America Just Checked Into Rehab
by Victor Davis Hanson

On Tuesday voters rejected President Obama’s attempt to remake America in the image of an imploding Europe — not just by overwhelmingly electing Republican candidates in the House, but by preferring dozens of maverick conservatives who ran against establishment Washington.

Why the near-historic rebuke? Out-of-control spending, unchecked borrowing, vast new entitlements and unsustainable debt — all at a time of economic stagnation.

So what is next? Like the recovering addict who checks himself into rehab, a debt-addicted America just snapped out of its borrowing binge, is waking up with the shakes, and hopes there is still a chance at recovery.

It won’t be easy. Obama and his Democratic Congress ran up nearly $3 trillion in new debt in just 21 months — after running a disingenuous 2008 campaign that falsely promised to rein in the fiscal irresponsibility that had been rampant during the spendthrift Bush administration.

So the voters intervened and sent America in for rehab treatment. In our three-step road to recovery, we, the sick patient, must first end the denial, then accept the tough medicine, and finally change the entrenched habits that caused the addiction.

First, voters did not reject Obama’s agenda because he was too centrist, borrowed and spent too little money, or did not more vigorously pursue unpopular agenda items like cap-and-trade and blanket amnesty. Nor was the Democratic meltdown because of Obama’s inability to articulate his agenda. The vision itself — not the talking points — was the problem.

Obama failed miserably to keep the nation’s trust. After just 21 months, the country concluded that he was an extremist, and that his attempts to manage the economy through massive borrowing, rapid growth in government size and spending, assumption of private enterprise, and serial harangues against business and the rich had turned a recession into a crisis of confidence and a near-depression. For some strange reason, Obama thought the cure for Republican big-spending was European-style socialism, when in fact, voters wanted an end to Bush-era borrowing and waste — not far more of it.

Second, not being Obama will no longer be enough for the ascendant Republicans, many of them political novices or Tea Party mavericks skeptical of both parties. These outsiders told outraged voters that America will have to step up and start controlling spending in a manner Republicans never did as a majority in Congress from 2001 to 2006. Perhaps a good symbolic start would be to cut back on popular pet programs — agricultural subsidies, for example — whose end the republic will survive. This would be iconic proof of congressional willingness to alienate powerful special interests. Social Security, Medicare and some Defense programs all have to be on the table.

If conservatives plan to cut taxes, they will no longer be able to convince the public that the resulting supply-side growth in the economy will eventually bring in more money and balance the budget. Instead, right from the start, the new House majority will have to demand that we pay as we go — every dollar lost in revenue will require a commensurate dollar cut in federal spending.

Republicans should be willing to be demagogued by a weakened Obama as heartless and cruel budget cutters — even if the president may well be the ultimate beneficiary by running on the new theme of fiscal responsibility and a recovering economy in 2012.

Third, voters want their Congress and president to end the pathological value system that got us into this mess. Instead of the president barnstorming the country handing out borrowed cash to favored constituencies and playing one identity group against another, he had better stay in Washington, keep off Comedy Central and “The View,” and only come out to brag when he has cut unsustainable spending for all of us.

It should also be an embarrassment, not an honor, for congressional members of either party to put their names on the latest pork-barrel projects. And instead of weekly newsletters from Washington that boast of bringing home the bacon, voters prefer hard proof that their government only spent what it took in. Any politician can promise a new project, an expanded entitlement or a special-interest tax break with someone else’s money, but only a statesman can explain exactly how it is all to be paid for.

So for now, voters have said that they are sick of profligate Democrats. But if Republicans do not get that message regarding fiscal restraint, in two years it will be their turn — again.

This Is a Referendum, Not an Election
by Dennis Prager

Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010 is not Election Day. It is Referendum Day.

It may be commonplace for commentators to announce that every election is “the most important election in our lifetime” or something analogous. But having never said that of a presidential election, let alone an off-year election, this commentator cannot be accused of crying wolf when I say that this off-year election is not simply the most important of my lifetime. It is the most important since the Civil War.

The reason is that unlike all previous elections, this one is actually a referendum on the direction of the United States of America.

If the Democrats win:

– The American people have announced, consciously or not, that they support the Democratic Party’s “fundamental transformation” — those were President Obama’s words when he campaigned, and he has lived up to them — of America from a liberty-based state of limited government into an equality-based welfare state with an ever-expanding government.

