Tea Party Thread

[Stavros]

The so-called 'Tea Party' is making enough news to merit its own thread -but what is it? Sometimes I think they are libertarian anarchists who don't want a federal government, or if they do, want it to cost as little as possible. At other times they seem to be one-issue wonders. If they are adamant that they have signed a pledge not to raise the deficit then they are just stupid.

This analysis from Theda Skocpol and two colleagues, reviewed by Christia Freedland is, I think, a fair assessment, although some would argue that the concept of the 'deserving poor' is patronising and in policy terms laden with difficulties.
I would rather a sensible discussion than a relay of insults, however much people feel the need for it, one way or another...the link as usual is at the end.






Chrystia Freeland (http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland)



(http://blogs.reuters.com/)


Only hard-working Americans need apply

Jul 8, 2011 15:16 BST


What does the Tea Party want? As the debt ceiling debate rages in Washington, that should be the central question in U.S. political discourse. After all, it is the rise of the Tea Party that revitalized the Republican Party in 2009 and gave it the muscle to deliver a “shellacking” to the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. And it is the radicalism of the Tea Party and the freshman legislators it elected that is often blamed for the uncompromising stance of the Republicans in the current budget negotiations.
That’s why “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” (http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles//7/B/3/%7B7B30B0ED-7AA0-4065-952B-1FCAB8B161C9%7DWilliamson%20Skocpol%20Coggin%20Tea %20Party.pdf) a recent study of the Tea Party by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, and Vanessa Williamson and John Coggin, two graduate students, is so important. An expanded version of the paper, which appeared this spring in the journal Perspectives on Politics, will be published as a book by the Oxford University Press later this year.
Ms. Skocpol is an unashamed progressive, but what is striking about her team’s work is its respect for the Tea Party and its members. “Commentators have sometimes noted the irony that these same Tea Partiers who oppose ‘government spending’ are themselves recipients of Social Security,” the paper notes. “Don’t they know these are ‘big government’ programs?”
The usual assumption of the news media elites is that the Tea Party’s worldview is inchoate or just plain uninformed. “I think the pundit class tends to treat popular ideologies as products of ignorance,” Ms. Skocpol told me. But when she and her colleagues delved deeper, including distributing questionnaires to Tea Party activists and interviewing many of them, the scholars found that, “Rather than assume ignorance, we should recognize that what appear to be contradictory or uninformed views of federal government programs make better sense once we understand how Tea Party activists view themselves in relation to other groups in society.”
When it comes to the central issue in U.S. political life today — the size of government and its proper role — Ms. Skocpol and her colleagues found the Tea Partiers had a clear and coherent point of view, but one that does not fully jibe with the orthodoxies of libertarian ideologues or of elite, ultraconservative, Republican Party doctrine.
The central tension for the Tea Party grass roots isn’t between the Big Brother state and the freedom-loving individual, or between inefficient government spending and effective free markets. Instead, Ms. Skocpol and her fellow investigators argue that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” The fundamental distinction for them is not state vs. individual, it is the division of the United States into “workers” vs. “people who don’t work.”
Some of those “people who don’t work” are the young. Deficit hawks on the think tank circuit like to talk about ballooning government spending on Social Security and Medicare— programs that benefit the elderly — as “generational theft.” But the Tea Party rank and file, 70 percent to 75 percent of whom are over 45, are concerned about a very different generational struggle.
This is a revolt of the grandparents’ generation — at least the conservative grandparents — and they are worried the feckless youth are taking over the country and emptying the state’s coffers. These young “freeloaders” include the Tea Partiers’ own relatives. “Charles” told the researchers, “My grandson, he’s 14 and he asked, ‘Why should I work, why can’t I just get free money?”’ “Nancy” complained about a nephew who had “been on welfare his whole life.”
“The conditions for young adults to establish themselves have changed radically,” Ms. Skocpol told me. “It is harder for young adults. They may live at home longer. And that manifests itself in ways that are easy to condemn morally. The older generation is having a little trouble understanding what is happening to their children and especially grandchildren.”
The other group of government-supported nonworkers the Tea Party fears is illegal immigrants. The Harvard scholars found immigration to be a core, and highly emotive, Tea Party issue, even in Massachusetts, which has relatively low levels of illegal immigration and no foreign borders.
This impassioned opposition to illegal immigrants is often equated with racism, but Ms. Skocpol and her colleagues take great pains to point out that the Massachusetts Tea Partiers, whom they studied most closely, are vocally and actively opposed to overt racism. A racist poster to their Web site was publicly reprimanded and a plan was made to take down racist signs at a rally (though, in the event, the researchers didn’t spot any that needed removing). For the Tea Partiers, the major intellectual distinction isn’t between black and white — although that is the color of most of them — it is between deserving, hard-working citizen and unauthorized, foreign freeloader.
The Harvard scholars’ careful parsing of the thinking of the Tea Party has some important political implications. The first is that there is a latent but potentially vast divide between the grass roots and the conservative elite on the United States’ most important fiscal issue — the twin entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. Cutting these programs is a core tenet of faith for the party’s funders and its intellectuals. But the Tea Party’s rank and file views them as earned benefits that belong to hard-working Americans as surely as do their homes and private savings.
What makes this conclusion particularly persuasive is its timing — Ms. Skocpol and her team reached this view months before Kathy Hochul’s surprise victory in the May special election in New York State, an upset largely driven by the conservative base’s fears that the Republicans in Washington wanted to partially privatize Medicare.
The second take-away is for the Democrats, particularly the technocrats among them. It has become conventional wisdom, including on the left, that the way to make social welfare programs affordable is to direct them at the people who really need them. If politics were a math exercise, that view would make a lot of sense.
But Ms. Skocpol and her colleagues’ study of the Tea Party suggests that the government spending programs that earn widespread, long-term public support, including among people with strongly conservative views, are those that are perceived to be both universal and deserved. Helping the poor is well and good, but when times get tough the institutions we are willing to pay for are those that assist virtuous, hard-working people — in other words, ourselves.






