I found a middle-class guy who insists Obama raised his taxes, and an ex-banker telling people the problem isn't Obama, it's the banks. Plus: Used tea bags are ugly.
Salon/Julie Coburn
Melanie Morgan speaks at the San Francisco Tax Day tea party.
I tried to keep an open mind as I headed over to San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza for our local Tax Day tea party, where a crowd of about 250 people protested, well, a whole lot of things having to do with Barack Obama. I knew I’d have a lot of chances to reinforce my stereotypes; I tried to look for things I didn’t expect to find.
First, the stereotypes: A little man in a Michael Savage cap carrying an “Obama = Imposter” sign handed out fliers demanding that Speaker Nancy Pelosi begin impeachment proceedings because Obama “is not a natural-born citizen.” There were several hammers and sickles; lots of signs warning against socialism and communism; three Betsy Rosses; a guy in what seemed to be a coonskin cap carrying a big sign with a gun that read “Reload for the Revolution” (to be fair, when he got onstage, he backed “reloading with ideas,” urged everyone to vote, and said nothing about guns — and later, Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickenson identified him as local author/man about town Barnaby Conrad III). One woman wore a white baseball cap adorned with dozens of used tea bags, which looked surprisingly … icky. Almost nobody was actually from San Francisco; I heard Moraga, Tiburon, Ross, Marin, Daly City. Oh, and the crowd was almost exclusively white.
But I had a few surprises. Right off the bat I did what I promised to in my Tuesday post: I asked a protester if Obama raised, or lowered, his taxes, trying to start a dialogue. I found the perfect person: Brad Huffman carried a makeshift brown cardboard sign that read (I paraphrase): “I can’t afford a better sign because Obama raised my taxes.” Did Obama really raise your taxes, I asked Huffman — and he answered yes. Surprised, I asked Huffman what he did for a living, and he told me he works in the “private security business” and makes roughly $50,000 a year. “Obama lowered your taxes,” I told him. But Huffman insisted I was wrong; he’s getting $28 less every pay period since Obama took office, and he hadn’t changed his salary or deductions.
I was stumped; so much for my effort to have an enlightening dialogue about how Obama’s tax plan actually cut taxes for, I’d estimate, 99 percent of the people at the tea party. I find the one guy making $50,000 whose taxes went up, or at least, so he believes? The day went on like that for a while. I met a lovely man who gave me a small copy of the Constitution and told me the credit crisis began when we passed the Community Reinvestment Act under President Carter, and Democrats forced banks to lend to people who can’t afford houses. I told him that, actually, home loans covered by the CRA had a lower default rate than other loans, and he thanked me for sharing that information, and promised he’d look it up when he got back to his computer. Dialogue achieved! I moved along.
Nationally the tea parties have been supported by Fox News; locally they were endorsed by right-wing talk radio station KSFO, home of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura. KSFO printed up hundreds of tea party signs, and former host Melanie Morgan, who now runs the pro-war Move America Forward group, was the only remotely recognizable figure attached to the event. Morgan led the group in a two-block march to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, though Pelosi was reportedly at a book signing, not in her office.
I have to say, the group had an admirable, open-mike approach to who spoke at the rally; it looked as if anyone who went up and asked to got to speak. Unfortunately for a reporter, the megaphone was terrible, and almost nobody was introduced with his or her full name. So I can tell you there was a blond-dreadlocked libertarian worried about a “police state,” a Polish immigrant in a Ron Paul hat warning against “socialism,” a lovely Ayn Rand devotee from the Ayn Rand Center, along with Morgan and “Reload” man and an all-white roster of people worried about what Obama’s doing with their taxes.
Finally, Morgan introduced Shawn Steel, whom she described as a leader of the 2003 recall movement that toppled Gray Davis and made Arnold Schwarzenegger California’s governor — a real lesson in “be careful what you wish for,” because honestly, the tax-hiking Republican got louder boos than Obama did. Steel insisted the tea party movement wasn’t a product of either party, praised the high turnout of Ron Paul supporters (who brought the average age down by about 10 years but tipped the male-female ratio hard in the male direction) and urged the group to continue to have “fun.”
