There's a new NY Times/CBS poll on the teabaggers, and guess what? It only confirms what we've been saying all along. They are mostly white male conservative sore losers who hate the poor and hate President Obama. Which means of course that they dislike black people, and are staunch Birthers and climate-change deniers. And they fall in line with the GOP because they do not want a third party.

The NY Times gave 17 Tea Party people 34 minutes of free ad time by posting videos of each one of their complaints. Did the Times do that for the blogosphere when we first started to rise? Did they do it when there were major Iraq war and immigration reform protests? Nope.

Anyway, Digby has a full rundown on the poll, so read the whole post because it's awesome. I'll only quote her wrapup.

They say the don't like the GOP 54% to 43%. But 92% of them despise the Democrats.

--

There's nothing particularly surprising about the rest of them either. These people are nothing new. They have different iterations, but when you get right down to it they are, quite simply, the far right. They hate poor people (especially blacks) and they hate government that helps poor people (especially blacks.) They are deluded about taxes and spending and are paranoid about the government being infiltrated by "the other." They believe they are the only "true" Americans and alternate between insisting that their "traditional values" are best represented by the Bible or the Constitution, both of which they believe they are ordained by God to properly interpret. And they do not really believe in democracy which is really why they hate the government.

When they lose they stage a national hissy fit of epic proportions and persuade the Village (where they are perceived as the personification of the heartland of America) that they are something very important. Now that they have their very own TV and radio networks featuring crazed right wing demagogues 24/7, they are more successful on those terms than ever. But they are nothing new, nothing new at all. They are mostly a bunch of cranky, white men with money who are trying desperately to hang on to their privileges. Same as it ever was.

They are what we have called "Republicans" for at least the last 30 years.

Most of them get their information from FOX News because they don't read websites and only 6% believe George Bush had anything to do with the deficit. Oh, and only 20% of them have heard of Ron Paul and they just love Glenn Beck. Why the media is spending so much time trying to figure these people out is a mystery to me now. They are arch-conservative racist wingnuts who hate the government, but still want their Social Security and Medicare.

Poll after poll will say the same thing. When they lose they get angry. When they get angry they make f*&ked up signs and scream in town hall meetings about the Constitution.

UPDATE: Rick Perlstein writes an incredible historical comparison in the NY Times about the teabaggers of today and yesteryear.

Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear.

“I just don’t have time for anything,” a housewife told a news magazine in 1961. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”

Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’s new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones establishing that the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government.

Continue reading »

Aravosis at AmericaBlog noticed this one...I guess that McCain should thank his lucky stars that most GOP are low info voters, so hopefully not many of them picked up on this:

This, two weeks after he said that Spain was in Latin America. Here's the video from McCain's economic forum that just took place today - Ben Smith has the transcript:

McCain, talking about energy policy, stresses the importance of "ensuring that America is secure, and not dependent on oil from people like Hugo Chavez or other parts of the Middle East which is, as we know, could be destabilized under certain sets of circumstances."

Can we just get this guy a map or a little mini-globe that some staffer can keep handy?

Islamofascists are so passe. I guess Russia is the big bad evil now. Bush and McCain never did catch Bin Laden though. I think they know where Putin is...

I always wanted to be fluent in another language. I studied Spanish in school, passed my HS Regents exam back in the day, but never got it down. I never learned Italian because of the racism that my grandparents faced when they came to the US in 1915. Studying a new language in school actually helps a person "think" better as far as I'm concerned. Maybe that's why right wingers hate Obama's idea so much.

Predictably, right-wingers flew into a rage at Obama's un-American call for better language skills. For example, John McCormack at the Weakly Standard labeled language education as snobbery and elitism. John Derbyshire called Obama's suggestion "idiotic" because "not many human beings can learn another language", as his own failures prove. He combines that with characteristic condescension:

In fact, below some cutoff point, which I'd guess at around minus one standard deviation in IQ (that would encompass sixteen percent of the population), education beyond the three R's is a waste of time, and foreign-language instruction a total waste of time.

What, my good pal John Derbyshire had a tough time learning another language? Well, that's not surprising. And since most Europeans speak many languages, are they just smarter? I don't think so. It's because all the countries do so much business together and are so close in proximity that it makes sense all around.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

Jon Stewart & Co. do a compare and contrast of the speeches given by the presumptive nominees Tuesday night, and guess who came up lacking?

Some helpful advice from the authorities. I guess Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" program is so 1981. Open thread below....

Who's a better environmentalist, John McCain or a slightly stale carrot? Okay, I guess the image gives it away. From MoveOn's new Bush/McCain/Carrot challenge.

Open Thread below....

These are the top 10 Most Influential Political Pundits in America, according to the Telegraph UK. Sing along with me: "One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong. Can you guess which thing is not like the other..." The rest of the list is hardly comforting either: 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50

And this is the sad state of political dialogue in the US today. Digby continues:

I have long held that the reason so many people hate liberals in this country is because the right convinced them that all of those pictured above who are not right wing icons --- are liberal. No wonder they hate us. With the exception of Jon Stewart, they are all immense jackasses.

The list includes a few Democratic political operatives and a handful of intelligent liberals like Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow who are listed at 48 and 50, but for the most part they are rich, mainstream gasbags and conservative dickheads.

I have no idea what criteria the Telegraph used to make these judgments (and they seem not to make any distinction between political operatives and pundits) but I don't think they are far off in their assessments, even if they were made for the wrong reasons. They are the most influential --- and that's the problem. When three of the top liberal pundits in the country are actually comedians (no matter how funny), you know there's a problem.

Sometimes the comedy just writes itself. PZ Meyers gets expelled from the creationist propaganda movie "Expelled" before entering---but you'll never guess who took his place....

..and throws in some jokes, of course.

(part 2 here)

Franken's opponent, staunch Bush-ally Norm Coleman, is already on the offensive against Franken, drawing on his past as a satirist to argue that he is unfit to be a Senator. Seems to me that someone who votes with Bush 86% of the time is unfit for anything, let alone one of the nation's highest offices. I guess it will be up to the good people of Minnesota to decide that.

We're proud to have Al as one of our ActBlue candidates. Feel free to fill the coffers if you can. How nice would it be to replace a steadfast Bush loyalist with a true progressive, running on a platform of ending the war in Iraq and providing universal health care? Sounds pretty good to me.

For more on the race, check out MNpublius, who does a great job of tracking Minnesota politics.