Teaparty socialists

In the right wing country the United States the most Republican state is probably Utah. There are no real Democrats to check them, so in Utah we get to see what the Teaparty looks like when they rule. Having huge numbers of Republican sheep is not enough, they need to gerrymander and have closed primaries. Can you say "elite"? And they have all sorts of laws to restricting personal behavior, so their talk of liberty are simply lies. They have huge income transfers to support their socialist school system. So what does the teaparty bring when they get power:

1. high taxes
2. income transfer
3. laws to restrict liberty

In summary, the more they talk about a "principle", the less likely they are to have it.

Mike Lee, Chinese tool

On Senate candidate Mike Lee's web page he begins with a balanced budget amendment. Suppose we have a war with the Chinese. Will we throw rocks? One of the first rules of war is to figure out what your adversary wants you to do, and then do something different. Mike Lee instead promotes exactly what the Chinese want. I do not believe Mr. Lee is actually a Chinese agent despite acting like one. It just goes to show being a corporate shill lawyer does not prepare one for the real world. Good thing our founding fathers were not as dangerously naive as Mr. Lee-- they beat the British by deficit spending-- if Mr. Lee had had his way the redcoats would have won. Winston Churchill is having a laugh over this silly boy thinking how the Nazis would have won had Lee been in charge of the allies making sure no tanks got built and no war bonds got issued.

Obama the socialist?

Of all the factually challenged beliefs of the Tea Party, perhaps the most ridiculous is that Obama is a socialist. His economic team are hard-core establishment free market proponents. But perhaps that is cover in his "Kenyan Conspiracy". But in a country whose national security is tied closely with to its economy, a rational argument could be made that the banks should have been nationalized after they almost destroyed our economy with epic incompetence. It would have been easy to sell the public too. Obama went nowhere near that. Case closed.

How much is a trillion?

In the US a trillion is 1 followed by 12 zeros, or a million millions. The estimate for the Iraq war is about 3 trillion. The number of household in the US is around 100 million. So whenever we spend a trillion dollars that is about $10,000 per household. So for Iraq, we could have sent one kid to college per household, or provided five years of daycare, or a few thousand bottles of vodka.

We need to privatize the military?

Tea party folks say that we need to eliminate or privatize social security and medicare because they are not self-supporting and their costs are escalating due to improved technology that is outpacing income. In addition, the constitution talks about "general welfare" but it is not explicit that means physical welfare of individuals. The military is also not self-supporting and has rising costs due to technology. The constitution talks about defense, but does not say anything about having a military larger than all our foes and allies put together. As the tea partiers are always reminding us how THEIR views are based on principles, I assume we'll hear a call for downsizing the military 90% soon.

Mike Lee's "Rand Paul Moment"

Mike Lee appears to have some problems with the federal government manhandling the racist states in the 60s to give up their "right" to abuse blacks. Listen to 4:14-4:45 here:
http://www.mikelee2010.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/mikelee_kznu_20100517.mp3
Here is that exchange:
DJ: You know really that tells us that she will be doing a lot of on the job training,
which is not what we want for a supreme court justice.
Lee: Yeah, I think that's right. We've learned through experience that in many instances, if you've got someone that doesn't have a whole lot of a track record, and if they have to be trained on the job, they are not going to turn out the way you want. The name "Earl Warren" comes to mind.
DJ: Yeah, there we go.

Apparently Mr. Lee has a problem with Earl Warren as he brought that up as a damning comment. Warren's big cases were those that prevented states from abusing citizens, particularly in the areas of race and state-imposed religion. Given Utah's troubled recent past with racism (e.g., 1973, MLK day) and the lack of separation of church and state (e.g., tax system designed for income transfer from non-Mormons to Mormons, gerrymandering to disenfranchise non-Mormons, utter lack of ethics on the part of the Mormon Church and Mormon SLC city council members in their "sale" of Main Street), it is easy to see why Mr. Lee is popular there. It is pretty obvious the Tea Party is mainly a white power movement.

Top 5 ways the Tea Party is like Al Queda

1. A strong belief in one religion's right to govern a certain region.
2. A desire to return to a "golden age" by adopting the values of people that lived centuries ago.
3. Though it is marketed as a people's movement, it is orchestrated by millionaires.
4. The spread of conspiracy theories by fake news TV and the internet, with no fact checking.
5. Being composed largely of one ethnic group that at one time ensured its success by subjugating other ethnic groups in their region (see 2).