade by refusing to accept any new taxes.

S &P downgraded the US for not addressing its debt problems.

Who insisted that Congress do something about the debt problem?

The tea party.

Once in a while the liberal fascist tips his hand.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: “And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.”

“It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?”

Legitimate ideas are determined by the public, not the media.

Legitimate ideas are determined by elections, especially shellacking elections.

It takes real brass for a party that has not passed a budget nor taken any real steps toward tackling the deficit, to lecture anyone about reality and accountability.

So much idiocy, so little time…

Al Gore pines for an American Spring:

“…we need to have an American spring. A kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change where people from the grassroots get involved again. Not the, you know, not in the Tea Party style,’” Al Gore said on Current TV’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”

“There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party. I understand that. But that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch Brothers, and promoted on Fox News,” Gore said.

Rise up as long as you agree with Al Gore’s big government agenda. Otherwise, you’re just a witless tool of billionaires.

Hey, Al: the revolution happened without you — and against you. Get over it.

Then there’s this:

MSNBC host Martin Bashir interviewed Stanton Peele, a psychologist and an “expert on addiction,” this afternoon. Bashir urged Peele to psychologically evaluate supporters of the Tea Party. “It reminds us of addiction because addicts are seeking something that they can’t have,” Peele said. “They want a state of happiness or nirvana that can’t be achieved except through an artificial substance and reminds us of the Norway situation, when people are thwarted at obtaining something they can’t, have they often strike out and Norway is one kind of example to one kind of reaction to that kind of a frustration.”

Bashir later asked: “So you’re saying that they are delusional about the past and adamant about the future?”

“They are adamant about achieving something that’s unachievable, which reminds us of a couple of things. It reminds us of delusion and psychosis,” Peele responded.

Oh, what a juicy one. Isn’t it delusional to:

• believe you can indefinitely spend more $$$ than you take in? And to ignore the examples of nations like Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland that are going broke?
• believe that intrusive government can overcome the defects of human nature and make a perfect world?
• believe that collectivism in any form will ever work?
• believe that the United Nations serves a meaningful purpose?
• etc.

For a nice roundup of uncivil comments from Dem Cong leaders, have a look here. The hypocrisy is astounding.

The “limited magnitude” of both debt plans put forward by congressional leaders would not put the nation’s AAA credit rating back on solid footing, Moody’s Investors Service announced Friday.

“Reductions of the magnitude now being proposed, if adopted, would likely lead Moody’s to adopt a negative outlook on the AAA rating,” the credit rating agency said in a new report. “The chances of a significant improvement in the long-term credit profile of the government coming from deficit reductions of the magnitude proposed in either plan are not high.”

The true threat to the credit of the USA isn’t the debt ceiling. It’s the debt and deficit spending.

Who takes this threat to our nation seriously? The tea party insurgents elected last November (the Shellacking) who are making things difficult for Washington.

They got elected with promises to cut federal spending, and shock of shocks, are sticking to their promises. The nerve!

A. Barton Hinkle at Reason, notes:

…Tea Partiers and their congressional cohort have been portrayed during the recent game of chicken over the debt ceiling. Rather, those opposed to raising the debt ceiling—or willing to do so in exchange for a slowdown in the rate of government growth—are “obstreperous,” “flatly and dangerously wrong,” and “not interested in governing.” (These are all quotes from major media organs, not obscure blogs.) They’re “crazy” proponents of a “dangerous delusion”—”ridiculous,” “extremist,” “ultraorthodox tax haters,” players of “ideological games,” “totally unrealistic,” authors of “madness,” etc. etc.

Hey, what happened to people of conviction? Aren’t the Tea Partiers “firebrands”? Isn’t there little doubt where their hearts lie?

Rather than praise Tea Partiers as passionate advocates for their beliefs, many in the press have taken to marginalizing them with mean-spirited attacks on their sanity.

And this from Tigerhawk:

Judging from the president’s speech last night and all the bleating from the press, the freshmen Republicans are nuts, or at least profoundly unreasonable, for sticking to their convictions in the face of a widespread belief in Washington and probably elsewhere that they should “compromise.” Hence their unpopularity among establishment politicians of both parties.

It seems to me, though, that Washington’s “problem” with the freshmen Republicans is precisely that many of them do not care if they are re-elected. They are amateurs doing what they think is right, acting in accordance with the commitments that they made in the campaign, damn the torpedoes. Annoying that might be, but isn’t that exactly how big government romantics of all stripes, and especially in the press, believe that politicians ought to behave?

