Strange that the Tea Partiers didn’t get motivated to take to the streets while George W. Bush was racking up $5 trillion in debt during the good years, or when he decided to spend a trillion dollars on a war without raising a war tax to pay for it, or even after he signed a $700 billion blank check to the banking industry. Instead, they took to the streets about a week after Obama took the oath of office.

The Tea Party line on the debt is exactly the same line that Republicans have been spouting for the last 30 years. No cuts to defense, no increase in taxes, slash all spending on public services (except for spending in their own districts).

Tea Partiers are simply hard core Republicans, mad that Democrats won the last election. They’ll forget their fiscal conservatism the day they can grab some money for their own pet projects. I’ll take them seriously when they give us real solutions to the problems they tell us are so important to them.

Still better than the paranoid, gullible rightism regurgitated by self-absorbed seventysomethings.

“The leaders of the Commonwealth government…were profoundly religious men for whom the will of God was the fundamental determinant of policy and the only guarantee of success. Though Cromwell and his colleagues were not immune to the temptations of human nature, and the promptings of the Holy Ghost did mysteriously tend to align with their political objectives, they were not chiefly motivated by worldly rationality. Believing they were God’s instruments, that His favour was proved by their repeated victories, they were apt to interpret opposition, not simply as misguided, but wicked, predestined to failure in this life and damnation in the next.”

The religious right in the United States do not “believe” in a literal interpretation of the bible. They KNOW it is correct, and they KNOW that in attempting to say anything – anything at all – that contradicts the bible is the work of the Devil.

You have to understand this, in order to combat them. You will NOT be able to convince them otherwise, because they have built-in counter argument that you are evil tempters sent by the devil to corrupt all of humanity. All you can do is continue to argue with those who are not committed to this point of view, and try to keep them from supporting it, so that it – eventually – the extremism will fade to a small element muttering sulphurously on the fringes of discourse.

Tiktaalik. Lucy. Archeopteryx. Ambulocetus. Google these, and please come out of the cave.