Now why does that picture remind me of an old-style Soviet propaganda poster?  I mean, all it needs is the hammer and sickle and/or pictures of Marx and Lenin.

Maybe because it <i>is</is> pure propaganda, and propaganda is about as anti self-awareness as it gets.

Holy WOW.

Next issue should have a cowboy in a tri-corn hat standing at ground zero.

Of course, a Soviet propaganda poster would have pictures of groups of happy farmers/workers; whereas the Tea Party is all about Rugged Individuals who just happen to live in ex-urban housing tracts.

For a second there, I thought that Rand Paul was the cover-model, tee-hee.

I also LOOOVE how to try to say “we’re not racists, really” they touch on two Black/AA subjects in their inaugural issue: “the Black Conservative” and Booker T. Washington. Usurping Black figures is now quite the tradition among wing-nuts and it does at least indicate that OVERT racism is no longer considered polite (if you want to be given air-time in the MSM—its totes okay on AM radio and on conservative blogs, particularly conspiracy oriented blogs). It is also interesting that issues of race rarely go beyond the Black/White rehashing of elementary American civil rights and history. Nuance, race as constructed as “white” or “of color” or “mixed”...that’s too complicated considering all they need to do is just have a racial “beard,” there’s no “come to Jesus” or actual soul searching, just symbols to be hijacked.

“Year of the Black Conservative”,  is that like “Year of the Rabbit”?

What does the rest of the Tea-Party Zodiac look like?

Could Colbert have done any better?

How much is that “farmer” getting in subsidies every year?

In 50 years, will we be looking back at this period and call this ‘art’ Americanist Realism?

What is that odd swelling under the flag? It’s supposedly a gust of wind, but the wind is blowing in the wrong direction for that, so…what is it? Looks like the flag is pregnant.

That aside, though, it’s not a bad piece of graphic design. Simple, clean lines, adequate contrast and tidy color scheme.

“What the Left will never understand about the Tea Party,” awww. Here’s a hint, teabaggers: if no one understands you, that might be because you’re not making sense.

@9: I’m guessing the swelling under the flag is where the guy is hiding his fertilizer bomb.

*zing*!

I wonder if the publisher of this magazine is really just playing a cruel joke on teabaggers and making some money at the same time.  I get this mental picture of a conference room full of writers and editors, all having a big laugh that someone is actually taking this joke seriously.

“On war, life, civil liberties…Which way for the Tea Party?”

Let’s see here:
Yes
But only for the fetus
Good for male WASPs but conditional for everyone else.

Did I get 100%?...

<i> I get this mental picture of a conference room full of writers and editors, all having a big laugh that someone is actually taking this joke seriously. <i>

No one laughs at the koch foundation, the only acceptable emotions are greed and rage and you exhibit those by cigar smoking and circlejerking

Cue Steve Martin’s “What I Believe”.

What is that odd swelling under the flag? It’s supposedly a gust of wind, but the wind is blowing in the wrong direction for that, so…what is it? Looks like the flag is pregnant.

That aside, though, it’s not a bad piece of graphic design. Simple, clean lines, adequate contrast and tidy color scheme.
Comment #9: Alyson Miers on 02/09 at 02:41 PM

His right hand doesn’t look right, though.

As to the writers and editors having a laugh—people create special interest magazines all the time, and people staff them whether they agree with them or not.  It’s not a laugh, it’s survival.

They already have Reader’s Digest; what more do they want?

Now why does that picture remind me of an old-style Soviet propaganda poster?  I mean, all it needs is the hammer and sickle and/or pictures of Marx and Lenin.

You mean like this?

Actually this is an interesting comparison too.

Damn damn damn.  Now I have to see if the library has a copy, because that ‘Black Conservative’ story is taunting me, and if I spend money on a copy how will I pay for the pain relievers I’ll inevitably need?

@9: My money is on bad Photoshopping.

Ms Kate @6:  I think these people make him cry because, seriously, they make his job of parodying them so hard.
They want $7 for that?

I think this picture has “Photoshop contest” written all over it.

Well you know, given that Rush Limbaugh’s magazine has portrayed him as just about everything including a firefighter at 9-11, there just isn’t any shame there.

But yes, the hat and shirt screamed “socialist propaganda piece” to me.

@ 9:  I’m thinking they are going for him fluttering it against the wind (like you’d flick out a sheet over a bed if you the housewife in the old drier sheet commercials).  But it could be caught on the grassy grain stocks, or made to look so. (is that some kind of rye?)

I also LOOOVE how to try to say “we’re not racists, really” they touch on two Black/AA subjects in their inaugural issue: “the Black Conservative” and Booker T. Washington. Usurping Black figures is now quite the tradition among wing-nuts and it does at least indicate that OVERT racism is no longer considered polite

It still makes me wretch hearing Glenn Beck talk about Martin Luther King, Jr. as if Beck and MLK would have totally been BFFs had they been contemporaries. Seeing Beck bringing MLK’s anti-choice wingnut niece to his white resentment rally was surreal.

They had better be careful, they have created a bit of a monster.

