What does the Tea Party stand for, exactly?

Just a month ago, Tea Party leaders were celebrating their movement’s victories in the midterm elections. But as Congress wrapped up an unusually productive lame-duck session last month, those same Tea Party leaders were lamenting that Washington behaved as if it barely noticed that American voters had repudiated the political establishment.

In their final days controlling the House, Democrats succeeded in passing legislation that Tea Party leaders opposed, including a bill to cover the cost of medical care for rescue workers at the site of the World Trade Center attacks, an arms-control treaty with Russia, a food safety bill and a repeal of the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.

“Do I think that they’ve recognized what happened on Election Day? I would say decisively no,” said Mark Meckler, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, which sent its members an alert last month urging them to call their representatives to urge them to “stop now and go home!!”

via nytimes.com

I'm a little perplexed by the Tea Party anger over some of the items in that second paragraph. I've always understood the Tea Party's focus to be primarily on economic issues and budgetary issues. So why would they oppose medical care for 9/11 rescue workers? Or an arms-control treaty? Or repealing DADT?

E.J. Dionne and the sacred Constitution

From its inception, the Tea Party movement has treated the nation's great founding document not as the collection of shrewd political compromises that it is but as the equivalent of sacred scripture.

Yet as Gordon Wood, the widely admired historian of the Revolutionary era has noted, we "can recognize the extraordinary character of the Founding Fathers while also knowing that those 18th-century political leaders were not outside history. . . . They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness."

An examination of the Constitution that views it as something other than the books of Genesis or Leviticus would be good for the country.

via washingtonpost.com

I think Dionne makes some good points here. We do tend to revere the Founders on the level of demigods, but they were politicians and operators who made compromises.

On the other hand: the Constitution deserves respect and adherence not just because the dudes who created it were super-awesome, but *because it's the law of the land.* I think it grants the national government more power -- and, weirdly, the people more rights -- than Tea Partiers seem to think. It's a good debate to have!

My gun-loving son

He made this from his blocks. He is making "pew pew" shooting sounds. His mama isn't happy. But I did similar things when I was a kid. My only question is: where did he come up with this?

Today in inequality reading: A sick society

There’s growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease.

That’s the argument of an important book by two distinguished British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that gross inequality tears at the human psyche, creating anxiety, distrust and an array of mental and physical ailments — and they cite mountains of data to support their argument.

“If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police,” they assert. “You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problem.” They explore these issues in their book, “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.”

via nytimes.com

I'm about halfway through reading Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal," and like today's Nicholas Kristof column (above) it's raising more questions for me than it answers.

Conservatives cast a low-tax low-regulation structure, often, in terms of freedom. And that's appealing: We all want to be free, right? But there's just a ton of evidence that the way the United States does capitalism isn't leading to income or social mobility -- and if the researchers Kristof cites above are correct, that it's not helping us create a healthy society.

The conservative era that began in 1980, then, appears to be one in which the rich get richer -- and everybody else gets sicker. It's a good deal for the rich, I suppose, but I wonder why the rest of us should go along with it.

2011 resolution update

Today: 2 miles walked.
2011 total: 2 miles walked.

Kris Kobach tries to ruin every state I live in

The newest initiative is a joint effort among lawmakers from states including Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri and Pennsylvania to pass laws based on a single model that would deny American citizenship to children born in those states to illegal immigrants. The legislators were to announce the campaign in Washington on Wednesday.

A leader of that effort is Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican state representative from Pennsylvania. At a recent news conference, Mr. Metcalfe said his goal was to eliminate “an anchor baby status, in which an illegal alien invader comes into our country and has a child on our soil that is granted citizenship automatically.”

The campaign is certain to run into legal obstacles. Courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment as guaranteeing birthright citizenship. Even among those who seek its repeal, debate has hinged on whether that would require a constitutional amendment, an act of Congress or a decision by the Supreme Court.

via nytimes.com

The newly elected Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is a mover and shaker behind the initiative, and I wish he'd stick to screwing up his own state. I understand concerns about illegal immigration, to some extent, but -- and I'm just going to be unfair here, conservative friends -- I can't help but think the above-described measures indicate that *some* conservatives let their dislike of Latinos override their fidelity to the Constitution -- which has long, long, long been understood to grant citizenship to people born on American soil. It's a lousy measure, which probably means it stands an excellent chance at passage.

The myth of Boomer self-absorption

The New York Times leads off with a lazy New Year's story about how Baby Boomers are turning 65 this year, and gives an overview of the landscape thusly: 

Though other generations, from the Greatest to the Millennial, may mutter that it’s time to get over yourselves, this birthday actually matters. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, about 10,000 people “will cross that threshold” every day — and many of them, whether through exercise or Botox, have no intention of ceding to others what they consider rightfully theirs: youth.

There are other hints throughout the story that Boomers are uncommonly shallow and narcissistic, but the problem is that the photo leading the story is of this guy, Aloysius Nachreiner, a 65-year-old who made his career at a folding box company and, by the looks of things, has had nothing to do with Botox at any point in his life.

Point being, sweeping generalizations about whole generational cohorts are kind of stupid. The kind of shallow narcissism that the Times describes as being typical of Baby Boomers is a more accurate description of upper- and upper-middle-class Americans who happen to be demographically similar to, ahem, the Times' editors and writers. But such critiques would be doubtless just as accurate for any generation of upper- and upper-middle-class Americans. Nobody likes to get old. Only some of us have the power to spend time and money fighting it, and those happen to be the same people inclined to document it.