TEA PARTY

See Teaparty 2 & TP Notes for newer content

see TP patriots (JBM)

see TP express russo

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wow, 30 tags (record) sparked by AH 1/20 on tp nunn djt

also jordan, PPP pence, perry, pompeo tag

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an 10 23 common dr

as GOP Congressman Jim Jordan tried (and failed for the third time) to claw his way up to Speaker of the House this week, he deployed the MAGA base to pressure those representatives who were reluctant to vote for him. Some extremist MAGA supporters even made death threats to fellow Republicans who didn’t support Jordan.

Who actually forms the backbone of this MAGA base that Jordan desperately turned to?

Media and social media enterprises have reinforced the idea that the MAGA base is composed of uneducated white working-class voters. Supposedly, these are the very voters who Hillary Clinton, as Democratic nominee for president in 2016, infamously described as a “basket of deplorables,” (racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist.) With the vivid images of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol burned into our national consciousness, if we’re honest, many of us now add ‘violent’ to Clinton’s picture of these working-class deplorables.

"These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves."

While researching Wall Street’s War on Workers, however, our Labor Institute team found compelling data that turns this image of the right-wing Republican base on its head. It is a destructive stereotype that doesn’t square with reality.

Let’s start with the Tea Party, which sprung to life in 2009. It is usually assumed that it was driven by disgruntled white working-class reactionaries who fundamentally resented intellectuals and the media. But a comprehensive study by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism(2012), provides an entirely different view of the socioeconomic status of Tea Party members:

“Tea Party supporters and activists are better-off economically and better educated than most Americans. . . . Most are not truly wealthy, however. Comfortable middle-class might be the best way to describe grassroots Tea Partiers.”

White? Yes, almost entirely so. Working class? Decidedly not, as defined by income, education, or occupation.

What about Republican primary voters? The 2018 Primaries Project at the Brookings Institution provides detailed profiles of Republican primary voters during the Trump presidency:

• They were disproportionately white compared to the rest of the country: 86.4 percent.
• They were better educated: Nearly 75% had a college degree, postgraduate study, or some college. Only 15% had finished high school or dropped out.
• They were richer: Republican primary voters were considerably richer than the rest of the population in their primary districts. For example, 26.9% of Republican primary voters (and 21.5% of the Democratic primary voters) had household incomes above $150,000 per year, compared to only 15.4% of the general population in the average district.
• They were also older than the general population.

How about the January 6th insurrectionists?

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago published demographic information on 656 of the 861 insurrectionists who, as of July 22,2022, had been charged with illegally entering the Capitol or Capitol grounds. The study found the following:

• 92% of the insurrectionists were white.
• 50% were white-collar employees or business owners.
• Only one-quarter were blue-collar (no college degree).
• And 25% had a college degree, slightly more than the 23.5% for the country as a whole.

The study does not say how many of the insurrectionists had graduate degrees, but we do know that the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes (sentenced to 18 years in prison for sedition and other charges for his January 6 activities), is a graduate of the ultra-elite Yale Law School, the same law school from which Bill and Hillary Clinton graduated.

*January 6, 2021, was not a working-class riot.

To be sure, members of the working-class form a significant portion of the MAGA base, but not disproportionately so. Instead, we see that the true MAGA base is disproportionately higher-income, white-collar white people who are enthralled by MAGA politics. And when we step back a bit and look at the many conspiracists who organized, staffed, and drove the election lies, this makes sense. Nearly all are lawyers and businesspeople, many with advanced degrees, backed by a vast ultra-right media and social media ecosystem of highly educated influencers. You don’t find labor union activists leading the MAGA charge.

The real drivers of the MAGA base—the ones the Ohio Republican was calling on to support his ultimately failed bid to become Speaker of the House—are financially successful people who are hungry for more power and wealth. MAGA is their ticket to move up the political ladder, to amass greater influence, and to garner more resources for themselves.

These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves. And precisely because they are not burdened by ideological consistency or deeply held principles, they rely on one overriding trait—a formidable will to power.

So, as many of us do, let’s not lay blame on white working people for the decline of our democracy or today’s rise of Jim Jordan. The authoritarian, oligarchical—yes, even violent—impulses of political life today are really the responsibility of a basket full of highly-educated elites. And because they are so unencumbered by principle, they are really dangerous.

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proto-Occupy? [KA also discounts importance of Koch TP?

https://www.kurtandersen.com/evil-geniuses

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/books/review/evil-genuises-by-kurt-andersen-an-excerpt.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/

laffer w/ hart and later dems cans

...

Although very few people I knew voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the 1980s and ’90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . whatever, as long as it didn’t involve big new social programs that affluent people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of ideological consistency.

When Gary Hart ran a second time for president, in 1988, one of his tax-policy advisers was Arthur Laffer, Reagan’s inventor of supply-side economics. When Jerry Brown ran for the 1992 Democratic nomination, he too sought Laffer’s help, to devise some kind of tax scheme “that was clear and easy to articulate,” and Laffer himself says he voted for Bill Clinton. (He’s now a Trump adviser.) The Democratic Leadership Council, co-founded by Clinton in 1985, became a think-tankish anchor for Democrats who didn’t disagree with Republicans that pretty much the only acceptable new solutions to any social problem were market based.*

For the remainder of the century, no candidate from the Democratic left became a plausible finalist for the nomination. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically centrist party. There was no organized, viable national economic left in the vicinity of serious power. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism at the beginning of the 1990s was very good news, but it had the unfortunate effect of making almost any left critique of America’s new hypercapitalism seem not just quixotic but also kind of corny and quaint.

Not everybody in the 1990s was sanguine about the emerging future, or as oblivious as I still was to the multi-faceted unfairness that had been built into the economy, or as complacent as I was about the millions of Americans losing out in the go-go globalizing digitizing frenzy. Around this time, a middle-aged law-school professor and bankruptcy expert, until recently a registered Republican who’d been affiliated in the late 1970s with the conservatives’ hugely influential new Law and Economics movement, began to see the light. Elizabeth Warren has said that she realized only in the ’90s that “starting in the ’80s, the cops were taken off the beat” in financial services. “I was with the GOP for a while,” she has said, “because I really thought that it was a party that was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets. I feel like the GOP just left that. They moved to a party that said,No, it’s not about a level playing field. And they really stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial institutions are just hammering middle-class American families.”

I’m betting that at the end of 1999, Warren didn’t feel complete solidarity with all the thousands of demonstrators in Seattle outside the biannual World Trade Organization meeting. Their grievances were various—from AFL-CIO folks pissed off about U.S. companies manufacturing more and more things overseas to anarchists smashing store windows and otherwise acting out their hatred for the System. I know I rolled my eyes at the Gen-X kids in Seattle chaining themselves together and getting off on tear gas; at their lack of a feasible agenda or nuance or even coherence; and at the belief of so many of them in a shadowy, multi-tentacled conspiracy of the omnipotent elite to tyrannize the little people and subvert democracy. It took me a few more years to realize that their caricature of the new economic paradigm was closer to right than wrong. What that new paradigm ultimately brought us, of course, is Donald Trump....

The obeisance of the rich right and their consiglieri to Trump for the past four years has exposed more nakedly than ever their compact—everything about money, anything for money—and the events of 2020 pushed that along to an even more hideous crescendo. In early spring, when COVID-19 had killed only dozens of Americans, Stuart Stevens, a strategist for the four previous Republican presidential nominees, wrote that “those of us in the Republican Party built this moment,” because “the failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party … Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect.”

Norm Ornstein: I’ve witnessed the decline of the Republican Party

Entirely apart from this administration’s unique incompetence and Orwellian denial of facts, while its handling of the pandemic may wind up as a political failure for them, every piece of the crises’ exacerbation came directly out of the right’s playbook of the past four decades. Stevens could have also listed Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear, Short-term profits are everything, Inequality’s not so bad, Liberty equals selfishness, and Entitled to our own facts.

2012 bk chapter

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312638415_Astroturf_versus_Grass_Roots_The_Precipitous_Rise_of_the_Tea_Party

ORIGIN OF GUBMINT?: KOCH, FOX, NORQUIST?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/koch/

no lnx

Koch keeps doing business in Russia as top journalist says family fortune came from Hitler: report

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 14, 2022

Award-winning journalist Jane Mayer, who literally wrote the book on the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries, pointed to a report published Monday stating, “Koch Industries continues doing business in Russia.” Despite major U.S. corporations shutting down operations after Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine, major U.S.-based multinational corporations, from Apple to Disney to McDonald’s, have responded by pulling out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Mayer’s 2016 book “Dark Money” focuses on Charles Koch and (the now late) David Koch, the powerful conservative billionaire Koch Brothers.

Monday morning is his widely-read newsletter Popular Information Judd Legum reported Koch Industries doesn’t seem to be joining the American movement to isolate Putin and Russia – even after his forces have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians in Ukraine.

“Guardian Industries,” writes Legum, “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, acquired in 2017. Guardian, a manufacturer of industrial glass and other products, is based in Auburn Hills, Michigan but has production facilities around the world.”

Guardian has two glass production plants that operate in Russia. One facility is in Ryazan, Russia, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow. The company added “a new jumbo laminated glass production line” to that facility in August 2021. Another facility is located in Rostov, Russia, near the border with Ukraine. The Rostov plant, which began operations about a decade ago, cost $220 million to build and produces “Guardian’s high-performance, energy-efficient ClimaGuard(R) (residential) and SunGuard(R) (commercial) glass products for construction of homes, offices, retail, health-care and other facilities.” It is capable of producing “900 tons of glass per day.”

Mayer, an investigative journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker, also wrote an article about the Koch Brothers, in 2010: “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”

Mayer’s piece suggests the Koch Brothers had funded and fueled the Tea Party almost since its inception.

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”

And it paid off.

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“The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to ‘educate,’ fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.”

So where did the Koch money originally come from?

Mayer on Monday reminded America:

For those who would like more information, here’s The New York Times on Mayer’s 2016 book:

The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.

Mayer’s “book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.”

KIRK TPUSA:bill montgomery is TP guy

And Charlie said he had memorized all the faces from this website of all the big donors there. And he happened to run into the guy in a stairwell and he pulls out his business card. And the guy was impressed with his pitch, whatever it was for those few seconds. And weeks later gives him $10,000.

And that was Foster Friess, one of the big donors. From that moment still though, Charlie Kirk gets on Fox News a couple of times. He was on “Fox News Live” from the convention floor with Neil Cavuto. But into the fall of 2012, that $10,000 does help them. But Charlie says in that eulogy by the winter, by December, they were broke again; and they didn’t have any direction, they didn’t have any events, they didn’t have any more ways to get on it.

So they decided: ‘Hey, let’s go to New York and corner Neil Cavuto again and get on TV again.’ So it was really a series of luck— but also Bill Montgomery constantly encouraging and pushing Charlie Kirk. But also, yes, when you don’t have a platform and you get platformed by Breitbart,Breitbart and Fox News, you’re constantly going to be invited back if you do well on them.

And he was invited back, I think he appeared on Fox news three or four times that year. It was really, can you make the most of the opportunities that you were given? And, and indeed that is, I guess the origin story of Charlie Kirk. He said it took off after that winter, December 2012. And it did. By 2015, which is obviously three years later, they’re a million dollar organization, which is a fast-moving train, if you know anything about nonprofits....

TEA PARTY LEGACY CLIMATE ZOMBIES AND COVID PANDEMIC?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-tea-party-budget-battles-left-the-national-emergency-medical-stockpile-unprepared/

no lnx

How Tea Party budget battles left the National Emergency Medical Stockpile unprepared

Written by ProPublica April 4, 2020

Dire shortages of vital medical equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile that are now hampering the coronavirus response trace back to the budget wars of the Obama years, when congressional Republicans elected on the Tea Party wave forced the White House to accept sweeping cuts to federal spending.

Among the victims of those partisan fights was the effort to keep adequate supplies of masks, ventilators, pharmaceuticals and other medical equipment on hand to respond to a public health crisis. Lawmakers in both parties raised the specter of shortchanging future disaster response even as they voted to approve the cuts.

“There are always more needs for financial support from our hardworking taxpayers than we have the ability to pay,” said Denny Rehberg, a retired Republican congressman from Montana who chaired the appropriations subcommittee responsible for overseeing the stockpile in 2011. Rehberg said it would have been impossible to predict a public health crisis requiring a more robust stockpile, just as it would have been to predict the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“It’s really easy to second-guess and suggest we didn’t do as much,” he said. “Why didn’t we have a protocol to protect the Twin Towers? Whoever thought that was going to happen? Whoever thought Hurricane Katrina was going to occur? You tell me what’s going to happen in 2030, and I will communicate that to congressmen and senators.”

There were, in fact, warnings at the time: [FOR ALL THE ABOVE ?!]  A 2010 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded report by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials urged the federal government to treat public health preparedness “on par with federal and state funding for other national security response capabilities,” and said that its store of N95 masks should be “replenished for future events.”

But efforts to bulk up the stockpile fell apart in tense standoffs between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans, according to administration and congressional officials involved in the negotiations. Had Congress kept funding at the 2010 level through the end of the Obama administration, the stockpile would have benefited from $321 million more than it ended up getting, according to budget documents reviewed by ProPublica. During the Trump administration, Congress started giving the stockpile more than the White House requested.

By late February, the stockpile held just 12 million N95 respirator masks, a small fraction of what government officials say is needed for a severe pandemic. Now the emergency stash is running out of critical supplies and governors are struggling to understand the unclear procedures for how the administration is distributing the equipment.

The stockpile received a $17 billion influx in the first and third coronavirus stimulus bills that Congress passed in March. But there had not been a big boost in stockpile funding since 2009, in response to the H1N1 pandemic, commonly called swine flu.

After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year’s budget of less than $600 million. Responding to swine flu, which the CDC estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile’s history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

“We recognized the need for replenishment of the stockpile and budgeted about a 10% increase,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. “That was rejected by the Republican House.”

Republicans took over the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms on theTea Party wave of opposition to the landmark 2010 health care reform law,the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The new House majority was intent on curbing government spending, especially at HHS, which administered Obamacare.

Congressional Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell in the Senate and House Speaker John Boehner, leveraged the debt ceiling — a limit on the government’s borrowing ability that had to be raised — to insist that the Obama administration accept federal spending curbs. The compromise, codified in the 2011 Budget Control Act, required a bipartisan “super committee” to find additional ways to reduce the deficit, or else it would trigger automatic across-the-board cuts known as “sequestration.”

Even in the aftermath of the swine flu pandemic, the stockpile wasn’t a priority then. Without a full committee markup, Rehberg introduced a bill that provided $522.5 million to the stockpile, about 12% less than the previous year and $132 million less than the administration wanted. “Nobody got everything they wanted,” Rehberg said.

The Senate version of the funding bill offered $561 million for stockpile funding. Senators said they regretted the cuts even as they voted for the bill.

“In this bill we’re now getting into the bone marrow,” Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa who then chaired the Senate appropriations committee, said at the markup. “Some of these cuts will be painful and unpopular.”

In the bill’s final version, Congress allocated a compromise $534 million for the 2012 fiscal year, a 10% budget cut from the prior year and $121 million less than the Obama administration had requested.

The next year, the “super committee” failed to secure additional savings demanded by the Budget Control Act, triggering the automatic, across-the-board cuts. This “sequestration” was an outcome that the leaders of both parties disliked — and blamed one another for.

“Did either party ever indicate sequestration was welcome, positive or desirable?” Dave Schnittger, Boehner’s deputy chief of staff at the time, told ProPublica. “Sequestration was conceived — not by Republicans, but by a Democratic White House — as a crude mechanism to compel the super committee to do its job. Republicans consistently advocated for reductions in mandatory spending programs that would have prevented sequestration from ever happening.” (Mandatory spending refers to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.)

McConnell’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Katie Hill, a spokeswoman for Obama, pointed to numerous statements he made in 2013 urging Republicans to compromise, warning that the sequester would weaken economic recovery, military readiness and basic public services.

Gene Sperling, then a top Obama economic adviser, said Republicans focused attacks on the HHS budget, along with the Departments of Labor and Education, which are grouped under the same appropriations subcommittee.

“The Labor/HHS budget is where a significant number of progressive priorities are, from Head Start to (the National Institutes of Health) to the Education Department,” Sperling said. “There’s just so much in there, so it is often the hot spot for where conservative budget hawks who don’t believe in public investment go hardest.”

