Papers filed by political humorists in Federal Court accuse The Republican Party, its elected officials, conservative bloggers, Fox News, and CNBC of "crossing the line in self parody" and "creating a situation that is difficult to satire" by acting "so fucking weird." The comics, some of them funny, are seeking damages in the hundreds of dollars to make up for lost revenue.
Lawyers for the class action suit showed tapes of recent episodes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and the House Republican caucus. After the crowd stopped laughing they pointed out that these were actual video tapes, not way out parodies. That seemed to confuse people. Lawyers played the tapes again and then people got very quiet and sad and most of them walked away from the TV and didn't say anything for a very long time but they told themselves that they would never vote for a Republican again, ever. Later they forgot all about the scary tapes but wondered why they didn't see Republicans any more like they used to in the old days, Republicans like Stephen Colbert.
Unsurprisingly, Jon Stewart explored the tax day tea protests on The Daily Show. He not only took on Fox News for sponsoring these events, but the people themselves for protesting wasteful spending by buying a million tea bags and wasting them. Stewart also looked at the amazing coincidence in timing that these people decided to go anti-government around two and a half months ago.
WATCH:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Tempest in a Tea Party | ||||
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96 comments:
The shrinking Conservative base is comical but increasingly scary. They each need the "Right Wing Deprogrammer".
Yes! It's vaudeville at it's finest. Currently, comedians can only hope they aren't scheduled to follow a repub!
YES!!! This is what I've been talking about. My daily dose of rib-tickling, belly-shaking laughter comes straight from the Repugs. Who would have thunk that FOX, et al were saboteurs of themselves?
You know, doc, if comedians actually did file such a suit, it wouldn't be entirely frivolous.... the Republitards have had me in stitches for DAYS.
I mean, honestly, what about those anti-gay marriage people? First they witlessly call themselves NOM, not realizing it's a silly silly meme, then they announce an initiative called 2M4M, not realizing THAT is Craigslist speak for a gay male anal threeway...who needs comedians when you can just read the news and make people bust a gut laughing?
In a separate suit, Richard and Sal from the Howard Stern show claimed that Republicans had ruined the humorous value of tea bagging.
I do all my teabagging online playing HALO3, Call of Duty4, & Gears of War2.... that's truly NON-PARTISAN Tea Bagging.
the high taxes that the "grassroots" are being encouraged to protest are Bush taxes: do these people know that?
ah................................no! In their case, ignorance is bliss
I doubt it. The power of mass ignorance.
HEEE, heeee, if these folks forgot that April 15th was the deadline for tax-filing while they were out there displaying crass ignorance. The IRS will pay them a visit INDIVIDUALLY.
They claim they "support" the troops and yet they refuse to pay taxes to maintain our "freedom". I hope they even ride on horses and not on cars or trains.
expecting these sort of twits to make sense is like expecting water not to be wet.
Excellent, Jon, excellent!!!
How Silly.... Just goes to show you.... Ignorance has no limits.... Racism is the real basis of this so-called movement... Fear of black authority .... These lames would rather see America destroyed rather than make it a better place...
not fear...but resentment
More likely BOTH.
Yea right. Whine away. But these Fox Followers should know that they are carrying water for big corporate interests while they had a tax cut two weeks ago. Did they whine when Bush was creating the deficit and not reporting the expenses for the war? I am amused and appalled at their stupidity.
people have the right to demonstrate their own stupidity whenever they want - in the case of GOPers, they did it when they voted Reagan into office (twice) followed by Bush 41, followed by a GOPer-dominated Congress (1994-2006) and finally Bush 43.
However, with the constitutionally-guaranteed right to behave like a muppett, comes the constitutionally-guaranteed right for people endowed with a fully-functioning cerebral cortex to point at the GOPers and roll around on the floor laughing at their idiocy.
This is where GOPers are so useful: not only do we get a morality play about the dangers of cousins marrying, but we also get entertainment as well.
