Sam Smith: How To Outflank The Tea Party (And Barack Obama)

"...we are faced with a politics reduced to two Mafia mobs, between which we will be asked to choose in 2012."

Sam Smith writes at the Progressive Review:
Pablo Davis in Memphis sent me a quote from the Argentinian essayist Arturo Jauretche that got me thinking about the key question of the day in a different sort of way.

That question, if you haven’t noticed, is this: what the hell do we do now?

The quote from Jauretche was: “The technique of our enemies is to demoralize and depress the people. Demoralized people don’t triumph and that’s was we come here today to battle joyfully. Nothing great can be accomplished from sadness. “

One of the reasons the right is doing so much better than the left these days is that the right has passion, while the left mostly has logic.

The problem with logic is that it easily ignores the passionate and the joyful. In its name, we trivialize the trivial, discounting the importance of the little things that keep people going in bad times.

The journalist Russell Baker understood this, writing once that, “Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard ... Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared to adults as a class ... Adults, on the whole, are solemn ... Being solemn has almost nothing to do with being serious.”

I understood this from an early age because my introduction to politics was not ideological or logical but as an eleven year old stuffing envelopes in a campaign that ended 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. I had never seen anything quite as much fun and exciting as a political campaign office.

Many years later, I would write, “We have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers. Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation." ...>more

Democratic Group Asks Koch Brothers for Donations After Attacking Them

It's official: there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans

Chris Moody reports at The Ticket:
Koch Industries, the billion-dollar energy conglomerate that faces regular attacks from liberal groups for donating millions to conservative and free-market political causes, reported that a national Democratic group approached the company seeking campaign donations. The appeal went out out over the signature of Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).

The DSCC asked Koch for a five-figure donation, a request the company is making very public after it weathered months of criticism from Democrats, including the DSCC.

A Koch spokesman responded to the request with a scathing letter to Murray.

"For many months now, your colleagues in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leadership have engaged in a series of disparagements and ad hominem attacks about us, apparently as part of a concerted political and fundraising strategy," wrote Philip Ellender, Koch's president of government and public affairs. "So you can imagine my chagrin when I got a letter from you on June 17 asking us to make five-figure contributions to the DSCC. You followed that up with a voicemail indicating that, if we contributed heavily enough, we would garner an invitation to join you and other Democratic leaders at a retreat in Kiawah Island this September." ...>more

Twittergate! How Internet Jerks Pranked The Tea Party

Hysterical Glenn Beck Claims Democrats Paid "E-Thugs" To Provoke Teabaggers Online



Adrian Chen reports at Gawker:

The best way to deal with jerks online is to ignore them. But when prominent Tea Partiers on Twitter started being harassed by a group of Internet trolls, they launched a twitter militia and concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory.

Twittergate is the hottest new conspiracy theory out of the conservative blogosphere. Yesterday, Glenn Beck's news site, The Blaze, posted an epic YouTube video which purports to expose a massive conspiracy by Democrats to take over Twitter: "DID DEMOCRATS HIRE A ‘TWITTER-THUG' TO SMEAR THE TEA PARTY?" The Blaze asks. ...more

Teabaggers At Play

White Powder Mailed to NY Congressman's Office in Wake of Healthcare Vote Determined to be "Not Hazardous"


via WABC-TV, New York City:

KEW GARDENS (WABC) -- New York Police Department field tests have ruled a white powder sent with a threatening letter to the Queens office of Congressman Anthony Weiner is not hazardous.

Workers reported the discovery in the Kew Gardens Road office just before 1:50 p.m.

Nine people in the office were being checked out, although none were reported to be injured.

Police say the letter was handwritten in block letters and made a threat related to Weiner's vote on the sweeping federal health care legislation.

Workers were decontaminated as a precaution. More sophisticated lab testing would also be done to determine the substance.

It was the latest in a string of several threats made against Weiner and apparently linked to the health care vote... >more

And, via Gawker, here's your latest Teabagger Terror Roundup!