– America will change from a country that emphasizes producing wealth to a country that emphasizes redistribution of wealth.

The left has never been primarily interested in creating wealth. Its primary goal always and everywhere has been to redistribute it. That so many businessmen and much of Wall Street are only now awakening to this fact is only a testament to the staggering lack of wisdom in big business.

– America will produce increasingly narcissistic citizens.

For proof, just look at the virtual shutdown of much of France and the ubiquitous rioting of vast numbers of its citizens over a tiny change in its welfare state — raising the age of retirement from 60 to 62. The idea that one will work two more years before receiving benefits until death so offends vast numbers of French — including young people who have every reason to believe they will live until the age of 100 — that they are fighting it as if their very lives were in jeopardy. That is the self-centeredness that all welfare states engender in their citizens.

– America will further reinforce the conviction that minorities are victims — who must be protected from their fellow Americans by the state.

Latinos, blacks, Muslims, gays and vast numbers of women have been told by the left and its political party that they are all persecuted by a country that is SIXHIRB — Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist and Bigoted. That America is the least SIXHIRB country in the world is a fact that has been all but drowned out by the left-wing domination of television and print news media, all the entertainment media, and the high schools and universities.

– America will continue to undermine its unique ability to Americanize people of all ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds.

With a Democratic victory the country’s very motto — E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many One” — will continue to erode as ethnic and racial identities rather one American identity are increasingly celebrated. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has just announced that Germany’s experiment with multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” but the left and its political party, the Democrats, have redoubled their efforts to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.

– America will continue its economic slide.

With a Democratic victory, unsustainable debts will mount, wealth-producing companies will continue to flee from higher taxes and more regulations, energy use will be taxed in the name of environmentalist utopianism, and the government will continue to print dollars.

– America will become increasingly secular.

With a Democratic victory, the left’s goal of rendering America’s other motto, “In God We Trust,” an anachronism will come closer to fruition. Leftism is a jealous god. As in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian roots of this country are ceasing to play the indispensible moral role they have played since before 1776.

And what would constitute a Democrat victory next Tuesday? Anything other than a Republican landslide. Any other result will be interpreted by the media and by the Democrats as solely a result of the economic recession and as the normal losses of the dominant party in off-year elections.

In other words, the only way to ensure that the electoral results are seen as a repudiation of the growth of the state and the other Democrat and leftist goals is through an enormous Republican victory.

Only then will America understand that this election was not first about jobs. It was above all about America.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Big Tea Party Spoof
by Jillian Bandes

Comedian Jon Stewart’s “Restoring Sanity” rally pokes fun at overzealous political activism, but it’s hard not to see how it doesn’t attack the Right more than it attacks the Left. After all, “Restoring Sanity” is a direct play on Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event just a few weeks ago, and the format of Stewart’s event is taken directly from the tea party rallies held over the past year or so.

Should tea-partying conservatives actually take offense?

It depends who you talk to.

“What these guys are about isn’t so different than what we are about,” said Adam Brandon, vice president of communications for FreedomWorks, which was responsible for organizing the 9/12 rally as well as helping mobilize for Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event. “I would guess if you polled these guys, they’re not that excited about higher taxes or bigger government. So even if there’s some anti-tea party stuff there, perhaps there are some commonalities.”

That opinion is quite different than the one expressed by Sally Oljar, a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, a limited-government grassroots activist group that has assisted with several events over the past year.

“I am reminded of Gandhi’s advice: ‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.’ Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert are comics and do not address issues substantively,” said Oljar. “Mockery is a tactic, not an answer. They are desperate to stop the change that’s coming – the showdown, so to speak.”

The event on October 30 is expected to draw upwards of 60,000 people, and will feature a counter-rally from comedy host Stephen Colbert, who is spoofing Stewart’s spoof with his own “Restoring Fear” campaign. Stewart has suggested signs such as “9/11 Was An Outside Job,” and “I’m Not Afraid of Muslims, Tea Partiers, Socialists, Immigrants, Gun Owners or Gays, But I am Kind of Scared of Spiders.”

Those sorts of signs didn’t really hit Seton Motley’s funny bone. Motley is the President of Less Government, a nonprofit group in D.C.

“One of the premises of this Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert pseudo-Woodstock is to denigrate to the tea party movement and conservatives,” said Motley. “Their calling it a rally to ‘restore’ sanity implies that the TEA Party and Glenn Beck rallies have been un-sane.”

