Speaking of the Tea Party. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with at least one eye, one ear, and half a brain, but the astroturf roots of teabaggerism are becoming ever more evident. And guess what: it started with big tobacco. Knock me over with a pack of Zig-Zag.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Tea Party movement emerged as a result of grassroots anger against the government in 2009. We've known for some time that the real story is more complicated. An awful lot of big money, including from the infamous Koch Industries and other corporate sources, helped fund and direct the movement. But that's not all. A new peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Tobacco Control and funded by the National Cancer Institute, found that the Tea Party's origin story involves another extremely troubling major character: Big Tobacco...Well, gee whiz. It's been apparent from the beginning that behind the gullible and credulous tricorner teabaggers were people with money and another agenda entirely. You'd think they'd be embarrassed to find out how successfully they've been hoodwinked and used. If, that is, they'd ever showed capacity for reflection or depth of thought.
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