It took a long time coming, but here’s the progressive answer to the Tea Party – the Coffee Party. Their slogan is “Walk up and Stand up,” and the official launch of the movement is tomorrow at a coffee shop near you.

Find a Coffee Party meeting near you.

http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/

The Coffee Party appears to be a lot more organized than the Tea Party. Now the question is, can they make a difference? For all its fits, screeching and screaming, the Tea Party hasn’t had much of an impact on the political process, despite the fact that they take credit, or are credited, with accomplishing things that they had nothing to do with (e.g. Scott Brown’s victory in Mass. in January).

Here’s the Coffee Party mission.

The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

The mainstream media often refers to the Tea Party spectacle as a “movement.” It isn’t.

A CBS News poll shows that Tea Party “members” are actually pretty dumb. Tea Party people believe that President Obama has already raised taxes – he hasn’t. One-third of Tea Party people think Obama favors the poor – that’s code for blacks and other minorities – and there’s no basis for that belief in anything Obama has done or said. If anything, Obama favors Wall Street bankers and corporate fat-cats more than he does poor people.

Who’s to blame for the federal deficit? Only 7 percent of Americans say it’s Obama’s fault, but 19 percent of Tea Partiers blame him. Forty-one percent of Americans put the problem squarely on Bush’s while only 16 percent of Tea Party people do.

These so-called patriots hate the government. Ninety-one percent of Tea Party identifiers are dissatisfied or angry at the United States government.

Not surprisingly, most Tea Partiers live in the South.

“Tea Party identifiers are overwhelmingly white – 95 percent are white, compared to 77 percent of Americans,” the poll said.

If it’s a “movement,” not many people have no knowledge of it. Fifty-five percent of Americans have not even heard of the Tea Party. Only 19 percent of Americans claim to know a lot about the Tea Party.

And among those who’ve heard of the Tea Party, 42 percent said it doesn’t reflect most Americans’ values with 21 percent are unsure.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that Sarah Palin may just be the smartest politician in America today.

Well, he didn’t say that exactly. What he did say was that while liberals, including White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, were yucking it up over Palin’s hand-scrawled Tea Party cheat sheet, she was building her base.

“You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap,” Rich wrote. “She knows all too well that the more the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait.”

Maybe Rich is right, perhaps Palin is just playing the fool to pander to American goobers who relate to her while baiting the liberals into acting like elite assholes. If so, she’s one hell of an actress.

I think Palin is the real deal. I think she’s as ignorant on the issues as she appears to be because she knows that her base doesn’t care. Palin followers don’t care that she campaigned as governor of Alaska on the so-called “bridge to no one” and then claimed to say “no thanks” when running for vice president.

Palanistas really believe that being the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population 6,700) and the governor of Alaska for a few months gives her international bona fides, because you know, Russia is right there.

They just don’t care.

These are the same people that voted for George W. Bush because he seemed like someone they’d like to have a beer with at a backyard BBQ.

And this is what has liberals so riled up.

For the left, it’s inconceivable that anyone could look at Palin and see the next president, but her base certainly does.

While Rich is right, the Obama administration should spend less time poking fun of Palin and more time ripping into Wall Street fatcats, Palin’s success is not their fault.

Palin’s a rising star in politics for the same reason Glenn Beck has millions of viewers in a pretty crappy time slot – millions of Americans just don’t care about politics. And because they don’t care, they don’t take the time to understand really complex problems, and so they gravitate towards people who appear to offer “common sense solutions.”

Palin says those words over and over again – “common sense solutions.”

Beck mocks liberals and other intellectuals for claiming he’s stupid, or you’re stupid, because you just don’t understand. Beck then proceeds to break it down for his viewers. Sadly, his viewers really don’t understand the issue, and therefore think Beck makes perfect sense – intellectual heads explode.

Palin panders to that huge swath of America that thinks politics is stupid, politicians are crooks and all that’s needed are some simple “common sense solutions” to fix the whole kit and kaboodle.

The problem is that many of the problems this nation faces are not simple. Health care, two wars, energy policy, the economy, terrorism, and the list goes on are not going to be solved with simple sound-bite solutions, and as far as common sense goes, that’s subjective.

