Tea baggers joke about Obama being waterboarded, shining the shoes of the Saudi king.

By Amanda Terkel on Apr 15, 2009 at 5:20 pm

Tea party organizers and participants have repeatedly insisted that their nationwide protests today are completely non-partisan and not meant to be anti-Obama. However, there didn’t seem to be any anti-Republican or anti-Bush signs at the protests. Instead, not only were there signs/clothing protest Obama’s policies, but some had violent or racist rhetoric. One participant even asked Joe the Plumber about waterboarding Obama:

Q: If you could waterboard Obama this weekend, what would you try to get out of him? What would you ask him?

WURZELBACHER: (LAUGHTER) Well, I don’t want to waterboard Obama.

Watch it:

Blogger Oliver Willis also saw a sign at the DC protest referencing Obama’s alleged bow to Saudi King Abdullah, saying that if he wasn’t bowing, “then he must have been polishing his shoes.” Dave Weigel from the Washington Independent saw another sign reading, “homey don’t play dat“:

Ironically, the AP reports that Greg Budell — a talk radio host in Montgomery, AL — said that the tea parties could “have the same impact that Montgomerian Rosa Parks had when she refused to move to the back of a city bus during segregation.”

Update

Matt Yglesias writes, “[O]ne of the hallmarks of contemporary American conservatism is that while it’s no longer a white supremacist movement, it is a movement marked by a combination of tolerance for racism with massive oversensitivity about the idea that ‘PC’ forces are stifling freedom.”

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Yglesias

Racist Signs at Tea Parties

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 15, 2009 at 4:55 pm

I mentioned this the other day, but one of the hallmarks of contemporary American conservatism is that while it’s no longer a white supremacist movement, it is a movement marked by a combination of tolerance for racism with massive oversensitivity about the idea that “PC” forces are stifling freedom. Thus it’s no surprise to me that Dave Weigel’s photo essay from today’s tea party included this sign:

Meanwhile, on Fox News today I saw about a million hours of Tea Party coverage, plus a little coverage of Jamie Foxx allegedly making “racially charged” comments against white people, but nothing about racism at tea parties.

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Politics

Pelosi: Tea parties are part of an ‘astroturf’ campaign by ‘some of the wealthiest people in America.’

By Ryan Powers on Apr 15, 2009 at 4:37 pm

This morning on San Francisco’s KTUV News, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) explained that today’s tea party protests are not by any means an organic grassroots movement. Rather, she said, they are a deliberate astroturf campaign organized by two well-funded right-wing think tanks intent on obstructing the Obama agenda:

PELOSI: What they want is a continuation of the failed economic policies of President George Bush which got us in the situation we are in now. What we want is a new direction. … This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.

Watch it:

As ThinkProgress has documented, the principal organizers of the local tea party events are the well-funded right-wing think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. Both of which provided logistical support and public relations assistance, including “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”

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Economy

Flack For Corporate Families Falsely Claims Estate Tax Will Cripple Small Businesses

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 15, 2009 at 4:29 pm

Today, Jeff Cook of the Policy and Taxation Group appeared on CNBC opposite CAPAF’s Michael Ettlinger, and went on a misleading tirade against the estate tax. Cook argued that the estate tax hits “family businesses directly,” causing the loss of “millions of American jobs.”

He also called Ettlinger’s completely accurate number of actual small businesses subject to the estate tax “absurd,” while characterizing Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl’s (R-AZ) proposal to turn the estate tax into a $250 billion giveaway to the rich as a “moderate, mainstream” idea. Watch it:

Labeling the estate tax as crippling for small businesses is a common conservative tactic with no basis in reality. The Tax Policy Center has found that about 100 small businesses and family farms would be subject to the estate tax under President Barack Obama’s proposal, which would tax estates over $7 million at a 45 percent rate. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, almost all “small businesses” affected by the estate tax “are able to pay the tax bill without having to sell business assets.”

As Ettlinger said, Cook’s argument amounts to “flacking for the Paris Hiltons, the rich heirs and heiresses who have nothing to do with small businesses.” Indeed, Cook is one of two listed members of the Policy and Taxation Group, the other of which is Patricia Soldano, who has been crusading against the estate tax for decades. And Soldano is not funded by small businesses, but by extremely wealthy corporate families:

A little-known Southern California estate planner named Patricia Soldano launched her [estate tax] repeal effort with the backing of about 50 wealthy clients, with the Gallo and Mars families leading the way. Other contributors included the heirs of the Campbell soup and Krystal hamburger fortunes. Frank Blethen, whose family controls the Seattle Times Co., was also pivotal.

