"the US would default if it didn't raise the debt ceiling. When, of course, that is precisely what it would have done."

Not true actually, just as mythical as Paul Revere being a founding father. But a very successful meme, that accomplished the agenda sought after. The teaparty aren't the only ones that rewrite history.

http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=2308

Gee, Mark Twain is usually more accurate. It’s been long past a century since 1892, and things don’t seem to be turning around yet—quite the opposite.

I used to think people mad who say Disney is an evil force, but the more I read about and think about the idea, I think they are mad as in angry. It’s a good to see an article laying out the insidiousness of their easy narratives and of our public school’s complicit dumbing down of our children.

"Never mind that the US has among the lowest levels of taxation in the developed world, matched only by Mexico and Chile (are these the nations the Tea Party would like to emulate?). "

Dunno about Mexico, but Pinochet's Chile was the laboratory for the Friedmanite ideas that Thatcher later brought to Britain and Reagan to the US. The Tea Party is merely the latest vehicle for those ideas.

Well when you have the History Channel putting out Documentaries of WWll, Civil War and most of your Tea Party types havent read any history since high school and getting behind the Tea Party movement, they have become experts on history. I work with a person who is trying to put compassion on Southern Confederates and telling of how brutal and inhumane the North was. In less than 5 years histroy as we have learned and read will be dropped down the "Memory Hole", and a rewrite of history will be available. You see what is happening in our public education system.

The author is much too generous in describing the Tea Party. It should be called the Part of Hostage Takers. More than ones now that is what they have done: taken America hostage and demanded ransom. The spineless cowards, Obama and most of Democrats, have willingly negotiated with these terrorists and given-in to their demands. Shame on all who coddle and enable this bunch of proto-fascist racist filth.

LOOK AT THE TEA PARTY! don't look at Obama and the Democrats because

LOOK OVER THERE - IT'S THE TEA PARTY!!

Let's see, the author wants us to see this:

A group of people who claim the mantle of the Tea Party and claim to be patriotic yet whose actions harm the future of this country and only aggrandize their wealthy puppet masters.

What a brilliant observation!

And was there a prototype in America for this type of subversive group, a group that went against its stated principles only to actually advocate for the exact opposite?

Voila! The Gospel of Wealth churches and ministries!

Where you too can be a "good" Christian AND a greedy a**hole AT THE SAME TIME!!

Gee, I wonder what a Venn diagram of the Gospel of Wealth adherents and the Tea Part folk could tell us about propaganda and societal manipulation, huh?

I can easily see how these vicious morons can take over the running of the country given the level of stupidity and greed of the American people. I saw that the idiot Governor Rick Perry would become the favorite should he enter the republican primary which says it all and should the economy continue to slide it is quite possible this theocratic racist dunce could win the presidency.

People mistake the pretext for the cause.

How many in this forum believe that the Tea Party morons would have the press coverage they do if they were not the astro-turf organization presenting a populist veneer to the policies that favor global corporate capitalism (and/or Disaster Capitalism) without conscience?

When a politician makes it about "all those angry tea party persons," it's quite an ingenious deflection device, isn't it? It actually makes it seem that politicians CARE about public approval, except that it's not OUR (Progressives) public approval.

Quite fascinating, too, when we consider the range of polls that suggest that a majority of American citizens favor:

1. Taxing the rich on a more equitable basis
2. NOT bailing out the banks (and if media did the job of educating the public, they'd likely demand regulation of the Wall Sreet-banking corridor)
3. A Single payer health care system
4. Less $ allotted to war, added to a reduction of the MIC budget
5. NOT touching Social Security or Medicare

So the Tea Party COVER is just that... it's a false ruse used to make it seem that there IS this viable protest organization whose values just HAPPEN to run parallel with those of Grover Norquist, Next Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and the other "I-got-mine-the-hell-with-you" crowd. This is a selfish, morally repugnant phase of US history.

Let's not mistake the pretext, for the true causative factors operating this dog and pony show. We've all lost enough already, with the karmic blowback still in its earliest stages.

one of the things we must surmount is our wistful view of our 'forefathers'...

ignoring who financed the 'revolutionary' affair (both sides), or who initially acquired, and maintained, title to the lands of the New World, is asking for delusion...

judging by my current times, and how difficult it is to get at the truth of recent events, even given widespread dissemination of immediate information, I am easily able to arrive at the conclusion that little, if any, of what I'm told about the distant past holds water...

to the point, it doesn't matter anyway...

if Paul Revere were to ride anywhere, and say anything, at this time, he would probably be riding through my neighborhood, warning us about Fukushima...

the Fallout is Coming! the Fallout is Coming!

y'all remember Fukushima, right? still going...