Under sequestration, the CDC, which managed the stockpile at the time, faced a 5% budget cut. In its 2013 budget submission, HHS decreased its stockpile funding request from the previous year, asking for $486 million, a cut of nearly $48 million. “The SNS is a key resource in maintaining public health preparedness and response,” the administration said. “However, the current fiscal climate necessitates scaling back.”

The decrease caught Rehberg’s attention at a budget hearing to review the request.

“Disaster preparedness is something that has been very important to me,” he said at the hearing. “I just would like to have you explain how such a large reduction can possibly not impact the national preparedness posture.”

Then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebeliusanswered that the CDC would prioritize replacing expiring drugs such as smallpox vaccines and anthrax treatments.

The next year, the administration again proposed cutting the stockpile’s funding from the 2012 funding level, but it warned that reduced funding could result in “fewer people receiving treatment during an influenza pandemic.”

Congress did grant extra funding in response to emergencies, but even then, the stockpile was a small-ticket item. In 2014, the Obama administration asked for and received billions of dollars to respond to the Ebola outbreak, but only $165 million went to the CDC’s public health emergency preparedness programs, including the stockpile. And in 2016, Congress granted emergency funding to respond to the Zika virus, but it gave the CDC less than half of what the Obama administration requested.

“It’s clear that the administration prioritized the SNS in this (Zika) request and in the Ebola supplemental,” said Ned Price, who was a spokesman for the National Security Council in the Obama White House. “In the case of Zika, congressional Republicans sat on the request for the better part of a year.”

The stockpile’s mission has steadily expanded as it confronts new public health emergencies. With limited resources, officials in charge of the stockpile tend to focus on buying lifesaving drugs from small biotechnology firms that would, in the absence of a government buyer, have no other market for their products, experts said. Masks and other protective equipment are in normal times widely available and thus may not have been prioritized for purchase, they said.

“It just was never funded at the level that was needed to purchase new products, to replace expiring products and to invest in what we now know are the really necessary ancillary products,” said Dara Lieberman, director of government relations at the Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health advocacy and research group.

The sequestration and strict budget caps ended with budget deals in 2018 and 2019 — a bipartisan rebuke to the earlier restraints. “It’s a burden off our shoulders,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., told reporters at the time. “In a troubled world, I think that was the wrong message.”

Yet non-defense spending still hasn’t fully recovered.

“One of the things that happened to public health preparedness was just the result of the general budget stringency we had,” said David Reich, a consultant working on federal appropriations issues for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We’re still seeing the results of that.”

During the Trump administration, the White House has consistently proposed cutting the CDC and the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, which took over stockpile management from the CDC. Congress approved more stockpile funding than Trump’s budget requested in every year of his administration, for a combined $1.93 billion instead of $1.77 billion, according to budget documents.

The White House budget request for 2021, delivered in February as officials were already warning about the dangerous new coronavirus, proposed holding the stockpile’s funding flat at $705 million and cutting resources for the office that oversees it.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-how-trump-weaponizes-crackpot-ideas-to-maintain-a-firm-grip-on-his-maga-base

no lnx

Here’s how Trump weaponizes crackpot ideas to maintain a firm grip on his MAGA base

Written by Alex Henderson January 10, 2020

If President Donald Trump is reelected in November, it won’t be because the majority of Americans share his views, but because of his ability to fire up his MAGA base, whip them into a frenzy, address their grievances and get them to the polls in large numbers. Trump, journalist Michael Kruse explains in a Politico article headlined “Trump’s Art of the Seal,” knows and understands his audience — and one of the things that has kept that audience excited is his ability to take fringe ideas, get them discussed in mainstream venues and weaponize them.

Trump has inspired widespread discussion of crackpot conspiracy theories ranging from birtherism (the racist claim that President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya instead of the U.S.) to the CrowdStrike theory — a belief that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election. It was Trump’s pursuit of the CrowdStrike theory, Kruse explains, that led to him being impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives.

During President Barack Obama’s first term, Kruse explains, Trump’s “proto-political operation was essentially a two-man team” consisting of veteran GOP operativeRoger Stone and his protégé Sam Nunberg.

“One of Nunberg’s self-appointed tasks was to help Trump understand what the masses on the right really wanted, and one way he did that was by listening to Mark Levin’s increasingly popular radio show,” Kruse recalls. “The people who were tuning in most intently to Levin, Nunberg thought, were the people most likely to vote for Trump if he launched an actual bid.”

Nunberg, according to Kruse, helped Trump realize that the far-right Tea Party movement was as angry at the GOP establishment as it was at Democrats.

“The Tea Party, in the estimation of Levin and his listeners, didn’t start as a reaction to the liberal outrages of President Barack Obama — it started as a reaction to what they viewed as the inconsistently hardline conservative policies of President George W. Bush,” Kruse observes. “Amnesty for immigrants, for instance? An absolute no-go.”

As Trump’s movement grew, Kruse notes, it didn’t do so by appealing to conservative intellectuals.

“For the better part of the past half-century, Trump, 73, has extracted from an array of similar sources — from the New York Post’s dishy Page Six to the toxicity of Twitter to far-right websites and lowbrow TV — a knack for knowing what people want. Not all people, but many people.”

Poll after poll has demonstrated that Trump is unpopular with the majority of Americans. But among his hardcore MAGA base, he is still quite popular. And Kruse wraps up his Politico article by describing the stranglehold Trump maintains on the Republican Party in 2020.

“If Trump began his political ascent as a follower —  cannily co-opting ideas that resonated with a certain segment of the electorate — in doing so, he clearly has proceeded to forge a following of his own,” Kruse explains. “He has become a leader of those who are willing to be led in this way, solidifying lockstep support from the agenda-setting base of his party as well as its kingpins and figureheads, who parrot him the way he once did Levin.”

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mcW and dunlap:

The sociologists say one major reason why attempts to better communicate the realities of climate change to conservatives have failed is down to “motivated cognition” — described as the tendency for people to only accept information that reinforces their existing political beliefs and their views on the world.

Even when Republicans experience extreme weather events, there was little evidence that this was enough for those voters to change their views. Dunlap told DeSmog:

“I fear polarization will be difficult to overcome because Republican reluctance to accept the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change is in a self-reinforcing loop.

There are top-down cues from Republican political elites and their supporters from conservative think tanks to conservative media — especially the Murdoch media— that influence voters, as well as bottom-up pressure from party activists such as Tea Party supporters who act as ‘enforcers’ of party principles, especially in primary elections to select Republican candidates.

The result is that global warming has joined God, guns, gays, and abortion as core elements of Republican identity, and this will be hard to change.”

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scary combo of legal, const, xian; http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/01/3429448/alliance-defending-freedom/

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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/10/13/174816/koch-tea-party-billionaire/

“I’ve never been to a tea-party event,” pollution billionaire David Koch told New York magazine in July, 2010. “No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.” Koch’s corporate public relations officials declared in April 2010 that “no funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.”

However, inOctober, 2009, Koch was applauding his army of Astroturf tea party organizers. Koch, who founded Americans for Prosperity with his brother David, was the guest of honor at AFP’s annual Defending the American Dream Summit. Independent filmmaker Taki Oldham filmed Koch beaming as organizers who run AFP’s 25 state-level outposts touted their success in mobilizing dozens of tea party events across the nation:

Rather than being a purely grassroots movement that arose spontaneously in 2009, the Tea Party developed in part as a result of tobacco industry efforts to oppose smoking restrictions and tobacco taxes beginning in the 1980s, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.

“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party movement have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda,” said senior author Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) and a UCSF professor of medicine and American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor in Tobacco Control.

Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education

The study, which appears on Feb. 8 in the journal *Tobacco Control*, shows that rhetoric and imagery evoking the 1773 Boston Tea Party were used by tobacco industry representatives as early as the 1980s as part of an industry-created “smokers’ rights’’ public relations campaign opposing increased cigarette taxes and other anti-smoking initiatives.

From previously secret tobacco industry documents available at the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, IRS filings and other publicly available documents, the study authors traced a decades-long chain of personal, corporate and financial relationships between tobacco companies, tobacco industry lobbying and public relations firms and nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party. 

The research uncovered the tobacco industry’s ongoing opposition to health care reform, dating back to a major campaign waged against President Bill Clinton’s proposed 75-cent cigarette tax to help finance it. 

“Tea party symbolism is nothing new for cigarette companies and their allies, which for many years have been cynically using a hallowed symbol of American freedom in order to advance their own interests,” said co-author Rachel Grana, PhD, a CTCRE fellow.

The UCSF researchers sounded a call for greater transparency of organization funding “so that policymakers and the general public – including people who identify with the Tea Party – can evaluate claims of political support for, and opposition to, health and other public policies.’’

The Role of Citizens for a Sound Economy

In 2002, before the mainstream media widely discussed Tea party politics, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a nonprofit funded in part by cigarette companies since 1987 to support a pro-tobacco political agenda, started its US Tea Party project. Its website stated “Our US Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated.’’ 

In 2004, CSE split into the Tea Party organizations Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and Freedom Works. Those two groups, say the authors, have since waged campaigns to turn public opinion against tobacco taxes, smoke-free laws and health care reform in general.

“If you look at CSE, AFP and Freedom Works, you will see a number of the same key players, strategies and messages going back to the 1980s,” said lead author Amanda Fallin, PhD, RN, also a CTCRE fellow. “The records indicate that the Tea Party has been shaped by the tobacco industry, and is not a spontaneous grassroots movement at all.”

While it is well known that corporations can influence policy, the study “demonstrates the extent to which a particular industry has leveraged its resources to indirectly affect public policy,’’ the authors write. “The tobacco companies funded one of the main Tea Party predecessor organizations, CSE, as well as other conservative organizations…to support the companies’ broader economic and political agendas.’’ 

The researchers also warn of the Tea Party’s efforts to push its political agenda in other countries, pointing out that the Tea Party movement has begun to spread internationally, with Freedom Works training activists in 30 countries including Israel, Georgia, Japan, Nigeria and Serbia. The international expansion “makes it likely’’ that Tea Party organizations will mount opposition to tobacco control and other health policies “as they have done in the United States,’’ the authors wrote.  

“Tobacco control advocates in the United States and around the world need to be very aware of the connections between Big Tobacco and the Tea Party movement and its associated organizations,” Glantz said.

The research was funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (CA113710 and CA087472).

Fallin presented the paper at the annual UCSF CTCRE “It’s About a Billion Lives” symposium at the UCSF Parnassus campus on Friday, Feb. 8. The symposium webcast can be found at http://lecture.ucsf.edu/special-events/billion-lives/.

notes on talk  fallin: 90's threats, rx reform, , FDA, OSHA; rico; anti-reg bigger strat

tim hyde to griscom: freedom choice privacy 1990 memo, a movement to change role of gov in lives; 1992 CART industry front excise tax, tea party, costumes BM; 1994 memo defend against tax: NSA, cse big players; 1984 newsletter has TP pix; cse got at least 5/6m from tob since 90's; PM cse cat A bev mckitrick; 

fda failing at core mission, thus no bandwidth for fda; cse, wa legal fdn; "new policing powers" 

ala cse : don't feed the trial lawyers

get govt off our backs (3rd party?) hide tobacco involve

~prop 10 1998 passed

prop 29 up tax; cse FW ~ 2002 TP lang/images usteaparty.com wwww

Give us liberty bk armey/kibbe

rjr pm et al had fronts, but all combine in cse see chart

oddly tp members favor smokefree laws at same levels as tp opponnts

john mashey stan dvis bd q  nancy pf; gmu vice rector #2 koch #2 donor behind DoD

FLS, DCI

clintoncare, soc med; 

http://blog.algore.com/2013/02/false_spontaneity_of_the_tea_p.html

To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party Tob Control tobaccocontrol-2012-050815 Published Online First: 8 February 2013 

2x?

Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests

BY LEE FANG APRIL 9, 2009 AT 6:02 PM UPDATED: MARCH 11, 2010 AT 10:31 AM

"Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests"

Yesterday, Think Progress reported on Republican lawmakers planning to speak at anti-Obama “tea party” protests taking place nationwide on April 15. Last night, Eric Odom of the DontGo website — one of the organizers of the protests — wrote a blog post stressing that these protests are displays of “regular American[s] in protest of government spending and extreme taxation,” rather than something affiliated with a political party or special interest agenda.

Today on Fox News — which has actively been promoting the protests — Glenn Beck pushed the tea party talking points, similarly claiming that the protests aren’t “coordinated” and are fully organized by “regular” people. Watch it:

:{

Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, 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:

– Freedom Works staffers coordinate conference calls among protesters to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”

– Freedom Works staffers apparently moved to “take over” the planning of local events in Florida.

– Freedom Works provides how-to guides for delivering a “clear message” to the public and media.

:{

– Freedom Works has several domain addresses — some of them made to look like they were set up by amateurs — to promote the protests.

– Americans for Prosperity is writing press releases and planning the events in New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas, and several other states.

}:

This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization. While working to promote Social Security privatization, Freedom Works was caught planting one of its operatives as a “single mom” to ask questions to President Bush in a town hall on the subject. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed Freedom Works for similarly building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Dick Armey, the former Republican Majority Leader who now leads Freedom Works and is a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.

Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, who was Ralph Reed’s former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations — a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.

UPDATE

This afternoon, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, leader of the corporate-funded American Solutions for Winning the Futures (ASWF), blasted an e-mail to his supporters with a reminder to attend the protests, along with a “Toolkit” of talking points. Gingrich’s ASWF is funded by polluters and helped orchestrate the “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign last summer. ASWF has been in the tea party effort since at least March.

}:

sourcewatch:

Organizing "grassroots" Tea Parties (2009)

FreedomWorks was one of the lobbying groups involved in orchestrating the April 15, 2009 anti-Obama, anti-tax "tea parties". In February 2009, the FreedomWorks website said the group was "now working with other groups to plan a massive, nationwide tea party protest day for Tax Day on April 15th, 2009"^[23], the Tax Day Tea Party protests.

In summer of 2009, FreedomWorks began pursuing an aggressive strategy to create the appearance of mass public opposition to health care and clean energy reform at Congressmembers' town-hall meetings in their districts. A leaked memo from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website "Tea Party Patriots," describes how members should infiltrate town hall meetings and harass and intimidate Democratic members of Congress:

"Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up ... You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation. Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early. If he blames Bush for something or offers other excuses -- call him on it, yell back and have someone else follow-up with a shout-out ... The goal is to rattle him ..." ^[24]

At the time, The New York Times reported on accusations by Democrats that such town hall opposition was "part of a coordinated effort to scuttle the White House political agenda rather than a true representation of public opinion," and noted that FreedomWorks had "repeatedly been in the center of the controversy at town halls."^[25]

For example, in August 2009, FreedomWorks supported the American Petroleum Institute's "Energy Citizens" rallies to oppose the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill, held in about 20 states. Other backers included the National Association of Manufacturers, American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform and Council for Citizens Against Government Waste.^[25]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/FreedomWorks#Organizing_.22grassroots.22_Tea_Parties_.282009.29

FOCUS | Karl Rove's War On the Tea Party

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/15868-karl-roves-war-on-the-tea-party

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/15868-karl-roves-war-on-the-tea-party

===

disenfranchise voters: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/tea_party_patriots/

  not sure why this is here, tho //

Since the framework was adopted, right-wing conspiracy theorists have pushed bizarre theories about Agenda 21 being a central tool for the United Nations to create a one-world government and take away the rights of local property owners. In recent years, elevated by the megaphone of extreme pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, these conspiracies made their way into mainstream politics. Today, Agenda 21ers — many affiliated with the Tea Party and the John Birch Society — are peddling fears about Agenda 21 in order to stop basic efficiency and renewable energy programs on the state level.

Conspiracy theorists active in politics have called Agenda 21 “socialism on steroids” that would cause Americans to be “herded into centers like the UN wants.”

And in an April presentation on Agenda 21, activist Victoria Baer had this to say about John McCain’s support of ethanol, which she also claimed was part of a UN plot: “We should have left him in Hanoi with Jane Fonda…he is a traitor, a pure traitor.”

Yes, Baer called John McCain — a decorated Vietnam War veteran who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war — a traitor who should be “left in Hanoi” because he supported minimal increases in domestic ethanol production.

Baer also claims that the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. National Parks Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — agencies founded more than 100 years before Agenda 21 — are “all out of the UN to have these wonderful little furry animal organizations to cut our land away from us.”