http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland/2011/07/08/only-hard-working-americans-need-apply/

[Prospero]

I'm posting links rather than the full articles which are very long. Two very acute analytical pieces about the tea party from the New York review of books and one from the New Yorker. I guess those who are viewers of Fox and its ilk will simply cry liberal bias but these offer some deep and disturbing analysis and evidence of the way the hopes and desires of ordinary people are being abused by big business. it is business not government which is the real threat to ordinary folk in America.

if you dig there are plenty of pieces about how some very shadowy people from big corporations (in particular the Koch brothers) are manipulating the ideological desires of ordinary folk - to persuade them it i in their best interests NOT to tax the very rich. It's a sort of alice-in-wonderland position really

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/no-thanks-memories/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false

[brummie]

I have never heard of an american who can make a decent cup of tea

[Yvonne183]

Why are people in the UK always interested in US politics? Colony envy? lol

I just say this cause no one that I know talks about UK politics,,, heck, I don't even know who your Prime Minister is,,, Wilson?

I know my words will be looked upon as American ignorance but, I'm just saying why the interest from UK people with the US and what we do? Why don't you guys in the UK make a thread about, let's say Uruguayan politics.

I do like UK television.

[brummie]

not a lot to discuss really
Jose Mujica seems to live in the real world
Next country

[Stavros]

Why are people in the UK always interested in US politics? Colony envy? lol

My perception is that in the broadcast media and the press, the top stories on a daily basis concern events in the UK, the USA, and then Europe, unless some European story is worthy, as was the case with Norway and recent events in Greece, Serbia and Ireland. About a third of the programmes on tv are American and obviously American films and popular music are huge here.
On a personal note I have family in North America, I like to visit as often as I can, I studied American political history in my student years and needless to say it is truly as interesting as it is demanding, in a way that, for example, politics in Uruguay is not. In fact there are some interesting issues in Urugay, not just its love-hate relationship with Argentina. Their football team is almost certain to win the World Cup in Brazil in 2014....and there was a point in the 19th century when Uruguay could have acquired the Falkland Islands. Uruguay has tended to side with the British on this issue though that may be to annoy Argentina. I understand Uruguay is a more relaxed and gentle place than Argentina...and so on. None of which contributes to an understanding of the Tea Party.

Harold Wilson is dead...the current PM is a Conservative, David Cameron, who shares power in a coalition with Liberal Democrats whose leader, and Deputy PM is Nick Clegg.