Other conservatives insisted that there was nothing to be afraid of – that the event was simply capitalizing on something for raw economic benefit.

“People will show up for a free show anytime there is a celebrity involved. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert figured out how much the Restore Honor rally boosted Glenn Beck and figure they could do the same thing,” said Judson Phelps, head of Tea Party Nation, who has held various tea party activist events throughout the year. “I think it is more of a joke than a political rally, but whatever floats their boat!”

Dean Nelson, head of the Fredrick Douglass Foundation, took an approach similar to Colbert’s when giving his take on “Restoring Sanity” – that is, he combined skepticism with humor.

“I am proud to live in a country that could produce or attract comedians as clever and entertaining as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert,” said Nelson. “Although I personally plan to be involved with get out the vote efforts, I can think of no better way for liberals to spend the weekend before the election than attending this fine event.”

Do journalists overseas have a better understanding of American politics than our own mainstream media?  I certainly think so.  Enjoy this animated video depiction of The Tea Party Express running wild with Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRXu4wna11I

Tea Party: Why the Left Doesn’t Get It
by Larry Elder

“Hello, fellow racists.”

That’s how I greeted the gathering at the Tax Day Tea Party rally in Sacramento, Calif. Several people dropped their hoods and sheets in laughter. After a thorough search, I can report that I detected no secret handshake, security guards or minority-sniffing German shepherds to alert blacks that our presence was unwanted.

An MSNBC reporter at another Tea Party rally actually asked a black man whether he “felt uncomfortable.” “No,” he laughed. “No, these are my people — Americans.” The man appeared far too polite to ask, “You ever felt uncomfortable working for MSNBC?” I once appeared on a television show where a black pundit accused former President Ronald Reagan of racism. When I asked for proof, he said that Reagan “was uncomfortable around black people.” I replied, “I’m uncomfortable around you. What does that make me?” So in the black tea partier’s case, his presumed discomfort around whites made them racist. In Reagan’s case, his presumed discomfort around blacks made him one. It does get confusing.

A more serious criticism of the Tea Party movement goes like this: When George W. Bush and the Republicans controlled the House, Senate and Oval Office, where were the complaints about spending?

One TP critic put it this way: “During these Tea Party protests conservatives are showing why the word ‘hypocrite’ should be part of the dictionary definition of conservative. They said nothing and did nothing while Bush and the Republican Congress were getting the country into deeper and deeper trouble. The conservatives who organize the Tea Party protests sat on their hands and did nothing. They did nothing when the balanced budget was destroyed, nothing when Bush exploded the deficit, nothing when Bush cut taxes instead of raising them to pay for the war he started.”

As to Bush’s non-defense, non-homeland security domestic spending, people did complain — lots of them and frequently. Why isn’t this more widely recognized? When a conservative criticizes Rush Limbaugh, that’s news. The left hates Limbaugh. When a conservative criticizes Bush’s spending, that’s not news. The left loves domestic spending. For liberals, Bush’s No Child Left Behind program “wasn’t fully funded.” The prescription bill for seniors contained a “doughnut hole,” which made it insufficiently generous.

Conservatives, pundits and talk show hosts routinely blasted Bush for domestic spending. In 2003, after the passage of the Medicare prescription bill, a member of The Heritage Foundation said, “The president isn’t showing leadership, and conservatives are angry.” Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said, “The conservative, free-market base in America is rightly in revolt over this bill.”

In 2003, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., made a bizarre accusation, condemning Bush for “undoing the New Deal.” That December, I wrote: “Does she not see the steam blasting from the ears of principled conservatives flatly astonished by President George W. Bush’s and his Republican colleagues’ willingness to spend, spend and spend? During Bush’s term in office, excluding defense and homeland security, non-war government expenditures increased at a rate faster than under former President Bill Clinton. By this time in his term, Reagan vetoed over 20 bills, Bush none.”

So if people were unhappy with Bush’s spending, then why are folks only now assembling, carrying signs and holding rallies in opposition to bigger government?

Fair question. Better late than never. More importantly, things are much, much worse. Government bailouts, “stimulus,” ObamaCare, etc., now push the nation’s deficit to record non-World War II levels and debt to an all-time high.

