Teabagging
If I weren't already sure that the "tea parties" going on around the nation were completely ridiculous, this news spot confirms it. Thank you Chris for linking it, I'm copying you so that more people can see it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#30199155
The video is about 8 minutes, though you don't need to watch the whole thing to get the gist of it. The main reporter is definitely tongue in cheek considering he's referring to the whole event as "teabagging," but the political analyst in the second half is quite professional and makes all the points that made me think the whole thing was silly:
*these people are imitating the Boston Tea Party to protest taxation with representation
*Obama has yet to raise income taxes
*the taxes everyone paid yesterday were put in place under Bush, with a Republican congress
*the "increased government spending" everyone is wailing about under Obama is nothing compared to what happened under Bush. I'm too lazy to look up the exact data, but I believe he managed to more than triple the national debt in just 8 years... not the yearly deficit, the entire national debt, and yet these conservatives weren't staging protests over that.
Of course, politics is one of those fields about which people have been shown to act completely illogically, and to actively dispute and deny logical arguments if they contradict deepseated beliefs, so I guess this isn't really that surprising *eyeroll*
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#30199155
The video is about 8 minutes, though you don't need to watch the whole thing to get the gist of it. The main reporter is definitely tongue in cheek considering he's referring to the whole event as "teabagging," but the political analyst in the second half is quite professional and makes all the points that made me think the whole thing was silly:
*these people are imitating the Boston Tea Party to protest taxation with representation
*Obama has yet to raise income taxes
*the taxes everyone paid yesterday were put in place under Bush, with a Republican congress
*the "increased government spending" everyone is wailing about under Obama is nothing compared to what happened under Bush. I'm too lazy to look up the exact data, but I believe he managed to more than triple the national debt in just 8 years... not the yearly deficit, the entire national debt, and yet these conservatives weren't staging protests over that.
Of course, politics is one of those fields about which people have been shown to act completely illogically, and to actively dispute and deny logical arguments if they contradict deepseated beliefs, so I guess this isn't really that surprising *eyeroll*