I like how "Real Americans" are all fat and sitting around. It makes me laugh...the rest makes me cry

I'm curious but too busy with other things to look: has any teabagger made any anti-corporate statement or promoted personal fiscal and health responsibility to reduce governmental burden --> governmental budget --> government size? How about constructive proposals?

Democrats don't know how to fight dirty. After Republicans impeached Clinton, they still didn't fight back. They have this pathetic hope that reason will win out. It won't. They need passion, emotion. Like accussing the Tea Baggers of being racist. Nothing. How about Republicans pandering to religious fanatics that want to start a religious war? Obama invites them to his inauguration! A lot of good that did! It alienated his supporters and made his opponents even bolder! What is wrong with them?

As long as a large percentage of the Democrats' base can't be bothered to vote, they'll always be a second-class party.

I've been following the buzz in the conservative blogosphere, and right on schedule the rhetoric has shifted from endlessly trumpeting the self-evidence of hard-right Tea Party anti-government dogma to imprecations to elect as many Republicans as possible, whether they are sufficiently conservative or not. So that's the gambit that's they're playing: Pretend to be a third party, sort of Libertarian-lite, when they're tapping into public anger, and then fold all those voters right back into the Republican camp after the primaries. Looks like it might work in the short term.

And of course, it's being presented as "hold your noses and vote for centrists, because this is war and our very way of life is at stake," complete with strained WWII references and everything. I don't know why, but conservatives think everything is a war, and every war is WWII.

The thing is, it's not a dumb movement. It may consist of a lot of uninformed people out at the rallies, but that's part of its design. Just like the Southern Strategy. The people running this movement are not dumb—they're smart, filthy rich, very scary, and they know exactly what they're doing. And it's working.

I personally thought that the B-roll was every bit as snappy as the one last week. These people are terrifying to me.

It's also worth mentioning that our chill-inducing contemplation amongst ourselves of wicked cigar-chomping overlord masterminds does nothing to reach those whom the masterminds have reached out to speak to directly. Our standoffishness and pantomime horror is not just part of the problem but a co-creator of the problem.

We give this woman a soapbox to speak about Jesus, yet we are infringing upon her rights ...

oh it hurts ... so sad.

Does anyone else NOT give a fuck about Acorn anymore? Why is Acorn so disproportionately demonized?

@6) Like I say in the post, it's an impressive strategy. Brilliant, really. But the movement itself--the people moving--are not.

#9--"Why is Acorn so disproportionately demonized? "

Because what they believe the Acorn scandal was about magically confirmed everything that the Right had already thought about the Left...which is "all they need to know."

And no one can tell them differently.

It is that "absolute certainty" that defines this movement--which makes it almost unassailable by the Left.

Vince @ #3 said that the problem is that the Left doesn't know how to fight dirty. I don't think that's it...

The real "problem" is that, by and large, the Left comes to its views by way of the scientific method...and constantly has to test itself with worries of "Well, what if I'm wrong...?"

...and the Right is quite content with "Well, I know for certain that I'm right."

We're trying to counter certainty with accuracy. Good luck to us.

(And one of the things that the Right "knows for certain" is that Left are simply smug and self-righteous bastards who assume that they always know what's right...which is part of the Tea Party wicked brilliance: they always accuse the other side of their own sins...only to do so louder and without any pause for self-reflection.)

A note from the Department of Corrections about the incorrect use of the term "B-roll". B-roll is not the footage you didn't use, but rather the footage not necessarily of the main subject or point of the film that is used as coverage over the main footage to hide edits and add visual context. Interview a bunch of lard assed racists when the point is to expose lard assed racists? That's all A-roll. B-roll is getting some shots of those lard assed racists crossing the street or some shots of the Capitol building.
Playing more interviews that didn't make the first cut is just releasing unedited content, not B-roll.

I am consistently appalled at the number of flag code violations at conservative events.

Right, not B-roll, but deleted scenes that will be valuable as EXTRAS material for the DVD release.

I made it to 7:14. I couldn't stand anymore after watching fat, Jesus lady get riled up because she couldn't answer the simple question as to how her right to talk about Jesus had been violated. She was worried about her toes getting stepped on, but I think she rides around on a Rascal scooter all the time. You might notice she made a special point to mention her right to SIT, not just stand, and talk about Jesus. I think the only thing she's truly gotten riled up over is an empty Krispy Kreme box.

I don't know if offering free Statistics and Probability courses to the folks would do any good, free education being a classic method of practicing socialism after all, but they desperately need it. Just a little lesson on rates of change and such, perhaps a chart with a graph showing the monthly loss in jobs nationwide before the stimulus vs. after the stimulus, while showing the first curve without any stimulus at all.

This is just grotesque.

Jesus, you guys.

These people are Americans -- they're our countrymen and women. You can't make them go away, you can't win a "culture war" with them. And they don't have the market cornered on stupidity. Go to The Evergreen State College. Ask the first 20 students you see what their position is on illegal immigration, then ask them to explain it. You'll get at least this much good B-roll, and it will sound at least this retarded.

Every Democrat who would take a candidate who has good positions on tax reform, transportation reform, the war on terror, civil rights, welfare, and social security -- every Democrat who would take that candidate and throw him or her under the bus based on their views on abortion, marriage equality, or guns is the liberal version of these bible-thumping twats from flyover country. But those aren't even the worst Democrats -- the worst Democrats are the ones who like MOST left-wing values, but who have some kind of special interest beef that is their "single issue"; they're in favor of everything else, but they won't vote for anyone who's going to tax soft drinks because they work at a bottling plant. They're in favor of everything else, but they won't vote for someone who's going to increase taxes on the rich -- because they're rich. They're in favor of everything else, but they won't vote for someone who's going to cut highway funding, because they live in the suburbs. And so on and so on and so on. Add all those people up, and you've got a Democratic party that doesn't stand for or against anything.

The Tea Party is only possible because there's really no such thing as a Democrat. Just a collection of people who Aren't Republicans.

@16: Okay, but the difference is those Evergreen students actually voted for Cynthia McKinney. There is no "Green Party Caucus" of Democrats in the U.S. Congress, but there is a Tea Party Caucus consisting entirely of Republicans. The Tea Party is nothing less than a fake political party that is funded from the same sources as the Republican Party, claiming to offer an alternative to the Republican Party, and yet is exclusively concerned with drumming up votes for the Republican Party. It's a canny strategy to heal the split in the GOP with a bait-and-switch, and by all accounts it's working.

I don't know if this strategy is truly something new under the sun, but I can't recall when I've seen the like.

@16 Have you ever been to Evergreen State College? Yes, they may be vegan granola hippies, and you may catch them going on about the Earth Mother, but radical environmentalism is based in scientific fact.

Which of these statements is more true:

Human beings are using the natural resources of Earth's biosphere at a rate that's faster than it can be recover.

Obamacare will set up death panels of bureaucrats that will decide to kill senior citizens.

The Tea Party's beef with this administration is based entirely in fiction. Far Lefties may engage in magical thinking, or conspiracy theory, but there is nothing on the left as completely divorced from reality as the Tea Party.

Just because two forces oppose each other, it doesn't make them equivalent.

@16 Have you ever been to Evergreen State College?

I went to The Evergreen State College. So, yes. And no, not all of their radically environmental perspectives are based on fact. I took Matter and Motion at Evergreen, and a bunch of other classes that dealt with environmental issues, and I'll remember some of the bone-headed shit I heard in those classes for the rest of my life.

Just because two forces oppose each other, it doesn't make them equivalent.

True.

...there is nothing on the left as completely divorced from reality as the Tea Party.

False.

Ahhhh Chase is so hot.