Monday, April 18, 2011

According to a piece...


...in the Chicago Tribune this morning:

For some tea partyers, Rick Santelli ranks with the Founding Fathers.

Two years ago, the CNBC newsman famously lost it during a live broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, giving rise to a larger movement. For some tea party faithful, Santelli's rant still serves as a rallying point.

This morning, thousands of tea party demonstrators are expected to gather at Daley Plaza to vent their frustrations with high taxes and big government.

"If (Santelli) wanted to know how it feels to be treated like a god on Earth, all he needs to do is show up on Monday," said Steve Stevlic, director of the Chicago Tea Party Patriots. "We will put him on our shoulders and carry him around the city."

In a related article in the New Yorker, George Packer says (my emphasis):

A decade and a half after Clinton and Gingrich, Republicans are once again trying to privatize Medicare, gut Medicaid (by turning it into block grants), cut education spending and regulations that protect the environment, and give yet another round of tax cuts to the rich. They continue to insist—despite years of evidence to the contrary—that market forces will lower health-care costs and that tax cuts will create economic growth and lift all incomes. “Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits,” the late Daniel Bell wrote. “One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.” Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.

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