"Tea Party! America Thanks You!" Video

Political Rancor - Arizona Tea Party Style

These Arizona Tea Party Types are surely a nice bunch. They're even tempered and they play nice with others.

Only not so much when they don't:

A nasty battle between factions of Legislative District 20 Republicans and fears that it could turn violent in the wake of what happened in Tucson on Saturday prompted District Chairman Anthony Miller and several others to resign.

Miller, a 43-year-old Ahwatukee Foothills resident and former campaign worker for U.S. Sen. John McCain, was re-elected to a second one-year term last month. He said constant verbal attacks after that election and Internet blog posts by some local members with Tea Party ties made him worry about his family's safety.

And then:

Miller said when he was a member of McCain's campaign staff last year has been criticized by the more conservative party members who supported Republican opponent J.D. Hayworth. The first and only African-American to hold the party's precinct chairmanship, Miller said he has been called "McCain's boy," and during the campaign saw a critic form his hand in the shape of a gun and point it at him.

"I wasn't going to resign but decided to quit after what happened Saturday," Miller said. "I love the Republican Party but I don't want to take a bullet for anyone."

Hmm...now why would an African-American man possibly object to being called someone's "boy"? I mean we all know there's no racism in the Tea Party, right? So this must be one big misunderstanding, right? What we have here is a failure to communicate.

And the hand in the shape of a gun? That's simply a reflection of that Tea Partier's enduring respect for those "Second Amendment" solutions spoken about so glowingly by that other Tea Party favorite, Sharon Angle. Reminds us of something, Joyce Kaufman a Florida Tea partier and talk radio host is quoted as saying:

If ballots don’t work, bullets will.

Of course there's no overheated rhetoric on the far-right. Of course not.

Very respectful of disagreement, these tea partiers. Very respectful.

Found Object

Can someone explain this picture to me? It's from a tea party protest.

Do they understand the concept of "Medicare"? Of "socialized medicine"?

Just asking...

Tales Of Tea Party Texas

- The Intolerant, Bigoted "Christian" Part.

From Thinkprogress:

Last month, several Tea Party activists formed a right-wing coalition to oust Rep. Joe Straus (R) as Texas House Speaker. They began circulating emails with anti-Semitic messages against Straus, who is Jewish. The groups ran robo-calls and sent out e-mails demanding a “true Christian leader,” and calling Straus’ opponent, Rep. Ken Paxton (R), “a Christian Conservative who decided not to be pushed around by the Joe Straus thugs.”

Thinkprogress then links back to the reporting at the Texas Observer.

So here's Abby Rapoport from the Texas Observer:

When emails first appeared calling for dumping current Speaker Joe Straus in favor of "Christian conservative" leadership, Straus' more visible opponents initially dismissed accusations of anti-Jewish/pro-Christian bias. "I've never heard any one talk about Mr. Straus' religion," said Michael Quinn Sullivan, the head of Empower Texans and a vocal leader of the anti-Straus crowd. "There is no place in the speakership race for discussions of people's religion or lack thereof." Shortly afterwards, Straus' opponents took a new approach, condemning the emails and distancing themselves from the statements. "There is absolutely no place for religious bigotry in the race for Texas Speaker, and I categorically condemn such action," said state Rep. Ken Paxton, who's challenging Straus for the position.

It seemed like things had died down, until I obtained an email exchange Tuesday between two members of the State Republican Executive Committee—Rebecca Williamson and John Cook. After Williamson sent a fact sheet to SREC members defending Straus, Cook responded by dismissing her claims and saying that "We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it."

You can see the emails here.

Rapoport goes on, quoting the very Christian Cook:

"When I got involved in politics, I told people I wanted to put Christian conservatives in leadership positions," he told me, explaining that he only supports Christian conservative candidates in Republican primary races.

"I want to make sure that a person I'm supporting is going to have my values. It's not anything about Jews and whether I think their religion is right or Muslims and whether I think their religion is right. ... I got into politics to put Christian conservatives into office. They're the people that do the best jobs over all."

She continues:

Then our conversation somehow turned to history. If someone couldn't see the connection between Christianity and government then "you don't like our founding fathers," Cook said. "They were Christians.... Why would I not what to be like our founding fathers?"

See? We ARE a Christian Nation! And in order to make sure our guv'ment more closely matches the Christian intent of our Christian founding fathers we have to make sure that only good Christian men are in positions of power.

I just want to be clear, here. Not all Christian Conservatives from Texas are bigoted religious zealots and not all bigoted religious zealots are Christian Conservatives from Texas. But when they are, it's a sad sad commentary on the party that once stood for something good (not that I agreed with it, but I could at least respect it - now, not so much).

Tea Party NY Gov Candidate's Racist & Hardcore Porn Emails

Meet Carl Paladino. He's the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York. You can see from his campaign website masthead above that he's "for the people," but if you read his emails you'll see he's not for all the people.

WNYmedia obtained dozens of emails either sent by Paladino or forwarded by him that contain outrageous racism, hardcore pornography and bestiality.

Here's a small sample:

(This is only a snapshot of the video as the original has beenbanned from YouTube. It shows African tribesmendancing (get it!). WNYmedia notes that it was popular atthe skinhead website Stormfront.org. You may recallthat cop-killer RichardPoplawski kept an account there.)


(This one needs no comment. He also sent an emailembedded with a video entitled “Miss France 2008 fucking”)
According to Talking Points Memo:

Paladino's campaign manager, Michael Caputo, would not comment on specific emails, but acknowledged to TPMmuckraker that Paladino had sent emails that were "off-color" and "politically incorrect," saying that few such emails represented the candidate's own opinion. Caputo accused Democrats of wanting to change the subject from substantive issues to "having sex with horses."

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Paladino is anti choice and anti same-sex marriage. Also, according to TPM, Paladino considers himself "the only Republican in the race who agrees 100 percent with conservative values." (OK, you can stop laughing/weeping now.)

Additionally WNYmedia notes, he "even counted Governor Paterson’s admitted affair as evidence of Albany corruption – until the media found out about his own extramarital affair and child birthed out of wedlock."

Apropos of nothing, The Pittsburgh Tea Party Movement will hold its second annual Tax Day Tea Party on April 15th in Mellon Square Park and the Southwest PA T.E.A. Party will hold their "Let It Begin Here!" tea party on Saturday April 17th at the Greensburg-Jeannette Regional Airport. (Hey, guys! Never let it be said that I ignore your events.)

Teabonics!

Flickr group devoted to the fine art of Teabonics here.

(h/t to Pam Spaulding & JoeMyGod)
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Facts: They Should Matter

First, I received a Facebook message from Fred Honsberger yesterday claiming:

"A million people march in the DC tea party….see much about that in the MSM?"

Then later that same morning, I heard Chris Moore repeating ridiculously overblown attendance figures of 1.7 to 2 million for this event on PCNC's "Pittsburgh Now."

Moore seemed to be unaware of any controversy with the numbers, but I'm betting Fred knows the real story. Of course this is exactly how the right operates -- they repeat a lie over and over until it becomes "the truth" in the MSM.

In case you missed it, there was a FreedomWorks/Glenn Beck 9-12 Project hootenanny/tea-bagger party on Saturday in DC. The president of FreedomWorks, Matt Kibbe, announced on stage at the rally that ABC News had reported that 1 - 1.5 million people were at the event. That got tweeted/blogged around the right side of the Internet. Problem was, it wasn't true. According to ABC News:

At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as "tens of thousands."

The figure kept getting bumped up on the right until they were claiming attendance of 1.7 - 2 million -- 30 times more than reliable crowd estimates -- and akin to me claiming that I'm 162 feet tall.

Moreover, they tried to pass off an at least five-year old photo of the mall as being from this past Saturday's protest. How do we know it's an old photograph? Because the photo is missing the National Museum of the American Indian which opened in 2004.

It also turns out that there was another group on the mall last Saturday. One might be tempted to forgive the tea-baggers for confusing that group with their own, except for the fact that the group was the National Council of Negro Women Black Family Reunion Celebration. And, if you look at pictures from the tea-bagger party on Saturday (or any other day) you'll notice that the attendees are not only overwhelmingly white, but also the kind of crowd where someone would fell comfortable carrying a Confederate flag or explaining how Obama will oppress "white America."


I'm happy to report that I was able to call-in to the Pittsburgh Now show and let Chris know the real deal.
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For the Teabaggers

From Crooks and Liars and my inbox:


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Mad Hatters at the Tea Party

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could.

`At any rate I'll never go there again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'

"Tea Parties" were held yesterday across the nation and Pittsburgh was no exception (despite the fact that there already was a Tea Party here just last Saturday). The Other Political Junkie has posted on this phenomenon but I thought now was a good time for a review.

The Message

Ostensibly these Tea Parties are protests against taxation and big government spending. Their basis is the Boston Tea Party of 1773 which was of course a protest against taxation without representation. The participants in these Tea Parties are protesting taxation with representation. It's just the wrong representation I guess as there were no nationwide Tea Parties while Bush squandered Clinton's $236 billion surplus in his first year in office and then managed to leave a $482 billion deficit in his wake and a broken economy.

Then there's the irony of people protesting taxes who just got a tax cut -- how many of these folks do you really think make $250,000+ a year? And, how angry do they get when faced with reality?

The Tea Parties are also being presented as bipartisan events ("was neutral in any perceived attack on a particular party or politician"). Perhaps that's why Robert Baehr (Founder/Coordinator of PennsylvaniaTeaParty.com ) felt it necessary to recently take down the Obama morphing into The Terminator graphic (complete with terminator theme music) from his web site. Fortunately, I captured a screen shot of it only two days ago:


Bipartisan, my ass!

The Players

While I'm sure there were many genuine grassroots-type anti-tax activists in attendance, there is no doubt that "the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests."

On top of that, you have FOX News which both heavily promoted the events and participated in them:





The Subtext

So no one really likes to pay taxes and most folks dislike "big" government and have some reservation about the bailouts (though the Left would define "big" with such actions as, say, spying on the citizenry and denying women autonomy over their own bodies and the Right with things like taxation and gun control) so what's the problem?

