What's that sound? Everybody look what's going down!

[Tev]

There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds,
Getting so much resistance from behind....

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

This was a fun read. This guy does a decent job explaining how things got to where they are now for the Republican party and how things may go if the trends continue. I'd really rather the rest of the country not become California.

[Wigmund]

I'm actually hoping that the Republican party schisms between the moderates and the ultra-conservatives before the 2010 elections, and seeing what happened with Scozzafava in New York I hope it happens sooner rather than later.

Beck denounced her as "ACORN-supported" and an "Obama-Lite Republican." Former House majority leader Dick Armey's group FreedomWorks mobilized against her. She said she heard conservative robo-calls in the district describing her as a "child killer," a "lesbian lover" and a "homo."

[Magus]

I think the protests are dying down. Only a quarter of the people showed up to this that showed up to Glenn Beck's 9/12 march, which was so disheartening to Fox News that they had to show footage of the 9/12 march while lying and saying it was the most recent protest.

I blame the cold weather.