I am a sport shooter, I go to gun shows.  At the last one there was some one marketing heritage seeds.

If the consciousness of those in the Tea Party is ever raised high enough so they realize who their real oppressors are then Wall Street and the corporations will have real concern for their safety, because these people haven’t made a religion out of non-violence.  If they figure out they have been lied to and robbed for 30 some years you will have a ton of extremely angry people with guns.

I’m a working class lefty from a poverty stricken mining and mill town background, people like the man depicted on that cover are filled with inchoate rage. They are not part of the top 10% of the wealthy in this country who control 90% of the wealth.  They are part of the bottom 20-30% who have a negative wealth due to owing more than they own.

While liberals in this country are quite willing to discuss oppression in terms of race, sexism and homophobia, they are seriously uncomfortable regarding the 800 pound gorilla in the room, class oppression.

In a game that dates to prior to the Civil War the right wing uses horizontal hostility to stymie any sort of organizing along left wing populist lines.  They also use “red baiting” and constant propaganda that pushes American exceptionalism, along with class based depriving of real education.

The wealthy receive an education, the poor are trained.

Sadly those who call themselves progressives are all to ready to write off people who are in every sense of the word just as oppressed by the same factors as people of color, because those people are white, mal-educated and poor.

There will never be a meaningful progressive movement in this nation until people are as willing to discuss matters of classism with at least the same candor afforded matters of racism, sexism and homophobia.

Why does the Tea Party idolize Paine?

He thought the rich had stolen everything and that the government should give everyone a huge stipend upon age 21 to make up for the inequity. He wanted everyone to receive a decent living salary from the government upon reaching age 50. He respected the way the Iroquois lived harmoniously with nature. he wrote some of the first anti-slavery pamphlets.

He was all about redistributing wealth and entitlement programs.

Why isn’t he tossed on the Pyre with Jefferson?  Can it be the TPers haven’t actually read him?

Roscoe, I’m not saying that is isn’t revolting—its just sorta kinda indicative that we’ve won the culture wars just a bit or are winning them in the long run. I mean, in the 1990’s they were still trying to slander MLK, now even conservatives have to acknowledge his status as a secular saint.

Suzan…I’m guessing you’re new here, if you think that all progressives are incapable of analyzing class structure. I feel like “class warfare” might be the only term that appears here less often than “feminism.”

@17: Happy peasant looking up and to the left/right + country’s flag + the harvest are classic motifs of Maoist/Communist propaganda.

http://chineseposters.net/

Leave out the Russian peasant cap, or the looking up and to the side hopefully, or the flag, or the grain, I’d say it was a tasteless mistake.  As it is, I’m willing to believe some snarky former history major turned freelance photographer had a pretty good time with this shoot.

Re Thomas Paine: no, they have not read him, they have simply read the title of his most famous work, “Common Sense.” Of course Tea Partiers think that they are the inheritors of “Common Sense” because seemingly, common sense is something certain people are born with and don’t need evidence based thinking and/or reason to decipher…Paine was a firebrand of the Enlightenment, thus fond of reason, but the common usage of “common sense” has been stolen by the know-nothings and the care-to-know-even-less in the vanguard of the right. As Paine’s great great (many great’s) grand-niece, I gotta say, LEAVE MY DRUNK UNCLE ALONE.

god damn it, MORE often, not LESS often. I wish the preview function worked on my office computer…

On the contrary, I have been reading this blog for years.

But I am also aware of the lack of class analysis on the part of progressives in general.

“Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”—Thomas Paine

What do you suppose the Tea Party market is worth, per annum?

If they’ve got this magazine, and the mag’s got ads, someone is not only thinking about this, they’re pitching it to would-be advertisers.

I agree that the lower classes are filled with rage. It’s just that moneyed interests have been extremely successful at channeling that rage towards minorities, unions, and other scapegoats. Oh, how I wish more of us in the middle/lower classes realized who our real enemy is - the wealthy.

Roscoe, I’m not saying that is isn’t revolting—its just sorta kinda indicative that we’ve won the culture wars just a bit or are winning them in the long run.

Yes and no… the same thing that has happened with MLK is also happening with Ronald Reagan. The dude is more popular today than he ever was in his lifetime, with the second highest approval rating of all past presidents from the past 50 years (behind only JFK). And I’m guessing that most of the people under 35 who view Reagan so favorably today have no idea who the man really was and what long-term damage he really caused our country.

While I’m happy that MLK’s stature has risen over the years, it’s largely because he’s been sanitized into mediocrity. Yes, he was for nonviolence, but he was not for letting his oppressors walk all over him, and he wasn’t hesitant to call out the evils of the reactionary right that were responsible for America’s inequity and perpetual need for war.

On the opposite side of the coin, the Ronald Reagan that America loves today is a sanitized version of a man who hated anybody who wasn’t rich, white, straight, male and jingoistic. The dude was not the nice old man who loved jellybeans, he was a monster that funded terrorism, exacerbated racial divides, made the rich richer and the poor poorer and set in motion many of the horrible fiscal policies that have gotten us to where we are today. It annoys the hell out of me to see President Obama joining in the lionizing of this POS, because Obama’s own presidency is being hurt by the damage Reagan caused.