I think you used too many words with more than 2 syllables.
Try to use words of one syllable or less.
Sorry, forgot that being able to string a sentence together is considered "elitist" by GOPers.
I put it down to their intellectual figurehead, Limbaugh, flunking out of the the correspondence course from the Panama College of Typewriter Repair.
Very artistic. As usual, Jon Stewart summarized the folly in the so-called TEA (Hate groups) party organized by Fox Noise... the network that assures that exclusive watching will make you very, very ignorant.
At some point we have to stop being stunned by the number of nitwits who will fall for anything
It's hard not to be stupefied when you consider the number of people who watch Fox News and BELIEVE EVERY FREAKING WORD these 'entertainers' who pose as legitimate newspeople throw at them.
And if you look at the speakers at all of the tea parties...they were all AM radio talk show hosts that are part of the Fox network.
Here in Oklahoma City, folks listened to Mark Shannon, a regional shock jock of the "dumber than even Sean Hannity" variety.... He did a stirring rendition of the speech from the first battle scene in Braveheart....it was, um, special!
photo
I was in Denver on the 15th, and visited the "tea party" out of curiosity. IN NO WAY were there 5000 people there!! I have seen that number reported in the Denver Post and elsewhere. I have seen large crowds, and AT MOST THERE WERE 700 TEA PARTIERS IN DENVER! That's not a difficult number to get at noon in downtown Denver. I wonder if other cities exaggerated numbers. The State Police in Denver are a very conservative lot as is the Denver Post. In the past they have underestimated large demonstrations of progressive groups, which they later 'corrected'.
[ I wonder if other cities exaggerated numbers]
Rushpublicans never use accurate figures. They always exaggerate or intentionally low-ball everything, depending on which is more of an advantage.
Bravo Jon....Palin rallies revisited...LOL... I love our democracy!!!
I just love the continued fiction that this is some spontaneous 'grassroots' outpouring of ordinary citizens. Yeah...right.
These people don't have a clue. Why weren't they protesting when George was running up our deficit and destroying the constitution? These people are so blinded that they can't see the lunacy in their own actions. They act like spoiled little children throwing a temper tantrum because they did not get what they wanted. Are they going to be a pain in the butt until another republican steals the presidency again? Fox News (if you call what they do news) should be investigated by the FCC. Fair and balanced? Bullshit! Not by a long shot,
"Why weren't they protesting when George was running up our deficit and destroying the constitution?"
Because then they would have been anti-American.
Now they are patriots.
Get it?
me neither.
You get it. I get it. but why don't they get it??? How hypocritical! Their ignorance is dumbfounding. They act like irrational, spoiled little children.
The tea party movement will have about as much lasting effect as a bowel movement.
LMAO
I don't see any evidence of the teabaggers actually gaining traction.. If the 'movement' had a life of its own, Glen Beck and the rest wouldn't need to endorse it like a Hummer dealer's Sale-O-Rama. "C'mon down, folks. Get 'em while you can."
This so-called protest was the first in a series to be put on by the GOP trying to reinvent themselves as the party of the people. Only they're skipping the reinventing part, the part that covers people's needs and voters' decisions, and just named themselves that.
This will only swiften their demise, thankfully, but in a very public manner.
i went to the tea party protest in my town and was happy to see very few people there. the people that did show up were mostly older white people. almost no people in their 20's to 40's attended. it seems to me this old school Republican view of the world is on its way out.
Any "people of color"?
Just curious.
When I said mostly older white people, i should have said ONLY older white people, I was the only black there.
I really don't think this has to do with taxes.
No, I think this has more to do with the last two elections being not really close.
My family income is less than $40,000 and we really don't pay much in the way of federal income tax.
In fact often we get a refund.
Working class people stand to benefit from Obama's new tax plan.
Fox and Rush and other wingnuts have stated openly their desire for our president fail. Their greasy fingerprints are all over these "tea parties."