Bush-bashing left-wing New York Times columnist Paul Krugman inadvertently explained why today things are different. In March 2006, he wrote about Bush’s (nonexistent?) conservative critics who were “rushing to distance themselves from Mr. Bush.” But he pointed out that a lot of Bush’s increased domestic spending came from entitlements on automatic pilot. He accused Bush’s critics of creating a “false impression” that Bush was a “big spender”: “The great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq war, and by rising health care costs.” In other words, as to increased domestic spending, Krugman argued that Bush wasn’t as bad as his conservative critics claimed.

Bush, the so-called fiscal conservative, irresponsibly increased domestic spending, including the decidedly non-fiscally conservative prescription benefits bill. But under Obama, the Democrats and some unprincipled Republicans, Americans now bear dramatically increased, brand-new domestic spending. With ObamaCare, taxpayers now support 30 million people who are guaranteed health insurance. Taxes must go up, and the middle class is not spared. Economics adviser Paul Volcker, along with others, even floats the idea of a European-style value-added consumption tax — on top of the current taxes.

Tea Party supporters, at least many of them, did complain about the size of government pre-Obama. Now things have changed — for the worse. Government is larger than ever — with no sign of abating unless and until this administration is stopped.

As Vice President Joe Biden so eloquently put it, “This is a big f—ing deal.”

Tea Partiers Fight Obama’s Culture of Dependence
by Michael Barone

“Do you realize,” CNN’s Susan Roesgen asked a man at the April 15, 2009, tea party in Chicago, “that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?” When the man refused to drop his “drop socialism” sign, she went on, “Did you know that the state of Lincoln gets 50 billion out of the stimulus?”

Roesgen is no longer with CNN, and CNN has only about half as many viewers as it did last year. But her questions are revealing. They help us understand that the issue on which our politics has become centered — the Obama Democrats’ vast expansion of the size and scope of government — is really not just about economics. It is really a battle about culture, a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence.

Probably unknowingly, Roesgen was reflecting the mid-century sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld’s dictum that politics is about who gets how much when. If some guy is getting $400, shouldn’t he just shut up and collect the money? Shouldn’t he be happy that his state government, headed recently by Rod Blagojevich, was getting an extra $50 billion?

But public policy also helps determine the kind of society we are. The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves. That is the culture of dependence.

The tea partiers see things differently. They’re not looking for lower taxes — half of tea party supporters, a New York Times survey found, think their taxes are fair. Nor are they financially secure — half say someone in their household may lose their job in the next year. Two-thirds say the recession has caused some hardship in their lives.

But they recognize, correctly, that the Obama Democrats are trying to permanently enlarge government and increase citizens’ dependence on it. And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they believe that this will destroy the culture of independence which has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous — and the most charitably generous — nation in the world.

Seeing our political divisions as a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence helps to make sense of the divisions seen in the 2008 election. Barack Obama carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and those with incomes over $200,000, and lost those with incomes in between. He won large margins from those who never graduated from high school and from those with graduate school degrees, and barely exceeded 50 percent among those in between.

The top-and-bottom Obama coalition was in effect a coalition of those dependent on government transfers and benefits and those in what David Brooks calls “the educated class,” who administer or believe that their kind of people administer those transactions. They are the natural constituency for the culture of dependence.

Interestingly, in the Massachusetts special Senate election, the purported beneficiaries of the culture of dependence — low-income and low-education voters — did not turn out in large numbers. In contrast, the administrators of that culture — affluent secular professionals, public employees, university personnel — were the one group that turned out in force and voted for the hapless Democratic candidate.

The in-between people on the income and education ladders, it turns out, are a constituency for the culture of independence. Smart conservatives like David Frum, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argued in 2009 books that modest-income conservative voters have had stagnant incomes over the last decade and that Republicans should offer them compensatory tax breaks.

That seemed to make sense in the wake of the 2008 election. But it’s been undercut by developments since. As Susan Roesgen discovered, tea party supporters are not in the mood to be bought off with $400 tax credits. They have a longer time horizon and can see where the Obama Democrats are trying to take us.

Paul Lazarsfeld saw politics as just a matter of dollars and cents. The tea party movement reminds us of what the Founders taught — that it has a moral dimension, as well. They risked all in the cause of the culture of independence. The polling evidence suggests that most Americans don’t want to leave that behind.

Tea Parties: “Calling All Racists!”
by Larry Elder

Did you know that only racists turned out for the recent nationwide “tea parties”?!

“Let’s be very honest about what this is about,” actress/comedian Janeane Garofalo said on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show. “It’s not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks.”

Oh.