In any case, the fact that the MLK brand has wide respect isn’t absolutely indicative that we are winning the culture war. I think we are moving forward, but I don’t think we’re winning it as fast as society’s (largely superficial) respect for MLK might suggest. Without invoking MLK’s name, if you described someone sharing the most unapologetically leftist positions MLK actually held, the approval rating for such a person wouldn’t be very high. The right has done a frighteningly excellent job of slandering the words “liberal” and “progressive”, as if they are contagious diseases.

/me conjours up image of host chest-thumping…

hmmm…

Why would any woman think chest thumping is a good idea?  Or fun?  Gold Winna Olympic Hockey Team has such a better idea…

Wait…why would any men think chest thumping is so fun?  I see that so much less in sports in general than in the population at large…

hmmm…

. . . channeling that rage towards minorities, unions . . .

The hatred toward unions is a sign (one of many) that our country has, no hyperbole, a serious large-scale mental health problem: a mass psychotic break.

No one who thinks about it believes that a wage-earner can equitably negotiate one-on-one with an employer (especially a big one), or that a company that sends its jobs to places with no labor laws is going to do right by its workers without being pressured.

And since most Tea Partiers (and Glenn Beckians, and Ditto-heads, and the other Kool-Aid drinkers) work for a living, or want to, you’d think they would think about it. Instead, they’re looking for better ways to shoot themselves in the foot.

If 20-odd% (or whatever percent of the population identifies with the Right’s mental-ward contingent) of, say, the high-school kids in America decided en masse to do something that would obviously mess themselves up in a big way, it’d be a national emergency.

I don’t know how to deal with this problem, but maybe instead of making fun of these dangerous people, we should be figuring out a way to extricate them from this (no other word for it) evil.

Sadly those who call themselves progressives are all to ready to write off people who are in every sense of the word just as oppressed by the same factors as people of color, because those people are white, mal-educated and poor.

There will never be a meaningful progressive movement in this nation until people are as willing to discuss matters of classism with at least the same candor afforded matters of racism, sexism and homophobia.

Progressives tend to win urban working class voters.  In mining areas and rural working class progressives win if unionized.  It’s complicated to play with poor whites.  They’ve been bred for generations to believe their the epitome of everything human and to look down on their fellow poverty-stricken fellows because it keeps the poverty-class broken up.  In most areas when we look at the federal electoral map the cities are solid blue the suburbs turn red and the rural areas fluctuate.  There are still far more liberals voting in major elections than conservatives but due to election redistricting the rural districts seem to elect more conservatives.

The complicating factor in all this is groups like the Tea Party who are remaining strong by co-opting the media into giving them authority so the republican corporate masters are losing power to the less traditional media corporate masters.  Murdoch always had a large say in the Republican party since he invented Fox News.  But now he basically runs the party.  This magazine is just an extension of that craziness.  What is interesting is that as the generations go on and civil rights merges firmly into every generation the need to co-opt black imagery will become more intense as racial hatred will become harder to accept.  Right now the top two controlling generations (Baby boomers & Gen X) are solidly born before civil rights really had been won and became simply part of the system.  Gen Y and younger are going to be harder to move with racial pleas.  So I find this move by the tea party interesting but really a desperation play.  A serious desperation play.  Once racial hatred is broken we have one less distraction from our social distractions.

If you just changed the flag, this would make a great Soviet propaganda image. Which begs the question: Why do they hate our freedoms?

Casey Jones you’d better watch your speed.

Leave out the Russian peasant cap, or the looking up and to the side hopefully, or the flag, or the grain, I’d say it was a tasteless mistake.  As it is, I’m willing to believe some snarky former history major turned freelance photographer had a pretty good time with this shoot.

It wasn’t a Russian peasant cap.  The picture clearly has a “John Deere” style billed cap, an iconic piece of American sun protection traditionally worn by American working-class agricultural labourers and farmers.  Totally different.

yeah, I wouldn’t be able to restrain myself from taking the piss out of such an assignment either if I thought I could get it under their radar.

I’m reminded of another magazine that came out at the beginning of the month before the one on the cover if you subscribed to it, it too was popular with a similar, albeit, younger demographic, and for similar purposes, “I just read it for the articles”. 

Seems to be a lot of dismissive smugness and snickering about this magazine.  The “Tea Party” is a recognizable movement which will have an influence on the 2012 elections, if not beyond.  It behooves those of us who think they are nuts to take them and their ideas more seriously so as to counter them among persuadable voters.  I plan on reading it when it comes to my local library, or on having my right wing relative send me his copy when he’s done.  We should be learning if there is a coherent position and why they appeal to any voters. 

The comparisons to commie or nazi propaganda is as useful as comparing the Obama campaign poster to a Mao poster.  It’s interesting art-wise but otherwise meaningless.

