Getting Our Priorities Straight

I should have seen this coming. A small political movement with strong anti-tax, anti-establishment sentiments, and many angry, heartless, selfish supporters is running out of money. Yeah, I'm talking about the teabaggers again:

Some leading tea party activists are concerned that their efforts to reshape American politics, starting with the 2010 elections, are being undermined by a shortage of cash that’s partly the result of a deep ambivalence within the movement’s grass roots over the very idea of fundraising and partly attributable to an inability to win over the wealthy donors who fund the conservative establishment.

Apparently their fiscal myopia combined with the blatant opportunism of their leaders is draining their coffers. Do we need any more proof that they're really neocons?

And do we need any more proof that their ideas about taxation are the bane of this country? Paul Krugman recently wrote about how all this anti-government rhetoric is harming us:

The anti-government campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

He calls is an "unlit, unpaved road to nowhere," but while Republicans stand strong against the tiniest of aid to state governments, Americans in Afghanistan get paved roads and more for their Humvees.