Brooks’ Strange Brew
New York Times token conservative David Brooks always has an interesting take on the tea party movement (See his previous piece on the movement where he contrasts tea partiers with the "educated class.")
Mr. Brooks' most recent reading of the tea leaves is equally...intriguing.
Take Brooks' summary of the tea party movement which he contorts to fit his cute narrative comparing tea partiers to the 60's radicals of the New Left:
The people we loosely call the Tea Partiers also want to destroy the establishment. They also want to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.
Brooks goes on to characterization of the tea party movement as preoccupied with black helicopter theories:
In its short life, the Tea Party movement has developed a dizzying array of conspiracy theories involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the big banks and corporations and black helicopters.
I'm curious to know how many tea parties Brooks has gone to and how many tea partiers he's interviewed in order to form the opinion that informs his commentary. Based on my experience organizing, participating in, and documenting the tea party movement, Brooks' generalizations of the tea party movement bears no correlation with reality. The tea party movement is in fact a mainstream, grassroots coalition of Americans concerned with the direction of this nation. Brooks would likely draw a different conclusion were he to look beyond the pages of his own paper. Sadly, Mr. Brooks appears to suffer from the same delusion as many of his colleagues: that the reporting on the pages of the Times truly is an accurate portrayal of "all the news that's fit to print."
Illinois Policy Institute
I am excited to be officially joining the Illinois Policy Institute, effective today.
Founded in 2002, the Institute has enjoyed tremendous growth and success advancing liberty-based public policy initiatives in Illinois.
The Institute houses a number of projects geared towards turning Illinois into a beacon of liberty in the Midwest. In addition to robust policy centers, the Institute is home to a cutting-edge transparency project, a "Liberty Leaders" grassroots force, and much more.
I'm very excited to be joining this impressive team.
Check out our latest policy publication, the 2010 Illinois Piglet Booklet. A joint venture with Citizens Against Government Waste, the booklet details just some of the wasteful spending of Illinois taxpayer dollars:
- $6,500 for a tub of live bass. The state paid for fishing seminars and demonstrations using a 4,000 gallon, 40-foot long tank filled with live fish.
- $353,165 for car racing. The state is funding Raceway Associates, which partners with big-time
races like the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500, as well as a massive construction grant for Atkinson
Motorsports Park in northwestern Illinois.
- $10,000 for a Batman gala. Your tax dollars funded a star-studded party for “Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan.
- $1,100 for Hawaiian party props. Your money made its way to Island Enterprises, a company providing “everything for luaus and Hawaiian themed events from dancers to music to props and apparel.”
- $78,066 for quail promotion. The state is funding Quail Unlimited, which is “dedicated to the wise use and management of America’s wild quail, doves, upland game birds and other forms of wildlife.”
Check out the booklet and more of our work at www.IllinoisPolicy.org
The Tea Party Nation
Great op-ed in the Sacramento Bee this weekend on the recent tea party convention, the media spin of same, and the real principles - and people - behind the tea party movement.
Writes Ben Boychuk:
What tea parties represent is a revival of good, old-fashioned constitutionalism and the idea that government needs to get back to basics. There is a great yearning for a return to first principles. Millions of Americans, but perhaps not yet a majority, would very much like to restore the principles of the American Founding Fathers to their rightful and pre-eminent place in our political life.
Read the full piece here.
The Green Police
By far the funniest ad I've ever seen that mocks the "green" culture aired during the Super Bowl:
Some environmentalists were predictably steamed, going so far as to state that Audi was equating environmental regulation with the Nazis... Others, like David Roberts hailed the ad as a recognition of the "moral authority" of so-called greening, but not after getting in some particularly gratuitous "teabag" references.
Both are wrong. The ad brilliantly mocks a world that makes such "green" selling points necessary. Corporations in all industries are "going green" for PR (and often in name only) not because of "morality," but because it is in vogue - "green" is the new black. Roberts, like many others, seems to buy into the global warming religion. It blinds him from what is a hilarious commercial mocking the nanny statist meddlers and junk science peddlers that want to tell us what kind of car we can drive and how high we can have our thermostat. Force us to "go green" through regulation? Fine, I'll buy a diesel Audi that fits into your arbitrary metrics to solve a problem that doesn't exist and cruise down the highway as fast and as much as I want. It's a joke, enviros, and the joke is on you.
Policy Prescription for Obama
In a new post at Big Government, Peter Fotos and I answer President Obama's call for help by giving him three simple health care policy prescriptions:
In his State of the Union Address Wednesday night, President Obama called on folks to let him know if there are better health care solutions he and congress should be considering...
...He echoed this sentiment at today’s House GOP retreat. Some might say he was being sarcastic, reminding us of how hard it is to govern (especially in light of all he has inherited from you-know-who.) But that would be cynical, particularly in this post-partisan era.