@41:
Nina Blackburn: So, what’s the deal with the hats?
Ice Cold: Shit, the hats’re what NWH is all about. See, back in the day when there were slaves and stuff, we was forced to work in the hot sun all day, hatless. I mean, not even a babushka.
Tone Def: Word. Heads totally exposed to the sun.
Ice Cold: So when the slaves got back from the fields, they was too tired to revolt against they masters. So what we’re sayin’ now is: Yo, we got some hats now, muh-fuckas.
Tasty Taste: And we ain’t too tired to bust a cap in yo’ ass.

The fact that it looks like Nazi and Stalinist agitprop is not mere coincidence. All totalitarianisms derive from similar yearnings, and drift toward the same aesthetical archetypes.

@44: Booty Juice isn’t a parody any more, either.

Also, question for Tbag Nation:

When did that stupid looking quasi-goatee, known by the young as the soul-patch and by construction workers as the ball-tickler, become a righty thing?  There some NASCAR dude rocking the chin-stain? Has Greg Behrendt become the new Nathan Hale?

Srsly (but snarky) - its there, look close, and I don’t remember it ever being an object of anything other than disdain. Hell, I’m a socialist and I think it looks ridiculous.

the graphic reminds me a bit of a burning flag, like the tea party subconsciously wants to burn it at the altar of ego.

Srsly (but snarky) - its there, look close, and I don’t remember it ever being an object of anything other than disdain. Hell, I’m a socialist and I think it looks ridiculous.

It’s not a soul patch—it’s the shadow on the left side of his face.

@MiddleAgeLiberal—I don’t know whether I find your earnestness about this ridiculous magazine adorable or annoying.

“The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.”

“When Rights are placed upon, or made dependent upon property, they are on the most precarious of all tenures. “Riches make themselves wings, and fly away,” and the rights fly with them ; and thus they become lost to the man when they would be of most value.”

“When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich. But the guarantee, to be effectual, must be parliamentarily reciprocal.”

“The study of theology as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and admits of no conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.”

“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Oh yeah, that sounds like Tea Partiers all right…

Suzan, It’s true that there’s way to little intelligent discussion of the Class War in the U.S. liberal/progressive discourse, but that’s a bit of a non sequitur in this discussion for two reasons:
1) Tea Party supporters, as has been documented in the press, tend to be kinda well-off, and
2) “The working class has turned against the liberals on they only talk about race-gender-sexuality” is a popular complaint associated with that, and it’s not particularly true: the last forty years have seen a rightward move in the U.S. electorate thanks to growing conservatism in the upper and upper-middle classes. See Larry Bartels’s readily Googleable “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” The amount of conservatism (or at least Republicanness)  in the working class and lower-middle class is appalling, but it’s been rather stable.

@helen w. h.@22: I’m not sure what it is. It looks more like Indiangrass or one of the bluestems than any kind of crops. It would be kind of fitting for the Teabaggers’ patriotic farmer to be standing in the middle of a field of weeds.

@paleotectonics@47: As far as I can tell it comes from a bunch of country singers. At least they’re the first I can remember having them. Either way we’ve hit two of the three likely causes. The only other option is a wrassler.

In most areas when we look at the federal electoral map the cities are solid blue the suburbs turn red and the rural areas fluctuate.

I can’t speak for the country as a whole, but in Missouri that isn’t really accurate. St. Louis and Kansas City proper are both solidly blue, the two bluest spots in the state. The immediate suburbs in St. Louis County and Jackson County tend to be purplish - they went Democratic in 2008 but leaned a little more Republican in 2010. The exurbs get pretty red, and the rest of the state is mostly red with the exception of Columbia, a colege town that is home to the University of Missouri. Urban cores are solid blue, suburban areas purple, exurban areas getting more red, rural areas solid red.

Article: “What the Left Will never Understand About the Tea Party”

Um, how they manage to tie their shoes without accidentally strangling themselves?  These ain’t the brightest bulbs in the light show.

Right now the top two controlling generations (Baby boomers & Gen X) are solidly born before civil rights really had been won and became simply part of the system.

Are you kidding me? Putting aside my belief that I don’t think civil rights have yet been fully won, I find the suggestion that someone born as late as 1981 grew up in an environment with a similar degree of racial tolerance as someone born in 1946 utterly ridiculous. I was born in the mid-1970s, and most of my earliest memories are from the early 1980s. I don’t think racial tolerance during my youth was at the same place as it was for someone who was born in the 1950s.

The picture clearly has a “John Deere” style billed cap

More simply referred to as a “baseball cap” by us Yanks.

I’m reminded of another magazine that came out at the beginning of the month before the one on the cover if you subscribed to it, it too was popular with a similar, albeit, younger demographic, and for similar purposes, “I just read it for the articles”.

While I can only assume you are referring to Playboy, it’s pretty standard practice for American magazines to be released a month (or a week if it’s a weekly mag) prior to the actual date on the cover. The March 2011 issue of WIRED is currently on newstands. See for yourself the next time you’re at a drugstore.

it’s a “gimme cap”, a freebe given away by a salesman. i.e. “Gimme one of them caps.”

the last forty years have seen a rightward move in the U.S. electorate thanks to growing conservatism in the upper and upper-middle classes.