According to Congress Watch, Soldano likely represents many mega-millionaire and billionaire families, but “since 2000, Soldano has chosen to mask her clients’ identities by reporting the Policy and Taxation Group as lobbying on its own behalf.” “We don’t disclose our membership to anybody,” she says. Since 2001, the Policy and Taxation group has reported more than $4 million in lobbying income.

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Yglesias

How to Think About Public Health Taxes

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 15, 2009 at 4:13 pm

I don’t know anything about Will Saletan’s article “Sweet Surrender: Taxing soda to make you stop drinking it” other than the title. But I do know the title, and I don’t think that’s the right way to think about the case for taxing soda.

Think about the case for taxing income, via the income tax and FICA. Why do it? Well, to get the money. That’s how we finance Social Security, the Department of Defense, Medicare, interest payments on the national debt, Medicaid, federal aid to schools, veterans’ health care and benefits, the FBI, etc. Now what’s the case against taxing people’s income? Well, it’s that it discourages work and it discourages investment. And that’s bad for the economy. Now we go back and forth over whether any given expenditure has a value that outweighs the economic costs. Liberals, like me, tend to think that a relatively high level of expenditure is justified whereas folks on the right tend to disagree.

But what if we could raise some revenue by taxing something else? Like, say, cigarettes. Or soda. Or booze. Well, then the case for doing the taxing remains similar—you can fund useful programs with it. But the case against looks a lot weaker, since reducing consumption of cigarettes or soda is not so bad. You introducing a little bit of allocative distortion into the economy, but not a huge amount, and you’re improving public health which is going to be beneficial.

There are limits to how much you can raise through these kinds of methods before you create problematic black markets. But at the margin, it makes sense to try to raise revenue through taxing environmental and public health hazards rather than, say, FICA or the ten percent income tax bracket.

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Media

Fox Reporter Contradicts Fox: DHS Report On Right Wing Was ‘Requested By The Bush Administration’

By ThinkProgress on Apr 15, 2009 at 3:40 pm

Yesterday, a Department of Homeland Security report about the rising radicalization of “rightwing extremists” was leaked. The right wing was immediately incensed, viewing the report on radical “extremists” as an attack on “conservatives.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, for example, tried to suggest it was a report about Republican “loyalists.”

However, this morning, Fox News’s Catherine Herridge revealed that the report, along with an earlier report on radicalized left-wing groups, was actually “requested by the Bush administration” but not completed until recently:

HERRIDGE: Well this is an element of the story which has largely gone unreported. One looks at right-wing groups, as you mentioned. And a second is on left-wing groups. Significantly, both were requested by the Bush administration but not finished until President Bush left office.

Herridge’s reporting undermines her network’s own “reporting” over the past 24 hours. Since news of the DHS assessment broke yesterday, Fox anchors and guests have been seizing upon the report as evidence that the administration is trying to intimidate tea party goers or “stifle speech”:

– ANDREA TANTAROS: It’s free speech and the Obama administration is trying to shut it down.

– JAY ALAN SEKULOW: The Obama administration here under Department of Homeland Security has allowed a new regime to come into place that basically says this: Our focus is going to be on the right-wing groups.

– SEAN HANNITY: What do you think of that interpretation, especially coming from a guy that started his political career in the home of an unrepentant terrorist who bombed the Pentagon and capital and sat in Reverend Wright’s church for 20 years?

– DANA PERINO: If Bush had done that we would be having a very different conversation. It wouldn’t have taken a week to find it out. There would have been a special prosecutor. We would have had to come out and apologize.

Watch a compilation, ending with Herridge’s report:

To recap, the Obama administration was apparently following the lead of the Bush Homeland Security Department in assessing the very real threat of violent right-wing extremism. Indeed, Bush appointees such as FBI Director Robert Mueller have acknowledged the threat of right-wing extremism multiple times.

Of course, we can always trust Fox News to jump to conclusions before fully weighing the facts.

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Media

Stars Sans Fards

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 15, 2009 at 3:24 pm

French Elle is kind of outside my usual beat, but this post from Miriam at Feministing piqued my interest. Jennifer Romolini at Shine reports with a “Yay!” that:

The April issue of French Elle features eight female European celebrities–including Eva Herzigova, Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau, and Charlotte Rampling–all without makeup and, perhaps even more revealing, all entirely without Photoshopping or retouching of any kind.