A few days after Garofalo’s analysis of why many Americans took to the streets in protest of the Obama administration’s borrowing, spending and upcoming tax hikes, I sat in the chair at my barber’s shop. A black customer came in, sat down and asked me whether I watched the coverage on the tea parties.

“Some,” I said.

“Well,” he responded, “it looked like a Klan meeting.”

“Excuse me?”

“I looked at my television,” he said. “I saw a bunch of white folks. It looked like a Klan meeting.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

“No, it was nothing but white people. Looked like a Klan meeting.”

“Really? I sometimes go to West Angeles (a large inner-city church with a predominately black congregation). Suppose a white guy walked into a Sunday service there and said, ‘Looks like a bunch of Bloods and Crips to me.’”

“That’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it? A bunch of people — some blacks included — came together in protest over this bailout stuff. But because most of them were white, you compared it to the Klan. News flash, my friend — not all white folks belong to the Klan.”

“OK, maybe you got a point.”

“Maybe?” I asked. “What would you say if white people said that given President Barack Obama’s 20-year relationship with his whack-job pastor, Obama is the one who’s racist?”

“What? Are you calling Obama racist?”

“No, I said one could make a stronger argument about that than your argument about the ‘racist’ tea parties.”

“But Obama’s a really smart guy. He didn’t know about those things Rev. Wright said.”

“Oh, no? When Obama announced his candidacy for president in Springfield, Ill., Rev. Wright was supposed to deliver the invocation. At the last moment, Obama called Wright and canceled him. But Obama didn’t know that his pastor was controversial?”

No response.

“And after the cancellation, Wright said something to the effect of, ‘Well, once people find out what I’ve done, the Jews could cause Obama some problems.’”

“That still doesn’t mean Obama knew about the reverend’s views.”

“Did you read Obama’s book? The first one?”

“No.”

“Obama wrote about attending the sermon where Wright talks about the ‘audacity of hope.’ The reverend talked about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities America bombed to end World War II. My dad, a Marine, was stationed on the island of Guam when we assumed Japan would have to be invaded. Instead, we ended the war by dropping those bombs — saving probably a million Japanese and American lives. Wright compared this to what happened in South Africa in 1960 in a place called Sharpeville. Do you know about Sharpeville?”

“No.”

“Over 250 innocent black men, women and children were killed or wounded when the apartheid government opened fire on unarmed protestors — a lot of them shot in the back. Now, Obama attended that sermon and had no problem with Wright comparing Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Sharpeville. Outrageous! And Obama used ‘The Audacity of Hope’ as the title of his second book and as a slogan when he ran for president. You want it both ways. Obama is so bright, but he was clueless about the stupid ideas of his pastor.”

“Well, he isn’t responsible for what his reverend says or believes.”

“Never said he was. We’re talking about whether Obama knew that Wright thought 9/11 was about the ‘chickens coming home to roost’ and that Wright implied that government was behind the drug epidemic by supplying the drugs.”

Again, nothing.

“Suppose John McCain attended a church whose pastor — a man he referred to as his spiritual adviser — made racist comments about blacks and other people. The press would have been all over it, and McCain wouldn’t have gotten his party’s nomination. And if it came out too late for that, he would have been slaughtered in the election.”

“You know,” he conceded, “I guess when you like somebody, you tend to make excuses for them.”

“That’s what I’m saying. One more point. Nobody, by the way, stopped you, as a black man, from going to one of those tea parties. You didn’t have to flash a secret sign. There was no registration fee. Nobody posted guards, stopping people at the gate. You try walking into a Klan meeting.”

He laughed. As I got up to leave, we shook hands.

“One small step for man,” I told him. “One giant leap for mankind.”

“You take care,” he said.

Live Tea or Die!
Are Americans subjects or citizens?
By Mark Steyn

Our lesson today comes from the old British novelty song:

I like a Nice Cup Of Tea in the morning
Just to start the day, you see
And at half-past-eleven
My idea of heaven
Is a Nice Cup Of Tea . . .

In other cultures, tea is a soothing beverage, a respite from the cares of the world. A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit-Down is a British bestseller offering advice on tea, biscuits (that’s “cookies” in American), and comfy chairs by the husband-and-wife team of “Nicey” and “Wifey,” whose soubriquets suggest that these are not the folks to turn to for societal insurrection.