I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems that the logical conclusion of that claim is that the upper and upper-middle classes have increased in size in the past 40 years, when it seems to me that the complete opposite has occurred. Even more wealth is concentrated into an even smaller group today than it was in 1971.

@roscoe: This assumes that elections are decided by sheer number, and not by who gets to field more people. Absenteism is mostly concentrated in the lower classes. Obama’s election was an exception in that it was one of the few times absenteism dropped instead of rising, and see what that resulted in?

See Larry Bartels’s readily Googleable “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?”
Actually it is by Thomas Frank.

May I also suggest Joe Bagaent’s “Deer Hunting with Jesus”

Also Michael Parenti’s “Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America”.

I grew up working class and union, my father called the Taft Hartley Act, the Slave Labor Act.

This was during the Red Scare of the 1950s there has since been a war against the poor.  The poor, black and white do not receive an education.  If they are bright and luck they receive training.  Mostly though they get the meanest schools and have the bleakest of expectations.

The liberal wing of the current Democratic party is to the right of Nixon and in the case of Obama seems more interested in pandering to the wealthy than fighting for anything for those who are rapidly sinking into the lumpem prole status of permanently unemployed/under-employed.

I for one wouldn’t mind a bit of old fashioned left wing populism.  Complete with a bit of serious class war and some serious tariffs on things not built here.

it’s a “gimme cap”, a freebe given away by a salesman. i.e. “Gimme one of them caps.”

IT’S STILL WORN BY GODDAMNED <strike>PEASANTS!!!-</strike>American working-class agricultural labourers and farmers.

Getting a joke through around here is like pushing a noodle uphill at times, I swear.

Dammit, PiaToR, maybe you’d be a bit more useful if you didn’t chime in on Every.Single.Thread with some joke you seem to think is oh-so-witty.

Seconding Suzan on Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Notice that MLK wasn’t assassinated until he decided to apply the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement to a Poor People’s Crusade?

Dammit, PiaToR, maybe you’d be a bit more useful if you didn’t chime in on Every.Single.Thread with some joke you seem to think is oh-so-witty.

“Useful”, hmmm?  In what sense, precisely?

Perhaps you’d be more “useful” if you were able to sit while you typed.  That massive stick up your ass must make it difficult.

@Suzan #61:

No, What’s the Matter With Kansas? is by Thomas Frank.

“What’s the Matter With What’s the Matter With Kansas?” is by Larry Bartels.

Poor folks aren’t going to pay $6.95 for a magazine. I’d think twice myself.

This might also be a good time to mention the sitcom pilot I’m writing, which is to be called, “Kansas, What’s the Matter With ‘What’s the Matter With What’s the Matter With Kansas?.’” It’s about a salt-of-the-earth, conservative Kansan who is SO salt-of-the-earth and Kansan that he is actually named “Kansas”[1] who comes to Boston in search of his long-lost cousin, a Harvard political science professor, who at first disdains him because he lacks education and table manners. They have nothing in common! And yet, the two of them wind up bonding over a ca-RA-zy misunderstanding involving the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, so the professor (tentatively named “Larry”) invites Kansas to move in with him.

Eventually everybody involved learns the true meaning of family or something. I haven’t worked out what I want to do with the whole season yet.

And if that isn’t enough, I can add a red-headed, flaming-gay neighbor who’s always getting into all kinds of wacky troubles! And who is a devout Catholic! Who solves crimes!

-

[1] (Though I plan to reveal in the third episode that he is actually named not for the state but for the band.)

I *love* the “what the left will never understand about…”
it’s the same line Rush pulled out last week when confronted with all the “liberal” things Reagan did while in office and then asked why Reagan is so worshipped by the right.
“I… I just don’t think you’d ever understand it”

It’s a line people pull out of their ass because they can’t actually compile an factual, coherent reason (that doesn’t make them sound like a complete prick) WHY.

$6.95?  I’m glad I have the intertoobs, since there’s a little hint in the name http://teapartyreview.com/ that just might save me the money it would cost for this hilarious entertainment source.

10% of the country does not control 90% of the wealth.  I take affront to that.  It’s nearing that, of course, but the wealth of the next 9% is hardly comparable to the wealth of the top 1%.  In that 9% you have people with simple houses and jobs that still are under the social security cap.

And in that 9% you have my spouse and I, we own a tiny cabin in a lumber-town turned exurban bedroom community.  A nice existence, for sure, but hardly are we the masters of the country.  She pays an extra nearly ten grand in federal taxes for our relationship, and owe more than our house is worth - although luckily not all in the mortgage, and drive a ten year old car.

The problem is the we talk about these income brackets and wealth, without realizing how much of it already is concentrated away from even what 99% of Americans have.

I’m not sure what it is. It looks more like Indiangrass or one of the bluestems than any kind of crops. It would be kind of fitting for the Teabaggers’ patriotic farmer to be standing in the middle of a field of weeds.

Indian grass and bluestem aren’t weeds.  Not that a teabagger could tell the difference between invasive plants and native grasses anyway.

