The muddled Tea Party version of history is more than wrong and fraudulent. It’s offensive. Calling Obama a tyrant, a communist, or a fascist is deeply offensive to all the real victims of tyranny, the real victims of communism and fascism. The tens of millions murdered. It trivializes such suffering inexcusably for the T.P.ers to claim that they are suffering from similar oppression because they might have their taxes raised or be subject to demonic “federal regulation.”

Read on at Slate.

Fox needs to learn never to tangle with a comedian.
Because the comedian always gets the last laugh.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains it all.

Tom Schaller at 538 has posted this great analysis of how low our government spending is as a percentage of GDP — and how skewed some folks’ view is of that number.

America isn’t the lowest, but we are fifth lowest and our share (28 percent, which includes state/local taxes) is 20 percent lower than the OECD average of about 35 percent.

…Goldberg says he “bring[s] this up because many in the Democratic Party and in the news media have a hard time understanding what the ‘Tea Party’ crowd is talking about when it complains of incipient tyranny and intrusive government.” Yes, many of us do, including that uber-Democratic media maven and former Reaganite Bruce Bartlett, who surveyed tea partiers and discovered they have no idea what the true tax burden in the country is. Their average response for what share of GDP goes into the (federal) public sector was 42 percent–more than twice what it actually is.

So, conceptually, this would be like asking a pack of tea partiers who by chance met Kareem Abdul Jabbar during one of their Washington rallies to estimate his height, and their average answer came back “14 feet tall.”