George Orwell — the George Orwell of Animal Farm and 1984 — wrote a famous essay called “A Nice Cup Of Tea,” all about the best way to warm the pot, and the defects of shallow cups. Is it some sort of political allegory for impending civil war set in a household torn between those who put the milk in before the tea and those who do so after? No, Orwell liked a good cuppa (as they say in England) and was eager to pass on his advice for extracting maximum satisfaction from the experience.

But in America, tea is not a soothing beverage to be served with McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits. It’s a raging stimulant. It’s rabies in an Earl Grey bag. At America’s tea parties, there’s no McVitie’s, just McVeighs — as in Timothy of that ilk, as in angry white men twitching to go nuts. To Paul Krugman of the New York Times, the tea party is a movement of “crazy people” manipulated by sinister “rightwing billionaires.” To the briefly famous Susan Roesgen of CNN, the parties are not safe for “family viewing.” Which is presumably why the Boston Globe forbore to cover them last week. The original Boston Tea Party was so-called because it took place at Boston Harbor, which I gather is a harbor somewhere in the general vicinity of the Greater Boston area. So there would appear to be what I believe the journalism professors call a “local angle” to Wednesday’s re-enactment. Might be useful for a publication losing a million bucks a week and threatened with closure by a parent company that in one of the worst media acquisitions of all time paid over a billion dollars for a property that barely a decade later is all but worthless.

But I digress. Asked about the tea parties, President Obama responded that he was not aware of them. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let them drink Lapsang Souchong.” His Imperial Majesty at Barackingham Palace having declined to acknowledge the tea parties, his courtiers at the Globe and elsewhere fell into line. Talk-show host Michael Graham spoke to one attendee at the 2009 Boston Tea Party who remarked of the press embargo: “If Obama had been the King of England, the Globe wouldn’t have covered the American revolution.”

The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else’s into the same abyss. Which is why they’ve decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans’ wealth and their children’s future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it’s AstroTurf — fake grassroots, not the real thing.

Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here: “Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right . . . ”

But Susan Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes . . . ? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as these Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from A Man for All Seasons: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but for a $400 tax credit?”

But Susan Roesgen wasn’t done with her “You may already have won!” commercial: “Did you know,” she sneered, “that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion dollars out of this stimulus? That’s $50 billion dollars for this state, sir.”

Really? Who knew it was that easy? $50 billion dollars! Did those Navy SEALs find it just off the Somali coast in the wreckage of a pirate skiff in a half-submerged treasure chest, all in convertible pieces of eight or Zanzibari doubloons?

Or is it perhaps the case that that $50 billion dollars has to be raised from the same limited pool of 300 million Americans and their as-yet-unborn descendants? And, if so, is giving it to “the state of Lincoln” — latterly, the state of Blagojevich — likely to be of much benefit to the citizens?

Amid his scattershot pronouncements on everything from global nuclear disarmament to high-speed rail, President Obama said something almost interesting the other day. Decrying a “monstrous tax code that is far too complicated for most Americans to understand,” the Tax-Collector-in-Chief pledged: “I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interests.”

That shouldn’t be hard. A tax code that put my interests over any special interests would read: “How much did you earn last year? [Insert number here] thousand dollars? Hey, feel free to keep it. You know your interests better than we do!”

Okay, to be less absolutist about it, my interests include finding a road at the end of my drive every morning, and modern equipment for the (volunteer) fire department, and a functioning military to deter the many predators out there, and maybe one or two other things. But 95 percent of the rest is not just “special interests” but social engineering — a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama and Susan Roesgen. That’s why these are Tea Parties — because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If the latter, then a benign sovereign should not be determining “your interests” and then announcing that he’s giving you a “tax credit” as your pocket money.

Doing the job the Boston Globe won’t do, Glenn Reynolds, the Internet’s Instapundit, has been posting many photographs of tea parties. For a movement of mean, angry old white men, there seem to be a lot of hot-looking young chicks among them. Perhaps they’re just kinky gerontophiliacs. Or perhaps they understand that their generation will be the principal victim of this grotesque government profligacy. Like the original tea party, it is in the end about freedom. Live Tea or die!

Million Taxpayer March
by Michelle Malkin

Let’s use liberal math to calculate attendance at this week’s nationwide Tax Day Tea Party protests. When left-wing activists make crowd estimates, the algorithm is: six figures = one million. An incomplete survey of newspaper accounts and organizer estimates pegged the Tea Party protest population at a minimum of 250,000. We can now, therefore, officially call it the Million Taxpayer March.