Also, Paine wrote The Age of Reason, which can be briefly summarized as “Ur bible sux (‘n so does ur church).”  So yeah, ‘baggers don’t know shit.  As if we needed any more proof.

Christ, that website looks like it’s from circa 2003.

The thing that Glenn Beck once said about Thomas Paine that made me want to shoot my television was when he heavily implied that Paine was opposed to the French Revolution.

Second only to the time when he said that Alexander Hamilton was for “small, limited government”. Yes, he used those words. Really. Alexander “Our National Debt is a Blessing” Hamilton, a “small government” guy!

#75, Paine was jailed by the French Revolutionary government, which is probably what Beck had to go on. But it was during the ‘eating themselves’ part of the Revolution, because he didn’t support Robespierre.

True, Mark, but Beck was clearly talking about the early, moderate stage of the revolution, specifically the “Declaration of the Rights of Man”.

“Useful”, hmmm?  In what sense, precisely?

Perhaps you’d be more “useful” if you were able to sit while you typed.  That massive stick up your ass must make it difficult.

Useful adj being possessed of a useful benefit. i.e., not a turd. What universe do you inhabit? You just made an ass of yourself. The correct response here is shame, not sarcasm. liberalrob agreed with you. That alone should give you pause. WTF is wrong with people.

This might also be a good time to mention the sitcom pilot I’m writing, which is to be called, “Kansas, What’s the Matter With ‘What’s the Matter With What’s the Matter With Kansas?.’” It’s about a salt-of-the-earth, conservative Kansan cheap watches online|Go Seeq Search Engine|cheap replica watches|GoSeeq
who is SO salt-of-the-earth and Kansan that he is actually named “Kansas”[1] who comes to Boston in search of his long-lost cousin, a Harvard political science professor, who at first disdains him because he lacks education and table manners. They have nothing in common! And yet, the two of them wind up bonding over a ca-RA-zy misunderstanding involving the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, so the professor (tentatively named “Larry”) invites Kansas to move in with him.

When did that stupid looking quasi-goatee, known by the young as the soul-patch and by construction workers as the ball-tickler, become a righty thing?

I agree with Tyro @49 that it’s probably a shadow.  Perhaps at higher resolution it will look like a soul patch though.  As to why the righties like it, it’s a Christian culture thing: http://blog.beliefnet.com/stuffchristianculturelikes/2008/08/7-soul-patches.html

paleotectonics @ 47:  I think he’s supposed to just look like he hasn’t shaved today, that tough guy rough shadow thing that was kind of fashionable (maybe ironically, but I doubt it for most of those who adopted it).

That is definitely some kind of Maoist hat.  I live in John Deere land, and I don’t know any farmers who wear hats like that.  They wear hats like this.

In other words, trucker hats.  The mesh is a definite must.  That hat the dude in the picture wearing is right out of a Communist propaganda poster.

While roscoe3680 @56 and Woodrowfan @58 are correct, I believe the technical term is ballcap.

JThompson @52: I thought it might be a fallow rye field gone over to grass, but I like your idea better.

I absolutely adore the spambot that stuck itself in the middle of the “Kansas, what’s the matter with what’s the matter with Kansas” sitcom proposal.

A plagerizing spambot with taste!

“I think he’s supposed to just look like he hasn’t shaved today, that tough guy rough shadow thing that was kind of fashionable…”

Don’t you understand?  He’s a Real American™.  He’s far too busy — holding back the barbaric hordes of Kenyan Mooslim Socialism and Liberalism while doing his mundane white-collar desk job and periodically pretending to be a Real American Farmer From the Heartland of America, Hoo Rah! — to bother shaving.

He doesn’t expect to get any help from the government — except cops, and roads, and public schools, and clean water, and a functioning judicial system, and unemployment insurance, and disability insurance, and military bases, and big defense contracts, and if he actually is a Real Farmer (god forbid) loads of government subsidies.  He’s made it all on his own, without any help from anyone else (except all that infrastructury stuff that he takes for granted as his birthright as a Real American)!

And if you piss him off, and liberals get elected instead of Hard Core Real American Ultra-Conservative Tax-Cutters and Committed Abortion Foes Who Hate Mooslims and Other Immigrants, then he’ll just have to resort to Second Amendment Remedies!  (He’ll just need a little help loading and cocking that cool pistol he bought on a whim at the gun show.) 

Look upon his works, Ye mighty, and laugh and point fingers!...

mr_subjunctive @ 68: but isn’t the band named for the state? Wouldn’t being named for the band that was named for the state be close enough?

While liberals in this country are quite willing to discuss oppression in terms of race, sexism and homophobia, they are seriously uncomfortable regarding the 800 pound gorilla in the room, class oppression.

wut

I thought liberals were all marxists. wouldn’t that make taking class seriously pretty much definitional?

joking aside, since when are liberals and progressives afraid of talking about class? isn’t half the discussion concerning economic policies and reduction of the welfare state, and attacks on services for the poor precisely about class?

*confused*

The liberal wing of the current Democratic party is to the right of Nixon and in the case of Obama seems more interested in pandering to the wealthy than fighting for anything for those who are rapidly sinking into the lumpem prole status of permanently unemployed/under-employed.

by definition, something to the right of Nixon can’t be liberal. And conflating the Democrats with liberals isn’t precisely useful when trying to accuse liberals, and especially progressives, of something. there are virtually no progressives, and very few liberals, in the Dem’s.

What the Dem’s are, though, is less toxic than the Republicans; and a necessary step in the right direction, unless you just want to go ahead and stage the revolution. (not that I’m disagreeing about the weakness of the progressive movement in the USA; it’s just unhelpful to see the Democrats as simultaneously part of it, and completely against it. what they are is a step in the right direction, away from where the Overton Window has been dragged over the last 30 years)

I look at it this way, jadehawk.

It’s gotten to the point where we have a Sane Party (the Democratic Party) and the Insane Party (Republicans). That’s the main difference between the parties. Sure, there are conservatives in the Democratic Party, but at least they’re not fucking insane conservatives.

@helen w. h. but isn’t the band named for the state? Wouldn’t being named for the band that was named for the state be close enough?

Probably. I think the context is going to be that, like, his parents didn’t know there was a state called Kansas, despite living in said state, but they knew about the band. (I might also be able to work in there that his middle name is “Boston,” also for the band, not the city, and that he wasn’t aware there was a city until he moved there to meet Larry.)

It’s a sitcom: nobody’s going to object if the humor is a little unrealistic and broad.

I was thinking the same thing Speedbudget. Around here they’re called “Seedcaps,” because yes, they are usually promo (gimme) items from seed companies - so a lot of DeKalb, Pioneer, etc. But also pipeline companies, tractor co’s, though since JD has become a “decor” item, usually JD doesn’t promo unless you are a BIG purchaser.  Feed and fertilizer, too.

Your link didn’t work .  Try this one. John Deere caps:

http://farmerssupply.net/allcaps.aspx?page=3

Cap in ‘bagger photo seems to have a shorter bill and a more flexible, smaller crown with a crown band on the outside.  More like this: 

http://www.buycoolshirts.com/fimistcaphat.html

Guess all those ‘bagger farmers must like Fidel’s style

Useful adj being possessed of a useful benefit. i.e., not a turd.

Uh-huh.  Now, go back on this thread - what was my very first comment?

And what exactly have you contributed again?

I absolutely adore the spambot that stuck itself in the middle of the “Kansas, what’s the matter with what’s the matter with Kansas” sitcom proposal.

I think it’s a bad sign. If they’re starting to hijack legitimate comments, its going to be just that more difficult to identify them fast enough to stop reading.

“As hard as it may be to believe, this magazine cover is not a parody.”

Are you sure?  The people who peddle this stuff are a separate group from the people who buy it.  Not every pusher samples his own product.  It’s a time-honored custom for concoctors of nostrums to laugh long and hard at the dupes and rubes who seek out their handiwork.  This could just be rube-mockery finding a visual expression instead a verbal one.

“...the urge of a bunch of suburbanite tea baggers working office jobs to imagine themselves as rugged farmers working old-fashioned fields their actual dietary and housing demands have killed off.  Your McMansion sits on an exurban street that used to be someone’s farm!  It’s practically the same thing, right? Your Sports Overcompensation Vehicle drives on roads that were paved right over where tractors used to roam.”

To elaborate: when the estate of a recluse or a small farm is bought up and torn down so that the gated community can be built, and when the requirements of exurban life start to surpass the capacity of the rural infrastructure to support them (I’m counting the basic productivity of any piece of territory as part of its infrastructure, since that’s what ultimately helps support life) the gated community and the SuperMall come to symbolize the environments and ways of life they have rendered defunct, because they stand literally in their places.  Symbolism is a system of displacement under which one thing comes to stand for another.  We can see that the same rule applies to human beings: the exurban commuter drone displaces the horny-handed son of the soil, then apes his pastimes and attitudes (or apes what he imagines those to be) because he has helped put a stop to the whole small-town small-farm bag—-not in spite of it.

Cool.

I’m weighing in on the hat controversy:  No logo visible, and it looks to be made of cloth, not the scary polyester mesh of most gimme caps.

It’s not a gimme cap: it’s a cloth hat.

ebay this phrase: “New Black Blank Basic GI Cap “

has there ever (in history, not just recently) been a more duped class of people than working class white Americans? 

as for the cap, I’m thinking either Cabela’s felt lined wool cap:
http://www.cabelas.com/mens-casual-ball-caps-cabelas-felt-lined-gray-wool-cap-2.shtml

or more likely this:
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_043E0028000P?sid=IDx20070921x00003a&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=043E0028000P

has there ever (in history, not just recently) been a more duped class of people than working class white Americans?

The data indicates, as another commentator pointed out, that teabaggers are overrepresented in the higher income brackets and underrepresented in the lower. Only 19% of them make less than 30K in contrast to 25% of the nation as a whole. They’re not glaringly white either: about 79% as opposed to 75 for the general pop. So why single out the class of Americans (white working class) who are actually underrepresented in the movement?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/tea-partiers-fairly-mainstream-demographics.aspx

I know, it’s a lib-dem core belief that the repub base is made up of working class whites—first among them Southerners who used to vote for the Dixiecrats. Only they are now voting against their economic interest due to divisive social issues—first among them race—deployed by repubs to get the former democrats to vote for them.

