And I don’t understand the whole tea-party thing. Was there some drastic, radical increase in federal taxes since Jan. 20 that I haven’t heard about? Are federal taxes higher now than they were a year ago — or eight years ago, for that matter? Or do I understand the whole tea-party thing too well after all?

I just read the comments to Barry’s article.

Be afraid, trevor. Be very afraid.

Sorry if my assumptions about Trevor and Tiffany are close to accurate. I’m glad that the article has been a boost for you and the school.

And I’ll bet that trevor is shaking in his bought-by-somebody-else boots. Tiffany is going to have hundreds of people, with more brains and better intentions than him, taking an interest in her. He’s not going to like that at all, but it may provide the support or the impetus for her to set her sights a little more in line with her talents, discipline and character. It’s worth a prayer, anyway.

Keep up the good fight!

Dick Armey was my congressman when I lived in Texas, so I maintain a special well of contempt just for him. We affectionately referred to him as “Our Dick in Washington,” and we meant it. He was a moron. He is a moron. He is also a sanctimonious prick.

Don’t these twits realize that the “skyrocketing tax rates” that they are ostensibly protesting are the very same rates that George Bush and the Republican House and Senate gave us? These are Bush taxes, not Obama taxes. Obama has not changed them at all. What douchebags.

Just a few more reasons to not vote Republican.

Texas is weird – I did 14 years there – but I think that Good Hair overplayed his anti-guvmint thing by quite a bit. I think that he will probably have his ass handed to him by Kay Bailey Hutchison. KBH is no real prize, but she is about as sane a credible as anything the Repubs got right now.

It will be interesting to see how Perry, Palin, Sanford, and Jindal make out in their respective re-election campaigns given their high stakes gambits of refusing, or at least appearing to refuse, the federal stimulus money. My bet is that the move will backfire for all of them.

Also, the Teabaggers are all morons. What nonsense. Couldn’t the folks at FauxNews come up with anything more lame?

Texas is weird – I did 14 years there – but I think that Good Hair overplayed his anti-guvmint thing by quite a bit. As strange as Texans are, I think that they are smart enough to see through Perry’s assholiness. I think that he will probably have his ass handed to him by Kay Bailey Hutchison. KBH is no real prize, but she is about as sane and credible as anything the Repubs got right now.

It will be interesting to see how Perry, Palin, Sanford, and Jindal make out in their respective re-election campaigns given their high stakes gambits of refusing, or at least appearing to refuse, the federal stimulus money. My bet is that the move will backfire for all of them.

well, any other kind of motorsport is obviously far less refined than F1, being a little short on poison dwarves and Nazi-bondage-philes… but there’s a Pakistani running in ARCA this year, does that count for anything?

(no, there really is: http://www.alimotorsports.com)

Alex – I saw Rachel Maddow do a riff on the Texas governor, and she played the video of him talking about secession*, and then demolished that strutting peacock’s pretensions by pointing out that just five days ago this same fellow was requesting (and receiving) Federal help with wild fire fighting efforts, and not so long ago asking for (and receiving) Federal troops for border control duty, and not long before that requesting (and receiving) Federal aid for hurricane-related emergency response and rebuilding….so that he’ll coyly flirt with secession, even as he begs for and receives Federal aid of all sorts.

Before Rachel’s show, Olbermann took a look at the essentially incoherent ideological veering about by Uncle Rush Limbaugh…”incoherent” that is, unless you reduce it to simply being ardently opposed to anything President Obama does.

That, to me, sums up the tea-bag thing; it is simply a somewhat limp (so to speak) pep rally for the down-in-the-mouth (so to speak) losers of the 2008 election (cue Joe the Plumber).

This evening I called our local radio lip flapper, who is a pleasant enough fellow. One can usually get through, and if you have a calm point to make, he lets you proceed. This evening he had gone on a riff about some government worker in New York who worked near enough to the massive slaughter at the immigration class to have been in a day-long lock-down.

This worker, it was emphasized, was a UNION man, doncha know, and what is the one thing this guy is working on now? Getting paid for the hour’s lunch he missed out on, during the lockdown! This made me laugh, but our local host was (apparently) trying to make a real point of the fact that this UNION man could only think about getting remunerated for his missed lunch-hour….the government worker had become his symbol for ALL that’s WRONG with UNIONS in America, doncha know?

I thought ‘OK – that’s it’ and called in, and boom – got right onto the airwaves…where I good naturedly pointed out that it was about as fair to point to this one little fellow as the personification of ALL that’s WRONG with labor unions in America, as it would be to point to radio lip-flappers such as himself, and ascribe all this horrible gun violence onto them….and I got the greatest compliment possible, which was a seamless seguay into a commercial!

*ignorant-ass talk about “secession” on the very anniversary of the assassination of President Lincoln is somewhat obscene, especially coming from the uppity governor of a state that was indeed treasonous and disloyal back when the chips were really down

Back to Formula One, baby! It’s Shanghai this weekend – and oughta be sublime!

They really are like a foreign nation, them Texans. They require their women to cover their heads with fake blonde hair and their faces with clown makeup, an affront to human dignity every bit as bad as the mandatory burqas in some Islamic nations. At least women are allowed to run for governor, as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is said to be doing. She’s evidently pretty tepid about all this tea-partying, unlike her incumbent rival.