Now, if you attend some tea party meetings in Indiana, a different kind of challenge is emerging. On the information tables, along with candidate brochures and handouts from right-wing blogs, is a stack of DVDs, one of them titled “Rothschild’s Choice: Barack Obama and the Hidden Cabal Behind the Plot to Murder America.”

As described in breathless narration over ominous, pounding, suspenseful music, the cabal is made up of Jewish financiers and billionaires, run today by Lord Jacob Rothschild, the 4th Baron. Along with Jewish-run secret societies and globalist organizations, their control of Barack Obama has turned him into a water boy to their causes.

Obama is a Zionist puppet, goes the argument, supported by Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Barney Frank — all Jews, all part of the banking system, all tools of the conspiracy. “David Axelrod,” says the narrator, “That’s right, he had a Jewish campaign manager.”

I can already hear the chorus starting up from the Tea Party crowd. This is just a fringe element, doesn’t represent the overall movement, blah blah blah.

Rather than getting into yet another argument about whether or not the Tea Party movement has a significant basis in racism, nativism, and xenophobia, I’m going to take a different route here. For decades, Republicans and conservatives have been tarring Democrats with every nutball and loon that shows up at anything that is even remotely related to the party. Democrats have been forced to answer for and disavow an endless stream of fringe groups and figures, down to the level of forum-posters on non-affiliated websites.

Now, faced with an escalating series of kooks, bigots, and crackpots showing up at their events and frequenting their forums, conservatives are falling back on the same “We’re not responsible for those guys” answers for which they have torched Democrats over and over again.

You can’t have it both ways, guys. Either drop the guilty-by-association tactics, or admit you’ve got some scary shit happening within your “party”.

The Republicans have spent the last couple of years doing everything they could to feed this kind of nutbaggery in the shadows while “respectable Conservatives” pretended to not know anything about it. The very first thing the Republicans did when Obama won the nomination was to court frothers and birthers in the PUMA movement and court the lunatic fringe with attempts to “otherize” Obama. Whisper campaigns about him not saying the Pledge or refusing to swear on a bible or not wearing enough USA #1 bling on his suit led to “underground” email campaigns that led to the continued existence of birthers and other nutjobs who insist Obama is a socialist Muslim Kenyan. You thought that rhetoric from Sarah Palin was a mistake when she said “He doesn’t look at America the way we do” and he “pals around with terrorists?” They knew what they were and are doing. They teases and teased, introducing citizenship bills and hinting he might not be American, and now Orly is one of them.

Two things.

First, I quite regularly read and hear people saying that while the Right has its nutjobs, so does the left. Complaints about extremist ideologies and general crazy-talk by Republican supports are generally shouted down by cat-calls about Cindy Sheehan and Sean Penn. Sorry, but no comparison when you have stuff like a member of your own party casually throwing around terms like “raghead”, or someone like Taitz making an apparently serious run for a major state office under your banner.

Second, Cole engages in some serious schadenfreude regarding the possibility of Taitz winning the nomination, the idea being that her name appearing on the Republican side of the ballot would result in a Democratic landslide. As much as I would like to laugh derisively at that, a part of me seriously wonders if Taitz’s chances of winning really would be that small.

Oh right—we weren’t supposed to take John Kerry seriously because he thought terrorism was just a nuisance

Clearly, only Republicans are qualified to tell us which global problems are serious and which are not.

Bruce Bartlett comments:

A new University of Washington poll sheds light on these observations by separating TPM agnostics, who may somewhat approve or disapprove of the TPM, from those that strongly approve of it. Released on Tuesday, it sampled 1,695 Washington State voters—a large sample—and asked them to define themselves as strong TPM supporters (19% of the sample), those that somewhat approve or disapprove of it (26% of the sample), and those that strongly disapprove (27% of the sample; not included below).

What I think this poll shows is that taxes and spending are not by any means the only issues that define TPM members; they are largely united in being unsympathetic to African Americans, militant in their hostility toward illegal immigrants, and very conservative socially. At a minimum, these data throw cold water on the view that the TPM is essentially libertarian. Based on these data, I would say that TPM members have much more in common with social conservatives that welcome government intervention as long as it’s in support of their agenda.

What is happening is that the term “Tea Party” is being expanded to include a bunch of different groups who don’t tend to have much in common. The charitable way of viewing it is that the primary commonality is an opposition to government intervention, “intervention” here being rather loosely defined.

The Venn diagram I’m imagining has a few circles: traditional libertarians, the “black helicopters are coming to take my guns” bunch, social conservatives opposed to Obama and Democratic control of Congress, corporate-types who are looking for a more business-friendly market environment, Republicans looking for a political opportunity, etc. There’s a relatively small area where all these circles overlap, and it’s marked “Opposed to government intervention.”

A somewhat less charitable way of viewing the situation is that the area of overlap among all the various circles is instead marked “Don’t like where they see the country going.”

Either way, around all those circles is a dotted line marked “Tea Party”. It’s convenient for the media to characterize the movement in this way, because it simplifies their narrative. It is also convenient for most (if not all) of the groups involved, as it gives each group the appearance of being a popular movement that is more widespread than if it were considered on its own.

The downside is that the umbrella label papers over very real differences between the different constituencies. While Christian social conservatives may be opposed to this particular federal government, they tend to enthusiastically support social activism by the federal government when its beliefs match their own. It is hard to see how they form a meaningful coalition with traditional “government out of our bedrooms” libertarians.

Jonathan Chait: Because the public doesn’t understand it, and politicians are too nervous to push for it.

