The headline reads: “NAACP backs report that ties racist groups to tea party.”¹ Say what? Is this implying that the Tea Party is tied to racists? Because that’s the conclusion I would draw from this headline if I were merely skimming the news this morning. Scandalous. Let’s read a little.

“A new report, backed by the NAACP, has found what it says are efforts by white nationalist groups and militias to link themselves to the tea party movement.”¹ Oh, well that’s not quite the same is it? If this sentence is taken on it’s face it merely implicates the groups themselves, rather than the Tea Party. Except that in the next paragraph it states that the report claims “that tea party events have become a forum for extremists ‘hoping to push these (white) protesters toward a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy.’”¹

A little further down you find out that the report isn’t necessarily concerned with the movement as a whole, rather it’s focused on the smaller county level groups that can be more easily infiltrated by these racist, nefarious groups.

It isn’t until you find yourself still sort of reading the article near the end of the first page that you get a Tea Party member defending themselves:

The national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, one of the groups mentioned in the report, said the report’s claims were not credible. “The Tea Party has only articulated three core values for the entire movement,” said Jenny Beth Martin. “They are limited government, fiscal responsibility and support for free markets. Everything we say and do is in support of these values. There is no credible method of making these values racist.”¹

Plain and simple, that’s what motivates these guys. I call this disingenuous reporting because the headline and story structure make it easy for an individual to conclude that yes, yes indeed these Tea Partiers are associated with some racist scum. Not only that, but evidence pointing to a conclusion other than racist collusion is placed on the second page, almost the last paragraph:

Other analysts who have begun to study the burgeoning political force have come to the opposite conclusion. A report on political signs displayed at a tea party rally in Washington last month found that the vast majority of activists expressed narrow concerns about the government’s economic and spending policies and steered clear of the racially charged anti-Obama messages that have helped define some media coverage of such events.

BAM! In your face (if you made it this far) defense of the movement.

It’s pretty clear that what motivates opposition to the Progressive Democrat agenda is purely related to disagreement over policy. I’m no Tea Partier, but I’ve been around enough of them to draw this conclusion without any hesitation.

I’m tired of Democrats painting these sorts of pictures of opposition to their ideas. And the media is happy to spin the same yarn. Good God am I tired of it.

I was wholly prepared to link to a certain article, convinced that perhaps Keynsianism was the ticket to our troubles. A certain quote lead me to the story: “the Keynesian prescription works. [However] austerity converts downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions.”¹ Boy was I hooked and ready for more. Seriously. I was curious about this; if it were true, then I would need to change my tune.

However, I followed the link, and read this:

The Keynesian policies in the aftermath of the Lehman brothers bankruptcy were a triumph of economic theory. In Europe, the US and Asia, the stimulus packages worked. Those countries that had the largest (relative to the size of their economy) and best-designed packages did best. China, for instance, maintained growth at a rate in excess of 8%, despite a massive decline in exports. In the US the stimulus was both too small and poorly designed – 40% of it went on household tax cuts, which were known not to provide much bang for the buck – and yet unemployment was reduced from what it otherwise would have been – over 12% – to 10%. ¹

This last bit in particular got me questioning this op-ed. The salesmen behind the stimulus here in the U.S. were claiming it would hold unemployment below 8%, never that it would keep it around 10%, let alone mentioning a figure of 12%. China’s growth isn’t necessarily growth if you follow their economic story at all. Sure a lot of things are being produced, but it’s over production and over development (so much so that large cities have been planned and built, yet remain completely unoccupied).

This guy talks about aggregate demand as if the only thing keeping the economy down is a lack of demand for goods and services; and if we would only spend a little government money we would see that vaunted multiplier in action, thus increasing aggregate demand, production, and ultimately get people to work.

Doesn’t really work that way though. Yeah, demand is down, but having the government flood the market with dollars isn’t likely to produce the demand necessary to get out of the doldrums. I’ve read that what appears to be taking place, among many factors, is a reduction in debt–people are trying to get their balance sheets in order, leading to less demand as retiring household debt is the focus.

Don’t feed me this stimulus laden crap. It doesn’t work, and hasn’t helped increase demand at all. Bailing out banks may have helped prevent a giant financial disaster, but sending up a package of money that won’t even be spent for several years, not to mention only serves to pay several interest groups, is not a winning deal. What a farce.

But, hey, I’m a web designer. Not an economist.

It rolls forth, a current of soft destruction, swirling about, leaving nothing untouched. It disturbs in epochs, in periods of time, in unmeasurable meters it wraps you up.

You see it lightly stimulate your skin–owning this moment more than you even recognize its passing. Shaping things that you’ll never see, shaping things that you might know. It owns you. Everywhere you go it is. It leaves you for dead and swirls on.

And it moves, it forgets. You never were.

Stochastic as fuck; creates a perfunctory pop as it fucks up your wares. Moving to a rhythm set in aces; changes perceptions, taking umbrage at one’s increased irrelevance. It’s modernity: hello!

fin

A man once said, “progress is the inexorable slide towards the ideal–of which I mean the all-consuming march towards the end of the week.”¹ It is in this progressive march that we find ourselves in an indeterminate battle for sanity–for these are the things that make life worth living.²

We are forever one day closer to Friday, yet forever further away from the last. How close can we come? We can be a day away, and a day after. While we live in it, we are neither, yet the experience is taken for granted and hardly appreciated. Be nimble in your observations. Ramble on in coherent thoughts. Word play is best served as a dish.

The real question we find ourselves asking is whether or not the author is out of his mind. What is his purpose in this stream of consciousness drivel that he is typing as we think? Does he realize he’s referring to himself in this fashion? Is he even aware?

Are any of us really aware. We have basic responses to every day stimuli, but are we truly capable of understanding what it is these bags of similarly grouped cells have as a purpose? In most contexts, individuals are incapable of basic patterns of recognizing there own recognizantness.³

For the record, today is Thursday. Sanity returns tomorrow. The cycle begins anew on Saturday. Ebb and flow.