James Ceasar and John York in Commentary:

With the breakdown of negotiations on a so-called grand bargain on the debt limit demanded by President Obama, liberal commentators have sought a convenient scapegoat to account for the impasse. Not surprisingly, they have begun by rounding up the usual suspect: the Tea Party. Its intransigence, so the line goes, has sunk this great deal.

For two years now, “Blame the Tea Party First” has been the Democrats’ favorite mantra. “Firsters” invoke the Tea Party to make sense–for themselves–of the otherwise inexplicable fact of large-scale public opposition to President Obama, and they hold the Tea Party responsible for many of the nation’s deeper problems, from incivility in our discourse to an inability to set aside intransigent partisanship.

Generosity in describing one’s foes is a rarity, especially among conspiracy theorists. But Firsters have carried their animus against the Tea Party to unprecedented heights by failing to credit it with what is today right before everyone’s eyes. Without the Tea Party, there would be no debt limit negotiations going on, just as there would have been no budget reduction deal last December. Without the Tea Party, President Obama would not be posing as the judicious statesman, but would be pushing –as in truth he still is–for more stimulus and further investments in high-speed rail. Whatever pressure now exists to treat the debt problem derives directly or indirectly from the explosion of energy that has been generated by the Tea Party.

In lambasting the Tea Party movement for its stubborness, Firsters have silently acknowledged what for two years they had all but denied. Instead of being in fact a front for racism or opposition to abortion, the “baggers,” as they have been derisively called, are genuinely insistent on cutting spending and containing the growth of government. Everything is less complicated than it seems. Supporters of the Tea Party are who they said they were.

Read it all. Just one more excerpt:

In this week’s controversy, Firsters are promoting the narrative of Barack Obama as the great statesman of the hour, willing to go the extra mile for a great bargain. Somewhere and sometime, according to this fantastic account, Obama experienced an 11th-hour conversion to spending restraint.

Only no one–no one–has seen or knows what he wants. It is the phantom of the budget, staged with wondrous smoke and mirrors and accompanied by the old refrain, now growing stale by repetition, of Obama worship. We are witnessing the sorry spectacle of high-minded commentators, who only recently were chanting in unison for greater transparency in our politics, and who now bite like a school of perch at the cheap plastic lures and leaks being tossed out by White House flaks. These are men and women without an ounce of pride in either themselves or their craft.

Doctors and teachers commiting fraud.

While Big Baloney cynically exploits the murderous act of a madmen to score political points, it’s useful to recall how certain Democrats and their media water boys tried to defame opponents of ObamaCare as racists.

Powerline:

McClatchy News was responsible for the single worst story reporting the allegations of Reps. Andre Carson, John Lewis. Emanuel Cleaver, and James Clyburn that Tea Party protesters abused black congressmen with racial epithets while demonstrating against Obamacare on Capitol Hill on March 20. The story is “Tea party protesters scream ‘nigger’ at black congressmen.”

The congressmen’s story was a fabrication intended to defame the Tea Party movement and distract attention from the resistance to Obamacare. Not a single video corroborates it, despite Andrew Breitbart’s offer of a $100,000 reward to anyone producing such a video. And no independent journalist or other eyewitness ever stepped forward to vouch for the congressmen’s story. It didn’t happen.

Breitbart played the indispensable role in demonstrating that the story, reaching to the top ranks of the Democratic congressional leadership, was a falsehood calculated to defame the resistance to Obamacare as — what else? — racist. Breitbart performed the difficult task of proving the negative with something like metaphysical certainty. We posted Breitbart’s video analysis of the evidence here.

Janet Daley:

…My Republican friends, perhaps surprisingly, were not gloating. They were too furious. But contrary to the superficial British assumption (heavily promoted by the BBC), they were not devoting their excoriation exclusively to the Obama Administration – or even to its clique of Congressional henchmen, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. That they were opposed to the Big State, European social democratic model of government which Obama had imported to Washington went almost without saying. But they were at least as angry with the leadership of their own party for having conceded far too much of the argument.

And this anger – again, contrary to the general understanding in Britain – is not new: it goes all the way back to the Bush presidency. It was widely known in Europe that the American Left hated George Bush (and even more, Dick Cheney) because of his military adventurism. What was less understood was that the Right disliked him almost as much for selling the pass over government spending, bailing out the banks, and failing to keep faith with the fundamental Republican principle of containing the power of central government.

So the Republicans are, if anything, as much in revolt against the establishment within their own party as they are against the Democrats. And this is what the Tea Parties (which should always be referred to in the plural, because they are not a monolithic movement) are all about: they are not just a reaction against a Left-liberal president but a repudiation of the official Opposition as well.

