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Archives by Tag 'Tea Party'
Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St. Martin’s Press, on the rising influence of Ayn Rand in modern politics. Titled ...
Long after its leading encampments have been torn down – often with brute force and (educationally enough) by predominantly by Democratic mayors and with the approval and involvement of a Democratic White House – the populist Occupy Movement deserves major credit for ...
For the last few months, the world has been fascinated by your frenzied search for a presidential candidate who is not Mitt Romney. We know that you find the man inauthentic and that you have buoyed up a string of anti-Mitts in the Iowa polling — Michele Bachmann, R...
US press coverage has usually cast the Tea Party as an authentic expression of popular anger against Washington insiders. Anthony DiMaggio’s new book, ...
The president was coming to town. And Neil Jednoralski was prepared. He’d taken his list and checked it twice. Handcuffs, Arrest Warrant, 4 guns! Check.
Barack Obama was coming to Osawatomie, Kansas, reportedly to do a Teddy Roosevelt impression. Neil was goi...
Many are thinking about the Tea Party and its relationship (or lack thereof) with Occupy Wall Street. I’ve received numerous complaints from some liberals who seem set on fostering an alliance between both forces in terms of what they promise will be a mass campaign t...
Not every change in national policy and events is announced with a new conference or presidential speech.
A case in point is the rapid rise of apparent mental instability in the Republican Party. You used to just disagree with Republicans; now you have to worry whe...
It’s interesting about Bill Koch, the energy and mining billionaire and Tea Party sugar daddy, though his brothers seem to be more the Tea Party groupies than he. He reminds me of Marie Antoinette, not in his looks, but in his mindless pursuits.
She prized ...
What a difference four years makes. Around this time in 2007 the race for Iowa’s pivotal Democratic Party presidential caucus was in full swing. The big national money and media focus was on the corporate-sponsored candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but John E...
Scott Borchert: Your primary focus as a scholar is on media and communications — so why a book on the Tea Party?
Anthony DiMaggio: I’ve also researched and participated in social movements and interest group politics consistently for the last ten y...
Many Christian fundamentalists believe that one day they will awake to the Rapture. On that day, the chosen will mount chariots of fire and be transported to Heaven while the rest of us unworthy survivors, those stranded on this living planet, will be visited by all th...
They thought they glimpsed a flash of Rick Perry’s soft underbelly. Eyes certainly strained from behind the Medicare benefit bifocals. Yes, it was a soft underbelly! He showed a moment of compassion by mentioning that it was hardly fair to deny children of illegal im...
He’s just a commodity anyway!
I find it grimly amusing that so many people were stunned by the Republican debate crowd who happily cheered on the demise of the 30 year old who wouldn’t pay his insurance tolls. By my way of thinking, at least the sociopathy is c...
If Republican candidate debates are an indication, executive orders have become anathema to Tea Partiers. This is bad news for Rick Perry– and not just because in a lapse from his usual know-nothing, puritanical moralizing, the Texas governor issued an executive ...
For Manhattan at least, last week was the weather week that wasn’t. But the minor earthquake and weakened Hurricane Irene served as reminders of the caprice of nature and — only a couple of weeks before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 — the k...
Reflecting upon growing voter indifference in democracies across the Atlantic, historian Tony Judt chalked it up to a roster of world leaders that “convey neither conviction nor authority” and “stand for nothing in particular.” These words resonate in the aftermat...
Texas Governor Rick Perry has ridden into the GOP presidential race on his high horse, threatening to ‘get ugly’ with Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, stopping just short of accusing him of treason, and catering, as expected, to the most radical of the ra...
Several sad parallels can be found in the bumbling way Washington dealt with raising the debt ceiling and averting financial catastrophe, and the US’s overall handling of the search for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
When Standard and Poor’s downgraded the ...
The Tea Party, mutant spawn of the Republicans, held their spineless parents and the nation hostage during the debt ceiling crisis, and is now demanding an even greater ransom.
Flushed with what they mistakenly believe is success, they have launched an all-out assa...
(Bar near the Capitol Building. Two southern Tea Party members. Sitting at the bar. A quarter bottle of Jim Beam in front of them. They have the style of the traveling salesmen made famous in the 1968 Maysles brothers’ film, “Salesman.” Like other Tea Party cong...
The Boston Tea Party in December 1773 threw the East India Company’s tea overboard. The Republican Tea Party in August 2011 threw America overboard.
Only in Congress, with its rules for minority rule, can a minority of the Republican Party in the House of Rep...
Last Thursday when the market crashed, the volume on the New York Stock Exchange was 7.5 billion shares, obviously much higher than usual. The Nasdaq volume was also unusually high. If we could levy a fee of one penny for each share bought and sold in the United States, t...
When I arrived in Washington this past Sunday, just as the debt ceiling crisis was approaching its climax, all the flags surrounding the capital’s Union Station stood at half-mast. I blackly joked with my brother and sister-in-law that maybe they’d been lowere...