Last spring, as the local Tea Party gatherings were shouting hosannahs to the Constitution, they also advocated not answering the decennial census. I pointed out that the census is required by the Constitution, and got disinvited.
Unbridled and unquestioning support of what the “founders” did, instead of the laws they wrote, can lead one astray, as this cartoon shows:
Tea Party philosophy: 'If the founders did it, it's good.'
3 Comments | 
America's founding, Cartoons, Health care, History, Humor, Political cartoons, Politics, U.S. Constitution | Tagged: History, Humor, Medical Care, Politics, Tea Party, U.S. Constitution | 
Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
From the Los Angeles Times blogs, Opinion, from February 2010:
Tea Party footnotes
February 7, 2010 | 7:39 amA couple of musings about the Tea Party convention in Tennessee:
I’m puzzled by the disgruntled reaction among Tea Partiers to the fact that the convention charged money to attend — about $550, it’s been reported — and that the convention organizer was a for-profit company. Yeah, it’s expensive, all right, but isn’t profit-making quintessentially American?
And I’ve seen photos of conventioneers wearing T-shirts with the image of a bald eagle on the back, the national bird, symbol of the nation. When the Founding Fathers were drawing up the blueprints for the United States, there were hundreds of thousands of bald eagles, coast to coast, clime to clime.
But then humans began crowding them out and shooting them down in such numbers that a law protecting them was put into place in 1940. But that was just about the time that DDT began to be used in vast quantities, and there went the bald eagle population again. DDT in the food chain rendered bald eagle shells too thin to incubate or hatch and perhaps rendered some adult birds infertile.
Rachel Carson’s seminal book ”Silent Spring” raised the public’s awareness of the risks of DDT. In 1967, bald eagles were ruled an endangered species in much of the U.S. — a status that was made national on the nation’s bicentennial, in 1976 — and they weren’t declared to be a thriving species once again until 2007.
Which means that, if it hadn’t been for all those tree-hugging pinko environmentalists, the bird of prey on all those T-shirts, the proud bald eagle, might very well have been a dead duck.
— Patt Morrison
Audubon watercolor of bald eagle – Library of Congress image
Help save the bald eagle from Tea Party sniping:
1 Comment | DDT, Environmental protection, Patriotism, Politics, Santayana's ghost, Science | Tagged: Bald Eagle, DDT, Environmental protection, History, John James Audubon, Patriotic Symbols, Politics, Santayana's ghost, Science, Tea Party | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ghost in the Machine has the story, really, “U.S. History for Dummies.” Well worth clicking over to read it in full.
But I also want to call attention to this brilliant graphic — a sort of photographic political cartoon, and it’s quietly, subtly, savage:
What things in this photograph were paid for by taxes?
Oh, there are a couple of inaccuracies — the phone lines were probably paid for by the telephone company, but eminent domain was used to get the easements in many cases. (Who did the photo and the captioning? Anyone know?)
Ben Sargent was a little less subtle, in the Austin American-Statesman, using that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote we looked at some time ago.
Ben Sargent, Austin American-Statesman, copyright 2009
8 Comments | Dissent, Political cartoons, Politics, Taxes | Tagged: Astro turf, Ben Sargent, Dissent, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Politics, Taxes, Tea Party | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 