[russtafa]

Australian people have no interest in your politics except our idiot socialist's who are as crazy as cut snakes

[hippifried]

One fantasy's as good as another...

[Prospero]

Yvonne - people internationally are no longer interested in British politics because we are now a rather insignificant world power, despite the beieif and behaviour of our leaders. For obvious reasons - political and economic - US politics is the very opposite. American power is at its zenith. When America stumbles the world quakes. How and by whom the US is governed affects us all.

[russtafa]

i would say America is in the decline and China is on the rise so why not Chinese politics

[Prospero]

There is a developing interest in Chinese politics Russtafa, but it is much harder for us to find out about the internal dynamics of a closed system.... and, being human, I think many people are more interested in a system in its death throes (which is ow you present America in your note) than a new order rising. Plus America seems in many respects to be the least bad system of Government yet devised - so to see the world's greatest democracy struggling to cope is, naturally, of great interest. To see the unreasonable power wielded by a group of delusional rightwing idiots is also astonishing.

[russtafa]

are you meaning the Chinese communist party?

[Prospero]

Russtafa - I assume you are being mischievous by taking the second element of my posting to refer to the Chinese Communist party. I am - of course - referring to the Repulsivicans and their idiot progeny, the tea party. The Chinese are, of course, a closed system in many key ways.

[fxtech]

Start investing in rice commodities...lol

[Prospero]

Except water problems could be the great undoing of the Chinese enterprise. See a recent book called The Big Thirst

[Stavros]

Prospero thanks for the links to the article and reviews on the Tea Party, it does suggest that it a diffuse group, which also suggests it will not last as a political movement although some elected individuals probably will. If there is a real danger it is that it could complicate the electoral strategy for the GOP in 2012.

Russtafa, the positition with China is that it is well studied at the academic level, and, outside the long-established Sinologists in Europe and the US, Australian academics were pioneers of China studies in the 1970s and 1980s, possibly a consequence of Gough Whitlam's rapprochement with China during his brief term as Prime Minister, as well as geographical factors. There are plenty of research programmes with a China focus at the university level, but primarily the two-way research and collaboration is in sciences and engineering with major corporations the source of funding. However,on this level, I expect India to do better than China at exporting intellectual know-how because of its firmer grounding in English -this also gives Indian graduates a better chance of working in the west than Chinese. The Chinese economy is continuing to grow, and as the internal market becomes as important to China as the domestic US market is to the USA, it will be cushioned from the worst effects of recession even though so much of its production is export-oriented. But that doesn't mean China will grow at the same rate every year, so it is conceivable that pockets of the Chinese economy could be undermined if, for example, the lack of resolution to the US deficit problem leads to disinvestment in China. And so on, but this is supposedly a Tea Party thread.

[brummie]

we seem to be drifting from the topic of a tea party

please answer do you put the milk in 1st or the boiling water

For you politicos Make your MP work Don't vote for him

[Stavros]

Its well known that people who put the milk in first are imperialists, as it is a habit derived from the Raj. I don't take milk with tea, I am a democrat.

[hippifried]

we seem to be drifting from the topic of a tea party

please answer do you put the milk in 1st or the boiling water

For you politicos Make your MP work Don't vote for him
I'm not losing track. I just befriended the Mad Hatter on facebook.

[russtafa]

i always put my milk in first

[yodajazz]

I'm posting links rather than the full articles which are very long. Two very acute analytical pieces about the tea party from the New York review of books and one from the New Yorker. I guess those who are viewers of Fox and its ilk will simply cry liberal bias but these offer some deep and disturbing analysis and evidence of the way the hopes and desires of ordinary people are being abused by big business. it is business not government which is the real threat to ordinary folk in America.

if you dig there are plenty of pieces about how some very shadowy people from big corporations (in particular the Koch brothers) are manipulating the ideological desires of ordinary folk - to persuade them it i in their best interests NOT to tax the very rich. It's a sort of alice-in-wonderland position really

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/no-thanks-memories/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false

I agree strongly with this post. Seems like the anger from the Tea Party, is towards, the poor, getting so called 'undeserved entitlements'. Meanwhile, it is the corporations, shifting jobs overseas. The richest are gaining in total percentage of total. And it seems like coportate entities are getting larger and larger, calling into question the concept of free market. I have not heard the terms, 'monopoly and 'strike' used in a long time. Labor has less and less power, with employers demanding, greater productivity. The financial bailout effected the big players, with one exec from a company that recieved bailout funds, was able to retire with a 115 million retirement package, only a a couple years later. People forget, there was a time when it was considered unfair for one media entity to own too many outlets. I think five was the limit at one time.

