From Stark
A CBS New York Times poll, conducted after the debt ceiling deal, shows that support for President Barack Obama is stagnating with an approval rating of about 48 percent, but support for the Tea Party has plunged.
In April 2010, 18 percent of Americans polled said they had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party. The most recent poll put the disapproval rating at 40 percent.
The poll also shows that while Obama’s ratings are nothing to brag about, he is well ahead of GOP House leader John Boehner and Congress in general.
The poll also indicates that a big majority of Americans think that job creation is more important than federal deficit-cutting, and 50 percent think the debt ceiling deal should have included steps to increase federal tax revenue. Sixty-three percent said taxes on wealthy households should be increased.
(My favorite part of the poll is where respondents were asked to describe their feelings about “the way things are going in Washington,” with “enthusiastic” being one of the choices. One percent chose “enthusiastic.” )
There will be a lot of new faces in DC iin 2013!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
What is becoming apparent is the gulf between TP rhetoric, their pseudo populism, and the needs of the majority of Americans.
While the Tea Party remains a somewhat untamed phenomenon, as they keep feeding at the Koch trough that’s changing. They may be fresh to the gene pool now, but they’ll be run-o-the mill Republican sheep soon enough.
Frankly, if the trend extends itself two years, nobody will be listening to their scripted idiocy in the coming election. Which, unfortunately, probably means we’ll be stuck with Wall Street’s boy four more years.
….independents don’t really exist–at least not in the way the media and pollsters continue to claim they do, against all available evidence. Last month, Alan Abramowitz wrote another full takedown of the obsession with independents–who usually vote for one party and are not an accurate indicator of the popular vote. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Greg Marx sums it up perfectly: “most ‘independents’ aren’t independent. The ones who are care most about the economy, not displays of bipartisanship. And winning independents doesn’t guarantee you’ll win the popular vote.”
The truth is, firing up your party base is at least as important as appealing to independents, and usually more so…..
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/08/05/gop-media-myth-independent/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
…it is part of a larger liberal pattern of smearing the Tea Party movement during the debate about raising the debt limit. It was not just Mr. Biden and Mr. Doyle who declared small-government Republicans to be the American equivalent of the Taliban or Hizbullah. MSNBC host Chris Matthews likened Tea Partyers to “terrorists” and “hostage-takers.” Newsweek’s Tina Brown called them “suicide bombers.” In short, for the Democratic left, the Tea Party is evil incarnate….
…Leftist expediency now requires that the most heinous, reckless and degrading comments be used. Tea Partyers are not simply being slandered, they are being dehumanized. Ironically, it is liberals who are paving the way for potential political violence. Terrorists, hostage-takers, suicide bombers, neo-Nazis, the Christian Taliban — all of the epithets regularly thrown at Tea Party members by rabid progressives — eventually foster one overriding emotion: hatred. It is not much of a leap for some deranged Democratic activist to conclude that the only way to defeat the phantom specter of marching right-wing jihadists is to slaughter them…..
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2011/k0984_08_05.asp
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Geeeeeeeeeeeez! The “oh poor me” defense.
In as much as the TPers are being used to block taxes on the super rich, force spending cuts on social programs and away from the engorged military budget; and as the overwhelming majority disagree with that agenda, you needn’t worry about someone killing them, Joe. They’re doing fine at political suicide.
Gee – do you suppose people are finally realizing the Tea Partiers are willing to drag down everyone unless they get their way? Perhaps we should rename them the Baby Party?
Be constructive like Tea party.net asks and send a letter to congress;
http://act.theteaparty.net/4897/open-letter-to-congress/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“Watching the extraordinary polarization in Washington today,” said CNN host Fareed Zakaria, “many people have pointed the finger at the tea party. It’s ideologically extreme, refuses to compromise and cares more about purity than problem solving. I happen to agree with much of that critique. … Why has the tea party become so prominent? Why is it able to dominate Washington?”
Answer: President Barack Obama created the tea party…..
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/28/democrat-budget-plan-attack-the-tea-party-and-misquote-reagan/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
How funny!
Between Obama and the Tea Party, it’s hard to figure out which is the shill and which the barker.
One things for sure, they’re working for the same forces, and making us swallow the same snake oil.
AFY, in response to your post above: “Leftist expediency now requires that the most heinous, reckless and degrading comments be used.”
I have 3 words for you: Ann Coulter’s “Demonic.”
So, everything is Obama’s fault then… thanks for clearing that up AFY…
No Aman, Obama has only made it better!
How’s that hope and change working for ya?
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“For two years now, “Blame the Tea Party First” has been the Democrats’ favorite mantra. “Firsters” invoke the Tea Party to make sense–for themselves–of the otherwise inexplicable fact of large-scale public opposition to President Obama, and they hold the Tea Party responsible for many of the nation’s deeper problems, from incivility in our discourse to an inability to set aside intransigent partisanship.
Without the Tea Party, there would be no debt limit negotiations going on, just as there would have been no budget reduction deal last December. Without the Tea Party, President Obama would not be posing as the judicious statesman, but would be pushing –as in truth he still is–for more stimulus….
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/07/15/blaming-it-all-on-the-tea-party/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
without the TEA Party, the US would still have a AAA credit rating.
AFY, you are the man……I feel so damned sorry for the Tea….I wish to apologize to every Tea Banger I ever slighted…I was just too blind to see that one should not blame the lunatics standing along the Guide, waving flags to celebrate an intellectually bankrupt idiotology, all because a few one term so-called leaders of We the Sheeple are taking their own verbal flatulence seriously, bypassing reality and leading the charge down the glory hole…how can we be so compassionless that we would blame idiotic politics on the idiocy fomenting it…just unthinkable, and so unfair………..
Aman, IMHO if cut, cap and balance had passed the Senate and been signed by the Pres as the tea party advocated, there would have been no down grade.
AFY!!theheeholsheepdog!!!
BTW, my ideal plan would be called, cut, cap, balance and reform the tax code!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
LOL! NYT and CBS, what a joke!
Right now, ANY generic Republican would beat Obama by 5% if the election were held next week.
Obama is one and done after this credit downgrade. It’s too bad we can’t just have a lack of confidence vote and get rid of him sooner.
@AFY
And if the Tea Party Caucus hadn’t manufactured a crisis and just increased the debt limit, there would also have been no downgrade.
@John Galt
I recommend you practice your guitar, get your Talkbox out of storage and see if you can get the electorate to clap along when you sing “Do You Feel Like We Do?”, because Obama isn’t going to face any generic republican in 2012 (not next week). He’s going to face one of the mental patients currently vying for the GOP nomination.
It remains puzzling to me, in the wake of this whole debt ceiling/crisis spectacle, why the Obamacrats didn’t simply raise the limit when they controlled both houses of congress last December, and preempt the attack on democratic programs underpinning the economy.
The Democrats are spineless wimps. That’s why they didn’t raise the limit when they had the power. They also were arrogant enough not to take the Tea Party seriously, even after the Koch Brothers started piling up money to finance them after the Citizens United case gave them the go-ahead.
Even though the Tea Partiers are nutcases with no care for the common good, they have plenty of corporate money behind them, so they can buy airtime for their ads and provide advertising money to pressure the news media to spin the news in their direction. Couple that with a President who is willing to cave whenever John Boehner says, “Boo!” and you have the current spectacle.
Obama needs to pull off one of those self-rescues like Cleavon did in Blazing Saddles.
Hold a gun to his own head and plead helpless n-word.
Obama won’t be pinned for the downgrade – that belongs strictly to the fraudsters at Standard and Poors who worked their magic math on the future of American reliability just slightly different than they did the rash of mortgage-backed securities that made them rich.
Greenspan’s Free-market at work!
Polls well before December indicated that Democrats were going to lose the House of Representatives; even the Senate was at risk.
Who’s responsible for passing the debt limit vote to the new congress?
As Obama’s right-hand-man, now the mayor of Chicago, liked to say, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
As the agenda of Obama’s de facto constituency (Wall Street) requires cutting Americans at the bottom loose (eliminating the socio-economic safety net) the crisis was strategic in the two-step underway now. The next crisis, a few months hence, will see the knife come out.
Like the bailout of Wall Street’s millionaires and billionaires earlier, these crisis are well orchestrated events. There are some powerful people who want to take America down.
While these political theatrics distract the citizenry, the ruling elite are getting everything they want. And now, they are coming after our retirement money and Medicare coverage.
Thanks to Obama and Tea Party republicans, they are sure to win, while the people lose.
ghk: “There are some powerful people who want to take America down.”