Miriam says “I think this is great, particularly in an era when the only time you see celebrities without makeup is from terrible paparazzi shots.”

In some ways, I think this might actually be a step back. A lot of people have done a lot of work over the years to get people to understand that images you see on magazine covers are not images of actual human beings. They’re complicated collaborations between photographers, hairstylists, makeup people, and digital image-retouchers that use real people as an important element of source material. The results have an extremely vivid hyperreal quality to them that we intuitively respond to as if we’re just looking at pictures of people, but we can come to understand what’s really happening and that nobody ought to beat themselves up over not looking like a computer-retouched image.

The “stars sans fards” initiative seems, especially when you consider the meaning of the French idiom, to be a deliberate effort to re-inject the artifice into the conversation under guise of rejecting it. Obviously, artifice hasn’t, in fact, been done away with here. The lighting, the attire, etc. is all being professionally done; vast quantities of film is being shot and only the very best images selected; and the “stars” being presented “sans fards” are extreme outliers in the genetic lottery. All of which is no worse than conventional magazine cover art, but it’s not really any better. And just at a time when public awareness of the fakeness of magazine covers is growing, we get a new artifice presented as unadorned reality.

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Security

Moving Beyond ‘Strategic Rent’ In Pakistan

By Peter Juul, Guest Blogger on Apr 15, 2009 at 3:14 pm

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the growing convergence of Punjabi and tribal area-based militant groups in Pakistan. The relationship between these two geographically distinct militant groups is more than ideological — tribal militants and al Qaeda have money, training sites and sanctuaries, and suicide bombs, while Punjabi militants have logistical networks in major cities like Lahore to survey possible targets and safe-house bombers. As Bruce Reidel, a former CIA analyst and the head of President Obama’s Pakistan and Afghanistan policy review, put it, “You are seeing more of a coalescence of these militant groups… Connections that have always existed are becoming tighter and more public than they have in the past.”

As CAP Senior Fellow Brian Katulis and I noted at the end of March, Pakistani militants were more likely to penetrate deeper into a weak Pakistan than they were to conduct their own “surge” against additional American forces in Afghanistan. Using existing links, militants (some still sponsored by elements of the Pakistani security establishment) have mounted increasing attacks deep in Pakistan’s “settled” areas -– especially Punjab -– even before President Obama announced his new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

This more public alliance between militant groups has been driven not by a build-up of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or increased U.S. drone strikes in the tribal region but by former President Pervez Musharraf’s military assault on the vigilante Red Mosque compound in Islamabad in July 2007. It’s also a consequence of the myriad dysfunctions of the Pakistani state –- which include double games with militant groups, politicians concerned more with intrigue than national interests, and the overall inability to govern the country.

Most people in the upper echelons of the Pakistani state seem to prefer to look the other way as militants gobble up sections of the country outside the tribal areas -– President Asif Ali Zardari recently assented to imposing Islamic law in the Swat region, effectively turning that area over to militants. As a Punjab landlord told the Times, “The government is useless… They live happy, secure lives in Lahore. Their children study abroad. They only come here to contest elections.”

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Politics

Limbaugh Agrees With ‘Some Guy Named Shakir’: Tea Baggers Rooting For Obama To Fail

By Faiz Shakir on Apr 15, 2009 at 2:51 pm

This morning, I appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss today’s nationwide tea party protests, and I made the following observation:

It’s “Fox News Protesters Against Obama,” at the end of the day. … What we shouldn’t forget is that Rush Limbaugh, who has said he hopes Obama fails, this is now the fruition of that effort. For the people who are hoping that Obama fails and actively plotting for his failure, this is what this effort is trying to do.

And I hope that the majority of the American public who agree with where President Obama stands and where he wants to take this country, understand that this is an effort that simply is trying to derail that.

On his radio show this afternoon, Limbaugh aired the clip of my appearance and responded to my argument by agreeing with me. He struggled with pronouncing my first name (note: it’s pronounced “Faiz” like “jazz”), so he referred to me as “some guy named Shakir from ThinkProgress.” Speaking about the tea party protesters, Limbaugh proceeded to say:

They’re not trying to derail failure. They want failure! He’s exactly right about that. These are people – and they’re not all Republicans. … Of course they want him to fail!

Media Matters provides the audio: