Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It is important to insist that the Tea Party Movement (TPM) is a movement, not a party. Most attempts to savage the movement by identifying its “leaders” and denigrating them have failed. A like but more brutal attempt to end the patriot insurrection in Boston and elsewhere by associating it with leaders and, say, hanging them on Boston Commons would have failed to terminate the movement afoot in the colonies to sever the ties that bound colonists with their mother country. You can’t stop an idea by cutting off the heads that contain the idea. This is the way of all movements: Ghostly at first, they take on flesh and later become an active political opposition. Democrats have been trying their best to associate the TPM with a number of politicians loathed by the left in an attempt to discredit the movement. So far, no luck. No George Washington yet has been found within the TPM. There is no one in the movement conspicuously leading the troops to do battle with the reigning power....

The picture of American politics as seen from Europe is often lucid, particularly when large matters are up for debate, because distance allows for a more dispassionate and objective view. Germany, for instance, is not too close to the trees to see the forest. With that in mind, the view of President Barack Obama and the Tea Party movement as expressed in Süddeutsche Zeitung , a German left of center paper, ought to give pause to those in the United States who are inclined to blithely write off the Tea Party Movement as a passing fringe phenomena: "Obama has underestimated the frustration in the country and the power of the Tea Party movement, which gives the prevailing disillusionment a platform and a voice. It is by far the most vibrant political force in America. Obama's left-of-center coalition, which got young people and intellectuals involved and which appealed to a majority of women, blacks and Latinos, has evaporated into nothing."

Ex-Governor and Senator Lowell Weicker appeared at the UConn Law School and gave a talk that touched on a number of subjects: health care, beltway manners, and bill paying averse legislators at the state capitol among them. Weicker on his reluctance to run for governor, as reported by Jeff Cohen of WNPR : "Somebody asked me, when I came on campus, wouldn't you like to be governor....Helloooo????" This as our tax belabored state is poised to celebrate the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Axe The Tax rally in Hartford. It seems like only yesterday, except for the many UConn students too young to have a personal memory of the event. All the spirits that hovered around Weicker on that grand day are very much in the air we breathe. Joe Markley -- who, along with Tom Scott, was responsible for the anti-tax rally in Hartford – is once again running for his old seat in the state senate, and he has a righteous wind at his back. The Weicker tax, as it was designed to do, ...

“A little frightening how you cats jump straight to revolutionary violence when faced with a political loss. I know you’re joking here, but that shit is for real for a whole lot of people” – a frightened blogger Okay, let’s at least try to get the history of the Boston Tea Party right. There were genuine revolutionists among the “Indians” who threw the tea into Boston harbor. The principle organizer was Sam Adams, as fine a made in America revolutionist as you are likely to find anywhere. But the issue that propelled the dumping was THE TEA. In an attempt to save the East India Company, an early government supported entity (GSE), the British government gave a subsidy to the company in the form of a tax reduction that allowed the company to reduce the price of its tea. Americans drank a lot of tea in those days because Starbucks as yet was not in business, and the British knew they could undercut the market by lowering the price of tea produced by their principle GSE. So they loaded al...