Or the Million Right-Wing Extremists March if you work for the Department of Homeland Security.

To George Soros-funded grievance professionals, 250,000 is an insignificant number. But unlike recent anti-war and pro-illegal immigration rallies padded with union workers, college students and homeless people, the Tax Day Tea Party demonstrations featured small-business owners, working taxpayers and families. This wasn’t a weekend or holiday, mind you. A quarter-million people took time off in the middle of the workweek to raise their voices against reckless taxing and bipartisan spending.

Multimillionaire jetsetter Nancy Pelosi scoffed that the Tax Day Tea Party movement was nothing more than “Astroturf” politics to protect the “wealthiest people” in America. Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky called the peaceable assemblies “despicable.” Other bitter, clingy Tea Party-bashers grumbled that activists only showed up where Fox News cameras were. But tens of thousands more came out in rain, snow and cold — in Bozeman, Mont.; Eau Claire, Wis.; Carson City, Nev.; White Plains, N.Y.; Bend, Ore.; Lansing, Mich.; Hilo, Hawaii; Nashville, Tenn.; and everywhere in between — with no media personalities or celebrities in sight.

If only the condescending cable TV anchors at CNN and MSNBC had paused from wallowing in gutter puns about tea bags, they might have reported an even more significant phenomenon: Tea Party protesters were as vocal in their criticism of Republicans as they were of Democrats. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a crowd of 2,000 repeatedly booed GOP Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, who both supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, and protested GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman’s decision to accept $1.6 billion in porky stimulus funds.

In Sacramento, Tea Party organizer Mark Meckler singled out California GOP Chair Ron Nehring for waffling on proposed $16 billion tax hikes. The crowd of 5,000 greeted Nehring — who unsuccessfully tried to hitch his wagon to the Tea Party movement — with a roar of boos and catcalls. Speaker after speaker lambasted Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for abandoning fiscal-conservative principles. The loudest chant of the day: “Throw them out.”

In Madison, Wis., GOP Rep. Paul Ryan — hyped as a conservative “rock star” — was well received. But I heard from staunch fiscal-conservative constituents who refused to be silent about Ryan’s complicity. He gave one of the most hysterical speeches in the rush to pass TARP last fall; voted for the auto bailout; and voted with the Barney Frank-Nancy Pelosi AIG bonus-bashing stampede. Milwaukee blogger Nick Schweitzer wrote: “He ought to be apologizing for his previous votes, not pretending he was being responsible the entire time, but I don’t see one bit of regret for what he did previously. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him get away with it.”

Other Tea Party participants pointed out that Newt Gingrich, who jumped aboard the bandwagon, flip-flopped on TARP in the space of a week last September and made common cause with Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi in ads calling for immediate action on “climate change.”

Before the grassroots Tea Party movement took them by surprise, Beltway GOP strategists argued fervently that the party’s traditional focus on taxes and spending had become outdated. The re-branders pitched their own expansive ideas to replace the anti-tax-and-spend agenda and inspire new voters. These included Gingrich’s “green conservatism,” David Frum’s proposal to raise carbon taxes, and open-borders Republicans’ plans for alternative forms of amnesty.

Newsflash: Eco-zealotry and in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens didn’t bring out thousands of first-time activists on the streets. Stay-at-home moms weren’t up all night making signs that read “Tax me more, please!”

What resonated on Tax Day were nonpartisan calls to roll back pork, hold the line on taxing and spending, end the endless government bailouts, and stop the congressional steamrollers that have pushed through mountains of legislation without deliberation. This is a teachable moment for GOP public relations peddlers in Washington. While they search for the Holy Grail of Re-branding in tony salons and country club conferences, the agenda for 2010 is smacking them in the face. It’s the three T’s, stupid: Too Many Taxes, Trillions in Debt, and Transparency.

The GOP path to reclaiming power lies with candidates who can make a credible case that they will support and defend fiscal responsibility. That means acting on fiscal-conservative principles now, not paying lip service later. The reckonable forces of the Tea Party movement didn’t let opportunists escape accountability on Tax Day. The GOP shouldn’t assume they’ll get a pass on Election Day, either. As one of the most popular Tea Party signs read: “You can’t fix stupid, but you can vote it out.”

