Alright Fine, We’ll Talk About the Tea Parties

I didn’t want to give these idiots any relevancy, but since the nutjobs are sprouting up all over the place, I guess I’ll take some time to respond, however inane their arguments are.

Ok so I think the best way to do this is to just rattle off some facts (and some opinions) in list format for ease of reading:

Here’s are 10 questions for all you people at these so-called T.E.A. (Taxed Enough Already…cute isn’t it?) Parties ranting and raving about wasteful spending and deficits–

1. Why all of a sudden are  you upset about paying taxes?
2. Why all of a sudden are you upset about government spending?
3. Why all of a sudden are you upset about the bailout and the stimulus package?
4. Where have you been over the past eight years?
5. Where have you been while GWB and his Republican administration racked up the largest deficit in our country’s history?
6. Where were you when GWB and his administration would not include Iraq in the normal budget and would only pay for it with “emergency spending money” so he could hide the billions that were being funneled to private contractors (aka his friends) over in the Gulf to rebuild and secure a nation that we had just irresponsibly attacked for no good reason?
7. Where were  you when GWB passed the first stimulus package?
8. Where were you when Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt (i.e. more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history?
9. Where were you when GWB doubled it after Clinton eliminated it?
10. Where were you when Reagan (because of his insane cut taxes/raise spending economics) was forced to raise taxes TWICE to avert a fiscal catastrophe?!

I don’t mind if  you are worried about government spending. I will respect your views as much as their are LOGICAL and VIABLE with facts, history, and reality. But you Republicans and Libertarians and Fox News nuts at these tea parties don’t have facts, history, or reality on your side.

You protest when there is a Democrat in the Oval Office and a Democratic Congress. But you’re silent when there is a Republican President and/or Congress. You are currently a party that is living in a heaping pile of lies, revisionist history, and alternate reality.

You’re not protesting spending. You have rallied behind deficit spending for the past 30 years. You are protesting the fact that you lost the election in embarassing form. You are protesting because you are sore losers and you’re not willing to allow the “other side” even 100 days to try to right this enormous ship that has been diverted off track by your leaders.

Rather than taking to the streets to allegedly protest wasteful spending (by, ironically, wastefully spending on millions of tea bags), why don’t you all take some time to READ FACTS and LEARN HISTORY and deal with REALITY. Just for a change. Just to see where it leads you. You might upset your other ignorant, fire-breathing friends and family members, but you might just feel a little better inside yourselves.

Repubs love porn! Duh!

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.

Political Divide

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.

After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states  online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog  and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election  Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Old-Fashioned Values

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays  a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”

“One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more,” Edelman says.

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Cut the nuclear crap. Literally.

Some Senators have stealthily stuffed $1 billion for nuclear weapons into the recovery bill. The only thing this will stimulate is an arms race. It must go.

The Senate bill now contains language authorizing $1 billion “for weapons activities” at the sprawling nuclear weapons complex of laboratories and factories run by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), including new construction, new projects and new computers. The House bill does not contain this funding, for good reason.

Military spending is notoriously poor at stimulating the economy. Studies show that investing in mass transit, education or state and local government projects generate far more economic activity than money spent on weapons. There are, in addition, three other major problems with using this emergency legislation for non-urgent and unnecessary nuclear weapons purposes.

First, this is a stealth increase in the nuclear weapons budget. The government currently spends at least $52 billion each year on nuclear weapons and related programs, according to a new study by the Carnegie Endowment. This is an unconscionable amount in any year, but particularly outrageous during this profound economic crisis. Of this amount, the NNSA got $9.3 billion last year. The Senate would give the agency a $1 billion bonus–free money above and beyond its normal budget. It is an 11 percent increase for weapons programs at a time when hospitals, schools and state governments are forced to slash their budgets and lay off workers.

The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability provides a complete NNSA budget breakdown on their website. They are mounting a public campaign against this give-away.

Second, this weapons increase comes without any presidential plan for the size, composition, or mission for the 5,200 nuclear weapons currently in our stockpile. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world–or any nation therein–many times over. But the Bush Administration planned to expand nuclear weapon production, plans that could cost $200 billion over the next two decades, according to Bill Hartung at the New America Foundation. Giving a nuclear bonus to the weapons complex now is an attempt to force start this expansion, box in President Obama, and create facts on the ground that he will find more difficult to reverse.

Finally, this is a nuclear earmark manipulated in Senate backrooms. There is not a record of who put these funds into the bill, nor any justification for why this amount and why now. The culprit, however, is suspected to be a senator who has no intention of voting for the bill. This is not transparency; this is hypocrisy. No member of Congress should be allowed to vigorously oppose the recovery bill with one hand and stuff nuclear pork into it with the other.

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