Being an optimist, I saw a few places where smart liberals might be able to win over some of the protesters. One of the speakers, who looked to me like a closet liberal, I know the type, got a big hand when she came out for a boycott of Chase Bank. Several people and signs railed against TARP and the bailout of failed banks and AIG.
But former banker Christina Plutarkos, in a black suit and gray pumps, had me beat for optimism, hands down. I watched her confess to a small crowd that “I don’t oppose Obama,” while she tried to convince them the real economic scandal is the bipartisan bank bailout. Plutarkos carried a big yellow sign that on one side read, “The stimulus is already working saving essential jobs … it’s the bailout that’s the problem,” and on the other asked: “Why did Treasury let AIG close out credit default swaps for 100 cents on the dollar?” I’m not kidding. She was trying to get the tea partiers to turn their anger toward the bailout, and she was getting a fairly respectful hearing.
“Liberals are idiots, they don’t try to engage these people, they’re too ideological,” Plutarkos told me. How was engagement going? “It’s been very interesting. People are nice to me. A burly 60-year-old man gave me a hug. ‘I’m with you, honey.’” She made friends with a group of young libertarian guys, and walked with them over to the rump rally that wound up at City Hall. It was kind of a nice end to the day.
Over at City Hall, though, the mood got a little uglier. There were chants of “Nobama, Nobama,” and cops came out to line the steps. But nobody tried to enter the building, and after 10 minutes or so of chanting, the crowd dispersed. There were dirty tea bags littering the sidewalks outside City Hall and in Civic Center Plaza, and I couldn’t help thinking of the city workers who’d clean up the mess. (I saw people handing back signs and placards to event organizers at the end; clearly a lot of the partiers had help with their signage.) An African-American neighborhood regular, missing some teeth and clutching his black hoodie against a cold April wind, just shook his head as he watched the crowd walk away. “Eight years of Bush and y’all out here now?”
UPDATE: Christina Plutarkos just wrote a letter correcting my poor transcription of her sign.
Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh
The fake “War on Christmas” outrage
It's become as integral to the season as caroling and Black Friday -- but the sentiment is completely manufactured
One of the defining qualities of late December is the predictable and ritualized nature of America’s holiday season. Other than discovering what’s inside the wrapped gift boxes, there’s no mystery or suspense to it anymore. The Christmas music starts right before Thanksgiving. Then come the flickering lights, the red-and-green decor, Hollywood’s vacation movie blitz, and finally, with media charlatans turning the key, the fake outrage machine rumbles back to life.
Like a narcissist’s souped-up 4-by-4, this turbocharged colossus of self-righteous indignation makes a lot of noise and leaves a mess in its wake — but ultimately says a lot more about its drivers’ pitiable insecurities than anything else.
This year has been particularly illustrative, as the fake outrage machine has caricatured itself like a Bigfoot-esque monster truck in a desperate bid for attention. In just the last few weeks, the Heritage Foundation billed an Agriculture Department initiative to raise revenue for tree farmers as a “Christmas Tree Tax”; Fox News said that standard federal safety warnings were proof that the government wants to “tell you how to decorate your Christmas tree”; and conservative activists criticized Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an Independent, for daring to consecrate a “holiday tree” — rather than a “Christmas Tree” — at the statehouse.
Meanwhile, under the headline “‘Modern Grinches Step Up Anti-Christmas Efforts,” the Christian Broadcasting Network lashed out at cities for trying to respect the separation of church and state at holiday time, and the American Family Association continued its annual effort to denigrate companies that substitute “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas.”