In fact, the Agenda 21 language explicitly states that countries and local communities have “the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies.”

So what do these historically-challenged and completely inaccurate claims have to do with the Republican party? The Republican National Committee has officially adopted these conspiracy theories as its national platform. In January, the RNC adopted a resolution calling Agenda 21 “insidious” and “covert.”

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/15/523931/republican-party-officially-embraces-garbage-agenda-21-conspiracy-theories-as-its-national-platform/

Ted Cruz, Tea Party’s new Latino hero, is a bit loony on green issues

By Lisa Hymas

After triumphing in the Republican primary in Texas last week, Tea Party It Boy Ted Cruz is virtually assured of winning a Senate seat in November. Unlike most of his Tea Party compatriots, he’s widely considered to be super-smart, one of the right’s leading legal minds. Conservatives are even embracing him as (gasp!) an “intellectual” — a label usually only deployed to heap scorn on scientists and other egg-headed freedom-killers.

But for a guy who’s so smart, Cruz has some truly stupid views.

On Glenn Beck’s radio show earlier this year, he said: “The federal government’s already shown that they believe they can control every aspect of our life. I mean, right now Congress is trying to tell us what kind of light bulbs to buy and what kind of toilets. Right now you are prevented from buying a toilet that actually flushes because the bureaucrats in Washington know better than you do.”

That old lavatory lament? Clearly Cruz hasn’t been keeping up with the latest in toilet R&D.

Cruz is cray-cray on Agenda 21, totally buying into the right-wing conspiracy theory. Agenda 21 is a two-decade-old, non-binding U.N. document that calls in general terms for things like improving living standards and protecting ecosystems; it was almost universally forgotten until American ‘wingers glommed onto it a couple of years ago. Cruz claims that George Soros is behind the whole nefarious plot and that “Agenda 21 attempts to abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. … Agenda 21 subverts liberty, our property rights, and our sovereignty.”

Cruz also, like many of his fellow Republicans, frequently spreads misinformation on environmental issues — particularly if it benefits the oil and gas biz. Cruz literally owes his existence to Big Oil: His parents met at an oil-exploration company and went on to start a business that processed seismic data for oil companies, and he seems to have inherited their affection for the industry.

Cruz has called for fast-tracking the Keystone XL pipeline, claiming (erroneously) that it would “create tens of thousands of jobs.” He says Obama’s refusal to rubber-stamp the Keystone plan “hurt the environment, by ensuring that we will continue to import more and more of our oil from overseas on tankers that inevitably suffer the risk of spills.” Apparently he hasn’t heard that pipelines spill too — right on American soil, no less — and that under Obama the U.S. is importing less oil than at any time in the last 16 years. Cruz also boasts on his website that he “helped lead the fight” against the offshore drilling moratorium put in place by the Obama administration after the BP oil spill.

Step No. 2 of Cruz’s 12-step economic plan is “Kill Cap and Trade.” He seems to have missed the two-year-old news that it already died. He claims (erroneously) that a cap-and-trade system “would take thousands of dollars from every family in America.” And he claims (erroneously) that the EPA is still trying to foist it on America “by adopting back-door regulations.”

Step No. 5 of Cruz’s economic plan is “Restrain Abusive Environmental Enforcement.” He explains the need for this plank by claiming (erroneously) that the Obama administration is trying to ban fracking.

And he seems to think the Endangered Species Act is a vast conspiracy designed to cripple capitalism as we know it. He writes, “Currently, the Obama Administration is using the alleged presence of a lizard to try to stop oil and gas exploration in West Texas.” (Here’s more on that dastardly lizard.) And Cruz proudly notes on his website that he has defended property developers threatened by the dreaded arroyo toad.

Cruz may have gone to Harvard Law School and clerked for the Supreme Court, but on environmental issues, he sounds about as intellectual as Sarah Palin.

===

It's increasingly difficult to explain the Tea Party's behavior by its nominal ideology. The core value it espouses -- a small federal government, with deference to the states -- is under dramatic assault from the Tea Party caucus of the Republican House this month. The House version of the five-year farm bill contains language which breathtakingly puts the federal Department of Agriculture on steroids, by giving it a monopoly on food safety standards, which have historically been a shared federal and state responsibility. Motivating this drive to centralize power in Washington is a fear by big livestock pork producers, who fear that states might establish safety or animal welfare standards for pigs as California has already done for poultry. But the House language isn't limited to animal welfare standards -- it simply sweeps away all state authority over food safety.

Nor does the Tea Party believe that states should be able to choose the best mix of electricity for their inhabitants. Delaware, for example, had entered into a program in which Bloom Energy, a hi-tech manufacturer of innovative fuel cells, agreed to build a factory in Delaware in exchange for the state agreeing to classify fuel cells as qualifying technologies under the state's Renewable Energy Standard. This kind of incentive to locate manufacturing facilities is standard, plain vanilla state economic development behavior -- George Bush and Rick Perry engaged in it when they were governors of Texas, and it was practically the hallmark of Haley Barbour's governorship in Mississippi -- including incentives for electric car and solar companies.

But now the Delaware Tea Party's legal arm, the Caesar Rodney Institute, is suing the state over the partnership with Bloom, claiming that the agreement is unconstitutional " economic protectionism."Since the Bloom cells actually burn any fuel, but mostly these days with gas so cheap are run on plain old geologic methane, this is actually a lawsuit against fossil fuel energy in Delaware -- it's just a cleaner and more reliable way to make electricity from natural gas.

In the food safety debate, advocates of federal preemption cloak their power grab by saying they are trying to protect the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the same clause that Republicans opposing President Obama's health care plan have been striving to chop down and limit. But they simultaneously oppose federal standards, saying it would make Washington too intrusive.

So why make Uncle Sam the sole protector of food safety? And why did the Tea Party sue Delaware? What happened to its fondness for the states' rights -- and the Tenth Amendment reserving to the states all of the powers not granted to the federal government?

The answer may lie in a third battle brewing with the Republican party. A group of conservative but not Tea Party Republicans -- former Congressman Bob Inglis, Bush Secretary of State George Schultz, as well as historically moderate voices like Sherry Boehlert, have come out and suggested that one ingredient in an overall tax reform package might be a reduction in other tax rates paid for by a tax on pollution -- carbon in particular. Now pollution or carbon taxes fit conservative economic orthodoxy very well -- they tax consumption, not savings; they improve, rather than distorting, markets; they are easy to administer and difficult to evade; and they don't discourage investment or entrepreneurship or hard work.

But even with conservative stalwarts like Arthur Laffer speaking out on their behalf -- on the grounds that all taxes are bad but some are worse -- the issue has become incendiary between mainstream Republicans and the Tea Party, with the Tea Party and the House and Senate Republican leadership denouncing the very concept of pollution or carbon taxes as anathema.

Listen to the mainline journal of the right, National Review, blister the idea:

"Disturbing reports are reaching us of a hitherto-secret meeting at the American Enterprise Institute Wednesday afternoon looking at the feasibility of persuading Congressional Republicans to back a "revenue neutral" carbon tax [...] Even if AEI was just providing the venue, one has to ask: What are they thinking?!"

Well, for starters, AEI may have been reading National Journal's founder, William L. Buckley, who was a staunch advocate of gasoline taxes high enough to cover all the costs of our oil addiction.

But William L. Buckley is so 20th century right -- not all the current version.

It's not hard to understand the source of Tea Party resistance to carbon taxes -- it's their paymasters -- Koch Brothers and other fossil fuel interests whose interests they are advancing. And the same applies to food safety -- big commodity agribusiness doesn't want higher state safety standards to get in the way of producing bacon or sausage as cheaply as possible. The commodity economy must be king. If Delaware helps fuel cells become a widely adopted commercial technology, fossil fuel usage will go down, because less coal or gas will be needed to generate a given amount of electricity because fuel cells are tremendously efficient.

So what we are seeing this summer from the Tea Party is the sad old story coming true -- he who pays the piper calls the tune, and monopoly energy and agribusiness are the paymasters behind the far right -- not Frederick Hayek and Ayn Rand.

A veteran leader in the environmental movement, Carl Pope is the former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club. Mr. Pope is co-author -- along with Paul Rauber -- of Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called "a splendidly fierce book."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/delaware-fuel-cells_b_1691109.html

===

Tea Party Express: The Tea Party Express bus tour, and affiliated political action committee, has raised funds using tea party messages. The Tea Party Express effort has been a slick public relations gimmick of the Sacramento-based consulting firm **Russo, Marsh and Rogers**(RMR). RMR has worked on several stealth campaigns for Republican clients, including the underhanded push to recall Gov. Gray Davis (D-CA). In any case, the Tea Party Express, which RMR staffers

New York Times Looks at Tea Party, Grassroots vs. Reid in Nevada

By Elizabeth Crum | 9:27 pm April 5th, 2010 

“Tea Party Groups Make Harry Reid Target #1″ says the headline of this piece in the NYT. A few excerpts, the first about Tea Party activist-organizer Eric Odom who recently moved to Nevada to set up his Defeat Reid HQ:

But come the midterm elections, what may be more significant is what is happening here, in a dark condominium where the Home Depot tags are still on the lawn chairs that double as indoor seating for guests.

The blinds drawn against the desert sun, this is the new burrow of Eric Odom, a chief organizer of the first nationwide Tea Parties last year. Mr. Odom moved here a few weeks ago with his fiancée and a blogger sidekick to mobilize the state’s Tea Party groups for the midterms. By training activists in get-out-the-vote tactics like the “voter bombs” that helped Scott Brown become the new Republican senator from Massachusetts, they are hoping to unseat Nevada’s senior senator and the Democratic leader, Harry Reid.

In a matter of weeks, this state has become ground zero for Tea Party members, who understand that as a symbol of the movement’s power, you cannot get much bigger than beating the Senate’s top Democrat.

Yep. A Reid defeat would be a big, fluffy feather-in-cap for both national and Nevada Tea Partiers. So various groups are doing their grassrootsy thing, including the Tea Party Express which kicked off its third cross-country bus tour last weekend in Searchlight. Their parent organization, Our Country Deserves Better PAC, spent $350K in the last few weeks of Massachusetts Miracle Brown’s campaign, and they have vowed to target the Reid race in much the same way.

....

operate, has proved to be a cash cow for RMR — in 2009 alone, it plunged at least $1,025,559 of money it raised back into RussoMR.

nson on Oct 13, 2010 at 2:14 pm

This is Part Two of a four-part Wonk Room series examining the implications for climate and clean energy policy of the 2010 gubernatorial races. Read Part One, on heartland states, or view the governor-race compilation.

Yesterday, the Wonk Room reviewed four gubernatorial races featuring anti-climate Republicans in the Midwest. Today, we look at five competitive state contests that pitch climate champions against global warming deniers with Tea Party backing, in Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, and Ohio. The future of renewable electricity standards, efficiency and clean technology support, and climate policy rest on these election results.

FLORIDA: Alex Sink (D) v. Rick Scott (R)

ILLINOIS: Pat Quinn (D) v. Bill Brady (R)

MINNESOTA: Mark Dayton (D), Tom Emmer (R), Tom Horner (I)

WISCONSIN: Tom Barrett (D) v. Scott Walker (R)

OHIO: Ted Strickland (D) v. :{John Kasich (R):(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

FLORIDA: Alex Sink v. Rick Scott

538 estimate: 43 percent chance of Democratic pickup

Florida is under imminent threat from the rising sea levels, fiercer heat waves, and stronger storms of global warming. Clean energy investment and energy-efficiency retrofits could restore hundreds of thousands of jobs to the economically battered state. However, millionaire health care executiveRick Scott, the Republican candidate for Florida governor, is a global warming denier:

Asked if he believes in climate change, he said “No.” “I have not been convinced,” he said. Asked what he needs to convince him, “Something more convincing than what I’ve read.” St. Petersburg Times, [7/26/10]

Despite the lingering BP disaster, Scott is open to oil drilling off the coast of Florida. Scott’s campaign attacked his Democratic opponent Alex Sink’s advocacy of renewable energy standards as “leftist energy proposals,” promoting nuclear power instead. Florida’s renewable-industry advocates responded: “Rick Scott needs to say something of substance or stop attacking small business people.”

Scott is a signatory of the Americans for Prosperity “No Climate Tax” pledge and the FreedomWorks Contract From America, and was endorsed by the FreedomWorks PAC.

===

10 Dumbest Members of Congress

By Mark Howard, AlterNet

Posted on May 22, 2012, Printed on May 26, 2012

http://www.alternet.org/story/155545/10_dumbest_members_of_congress

The Sunlight Foundation just released the results of a study measuring the scholastic grade level of speeches made by members of Congress. The scale uses the Flesch-Kincaid test and is based on the length of words and sentences used. Among its findings are, “Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level.” The study further found that it is the “most extreme members” who speak at the lowest grade levels, as well as the most junior.

As you may remember, a major turning point in American politics was the 2010 election that saw a wave of new Tea Party Republicans elected to Congress. Of the 20 lowest scoring members, 17 were Republicans, and 12 of those are in their first term of office. You have to go down to 15th place before you find a Democrat.

fascist pendulum:  http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/155222

Fascist America: Have We Finally Turned The Corner?

The author offers one of her periodic assessments of America's potential to go fascist. And the news is better than it's been in years.

May 1, 2012  |  

America has never been without fascist wannabes. Research by Political Research Associates http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010010428/state-union-status-report-far-right  estimates that, at any given time in our history, roughly 10-12 percent of the country's population has been bred-in-the-bone right-wing authoritarians -- the people who are hard-wired to think in terms of fascist control and order. Our latter-day Christian Dominionists, sexual fundamentalists and white nationalists are the descendants -- sometimes, the literal blood descendants -- of the same people who joined the KKK in the 1920s, followed Father Coughlin in the 1930s, backed Joe McCarthy in the early '50s, joined the John Birch society in the '60s, and signed up for the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.  

Given its rather stunning durability, it's probably time to acknowledge that this proto-fascist strain is a permanent feature of the American body politic. Like ugly feet or ears that stick out, it's an unchanging piece of who we are. We are going to have to learn to live with it...

A new book out this week presents an astounding fact that could help shape the upcoming elections: the Republican-led House voted nearly 200 times to undermine public health and environmental safeguards in 2011.

This constitutes the largest attack on environmental protections in our nation's history. But the American people didn't ask for such a radical departure. Eight out of 10 voters want the standards that keep our water clean and our air safe to breathe either strengthened or left alone.

Reckless: The Political Assault on the American Environment chronicles the Tea Party-inspired attempt to strip away trusted safeguards. Written by Bob Deans, a veteran journalist who now works for the NRDC Action Fund, the book describes the damage these measures would do and the polluting companies they would benefit.

But the book also provides something else: a valuable insert to a 2012 campaign playbook.

Anyone running in a primary or race against a Tea Partier or those who have voted with them should shine a spotlight on their radical environmental assault. They can remind voters that when the economy was in flames and Americans were losing their homes, these lawmakers spent their time trying to dismantle environmental laws that have stood strong for 40 years.

Instead of addressing the global financial crisis and unregulated mortgage debt, leaders like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency and its public health safeguards were the "job destroying" villains.

Challengers can also remind voters that the Republican war against environmental protection is bad for our health.

Reckless describes how Tea Party House members tried time and again to gut the Clean Air Act. This isn't some obscure, bureaucratic regulation. It is the law that has prevented more than 4,300,000 premature deaths since 1990. It's the law that slashed the number of unhealthy air days in Los Angeles from more than 200 days in 1970 down to 28 days in 2003. It's the law that brought the percentage of American children with dangerous levels of lead in their blood down from 90 percent in the 1970s to 2 percent in 2000. And it's the law that has had decades of bipartisan support.

But the leadership of the House Republicans wanted to halt this progress and return us to darker, dirtier days. Challengers can offer voters a clear contrast: clean skies and healthier families or more smog and asthma should remind Americans of something else as well: the Republican Party didn't always put polluters first. Reckless charts the GOP's proud tradition of conservation from President Teddy Roosevelt to President George H.W. Bush -- the man who called the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 one of his greatest legislative accomplishments. Most Republican voters continue to hold these values even if their lawmakers have set them aside: 58 percent of Republican voters said they oppose House efforts to block the EPA from reducing air pollution from power plants, according to a 2011 poll by GS Strategy Group and Hart Research.

Why have so many House lawmakers forgotten that conservation is part of conservative values? I see two reasons. First, the Tea Party scared the daylights out of moderate Republicans and even out of sensible conservatives.

And second, polluters spend a lot of cash in Washington. Reckless reports that people and organizations associated with the oil and gas industry spent $31.8 million on campaign contributions during the 2010 congressional elections, with 77 percent of the money going to Republicans.

Polluters may have piles of money, but candidates who stand for ordinary Americans and offer a vision of a cleaner, healthier future can mobilize voters better than any corporate-funded rally can. NRDC Action Fund's research shows that promoting a clean energy vision can help candidates win elections. In this election cycle, candidates should remind voters how hard Tea Party Republicans worked to take away that cleaner future.

===

related: TP

This kind of unglamorous, labor-intensive work is happening around the country. The demand for planning funds far outstrips the supply - this year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development received $500 million in funding applications for a $100 million pool of grants. But this year’s batch of grants will be the last. Tea Party activists have been assailing Sustainable Communities as a tool for making municipalities subservient to Washington bureaucrats; alternately, they’ve denounced it as the soft launch of a socialist-inspired UN takeover of America’s government.

In response House Republicans cut all Sustainable Communities grants from a recently enacted mini-omnibus budget. The House actually wanted to go even further, prohibiting any HUD funds from being deployed in support of what it called “ill-defined rubrics, such as ‘sustainability,’ ‘livability,’ ‘inclusivity,’ and equity.’ ’’ And it cut a $100 million placeholder for Obama’s doomed $38 billion high-speed rail initiative for good measure. Never mind that the cuts will wind up costing more than they save: These days, craven power plays are good politics....

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2011/11/29/frugal-answer-zoning-pitfalls-needlessly-slashed/I9OVLx1ORogUj2NPCnNfFN/story.html

:{Tea Party Profiteers:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:: How Republican Operatives Are Exploiting Economic Anxiety For Power, Cash

By Lee Fang on Feb 2, 2010 at 3:03 pm

Republican partisans — aided by lobbyists and corporate front groups — are exploiting the legitimate feelings of anger and distrust among many struggling Americans. These operatives and profiteers, many of them experienced public relations professionals, have set up sophisticated social networking portals and online solutions to control the flow of information within tea party organizations. As gatekeepers to ostensibly open forums, these political operatives and profiteers have been able to set the political agenda of the tea parties and hand out marching orders. And tea party profiteers are making millions cashing in on the movement. They are selling tea party support to candidates and policies which continue the legacy of Bush-era unregulated capitalism and corporate bailouts:

– Eric Odom: Odom, who appears regularly on Fox News and on other venues as a spokesman for the tea party movement, is at the center of tea party profiteering. Odom maintains dozens, possibly hundreds of tea party websites and community forums which he controls through a “Ning” technology based social networking platform. Odom’s vast online control of county, state, and issue oriented tea party websites is done through his two for profit consulting companies: American Liberty Alliance and Strategy Activism, LLC. His American Liberty Alliance has served as a hub between disparate tea party groups and right-wing front groups. In a biographical video he posted on YouTube, Odom explained that he has worked for years on local and statewide Republican campaigns developing marketing…some say ‘attack sites.’” He boasted that he built “sites behind the scenes, many of them to this day, some of them were actually very effective in defeating the opponent.” While it is unclear exactly who is paying Odom now for his tea party profit ventures, Odom has delicately straddled independent populist rhetoric while proclaiming that his network will work exclusively for the election of Republican candidates this year.

– Allen Fuller: According to Tennessee business records, Odom’s Strategic Activism, LLC business partner is Republican new media consultant Allen Fuller, who also maintains a firm called Flat Creek Public Affairs. Fuller may be the best clue to find out who pays Odom. On his website, Fuller counts Jane Norton, the GOP candidate for Senate in Colorado, as a client, and also receives payments from several other Republican members of Congress. Fuller helps corral tea party support to American Majority, a Republican training organization.

– Glenn Beck: Beck, the most powerful promoter of the tea parties in the media, often rants during his regular programming that investing in gold is the only way to hedge against a supposed deep inflation in the future. He does not disclose, however, that gold companies are his primary sponsors, or that the gold companies he promotes have predatory fees: Goldline, one of Beck’s sponsors, sells gold for 30-35% more than market value. “Here’s the deal, call Goldline, study it out, pray on it,” Beck advises his listeners. Beck has cemented his control over the tea parties by launching his own 9.12 project network of social networking sites — which are hosted by his for profit media company Mercury Radio Arts.

– Tea Party Nation: As a for-profit business, Tea Party Nation organized the Tea Party Convention this year at Nashville’s swank Opryland Gaylord hotel. The convention, set at the “grassroots” ticket price of $550 per person, features a Madison Avenue fashion company selling tea party jewelry and a paid ($120,000) speech by Sarah Palin. Tea Party Nation also maintains a message board.

– Dick Armey: As ThinkProgress has documented, Armey has a long history of organizing conservative grassroots causes in support of his corporate clients. Armey presents himself as a ideologue, who helms his nonprofit FreedomWorks as a mere exercise in his free market beliefs. But while Armey rails against the Wall Street bailout and efforts to rebuild the foundations of the economy, his own lobbying firm represented AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch during the bailouts. Indeed, even his nonprofit still pays him a lobbyist salary of $550,000 per year.

– Tea Party Express: The Tea Party Express bus tour, and affiliated political action committee, has raised funds using tea party messages. The Tea Party Express effort has been a slick public relations gimmick of the Sacramento-based consulting firm Russo, Marsh and Rogers (RMR). RMR has worked on several stealth campaigns for Republican clients, including the underhanded push to recall Gov. Gray Davis (D-CA). In any case, the Tea Party Express, which RMR staffers operate, has proved to be a cash cow for RMR — in 2009 alone, it plunged at least $1,025,559 of money it raised back into RMR.

The profiteers say that the original American revolutionaries cast their tea into the Boston harbor as a simple rejection of taxation, so the modern tea party movement should similarly reject increased financial regulations, health reform, and taxes on the rich. But the history tells a different story. Boston revolutionaries rejected subservience to the East India Company, a British-run international corporation. They cast the tea into the harbor as a symbolic message to say that their taxes should go back into the American community, not subsidizing the profits of London elites and foreign corporations. Now, Republican tea party profiteers are trying to exploit the movement, pushing them to oppose policies which would actually liberate the middle class and crack down on international corporations. Despite the populist rhetoric, the profiteers see the tea party movement as a pool to extract fundraising dollars and volunteers for Republican campaigns. Indeed, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, himself a former lobbyist, has said that he has an “expectation” that tea partiers loyally toe the Republican line.

Tags:

• 004: Lobbying
• Americans for Prosperity
• Eric Odom
• FreedomWorks
• Radical Right
• Tea Party

==

KOCH COLLECTS NAMES FOR BIG DATABASE

afp hires TP ppl as coordinators

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/americans-for-prosperity-paying-tea-partiers-collect-voters-personal-info

Let’s go back to February 19th: Rick Santelli, live on CNBC, standing in the middle of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, launches into an attack on the just-announced $300 billion slated to stem rate of home foreclosures: “The government is promoting bad behavior! Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?! This is America! We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July, all you capitalists who want to come down to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.”

Almost immediately, the clip and the unlikely “Chicago tea party” quote buried in the middle of the segment, zoomed across a well-worn path to headline fame in the Republican echo chamber, including red-alert headlines on Drudge.

Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican andproducer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people. Last August, Rosenberg, who looks like Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed Stanley Kurtz, the conservative writer who first “exposed” a personal link between Obama and former Weather Undergound leader Bill Ayers. As a result of Rosenberg’s radio interview, the Ayers story was given a major push through the Republican media echo chamber, culminating in Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” That Rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the “Obama is a terrorist” campaign. It’s as if they held this “Chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.

ChicagoTeaParty.com was just one part of a larger network of Republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the “Sam Adams Alliance,” whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. Cached google records that we discovered show that the Sam Adams Alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the Koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots “tea party” protests going on today. All of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious rightwing advocacy group, FreedomWorks, a powerful PR organization headed by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey and funded by Koch money.

On the same day as Santelli’s rant, February 19, another site called Officialchicagoteaparty.com went live. This site was registered toEric Odom, who turned out to be a veteran Republican new media operative specializing in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns. Last summer, Odom organized a twitter-led campaign centered around DontGo.com to pressure Congress and Nancy Pelosi to pass the offshore oil drilling bill, something that would greatly benefit Koch Industries, a major player in oil and gas. Now, six months later, Odom’s DontGo movement was resurrected to play a central role in promoting the “tea party” movement.

Up until last month, Odom was officially listed as the “new media coordinator” for theSam Adams Alliance, a well-funded libertarian activist organization based in Chicago that was set up only recently. Samuel Adams the historical figure was famous for inspiring and leading the Boston Tea Party—so when the PR people from the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance abruptly leave in order to run Santelli’s “Chicago Tea Party,” you know it wasn’t spontaneous. Odom certainly doesn’t want people to know about the link: his name was scrubbed from the Sam Adams Alliance website recently, strongly suggesting that they wanted to cover their tracks. Thanks to google caching, you can see the SAA’s before-after scrubbing.

Even the Sam Adams’ January 31 announcement that Odom’s fake-grassroots group was “no longer sponsored by the Alliance” was shortly afterwards scrubbed.

But it’s the Alliance’s scrubbing of their link to Koch that is most telling. A cached page, erased on February 16, just three days before Santelli’s rant, shows that the Alliance also wanted to cover up its ties to the Koch family. The missing link was an announcement that students interested in applying for internships to the Sam Adams Alliance could also apply through the “Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program” through the Institute for Humane Studies, a Koch-funded rightwing institute designed to scout and nurture future leaders of corporate libertarian ideology. (See hi-resolution screenshots here.) The top two board directors at the Sam Adams Alliance include two figures with deep ties to Koch-funded programs: Eric O’Keefe, who previously served in Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies and the Club For Growth; and Joseph Lehman, a former communications VP at Koch’s Cato Institute.

All of these are ultimately linked up to Koch’s Freedom Works mega-beast. Freedomworks.org has drawn fire in the past for using fake grassroots internet campaigns, called “astroturfing,” to push for pet Koch projects such as privatizing social security. A New York Times investigation in 2005 revealed that a “regular single mom” paraded by Bush’s White House to advocate for privatizing social security was in fact FreedomWorks’ Iowa state director. The woman, Sandra Jacques, also fronted another Iowa fake-grassroots group called “For Our Grandchildren,” even though privatizing social security was really “For Koch And Wall Street Fat Cats.”

see scott walker support mojo 2/1

[bs FreedomWorks today announced that Sandra Jaques will join the grassroots group as the Director of the Iowa State Chapter. In this role, she will lead FreedomWorks’ 3,847 Iowa members in the fight for pro-growth, limited government public policy at the state and federal level.

FreedomWorks was created on July 22, 2004 by a merger between Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America.

The new organization has over 30 years of combined experience and over 360,000 members nationwide. The FreedomWorks effort in Iowa is just one part of a $10 million national voter education and Get Out the Vote campaign focused on the 2004 election battleground states.

Ms. Jaques previously worked as the grassroots director for Citizens for a Sound Economy in Iowa from 1999 to 2001. Following her time at CSE, she worked in the government relations department of the Greater Des Moines Partnership. She then served as Midwest Regional Director for a national nonprofit organization educating the public about the need for Social Security reform – For Our Grandchildren.

Ms. Jaques, an Iowa native, holds a bachelors degree from Grand View College in Des Moines, Iowa.

FreedomWorks co-Chairman Dick Armey commented:

“Sandra Jaques understands Iowa politics, and she’s been a successful part of the FreedomWorks/CSE organization in the past. What’s more, over the past year we worked closely with her and the rest of the team at For Our Grandchildren on the critical issue of Social Security reform. We’re delighted to have Sandra back at FreedomWorks, working to grow our Iowa Chapter and to continue to educate the broader Iowa community on the benefits of Social Security Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs) and the rest of our Freedom Agenda.”]

===

target ppl who believe in AGW:

The race for a congressional seat in southern Indiana underscores the difficulty many people have arguing against the Tea Party or its candidates. This is especially true when it comes to climate change.

The New York Times explored a recent debate in Jasper, Ind., to showcase the arguments the Tea Party is using to unseat Democratic Rep. Baron Hill, who voted for the cap-and-trade energy bill in 2009.

To his credit — though probably not in his best political interest — Hill, who faces Tea Party-backed Todd Young, explained exactly why he voted in favor of the bill.

“It will create jobs in Indiana, reduce foreign oil imports and address global warming,” the Democrat said before committing further political suicide in the largely conservative district. The final blow likely came when he said, “Climate change is real, and man is causing it. That is indisputable. And we have to do something about it.”

According to the story, Hill’s science lingo was received with boos and a few direct comments about the Bible, redistribution of wealth and a conspiracy to create one world government. That kind of backlash is difficult for any candidate to counter — not because it's factual, but because challenging it plays right into the Tea Party’s hands.

---

Tea Party

death and taxes: As Mark Ames and Yasha Levine reported–later repeated by “The Washington Post”‘s Dan Eggen and Philip Rucker–the Kochs are behind the Tea Party cover group Americans For Prosperity, who are anti-tax and anti-regulation.  Whose prosperity?  The Kochs’ prosperity.

Backlash book: santelli rant about bailing ouyt foreclsure victims (ironic given surrounded by rich traders and not a peep about bailing out rich bankers)  p38

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_the_Tea_Party_movement

In the 2010 midterm elections, The New York Times identified 138 candidates for Congress with significant Tea Party support, and reported that all of them were running as Republicans—of whom 129 were running for the House and 9 for the Senate.^[4]

According to a calculation on an NBC blog, 32% of the candidates that were backed by the Tea Party, or identified themselves as a Tea Party member, won the election.^[7] In the primaries for Colorado, Nevada and Delaware the Tea-party backed Senate Republican nominees defeated "establishment" Republicans that had been expected to win their respective Senate races, but went on to lose in the general election to their Democrat opponents.^[8] The three Senate nominees were seen by many in America and the media as either amateurs or too far-out there to be electable as their positions on certain aspects were viewed as extreme.^[9] Several of the Tea Party-endorsed candidates won victories against established Republicans in primaries, such as Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, and Utah.^[10][11]

• Republican Scott Brown, who received Tea Party support, was elected as the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, normally a solidly pro-Democratic state.^[12]
• L. Dean Murray, a Long Island businessman, won a special election for a New York State Assembly seat. He is believed to be the first Tea Party activist to be elected into office.^[6]
• In Utah attorney Mike Lee defeated establishment Republican U.S. Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) in the GOP senate primary on May 8, 2010. Lee's win is seen as a victory for the Tea Party Movement, whose supporters were against Bennett's return.^[13][14][15]
• Rand Paul, who gave a speech at the first tea party event held in December 2007 and who subsequently endorsed by other Tea Party groups, won the Super Tuesday GOP Senate primary in Kentucky. Paul, the son of Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, comfortably beat Republican establishment favorite Secretary of State of Kentucky Trey Grayson with 60% of the vote, and subsequently won in the November general election.^[16] He was quoted saying, "The Tea Party Movement is about saving our country from a mountain of debt."^[17]
• In the South Carolina's 1st congressional district GOP Primary, Tea Party favorite State Rep. Tim Scott, defeated two establishment Republicans with long family histories in Republican politics: Paul Thurmond, son of the former South Carolina U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond.^[18] and Carroll Campbell, son of former South Carolina Governor Carroll A. Campbell, Jr. Scott has spent one term in the South Carolina House, where the businessman became the first African American GOP representative in more than 100 years.^{[19][20][21][22][23]}
• Nikki Haley, a 38-year-old Indian-American state representative, beat out three prominent Republican rivals in the South Carolina primary race for governor, capturing 49% of the vote. She defeated the second-place finisher, U.S. Representative Gresham Barrett, in a run-off election on June 22.^[24][25]
• In California, Chuck DeVore, who had Tea Party backing, lost the GOP senate primary to Carly Fiorina, who had backing from Sarah Palin.^[26] But she lost on November 2, 2010, to Boxer.^[27]
• In Nevada, State Assemblywoman Sharron Angle won the U.S. Senate Republican primary race, defeating the GOP favorite, State Sen. Sue Lowden, the one-time front runner.^[28] Angle was defeated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.^[29]
• In Alaska, attorney Joe Miller defeated current U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, in the GOP primary race on August 24, 2010. Murkowski had been appointed to the seat by her father, Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski, who had held the Senate seat for 30 years prior to becoming governor.^[30] Murkowski remained in the election as a write-in candidate, eventually beating Miller in the general election.^[31]
• In Delaware, Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O'Donnell defeated veteran U.S. Representative Mike Castle in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.^[32][33] Her victory was a surprising upset and was seen as a sign of Tea Party movement strength, even though Castle and not O'Donnell was the Republican expected to easily win the seat.^[34][35]O'Donnell lost the election.^[29]
• In New York, Tea Party-backed candidate Carl Paladino defeated former Representative Rick Lazio in the Republican primary for governor;^[36][37] in the November election he was defeated by Democrat candidate Andrew Cuomo.
• In Florida, tea party favorite Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives Marco Rubio defeated Independent and sitting governor Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate seat.^[38]
• In Colorado, tea party favorite Ken Buck won the GOP Senate primary, defeating Republican establishment candidateLieutenant Governor of Colorado Jane Norton, which caused controversy especially over Buck's stance on abortion.^[39][40]In the November general election, Buck was defeated by Senator Michael Bennet.^[41]