"The motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was not "In God We Trust": it was "E Pluribus Unum," out of many, one. The phrase "In God We Trust" emerged from the American Civil War, but it wasn't put on US currency until the Cold War, in 1955. The following year, the same year he signed the Civil Rights bill into law, Eisenhower made it the nation's motto."

Ironic how the Civil Rights Bill was signed into law in 1956, and the very first casualty of our Revolutionary war was A Black/Wampanoag Man named Crispus Attucks, who was shot dead by British Troops at the Boston Massacre...

Crispus Attucks (c. 1723 – March 5, 1770) was a black man in the American Revolution. He was the first person shot to death by British redcoats during the Boston Massacre, in Boston, Massachusetts.[1] He has been called the first martyr of the revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispus_Attucks#Boston_Massacre

Sarah, I'm completely sympathetic to your words. However, I'm growing increasingly impatient with all the complaining about the Tea Party with no specific call to action – and I’m left-center.

That complaining and blaming only serves to further alienate independents. Democracy Corps just released an in-depth messaging survey that confirmed that.

Polls indicate that 2/3 of REPUBLICANS disapproved of the Tea Party's position of "protect corporate welfare at all costs while throwing seniors into poverty". Independents aligned with Democrats in almost unanimously disapproving. That does NOT mean that Independents linked arms with Democrats and started singing love songs to each other. Independents hate Democrat POLITICIANS as much as they hate Republican POLITICIANS. Independents are also FED UP with the "blame game".

Let’s stop wallowing in the blame game and instead start publishing calls to action to achieve specific results. People need to join a local progressive group and start insisting that the group perform political ACTIONS and not just sit around living rooms complaining about how neoconservatives are destroying the country.

As just one example, there are numerous states where Republicans are trying to disenfranchise progressive voters. (Yes, we’re back to fighting the civil rights battles again, just on a new field.) If you’re in one of those states, get involved in a progressive group and insist that the group start engaging in actions to get progressive voters to apply for the necessary ID cards, or whatever. Figure out the easiest way for them to get ID cards, and make the path as easy for them as possible. That is something that can be done NOW – long before the 2012 elections start heating up. There’s tons of work to do during the election season, so start getting this task out of the way early. It’ll free up resources to work on other tasks during the election season.

As I was driving through North Carolina today, hitting the seek button on the radio, I came across a radio host explaining that the debt deal was just an excuse to "bash" the Tea Party and that they were being accused of being anarchists. He went on to explain that the Democrats were the ones "sleeping with anarchists." I couldn't help buy wonder how one can possibly reason with people who would believe such drivel.

"Colonial" readers here resent the fact that the author of this article is English and teaches at East Anglia University, so they have an ideological blindfold that does not allow them to appreciate a lesson taught with lucidity, organization and graceful prose. The Tea Party misses them; they should join it.

The Tea Party is a slow fat target, but this piece isn't much better. It should be possible to keep basic facts straight.

The first US coin to bear IN GOD WE TRUST was the 1864 2 cent piece. I have ready to hand coins from 1886, 1899, 1904, and 1914 that all bear the same motto prominently. The details are readily available by just consulting Wikipedia.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was signed by Eisenhower that year, not in 1956. The Civil Rights Division of the US Dept of Justice tells you about that on their website.

More serious is the nonsense that failing to raise the debt ceiling would necessarily force default. 31 USC 3101 prescribes the debt limit. But not only does the 14th Amendment require the public debt to be paid, 31 USC 3102 authorizes the President to tell the treasury secretary to issue bonds in order to pay those obligations authorized by Congress. Obama could have just issued bonds to pay just those items authorized by Congress and invited Congress to repeal such authorizations explicitly. There's nothing else they could have done about it, since it's already well-established law that individual congressmen are not "particularly" injured as individuals and thus have no standing as individuals to sue over it.

Obama, a constitutional law professor, let this be made an issue because he wanted it to be, so that he could screw over the non-Geithners of the country and blame it on the Republicans. He didn't do anything he didn't want to do.