To know that this machine’s outrage is indeed fake is to appreciate some telling facts about the alleged transgressions. For instance, the government’s recent revenue and regulatory moves were entirely routine and nonreligious, while Gov. Chafee was just preserving a long-standing tradition in a state founded as a haven for religious pluralism. Similarly, many cities are still including Christmas in their winter festivities — they are just including other celebrations as well. And if saying “Happy Holidays” somehow represents a “War on Christmas,” then none other than Christian icon Tim Tebow must be one of the aggressors’ lead field generals, what with the NFL quarterback now appearing in a television ad wishing Coloradans “Happy Holidays” — not “Merry Christmas.”
These facts, of course, are no deterrent to the fake outrage machine, because the machine’s operators aren’t really interested in preventing religious bigotry. In a majority-Christian nation whose politics and culture are steeped in Christianity, these zealots are interested in pretending their fellow Christians are somehow oppressed, contradictory facts be damned.
In propagating such an illusion, they’re not earnestly embodying their religion’s missionary spirit. Instead, they’re manufacturing victimhood, all to gin up sympathy and create a rationale to continue ramrodding their theology down everyone else’s throats.
That some feel this need to push their faith with such craven tactics speaks volumes about the nature of spiritual self-doubt today. Sure, our tumultuous world of bombast and chaos leads us to assume that the loudest are the most devout. But in practice, those who are truly comfortable in their faith are often the most humble about their orthodoxies because they have nothing to prove. By contrast, those who are the most insecure in their beliefs can sometimes be the most in-your-face about their dogma.
In that sense, there’s a “doth protest too much” tenor to the roar of the fake outrage machine. That self-indicting message may be difficult to detect amid all the exploding ordnance in the War on Christmas, but it’s there — and the more the machine revs its engines every December, the more that message comes through.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota
13. Megyn Kelly
Fox's perpetually outraged anchor will sell any dubious talking point with a sneer
Megyn Kelly is one of Fox News chief Roger Ailes’ favorites, and it’s easy to see why: She’s equal parts gorgeous and belligerent. She’s smart and quick enough to hold her own in any interview, and she has no qualms about beating the drum for whatever crackpot right-wing story line the network’s lead propagandists are currently pushing, no matter how dubious. Hence, we get a year’s worth of terrifying stories on the awesome political power of the New Black Panther Party, complete with unlikely Justice Department conspiracy theories and b-roll footage designed to unnerve old white viewers. When the story has outlived its usefulness, it’s summarily forgotten, and we move on to the next tale.
There’s really no one who better represents the insidious nature of the Fox project than Kelly. Hannity and O’Reilly are packaged and sold as right-wing shouters. Kelly’s an “anchor” who professes to have no partisan bias of her own. And she could very well be telling the truth! She doesn’t need to personally believe the things she says, after all. When she casually refers to the tax burden on “the so-called rich” (so called because they are, generally), she’s just doing her job. When Kelly, in the midst of excoriating a Democrat, claims that Fox personalities don’t regularly compare liberals and Democrats to Nazis, everyone (besides some unknown non-savvy portion of her audience) knows we’re not supposed to take her seriously.
I imagine that perma-sneer, that disgusted look of disbelieving contempt that remains plastered on Kelly’s face during the entirety of “America Live,” disappears the minute the red light on top of the camera goes off, because Megyn Kelly doesn’t actually give a shit about the National Day of Prayer or seriously believe the New Black Panther Party represents a threat to democracy. She’s just happy to have a job doing something she loves: being a reliable bile-delivery system for a massive political messaging organization.
Recently, in an argument with some repulsive talk radio hack, Kelly defended not just her own paid maternity leave — the sort of professional perk that a high-powered attorney like herself would (justifiably!) feel totally entitled to — but went on to seemingly endorse European-style government-mandated paid leave for all, including fathers. The fact that a pre-leave Kelly had savagely mocked the idea of paternity leave is amusing but unsurprising. She’s a former attorney. Her primarily professional skill is convincingly making whatever argument you pay her to make. (She said as much to Rebecca Dana, in fact.) Which is so much worse and hackier than being a simple ideologue.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Her offhand claim that police pepper spray is “a food product, essentially,” which seems like a very rough first draft of a right-wing talking point that was not quite ready for standard use by the noise machine.