Nor are they simply the embodiment of reactionary social conservatism, which has been the last redoubt of the traditional Republican Right. There were plenty of people in New York who wanted to believe that Tea Partiers were just a new incarnation of the gun-totin’, gay-bashing right-to-lifers whom they found it so easy to dismiss as risible throwbacks. This is a huge political miscalculation, which quite misses the point of what makes the Congressional midterm elections this week such an interesting and historic political event. This is so much more than the predictable to-ing and fro-ing of party control midway through a presidential term. What the grassroots rebellion is really about is an attempt to pull the Republican party back to its basic philosophy of low-tax, low-spend, small government: the great Jeffersonian principle that the best government is that which governs least.

Two more voices, one who should know better, caricature those resisting the growth of government.

Instapundit posted this:

OBSCURANTISM:

Kate Zernike of the New York Times describes how tea-party activists explore “dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas” and study “once-obscure texts” by “long-dead authors.” She is of course referring to Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom was excerpted in Reader’s Digest and never has been out of print, whose Nobel Prize for economics in 1972 celebrated the importance and mainstream acceptance of his thinking, and whose death in 1992 isn’t exactly ancient history.

If they didn’t learn it in college, it’s “obscure.” Which, alas, merely highlights the inadequacy of their educations. (I, on the other hand, took a semester-long seminar on Hayek in college.) At any rate, the “obscure” Road to Serfdom is currently #56 on Amazon.

Related: Stuart Schneiderman: Who’s Smarter Now?

UPDATE: Reader Michael Costello writes: “How long has Karl Marx been dead? And Friedrich Hayek outlived Saul Alinsky by 20 years.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: OUCH:

If I had said a day ago that your typical New York Times reporter doesn’t have the vaguest sense of what the rule of law means, I would have heard from all sorts of earnest liberal readers — and probably some conservative ones too – about how I was setting up a straw man. But now we know it’s true. It’s not just that she doesn’t know what it is, it’s that even after (presumably) looking it up, she still couldn’t describe it and none of her editors raised an eyebrow when she buttered it.

The claims of superior intellect on the part of the legacy media seem unfounded.

MORE: Reader Jim Bass writes:

Since Kate is so clueless about Hayek, she can take a remedial course by watching “Commanding Heights.” The full series is here for her enlightenment on PBS’s website safely away from dusty bookshelves.

Learning through TV may work best here, though no doubt it would be more persuasive if it came from Jon Stewart . . . .

Henry Olsen in the Weekly Standard:

As a cradle-to-grave welfare state, Sweden has long been the northern light of liberals, the pole star of congressional progressives. And yet when the Social Democrats cast the recent election as a choice between tax breaks for the rich and more welfare, they were handed their worst electoral showing since 1914. By electing the four-party right-of-center coalition, Alliance for Sweden, voters opted for tax cuts. This unexpected Swedish victory is just the latest in an unprecedented run of success worldwide for fiscally conservative parties, beginning after the Greek debt crisis in April.

Since then, there have been eight elections in the developed world, six of which have been won by the right. In Central Europe, voters embraced center-right parties that pledged to reduce spending. The Czech Republic’s TOP 09 party fared well in May elections, as did Slovakia’s free-market Freedom and Solidarity party a month later. Results from Western Europe are even more telling, where in June Dutch voters gave their most fiscally conservative party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, its first ever victory.

Despite particular differences, a few common themes emerge from this record, themes with which American conservatives are certainly familiar but which they might do well to internalize in the weeks ahead.

First, cap and trade has proved to be a successful foil. For instance, in Australia Liberal leader Tony Abbott argued that cap and trade would hurt mining interests, an approach that enabled the coalition he led to pick up votes and seats in working-class, especially mining, districts. In the Western Sydney suburbs, Abbot told working-class voters it would significantly increase their electricity bills. Even as green parties increased their share of the Australian vote, the Labor party shunned cap and trade and instead pledged multiparty talks on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, the Tea Party phenomenon is part of a surging populism worldwide, and traditional parties everywhere are feeling the crunch. The most attention has gone to anti-immigrant parties, like Geert Wilders’s Freedom party, which nearly tripled its representation in the Dutch parliament, or the far-right Sweden Democrats, which entered parliament for the first time. But there is also the populism that issues from frustration with an unresponsive, and fiscally irresponsible, ruling class. Accordingly, new parties pushing fiscal conservatism form the backbone of the Czech and Slovak governments. In the United Kingdom both currents did better than they have before. Both the United Kingdom Independence party, a fiscally conservative party, and the anti-immigrant British National party, siphoned votes away from Cameron.

