What matters is that you have a whole lot of people who are either confused, pissed off, or emotionally manipulated enough to attend.

So instead of griping and making fun, why don’t you get your ass out there and get these people’s names, invite them to a meeting, and start educating them about the truth.

All of us woke up at some point or another because someone taught us or influenced us to learn more about liberty and the constitution. It takes people who are willing to be patient and to kindly teach the truth and point out error.

These people are ready to learn; I know because I talked to many of them. They’re ready for something new. Something that works. But yes, they are ignorant in many ways. So what? What matters is that they’re ready to learn now.

If all we do is mock this movement, we’re simply snobs and idiots. If you actually want the message of liberty to spread, you have to do something other than complain.

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/04/17/janeane-garafalo-says-tea-parties-were-for-rednecks/

For what it’s worth, MSNBC’s parent company’s banking division — GE Financial — got $140 billion in bailout money.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/105984-general-electric-gets-a-140b-bailout-what-s-the-point-of-aaa

Moreover, the tea parties offered constructive solutions for reining in big government (contrary to Andrew Sullivan’s unfounded claim that the tea party protests had no “constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending”).

Many of them protested a specific spending program: the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy “in the long run.”

Obama falsely sold the stimulus package to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” even though the CBO pointed out it would eventually shrink the economy. Many protests expressly targeted the stimulus package. See the links in my blog posts at Openmarket entitled “Slandering the Tea Parties.”

Tea parties also targeted the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign at the Olathe tea party, for example).

The money appropriated for the stimulus package has mostly not been spent yet, and much money could be saved by canceling it — and the mortgage bailouts, which also have just begun.

Many of the tea parties protested a specific spending program: the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy “in the long run.”

The “tea party” protests against out-of-control government spending have been very clear in identifying what wasteful spending they object to. One example is the stimulus package, which Obama falsely sold to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but which the CBO repeatedly pointed out would eventually shrink the economy. Many protests expressly targeted the stimulus package. See the links in my blog posts at Openmarket entitled “Slandering the Tea Parties.”

Another example is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign at the Olathe tea party, for example).

For having the temerity to protest broken promises (like Obama’s claim that he would enact a “net spending cut,” discussed in my blog post “Blind to Obama’s Broken Promises”) and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been called “despicable” by a liberal Congresswoman, and attacked in the left-wing blogosphere in the most vicious language as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks” who “got together and tried to start a revolution…to drive the Fascist/Communist n****r out of the White House and stop the f**s from stealing their children.”

As a Harvard-educated, arugula-eating, urban dweller whose office hosted the end of the Washington tea party, I find these claims baffling. I am certainly not afraid of my Asian, black, and Hispanic relatives, my French-born wife, or the gay neighbor whose children play with my daughter.

Andrew Sullivan derides the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”

I did too make “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2008. I publicly called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.

And contrary to Sullivan’s claims, I do indeed have a “constructive and specific argument about how . . . to reduce spending and debt and borrowing” — cancel the wasteful $800 billion stimulus package, most of which has not been spent yet, and may cause inflation when it finally is.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8132577/

It´s wonderful to do while traveling by bus or train… I find that economically these shows are horrible, but I watch Olbermann just to see him mocking O´Reilly and Limbaugh…

They point is that they are lying (maybe to themselves) about what bothers them.

If someone says “I dont like Gov’t spending” but ONLY objects to gov’t spending on X and not on Y and Z, then the logical conclusion is that he does NOT dislike “gov’t spending”. He really just dislikes X. Calling him out on that is legitimate.

You missed the third, and largest, faction that think you guys are just pathetic jokes. We’re not blind. We’re not scared. We’re laughing our assess off at you.

Yeah, there’s a word for that. Typically, the conclusion the papers came to was that this made Montana a swing state. I’m not sure how it shows that Montanans support moderate amounts of activities they’re against.

This used to confuse me…until I was part of an official Libertarian Party campus organization, for two years. It was simply…fuck. Some very intelligent people, but largely a zoo monkey shit-fight.

So I can’t blame people for not supporting a party that nominated, at the statewide level (thrice), a man who TURNED HIMSELF BLUE drinking silver out of fear of Y2K, and was more rabid conservative than libertarian, in any case.

Which brings us to these Tea Parties people, who are limited government on this issue, if nothing else. We’d like to align ourselves with this group on this issue, and nothing else; but when the DNC has jettisoned any chance of picking up this voting bloc, and they can’t bring themselves to vote for a laughable LP, they end up in a GOP in which they do not constitute a large enough percentage to influence primaries.

I did not vote, due to a lack of options.

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/15/a-tax-day-tea-party-cheat-sheet-how-it-all-started/

Started off with the good old pledge of allegiance. Then a good word for our troops overseas protecting our freedom. Then a bunch of words about Obama’s budget. So…the right wing was smiling proudly after the first 20 minutes.

There was a mix of some Gov. Lynch directed venom, and we’ve been invaded by Mass-hole Democrats and the local Republicans are anxious to vent.

There were also die-hard libertarians (I recognized more than a few of them) in the audience.

John Birch Society arrived an hour after it all got started.

Sign grammar was pretty good for New Hampshire!

Message of the day: YOU need to run for office. Get busy.

My skepticism with the Tea Party is that nothing short of several complete collapses of the country and millions of lives diminished will convince people to limit government. But, I’m an optimist…in that eventually we’ll get there…just not in my life…or anyone I know.

Yeah, their ideological impurities disqualify them from having valid concerns about taxation and government spending.

lol brilliant!

And for those of you baffled by the contempt directed at this phenomenon, I suggest you attend one and take your own informal survey of the attendees to ascertain their feelings toward the Patriot Act, FISA violations, the death of habeas corpus, Gitmo, waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, the War On (Some People Who Use Some Kinds Of) Drugs, and on and on. I think you’ll find that most – not all, but most – of the people ranting and raving about “limited government” are sunshine patriots and summer soldiers when it comes to any violation of civil liberties, and that their half-witted understandings of “Taxation Without Representation” and who spends what are their only, and very bad, reasons for being there.

Well, I’m by myself, then. I think the whole thing is bloody horseshit, but not for the reasons that the myopes here do. They think it’s a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. That’s fucking stoopid, but that’s who they are.

No; the thing wrong it is that there is no philosophy under it. These are people who’ve lived with generations of the rot that brought them to the point where the best they can do is sit up and blink their eyes at what’s happening. They don’t really know, and they never really cared. They still don’t.

This is a moment of indigestion. They’ll get over it, and The Endarkenment will proceed.