Democrats need to stand for something and stop wavering. They need to come out strong against greed and corruption. They need to stand by the average American and say we’re here to help you and not them. For some reason Democrats don’t do that. They’d rather position themselves with the Wall Street executives and corporate fatcats while the Palinistas and Beckheads write them off as elite assholes.

But Democrats just aren’t going to win over Palin supporters – it’s impossible. What they need to do is focus on the huge majority of Americans who really do get it. It worked in 2006 and it worked in 2008, but making Palin jokes, that’s not going to cut it.

–

Read Rich’s column “Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand.”

Here’s the complete transcript of a debate between me and @GregWHoward on Twitter. It’s almost 2010 and this is how far we’ve come in the health care global warming debate.

This exchange took place today. I started the debate, unknowingly, by criticizing a stupid joke. I retweeted an update by @GregWHoward with the hashtage #DumbestJokeEver and then the following “discourse” ensued.

–

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

ME: RT @GregWHoward: Let’s see how many libs really believe CO2 a pollutant and do us a favor by not breathing anymore. #DumbestJokeEver about 2 hours ago from web.

@GregWHoward: @svendarko Who said I was joking abt libs not breathing any more to cut CO2? #tcot #p2 #ocra #sgp #ucot 40 minutes ago from UberTwitter in reply to svendarko

ME: @GregWHoward Spoken like a true pro-lifer. Proponent of anything that results in liberals being dead. #tcot #p2 36 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to GregWHoward

@GregWHoward: @svendarko I just want libs to practice what they preach. If CO2 harms planet, stop breathing #p2 #tcot #ocra #sgp #ucot #hhrs 17 minutes ago from UberTwitter in reply to svendarko

ME: @GregWHoward It’s not the CO2 from breathing that’s the problem but from burning fossil fuels. #duh #climate #tcot #p2 13 minutes ago from web in reply to GregWHoward

@GregWHoward: @svendarko Still expect libs to do their part to improve man’s lot by dropping dead #p2 #tcot #ocra #sgp #ucot 3 minutes ago from UberTwitter in reply to svendarko

END TRANSCRIPT

Twitter can be a creepy place.

It was a joke – I think. But during an interview with Politico, Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Missouri, when asked what the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus does, he said “We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition.”

Harper was probably kidding. Here’s the Politico interview.

It’s stupid to go on and on about the number of people who demonstrated in DC on 9/12.

Certainly there wasn’t 2 million people roaming the streets of Washington, DC, as radio host Alex Jones and other people are alleging. I mean, come on, the Washington Times reported that organizers expected between 25,000 and 50,000 people. Are we really supposed to believe that the city of DC, and the organizers, could have handled 2 million people just dropping by when they were planning on 25,000?

But if you want to get into the futile numbers game, recall back on Feb. 15, 2003 when millions of people did take to the streets. All across the world people protested the pending US invasion of Iraq. There really were millions of protesters.

Now it’s true that some of the largest protests were in Europe, but there was some big ones in the US too – despite state-sponsored suppression of free speech.

In New York, the protesters were denied a permit to march to the United Nations building because the police were concerned they wouldn’t be able to control the crowd. The organizers were forced to have a stationary protest, but the throngs of people walking to the rally area constituted a pseudo-march stretching some 20 blocks down First Avenue. The estimates are that between 300,000 and 400,000 people attended this demonstration in Manhattan.

There was another 20,000 or so in Seattle. I was at this rally and it seemed like hundreds of thousands, but even 20,000 in a city the size of Seattle looks like a lot of people. In San Fransisco about 150,000 people protested the invasion of Iraq.

All of these protests took place when public opinion polls were showing support for the war with Iraq at more than 60 percent.

But you see, it doesn’t matter how many people rally in the streets and how many polls say the nation is for this or against that, because the people aren’t in charge of jack. Everyone has been fooled into thinking that this is a representative democracy – representing the will of the people. It is not now and it has never been.

Let’s face it, this country was formed to be a republic. The idea was, according to James Madison, that virtuous men would fill Congress and the White House and make the right choice for America. That’s called a republic. Unfortunately the virtuous men turned out to be lawyers, bankers, lobbyists and other hucksters.

But that was the plan – a republic. For instance, there was no interest among the founders of this country in the popular election of the president – hence the compromise between state legislators and members of Congress to figure out who will decide who will be the president. This compromise resulted in the goofy electoral college system we have today. And go figure, under the watchful eye of our much heralded founding fathers, no one even bothered to record the popular vote for president until the 19th century.