Nonetheless, despite voters’ fiscal conservatism, they do not want to uproot entirely the welfare state. Australia’s Abbott started his campaign by pledging not to reintroduce WorkChoices, a law deregulating labor markets passed by the last Liberal prime minister, John Howard, which proved so unpopular that voters toppled Howard’s government despite a booming economy. In Sweden, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s right-wing New Moderates party has successfully argued that lowering taxes, increasing the number of Swedes at work, and decreasing those on the welfare rolls is the best way to pay for Sweden’s social model.

Polls show that each of these trends is in evidence on our shores. Voters say they want smaller government with fewer services, and independents are especially concerned with the deficit. Cap and trade may be popular in San Francisco and on college campuses, but Democrats who backed the bill in districts dependent upon fossil fuels for their electricity—or for their jobs—are paying the price. And anger at establishment leaders on both sides of the aisle has fueled the Tea Party, suggesting that the “plague on both your houses” sentiment is deep and widespread. Still, antigovernment attitudes don’t seem to affect the pillars of the American welfare state: Even ardent constitutional conservatives like Sharron Angle promise to protect Social Security and Medicare.

These trends sound both optimistic and cautionary notes for GOP leaders. Republicans can ride the wave of populism and fiscal conservatism to victory now, but they will need to reconcile Tea Party populism with Americans’ attraction to the welfare state if they are to simultaneously govern and forestall a third party effort in 2012. Republican leaders might look to their foreign counterparts for lessons in how to manage this challenge now, before the challenge manages them.

A testy U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry yesterday blamed clueless voters with short attention spans for the uphill battle beleaguered Democrats are facing against Republicans across the nation.

“We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening,” Kerry told reporters after touring the Boston Medical Center yesterday.

Perhaps if Kerry were not preoccupied with dodging taxes on his yacht, he might have seen some of the folks who came to the townhall meetings last summer.

Though pudgy and unstylish, many were able to recite from the text of the Obamacare bill. (And who can properly pronounce Genghis.)

This is the same bill most members of Congress never bothered to read.

Now, who is clueless?

Liberals are in full assault mode on Christine O’Donnell. So much so they’re revealing their own ignorance as they attack her.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

I have been fascinated by Christine O’Donnell’s constitutional worldview since her debate with her opponent Chris Coons last week. O’Donnell explained that “when I go to Washington, D.C., the litmus test by which I cast my vote for every piece of legislation that comes across my desk will be whether or not it is constitutional.”

How weird is that, I thought. Isn’t it a court’s job to determine whether or not something is, in fact, constitutional? And isn’t that sort of provided for in, well, the Constitution?

I can just picture Dahlia with a Michael Mooreish faux-commoner grin as she wrote that. Haw haw.

What’s she think: senators are meant to ignore the Constitution, pass laws at whim and wait for the Courts to sort it all out?

David Bernstein at Volokh corrects:

Senators swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. Of course they are obligated to determine whether a bill they are considering is constitutional. Where did Lithwick get the idea that courts, and only courts, should be concerned with the constitutionality of legislation?

Somewhat longer answer: The Constitution doesn’t vest the authority to determine the constitutionality of legislation in any single branch of the government. In fact, not only does the Constitution not grant the judiciary the exclusive power to consider the constitutionality of legislation, it doesn’t speak of judicial review at all. I think that judicial review is implicit in the Constitution, for the reasons stated by Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. But there is no contradiction between allowing the Court to exercise its authority in its own sphere (i.e., when a lawsuit comes before the Court) while the other branches determine the constitutionality of legislation in their own spheres. At least since the late 1950s (Cooper v. Aaron), the Supreme Court has asserted that if an elected official defies a Supreme Court precedent, that official is violating his oath to uphold the Constitution. But even if we accept that it would be a dereliction of a Senator’s duty to vote for a law that he knew the Court would deem unconstitutional, I don’t know of any reason why a Senator should vote for a law that he deems unconstitutional, even if the Supreme Court would uphold such a law; no defiance is involved in such an instance, just an independent assessment of constitutionality. Regardless, it’s hardly the case, as Lithwick suggests, that a Senator should ignore constitutional issues, vote completely based on policy preference, and wait for the courts to sort things out.

How weird is that, Dahlia?

Ann Coulter

Washington elites’ heads exploded when Christine O’Donnell won the Republican Senate primary in Delaware last week. Luckily they were all reading The New York Times‘ op-ed page at the time, so the mess their exploding heads created was minimal.