- – - – - – - – - -
(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
17. John Stossel
The cable news clown is a poor ambassador for libertarianism
I’d say it’s nice to have a libertarian presence on television regularly, but there are I believe more libertarians on television regularly in 2011 than there are morally ambiguous antiheroes on premium cable dramas. (What we really need are more socialists — Americans are sick of capitalism!) And Stossel is not a great brand ambassador for the “free minds, free markets” crowd, because he’s a silly clown.
Stossel’s a ridiculous local-news “consumer watchdog” reporter who discovered Milton Friedman. He’s the worst of simple-minded sensationalist television news masquerading as a maverick because he’s “politically incorrect” (a term that when self-applied invariably means “an asshole”).
If I were a libertarian, I’d be embarrassed by Stossel’s prominence. Sneering contempt for supposed liberal shibboleths is not actually a well-considered political philosophy. There’s nothing “libertarian,” for example, about not believing in climate change. That’s just tribal corporatism, totally disconnected from any economics-based belief about the superiority of market forces over government industrial policy.
Stossel rehashes received wisdom without truly understanding, let alone questioning, any of it, which is basically what conservatives think every leftist college student is doing. The limits of his conclusion-first mode of advocacy journalism are exposed when he’s forced to apologize for reporting his predetermined conclusions even when the evidence doesn’t bear them out, like when he attempted to report that organic produce (which hippies and liberals like) is more dangerous than conventional produce (which is grown and picked by the great free market god, who bestows his grace on giant agribusiness conglomerates), only for it to be revealed that his own tests showed no such thing.
Of course, it’s perfectly libertarian to profess not to see what exactly is unfair or exploitative about the widespread practice of unpaid internships, a system that provides profitable organizations with free labor while offering work experience only to college students privileged enough to devote significant amounts of time to unpaid internships. “I built my career on unpaid interns,” Mr. Stossel says, which does at least explain the quality of research that goes into his specials.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
In which Stossel plays a clip from the film “Gasland,” a documentary exposing the dangers of natural gas extraction for people living near the extraction sites, and then announces that it is perfectly normal for your tap water to contain highly flammable amounts of methane. “Weird stuff happens,” Stossel says. The fact that a peer-reviewed study showed that water wells close to natural gas mines had 17 times the levels of methane in the water than wells farther away from fracturing sites is just one of those nutty coincidences.
- – - – - – - – - -
(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Who’s winning the Fox primary?
The conservative cable channel treads carefully in Gingrich-Romney race
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney (Credit: AP)
The Republican primary campaign has become a two-man race, with unloved ostensible front-runner Mitt Romney currently suffering the indignity of trailing in the polls to self-satisfied serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. Where does the unofficial communications arm of the conservative movement stand on the race? They’re noncommittal, thus far.
We all know the basic facts: A lot of conservatives see Romney as completely unacceptable. The more pragmatic ones see Gingrich as wholly unelectable. Fox News is run by consummate conservative elite Roger Ailes. Ailes has two objectives: Generate ratings and elect Republicans. The Gingriches of the world excite Fox viewers, because of their shamelessness. Romney excites no one, but he’ll need Fox’s support if he ends up the beneficiary of a Gingrich collapse.
Fox has indulged its audience’s brief surges of affection for unelectable fringe candidates, from Trump through Cain, but the channel’s always been careful to remind the base that they may eventually have to hold their noses and vote for Romney. Karl Rove, who’s already running a shadow campaign against Obama, has made this point explicitly during his Fox appearances.
Romney went from trailing in the Fox News appearances list to getting more uninterrupted airtime over the last week than any other candidate. But Gingrich beat him in minutes the week before. And Newt was just on Hannity last night, where he seemed much more comfortable than Romney did in his earlier sit-down with Bret Baier, a tougher interviewer by any standard.
