conryf's blog

 Greg Sargent over at The Plum Line tweets:

New poll demolishes emerging BS meme on the right that Tea Party movement is politically "mainstream"

Which seems especially odd given this is a post about the new Gallup poll relased with the headline:

Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics

Sound fishy? I thought so. Turns out The Plum Line is cherry picking in the worst way. So desperate are these lefties to prop up their angry white men meme that they are forced to discard half the data from the survey they are referencing and go way over to the census bureau to mix and match their data. According to Sargent:

A whopping 79% of Tea Party supporters are non-hispanic whites. Only 65% of Americans were non-hispanic whites as of 2008.

That 65% figure came from the Census Bureau circa 2008. But Sargent didn't need to go all the way over there as you can see, RIGHT NEXT to the percentage of non-hispanic white Tea Partiers is the percentage of non-hispanic white persons in the general population, according to Gallup; 75%. Pretty pathetic. Especially since Gallup concludes:

In several other respects, however -- their age, educational background, employment status, and race -- Tea Partiers are quite representative of the public at large. [Emphasis Mine]

Greg didn't get everything wrong. He did correctly dispute the claim of a column stating that 4 in 10 Tea Party supporters were Democrats or Independents. In fact, according to Gallup, the figure is 51% or 5 in 10. 

Pelosi did it. Health reform passed the house 220-215 late saturday. Whatever my personal disagreements with her I have to grudgingly admit she's a decent speaker, her arm twisting in this situation is exceptional. Thank god for Harry Reid. 

Nice round up of why it's the worst bill ever here.

Found this excerpt from Andrew Sullivan in the Bush years (February 2005):

If Al Gore, say, had, ... added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he'd over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he'd put tariffs on steel, if he'd increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he'd said that government's job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he'd ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy.. ...I don't think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office. The duplicitous, budget-busting Medicare entitlement alone should have caused an insurrection. It didn't. I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

Well, he was right then and he's right now, even if he doesn't think so.

Healthcare reform opponents may have their best ally in the electorally weak and suprisingly imcompetent Reid. This article describes Reid actually bring a vote to floor for which he DIDN'T HAVE THE VOTES. That is a level of incompetence that even Ried's opponents should be suprised at. 13 Democrats voted against this budget gerry mandering tactic. It's time to start talking about the possibility of health reform failing altogether!