==

lowdown

• Mo Brooks: Huntsville, AL
• Rick Crawford: Jonesboro, AR
• Tim Griffin: Little Rock, AK
• Paul Gosar: Flagstaff, AZ
• Tom Graves: Ranger, GA
• Raul Labrado: Eagle, ID
• Bobby Schilling: Colona, IL
• Adam Kinzinger: Manteno, IL
• Todd Young: Bloomington, IN
• Marlin Stutzman: Howe, IN
• Mike Pompeo: Wichita, KS
• Jeff Landry: New Iberia, LA
• Dan Benishek: Iron County, MI
• Tim Walberg: Tipton, MI
• Steven Palazzo: Biloxi, MS
• Vicky Hartzler: Archie, MO
• Jon Runyan: Mount Laurel, NJ
• Ann Marie Buerkle: Syracuse, NY
• Nan Hayworth: Mount Kisco, NY
• Renee Ellmers: Dunn, NC
• Steve Stivers: Columbus, OH
• Joe Wilson: West Columbia, SC
• Tim Scott : Charleston, SC
• Kristi Noem: Castlewood, SD
• Jaime Herrera Beutler : Camas, WA
• Sean Duffy: Ashland, WI
• Reid Ribble: Appleton, WI
• Paul Ryan: Janesville, WI

II. Members of the tea party caucus

Formed early this year by Rep. Michele Bachmann, who chairs it, the caucus is open to all lawmakers who want to wear the tea party label (interestingly, about two dozen of the tea party-endorsed candidates who won last year have chosen not to join Bachmann's group). There are 61 members in the House caucus, plus four members of a Senate caucus. All are Republicans.

ALABAMA

Robert Aderholt

ARIZONA

Trent Franks

CALIFORNIA

Wally Herger

Tom McClintock

Gary Miller

Ed Royce

COLORADO

Mike Coffman

Doug Lamborn

GEORGIA

:{Paul Broun

Phil Gingrey}:

Tom Price

Lynn Westmoreland

FLORIDA

Sandy Adams

Gus Bilirakis

Ander Crenshaw

Rich Nugent

Dennis Ross

Cliff Stearns

Allen West

ILLINOIS

Joe Walsh

INDIANA

Mike Pence

IOWA

Steve King

KANSAS

Tim Huelskamp

Lynn Jenkins

Sen. Jerry Moran

KENTUCKY

Sen. Rand Paul

LOUISIANA

Rodney Alexander

Bill Cassidy

John Fleming

Jeff Landry

Steve Scalise

MARYLAND

Roscoe Bartlett

MICHIGAN

Tim Walberg

MINNESOTA

Michele Bachmann

Chip Cravaack

MISSOURI

Todd Akin

Vicky Hartzler

Blaine Luetkemeyer

MONTANA

Denny Rehberg

NEBRASKA

Adrian Smith

NEW MEXICO

Steve Pearce

NORTH CAROLINA

Howard Coble

SOUTH CAROLINA

Sen. Jim DeMint

Jeff Duncan

Mick Mulvaney

Tim Scott

Joe Wilson

TENNESSEE

Diane Black

Stephen Fencher

Phil Roe

:{TEXAS

Joe Barton

Michael C. Burgess

John Carter

John Culberson

Blake Farenthold

Louie Gohmert

Kenny Marchant

Randy Neugebauer

Ted Poe

Pete Sessions

Lamar Smith}:

UTAH

Rob Bishop

Sen. Mike Lee

WEST VIRGINIA

David McKinley

-

Tea Party "allies"

These are GOP lawmakers who were not tea party endorsees and are not in the caucus, but they provide the margin of votes and the hard-right leadership in Congress to push the extremist laissez-faire agenda forward. It includes many of the committee chairs and other leaders in the House. There is no definitive list of these players (much of this action is behind closed doors), but Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Jim Jordan of Ohio (chair of the GOP's powerful "study committee") have been the most aggressive House allies, helping the tea partiers shove the GOP's congressional center to the far-right fringe. In addition, all eight Republicans running for president are allies, with the likes of Bachmann, Perry, and Santorum often scuttling beyond the fringe in a frenetic but unabashed effort to appeal to the kookiest of right-wing factions.

9/5/11 huffpo

A recent AP-GfK survey showed that 56 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning people identified themselves as tea party supporters. Also, Republicans who back the tea party place a higher priority than other Republicans on the budget deficit and taxes, issues at the center of the nomination contest.

Last year, the tea party injected the GOP with a huge dose of enthusiasm, helping it reclaim the House and end one-party rule in Washington. These days, they are firing up the campaign trail in early-voting Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

It's little wonder, then, why many of the White House aspirants are popping up at rallies by theTea Party Express, a Sacramento,Calif.-based political committee that's in the midst of a 30-city bus tour. That tour ends Sept. 12 in Tampa, Fla., where the group will team with CNN to sponsor a nationally televised GOP debate. Every Republican candidate faring strongly in the polls is set to participate.

Some grass-roots activists will cringe. They consider the Tea Party Express uncomfortably close to the GOP establishment. Nonetheless, "it's a moment of political arrival" for the tea party, says Bruce Cain, a University of California, Berkeley political scientist.

Five months before the first voting in the nomination fight, a Gallup survey of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents last week found Perry pulling strong support from voters who identify themselves as tea party supporters, with 35 percent, followed by Romney and Bachmann at 14 percent.

That may help explain why Romney decided to speak Sunday at a Tea Party Express rally in New Hampshire and appear Monday at a forum in South Carolina hosted by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint, who oversees a political committee that has supported tea party candidates.

Half of US social program recipients believe they "have not used a government social program"

Cory Doctorow at 10:48 AM Fri 

"Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era," a paper by Cornell's Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions Suzanne Mettler features this remarkable chart showing that about half of American social program beneficiaries believe that they "have not used a government social program." It's the "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" phenomena writ large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive policies who've been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite.

Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era (PDF)

RS oct 2010

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-on-the-tea-party-20100928?print=true

wiki list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tea_Party_politicians

EAST BAY from grist 5/11 http://www.grist.org/urbanism/2011-05-31-tea-party-reveals-sustainable-development-to-be-sinister-attempt

23 Nov 10 grist http://www.grist.org/article/2010-11-23-the-tea-partys-livability-paranoia

climate skeptics:

http://climateprogress.org/2010/09/14/senate-gop-candidates-deny-scienceclimate-zombies/

Remarkably, of the dozens of Republicans vying for the 37 Senate seats in the 2010 election, none supports climate action. Even former climate advocates Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) now toe the science-doubting party line.

Many of the Senate candidates are signatories of the Koch Industries’ Americans For Prosperity No Climate Tax pledge and the FreedomWorks Contract From America. The second plank of the Contract From America is to “Reject Cap & Trade: Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.”

In reality, a carbon cap-and-trade market — by rewarding work instead of pollution — would increase jobs, lower electricity bills, restore American competitiveness, and forestall a climate catastrophe.

GOP SENATE CANDIDATES ON CLIMATE SCIENCE AND POLICY

Overwhelmingly, the Republican candidates not only oppose action to limit global warming pollution, they question the validity of climate science. Here are a few quotes drawn from the Wonk Room report:

Gov. John Boozman, Arkansas:

“Well I think that we’ve got perhaps climate change going on. The question is what’s causing it. Is man causing it, or, you know, is this a cycle that happens throughout the years, throughout the ages. And you can look back some of the previous times when there was no industrialization, you had these different ages, ice ages, and things warming and things. That’s the question.” KTHV Little Rock, [3/10]

Rep. Roy Blunt, Missouri:

“There isn’t any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth.” Human Events, [4/29/09]

Rep. Rob Portman, Ohio:

“When you analyze all the data, there is a warming trend according to science,” he said. “But the jury is out on the degree of how much is manmade.” Columbus Dispatch, [7/25/10]

Jim Huffman, Oregon:

He casts doubt on scientists’ findings about global warming. It’s “rooted in some fairly vague science,” he says. “There are a lot of studies out there that offer alternative explanations for global climate variations.” Huffman opposes a cap and trade system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, largely because it will be too expensive. He argues that it’s more realistic to adapt to climate change than disrupt peoples’ lives trying to prevent it. If some island nations become uninhabitable, he says, “I think that’s a tragedy, but we can adapt to that.”Portland Tribune, [9/2/10]

To recap: 97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming, but 97% of GOP Senate candidates disagree.

From SourceWatch

The Tea Party Movement gained national attention in the summer of 2009 when organized protests occurred at Congressional "town hall" meetings that discussed healthcare reform.

While promoted as a spontaneous "grassroots" movement, many of the activities of Tea Party groups were organized by corporate lobbying groups.

Financial support

In an article in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, author Jane Mayer links the billionaire brothers David Koch and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries to tea party movement funding. Mayer writes,

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.^[1]

Reports indicate that the Tea Party Movement benefits from millions of dollars from conservative foundations that are derived from wealthy U.S. families and their business interests. Is appears that money to organize and implement the Movement flows primarily through two conservative groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

In an April 9, 2009 article on ThinkProgress.org, Lee Fang reports that the principal organizers of Tea Party events are Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, two "lobbyist-run think tanks" that are "well funded" and that provide the logistics and organizing for the Tea Party movement from coast to coast. Media Matters reported that David Koch of Koch Industries was a co-founder of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), the predecessor of FreedomWorks. David Koch was chairman of the board of directors of CSE.^[2] CSE received substantial funding from David Koch of Koch Industries, which is the largest privately-held energy company in the country, and the conservative Koch Family Foundations, which make substantial annual donations to conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, etc. Media Matters reported that the Koch family has given more than $12 million to CSE (predecessor of FreedomWorks) between 1985 and 2002.^[3][4]

Koch Industries has denied specifically funding Freedomworks or tea parties directly, however. The company's director of communications wrote ""Koch companies value free speech and believe it is good to have more Americans engaged in key policy issues. That said, Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch and David Koch have no ties to and have never given money to FreedomWorks. In addition, no funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties." Koch's director of communications did affirm, however, that the company funds Americans for Prosperity (AFP). TPM's Lee Fang reports that "AFP was founded in part by the company's Executive Vice President, David Koch. He is currently the chairman of the board of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation." ^[5][6]

Media Matters also lists the Sarah Scaife Foundation as having given a total of $2.96 million in funding to FreedomWorks.^[7] The Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation is financed by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune. ^[8]

The Claude R. Lambe Foundation, also controlled by the Koch family, has donated more than $3 million to Americans for Prosperity. ^[9]

Media support

Fox News support

Fox News Channel took ownership of Tax Day Tea Parties around the nation by promoting them on-screen as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties"

The Tea Party has also gotten substantial support in the form of promotion from Fox News Channel and its talk show hosts, including Glenn Beck. Karl Frisch of Media Matters wrote that Fox News "frequently aired segments imploring its audience to get involved with tea-party protests across the country." Fox has also provided organizing information for the events on air and online. ^[10]

Media Matters also noted that "While discussing the April 15 protests on his April 6 program, Glenn Beck suggested that viewers could "[c]elebrate with Fox News" by either attending a protest or watching it on Fox News. Beck stated that in addition to himself, hosts Neil Cavuto, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity would be "live" at different protests. While Beck spoke, on-screen text labeled those protests as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." ^[11]

Tax Day Tea Party protests

The Tax Day Tea Party protests occurred on April 15, 2009. This event was organized by Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and Freedomworks, corporate astroturf organizations.

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Tea Party Nation
• Astroturf
• Dick Armey
• Front groups
• Grassroots
• Tea Party Patriots
• Tea Party Express
• FreedomWorks Foundation
• Citizens for a Sound Economy
• Americans for Prosperity

References

1. ↑ Jane Mayer Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama, The New Yorker, August 30, 2010
2. ↑ Bloomberg Business Week Profile of David Hamilton Koch, Executive Vice President and Director, Koch Industries, Inc., Background, accessed July 27, 2010
3. ↑ Media Matters Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation Conservative Transparency, accessed January 27, 2010
4. ↑ Lee Fang Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests ThinkProgress.org, April 9, 2009, accessed January 27, 2010
5. ↑ Justin Elliott Koch Industries: We Don't Fund Tea Parties (Except For The Tea Parties We Fund), TPMMuckraker, April 15, 2010
6. ↑ Lee Fang Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests ThinkProgress.org, April 9, 2009, accessed January 27, 2010
7. ↑ Media Matters Action Network Sarah Scaife Foundation grants, accessed January 27, 2010
8. ↑ Media Matters Sarah Scaife Foundation Overview, accessed January 27, 2010
9. ↑ Media Matters Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, accessed January 27, 2010
10. ↑ Karl Frisch Warning: This tea may cause severe damage to journalistic integrity Media Matters, April 10, 2009
11. ↑ Media Matters for America REPORT: "Fair and balanced" Fox News aggressively promotes "tea party" protests Special Report. April 8, 2009

External resources

External articles

• David Brooks, The Tea Party Teens, New York Times, Jan. 4, 2010.
• David Barstow, Tea Party Movement Lights Fuse for Rebellion on the Right, New York Times, Feb. 15, 2010.
• Kate Zernike, Tea Party Looks to move from Fringe to Force, New York Times, Feb. 6, 2010.
• Robert Zaretsky, The Tea Party the Last Time, New York Times, Feb. 2, 2010.
• Dave Johnson, A Warning About The Tea Parties, Speak Out California, April 14, 2009.
• Ben McGrath, [1], The Rise of the Tea Party Activism, Feb. 1, 2010.
• Nytimes Blog, [2], Tea Partyers and the Power of No, Jan. 31, 2010.
• Huffington Post, [3], Instant America, Feb. 2, 2010.
• Philip Rucker, [4], Republicans woo 'tea party' members, Jan. 30, 2010.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tea_Party"

Categories: Tea Party Movement | Lobby group | Lobbying | Conservatives | Front groups | United States

going after science/gw: http://www.truth-out.org/were-all-mad-here67858

video of koch acknowleding tea party support:http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/13/koch-tea-party-billionaire/

TP:

proto was health care hecklers organized to shout down http://crooksandliars.com/taxonomy/term/12266

http://showmeprogress.com/tag/Blaine%20Luetkemeyer

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/10/tea-party-pyramid-scheme

→ Must Reads, Politics, The Right

How the Tea Party's Like Herbalife

— By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Oct. 19, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Tea party leaders love to talk about how their grassroots movement is a revolutionary new way of doing politics from the bottom up, organized more like a regenerating starfish than a top-down bureaucracy. But what if the tea party isn't a star fish but more of a pyramid? At least one of the biggest tea party organizations in the country, Tea Party Patriots, bears a striking resemblance to companies like Herbalife that operate what some critics consider nothing more thanlegalized pyramid schemes. And that's not just because, as I report today, one of the group's top leaders was a top earner at Herbalife. Consider some of the parallels:

CONSTANT RECRUITING

Herbalife: Ninety percent of Herbalife’s low-level distributors quit within a year, requiring constant recruitment to keep the company afloat.

Tea Party: Lorie Medina, a recruiter for the Dallas tea party, recently told the *National Journal*: "What I see is, every three, four, five months about 10 to 20 percent of your active people trail off. Those numbers have to be replaced every few months. It's a continual grind to keep the numbers up." Dawn Wildman, a California based national Tea Party Patriots coordinator, said: "The message is important, but people are expendable."

LOW OVERHEAD

Herbalife: By using "independent distributors," Herbalife keeps its costs low and shifts overhead to the little people.

Tea Party: *National Journal* touts cheapness as one benefit of the tea party's "leaderless" structure: "The network never outgrows the infrastructure, because each tea party is self-reliant. And the groups make it their business to seed more groups, producing sometimes dizzying growth."

FONDNESS FOR SIGNS

Herbalife: Responsible for ubiquitous telephone pole signs offering work from home deals.

Tea Party: Tea Party Patriots recently launched a “One Million Yard Signs” project as part of a “branding” and recruiting effort.

MEGA RALLIES

Herbalife: Motivational rallies, complete with testimonials, are a staple. Company founder Mark Hughes (who died of a drug overdose in 2000), once told rally crowds selling Herbalife products would make the world a better place.

Tea Party: Rallies often seem to be the movement’s raison d'etre. They often feature testimonials from an activist claiming that before the tea party, she had been "just a mom" who didn't care about politics, but now, her life has been transformed through work to make the country a better place for her children and grandchildren.

PEOPLE AT THE BOTTOM GO BROKE

Herbalife: Class action lawsuit settled in 2004 for $6 million alleged that thousands of people who signed on as Herbalife “supervisors” lost anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000.

Tea Party: Pam Silleman, a single mom who founded the Napa Tea Party in California, says she has depleted savings and run up $100,000 in credit card bills getting local tea party off the ground.

PEOPLE AT THE TOP MAKE $

Herbalife: The average "president's team" member, a group that makes up less than one percent of Herbalife’s distributors, reportedlygrosses about $600,000 a year.

Tea Party: Jenny Beth Martin, a national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots has saidshe now earns $6,000 a month. Co-coordinator Mark Meckler, the former member of Herbalife's "president's team," draws a salary, too, though won’t disclose the amount. (Conspiracy minded and disgruntled patriots suspect it is at least six figures, paid with donations vacuumed up from local groups whose organizers are going broke.)

THRIVING IN BAD ECONOMIC TIMES

Herbalife: While the stock market was in a serious slump and the country in a dire recession, Herbalife’s stock price has more than doubled as the unemployed turn to desperate money-making schemes.

Tea Party: Didn’t exist before February 2009. Tea Party Patriots, for its part, now claims 15 million members.

proto was health care hecklers organized to shout down http://crooksandliars.com/taxonomy/term/12266

http://crooksandliars.com/taxonomy/term/12266  rachel maddow script  Bob McGuffy, freedomworks

Tim Bishop in NY needed 5 cops to get to car

D Tom Pirello astroturf fake letters on climate change from coal co

bonner: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/coal_lobby_paid_7_million_to_pr_firm_that_hired_bo.php

join a coal-industry front group, which then hires a PR firm, which then hires an astroturf lobby firm, which then hires a temp, who forges a letter in support of your position.

2010 Tea Party incident

The FBI investigated a March 2010 incident in which Perriello's brother's address was listed on a Tea Party movement website, mistakenly believed to be the congressman's address. Mike Troxel, an organizer for the Lynchburg Tea Party, posted the address on his blog, encouraging tea party activists to "drop by." A gas line to an outdoor barbecue grill was cut at the brother's house and is being treated as a threat to Perriello over his vote on healthcare reform during the 111th Congress.^[20]

deathers bd member of large medical device co

http://www.campusprogress.org/know5things/3909/astroturf-tea-parties

Know Five Things

1. The tea parties are organized by two large, well-funded, lobbyist-run think tanks.[Think Progress]

• Americans for Prosperity: This group, run by Ralph Reed’s former lobbying partner Tim Phillips, is handling the PR and planning the events in the following states: New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas

• Freedom Works: This group is run by former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey. They have a) set up Web sites to promote the events that are supposed to look as if they’ve been set up by amateurs; b) written how-to guides and talking points for the events; c) coordinated conference calls among protesters and activists to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”

2. Free Publicity and Hype on Fox News

• Media Matters has documented the aggressive promotion of the anti-tax protests on Fox News: “Fox News has in dozens of instances provided attendance and organizing information for future protests, such as protest dates, locations and website URLs. Fox News websites have also posted information and publicity material for protests. Fox News hosts have repeatedly encouraged viewers to join them at several April 15 protests that they are attending and covering.” [Media Matters]

• Promising “fair and balanced” coverage, hosts such as Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, and Sean Hannity are all planning to broadcast live from the events. Fox News commentator Neil Cavuto defends the network’s coverage, saying Fox News covered the Million Man March, so it should be able to cover the tea parties. News Hounds, however, points out that the Million Man March took place on Oct. 16, 1995, while Fox News wasn’t created until Oct. 7, 1996. [Think Progress] [News Hounds]

3. Heavy Involvement From GOP Leaders

• To stress the grassroots nature of the anti-tax protests, Fox News has stressed the event has no partisan agenda.

• The Hill reports that the NRCC is using the event to raise money. The group sent an e-mail to supporters with a link to show them any local tea parties, then asked, “You cannot afford to allow the Democrats to continue their fiscally insanity. Please consider contributing $15, $25, $50 or more as we fight for you.” [The Hill]

• An article on their Web site claimed “only two members of Congress — both Republicans — who have committed to attending the demonstrations on the day income taxes are due.” [Fox News]

• On Fox’s show America’s Newsroom, host Megyn Kelly repeated the claim that “only two members of Congress have agreed to join in, in these events, one of them is South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint.” [Think Progress]

• Progressive blogs quickly found at least 12 GOP lawmakers involved in the protests.

• Fox News then “corrected” its story, saying, “Editor’s Note: Following this FOXNews.com report, the Republican Study Committee surveyed 110 members and found 38 lawmakers who say they will participate in tea party activities on tax day.” [Fox News]

4. What Do The Protesters Want?

• Anti-TARP bailout. According to the Web site, the biggest complaint is about the $700 billion TARP bailout of the banks (which happened more than 6 months ago at the behest of George W. Bush.)

• Anti-Obama. From Paul Krugman: “Thus, President Obama is being called a ’socialist’ who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.”

• Anti-Stimulus. Another complaint is against the package designed to create 3.5 million jobs in the U.S.

• Pro-Tax Cuts. Following a link from the Tea Party web site takes you to a “Tool Kit For Tea Parties,” on a site hosted by Newt Gingrich’s group “American Solutions.” Their solutions include: Tax cuts. Getting rid of the Capital Gains tax. Killing the Employee Free Choice Act. More drilling. Getting rid of Sarbanes-Oxley, the 2002 law created in the wake of the Enron scandals to provide oversight of large public corporations. [American Solutions]

5. Polls show “regular people” aren’t as interested in the protests.

• A Fox News poll released on April 2 found only 36 percent of Americans said they would “be willing to join” a “tea party” protest. [Fox News]

Also:

Think Progress compiled a list of involved lawmakers and their venues. Also, “the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported yesterday that Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) will be appearing at tea party protests as well. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) have also been urging their constituents to attend tea party protests while Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is sponsoring a bill in Congress to honor the protests.” [http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/13/kelly-fox-tea-party/]

• Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Salt Lake City.
• Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) and a representative from Rep. Sam Graves’ (R-MO) office, Overland Park
• Rep. John Fleming (R-LA), Shreveport
• Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-FL), Jacksonville
• Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH), Wauseon
• Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) and former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ), Phoenix
• Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), Charlotte
• Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), Brevard
• Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Longview
• Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), Columbia.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/print/article/288283

Pelosi says Tea Party "Astroturf" yet shares some of her concerns

Posted Feb 28, 2010 by ■ Chris Dade

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday repeated her accusation that the Republican Party is orchestrating some of the activities of the Tea Party movement. Nevertheless she believes the movement shares some views with Democrats.

Pelosi, who has represented California's 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives for approaching 23 years, spoke Sunday on the ABC program "This Week" and repeated an accusation she has made regarding the alleged link between the GOP and the Tea Party movement.

Responding to questions from Elizabeth Vargas of ABC the House Speaker again used the term "Astroturf" when referring to what she believes is the Republican Party "hijacking the good intentions of lots of people who share some of our concerns".

Asked by Vargas if the Tea Party is a force, returning to previous comments she had made when talking about the movement, Pelosi said:

No – No what I said at the time is, that they were -- the Republican Party directs a lot of what the Tea Party does, but not everybody in the Tea Party takes direction from the Republican Party. And so there was a lot of, shall we say, Astroturf, as opposed to grassroots.

But, you know, we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as -- it just has to stop. And that's why I've fought the special interest, whether it's on energy, whether it's on health insurance, whether it's on pharmaceuticals and the rest

One instance of Nancy Pelosi questioning the authenticity of the Tea Party movement was reported by Think Progress in April 2009.

On that occasion Pelosi was quoted as saying when appearing on KTVU News, which is shown in the San Francisco area:

What they want is a continuation of the failed economic policies of President George Bush which got us in the situation we are in now. What we want is a new direction. … This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle clas

Think Progress appeared to be lending support to Pelosi's claims when it noted that Tea Party events have been organized by what it describes as "the well-funded right-wing think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works".

But Pelosi has also drawn angry responses from her opponents in respect of comments she has made in which she has seemingly either tried to compare Tea Party activists in some way to Nazis or complained about their use of Nazi symbols when protesting against the policies of President Obama.

Also in April 2009 the Weekly Standard stated that Tea Party activists had indeed been compared to Nazis, although it attributes the comparison to a senior aide to House Democratic leaders and not specifically Nancy Pelosi.

Confirming Pelosi's "Astroturf" accusation around that time the Weekly Standard highlighted a document circulated to the media by the unnamed aide which apparently spoke of "neo-Nazis, militias, secessionists and racists" attending Tea Party events and reporters needing protection from the police while at a Tea Party event in Cincinnati.

Then in August the Washington Times opined that the House Speaker had not been offended when placards suggesting former President George W. Bush was a Nazi were carried by protesters in her own Congressional district.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh entered that same row over the use of Nazi imagery.

According to the Los Angeles Times Limbaugh repeated an observation by the Sweetness & Light blog that the logo created for President Obama's healthcare program was similar to Nazi symbols.

Limbaugh paraphrased the same blog when he explained why he thinks it is the Democratic Party that has much in common with the Nazi Party that ruled in Germany from 1933 through 1945 under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. He asserted:

Well, the Nazis were against big business -- they hated big business. And of course we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn. They were against cruelty and vivisection of animals, but in the radical sense of devaluing human life, they banned smoking. They were totally against that. They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables, as we all know, and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare

NRCC http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/109823-gop-campaign-chief-joins-tea-party-caucus

astroturf invest

http://exiledonline.com/how-freedomworks-gave-the-teabaggers-a-dirty-sanchez/

,,,

Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an investigation exposing the nascent “Tea Party” protest movement for what it really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or “fake grassroots”) lobby campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core.

The Tea Party movement was born on Feb. 19 with a now-famous rant by second-string CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli, who called for a “Chicago Tea Party” in protest of President Barack Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners. Santelli’s call blazed through the blogosphere, greased along by a number of FreedomWorks-funded blogs, propelling him to the status of a 21st century Samuel Adams — a leader and symbol of disenfranchised Americans suffering under big-government oppression and mismanagement of the economy.

That same day, a nationwide “Tea Party” protest movement mysteriously materialized on the Internet. A whole ring of Web sites came online within hours of Santelli’s rant, like sleeper-cell blogs waiting for the trigger to act, all claiming to have been inspired by Santelli’s allegedly impromptu outburst.

At first glance, the sites appeared to be unconnected and unplanned. But many were suspiciously well designed and strangely on point with their “nonpartisan” and “grassroots” statements. It was as if all of them were reading from the same script. The Web sites heavily linked to each other, spreading their mission with help of Facebook and Twitter feeds. FreedomWorks, as if picking up on rumblings coming from the depths of the conservative netroots, linked to them, too.

But as our investigation showed, the key players in the Tea Party Web ring were no amateurs, but rather experienced Republican operatives with deep connections to FreedomWorks and other fake grassroots campaigns pushing pro-big-business interests.

FreedomWorks has a long history of using such campaigns. Founded in 2004 by Dick Armey, the former Republican House Majority Leader and lobbyist from Texas, and publishing titan Steve Forbes, FreedomWorks represented the consolidation and rebranding of two older think tanks, Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded by the notorious Koch family, and Empower America, a powerful lobbying firm that has battled health care reform and minimum-wage bills while championing deregulation, corporate tax cuts and whatever else their corporate clients desire.

The idea was to bring these two dinosaurs into the Internet age so they could compete with the newly created MoveOn.org.

FreedomWorks got caught AstroTurfing their sponsors’ agendas almost as soon as the group was formed. In 2005, when President George W. Bush was trying to get the public to go along with his plans for handing Social Security over to Wall Street bankers, the New York Times revealed that a “regular single mom” paraded by Bush’s White House in its PR campaign was in fact FreedomWorks’ Iowa state director. jacques]

Last year, the the Wall Street Journal exposed FreedomWorks’ role in sponsoring AngryRenter.com, a site designed to imitate an amateur blog with a plutocrat’s agenda: to shoot down a $300 billion bill meant to help distressed American homeowners. Freedomworks and its clients understood that if the superwealthy Republicans who opposed the bill were fronting the campaign, it wouldn’t fly with regular Americans buckling under the housing crisis, so they set up Angryrenter.com to give the impression that millions of ordinary Americans were the ones opposing it. The bill passed, but AngryRenter.com served as a warm-up exercise for the Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party improved on the AngryRenter.com model by diversifying its AstroTurf assets. Rather than put all its efforts into one vulnerable strategic entity, FreedomWorks distributed its campaign across a network of smaller, seemingly independent blogs and sites. If one was outed as a fake, the rest of the machine could deny affiliation and survive.

But what reeked of AstroTurfing on the Internet also reeked on the street, when protests hit over 30 cities across the country on Feb. 27.

In Santa Monica, Calif., the crowd was no bigger than the kind that mills around taco trucks at lunch hour. Other locations reported the same pathetic tally. In Cobb County, Ga., which should have been teeming with outraged freedom-loving, small-government activists, turnout was only marginally better.

It was clear that this grassroots movement was meant as a TV-only event. In the following days, as our article generated controversyabout who really backed the Tea Party, FreedomWorks came clean and admitted to staging the whole thing.Santelli, the movement’s own larger-than-life hero, published a lawyer-crafted statement on CNBC’s site renouncing his role in the rebellion and throwing himself at the feet of Obama.

It was a crushing and humiliating blow to see the movement’s leader buckle so quickly, as if Adams had rushed to King George’s palace, three-pointed-hat in hand, and threw himself at the monarch’s mercy. To add to the humiliation, Santelli’s appearance on the Daily Show was canceled, and his employer, CNBC, soon became the laughingstock of the American network TV world.

The Tea Party movement seemed like it was dead in the water. But what seemed to be another failed FreedomWorks project came back one month later with a vengeance.

FreedomWorks is now running the show completely out in the open, coordinating a vast and confusing army of Web sites, selling Tea Party merchandise (with proceeds going straight into FreedomWorks’ coffers) and tapping Republican celebrities for speaker slots. Fox News will provide around-the-clock, coast-to-coast coverage of today’s Tea Party event. (The network’s newest star, Glenn Beck, will hold a $500-a-plate fundraiser for the cause before zooming over to a tea party scheduled to take place at the Alamo in San Antonio.) Last week, Newt Gingrich, former Georgia congressman and Speaker of the House, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced they’ll keynote tea parties of their own in Texas and New York.

The Tea Parties have gone large — and they’ve gone populist. Today’s Tea Parties are sure to dwarf the duds of February. Somehow, a movement that was exposed as a fraud has persevered and morphed into something that is channeling and redirecting legitimate concerns about Obama’s handling of the financial crisis.

To understand what the Tea Parties are really about, timeline is everything. The Tea Parties were never about the little guy’s fight against big government or Wall Street. FreedomWorks did not uncork Santelli while the government was bailing out the banks. The FreedomWorks machine was idle while Citibank and GE pocketed their billions. (The latter, incidentally, a big donor to FreedomWorks).

Freedomworks kicked off its anti-tax, anti-spending movement only when the government announced it would give money to regular Americans to help avoid a wave of housing foreclosures.

How did the right-wing get people behind its absurd and unpopular economic platform of tax cuts, deregulation, status-quo health care, slashed entitlements and leaving homeowners to the wolves?

Enter the AIG-bonus scandaland a steady trickle of news about the mismanagement of the bailout billions and the corrupt backroom cronyism that has guided the whole process, from the Henry Paulson era straight into the Larry Summers/Tim Geithner era. These developments, all under liberal Democratic governance, enraged a lot of people and muddied the waters of outrage — and policy.

The AIG-bonus scandal put a handle on the irresponsible government policies that the Tea Party movement was supposedly rallying against. What could be more irresponsible than allowing financial executives that got America into this mess to walk away with multi-million dollar bonuses lifted from taxpayer money? The same people who cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes were taking what was left of the kitty to ensure that they could maintain their mansions-and-yachts lifestyles.

Somehow, the Right twists this issue by getting people to focus their rage on the government and not the banker. The problem is the Left has been subdued, to put it mildly, in channeling rage at the bankers, in part because Obama’s economic teamis the bankers and so far serves the bankers in programs that are corrupt, opaque and infuriating.

The Left should have been there to claim this genuine outrage from the very beginning. But it was late to the game. Until a new initiative called A New Way Forward began picking up steam a few weeks ago, a lot of people outraged by Obama’s economic policies had only one place to go: their local FreedomWorks Tea Party.

Luckily, and not a moment too soon, this is no longer the case.

It is hard to imagine more different origins from the FreedomWorks creation than those of A New Way Forward. The seed for the initiative was planted on the ratty couch in a 19th century farmhouse on a western Massachusetts apple orchard. It was there that 29-year-old Tiffiniy Cheng sat one night watching Bill Moyers Journal with her 86-year-old landlord. Moyers’ guest that night was MIT professor and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson.

A fierce critic of Obama’s handling of the crisis, Johnson explained on the show that there were plenty of roads not being taken, all of which led to nationalization and strict new antitrust laws.

As they listened, Cheng and her landlord grew increasingly despondent. When the show ended, the old woman turned to the younger woman and said, “You kids need to go out and do something. The world is changing so much, you need to take control of things.” Cheng decided to take up the challenge.

“I knew a lot of people like me were upset that the banks are driving the process,” she says. “So I decided to coordinate among all of the frustrated people out there, who are angry about the bailouts and want to break up the massive institutions who brought us here.”

Unlike a lot of people who might have shared the same thought, Cheng actually had the organizing experience and tech chops to do put it together. A self-described nonprofit “technologist” and activist with a decade of experience — she was part of the group that launched OpenCongress.org and has developed software designed to facilitate Internet organizing — Cheng sketched out a plan and called some colleagues.

Soon they had a manifesto based on three principles: nationalize, reorganize and decentralize. A Web site followed, and word quickly spread with the help of some well-connected and supportive advisers, among them Zephyr Teachout and Joe Trippi, both architects of Howard Dean’s pioneering 2004 presidential campaign.

Aided by social-networking sites and Cheng’s own organizing software, more than 10,000 soon signed NWF’s petition to break up the banks. The petition now holds more than 40,000 signatures and counting.

Last Saturday, NWF held the first day of rallies — the left’s answer to the Tea Parties. Hundreds gathered in 60 cities around the country (including on the East Coast, despite heavy rains). The organization is also picking up its share of media attention, including a mention last month on Moyers’ Journal, which brought the nascent group full circle.

“Having been around politics and political organizing for many years, this feels different,” says William Greider, a New Way Forward senior adviser. “The ‘Tea Party’ gambit is the opposite example — planned and promoted top-down with the old hands of the right and lots of money. One of our democratic difficulties in this mass-market age is figuring out what’s real and what’s cleverly constructed propaganda.”

It’s hard to get more real than the first line of the NWF manifesto: “Big bankers ruined our economy, and now they are gaming the political system so they can profit even more off the crisis they caused. They must be stopped.”

Stopping the big bankers from plundering America. That’s what protest against the administration’s economic policy must be about.

And whatever the Tea Party organizers scream today while standing on tea boxes, their sponsors at FreedomWorks have no intention of ending the plunder.

Instead, FreedomWorks and its clients want to ensure more of the national wealth is at their disposal — which for them means more deregulation, lower taxes for the rich, fewer government programs for distressed homeowners and no pricey national health insurance.

The suckers in the Tea Party movement have no idea that while their anger is genuine, they’re doing the king’s bidding, not their own.

This article was originally published on Alternet.

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine are editors of eXiledonline.com. Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

Further reading:

• Yasha Levine reports from the disturbingly grassroots Tea Party in Victorville, CA
• The investigative piece that broke the Tea Party/FreedomWorks connection wide open

RS

By voting en masse against the president's initiatives, Republicans now have the luxury of casting everything as Obama's fault — even if it requires distorting the president's record. Democrats, they argue, are hurting average Americans. "The economy is worse for having done the stimulus," says Norquist. "It's not that it helped a little bit. It didn't help at all!" The GOP, he insists, can make the same argument on health care: "There's nothing in the health care bill that's any good at all. It's all taxes and transfers of income. There's nothing in there that reduces the costs of health care for anybody."

In reality, both assertions are demonstrably wrong. The stimulus has created 2 million jobs in its first year, according to the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, and the Democratic health care plan will save taxpayers $104 billion over 10 years. But Republicans aren't letting the reality-based virtues of Obama's initiatives stand in their way. To distract voters, they have unleashed an all-out campaign to demonize the president's agenda.

Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, played a lead role in instigating the Tea Partiers — a nearly all-white movement that has cast the president as a socialist, Kenyan-born tyrant intent on bankrupting America and euthanizing the elderly. The Tea Party's most extreme rhetoric has often been fanned by top Republicans in both the House and Senate. Last July, long before Sarah Palin coined the phrase "death panels," Boehner warned that Obama's health care plan would lead America "down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia." Grassley, one of the chief GOP negotiators on the bill, claimed that under "government-run health care" the ailing Ted Kennedy would have been denied care for his brain tumor by federal bean counters who would "pull the tubes." The rhetoric was as hypocritical as it was dishonest: Both Boehner and Grassley had previously voted to provide government-funded, end-of-life counseling for terminal patients as part of the GOP's Medicare expansion in 2003.

The Republicans' grotesque distortions of Obama's record have become a matter of dogma for the GOP's new grass-roots base. A recent poll found that only two percent of Tea Partiers are aware that the president enacted the largest middle-class tax cut in history. A staggering 44 percent, by contrast, believe that Obama has increased their taxes — and only 16 percent blame the current economic catastrophe on Bush, who ran up record deficits by slashing taxes for the wealthy.

The Tea Party's fight-the-power theatrics have also helped Republicans obscure the fact that the few alternatives they have bothered to offer to President Obama's policies are a repeat of the Bush-league economics that cater to Wall Street banks and hedge-fund billionaires. The GOP attacked Democrats for the size of the stimulus, for example, arguing that anything the government did be "timely, temporary and targeted." But the Republican alternative — a Rovian package of permanent tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthiest Americans — carried a 10-year price tag of more than $3 trillion. And the GOP alternative to health care — a mix of deregulation and health-savings accounts — would leave the share of Americans without insurance unchanged at 17 percent.

[From Issue 1100 — March 18, 2010]

---

mojo

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/08/:{bob-inglis:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-tea-party-casualty?page=2

GW

Just what the Senate needs: another climate change denier. Joe Miller's potential upset ofSen. Lisa Murkowskiin Alaska's Republican primary could mean another diehard climate skeptic in the mix. 

Not that Murkowski is a hero of enviros. She's been doing her darnedest to stifle the EPA on the public health dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, hardly a surprise given the fact that Big Oil has sent almost $500,000 her way since she joined the Senate in 2002. But at least Murkowski acknowledges the human role in heating up the planet. 

Miller, a Tea Partier backed by Sarah Palin, holds fast to the notion that it's nature's way:

I think it's undeniable, that anyone who has looked at the natural record of the Earth can see significant cyclical changes well before the industrial age, so we know the temperature change is part of the process of our existence, and frankly, you're probably aware in the '70s there were real concerns about global cooling.

Here's more on his take.

Twist and doubt:At least Sen. John McCain won handily in Arizona's Republican primary. Yes, this is good news. McCain did a world-class flip flop on cap-and-trade this past year. But his opponent J.D. Hayworth, another Tea Partier, proudly "rejects phony climate change data." Expect more deniers in the fall campaigns. Susana Martinez, the Republican candidate for governor in New Mexico, says scientists still haven't proven that climate change is manmade. All three Republican congressional candidates in the state agree with her. The same goes for every one of the six Republican Senate candidates in New Hampshire.

----

Post-Beck Tea Party's Strange Bedfellows

— By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Aug. 30, 2010 4:44 AM PDT

— Stephanie Mencimer

For tea partiers, one of the great disappointments of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall Saturday was the ban on political signs. After all, sign-making seems to be half the fun of going to any good tea party. So the Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella group for thousands of tea party activists, decided to give folks from out of town a chance to wave their "NOBama signs" in the shadow of the Capitol. On Sunday morning, they convened a tea party, complete with fiery speeches from minor celebs and organizers, plus the requisite open mic session for anyone who wanted a chance to publicly call Obama a liar or read some bad poetry they'd written about liberty.

But signs or no signs, after baking in the sun all day on Saturday (the Mall was so hot that dozens of attendees had to leave the rally in ambulances), not that many Beck fans were looking to do it again on Sunday. Only about 200 die-hards made the trek up the Hill. For their trouble, they were treated with an unusual assortment of speakers. There were the usual suspects—Tea Party Patriot organizers Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin—but there was also a former FBI agent known for telling wild and dubious tales about his time in the Clinton White House, and a former Republican congressman with a long history of trampling the Constitution and trading favors with disgraced lobbyist Jack A...

The FBI agent was one Gary Aldrich, who, if you recall, in 1995 wrote a bestselling "expose," Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House,claiming that, among other things, the Clintons hung sex toys and drug paraphernalia on the White House Christmas tree. (The book, naturally, made him an immediate hero of Republicans and right-wingers everywhere.) He now writes occasionally for WorldNet Daily and runs the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, a group he founded whose advisory board includes Reagan-era luminaries Ollie North and Ed Meese. The Patrick Henry Center probably earned a few new members at the tea party for giving sweating activists a bunch of bright yellow fans emblazoned with "Stop Socialism."

Even weirder than having Aldrich on the podium, though, was the presence of former Rep. Ernest **Istook** (R-Okla.). Of all the former washed up congressmen you could drag out for a tea party, Istook is probably not a first choice. A longtime darling of the Christian Right, the Mormon politician is most famous for his attempts to pass a constitutional amendment that would allow prayer in schools. His record as a social crusader doesn't exactly align with some of the tea party's more libertarian or states' rights positions, or even its reverence for the Constitution.

Outraged to discover an ad on a DC bus urging marijuana legalization during his time on the House Appropriations Committee, Istook once introduced legislation that would punish the DC transit system financially for accepting the ad. His bill also would withhold funding from any transit authority that dared accept bus or subway ads challenging the nation's drug laws. The law was eventually found unconstitutional by a federal judge who wrote, "the government articulated no legitimate state interest in the suppression of this particular speech other than the fact that it disapproves of the message, an illegitimate and constitutionally impermissible reason." 

Istook's record also shows scant little respect for local governance. Most Americans don't realize that DC residents do not have voting representation in Congress. We are the only American citizens who truly understand what it means to be taxed without representation. To their credit, individual tea partiers informed about this abomination are usually deeply outraged. Istook, though, who served on the DC subcommittee of the House appropriations committee (briefly as chairman), has shown little sympathy for DC's disenfranchised residents. He used his committee post to meddle in the city's affairs like nobody's business, taking advantage of the fact that city residents had no way to fight back.

In the late 1990s, for instance, Istook joined with his GOP colleagues to prevent the city from counting the results of a ballot initiative that would have allowed medical marijuana in the District. Eventually a federal judge rebuked Istook and reminded him and his fellow congressmen that they were engaged in a huge violation of city residents' First Amendment rights. Two years after the election, the ballots were finally counted; the measure passed. But rather than let city residents decide their own fate, Istook helped prevent DC from spending any of its own money to implement the law. Istook also helped push measures that barred the District from using city money to fund needle-exchange programs to fight HIV and AIDS, which are epidemic in the city.

His actions on the DC subcommittee were hardly those of someone with deep, abiding respect for local democracy. On Sunday, I asked him about whether he's had a change of heart about meddling in the District's affairs now that he's come out as a tea partier. But Istook was unrepentant. He even disagreed that city residents were taxed without representation, saying, "You have representation. You just don't have the same vote."

Mark Meckler, one of the national coordinators of the Tea Party Patriots, the large national umbrella group that organized the event, said he was unaware of Istook's history in the District. "DC residents should have a vote," he said. Even so, Meckler said Istook was a good fit for the tea party because he has a stellar record on the group's core issues of fiscal conservatism.

But there's still one more reason why Istook and the tea partiers make rather strange bedfellows: He was implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Along with taking thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Abramoff's firm, Istook used Abramoff's sky boxes at Fed Ex Field during a Washington Redskins game for a fundraiser. Documents from one of the Abramoff-related prosecutions showed that Istook returned the favor by asking Abramoff what his clients would like to see in an upcoming transportation bill, a move that had Abramoff directing his staff to come up with a "Christmas list" of pork-barrel spending. Istook's chief of staff ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges for taking perks from lobbyists in exchange for official favors in a case related to the whole mess. It's hard to see how this sort of stuff would endear Istook to the tea partiers.

Perhaps they simply invited him to the party because of his singing voice. After reminding the crowd that all of the inalienable rights outlined in the Constitution come directly from God, he declared, "America should bless God," and then startled everyone by launching into a stirring baritone rendition of "God Bless America." He wasn't bad.

Stephanie Mencimer is a staff reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau.http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/post-beck-dc-tea-party-brings-strange-bedfellows

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/13/tea-party-billionaire-koch-brothers

Tea Party movement: Billionaire Koch brothers who helped it grow

Industrialists who own private company with annual revenues of £62bn have channelled millions of dollars to rightwing causes

• Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 October 2010 18.21 BST
• Article history

A clip from new documentary, (Astro) Turf Wars: How Corporate America Faked a Grassroots Revolution, ties oil billionaire David Koch closely to the Tea Party movement Link to this video 

It likes to present itself as a grassroots insurgency made up of hundreds of local groups intent on toppling the Washington elite.

But the Tea Party movement, which is threatening to cause an upset in next month's midterm elections, would not be where it is today without the backing of that most traditional of US political supporters – Big Oil.

The billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, a private company with 70,000 employees and annual revenues of $100bn (£62bn), used to joke that they controlled the biggest company nobody had ever heard of.

Not any more. After decades during which their fortune grew exponentially and they channelled millions of dollars to rightwing causes, Charles and David Koch are finally getting noticed for their part in the extraordinary growth of the Tea Party movement.

The two, 74-year-old Charles and David, 70, have invested widely in the outcome of the 2 November elections.

One Koch subsidiary has pumped $1m into the campaign to repeal California's global warming law, according to state records.

The brothers, their wives and employees have also given directly to Republican candidates for Congress and are the sixth-largest donors to the Senate campaign of Tea Party favourite Marco Rubio.

They have also given heavily to the Republican Jim DeMint in South Carolina, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics.

But organisations tracking money in politics say the Kochs' biggest impact in the midterm elections will be from funding and providing logistical support to such groups as Americans for Prosperity (AFP), one of the biggest Tea Party groups.

AFP, in turn, has spun off other organisations such as November is Coming, Hands Off My Healthcare, and the Institute of Liberty, which are buying up television ads and holding rallies across the country in an attempt to defeat Democrats.

US campaign laws make it easy for political interest groups and their corporate backers to hide their spending in elections. "This is a world of shadows," said Taki Oldham, an Australian documentary maker who spent months following Tea Party activists. "In my mind, without a doubt nobody has had more influence on the anti-Obama campaign than the Koch-funded groups."

For the Kochs, who inherited their politics as well as their business from their father, Fred, this has been a long and carefully cultivated project.

But after years in which their support for anti-regulation thinktanks and groups went largely undetected, the sudden visibility of the Kochs' power seems to have taken even the brothers by surprise.

"Five years ago, my brothers Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity," David Koch told AFP's annual Defending the Dream gathering in 2009. "It is beyond my wildest dreams that AFP has grown into this enormous organisation. The American dream of free enterprise and capitalism is alive and well."

Until last summer, most Americans had no idea who the Koch brothers were, and it is very likely that even AFP members did not know they were bankrolled by one of the richest men in corporate America.

