Tag Archives: tea party

Tea Party version 1.1

Aside from being jihadists, hostage takers, and terrorists, some say that the Tea Party version 1.1 (version 1.0 was racist) has no interest in governing.

Wedding Party

American TV networks flocked to the Royal Wedding even though viewers had to rise at 4 am to see it live.  The crowd outside Westminster Abbey was pegged at 1 million.  Easy for them, they were on London Time.  I settled for the replay.

Strange that royalty should be so popular here in the land of the Tea Party.  It’s complicated.

NPR Seeks Tea Party Invitation

NPR faces the same federal defunding fate as cowboy poets.  Former NPR executive Robert Schiller was caught on tape calling members of the Tea Party gun toting racists.  That cost him his next job at the Aspen Institute (he was already leaving NPR).  NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (unrelated) got the axe too.

Some of NPR’s top guns, including Robert Siegel, Scott Simon, and Nina Totenberg, put out an open letter denouncing Robert Schiller’s comments. Here’s an LA Times story.

I wonder if cowboy poets tote guns.

Fighting Words

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has used the Tucson tragedy as a platform to attack his political enemies.  Paul Krugman did the same even before Dupnik’s yellow crime scene tape was up.  Los Angeles Times columnist, Andrew Malcolm, takes a dim view of Dupnik’s police work.  Victor Davis Hanson wonders, in National Review, why people like Dupnik and Krugman focus on Sara Palin’s crosshairs on a map but not the president’s search for an ass to kick. And finally, here’s the Krugman view expressed in a more thoughtful way by Jacob Weisberg in Slate.

If some deranged person strangles an elephant, I’m in trouble.

This item from today’s NYT is by Yale history professor Joanne Freeman on congressional violence – by congressmen!- back in the good old days.  I met Joanne at a conference in Boise last October.  She spent 10 years digging up stuff for a book about duels, fist fights, and other interesting behavior in Congress.

Junk Science

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I got the idea for this one from Charles Krauthammer’s Friday “Don’t Touch my Junk” column and the PETA “We’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign.  Some things just go together.

Here’s a link to the John “If You Touch My Junk I’m Gonna Have You Arrested” Tyner cell phone video of his own last stand against TSA.