This is the dem equivalent to the repubs “tax cuts pay for themselves.” It’s basically a load of crap. The thesis was based on anecdotal evidence, most notably Thomas Franks “Whats the Matter with Kansas.” As others pointed out up thread, now some serious scholars—most notably Larry Bartels, who is (like the rest) left of center—have crunched the numbers to reveal (in Bartels words):

Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century.

Has the white working class become more conservative? No. The average views of low-income whites have remained virtually unchanged over the past 30 years.

Do working class “moral values” trump economics? No. Social issues (including abortion) are less strongly related to party identification and presidential votes than economic issues are

So if this narrative is BS, what the hell happened to the New Deal Coalition? What happened was the demise of Jim Crow. Dems have things completely backwards. It was the New Deal Coalition (not the conservative one) that owes its success predominately because of white racism. And the white racists in question were not the working class, but the middle and upper classes…who were convinced to vote against their class interests in favor of progressives—like Fullbright, Wallace, Byrd, etc; and on a national level JFK, FDR, Stevenson—who promised (either explicitly like Byrd or thru dogwhistles like JFK) to maintain the regime in return for the support.

When the regime fell, the middle to upper classes drifted slowly to the repubs. As far as the working class goes (Bartels again):

Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites – and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era.

Got that? You progressives had a one-party system. Once you lost that you spent decades constructing alternate explanations as to why you keep losing elections whereas it was so much easier in the past.  The word for this is denialism.

Now, to leave this on a bright note for you all, since I actually do vote for your party…none of this means there was no Southern Strategy. Indeed, the South seems to have overdone it now, with wealthy whites voting republican at a much higher rate than in the north. So, to the extent this is due to racism, your focus should be on the upper-classes, not the working classes who you’ve been shitting on all this time. I think this will come as a nice consolation prize for you all.

Manju—If your point all along was that progressives should stop hating on poor, rural whites, you are absolutely right and it would have been great if you would of just said that instead of trying to making asinine points about the history of the parties.

You are mostly right, all though I will add that it isn’t just lefties that assume that poor whites are republicans. The Republicans paint themselves as working class whites and most of the media takes that assumption on faith. I wish liberals would stop the classism as well.

Alysia,

The moral issue (stop telling the white working class they are duped) is a sidepoint. It naturally follows from the fact that the working class are not behaving in the manner attributed to them (abandoning the democratic party, increasingly voting on social issues and against their economic interest, etc). I suppose if they were doing that then the patronizing class-based hatred would at least have a rationale.

I’m a right-winger of sorts so I don’t believe in using a moral argument to defeat a factual one, i.e. you can’t say since “What’s the Matter with Kansas is classist” its therefore factually incorrect. I mean, you have to argue on the facts. Either the white working class are voting more conservative post-64 or they are not. Which one is it?

They are not. That’s the central point. This is because Thomas Frank’s book was anecdotal: i.e., lefty goes to a few bars, talks to working class people who express socially conservative views, and reaches a conclusion that just happens to align with his political leanings while demonizing his opponents. It’s not serious scholarship.

Larry Bartels in contrast is a Princeton U scholar who has analyzed a huge amount of data. Andrew Gellman is renowned Columbia U statistician who reached similar conclusions in “red state, blue state.” There are others like Byron Shaefar and Nelson Polsby who have studied the southern realignment in great detail, and have therefore thoroughly debunked the liberal happy-land narrative (the white working class punished the dems for civil rights). None of these scholars are right-wingers. Indeed, Bartels current focus is income inequality.

The ultimate irony is that after years of hearing this neo-Marxist (false consciousness) argument, the data actually indicates that the upper classes vote in ways that lefties attribute to the working ones. Gellman’s book goes into great detail about how the upper-classes in the north actually vote against their perceived class-interest and do it because they are concerned about social issues. I can identify with that, I vote dem because you all are pro-gay marriage and abortion etc (and also b/c you are the party of fiscal responsibility). But in the South the upper classes do no such thing.

So it is not the working class who are really in play. The reason things seemed so much easier for the left in the years preceding the civil rights act (and up till 94 on the congressional level) is because upper class southern whites were convinced to vote for the left-leaning party due to, ironically, race.  Dems have it all backwards. For better or for worse, it is the upper class, not the working one, that vote on social issues. That’s both how you get Jim Crow in the South and Dem dominance in the North.

Will somebody please explain to me how the Tea Partiers can stand behind cuts that will eliminate their Social Security and their Medicare checks, because it seems that most of them are receiving such payments? Have they been so snookered by Big Business including Wall Street into believing that tax cuts will be beneficial to them?  I can hardly believe they are so stupid. The Republicans are coasting to the place where they won’t get elected again, but they don’t seem to care, maybe because they’re feeling big and fat with Big Business and Wall Street contributions.  What am I missing?