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Happy Birthday to the Tea Party


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happy-birthday-to-the-tea-party.phpPower Line:

Steven Hayward

2/27/14

 

 

There will be a *celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Tea Party today in Washington DC. The Wall Street Journal‘s Jason Riley gives a run down * here. The Tea Party is the best thing to happen to American politics since the tax revolt of the 1970s. Paradoxically, its broader focus has made it both less easy to lead and organize effectively, and easier for liberal media to attack, such that polls show many voters in the middle have an unfavorable impression of the Tea Party even while they agree with many Tea Party points of view on individual issues. It was ever so in politics.

 

In any case, on this fifth anniversary (and here’s to the next five years, where the Tea Party will be even more important), it’s worth savoring the famous Rick Santelli rant that got it all going (about four minutes long):

 

 

* Evil White Neo-Nazis only please. smile.png

 

** Behind Paywall


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Inside the Beltway: The tea party at five years
Jennifer Harper
2/26/14

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On the roster with Mrs. Bachmann: Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Ted Cruz of Texas, plus Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Steve King of Iowa, Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, Louie Gohmert of Texas, and Matt Salmon of Arizona.

 

Talk radio kingpin Mark Levin is a featured speaker, along with the indefatigable Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, which has organized the eventicon1.png. Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley will also be at the podium.

 

“Five years ago, American politics — as dominated by the Democratic Party and the big government Republican Party — was intellectually bankrupt. Fortunately, a renewed philosophy centered on elegant reductionism began to develop, just as it did under Reagan in the 1970s,” Mr. Shirley tells the Beltway.



(Snip)
__________________________________________________________________________
What! No left handed albino dwarves....No diversity!
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A Blast From The Past

 

Tax Day Becomes Protest Day

How the tea parties could change American politics.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

April 15, 2009

 

Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies -- dubbed "tea parties" -- to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501© group like MoveOn.org.

 

So who's behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing "flash crowds" -- groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month. This is part of a general phenomenon dubbed "Smart Mobs" by Howard Rheingold, author of a book by the same title, in which modern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don't know each other.

 

In the old days, organizing large groups of people required, well, an organization: a political party, a labor union, a church or some other sort of structure. Now people can coordinate themselves.

 

(Snip)

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The Tea Party at Five: What the Wacko Birds Have Wrought

2/27/14

 

On the fifth anniversary of the first Tea Party rallies, the movement's record appears mixed. It swept the GOP to a majority in the U.S. House, where it has blocked President Barack Obama's most radical ambitions. It helped the GOP win several governorships, launching reforms that broke the unions' political stranglehold. At the same time, weak Tea Party candidates cost the GOP the Senate, and aggressive legislative tactics cost it support.

 

The debate for and against the Tea Party obscures the movement's larger achievement, which is that it reinvigorated a sense of opposition in American politics. Opposition is a natural force in all political systems, to some extent, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America. Yet it does not have the same formal role in the American system as it does elsewhere, and it has been especially weak--both left and right--in recent years.

 

The great paradox of the Tea Party is that despite the fact that it currently enjoys the approval of only a minority of Americans, the principles for which it stands are shared by a broad majority. The Tea Party stands for greater freedom and less government, and its flaws all arise from the fact that it has pursued those goals with a far too idealistic expectation that the political system could be restored to those values given enough energy and effort.

 

(Snip)

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