Tea is an import. The United States produces no appreciable amount of tea. The Boston Tea Party was triggered by duty (i.e., import) taxes. Lipton is owned by Unilever, which is based in London. Nestea is a brand of Nestle, which is Swiss.
So all the teabaggers who went out and partied today? Yeah, not only do they not understand what representation is, they also don't understand that they just spent a day supporting foreign economies.
Yeah.
April 15, 2009
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However, most importantly, they don't understand the word "teabagging". That is what really makes me want to point and laugh.
I'm with Becca, pointing and laughing.
For a bunch of sexually repressed homophobic dicknoses, they sure are a kinky lot.
Now, Becca, there's a difference between doing it and talking about it. ;)
Lou, the funny thing is that if you look at the SF written by Republican officials (and there's a lot of it; I blame Heinlein), it tends to give Janie a run for her money, in content anyway. Certainly not in quality.
Hey now, I rather enjoy Heinlein...
I really don't understand how they could have gone this far with it, without someone saying something. The only thing I can imagine, is that there are a lot of them who just didn't want to be the one who actually knows what teabagging is, so they just suffer in silence...
I do tend to think that rather than the hypersexuality of republican scifi authors being because they're republicans, it's more a result of their generally being geeks. But I am somewhat biased by having a lot of gamer friends and observing the phenom of the very worse geeks being the most inclined to play out sexual encounters that don't happen in real life, in games.
And Piers Anthony, for example, is definitely not a republican - yet there is pretty hardcore, sometimes quite disturbing sexuality expressed in his non-Xanth writing...
That said, I had a client who, unfortunately learned of my love for scifi. He's actually more of a big L Libertarian and aside from being a judge, also believes himself an author - really doesn't understand why no one will publish him. He was very keen on having me read his work and it was painful - not to mention very kinky, disturbingly kinky. Also rather repressively kinky. In spite of being vocally not into Teh Gay, he sure wrote some interesting scenes - interesting in the dichotomy, not the content.
http://tinyurl.com/c2t8zg
Let's see:
In 2004, 32.4% of tax returns had zero tax liability. And many Americans are not filing at all.
So > 1/3 of Americans who pay no money are voting away money from those who do pay -- this is taxation without representation. Plain & Simple. It is like letting your kids decide how family money is spent. Go figure !
critter, thanks for the link. Hilarious!!
You're so right there Sabio. How dare assholes like me, who didn't make enough last year to actually owe any taxes vote? I mean I did for years before last, but work crapped out and I lost my home - how fucking dare I vote - fuck people like me!
I propose we just stop letting people who don't have tax liability vote. And while were at it, lets get a intelligence test for those who do, to weed out the morons. Of course that would provide us with roughly the same result - except with more solidarity among voters.
Because the fucking morons on the street "teabagging" wouldn't be allowed to vote either.
Full disclosure: I abstained from the presidential vote, because there was no one running I wanted to see in the white house and I only voted for my house district - lost that one. A couple of the locals I voted for won. Had the rep I voted for won, he would have probably fought much of the spending you're whining about.
Just because I didn't carry tax liability, doesn't mean that I voted us into this mess. A mess, I might add, that Obama inherited from his idiot predecessor. You know, the moron who spent like a fucking teenager with daddy's credit card - knowing that daddy doesn't have the cash to pay the damned bill.
DuWayne, I like Heinlein too. The Star Beast is still very high on my list of faves. I even still like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. I just think they have a lot to answer for in making geeks think politics is as straightforward and rule-based as physics. And yeah, the Space Tyrant books were not, um, pleasant.
Sabio, what you don't understand is how much more those people are contributing to the Treasury. Why, by not having the energy left over to fight for living wages, they're giving up their ability to be taxed so that their money can go to the rich and be taxed at a higher level.
An other way to think about it, should you ever find yourself so inclined, is that this is a mass privatization scheme. Most of these people are parents, who are doing the job of raising their children much better and more cheaply than the government could and getting paid for it.
I never went back and read adult Heinlein, but I attribute my love of scifi in significant part to Podkayne of Mars.
Piers Anthony! I forgot about him. My mother always told me he was into teabagging. But is he a fiscal liberal?
Sabio:
taxation without representation != representation without taxation (to illustrate the logical flaw: if you could substitute "sex without love" for "love without sex" what would that do to your relationship with your mother?)
Stephanie -
I think that my favorite Heinlein may be the first he wrote, that wasn't actually published until the late nineties (IIRC), For Us The Living. Though reading Stranger in a Strange Land was pretty transformative when I read it at ten. The funny thing is, I didn't even know that he had written books for young adults, until I actually became an adult. I read SIASL because one of my brothers (or possibly a friend's brother) had it lying around...
Becca -
I would be very surprised if Anthony would fall in with this bullshit. I don't know if he really qualifies as fiscally liberal/conservative, but having read virtually everything he wrote (haven't stuck with the Xanth novels in years) - I would suspect him to be far more interested in social welfare, than saving money.
He is one of my very favorite authors for his non-authoring activities (though I really do love his writing). He is remarkably supportive of new, especially young writers. He has a great deal of (seemingly) genuine affection for his young readers and has over the years, gone above and beyond the call of duty to express that affection, including visiting a great many child fans who used his novels to take their minds off grievous/terminal illnesses. He also finished the novel of a young man who died before he could finish it himself - the list goes on. All that, and he was one of my first intros to fantasy and scifi.
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