103 days? Really? Really? From Reason TV: Jonah Goldberg: According to that reason video I posted below, Americans work an average of 103 days a year just to pay their taxes. If you had to work 365 days a year to pay your taxes, that would be a kind of slavery or indentured servitude, because all of your productive labor would be going to the government. You would have no

I’m shocked, shocked: An investment company once run by the head of the Obama administration’s auto task force has been accused of paying more than $1 million to an aide to New York’s former comptroller in a bid to win a lucrative deal with the state pension fund. Steven Rattner was an executive at the Quadrangle Group, a private equity firm, until he left this year to lead President Barack

A follow-up to Jeff’s post from yesterday, John Ziegler talks about his ordeal at USC, where he attempted to interview people going to the awards ceremony for Katie Couric for her stellar work interviewing Sarah Palin.  Fascism with a frowny face. David Thompson also posted on the subject yesterday, a short bit worth your reading. Clearly, the USC Campus Police were impressed by the DHS warning about dangerous right-wing extremists. 

Hmmmmmmmmm . . . I’m pretty sure I side with Glenn Beck on this.

May I raise a practical question at this point? Are these the kinds of “moderates” we’re supposed to be trying to win over? These? These? Also, are we going to do “Stonehenge” tomorrow? Face it: At some point you just have to point and laugh at midgets clad in tights dancing around a wrongly-scaled hunk of styrofoam to the plaintive pluckings of a lyre. And fuck ’em if they can’t

Perhaps if the protesters had been more careful about what they wore, or more precise in the language they used on their signs… (h/t N O’Brain)

From C-Span’s Washington Journal: Tea Parties are merely ineffective “ad hoc photo ops,” opines his waxy-faced rice paperedness — with all the confidence one expects from a Vanity Fair writer trying to fathom a culture in which Wal-Marts thrive and sidewalk fish markets are as distant a memory as Mr Wolcott’s once-discernable jaw line. Most telling bit: This can’t be a burgeoning movement because people simply weren’t angry enough! Sadly,

Or, when is a contrived mea culpa nothing more than a passive-aggresssive attempt to prove oneself correct and insightful in the long term? Well, there still isn’t much organization and little professionalism, but it turns out that I was the one lacking realism. I failed to grasp the excitement this idea generated and how it would animate the grass roots to actually get out of their chairs and do something

“reports” on the Tea Party in Montpelier yesterday, being a companion piece to happyfeet’s comment, here. This morning, after driving Aidan to school, I heard VPR’s mention of the Tea Party rally at the State Capitol.  Top billing was given to some approximately twenty people who were from S.O.S., Save Our State, who handed in fake tax returns suggesting that higher taxation would result in fewer essential state programs and

To get things started, check out pics and this report from Chicago. Oh. And have I mentioned what Rachel Maddow and Howard Dean think of all this? Roughly the same as some of our more “pragmatic” conservatives, as it turns out. Obligatory italicized “nuance” reminder to follow: Nuance. **** Zombyboy has a photo spread from the Denver tea party. Send along others and I’ll link them here. **** Journalism. Squared.