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Jeremiah Cornelius snorted:

Stage management. Drama. Theatrics.

In the end? The powerful will be more so - you will pay more, and get less.

Mission accomplished, and your expectations diminished, as planned.

Oh, horseshit.

The "drama and theatrics" of which you so dismissively speak is ALL on the Tea Party side. The House clowns behind this public tantrum ARE the agents of plutocrats - but they are unwitting ones, blinded to the control of their puppetmasters by their ideology and prideful ignorance. That's an argyle horse, because all their non-TP peers understand EXACTLY who has purchased them.

The Tea Party currently controls the Republican Party - and, because of gerrymandering and the fact that most Democrats only vote once every four years, that is unlikely to change any time soon. It is unlikely to change, because mainstream Republican voters don't turn out in significant numbers for primary elections. Instead, they're happy to cast their vote for a Republican slate in the general election, and go away satisfied that they've done their duty to party and (only incidentally) country. So it's the "base" - the evangelicals that Ronald Reagan's campaign strategy so empowered - the NRA lifers, and the slack-jawed Fox News addicts that turn out for the primaries. Those are the identical constituencies of the Tea Party, and they'll uncritically accept and vote in accordance with any propaganda effort that gets them sufficiently riled up over abortion, gun rights, taxes, and "socialism" (all while happily depositing their Social Security checks, and leaning as heavily on their Medicare coverage as they do on their walkers and canes).

Cue the Koch brothers - the oil billionaires who have (thanks to the Roberts Court's decisions that money and speech are somehow equivalent, that "corporations are people" for purposes of political speech, and that unlimited secret spending on political campaigns - as long as it pretends to be "educational" and "issue-based" - is a bastion of fr-r-ee-dom!) essentially bankrolled the entire Tea Party monster from its inception, as a proxy for their personal business interests.

Only now the monster has escaped their control - as Victor Frankenstein could have told them it inevitably would. And it's far too late to chain it back up in the basement, because the Tea Party is now a self-sustaining reaction.

THAT's the difference. Washington's establishment pols are self-aware. The Tea Party is not. It's all id - and the Republican superego has left the building, so its ego, the career Republican establishment, has been left to fend for itself. The result is that the career Republican pols are falling all over themselves to embrace all things Tea, in perfectly-justified panic over being "primaried" (a nonce verb that owes its very existence to the Tea Party) out of their comfy jobs as shills for whoever pays them to be.

It's the triumph of arrogant ignorance over calculated self-interest - and that is Not A Good Thing for the country. Or you and me, for that matter, because the Tea Party is the very definition of a faith-based movement. And I'm not talking about their Christian evangelism, here. I'm talking about their blind hatred of "socialism" - despite their personal dependence on it - of taxes - even though our tax rates are still near historic lows (and FAR lower than during the Eisenhower administration, which is a Golden Era in the Tea Party credo) - and of all things Obama - regardless of the fact that our 44th president is an enthusiastic centrist, and ardent supporter of the status quo.

Your sneering dismissal of all pols as corrupt representatives of corporate plutocracy represents a faux-sophisticate's rhetorical overreach: they're NOT all the same. The Tea Partiers are DANGEROUS, precisely because they're NOT subject to the "business-as-usual" corruption of Washington politics. They're True Believers - and not in the good, Marvel-comics way, but in the terrible Spanish-Inquisition-and-Crusades way.

And... Using the word "teabagger" in an argument is liberal code for, "I think Anderson Cooper is really hot and maybe I'll come out of the closet."

No, teabagger is what you stupid fucks decided to call yourselves. You can look it up here or here. Of course if you weren't a bunch of stupid fucks you might have known what it meant. Oh, and I love your statement about Anderson Cooper, typical conservative thinking, don't like someone, call them a fag. Of course it's a well known fact that guys like you who make statements like that are usually the biggest closet cases around. You're just another pathetic, scared, conservative homosexual, like Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, et cetera. I'd be willing to bet that you know quite a bit about teabagging, or at least about being teabagged.

Oh, and as far as the phrase "nanny state" goes you conservatives are the biggest nanny state motherfuckers out there. You assholes complain about the nanny state and then turn around and advocate spending money for more cops, more prisons and more soldiers to protect you from all of the things you're afraid of. Give a conservative the choice between illusory security enforced by gun-toting thugs and constitutional liberty and the rule of law and they'll take the former every time.

In case anybody's wondering if their congresscritter signed on to this letter, here's the list. You can get a laugh out of the "threat or danger" propaganda at this site too, if you're amused by that sort of thing.

The thing to pay attention to is that a total of just over 100 congresscritters signed either the blue dog democrat letter or the republican letter. So characterizing this as congress taking a position on what the FCC has done is nonsense, and it's unfortunate that cnet feels they can get away with such a blatant misrepresentation. This doesn't even represent a third of congress, much less a majority.

I used to think Declan McCullough was a reasonably intelligent fellow, but this is just a propaganda piece. Congress didn't do anything, and if hopes for net neutrality fade, it's because we believe this tripe, not because congress has said anything to anyone about anything.

And yet, she specifically targeted the Bridge to Nowhere and had it killed.

Despite what people continue to say Palin didn't oppose the bridge to nowhere. There are more links on it.

Falcon

That is one of the silliest things ever. So if I understand your complaint you are tired of your local taxes going up because the Feds won't raise taxes on you? I would MUCH prefer to pay more taxes locally, at least then I have a pretty good idea the money is being used to support the people, places and things around me and not some stupid pet project like the Bridge to Nowhere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge , or http://www.americansforprosperity.org/index.php?id =1202 the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative.