Co-Opted False Flag Tea Party takes aim to unseat Ron Paul
February 9, 2010 by
Filed under Featured Stories
By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 — 11:19 am
There is more than a little irony in the fact that congressman Ron Paul is facing three primary challengers this year, all of them linked in some way to the Tea Party movement.
Many observers give the libertarian from Texas credit for having sparked the Tea Party movement in 2007 when he held a “money bomb” fundraiser on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, raking in some $6 million for his presidential run in one day.
But, as the Dallas Morning News reported earlier this week, Paul is facing three primary challengers — more than he has faced in the past six primaries combined. And every one of the challengers is linked to the Tea Party movement.
Washington Independent contributor David Weigel told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Monday night that the Tea Party movement of today has little in common with that fundraiser in 2007.
“Those libertarian ideas [may be] popular at the Cato Institute, [but] they’re not really popular with Tea Party activists,” Weigel said.
As the Morning News put it, Tea Partiers say Paul is “too focused on his national ambitions; that his views are too extreme; that he doesn’t support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that he votes ‘no’ on everything, including federal aid for his district after Hurricane Ike.”
By comparison, “the Sarah Palin version of Tea Party conservatism is a little bit less specific,” Weigel said. “It’s more slogany. You can write the talking points on your hand if you want to.”
That the Tea Party movement has become a threat to Paul is not lost on the congressman.
The Morning News reports that, in December, Paul sent out a letter to supporters saying that his opponents “turned their attack dogs loose on me,” and warned that the anti-incumbent mood among voters could affect him as well.
“There is one thing Paul does that might backfire,” Weigel wrote at the Washington Independent. “While Paul votes against basically all spending bills, he notoriously gets earmark requests into those bills, so that local projects survive when other members vote those bills through. That barely dinged Paul in 2008, but it may become an issue now.”
This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Feb. 8, 2010.
Download video via RawReplay.com
Sarah Palin Destroys the Co-Opted Neo-Con Owned False Flag Tea Party With a Flash of Her Hand: Colbert Calls her “F**king Retarded”
February 9, 2010 by
Filed under Featured Stories
Stephen Colbert has fine words for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who defended Rush Limbaugh’s use of the word “retard” this weekend after attacking an Obama aide for the same offense.
“Sarah Palin knows that it’s okay to call someone a retard if like rush you clearly don’t mean it which is why we should all come to her defense and say: Sarah Palin is a fucking retard,” Colbert quipped.
Palin’s son, Trig, has Down Syndrome. She had criticized Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for telling liberal activists that a political strategy was “fucking retarded” during a private meeting in the White House.
But when Rush Limbaugh used the same word, Palin declared that his usage was acceptable because it was satire.
On his radio show, Limbaugh said: “Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards. I mean these people, these liberal activists are kooks. They are looney tunes. And I’m not going to apologize for it, I’m just quoting Emanuel. It’s in the news. I think their big news is he’s out there calling Obama’s number one supporters f’ing retards. So now there’s going to be a meeting. There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House.”
Palin had no problem with Limbaugh’s remarks during an interview with Fox News on Sunday.
“They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh,” Palin said, claiming Limbaugh was merely “using satire.”
This video is from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, broadcast Feb. 8, 2010.
O’Reilly helping to destroy their co-opted creation: Some tea partiers ‘nuts, loons, out of their minds’
February 9, 2010 by
Filed under Featured Stories, US News
By Sahil Kapur
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 — 9:29 am
Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly is better known for picking fights with liberals, but on Monday he turned his combative drive toward an unsuspecting crowd: teabaggers.
“Some of these tea parties are nuts,” O’Reilly told Fox News anchor Brit Hume. “They’re crazy.”
Hume was silent, and O’Reilly added that Fox News’ Jesse Waters, who attended the high-profile Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, “puts the number at about 10 percent, that are just loons, out of their minds.”
O’Reilly’s words came in response to Hume’s suggestion that there are “very few really favorable stories about the tea partiers.”
His remarks are doubly surprising not only because O’Reilly seldom takes on conservative groups or causes so explicitly manner, but also because the network that has made his career is a vigorous supporter of the tea party movement.
The weekend event’s opening night speaker, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo, explicitly advocated the return of a Jim Crow law that prevented blacks from voting.
Sarah Palin was its main-event headliner and her speech received considerable fanfare as well as criticism.
Despite his harsh critique of some tea partiers, O’Reilly nonetheless assailed the mainstream media’s coverage of the movement, praising most teabaggers as “citizens getting involved” in their government. “Even if you don’t agree with them, that’s a good thing,” he said.
“Just the fact that these people walk the walk, they don’t get any respect.”
O’Reilly also debated Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei Monday night, who slammed Fox’s Bill Sammon for alleging the mainstream media “hates” the tea party movement. “He has no clue,” VandeHei said, calling the comments “ridiculous.”
“He follows [the movement] just like you do,” responded O’Reilly. “We have eyes, Jim.”
The following video is from Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor program on Monday, Feb. 8, uploaded by Mediaite.com.
Co-Opted Masonic False Flag Tea Party Begins Major Psy-Op
February 9, 2010 by
Filed under Featured Stories
Palin star of controversial Tea Party
By Ed Stoddard – Analysis
DALLAS (Reuters) – The first national Tea Party convention meets this week to take aim at all the raucous movement says is wrong with Washington and Sarah Palin, darling of America’s conservatives, will help lead the charge.
Tea partiers grabbed headlines last year with often highly charged protests against President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform drive, his $787 billion economic stimulus package and other aspects of his agenda.
The movement takes its name from the historic protest against British taxation, the Boston Tea Party, one of the triggers of the American revolution against colonial rule.
Organization for the convention in Nashville has been plagued by in-fighting, pullouts and criticism of an attendance cost of more than $500 and a glitzy dinner that evokes Wall Street rather than Main Street.
It also brings together activists who make for an awkward fit, mirroring wider divisions in a movement which seems united in little but its opposition to big government, especially under Obama’s Democrats.
Conservatives ascribe the movement to grass-roots frustration with the big spending ways of both Democrats and Republicans. Liberals counter that it is a Republican Party or corporate front.
“Some have tried to portray this movement as a commercial endeavor rather than the grassroots uprising that it is. Those who do so don’t understand the frustration everyday Americans feel when they see their government mortgaging their children’s future with reckless spending,” Palin wrote in an opinion published on Wednesday in USA Today.
Palin said she will donate her fee as keynote speaker at the convention to the cause and its candidates.
There is no reliable estimate of the movement’s nationwide numbers though strands of it are coming together under different umbrellas such as the National Tea Party Coalition.
ROOM TO GROW?
Some want it to grow from boisterous agitation to a political machine that can get out the vote for candidates who subscribe to its view of limited government.
Activists interviewed by Reuters said they were targeting Democrats made vulnerable by Obama’s sinking popularity. All 435 seats of the House of Representatives and more than a third of the 100 Senate seats are up for grabs in November.
In the House, Colorado Democrat Besty Markey is frequently cited as a target while in Arkansas tea partiers in neighboring Texas have signaled their desire to send volunteers to campaign against Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, who faces a tough re-election campaign.
They have said they may try to influence Democratic contests by pushing for conservatives within the party to win nominations to run for state or national offices. Activists have said they have their eye on the race in Connecticut to replace retiring Democratic senator Chris Dodd.
“What we are working to do is engage people in the process and we are actively recruiting people that have this limited government view. At the same time we are working on training them up to effect political change,” said Ken Emanuelson, who is on the steering committee of the Dallas Tea Party.
The Dallas group is organizing local activists by their zip or postal codes enabling them to their work such as voter registration drives in their own backyards.
Paul McGovern, 62, a small businessman in Irving, Texas, who is a volunteer with his local Tea Party group, said he saw the benefits of taking things to the next stage by organizing politically in many ways including on-line.
“Obama used the Internet to get elected but now it’s his own worst enemy because we’ll use it,” he said on the sidelines of a tea party leadership conference last weekend in Dallas.
The tea party movement has drawn a mixed bag of what critics might call malcontents, and such a structured approach may grate with libertarians among the faithful.
“It is inherently difficult to organize libertarians, which most of the Tea Partiers are,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
IN-FIGHTING
Mainstream conservative groups such as Judicial Watch, which pushes for government transparency, will rub shoulders with fringe elements such as “birthers” who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and his administration is therefore illegal.
Organizers say Palin’s speech at the steak and lobster dinner on Saturday night will be broadcast live, giving the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential contender a chance to rally activists nationwide.
Commentators credit the movement with generating some of the energy behind the Senate election upset in Massachusetts last month when Republican Scott Brown captured the late Edward Kennedy’s seat in a sign of voter discontent with Democrats.
If it does manage to transform itself into a political machine, its impact may be most felt during the primaries when candidates compete for party nominations to run for state or national offices.
The field in the primaries is more fluid which can work to the advantage of a diffuse movement. In Florida, it is credited with a surge in the polls by tea party favorite Marco Rubio, who is vying with Republican Gov. Charlie Crist in the party’s primary to contest for a U.S. Senate seat.
(Editing by Anthony Boadle)
Poll: Co-Opted Tea Party candidates come in dead last
February 9, 2010 by
Filed under Featured Stories, US News
Could the Tea Party movement be losing ground?
Days after Sarah Palin headlined the nation’s first Tea Party convention, a Rasmussen Reports poll released today shows that a generic “Tea Party candidate” would come in third in a theoretical three-way congressional contest.
The poll found that 36% of voters would support a Democratic candidate on a generic ballot, 25% would back the Republican and 17% would go for the Tea Party pick. Twenty-three percent of respondents are undecided.
In early December, the same poll showed the Tea Party in second place and the GOP in third. Unchanged between the polls, according to Rasmussen, is that 41% of voters have a favorable view of the conservative movement.
The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken Feb. 7-8, just after the national Tea Party convention in Nashville. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
(Posted by John Fritze)