What I don’t understand is why. I would sincerely appreciate any light shed on what is the long-term benefit and to whom of dragging us down to 2nd world status — the seeming inexorable goal.
Why? The need for power makes men value liberty over equality and brotherhood.
Why? William Fbuckley started a movement.
Why? Gerrymandering, among other reasons, has created a situation in which congressmen campaign all the time and pander to the extremists in their base to avoid losing primaries.
This effort is rooted deep in history, at least as far back as the early 19th century, though the enmity towards democracy goes much farther back.
But for my part, the seed that’s grown some 200 years came in 1811, when the charter for the Rothschilds Bank of the United States ran out and Congress voted against its renewal.
Rothschild (who by then controlled the Bank of England) was un-amused and told the English parliament, “Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war. Teach those impudent Americans a lesson. Bring them back to colonial status.”
They remain central in the international banking cartel behind all the worst financial machinations plaguing the world today, and the oil monopoly. Democracy still remains an obstacle to their vision of financial control of the world. And if you’re going to defeat democracy you must subjugate America.
Really, at the heart of things, there are always the few (elites and the wannabes) who would control the many. If they divide the majority and cause us to forget that our own well being relies on the well being of our fellows, we are doomed.
Their influence is enormous. The issues have been at the heart of political struggle throughout modern time, from before revolutionary times till now.
We must also recognize and understand the immense influence of the legacy of dynastic, familial wealth in America, which was initailly amassed during the Gilded Age, with the rise of the railroad, oil, chemical, rubber, steel, and other industrial monopolies. Perhaps, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Rockefeller family had become the wealthiest and most powerful family in the United States. Soon thereafer, certainly by the first World War, the center of Rockefeller wealth had shifted to the great financial institutions in New York, including the giant investment banks, commercial banks, and insurance companies.
There’s too much socio-economic history to cover in a blog entry, but suffice it to say that the world has never witnessed such vast wealth concentrated in the hands of so few as exists today. In fact, the most credible estimates suggest that fewer than 6,000 individuals control at least half of all the wealth and most of the major financial, economic, industrial, and political institutions, not only in the country, but in the world.
For those who wish to learn more, there are many academic and informative works addressing these issues, such as the following:
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance
Thomas R. Dye, Who’s Running America? The Bush Restoration (7th Edition)
David J. Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
And, for fun, you might read Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich, by Robert Frank.
“Santelli slams the Obama administration for playing the blame game over the downgrade to our credit rating, noting that even if you think it’s a bad call, you don’t beat up the other coach or take the umpire out behind the barn. And he also points out that without Tea Party, we would’ve had a clean debt ceiling increase and our credit rating would have likely been dropped even lower to BBB….
http://www.therightscoop.com/santelli-if-it-wasnt-for-the-tea-party-wed-be-rated-bbb/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Not to dispute Todd2′s acknowledgment, “There’s too much socio-economic history to cover in a blog entry…” here is an excerpt from recent writing by Michael Hudson that puts that history into perspective:
[Poverty] stems from special interests carving out privileges to extract income without any technologically necessary cost of production, but simply by ownership of “tollbooths”: land, mineral rights, or basic monopolies and banks privileged to create credit.
Poverty and austerity are the result of special interests monopolizing the economic surplus at the expense of the economy at large. The main rentiers falling into this category are the financial class, landowners and natural resource owners at the top of the economic pyramid. It is to them that the bottom 90% are indebted and must pay interest, rent, user fees and other access charges. Rent seeking is an economically unnecessary burden – and one from which the classical economists sought to free society. The idea of a “free market” from the Physiocrats and Adam Smith down through John Stuart Mill and the 19th century socialists was to free industrial capitalism from the rentier class that itself was a carry-over from Europe’s feudal epoch.
However, today’s neoliberal advisors turn this classical idea of free markets upside down. Their idea of “free” markets is one free of government price regulation, “free” of taxation on land rent, monopoly rent, financial interest and other categories of what the classical economists called “unearned income.” So we find ourselves with two quite different ideas of the economy. The classical idea was to grow by avoiding “artificial poverty,” purely extractive forms of wealth-seeking at society’s expense.
The neoliberal idea is to dismantle the government’s ability to regulate markets to steer growth and economic advance in the national interest. They claim that this is an alternative to centralized planning. But the reality is that it simply centralizes planning in the hands of bankers – primarily those of Wall Street and the City of London, followed by financial interests in satellite economies and other subordinate partners in this policy.