If I remember correctly, these same people were calling good Americans traitors for questioning Bush's war and the WMDs. The transparency of these wingnuts is astounding!
And do you recall how FOX covered the anti-war protesters? Calling them unAmerican.
It is hard to believe that in the United States of America, a so-called "news" organization can be completely taken over as a propaganda station for a political party. "We Report. You Decide."
Really? Like when your reporter was telling the people Obama was a facist? In case you don't know, that's an opinion, not a fact. I thought the purpose was to let the PEOPLE at the rallies speak, not Fox reporters posing as rally people.
I do recall the unAmerican/ unpatriotic BS, how shameful and hypocritical. I saw one segment the other day where people at a TEA party did speak to an interviewer and it was pretty sad. It seems the GOP/rightwing is chock full of inarticulate undereducated sheep.
Bless you, Jon Stewart. You a the voice of reason.....being funny and adorable doesn't hurt either.
Amazing, isn't it, that Fox couldn't say a bad word about Bush.....but they are on a roll now.
Sad to think that they've brainwashed people to feel the same way......
As long as people like Stewart, Colbert, Olbermann, Maddox, and Dr. B. keep getting the word out...we will be ok. Thank you for all you do to keep us sane.
Even with all the support and coverage given this thing by its instigators FOX, by protest standards, it was a non-event. Nate Silver sums it up.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/tea-parties-appear-to-draw-at-least.html
All the shots on Fixed News were tight. No wide shots that would have shown the actual small crowd sizes.
I watched the BBC America news that night. They usually at least mention major events that occur in the U.S. Guess how much air time the tea bag party got: none!
The irony in these "tea bagging" parties is that were any of the right wingers actually around in 1773, they would have been Loyalists denouncing the Revolutionists as dangerous radicals!
Good point, Oh Wise One. But, since it requires analytical thought, your statement would be lost on wingnuts, who don't really "do" irony...
I hate to say this...because I don't want to believe it. But, Occam's Razor is the only solution to this insane abundance of hypocrisy.
The people who genuinely believe in the premise of the "tea party" have a serious genetic flaw that does not allow them to think independently.
That's right. I'm throwing down the glove. We are talking about a major evolutionary malfunction.
If these folks are so concerned about how tax dollars are being spent, maybe they should be the first in line to not receive social security benefits or medicare....
Truthfully, I would be proud to pay higher taxes guaranteeing better health care, education and a healthier planet...
Times have changed people, the old way just does not work efficiently anymore and we are lagging behind....no thanks to Bush and the last eight years. He did nothing to makes us a stronger, healthier nation...
The teabaggers are just disgruntled (and Obama pegged them accurately when he said they cling to their guns and religion), and no matter what President Obama does, it will never be good enough. They will always find fault and something to complain about, thanks to their leaders like Rush and Fox News.
Side note: The Hatfields VS the McCoys.
Two real families locked in a generational war. Geneticists have found a genetic marker that links people to aggressive, war like tendencies.
So, what I'm positing is not unrealistic at all. But it is scary. It implies there is NO solution to the problem. Evolution will either amplify that gene or remove it from the population depending on which faction "wins". In other words...who reproduces the most. If that last statement doesn't scare you, you aren't paying attention.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04
very interesting posit (and post). The recent article on Huffpo about Jim Bob and the Bobbetts (Duggar family becoming larger than population of Vermont) could indicate which way the wind is blowing:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/13/how-long-until-the-duggar_n_186261.html?page=3&show_comment_id=23132279#comment_23132279
Oops! Since there are no working links in comments, here's what the article said, in full:
The Duggar family of TLC fame just announced that they are expecting their first grandchild. Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar have 18 children ranging from 0 to 21 years old. Their eldest, Josh, was married in September and will welcome the littlest member of the brood just one month after his first anniversary.
