Welcome to your Monday open thread. Yes, it’s Monday. Ugh.
An “Uni-Tea” party rally was held in Philadelphia this weekend to highlight the diversity of the Tea Party. TPM has the story:
Even as just a regular old tea party rally, the event fell flat. Though organizers said the event’s website had been visited more than 2 million times in the days leading up to today’s rally outside Independence Hall, for most of the afternoon there were fewer than 500 in attendance. It was clear from the large numbers of volunteers and the 1,500 bottles the organizers put on ice that they expected a big crowd to turn out. They did not get it by a long shot. They blamed a traffic jam on I-95 for keeping people away (for the record one organizer said that she counted 1,500 on the high end of attendance, but that appeared a bit generous to us).
Among those who did make it, for most of the time the numbers of non-white faces could be counted on two hands, and maybe a foot.
The same can’t be said for the group who went up on the event’s small stage. Organizers promised the most diverse cadre of speakers ever to grace a tea party rally, and they delivered. For the most part their message was the same: tea partiers are not racists and never were — but liberals are.
I’ve seen estimates from 5 to 20 for non-white participants. (I assume this doesn’t include the invited speakers. Yay for diversity! Using the high estimate, that means the Tea Party is 4% non-white. That’s not much different than the Fox News demographic which is 1.5% African-American. It’s funny that everytime the Tea Party tries to prove how non-racist and inclusive they are, they end up showing the opposite.
Paul Krugman talks about unemployment and how we’ve become a heartless, do-nothing nation.
I’m starting to have a sick feeling about prospects for American workers — but not, or not entirely, for the reasons you might think.
Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.
…
First, we see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless.
We’re told that we can’t afford to help the unemployed — that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the “bond vigilantes” will send U.S. borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks’ imagination — far from fleeing U.S. debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows. But the fearmongers are unmoved: fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything else — everything else, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.
The point is that a large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work.
I feel sick now too. I know it’s a stretch, but could we actually elect politicians that care more about the American people than their jobs or their donors?