An intra-party revolt against the Bush dominated Republican establishment.
I understand all that, and that the tobacco industry organized smokers-rights groups. What puzzles me is this line from the article about the study:
If there was a pro-tobacco part of Tea Party rallies/protests, it must have been kept on the backburner.
As pointed before, it is a side benefit: when you protest taxes that could go to fossil fuel companies, you also oppose taxes to tobacco companies, and virtually everything else.
Is that (promoting a general atmosphere of opposition to regulation and taxation) what was meant by “mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws”? If so, that’s a very misleading way to phrase it, and makes me suspicious of this study’s neutrality.
With what prospects of success?
Well, here’s one answer: The TP is going to primary that week-kneed bleeding-heart RINO, Mitch McConnell.
The tide is turning against Bushism as evidenced by the whooping that Karl Rove’s candidates took last election, but it’s hard to tell.
Well, on which side of that divide would you place Romney and Ryan?
The losing side.
Well, not in intra-party terms.
Is that same part of the party going to run next time? If so, they’ll still be the losing side.
The money republicans have to kick out the sex republicans.
It’s that easy. Get rid of the sex nazis, (and the isolationists), then balance a budget.
they’ll end up with 60ish% of the vote if they can do that. imho
Establishment types. Ryan plays both sides nicely, though.
Who are the isolationists?
ERm, uh, there’s a subset of the right that wants everything to stop at our borders.
The left has a similar group, but they are even less powerful. On the right, it’s some of the tea partiers and most of the Ron Paul supporters.
A Republican party that wants to balance the books at home and expand business abroad is a winning party, imho.
Keeping everyone’s collective nose out of each others’ bedrooms is just good business too.
Ron Paul was an avid free trader. What exactly do you mean by “expand business abroad”?
Once again, the documents from the tobacco companies and fossil fuel ones obtained from court cases and releases of information showed that the expected result was indeed what they wanted; the companies knew who to fund to get the expected inaction in congress, the documents identified the opposition that needed to be funded, and it was.
Of course there were elements that denied the science that made the connection with tobacco use with cancer and other diseases, and that anti-scientific opposition was also funded. The study does not concentrate just on the anti-tax angle, and ever since I got involved also with climate change, it is clear that denial of science and anti-taxation goes hand in hand regarding the reasons why groups like the Heartland Institute can jump from working against regulations of tobacco to also deny the science behind climate change without losing a beat.
And one of the reasons for mentioning Heartland is that they also got a hand in propping up the tea party:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/04/15/37585/heartland-chicago-teabag/
Pat Buchanan is one. Quite consistently.
I should hope you don’t want your politics to resemble his in any way conceivable.
No, you had it right. What they are doing is highly irrational, making contentious points that they can’t actually back up with evidence. Even “snark” has to be accurate. Motivations are assigned to people that they cannot back up. It’s not being rational, it’s pushing their own story.
And it didn’t use to be that way. You can see it in many articles. You can see the more nuanced approach in some sentence followed by some asshole saying something stupid in the next. It’s constantly full of unwarranted assumptions being made to score points with the contributors rather than to inform the audience.
You absolutely cannot link to it to help you fight ignorance anymore. It’s not like this site where you are talking to people directly, so that’s its only purpose. And it fails at that purpose because it’s more fun to be caustic. They let their own desire for that fun override its goal to inform about woo. They decided to focus on political issues which are inherently ambiguous rather than sticking with woo which is unadulterated bullshit. And thus they discredit themselves as a decent source for anything.
And, no, a lot of their crap isn’t cited.
Well, the Tea Partiers have their sights set on McConnell. How do you think that’s likely to work out for them?
The TP does at any rate appear to be a thing about which it’s hard to be neutral. Everyone who does not support them thinks they’re a bunch of idiots.