The Duggars live in northwest Arkansas and can be seen on TLC's hit "18 Kids and Counting." Michelle Duggar gave birth in December to their youngest child, Jordyn-Grace, and as the title of their show suggests, it may not be her last. Assuming they do stop at 18, and assuming each of their kids have the same amount of children (which are both big 'ifs') how long until those with Dugger blood outsize the population of America's smallest state?
After the next generation of Duggars breeds at this rate, there will be 324 members of the clan (not counting the husbands and wives that married in). The third generation will have 5,832 members, the fourth will have 104,976, and the fifth will have 1,889,568...almost three times the population of Vermont. This would mean...
* There would be one Duggar for every two square miles of America.
* If all the Duggars earned the average American salary, they would collect $85 billion a year before taxes, enough to bailout AIG.
* There would be more Duggars than Muslims in America.
In one more generation...
* There would be almost as many Duggars in America as African Americans.
* Duggars would outnumber lawyers 42 to 1.
* There would be more Duggars than Canadians.
Of course it would take the Duggar family at least 200-300 years to breed this much, and the number of African Americans, Muslims, and lawyers could also grow. These statistics require an amazing amount of hypotheticals, they are just meant to give you an idea of how fast a family can expand when they start having kids young and keep going!
260,000 people nationwide attended the so-called Parties? Wow! That's less than Obama usually gets in one place! And I'll bet most of them just showed up not to participate but rather to enjoy a good freak show!
And that number is most certainly an exaggeration.
It was less than half of that. Not a good idea to get numbers from FOX. LOL
Rightwing "tea parties" = abysmal failure. Just like the repub Party. LOL!
What if Fox News threw a tea party - and nobody came?
It came and went already? It was such a good party I can't remember it... Damn, those FOX guys sure know how to get down.
I believe this was a test that Fox News Channel conducted to see if they could mobilize a mass protest and then "cover" it like a legitimate "grass-roots" event. Kind of creepy, and I am sure they are now analyzing how to do it better the next time. FNC appears to be one of Cheney's "stay behind" elements, and merits close monitoring.
Unfortunately, there will probably be a next time...
So what? And it will be promoted by Fox and the GOP and sparsely attended by mostly clueless morons just like this one.
And the rest of us will laugh about it just like this one.
4th of July, right? Then they all can have some BBQ weinies with their teabags!
So on the 4th, is it going to be iced tea? Just askin'.
Stewart: "...people of non-color ..." !!!!
That was my favorite line too. LOL
OMG -- that was hilarious!!
Jon Stewart nailed it. They want to talk about wasteful spending yet they bought millions of tea bags, worthless spending - oh the irony! Notice how no one asked the question "What was the purpose of the Boston Tea Party?" They did not want to embarrass the trolls. It takes comedians to bring out the truth...need to give Steward and Colbert prime time spots.
I might add that the tea most likely was made in China and the purchase of them only aided the corporations at the top level with their direct products and other than the food store chains, no American worker benefited from the sale of the teabags.
I wonder how much interest David Koch, the 19th richest man in the world who funded it through his think tank 'Americans For Progress', has in Chinese tea. God knows they own everything else. He funded the stupid thing from money earned from the family owned conglomerate that owns almost every pipeline in the U.S. plus Georgia Pacific paper company which makes what those idiots use to wipe themselves and blow their noses with.
Those gullible folks have no clue how much they are being used to enrich two brothers David and Charles Koch whose wealth level has grown from 4.7 billion each in 2004 to 19.7 billion three years later thanks to all the tax benefits the upper 1% got with Bush Tax cuts.
Did any of these stupid yahoos have their income grow 4 times larger in the same period from the Bush tax cuts? I think not!
Shhhh don't tell them that, their brains will go into seizure......oh wait, you have to have a brain first.
It's a MOVEMENT alright.
All that tea will do that to ya . . .
If conservatives whine, and nobody cares, do they make a sound?
LOL - right!!
The irony of this "Tea Party" is that 90% if not more of the people who attended make less than $200k and they are actually paying lesser tax under the Obama Administration.
