Close Readings: Judson Phillips’s immigration proposal

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments

If you haven’t heard of Judson Phillips, it’s probably because you haven’t yet signed up for Tea Party Nation, the national-level organizer of Tea Party organizations that sends you a ton of emails, many of which are titled “Draft” or, once, “Do Not Send.” Judson Phillips may be an idiot. As the organizer of the first national Tea Party Unity Convention, he may also be one of the few identifiable leaders in the still-amorphous movement. The Tea Party Nation website is either the canary in the mine or one arbitrarily drawn constellation in the exploded galaxy that is the Tea Party, depending on whose side you took in the series of schisms that immediately followed its formation. I prefer the first interpretation, since A) the alternative is to have no concrete information about the Tea Party at all and B) Phillips is hilarious. Case in point: his recent screed/policy proposal regarding illegal immigration, which is the subject of today’s Close Reading. Text after the jump.

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Friday links! Combust in a fiery pillar of rage edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 4 Comments

Yes, I have. Thank you.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: democracy doesn’t work. Okay, democracy totally works, but it works on the responsible conduct of an informed citizenry. I don’t know if our current citizenry is less informed and responsible than that of, say, 1893, or if I’m just alive and therefore capable of experiencing blinding, indignant anger only now. But what. The fuck. Is wrong with everybody? Maybe it’s because a loose national organization of the proudly ignorant just held a rally to congratulate themselves on being Americans. Maybe it’s because I spent yesterday watching my 45 year-old neighbor get drunk and burn his hand with fireworks, again. Or maybe it’s just because I have the internet. This Friday’s link roundup will propel you into the weekend on a jet of pure, baffled rage. It’s probably best not to think about from whence such a jet would emanate, though. Gross.

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Pleasingly-named billionaire Koch brothers fund Tea Party

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 2 Comments

Charles Koch, photographed here with the things he does not own

Here are just two of the many fun quotes in Jane Meyer’s New Yorker article about David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who founded Americans For Prosperity, support a network of conservative think tanks dedicated to libertarian causes, and have been instrumental in creating and sustaining the Tea Party movement:

They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.

The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.

The first is from a previous advisor to the Kochs and one of the many sources in Meyer’s story that go unnamed. The second is from Bruce Bartlett, formerly of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a think tank the Kochs funded. If you lack the time or patience to read Meyer’s mind-blowing but also 10,000-word story on these men—whose combined income is exceeded in America only by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet—you should know two things. One, the Fifth Avenue apartment mentioned in the opening section now belongs to one of my former clients, and I used to tutor there twice a week. Two, you can get the gist of Meyer’s article by reading Frank Rich’s column from Sunday.

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head 6 Comments

run subroutine {real Americans} ^not found^ :: gosub {made-up statistics} ^catalog error^ /fail

Like a child who insists that everyone watch her do a roundoff after her older sister’s piano recital, Michele Bachmann held a rally of her own Saturday at the Washington Monument, across the Mall from Glenn Beck. The event was essentially a campaign speech—outside of the state in which she is campaigning, which adds to the terrifying accumulation of evidence that Bachmann is trying to become some sort of national figure—but it occasioned perhaps the funniest Washington Post story ever written. Emi Kolawole packs more gems of dry paragraph-structure humor into her 275 words than I have time to enumerate here, including:

The Republican lawmaker also took the opportunity to list members of the House Tea Party Caucus, which she chairs. When she reached the name of Rep. Joe Wilson, best known for shouting “you lie” during President Obama’s address to Congress, the crowd started chanting “you lie.”

The best journalism makes you feel like you’re there. My favorite quote from Kolawole’s report, however, and the big story from the event, was Bachmann’s absurd estimate of the size of the crowd. Lay down some plastic, because your head is going to explode when you click on “More…”

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Religious politics and the President’s secret agnosticism

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 3 Comments

In all the speculation about whether the President of the United States is a secret Muslim—a concern matched only be the pre-election fear that his Chicago pastor made him a secret black nationalist—we sometimes forget another possibility: that he secretly subscribes to no religion at all. Obviously, when you’re publicly speculating on a man’s deeply-held beliefs, you can’t just accept what he says. Until we devise some sort of test for determining whether someone is actually a Christian, possibly involving a very large wheel, we’ll have to content ourselves with two things: wild speculation by crazy white bitches and textual analysis.

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