I happen to agree with Chait, but I think there’s another issue that deserves to be called out. Cowan’s complaint, as I read it, is basically an upside-down argumentum ad populum, a.k.a., an appeal to popularity. The standard example is “My idea is valid/true/correct because many people believe in it.” They may very well believe in it, but people believe all sorts of crazy stuff for all sorts of crazy reasons, and that has no bearing on the validity of the idea itself.

Cowan takes the opposite approach—”Your idea is no good because no one supports it.” As Chait points out, there are some fairly obvious explanations for the current unpopularity of Keynesian theories. However, even absent those explanations, Cowan’s argument is bogus.

It’s a reminder that when Republicans block domestic spending on areas like extended unemployment insurance, what we’re seeing is a reflection of priorities — the already-enormous Pentagon budget is important (even if it means funding programs the Defense Department doesn’t want) and struggling families aren’t.

It’s also a reminder that Republican talk about fiscal responsibility is a shallow scam.

It’s generally safe to bet on the ever increasing mendacity and hypocrisy of Congressional Republicans. There’s a fair amount of that on the Democratic side of the aisle as well, although I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the Republicans have far more to answer for than Democrats. However, I’m aware part of that may be my own political biases.

All that being said, chalking this stuff up completely to hypocrisy misses the mark slightly.

Part of it *is* priorities, but there is also the issue of fundamental differences of opinion regarding the role of the federal government. If you think that the federal government should be responsible for national defense, but has no business engaging in social welfare, then supporting spending on the former but not the latter doesn’t fall into the category of hypocrisy.

Personally, I think that the government does have a role to play in helping its citizens weather economic crises. What I’d like to hear from Congressional Republicans is a reasoned argument in defense of their votes.

My former Senator has, unsurprisingly, found yet another excuse for some grandstanding. According to the Washington Independent:

To discourage businesses from outsourcing their operator services, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is proposing legislation to tax businesses that set up help lines overseas. The levy, under Schumer’s bill, would be a quarter-cent per call.

Generally speaking, I find it difficult to take seriously much of anything that issues from Schumer’s mouth, press office, or his multitude of press conferences. He picks obvious, easy targets, and then chases them with pointless legislation that usually doesn’t go anywhere.

In this case, I find myself even more skeptical than usual. Schumer’s got a real twofer here: everybody loves to bitch and moan about call centers (they’re like the Postal Service in this regard), and hey, who doesn’t hate out-sourcing? Trouble is, making it more expensive for companies to use overseas call centers isn’t going to make those companies open call centers in the U.S. It’s going to make them even more enthusiastic than they already are to phase out human interaction altogether.

Instead of using your offensively fake Indian accent (HILARIOUS!) to complain about the customer rep you talked to, now you’ll get to complain about having to navigate an endlessly branching automated phone system.

Young people reading Robin Givhan’s article on Kagan’s scandalously open knees think they’re reading something hilarious from their grandparents’ stack of dating magazines from the 1950s. When they hear us yelping about racial diversity at the court, they think about the fact that their classrooms are already incredibly diverse and their Facebook friendships span continents. When they hear us shrieking over women’s softball, they shake their Title IX heads and figure we’re just idiots for thinking straight women don’t play sports. And when they hear us whispering behind our hands about whether someone is gay, most of them tell me they think we’re just freaking idiots. Just as they embody Barack Obama’s post-racial America, they identify almost completely with Kagan’s post-gender America—in which womanhood simply isn’t defined by skirts, babies, or boyfriends anymore.

Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum rightly points out that while that’s all well and good, maybe theres’s still some other stuff we might want to be concerned about:

Good job, young people! But we still have that whole judicial philosophy thing to hash out. It would sure be nice if we knew a little more about that.

Digging a bit deeper into Lithwick’s actual post, though, I find myself more than a bit skeptical about even the relatively useless claim she is making.

I might be more encouraged about the increasing tolerance and openness of our society were Lithwick not apparently drawing her examples entirely from a) people who call into political radio shows that she has been on, and b) people who respond to her Slate posts via email, Facebook, and Twitter. Mind you, I don’t have any data myself, but I’d bet there’s at least a possibility that those to groups don’t constitute a particularly random sample of “20-somethings”.

The U.S. uses 23 percent of total world oil consumption, but has only 3 percent the world’s oil reserves within its borders. Drilling off every coast in the U.S. won’t resolve that issue. Even the most productive portion of the new area opened to drilling in the March announcement, a 24 million acre area of the eastern gulf, is expected to yield only 3.5 billion recoverable barrels of oil. The U.S. consumes 19.5 million barrels of oil per day, which means that these wells would only produce about 180 days worth of oil – hardly worth the catastrophic situation we face in the gulf today.

This topic is, generally speaking, something I have wondered about. While it might make for a catchy political slogan, the notion of drilling our way to any form of energy independence strikes me as pretty far-fetched. If the idea were that we would temporarily pursue increased domestic oil production while we also pursued alternative, non-fossil fuel energy sources, I might be more inclined to go along with it. However, given that the majority of the people shouting “Drill, baby, drill!” are using it as a rhetorical bludgeon against anyone suggesting we seek out or fund alternative energy production, I am disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I do have one issue with Sheppard’s post, though. I don’t know the numbers involved, so I can’t say for sure, but the “23% of the world’s consumption / 3% of the world’s supply” comparison seems a bit slippery to me. Comparing percentages seems like it is apples-to-apples, but without actual, hard numbers, I can’t say that there isn’t some fudging going on there.

Many of the demonstrators, like Judith Garloch of Newark, Ohio, said they were opposed to an increasing government role in the health care. Many said they feared cuts to the Medicare program for Americans 65 and over.

Yes, let’s all make sure the government stays out of Medicare.