Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

[tsetsefly]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61P0EV20100226

Can you feel that change yet?

I really hope at least 20% of incumbents lose their seat this upcoming election, but I doubt it...

As for the notion that the democrats are somehow different than the republicans, they do a good job of destroying that notion everyday...

[aaron]

Re: Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

I can't believe they voted 315-97! Who do they work for? I do not know ANYBODY who wants the Patriot Act.

This does give Obama ONE LAST CHANCE for change. All he has to do is veto the bill. He'd have instant credibility.

[Ghent12]

Re: Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

I can't believe they voted 315-97! Who do they work for? I do not know ANYBODY who wants the Patriot Act.

This does give Obama ONE LAST CHANCE for change. All he has to do is veto the bill. He'd have instant credibility.

Why would he veto a bill he wholeheartedly supports? The man is pretty much every bit the "warmonger" and "dictator" and all the other labels attached to the previous president.

[don]

Re: Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

Frank Rich is the New York Times darling political columnist, who once was found in the entertainment pages. Is he unwittingly connecting the P.A. renewal and the Tea Bagger dots?

The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged

By FRANK RICH

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

Equally significant is Barstow’s finding that most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

In the days after Stack’s Austin attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its “progressive-lite” collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt — that would be McCain — and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that “must be cut out of the system.”

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/op...ml?ref=opinion

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

Frank Rich is the New York Times darling political columnist, who once was found in the entertainment pages. Is he unwittingly connecting the P.A. renewal and the Tea Bagger dots?

I don't see any mention of or connection to the Patriot Act Renewal in Frank Rich's article.

What am I missing, don?

What I do see in Rich's article is the continuation of an effort to discredit the Tea Party. His piece is a rude broadside of insults and innuendos.

I am unsure whether the suicide/murder plane crash of A.J.Stack was what it appears to be or not. Certainly the propagandists of the elitists who would continue to steal our liberty, our wealth and our heritage have staged more elaborate events than that one.

But it is clear to me that this event is being taken as justification for more cracking down on freedom loving Americans and discrediting their efforts to gain traction politically.

[dummass]

Re: Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

Why would he veto a bill he wholeheartedly supports? The man is pretty much every bit the "warmonger" and "dictator" and all the other labels attached to the previous president.

How about that Nobel Peace Prize and his "call to action." :rolleyes:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33237202/

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

The Patriot Act is being passed again because the people in power are afraid, and they should be.

The propaganda being hurled towards "extremists" is becoming, well, extreme. The New York Times is no surprise, but even the neocon rags here in New York City are pulling the Hitler card en masse on Ron Paul. The power elite is happy with the northeast neocon crowd, and CPAC effectively proved they have no real influence outside of the New York City/Ivy League crowd.

You combine this with the many recent polls that indicate a tiny fraction of the population believes the government operates with the consent of the governed, and you can see why they are afraid. The right wing "fringe" is scarcely a fringe at this point.

[Ghent12]

Re: Congress extends unCHANGEd Patriot Act

How about that Nobel Peace Prize and his "call to action." :rolleyes:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33237202/

Ah yes, I can't tell if that Norway governmental organization has a profound sense of irony or if they were merely acting out of hope. The Peace Prize winner being the same man to "work together with other nations" to increase Predator drone strikes both in quantity and in more countries, to expand the 'wars' overseas, and invite aggression.

Meanwhile he abandons the hopes of those without medical coverage by attempting to finally, in one last climactic battle, ram down a law forcing them to pay for it.

I wonder what his die-hard supporters still cling to...