Midweek Mayhem II – The “Tea Party Edition”

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It’s been a busy week in OLV Land, so forgive the time away. That’s the trouble with day jobs – they keep us wacko progressives honest, sometimes until very late into the night!

With that, here are a few snippets to highlight the world’s wackiness since the last time we met. We promise more articles this coming weekend – even work can’t keep us away from our keyboards all the time.

OMG – The Tea Party found a black man!!

And what ’s more amazing… his name isn’t Michael Steele!

Of course, once you watch Lloyd Marcus sing the “Tea Party Anthem”, you just might urge the Tea Party to throw him back. Please note when they scan across the stage and across the crowd…. can you find another person of color anywhere? Finding diversity in a Tea Party gathering is like playing “Where’s Waldo” – only in this case someone found Waldo and made sure he was in the middle of the page. We count one other black person and one Asian…hardly the representative sample that the Tea Party pretends to portray.

On that note, here is another CBS piece on the same rally. This is an interesting clip in that it discusses the inconsistencies of the “movement’s” own members, and draws a more accurate picture of the face of this group. Once again, count the people of color in the entire piece – we couldn’t find one.

Companion Piece

Here is a companion article describing what the Tea Party really “looks” like. And the article asks a great question…. given how little of the population the Tea Party truly represents, is it worth all of the fuss?

We think this is an arguable question. While the movement itself does not represent even a sizable minority population, the anger and venom released by Party followers, along with the cultivation of these followers by “mainstream” Republican officials who see these people as a means for getting elected, merit some attention.

This most recent poll tells us what we already knew about the Tea Party members… they are older, white, southern, Protestant and conservative. Now there’s a news flash.

Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe
Posted by Brian Montopoli

They’re white. They’re older. And they’re angry.

CBS News and the New York Times surveyed 1,580 adults, including 881 self-identified Tea Party supporters, to get a snapshot of the Tea Party movement. There is a lot of information to unpack; let’s begin with the demographics.

Eighteen percent of Americans identify as Tea Party supporters. The vast majority of them — 89 percent — are white. Just one percent is black.

They tend to skew older: Three in four are 45 years old or older, including 29 percent who are 65 plus. They are also more likely to be men (59 percent) than women (41 percent).

More than one in three (36 percent) hails from the South, far more than any other region. Twenty-five percent come from the West, 22 percent from the Midwest, and 18 percent from the northeast.

Read the entire article at CBS News…

Tea Party Militia

Sticking with our Tea Party theme, and understanding that we simply don’t have enough wingnut militias in this nation, Oklahoma lawmakers working with Tea Party followers are now contemplating a volunteer militia. The purpose of the militia? Why, of course its to stave off dastardly federal intrusion on state sovereignty.

Apparently the wingnuts in Oklahoma have never heard of the Oklahoma City bombing, or else they’re inspired by it. In either case, this is exactly radical conservative separatist movement that inspires the less mentally sound to act out.

Okla. tea parties and lawmakers envision militia
By Sean Murphy and Tim Talley / Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY — Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

Tea party movement leaders say they’ve discussed the idea with several supportive lawmakers and hope to get legislation next year to recognize a new volunteer force. They say the unit would not resemble militia groups that have been raided for allegedly plotting attacks on law enforcement officers.

“Is it scary? It sure is,” said tea party leader Al Gerhart of Oklahoma City, who heads an umbrella group of tea party factions called the Oklahoma Constitutional Alliance. “But when do the states stop rolling over for the federal government?”

Read the entire article at MichaelMoore.com…

The U.S.’s “original sin” – not a “bad thing”

Finally, it does seem appropriate to end this evening with a piece from Eugene Robinson, who again touches on the Virginia celebration of the Confederacy. This time however, Robinson targets the clueless reaction of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to the controversy. Robinson also deftly dismantles the southern claim that the Civil War was about issues other than slavery.

It occurs to us that little has changed since the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bitter southern whites (who like the Tea Party are predominantly male, conservative and Protestant) still live in denial about the state sanctioned atrocities committed against other human beings, and about the fact that the southern states started a traitorous was to protect a valuable “state right” – the right to own other human beings. All that has changed now is that the power of the federal government is on side of equality… yet another reason why the Tea Party followers and other angry conservatives hate the federal government and issue calls for revolution and secession.

Let’s underscore here the fact that in numerous ways the federal government created its own problem, dating all the way back to manner in which Reconstruction was handled. The Ku Klux Klan emerged during that period as a part of violent resistance to U.S. government policies. Thus, it is reasonably easy to understand why the Confederacy is unrealistically romanticized in the South.  And generations of Americans have come and gone since that time, adding to the myths and lore surrounding a movement that by any objective measure can only be described as racist and traitorous.

But this is not the world of the 1860s and 1870s. It is time for people to take responsibility for their own prejudices, and for us as a people and nation to come together and acknowledge that a great wrong was committed, and it is not a wrong that will be corrected through just time, or even with the election of a black president. And it is time for people to stop passing their hate and bitterness along generation after generation. I get tired of having to de-program my children after time spent with their grandparents… maybe it’s time for grandma and grandpa to de-program themselves.

The Confederacy Isn’t Something to Be Proud Of
By Eugene Robinson

It was bad enough when Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery, but at least he came to his senses and apologized. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s contention that the whole controversy “doesn’t amount to diddly” is much worse.

“I don’t know what you would say about slavery,” Barbour told CNN, “but anybody that thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing, I think that goes without saying.”

And that’s the problem—Barbour thinks it “goes without saying.” The governor of the state whose population includes the highest percentage of African-Americans in the nation believes it is appropriate to “honor” those who fought for the Confederacy. Clearly, he has no problem with revisiting the distant past. Yet he sees no reason to mention the vile, unthinkable practices—state-sanctioned kidnapping, torture and rape—that those Confederate soldiers were fighting to protect.

Read the entire article at Truthdig…