It's really hard to cut through the incoherence of the tea party protestors and figure out exactly what they are protesting about. Something about taxes, maybe?
Well, whatever size the protests, fueled by Fox channel shilling:
You see, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, and Greta Van Susteren are all scheduled to broadcast live from tea parties in different cities across the country, and they've wasted little time in diligently working to boost attendance levels for the April 15 events.
Views of Income Taxes Among Most Positive Since 1956
it turns out the
American people have a different idea about taxes than the teabaggers:
A new Gallup Poll finds 48% of Americans saying the amount of federal income taxes they pay is "about right," with 46% saying "too high" -- one of the most positive assessments Gallup has measured since 1956. Typically, a majority of Americans say their taxes are too high, and relatively few say their taxes are too low...
The poll also finds 61% of Americans saying they regard the income taxes they have to pay this year as fair. There has been very little change on this measure in the last six years...
Implications
As the remaining U.S. tax filers prepare to send their income-tax returns before the April 15 deadline, Gallup finds Americans' views of their federal income taxes about as positive as at any point in the last 60 years. This may reflect the income-tax cut that was part of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan, as well as a continuing sense of patriotism with the country fighting two wars.
Soooo... where's the outrage, exactly? Hello? Anyone? As Paul Krugman pointed out in the NY Times today, the GOP is really going off the rails.
One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the "tea parties" that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.
But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.
Thus, President Obama is being called a "socialist" who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
Remind me again exactly what the protests are supposed to be about? Is it to remind us that the nutters are different than the rest of us, and that Fox isn't really a news station but an entertainment division of the GOP? Well, for anyone who doubted it, it should be clear as crystal after Wednesday. Let's see if they are as family-friendly as a late October Sarah Palin rally.