Well, I think something pretty important is ignored here. No, it isn't "ironic" that the facist group appropriated a key symbol of the (first) American Revolution--nor does it stem from ignorance. It was deliberately done to remove this symbol (and others such as "don't tread on me") from use by actual revolutionaries--because those who set up the largely FAKE Tea Party "movement" understood that their plans to further enrich the few at the expense of the many, and continue attcking the Bill of Rights, would sooner or later engender resistance. So they created and funded the Tea Party to divide those who are fed up, and to discredit the idea of uprising. Thus the corporate media covers any Tea Party rally, however small, while ingoring much larger demos against war, or the 15,000 people at the U S Social Forum attending hundreds of workshops for a week--anything left of cnter is not newsworthy. But while they make a big deal of the movement and try to make it appear bigger than it is, they also make sure to focus in on the most racist, mispelled signs, to get across the idea that angry people in the streets are laughable---and that a united Right and Left--their great nightmare--could never happen. But I'm not so sure. I know some right-wingers, and they simultaneously believe some of the most absurd horseshit, and some plain fax that the liberal pundits often ignore. I think the possibility of united resistance cannot be counted out.

Americans are woefully ignorant about economics, politics, and history and thus cannot vote wisely. They would do well to remember the following:

1. one cannot understand the present without understanding the past (history).
2. there is a direct connection between politics, economics, and standard of living.
3. bad people get elected when good people stay home and don't vote.

AMERICA PLEASE WAKE UP!

Racists wear the skeleton where the skin membrane organ should be.

Let's see, "No taxation without representation."

Does that mean when you don't pay taxes you don't get representation? Lots of people in America don't pay income taxes -- yes they pay all the many other taxes -- but they can vote.
Big Money, essentially pays no taxes --- but can buy as many votes as they spend. And, anyway, the Tea Party (the Koch brothers) in Congress IS representing them, among others, Speaker Bayner (Americans cannot hear the German öh -- it does not sound like ay)

Confusing. Oh yeah, ask Palin and Backman (we also cannot make the ch sound), today any word can mean whatever the speaker meant it to mean.
The Age of Information.

How about "No representation without taxes"

This particular tea party has way too many mad hatters. You might say they have lost their way in wonderland!

Yes! Now here is an understanding that needs to be addressed.

I will take it further as I have been for some time on these pages.
Great as it is, there is something terribly wrong with the structure of meaning in English and, English being the leading language of the West, hence the Western culture. This is what the Chinese have been saying for nearly 3 centuries, first grudgingly about the greatness and now taking the greatness with qualified admiration into their own. For them science and its clone, success, is wonderfully childish, but they are fully aware that a child cannot be allowed to captain the ship of state.

They have always seen the infantile weakness or childish stupidity embedded in the West. Briefly, with reference to this article, Jay Gould embodies this Western weakness. Like George W Bush and Tony Blair, he is not an accident. His mind is embedded in Western culture and can be traced all the way back to the Stoics and Sophists and beyond. He was a pirate who accepted as a matter of faith that his degradation was expressive of the degradation of mankind or fate. The Protestant religions have the same understanding. John Calvin's maxim, The Total Depravity of Man, cannot be bettered as an expression of this. Those who understand will see that this is the Godzilla hatched and rampaging through Western society now.

The USA is revealed today as the result of this Western mind. It is not an accident. It is the logical consequence; expressive of the nature of the beast.

The West has to change and there is very little time left. English, the leading language of the West has to be fundamentally reassessed. Western history needs to analysed and placed in perspective. This will allow the leadership available within Eastern understandings to be accessed, whereupon the world's cultures will develop in essential power to the benefit of mankind.

This is not a religious statement.

Am I missing something? Haven't read all the comments yet. But I distinctly remember, and looked it up when I thought I had it wrong, that it was LBJ who signed the Civil Rights Law in 1965? Unless there is some other earlier law that I am forgetting. I was 10 in 1965 and remember what a big deal it was.

Our world is in an Ending Which Is A Beginning. Most can recognize the Ending, but how many can discern the Beginning?

This is the most eloquently written essay yet to describe the actual threat the Tea Party is to the health of the United States of America. I will gladly stand alongside any other American who shares these sentiments, and will fight with you our Nation’s enemies. Where do I send my money? Where do I sign? Should I arm the right or left flank? Do you need to borrow any ammunition? A revolution is apparent, and I am again ready to beat my pens into swords

Here's the thing.

"E Pluribus Unum" (out of many, one) is still the goal of the United States of Global Dominion, but with one unspoken addition.

Out of many, one (percent).

This has probably been understood by the one percent since the beginning of history, but it has now become un-escapably the goal of this most toxic empire.

One of the best at describing the Teabagger Party.

If guns are not the answer would somebody kindly educate me as to the rational alternative.