Anti-Tea Party Spam

Yesterday morning, a couple of hours before the Tea Party, I got the following spam on the email account associated with this blog (and not on any of our other email accounts on the same ISP). I'll put my fisking in brackets and italics.

PAYING FOR PROTESTS AND FOR BAGS OF TEA
Tea Party protests are expected in cities across the United States. WHERE WE STAND In railing against taxes and spending, what are protesters standing for? [Just as an off the cuff guess, I'd say lower taxes and lower spending.] HOW MUCH are you willing to pay to support a civil society? Given that today is April 15 — Tax Day — it’s not an idle question, even though most of us [aside from some politicians, of course] have actually been paying our dues with every paycheck over the past year. If the Americans deploying tea bags today are any indication, lots of people think they pay too much. Of course, the fact that most of those same protesters recently had their federal taxes cut under President Barack Obama blunts the point a bit ["Less tax than before" can still be "too much tax". In addition, those trillions of new deficit spending will have to be paid for somehow, even if it's not by direct taxes. If it's by corporate taxes, those will get passed on to us as higher prices; if it's by inflating the currency, that also acts as an indirect tax. And there's no promise it won't be by direct taxes in a couple of years, either. Several of the signs I saw yesterday were along the lines of "I'm eight years old and already $32,000 in debt"], as does the fact that these grassroots Tea Parties were partially fomented and sponsored by very big and well-financed conservative groups and media outlets ["Partially" is a slippery term--are we talking 80%, 50%, 10%, .0005%? Is there a ceiling of contribution below which the movement is "genuine" and above which it's "astroturf"? If conservative groups are funding the protests, does that somehow mean that the message of the protests isn't true? Does the writer think that, unlike conservatives, leftist protesters can remain pure while taking money from the likes of Soros, union bosses, etc?]. As today’s gatherings show, it is not difficult to inspire anger against taxes, against spending, against Washington, against Richmond, against City Hall, especially at a time when many Americans feel poorer and their government is struggling to cope with the worst economic downturn in at least a generation. What’s not immediately clear ["not immediately"? How many seconds did you stop to think?] is what the Tea Party protesters are willing to pay for functioning civil institutions, for the kind of society where children must be educated, roads must be built and people must be protected. [It's not the functioning civil institutions that bother me, it's things like GM getting a huge bailout a few months ago and still planning on going bankrupt two months from now.] It is completely undeniable that anger against taxation and spending has been building for years, resulting in truly organic anti-tax movements in communities across the nation. [Weren't you just saying the Tea Party movement is funded by Big Conservatives? Is it organic, or isn't it?] But the days leading to today’s protest seem a little different, at least to witness an e-mail from the anti-tax Americans for Prosperity: “In addition, we’ll be offering anybody attending a tea party the chance to win $1,000! AFP Foundation and Heritage Foundation have joined forces to launch the Stop Spending Our Future initiative, which offers four contests and $5,000 in total prizes. Our ‘Spread the Word’ contest will award $1,000 to the individual that collects the best video testimonial from an attendee at one of these tea parties.” [So? They're not paying for the protests, they're paying for the best reporting on the protests]. The Tea Party protests have been unusual from the start, mixed up — in many places — with anti-Obama fervor [God forbid we should hold the President responsible for what his administration does], anti-immigrant passion, and even opposition to the teaching of evolution and to civil rights for homosexuals [I didn't see anything at all along those lines, but let's say there were. Does that somehow render the "anti-tax" message invalid, or is it just an opportunity to be snide about social conservatives?]. But it’s an unusual protest, to say the least, that commands prize money for participants. [I'd say the last campaign season was a protest against the Big Government Conservative administration, and I hear some community organizer from Illinois got a pretty impressive prize out of it].