Government is the major force that can balance the powers of big business and big money, yet the anger of the tea party, seems to all be directed at the government. I see the tea party as a diversion funded by the rich, to direct attention from the corporate takeover of America. This is the danger predicted in the farewell speech of President Eisenhower, a Republican, by the way.

[hippifried]

I tried puttig milk in tea once. I can't understand why anybody would bother.

[russtafa]

it's the civilized way don't you know.this is what made the empire great ,ours not yours

[Prospero]

George Monbiot, a writer for the Guardian in London, expresses with clarity, the truth about the Tea party. It's a shame their own demagogues and obscurantists throw up massive smokescreens to keep this reality from the moral but deluded folk who provide this movement with its foot soldiers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/25/tea-party-koch-brothers
The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of".

Charles and David Koch own 84% of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. It runs oil refineries, coal suppliers, chemical plants and logging firms, and turns over roughly $100bn a year; the brothers are each worth $21bn. The company has had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements for oil and chemical spills and other industrial accidents. The Kochs want to pay less tax, keep more profits and be restrained by less regulation. Their challenge has been to persuade the people harmed by this agenda that it's good for them.

In July 2010, David Koch told New York magazine: "I've never been to a Tea Party event. No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me." But a fascinating new film – (Astro)Turf Wars, by Taki Oldham – tells a fuller story. Oldham infiltrated some of the movement's key organising events, including the 2009 Defending the American Dream summit, convened by a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP). The film shows David Koch addressing the summit. "Five years ago," he explains, "my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation."

A convener tells the crowd how AFP mobilised opposition to Barack Obama's healthcare reforms. "We hit the button and we started doing the Twittering and Facebook and the phonecalls and the emails, and you turned up!" Then a series of AFP organisers tell Mr Koch how they have set up dozens of Tea Party events in their home states. He nods and beams from the podium like a chief executive receiving rosy reports from his regional sales directors. Afterwards, the delegates crowd into AFP workshops, where they are told how to run further Tea Party events.

Americans for Prosperity is one of several groups set up by the Kochs to promote their politics. We know their foundations have given it at least $5m, but few such records are in the public domain and the total could be much higher. It has toured the country organising rallies against healthcare reform and the Democrats' attempts to tackle climate change. It provided the key organising tools that set the Tea Party running.

The movement began when CNBC's Rick Santelli called from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a bankers' revolt against the undeserving poor. (He proposed that the traders should hold a tea party to dump derivative securities in Lake Michigan to prevent Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers": by which he meant people whose mortgages had fallen into arrears.) On the same day, Americans for Prosperity set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events.

Oldham's film shows how AFP crafted the movement's messages and drafted its talking points. The New Yorker magazine, in the course of a remarkable exposure of the Koch brothers' funding networks, interviewed some of their former consultants. "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded [the Tea Party]," one of them explained. "It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud – and they're our candidates!" Another observed that the Kochs are smart. "This rightwing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves."

AFP is one of several groups established by the Koch brothers. They set up the Cato Institute, the first free-market thinktank in the United States. They also founded the Mercatus Centre at George Mason University, which now fills the role once played by the economics department at Chicago University as the originator of extreme neoliberal ideas. Fourteen of the 23 regulations that George W Bush put on his hitlist were, according to the Wall Street Journal, first suggested by academics working at the Mercatus Centre.

The Kochs have lavished money on more than 30 other advocacy groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the George C Marshall Institute, the Reason Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. These bodies have been instrumental in turning politicians away from environmental laws, social spending, taxing the rich and distributing wealth. They have shaped the widespread demand for small government. The Kochs ensure that their money works for them. "If we're going to give a lot of money," David Koch explained to a libertarian journalist, "we'll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don't agree with, we withdraw funding."