Watching Fox this morning, clips of Gingrich’s Hannity interview were replayed multiple times. Ron Paul’s devastating anti-Gingrich ad was excerpted for a minute, followed by a clip of Romney sounding like he believed in anthropogenic climate change.
The network seems, in other words, undecided at the moment, or at least willing to see if Gingrich can pull this out without humiliating himself like he always does. The Rovians may yet win the day, but for now Fox seems to be joining the GOP base in convincing itself that Gingrich is electable.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Right-wing press demands liberal media repeat “Occupy shooter” smear
How a disturbed would-be presidential assassin became another bizarre conservative meme
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez tried to kill President Barack Obama, by firing a gun at the White House, and one would think that that combination of “hating Obama” and “using a gun” would make using him to smear liberals a bit of a stretch, even for Fox and the rest of the right-wing press. You’d think that they’d shy away from even mentioning the guy, as they generally do in prominent cases of decidedly right-wing politically motivated violence. You’d be wrong, though, because they’ve all decided that Ortega-Hernandez is the Occupy Wall Street shooter.
Ortega-Hernandez will soon be a minor historical footnote, like the guy who tried to crash a plane into Nixon’s White House, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, the weird guy who may have been a part of a secret plot to kill or scare Jimmy Carter, John Hinkley, the guy who tried to crash an airplane into Bill Clinton’s White House, the guy who fired bullets at Bill Clinton’s White House and the guy who fired bullets at George W. Bush’s White House. What did all of these people have in common? Their motives were … slightly difficult for rational people to comprehend. They tended to be paranoid and disturbed and their stated reasons for wishing the president dead were usually fairly incoherent.
Ortega-Hernandez wanted to kill President Obama because Ortega-Hernandez thought himself the second coming of Jesus Christ and was convinced Barack Obama was the antichrist. It’d hard to make any sort of coherent political point out of that.
But because of a bad bit of reporting — bad but understandable — ABC initially said that police suspected Ortega-Hernandez had spent time at the Occupy DC encampment, before heading out to shoot the White House. Police may have suspected that, but there’s been no evidence whatsoever that it’s the case. (He seems to have more of a connection to Oprah than Occupy, but no one is calling him the “Oprah shooter.”)
The truth has not dissuaded Fox News from repeatedly referencing Ortega-Hernandez’s completely imaginary time spent at the Occupy camp. The NRA’s radio show did the same.
But the fact that it is now known that there has never been any evidence linking Ortega-Hernandez to any Occupy event anywhere has not stopped conservatives from … crying about liberal media bias against conservatives. John Nolte at Big Journalism says: “the MSM is working overtime to make sure no narrative is created from the suspected White House shooter’s connection to #OccupyDC.”
Right, because … there’s no connection. Except that some guy at Occupy San Diego said something stupid and regrettable about feeling sympathy for the crazy guy who shot at the White House. Which is, as “connections” go, a stretch!
So here we have a wholly invented right-wing meme based on fantasy and one out-of-context line from a now out-of-date news story, repeated endlessly in an attempt to unfairly smear a political movement they despise, and the fact that responsible media outlets aren’t repeating the smear is an example of the nefarious leftist media conspiracy. Sorry the New York Times isn’t repeating this particular lie, guys!
I for one wonder why the media ins’t investigating the shooter’s connections to the University of Texas College Republicans.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Page 1 of 80 in Fox News
Obama Continues to Box In His Opposition 
The Fictional Obama 
Bishops' rift with Obama about politics, not religion 
Demi’s last night out 
One day you’re in 
Pitch and catch 
Whip-it 
My debate with Charles Murray 
More tips for literary lovers 
U.S., China need a green peace, not a trade war 
Santorum mangles the Founding Fathers 
Chris Christie’s gay marriage headache 
