Brains, astroturf vs. grass

[elfs]

[Late note: the article on which this entry is based has been taken down from Playboy, no explanation given. One of the authors has reprinted the article on her own blog, along with a followup. Whether or not it came down for journalistic failure or other reasons is still unknown. The whois registry and the Lewis Lapham article are still well worth contemplating.]

You may have heard something this weekend about the "New Tea Party," a minor kerfluffle in which the right tries to motivate its base to make its numbers known and protest the "stimulus" thingy going on in Washington. Dave Weigel took some great photos.

The whole thing was sparked by a now famous rant from CNBC Chicago Mercantile reporter Rick Sanetelli, who seemed to lose it on the trading floor and "surrounded by multimillionaire traders, railed on the Obama administration for trying to help struggling homeowners and berated people who are getting foreclosed on as 'losers.'" Santelli moved into a full-throated tirade and called for a new "tea party."

A few years ago, I read Lewis Lapham's article (I love Lapham's writing; he's such a great stylist, and has only gotten better recently) Tentacles of Rage, in which Lapham described how, back in the late 1960's, the upper 2% of our country decided that it needed a propaganda machine to counter the general leftward tendency of the nation and poured nearly a billion dollars (that was a lot of money in 1971) into the formation of a network of "think tanks" dedicated to publishing, reinforcing, propagandizing, and legitimizing in the minds of the voters notions of market deregulation and taxation policies that, naturally, favored most that upper 2%.

Santelli's rant wasn't so spontaneous after all [warning: the post goes to Playboy's political blog; text SFW; some of the ads, maybe not so]. A well-financed machine, seemingly organized by The Sam Adams Project. The material is a bit sketchy, but the fact that "ChicagoTeaParty.com" was registered in August 2008 by a well-known Republican operative turns out to be true:

Zachary Christenson
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com) 
Domain Name: CHICAGOTEAPARTY.COM 
Created on: 03-Aug-08 

Things that make you go hmmm....

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

berated people who are getting foreclosed on as 'losers.'

Uh huh. And whose administration never stopped the obvious coming train wreck that was the banks lending money to those losers in the first place? And why was it that those banks and the multimillion dollar traders surrounding him couldn't see the obvious truth and *not lend* those losers money?

Oh yeah, it was all because a bunch of losers wanted to borrow money, and the banks just couldn't help themselves but lend it to them. Hello? Can we say "blaming the victim" anyone?

I was about to comment further, but I'd be ranting for the rest of the afternoon if I did.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

...but property values are always going to go up, right?