Most of these bodies call themselves "free-market thinktanks", but their trick – as (Astro)Turf Wars points out – is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt. The thinktanks that the Kochs have funded devise the game and the rules by which it is played; Americans for Prosperity coaches and motivates the team.

Astroturfing is now taking off in the United Kingdom. Earlier this month Spinwatch showed how a fake grassroots group set up by health insurers helped shape the Tories' NHS reforms. Billionaires and corporations are capturing the political process everywhere; anyone with an interest in democracy should be thinking about how to resist them. Nothing is real any more. Nothing is as it seems.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/01/us-debt-deal-tea-party

here are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama's words, "is at its lowest level in half a century". The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: "The little guy is going to be cremated." That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It's insane. But how did it happen?

The immediate reason is that Republican members of Congress supported by the Tea Party movement won't budge. But this explains nothing. The Tea Party movement mostly consists of people who have been harmed by tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor and middle. Why would they mobilise against their own welfare? You can understand what is happening in Washington only if you remember what everyone seems to have forgotten: how this movement began.

On Sunday the Observer claimed that "the Tea Party rose out of anger over the scale of federal spending, and in particular in bailing out the banks". This is what its members claim. It's nonsense.

The movement started with Rick Santelli's call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers". In other words, it was a demand for a financiers' mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.

So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch. They run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of", and between them they are worth $43bn. Koch Industries is a massive oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals company. In the past 15 years the brothers have poured at least $85m into lobby groups arguing for lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry. The groups and politicians the Kochs fund also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie healthcare reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, AFP spent $45m supporting its favoured candidates.

But the Kochs' greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham's film (Astro)Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream summit, explaining the events and protests they've started with AFP help. "Five years ago," he tells them, "my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation."

AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves.

Are they stupid? No. They have been misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favour of his.

What's taking place in Congress right now is a kind of political coup. A handful of billionaires have shoved a spanner into the legislative process. Through the candidates they have bought and the movement that supports them, they are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we've forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won't even see?

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website. On Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot

[Stavros]

Tim Stanley in today's Telegraph offers a conservative view, which is that the base demographic of Tea Party support is insufficient to win an election, that if anything it has exposed a weakness in the GOP while pushing Obama to a more electable centre ground -the left never wins an election in the US anyway -sounds like the UK!

Chinese tea and Russian tea would be disgusting with milk; I stopped using milk in tea because I need to cut dairy products from my diet; and I always liked the way they drink tea in the Middle East - so I drink it out of a glass and black. In Morocco they like it with mint also...and so on.

ps I note Monbiot has not said anything substantially different from the articles and reviews in the New Yorker...

[Prospero]

You are correct about the Monbiot pieces. But he said it to a british readership who, by and large, do not see the New Yorker or the New York review and he said it more succinctly.

However the readership of the right-wing dominated UK Press will not be exposed to this information at all.

[Stavros]

A fair point.

[hippifried]

it's the civilized way don't you know.this is what made the empire great ,ours not yours
Yeah, well, I know about the aristocrats & all. But it just seems to me that as soon as the great unwashed developed the wherewithal to afford milk in their tea, the "Empire" (yours not ours) started crumbling. Maybe y'all need to take a real hard look at this whole tea thingie. Sumatran plot?

[Stavros]

Hmmmm...on the other hand why is that the tea always tastes better in Kenya and India and Sri Lanka? Because they mostly send us the second best...I guess that's anti-imperialism as a form of tasteful subterfuge. You can't get the best Chinese teas here for love or money, or maybe its the water there. I had some Osmanthus in southern China and it was one of the finest teas I ever had -couldn't even get it in Beijing. All of which, I suspect, is beyond the ken of Congress...

[brummie]

Is "Ken of Congress" one of the tea party or the one who used to shag Barbie or the newt lover who used to run London?

[bobfryfish]

I love the tea party hopefully they will bring back race segregation none of this race mixing and Blacks dating whites or mexicans but Blacks dating our own kind

[brummie]

I love the tea party hopefully they will bring back race segregation none of this race mixing and Blacks dating whites or mexicans but Blacks dating our own kind

If blacks want to date morons then as long as it is consenting who cares

[hippifried]

What color are the morons?

