When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents said that the movement’s goal should be reducing the size of government, more than cutting the budget deficit or lowering taxes.

And nearly three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

via Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated – NYTimes.com.

Funny thing about Social Security is that you don’t pay into the system for you own benefits. It is now and always has been an inter-generational wealth transfer. Your contributions go to pay for current retirees.

It would be nice if all the Social Security recipients in the Tea Party would stop and think about the implications of cutting taxes and government expenditures. Would they be willing to see their Social Security checks and Medicare benefits shrink? Or do they think someone else should bear the burden?

The bit about cutting waste is just silly. There’s not enough there to cut to make a dent in the deficit. The drivers of the deficit are the two largest entitlement programs: Medicare and Social Security. The larger issue is Medicare. Health reform was the first baby steps towards dealing with ever increasing medical costs endemic to our bizarrely inefficient health care delivery system. The Affordable Care Act=deficit reduction.

If you really care about deficit reduction and are intellectually honest about it, you need to go after where the big buck are spent. In addition to the entitlement programs, that would be military spending. An additional point would be the cost of the tax cuts passed under George Bush, which disproportionally benefited the wealthiest Americans. Call it what it was: welfare for the wealthy.

Protesters From Kansas Take Aim at Miners – NYTimes.com.

relevant to your interests.

Never mind Sarah Palin and the tricornered hats. The tea-party movement is dominated by conspiracist kooks.

via Tea Party Movement Is Full of Conspiracy Theories – Newsweek.com.

This was from a conservative author and Newsweek contributor. Tea Partiers have always seemed like a gathering of full metal jacket type wingnuts, nut jobs, Birchers, birthers and racists with enough of a sprinkling of actual concerned citizens to add a thin veneer of everyman to the affair.

The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:”This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

via Texas’ gay marriage ban may have banned all marriages | McClatchy.

Beck agrees that we need another 9/11 attack to “save” us from the evil socialist plot that is the Obama administration.

Enjoy “God Hates the World” sang to the music of “We Are the World” by America’s sickest “church”. Sadly it’s not a parody, it’s normal fare for the Westboro Baptist Church.

Favorite right wing warmonger Chuckie C, much like the man he’d most like to publicly fellate quoted above, drops this little nugget of truth: “What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.”

The sad days of “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their facts” are happily behind us. We’re now free to just make shit up as we go along! Whoo hoo, the bloggers everywhere rejoice!

Ah, the delicious irony of it all:

According to a Rasmussen poll released last week, 37 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, 33 percent prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided. Among all Americans, 53 percent prefer capitalism, 20 percent prefer socialism and 27 percent are undecided…

…The data on the young are particularly telling. Twenty-somethings are more open to socialism — or social capitalism — than 30-somethings not only because they never lived through the Soviet threat but because the economy, during the years in which deregulatory policy and Wall Street financialization were at their height, hasn’t worked very well for them. Americans under 29 scored well to the left of the general public in a recent survey by the Center for American Progress, and voters under 30 backed Barack Obama by a 34-point margin in November, 66 percent to 32 percent.

The young may now disdain Wall Street — but what do they know of socialism, past and present? Who even speaks of socialism in America today? The answer, of course, is the demagogic right. According to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and their ilk, Obama is taking America down the Socialist Road. As Benjamin Sarlin has noted on the Web site the Daily Beast, the talkmeisters of the right have linked a doctrine that never commanded much support in America to a president whose approval rating hovers around 60 percent and much higher than that among the young.

Rush and his boys are doing what Gene Debs and his comrades never really could. In tandem with Wall Street, they are building socialism in America.

Go Fox, go Rush, go Sean, heck of a job there boys! They’re doing more to build socialism in American than Molotov, Trotsky and Mao put together.  Their nearly complete ignorance of what socialism is coupled with a willingness to throw around the accusation willy nilly is having the effect of pushing American youth further to the left.

This is not to say that I believe a “worker’s paradise” is imminent or even desirable, but the excesses of the right are chipping away the future of the right and the GOP. As I’ve said several times before, we need a right center party to counter balance the Democrats.

Look we’ve already tried it their way and the results are in: utter failure for American world standing and its economy. A very narrow swath of already very wealthy people did even better. But that’s about it. The rest of us have suffered stagnant wages, joblessness and destitution. Perhaps it will all accidentally bring a bit more balance to American political life.

A degree in Creation Science? Other than creation science totally being an oxymoron, how can you teach a science course if you can’t differentiate between the word theory in common usage vs. theory in scientific usage? Then there’s the nasty little fact that obviously this degree could only be open to young Earth evangelical Christians. Separation of curch and state much? Perhaps Texas should rename their capital Wingnuttia.

I wonder why CNN wanted to give this person airtime? All he did was make an ass out of himself and never even attempted to address any questions in an intelligible way.

Yes it seems a real possibility. If Trick or Treat during Halloween makes kids liberal then why did we suffer through a decade of GOP majority stupidity in congress and  two terms of the unique combination of incompetence, stubbornness and hubris that is the Bush administration?

Father Awarded Millions for Funeral Protest – New York Times

Crooks and Liars » Coulter just wants Jews to be “Perfected”

Inside every Jew there’s Christian just dying to get out? Most Jews I know might be kinda pissed off by the breath taking parochialism of that statement. It would be difficult to formulate something more offensive without resorting to tired stereotypes.

Jews respond.

Glenn Greenwald – Political Blogs and Opinions – Salon
After highlighting all the scary, fringe positions Edwards holds, O’Reilly summarized what the Far-Left America would look like once John Edwards got done with it:

[W]ould you support President John Edwards? Remember, no coerced interrogation, civilian lawyers in courts for captured overseas terrorists, no branding the Iranian guards terrorists, and no phone surveillance without a specific warrant.

Who could even fathom an America plagued by habeas corpus, search warrants, and a military that fails to beat, freeze and mock-execute its detainees? And nothing is more sacred to core American values than branding other countries’ armies as “Terrorists” (“The [Revolutionary] Guard is the SS of Iran”).

The stalwarts of the far right must be wetting themselves in abject fear at the thought of restoring basic rights. The horror, the horror…

Sliming Graeme Frost – New York Times
All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they’re “phony soldiers”; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he’s faking his Parkinson’s symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he’s a fraud.

Meanwhile, leading conservative politicians, far from trying to distance themselves from these smears, rush to embrace them. And some people in the news media are still willing to be used as patsies.

Politics aside, the Graeme Frost case demonstrates the true depth of the health care crisis: every other advanced country has universal health insurance, but in America, insurance is now out of reach for many hard-working families, even if they have incomes some might call middle-class.