Neoliberal economists endorse this as being the “natural” way in which economies grow and accumulate wealth. Their concept of “wealth” in this case takes the form of financial riches and special privileges, not the means of production, education and skills, or research and technology. In this respect, “bad” forms of wealth-seeking have become the major threat to national economic growth and power today. This in turn results from a failure to draw the classical economic distinctions between productive and unproductive investment.
@AFY
Good luck with that argument.
….Our nation is crumbling without anyone at the helm. And out of all of this comes the rhetoric that the TEA PARTY is to blame.
Well, okay then, I’m to blame for not wanting to see my country destroyed. I’m guilty for demanding that those in charge stop spending the country into oblivion. I’m guilty of loving the fighting military men and women of our armed forces, and expecting that they have EVERYTHING they need to fight the battles they’ve been called in to fight. I’m guilty of wanting to compassionately take care of those in need, without breaking the backs of those that are being compassionate. I’m guilty of wanting a leader in a time of crisis to lead, and not point fingers at anyone in his line of sight to blame for his failures. I’m guilty of wanting a future for my family and myself. I’m guilty of paying for things and being responsible for the costs, not my neighbor. I’M GUILTY FOR LOVING MY COUNTRY!! There I said it. I’m guilty of all those things and for loving a red, white and blue flag with the stars and stripes.
I’m the TEA PARTY. Are you?
http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=88625
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Samuel Johnson
Some things never change.
@AFY
No… you’re just to blame for the downgrade.
“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
Mark Twain
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Actually, real patriots support their countrymen not their country; and the governed regardless of the government.
Your party, Joe, is only concerned for some of their countrymen and installing a government of like mind.
This is what I’s for; living within our means, and leaving a country for the next generation which is not up to it’s eyeballs in debt, and anyone from either party who supports that; I can support.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Some pudge for your afternoon enjoyment:
….the “Tea Party” proposal was the only one that, guaranteed, actually would’ve prevented a downgrade. Say whatever you like about the S&P statement, but the main concern was ever-increasing debt, and cut/cap/balance (along with similar proposals) would’ve fixed that problem, even if you don’t like other results of it. No other proposals, including the one that passed, seriously deals with the debt. Obama’s guaranteed continuing debt increases, and Boehner’s merely holds out hope for some cuts in the near future….
http://pudge.net/glob/2011/08/tea-party-downgrade.html
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ODowngradev2b.jpg
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“Say whatever you like about the S&P statement, but the main concern was ever-increasing debt”
No, Joe, it was the obstinate refusal by some to consider improving federal revenues as a means to stop ever increasing debt.
And it’s not lost on those of us with eyes and ears who the obstinate be!
@AFY
Having read the S&P report, the concern was about political brinksmanship and concern that the Bush Tax Cuts won’t actually sunset in 2012.
The debt limit being raised was not, itself, a factor.
…the spending reductions in the deal negotiated by President Obama to raise the debt ceiling were entirely and woefully inadequate. Second, the global economy, the national economy, and state finances have all in their own ways been delivered a mighty and frightening body blow….
The objective for the nation, the President, and the joint select committee is clear: drive down spending—including and especially on entitlement programs—toward a balanced budget while protecting America and without raising taxes. Properly done, this would lead to economic growth, more jobs, less government, and a restoration of the nation’s credit rating. It can be done….
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/08/US-Credit-Rating-Downgraded-Now-Theyve-Done-It
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“The objective for the nation, the President, and the joint select committee is clear: drive down spending—”
Well hell, then Joe, let’s ask them to start with stopping the subsidy to SSA and BNSF to help Goldman et al flog coal at Cherry Point.
Are you with us Joe????
You should ask that question of your buddy Patty, she’s on the committee not I.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“…she’s on the committee not I.”
I had been disappointed by her selection, but you’ve shown me it could have been worse. A lot worse!
And why the hard words for Patty? She’s in there pushing for that subsidy you hope will line your pocket.
BTW if there are financial resources available that will bring jobs to our corner of the world, I sure hope we get to partake of those resources before other corners take them for themselves!
If they are going to be spent might as well be here, don’t ya know!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
I’m sure, with that philosophy in every corner of the world, your crusade to cut spending will charge ahead, Joe.
Who said consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds? Seems small minds aren’t really plagued any such way!