Lipton Lugnuts channel Taliban

After last Tuesday's Tea Party jailbreak, it took less than 24 hours for the movement's leaders to shift from economic engineering to social engineering.

They spent 2 years claiming (falsely) to be for limited government, but Tea Party cofounder Mark Meckler now says not so fast. At a press conference last week, Meckler said Tea Party followers in Congress now "need to lift up conservative culture, family values, and wholesome things by supporting conservative musicians, writers, artists, and producers."

In just a day, the Tea Parties went from attacking government to praising it as an arbiter of political thought by demanding a bailout for right-wing writers and artists.

The Tea Parties are a movement of snobs. Their values don't prevail in the marketplace of ideas, so they have to fleece the taxpayers to prop them up. Similarly, their values don't prevail at the polls anymore unless they get the Citizens United ruling to flood their campaigns with foreign corporate dough.

Call it wingnut welfare, if you will. They claim to be for the "free market", but they demand bailouts like this that would seem to defy market principles.

All this of course is funded by taxation without representation. Impoverished inner cities are paying disproportionately high taxes to fund a movement by rich exurbs - while the cities are badly underrepresented in Congress.

My message for urbanites from Bellevue to Boston is: I live in the city, and you do too. And you have brains. Take back what is rightfully yours. Don't let the teabaggers live off your tax dollars. If you have to stand up for yourself when somebody's giving you a hard time, so be it. America is yours, and don't let the exurban property barons decide what goes on in your town.

Join me in fighting back and in taking back what belongs to the cities.