As Atrios put it today:

All fun aside, there's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of "The Left" have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ("don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq") which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else.

I have to say that I agree with him on the Obama Derangement Syndrome part. Here are some signs from yesterday's protests:


Here's a video of delusional wingnuts from a Cleveland Tea Party a couple of months ago:



And, then there's this bit from the Saturday Pittsburgh Tea Party where Alan Keyes compared the Obama team to Al-Qaeda:

We have had foreign enemies who have sought to terrorize us with attacks, and we have domestic enemies who seek to terrorize us with economic collapse.

And works its way to a vision in which we are being led

happily into the slaughter pens where we shall go from being proud citiziens of the United States, fearing no one but our God, to being the subjects of a government where we must fear its every shadow.

But maybe Philly being far from Pittsburgh, Atrios is too far from seeing the broader picture: the Tea Parties aren't just about hatred and fear of Obama, they are about that deep, dark, ugly strain of America who hates government itself, fears anyone who is not like them, find conspiracies around every corner and see themselves as victims (but who only play at being martyers with their little tea bags vs. colonists who actually put their lives and liberty on the line).

As Chris Potter put it at his Slag Heap blog:

Let's recall that one week to the day before Keyes gave his little pep-talk, three Pittsburgh police officers were gunned down -- apparently by a guy who thought the government was going to take away his guns. It is in this context, in this city, that Keyes chose to praise his audience as a group in which "every individual is an army empowered by their faith in God."

I'm willing to bet that's how many lone gunmen see themselves. Especially the ones who would admire this line from Keyes' speech:

[N]ever as long as we have breath [will we] surrender the instruments with which we can defend [our] liberty against the depradations of a government no longer committed to it.

Make no mistake: I'm not suggesting that Keyes is encouraging people to go shoot cops. (His political program, such as it is, seems to involve "throwing the bums out" -- voting against every incumbent in 2010.) Nor would he be responsible if one of his audience later goes out and does just that. But Keyes talked quite a bit about how "liberty" wasn't all about doing whatever you wanted -- at least not when it applied to things like gay marriage. Maybe a word about the moral obligations of gun ownership would have been in order?

If you're in a city still grieving from a terrible shooting, you might want to think the se things through. If only to show you actually give a damn about the city you happened to parachute into that morning with your rantings. This is almost like Charlton Heston showing up in Littleton, Colorado to do the NRA "not from my cold, dead hands" shtick after the Columbine shootings.

What does it say when you don't have to go to skinhead web sites to hear these rants, when you can hear them at rallies across the country or pimped on FOX News or just listen to the batshit crazy rants of an elected official like Rep. Michele Bachmann who wants people to be "armed and dangerous," who rants about Obama's reducation camps for kids, calls for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America" and feels like she's a "foreign correspondent on enemy lines" when in the nation's Capitol or Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, told a Birmingham paper that there were 17 socialists in Congress?

Undoubtedly, someone can easily Google up a picture of Bush portrayed as Hitler from some Left rally, but there is a difference between the Left and the Right. For one, when the Left claimed that Bush cherry-picked intelligence or spied on citizens or tortured prisoners, they were proven right. More importantly, when they asked for redress, they called for impeachment or war crime trials -- legal remedies. The right is throwing red meat with talk of revolution and some coming storm and the need to keep their AK's.

If there's any doubt just how far they've gone, one only needs to see their mouthpieces willingly self-identify with extremists and terrorists all the way down to local radio personality Fred Honsberger who according to his Facebook message claims that our government thinks that you might be a home grown terrorist if: "you're a returning war vet, you ascribe to "radical" Christian views, you're against abortion, you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car."

The Joke

But before we settle into a deep depression over the ugliness and lies of the Tea Parties, let's remember that wingnuts seem to have never heard of teh google and did not know that teabagging refers to a specific sexual act. So when you see things like this:






Remember that it means this:


And, laugh your ass off at them (but remember to breath through your nose):


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At A Florida Tea Party Yesterday

When faced with the facts, the crowd boos.

Loudly.

On Today's Tea Parties

ThinkProgress has the rundown.

Lest you think it's a bottom-up (ie "grass roots") effort, the whole thing is being coordinated by a group called "Freedomworks." And the group has already claimed in a statement released to Fox "News" yesterday a central role in coordination:

We'd like to say we are one of the main driving forces, but we are not THE driving force behind the protests. We're mainly helping activists get in touch with each other.

ThinkProgress has more than enough evidence to show the whole "tea party" movement is astro-turf (ie fake grass):

Today, FreedomWork’s Adam Brandon responded to the criticism that its efforts to organize these anti-Obama protests are ‘astroturf,’ saying that the organization’s work in coordinating and planning the events would be akin to “MoveOn’s model.” However, MoveOn is not run by corporate lobbyists and is funded by actual grassroots activists. On the other hand, the leader of FreedomWorks, Dick Armey, who is ranked as one of DC’s top “hired guns,” is a corporate lobbyist with a history of directing FreedomWorks to support the goals of his lobbying clients.

No matter what the individuals involved may be thinking, that's what's going on today.

One lump or...?

These people have no clue.
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