Just before Christmas my colleague Peter Fotos and I penned a “wish list” of simple policy proposals that constitute substantive health care reform – and it didn’t even take 1,000 pages! The health care snitch line was disabled, so we’ll give the President the benefit of the doubt that it ended up in his spam folder.
President Obama and his Congressional allies talk a lot about the need to control health care costs and avoid pressure from special interests. Unfortunately, neither the House nor the Senate versions of “ObamaCare” that he called upon congress to reconsider withstand either litmus test.
Click here for more.
SOTU Wish: Stop Talking
In my debut piece at The Daily Caller, I outline why Americans are so frustrated with President Obama just one year after his inauguration: the rhetoric and the reality just don't match up. President Obama has broken the trust of the American people too many times in such a short window of time. It's time for less talk and more (substantive) action.
Below, Paul Bedard at US News & World Report has a great wrap-up of the growing discontent across party lines throughout the nation.
Puzzling Media Attention Re. One Tea Party
The New York Times and other outlets that haven’t given the enormously popular and politically potent tea party movement the time of day over the past year are suddenly quite interested in covering it.
Many political and media elites wrote the movement off as “fringe” – an irrelevant, small cadre of disgruntled right-wingers not worthy of their attention. As I told the Washington Times, know that they smell a hint of controversy, they’re suddenly quite intrigued.
Many in the media are quick to point out the missteps of this one group in TN throwing a convention with Sarah Palin as signs that the movement is in trouble. They see one event, one organization hitting bumps in the road and conclude from there that there is a significant rift in the movement.
It is particularly curious given that these very journalists, commentators, and politicians have to date characterized the movement as directionless and leaderless. The former has been proven untrue beyond doubt in the wake of the election of Scott Brown in my bluer than blue home state of Massachusetts. The later is true: this isn’t a top down movement by any means, and I argue that it doesn’t need a leader. This movement’s power comes from the millions of concerned Americans that constitute it. The movement rejects the creepy idolatry exhibited in the past presidential campaign. It represents an important shift away from partisanship and personalities to principles.
If only there was one book out there journos could take for a spin that clearly articulates the history of and principles behind this powerful grassroots movement…
The bottom line is, if millions of people getting involved in the political process through protests, town halls, and marches over the past year weren’t newsworthy, the attention given to a couple thousand in TN is…curious. Maybe I’m just being cynical.
The Electoral Counterrevolution
Last night Scott Brown clinched the MA Senate race with a solid 5 point lead. More from the good folks at the Boston Herald here.
This is a huge victory for the tea party and for the millions of Americans the recognize the threat of ever-expanding government exemplified in policies like ObamaCare, the bailouts, cap and trade, and the rest of the President's radical agenda.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco summed it up best before the final tally. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:
"Regardless of the outcome ... this should be a gigantic wake-up call to the Democratic Party - that we're not connecting with the needs, the aspirations and the desires of real people right now," said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
It gets even better:
...But Newsom said the Republican resurgence in Massachusetts suggests "there's real intensity and fervor out there, as represented by the Tea Party" activists expressing anger at government spending and at job losses.
"This is real," he said. "At our own peril, we dismiss these tea parties as ... some sort of isolated extremism. ... It's not."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
A New American Tea Party
O’Hara at The Daily Caller
- How to lose jobs and alienate taxpayers
- Squashing dissent with slander and libel
- Strange brew: The Coffee Party
- A civic reawakening: The Tea Party movement
- SOTU wishes: A lot less talk, a lot more action
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Not Our Cup of Tea
The decision of Jon Scott Ashjian to take on Harry Reid is curious to say the least. He's running as the "tea party" candidate, though few activists have ever heard of him. Many have suggested he is a plant from the Reid camp intended to split the opposition vote.
I hesitate to attempt to discern people's motives, I simply don't see what he brings to the table other than the risk of splitting the common-sense government vote, resulting in a Reid victory.
Does he bring a unique perspective and positive agenda to the race that other contenders don't? Does he have a solid platform informed by principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility? I've seen evidence of neither. The tea party movement rejects mere labels as reliable indicators of a political philosophy. For example, Republicanism isn't synonymous with fiscal responsibility. Likewise, a candidate claiming to be the "tea party" candidate means nothing. What does he stand for? The citizens of Nevada deserve to know.
What's more, according to numerous accounts from grassroots activists on the ground in Nevada, he's a Johnny-Come-Lately to the movement - just in time for the election cycle.
One comment he made to CNN.com was particularly troubling:
Claiming to "own" the tea party movement is highly hubristic and highly inaccurate no matter who you are. In Mr. Ashjian's case, it is particularly odd given that he has been uniformly denounced by virtually every grassroots tea party group in Nevada.
While I'm not sure if he's a plant intended to be a spoiler as some have mused, he is, at the very least, a sub-par, unserious candidate. The best service Mr. Ashjian can do his country and the state of Nevada is to step aside so Nevada voters have a solid challenger to face Mr. Reid in the general election.