You see the goal of forming a strong central government, legitimized and empowered by a constitution, was to provide an effective means to control wealth. It just so happened that during Andrew Jackson’s reign in the 1830s, there became a strong desire for more representation of the people (i.e. democracy), and so the Establishment yielded the illusion of power via the ballot box to the people, well, some of the people. But even today when everyone is supposed to able to vote, if you think your vote matters, you’re just not paying attention.

There’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that if millions of liberals protest a war, or millions of conservatives protest health care reform that these outbursts will have any meaningful impact on the political process. When the debate over health care reform ends, no substantive change for the people will have happened, but rather just another shuffling of the deck with corporations, capitalists and the Establishment firmly in charge of the wealth and power in America.

But I guess that’s what conservatives want, so historically the Establishment, or the right, have been winning most of the political battles while the liberals just keep losing one right after the other. It makes sense though, liberals, not Democrats, favor civil rights and equitable redistribution of the wealth, while conservatives, such as Republicans, Democrats and people incapable of abstract thought, favor corporations, capitalists and the Establishment.

Feb. 15, 2003 anti-war protests around the globe

It’s hard to believe that a lunatic like Glenn Beck can actually have this much influence with Obama’s administration that people are actually being fired and demoted over what he says on his show, but it’s really happening.

Maybe it’s all just a coincidence that Obama’s man in charge of creating green jobs is fired after Beck attacked him on his show. It’s probably just a fluke that this guy over at the National Endowment of the Arts is demoted after Beck pinpoints this pinko-commie-bastard with his laser of doom.

I doubt it.

This is how the Democrats achieve political victory. They cave to right-wing extremists on every issue until they’re voted out of office. I guess I don’t have the political intelligence to figure out how their strategy leads to implementing a liberal agenda. They are supposed to liberals, right?

Read the Huffington Post story about Beck’s latest victim

If you ask the founder of the conservative Media Research Center what he thinks of the media, L. Brent Bozell III will say that news coverage has an overt liberal bias. If you ask me, that’s bunk, the reason journalism sucks has nothing to do with political ideology, but just plain old incompetence.

The root of the problem is corporate consolidation of the media. The bean-counters expect 20 percent profit from an industry that in a good year can turn out 5 percent, maybe ten.

The only way to get those huge profits is to track the least expensive and most outrageous “news” story. Last month’s town hall meeting coverage provides a perfect example.

Certainly there was plenty of reasonable debate taking place in town hall meetings everywhere, but that’s boring. The cheap thrills were found in taping the wackos representing a small percentage of the population, giving the impression that there’s widespread outrage over health care reform. There isn’t.

Bozell’s argument for a liberal bias in the media holds no water. Leading to the war with Iraq, the “liberal” media duckwalked in lockstep with the Bush administration and did nothing to challenge the president, in fact, they paved the path to war by not providing a valuable check on the Executive. The New York Times and the Washington Post issued apologies for their failure after-the-fact.

But none of these anecdotal examples of conservative bias proves the media has any particular bias at all. What it means is that the news media is grotesquely incompetent. Sure there are overtly biased “news” organizations on cable TV. Fox is obviously a right-wing propaganda machine and MSNBC is now unabashedly liberal (it’s worth noting that back in 2003 MSNBC was clearly ideologically right-of-center).

If the responsibility of a journalist is to provide all sides to a story (yes, sometimes there are more than two), there can be no doubt that the news media, particularly broadcast news, is utterly failing. It’s failing because telling all sides of a particular story is difficult, expensive and not always the most exciting to watch on TV.

So to get viewers or readers – to make lots of money – journalists are in a race to the bottom and our supposedly representative form of government is failing. Extremists, liberal and conservative, know that if they scream loud enough and burn enough people in effigy, someone will point a camera at them and they’ll dominate the news cycle – creating the illusion of widespread outrage.

It is interesting that conservatives are far more effective at changing policy with this strategy than liberals. My guess is that while most journalists are politically left of center, most executives that run these corporate media conglomerates are not. So we’re left with a corporate-controlled incompetent news media that is failing as the unelected fourth branch of government. To solve this problem, the FCC must reinstate rules about media ownership to break up media conglomerates and put the power of the press back in the hands of the people rather than the MBAs.