I am from African, this event is exactly the same as some riots in some part of Africa, where influencial & weathy people through proxies will organize and mobilize the ordinary citizen to protest and riot on the street just to cause mayhem for the government.
The people that will benefit from the continual lower taxes are not the 260,000 estimated people that attended these parties. These people are just tools, meant to be used and dumped...
Welcome, and well said. I agree.
Your example from Africa is appropriate, but I worry about another example from Africa, namely the Rwandan genocide. The groundwork for that was laid in advance by hate radio and a secret network of local organizers, wasn't it? As soon as the president's plane was sabotaged, the signal was given by radio and the hate groups went to work locally, with neighbors attacking neighbors for no apparent reason.
Yes, that is a sobering reminder of how dangerous these otherwise silly, apparently harmless events could be.
If these tea parties were really about taxes and wasteful spending these people would have been out protesting during the Bush administration. What it really comes down to is the right's fear that a Democratic administration may actually succeed.
Yes, and yes!
exactly.
The good news for Fox's ratings is that a lot of people (like me) tuned in to laugh at the lemmings, since their core viewers were out trying to help Fox MAKE news. Their potential ratings dip was probably made up by people like me wanting to watch this car accident.
On another note, watching Fox try to spread panic and fear over the whole right-wing extremist concern from Homeland Security is sad. It was one of like 5 types of people, and Fox spins it into an attack on their conservative contingency.
I thought Fox used to be at least credible 5 years ago. Now, I can't watch 5 minutes without seeing obvious bias. I would think that it would be in their best interest to strive for semi-crediblity. I almost feel bad for any legitimate journalists that have to put on that act for Fox News, if they have any.
They don't care about credibility. It's all about ratings and tax breaks for the wealthy.
it's all about hating Obama.
You know it! I don't think I could roll my eyes any farther without having them roll out of my head.
"Run fer the hills, Jeb, and bring yer guns! It's a black man, and he's bringing his Socialist posse to steal our money and enslave us all!"
And they all tell you it's not about race. Please...
Exactly!
Fox News should just change their name to Fascist & Racist News. Their numbers wouldn't change.
Their numbers would go up! Better let em stick with Fox News (I prefer Faux Noise)
The tea parties looked like McCain/Palin rallies. No people of color! Most of these people will be getting a tax break. Did Fox let them know this? Will they be returning it? Has Fox asked them to reject the money? What about Medicare? What does Fox think of such a "social" program.
Assholes.
This teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.
So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off .
What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them.
You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia.
You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years.
Fox News watchers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.
Exactly!!! Teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs.
But they DO hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure.
And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college.
Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!
39% of respondents with incomes below $30,000 told the Gallup agency that they felt that federal income tax levels were “too high.” Which is interesting, because only 32% of respondents in that income category will pay any federal income taxes at all on their 2008 income. You can draw your own conclusions.
The really irritating thing about these morons is that, guaranteed, not one of them has ever taken a serious look at the federal budget.
Not one has ever bothered to read an actual detailed study of what their taxes pay for.
All they do is listen to one-liners doled out by tawdry Murdoch-hired mouthpieces on Fox and then repeat them as if they’re their own opinions five seconds later.
That’s what passes for political thought in this country. Teabag on, you fucking fools.
One Republican got booed at his own teabagging party, so that made the cable (CNN) news. They booed until he quit. LOL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QsY2r7HbTM
OK - No satire for a change, just a semi-thought out rant:
if there's a lesson from this teabagging crap I think it is that Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration should work together to make the public AM radio airwaves more competitive so more diverse voices are heard.
As long as the Republicans and the Right hold on to their monopoly on AM radio they'll be able to stage these kind of hate-fests easily and more often.
I'd take the Teabaggers seriously and move to use the FCC to open up the public airwaves and also use the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department to break up Rupert Murdoch's media empire along with the other media corporations that have become as dysfunctional to our democracy as the "too big to fail" financial corporations.
right on!
Best idea I've heard in ages!
You go doc!
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