Obama’s Recipe For Change Not My Cup of Tea
by Ann Coulter

I had no idea how important this week’s nationwide anti-tax tea parties were until hearing liberals denounce them with such ferocity. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote a column attacking the tea parties, apologizing for making fun of “crazy people.” It’s OK, Paul, you’re allowed to do that for the same reason Jews can make fun of Jews.

On MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been tittering over the similarity of the name “tea parties” to an obscure homosexual sexual practice known as “tea bagging.” Night after night, they sneer at Republicans for being so stupid as to call their rallies “tea bagging.”

Every host on Air America and every unbathed, basement-dwelling loser on the left wing blogosphere has spent the last week making jokes about tea bagging, a practice they show a surprising degree of familiarity with.

Except no one is calling the tea parties “tea bagging” — except Olbermann and Maddow. Republicans call them “tea parties.”

But if the Republicans were calling them “tea-bagging parties,” the MSNBC hosts would have a fantastically hilarious segment for viewers in San Francisco and the West Village and not anyplace else in the rest of the country. On the other hand, they’re not called “tea-bagging parties.” (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour at Barney Frank’s condo in Georgetown.)

You know what else would be hilarious? It would be hilarious if Hillary Clinton’s name were “Ima Douche.” Unfortunately, it’s not. It was just a dream. Most people would wake up, realize it was just a dream and scrap the joke. Not MSNBC hosts.

The point of the tea parties is to note the fact that the Democrats’ modus operandi is to lead voters to believe they are no more likely to raise taxes than Republicans, get elected and immediately raise taxes.

Apparently, the people who actually pay taxes consider this a bad idea.

Obama’s biggest shortcoming is that he believes the things believed by all Democrats, which have had devastating consequences every time they are put into effect. Among these is the Democrats’ admiration for raising taxes on the productive.

All Democrats for the last 30 years have tried to stimulate the economy by giving “tax cuts” to people who don’t pay taxes. Evidently, offering to expand welfare payments isn’t a big vote-getter.

Even Bush had a “stimulus” bill that sent government checks to lots of people last year. Guess what happened? It didn’t stimulate the economy. Obama’s stimulus bill is the mother of all pork bills for friends of O and of Congressional Democrats. (“O” stands for Obama, not Oprah, but there’s probably a lot of overlap.)

And all that government spending on the Democrats’ constituents will be paid for by raising taxes on the productive.

Raise taxes and the productive will work less, adopt tax shelters, barter instead of sell, turn to an underground economy — and the government will get less money.

The perfect bar bet with a liberal would be to wager that massive government deficits in the ’80s were not caused by Reagan’s tax cuts. If you casually mentioned that you thought Reagan’s tax cuts brought in more revenue to the government — which they did — you could get odds in Hollywood and Manhattan. (This became a less attractive wager in New York this week after Gov. David Paterson announced his new plan to tax bar bets.)

The lie at the heart of liberals’ mantra on taxes — “tax increases only for the rich” — is the ineluctable fact that unless taxes are raised across the board, the government won’t get its money to fund layers and layers of useless government bureaucrats, none of whom can possibly be laid off.

How much would you have to raise taxes before any of Obama’s constituents noticed? They don’t pay taxes, they engage in “tax-reduction” strategies, they work for the government, or they’re too rich to care. (Or they have off-shore tax shelters, like George Soros.)

California tried the Obama soak-the-productive “stimulus” plan years ago and was hailed as the perfect exemplar of Democratic governance.

In June 2002, the liberal American Prospect magazine called California a “laboratory” for Democratic policies, noting that “California is the only one of the nation’s 10 largest states that is uniformly under Democratic control.”

They said this, mind you, as if it were a good thing. In California, the article proclaimed, “the next new deal is in tryouts.” As they say in show biz: “Thanks, we’ll call you. Next!”

In just a few years, Democrats had turned California into a state — or as it’s now known, a “job-free zone” — with a $41 billion deficit, a credit rating that was slashed to junk-bond status and a middle class now located in Arizona.

Democrats governed California the way Democrats always govern. They bought the votes of government workers with taxpayer-funded jobs, salaries and benefits — and then turned around and accused the productive class of “greed” for wanting not to have their taxes raised through the roof.

Having run out of things to tax, now the California legislature is considering a tax on taxes. Seriously. The only way out now for California is a tax on Botox and steroids. Sure, the governor will protest, but it is the best solution …

California was, in fact, a laboratory of Democratic policies. The rabbit died, so now Obama is trying it on a national level.

That’s what the tea parties are about.