Oh never mind. I just looked it up, & apparently the moron race is plaid.

[russtafa]

What they are Scottish ?

[Prospero]

Is "Ken of Congress" one of the tea party or the one who used to shag Barbie or the newt lover who used to run London?

Gotta love this.... it's the newt lover who used to shag all of us

[hippifried]

What they are Scottish ?
Some, I'm sure. Gotta wonder about dudes who run around through the boulders & partially frozen swamps, wearing Catholic schoolgirl uniforms with no panties, & dancing to what sounds like a gunnysack full of alley cats in heat.

[russtafa]

The hills are alive with the sound of music

[Prospero]

On a point of information the Scots call it tartan. not plaid.

[russtafa]

same as same

[Stavros]

It is certainly not tea but I defy anyone to come up with something to replace single malt whisky, Scotland isn't as useless as it seems to some. And anyway even the Scots know their wailing pipes originated in the Middle East. I went to Sonny Rollins' gig at Ronnie Scott's in the 70s when he had a bagpipe player in the band....it worked for a while then the novelty wore off. The drummer was sensational. And none of this has anything to do with the off-off-off- (well, very off)-Broadway show...

[hippifried]

Tartan is the cloth with the color pattern woven in.
Plaid is the color pattern itself, irrespective of the medium or the technique used to make it visible.

That's my story & I'm sticking to it. :D

[brummie]

Plaid are the Welsh Nationalists I thought not Scottish

[robertlouis]

You bunch of bastards for all this anti-Scottish nonsense. Clearly the time for my return to these columns is way overdue....

And only poofs drink tea - real men only drink whisky*, everyone knows that.







* Said purely for effect. I suspect I'm probably one of the main tea drinkers hereabouts, ducky.....

[russtafa]

did Robert the Bruce drink tea?

[robertlouis]

did Robert the Bruce drink tea?

Nope. There wasn't any in 13th century Scotland.

[Stavros]

But this is true: I was in the Middle East in the 1990s and an Arab lifted his glass of tea and said to me: This is our Whisky....

[Prospero]

But this is true: I was in the Middle East in the 1990s and an Arab lifted his glass of tea and said to me: This is our Whisky....

That remark is for public consumption - as you'll know if you've spent much time with the Arabs.

[russtafa]

a dram of whiskey is good for you

[hippifried]

Then 2 drams should be twice as good, etc...

[robertlouis]

a dram of whiskey is good for you

***GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING***

Any whisky containing the letter "e" is strictly not for human consumption, but can be used as a toilet cleaner under the guidance of a public health official.

:dancing::dancing::dancing:

Oh yesssss!

[Stavros]

That remark is for public consumption - as you'll know if you've spent much time with the Arabs.

So true, Prospero, although two Arabs I used to know when they were in the UK would casually say 'fancy a pint?' and head in the direction of the nearest pub -that's a pint of ale, by the way, not a pint of Whisky....back home one of them just used the bar in a hotel in town; I think its worse in places where its supposed to be illegal, it seems to encourage an excess of drinking. Incidentally, Saddam Hussein's favourite Whisky -so I read somewhere- was Old Parr.

RobertLouis -I take it you don't like Bourbon...

[Prospero]

And in public, my experience is that you're usually offered a cup of strong fragrant coffee - in meetings and - in the desert with the Bedu, it'll be fresh dates and a strong (sometimes VERY strong) coffee.

[Prospero]

Oh c'mon you Scottish supremacist - some irish Whiskey is damn fine stuff.

[robertlouis]

Oh c'mon you Scottish supremacist - some irish Whiskey is damn fine stuff.

Oh, I agree, just enjoying the wind-up. :dancing:

The triple distillation of a lot of Irish blended whiskies gives them a smoothness and peat on the nose which feature in very few blended Scotches.

Jameson is a good starting point, Black Bush and Bushmills are excellent, and Tullamore Dew is simply glorious.

But you're right, Stavros, I don't rate most bourbons, find them horribly sweet and sickly. Some of the rarer and older ryes are damn fine, though.

And Penderyn from Wales is one of the nicest lighter malts there is!

So yes, I'm a whisky snob, but not dogmatically so.