The establishment’s complaints are confusing. They say O’Donnell has a problem because she’s never held a job in the private sector (like our president), didn’t pay her taxes (like our treasury secretary), and had her house foreclosed on (like half of the electorate).

They also accuse her of saying crazy things — but she’s running for Joe Biden’s old seat, so this may be an advantage.

This week, all we’ve heard about is how O’Donnell once said she went on a date with a guy in high school who claimed to be a witch. (So what? Bill Clinton married one!) Bill Clinton was credibly accused of at least one forcible rape. Those two seem about equal to you?

I haven’t seen hypocrisy like this since — oh, that’s right, since last week when CBS’s Bob Schieffer attacked John Boehner for smoking, after two years of the media’s ferociously avoiding the topic of Obama’s cigarette habit.

And let’s not forget Obama’s coke snorting days.

The Republican Party is being warned that tea party-endorsed candidates such as O’Donnell might lead to Barry Goldwater-style epic defeats.

Of course, the tea party candidates range from libertarian Rand Paul in Kentucky to Yale Law/Iraq War veteran Joe Miller in Alaska to Christian activist O’Donnell. But any evidence of principle in a Republican is always treated by the elites as if it’s an embarrassing eccentricity best kept under wraps…

From Der Handelsblatt, a German business daily, on the influence of the Tea Party.

“In the US, people … spend time and money supporting the Republicans. Unlike in Germany, in America, which never had a Hitler, being ‘right-wing’ is not taboo. ‘Right-wing’ represents Reagan, religion, the free market, individualism, patriotism and small government.

In reality, it is an impossible mixture: National pride, God and tradition are conservative ‘us’ values. The profit motive, competition and a weak state are ‘me-first’ sentiments … . But this mixture of conservative values and neoliberalism works well in America, where it transcends social class — that’s the difference to Germany.”

No, the mixture is not “impossible.”

One can have pride in our nation because it honors the profit motive, which allows human beings to realize their full potential and generates wealth that eventually benefits all.

Zero sum thinkers have trouble with this concept, which is odd because it goes back to Adam Smith.

More recently, there was The Virtue of Selfishness. That book is hardly unknown, having been chosen as the #1 best nonfiction book since 1900 on the Reader’s List 100 Best Nonfiction list of the Modern Library.

Peggy Noonan has an excellent column on the Tea Party:

…we are witnessing a shift that will likely have some enduring political impact. Another way of saying that: The past few years, a lot of people in politics have wondered about the possibility of a third party. Would it be possible to organize one? While they were wondering, a virtual third party was being born. And nobody organized it.

Here is Jonathan Rauch in National Journal on the tea party’s innovative, broad-based network: “In the expansive dominion of the Tea Party Patriots, which extends to thousands of local groups and literally countless activists,” there is no chain of command, no hierarchy. Individuals “move the movement.” Popular issues gain traction and are emphasized, unpopular ones die. “In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on such a large scale.”

Here are pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in the Washington Examiner: “The Tea Party has become one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in American political history.” “It is as popular as both the Democratic and Republican parties.” “Over half of the electorate now say they favor the Tea Party movement, around 35 percent say they support the movement, 20 to 25 percent self-identify as members of the movement.”

So far, the tea party is not a wing of the GOP but a critique of it. This was demonstrated in spectacular fashion when GOP operatives dismissed tea party-backed Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. The Republican establishment is “the reason we even have the Tea Party movement,” shot back columnist and tea party enthusiast Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News. It was the Bush administration that “ran up deficits” and gave us “open borders” and “Medicare Part D and busted budgets.”

Everyone has an explanation for the tea party that is actually not an explanation but a description. They’re “angry.” They’re “antiestablishment,” “populist,” “anti-elite.” All to varying degrees true. But as a network television executive said this week, “They should be fed up. Our institutions have failed.”

I see two central reasons for the tea party’s rise. The first is the yardstick, and the second is the clock. First, the yardstick. Imagine that over at the 36-inch end you’ve got pure liberal thinking—more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you’ve got conservative thinking—a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction.

But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they’re dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It’s always grown! It’s as if something inexorable in our political reality—with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy—has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: “Hey, it coulda been 29!” But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They’d like eight. Instead it’s 28.

For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, “We should spend a trillion dollars,” and the Republican Party would respond, “No, too costly. How about $700 billion?” Conservatives on the ground are thinking, “How about nothing? How about we don’t spend more money but finally start cutting.”