But a spate of attention – sparked by a Greenpeace investigation and a profile in the New Yorker – has given the Kochs a degree of notoriety they are finding it difficult to live with.

When the Guardian stopped into the offices of the Charles G Koch charitable foundation, in the suburbs of Washington DC, the receptionist sent the head of the legal department out to talk.

After declaring all conversations off the record, lawyer Brian Menkes said it wasnormal for the Koch legal team to be involved in routine press inquiries.

"Go to any company in the world and the legal department is involved in media inquiries," he said. "It is standard operating procedure."

For his part, David Koch now seeks to distance himself from the Tea Party. In a rare interview in New York magazine, he said: "I've never been to a Tea Party event. No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me."

The extreme sensitivity carries across to the company website, where recent additions tout the brothers' commitment to environmental protections and offer a selection of "Koch facts", an antidote to the unflattering personal and political portraits of the two that have appeared recently.

"This is the outing of the Koch brothers. They didn't want this story told, especially in an election year," said Kert Davies, the research director for Greenpeace who has spent a decade gathering data on the family. "They have never been face forward."

But they do have deep pockets. Koch Industries has expanded from oil refinery to paper towels and Lycra.

The two brothers each own 42% of the company and occupy top-10 positions in the Forbes annual ranking of wealthy Americans, with personal fortunes of $21bn each.

Over the last 20 years, Koch Industries has donated at least $5.9m to political candidates, some 83% of which was set aside for Republican candidates, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics.

Since 1989, Koch Industries has spent more than any other oil and gas company on finding favour in Congress, paying $50m to lobbying firms.

But it is the Kochs' links to a welter of mass mobilisation campaigns opposing Barack Obama that is making the biggest impact. Political monitoring organisations say the Koch-connected Claude R Lambe Charitable Foundation has given $3.1m to Americans for Prosperity.

The Kochs' involvement in anti-government causes goes back to their father, who was a founding member of the virulently anti-communist John Birch Society.

He made his fortune by developing a more efficient refining method and built plants around the world, including 15 in the Soviet Union at the height of Stalin's purges in the early 1930s. He came to despise Stalin and, David Koch told the New Yorker, was "paranoid about communism, let's put it that way".

He worked hard to instil the same beliefs in his four sons. Two of those sons later became estranged from the family, and were eventually bought out of Koch Industries, but for Charles and David, the rightwing free market ideology was their lodestar.

As the CEO of Koch Industries, Charles Koch began supporting free-market thinkers while honing his own ideas in a book called the Science of Liberty.

The brothers did try direct action. In 1980, David Koch ran as a vice-presidential candidate on the libertarian ticket, winning just 1% of the vote.

The episode, Charles Koch has written, persuaded the brothers to refocus their energies. In the 1980s, they founded Citzens for a Sound Economy.

Over the next 20 years, they funnelled around $13m to Citizens for a Sound Economy. In 2004, the organisation split into Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which is closely tied to the former Republican Congressman Dick Armey and has received no more funding from the Koch family.

Obama's election, and the prospect that the new president would reverse nearly two decades of reduced government oversight of industry, put the Kochs and their footsoldiers in Americans for Prosperity on high alert.

"They were very afraid of the Obama administration and a return to a pro-regulatory environment after the Bush years, and probably ramped it up a bit to make sure nothing new was going to inhibit their business," Davies said.

A day after CNBC's Rick Santelli launched his on-air howl against Obama's mortgage bailout plan, AFP and Freedom Works put up Facebook pages and began organising events around the country. The Tea Party was under way.

• This article was amended on Thursday 21 October 2010. We said that there was no sign of David Koch at the Defending the Dream convention this year, but he did in fact attend the gathering, where he presented an award. This has been corrected.

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/

daily kos list 

• Pajamas TV

      - American Solutions  (SourceWatch Info)

      - The Institute for Liberty   (About Us)

      - Freedom Works   (SourceWatch info)

      - Americans for Limited Government  (SourceWatch info)

      - ParcBench   (About Us)

      - GOP USA   (SourceWatch info)

      - Radio For Conservatives   (About Us)

      - Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assoc.   (About Us)

      - Citizens Against Government Waste

      - Sen. Jim Demint- Saving Freedom   (SourceWatch info)

      - Americans For Tax Reform   (SourceWatch info)

      - Heartland Institute   (SourceWatch info)

      - Freedom Works   (SourceWatch info)

      - Coalition for a Conservative Majority   (SourceWatch info)

      - National Taxpayers Union   (SourceWatch info)

- New American Tea Party

We’re a coalition of citizens and organizations concerned about the recent trend of fiscal recklessness in government. This website is dedicated to the Washington, D.C. effort of February 27th, 2009 specifically sponsored by the American Spectator, the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Institute for Liberty, the Coalition for a Conservative Majority and the Young Conservatives Coalition.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/14/719839/-Peeling-Back-the-Layers-of-the-Tax-Day-Tea-Party

A Win in Spin for the Corporate-Backed Tea Party

Submitted by Anne Landman on November 5, 2010 - 3:16pm.

• media
• politics
• right wing

In the weeks before the 2010 mid-term elections, the Tea Party and its activities dominated the media, but there was a decided lack of discussion about exactly what the Tea Party is. Major media seemed sold on the idea that the Tea Party is one big homogenous, spontaneous grassroots uprising, but this was not the case. Apart from a single, exhaustive article in the August 30, 2010 edition of The New Yorker (aptly titled "Covert Operations,") that linked the wealthy billionaire Koch Brothers' and their corporate interests to the Tea Party, few media outlets discussed which factions of the movement were truly grassroots, which were corporate-backed, and to what extent corporations supported the "movement."

Here at PRWatch, we strove to tease out the difference between various Tea Party factions, like the GOP-backed Tea Party Express, the grassroots Tea Party Patriots and the for-profit corporation called Tea Party Nation. We found out which factions were getting the big money, who their PR operatives were, what types of PR tricks they were engaging in, and more.

Another big story about the Tea Party -- and perhaps the biggest missed story -- was about the a corporate takeover of a real grassroots movement. The Tea Party arguably started as a real grassroots movement, but was effectively taken over by wealthy corporate interests seeking a "grassroots" face to manipulate elections. PR Watch exposed Tea Party organizers Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity as corporate-backed front groups that have links to the Republican Party. We also linked their damaging anti-government rhetoric to the billionaires and corporations seeking to block regulation, torpedo consumer protection laws, and influence public policy in their favor.

In the run-up to 2012, PRWatch will continue our mission of exposing the growing corporate influence in elections, whatever forms it may take next. Stay tuned, and we'll do our best to keep you informed about the truth behind the news.

Will the Real Tea Party Movement Please Stand Up?

Submitted by Anne Landman on April 19, 2010 - 3:31pm.

Have you wondered how the Tea Party, portrayed as a "grassroots" movement, could possibly raise enough money in one year to procure a professionally-painted, luxury motor coach and send it on two highly-publicized national tours? Or how the Tea Party so quickly developed the expertise to plan, organize and execute the tours, and consistently draw major media attention to them?

The answer is that the Tea Party Express is not a "grassroots" effort. The Web site Politico.com obtained and posted a proposal (pdf) showing that long-time Republican party operatives are, in fact, directing the "Tea Party Express" portion of the movement. The "group" and its activities are the result of efforts by a Republican-affiliated political consulting and public relations firm, Russo Marsh & Rogers, based in Sacramento, California. PR executive Sal Russo of Russo, Marsh & Rogers is also the chief strategist for the Our Country Deserves Better, political action committee (PAC) formed in 2008 to oppose then-candidate Barack Obama.

A Visible "Brand"

The "Tea Party Express" is one of the more visible "brands" of the overall tea party movement. It is the faction that organized the highly publicized desert rally in Searchlight, Nevada last March to oppose Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), an event that cost around $1 million to pull off -- a pretty big chunk of change for a real "grassroots" gathering.

Since forming in 2008, theOur Country Deserves Better PAChas taken in more than $4.5 million in donations, including major contributions from corporate executives and other wealthy supporters of conservative candidates, like the actor Chuck Norris. The PAC does not have to disclose who its big-name funders are.

"Tea Party Express" PR Proposal

The PR proposal obtained by Politico was written by Joe Wierzbicki, a principal at Russo Marsh & Rogers. In it, Wierzbicki suggests essentially taking over the Tea Party movement by rushing in with campaign-style event planning and advance work. He suggests obtaining a "proper luxury coach wrapped in 'tea party'-themed graphical design," and sending it out to "cross the nation, stopping in cities to conduct 'tea parties.' " Wierzbicki suggests inviting local Tea Party leaders, talk radio hosts and fiscally-conservative political candidates to speak at each stop. Wierzbicki says a major fundraising effort would be needed "to 'do this 'right' (have an awesome looking tour bus, getting the word out, having slick/persuasive/compelling advertising, paying for permits/insurance hotels, food, etc... ). He suggests that, to raise the money, "the bus tour rallies focus not on asking for funds to support the tour, but on the " 'Defeat Harry Reid' or 'Defeat Chris Dodd' or 'Defeat Arlen Specter' political components to this effort."

In other words, Wierzbicki suggests exploiting the real Tea Partiers' emotions to raise money, and take the focus off the PR project itself. He also suggests renting email lists from conservative news outlets like Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, etc. to begin direct fundraising -- again, not a cheap endeavor.

All of Wierzbicki's ideas are professional-style campaign moves proposed by a GOP-affiliated, political PR firm. In fact, they bear a suspicious similarity to the strategy we saw in another big-funded, right-wing endeavor by Americans for Prosperity: the "Hands Off My Health Care Bus" and its tours around the nation. Clearly, none of this is the work of the kitchen-table set.

"Outsider" Sensitivity, "Buttressing Authenticity"

Wierzbicki expresses sensitivity to the issue of outsiders coming in and "working" the tea party theme. He says,

"We have to be very very careful about discussing amongst ourselves anyone we include 'outside of the family' because quite frankly, we are not only NOT part of the political establishment or conservative establishment, but we are also sadly not currently a part of the 'tea party' establishment ..."

Wierzbicki acknowledges the difference between their big PR effort and "real" grassroots activists:

"We can probably pull off a phenomenally successful tour without these big-ego establishment types, provided that we do a good job in getting the word out to local tea party leaders and grass roots conservatives who operate in their local communities independently as is..."

He discusses "buttressing our authenticity" by featuring local supporters and donors in TV ads that target Harry Reid.

True Grassroots Buried

Most everything Wierzbicki put in his proposal has come to fruition. The Tea Party Express is successfully raking in money and garnering tons of media attention while the real grassroots faction of the movement, the Tea Party Patriots, struggles to raise money and get attention. The Patriots have said they do not want to support political parties or PACs, and have accused the "Tea Party Express" of being a "sham organization" and an "astroturf" outfit. They point out that Republican strategists are co-opting a true conservative movement to raise money to support the party's agenda. The Patriots have even charged that Tea Party Express organizers dragoon real grassroots Tea Party activists into doing the grunt work for the professional campaign, like getting them to help set up stages and clean up rally sites after the bus leaves.

Even More Dubious Tea Party Factions

Other Tea Party factions are equally dubious: Tea Party Nation (the entity that organized the first official Tea Party convention last February in Nashville, Tennessee) is purely a for-profit business entity. Its official name, "Tea Party Nation Corporation," is even registered with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and Commerce, Division of Business Services. Its business is selling "tea party" merchandise, like bejeweled tea bag pins ($89.99 apiece), regular and decaffeinated "Freedom" coffee beans, trucker hats, coolers and other items at a Web site called Tea PartyEmporium.com. Tea Party Nation's organizer, an attorney named Judson Phillips, was even alleged to have linked a PayPal account for Tea Party Nation merchandise to his wife's bank account.

Corporate Backing

Reports indicate that the Tea Party movement benefits from millions of dollars in funding funneled to it from conservative foundations supported by mega-wealthy U.S. families and their business interests.

Money to organize and implement Tea Party activities flows primarily through two conservative groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. In an April 9, 2009 article posted on ''ThinkProgress.org'', Lee Fang reported that the principal Tea Party movement organizers are Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, two "lobbyist-run think tanks" that are "well funded" and provide the logistics and organizing for the Tea Party movement from coast to coast. ''Media Matters'' reported that FreedomWorks receives substantial funding from David Koch of Koch Industries, the largest privately-held energy company in the country, and the conservative Koch Family Foundations, which make substantial annual donations to conservative organizations (including FreedomWorks and other conservative think tanks advocacy groups). Media Matters reports that the Koch family has given more than $12 million to FreedomWorks and its predecessor, Citizens for a Sound Economy, between 1985 and 2002.

"Fox News Tea Parties"

The Tea Party also gets substantial support in the form of promotion from the Fox News Channel and its talk show hosts, including Glenn Beck. Media Matters noted that "While discussing the April 15 protests on his April 6 program, Beck suggested that viewers could "[c]elebrate with Fox News" by either attending a protest or watching it on Fox News. Beck stated that in addition to himself, hosts Neil Cavuto, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity would be "live" at different protests. While Beck spoke, on-screen text labeled those protests as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties."

The Real "Takeover" is by Corporate Interests

While tea partiers load their rifles and worry about a supposed "government takeover," their nascent movement itself has, in fact, been taken over by GOP-affiliated PACs, professional PR operatives, wealthy corporate interests seeking a "grassroots" face and by individuals seeking to profit off of citizens' honest concern about the country's political direction. Like a human hand zooming in and animating an otherwise limp hand puppet, these entities have zoomed in and co-opted the tea party movement from the inside out, and have started using it to advance their own agendas.

The bright side is that this episode is instructive to people on both sides of the political spectrum about how entrenched corporate, media and political interests work together to co-opt real public sentiment, and harness it to advance their own goals. A "big government" takeover may seem like less of a threat when viewed through the prism of how all these big, professional political and corporate-level interests have siezed the tea party movement and started using it for their own gain.

Tea Party Patriots

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Tea Party Patriots (TPP) is a conservative group initially organized by Freedomworks, which was responsible for organizing the anti-healthcare reform town hall mobs that occurred during the congressional recess period in August, 2009. TPP purportedly organized the anti-government, anti-tax rallies that occurred in April, 2009, but apparently Freedomworks was responsible for organizing these protests as well. After FreedomWorks orchestrated the original "Tea Party protests" in April of 2009, it supposedly handed over the reins of the movement to a group named the "Tea Party Patriots," but Rolling Stone magazine reports that internal correspondence from TPP's private listserv made it clear that FreedomWorks was still directing the Tea Party Patriots' activities. In June, 2009, after activists on the TPP list-serve began advocating to change the Tea Party logo, a top official from FreedomWorks stepped in and shut down the discussion. "I talked to everyone here," wrote Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for FreedomWorks, "and there was consensus that we will keep the logo."^[1]

TPP consists of a website (http://teapartypatriots.org), the ownership of which is masked by ProtectPrivacy, located in the Netherlands.^[2] There is no "about", "staff", "directors" or other information identifying any individual as responsible for any part of the website, listed as a 501(c)(4) organization on the homepage.

Tea Party Patriots avail themselves of free website services from ning.com (teapartypatriots.ning.com), where Bob MacGuffie's page (teapartypatriots.ning.com/profile/BobMacGuffie),[3] connects the TPP with the writer of the activist-disrupter "Rocking the Town Hall" memo composed by MacGuffie. TPP is listed as co-sponsor of The 912 Project (912dc.org March on Washington, September 12, 2009).^[3]

A person identified as "Key Note Speaker, Mark Meckler, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots" talked at the launch of the Tea Party Express bus tour.[4]

The Facebook page reports Tea Party Patriots National Coordinators, Amy Kremer, Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler.[5] Ironically, despite the heavy support of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and other MSM properties, they use Facebook instead of Murdoch's MySpace.com.

Another Facebook page offers this list of National Coordinators and associates them with The 912 Project.[6]

Tea Party Patriots National Coordinator Team

• Amy Kremer (amykremer@gmail.com; amykremer on gchat, 678.495.8271 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              678.495.8271      end_of_the_skype_highlighting) [7] [8]
• Jenny Beth Martin (jennybethm@gmail.com; jennybethm on gchat, 404.326.0936 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              404.326.0936      end_of_the_skype_highlighting)
• Mark Meckler (mark@teapartypatriots.org, mark.grassroots on gchat)
• Rob Neppell (rob@teapartypatriots.org)

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO.gov), the trademark was filed on July 9, 2009, by "Tea Party Patriots, Inc. CORPORATION GEORGIA Ste. 620-322 1025 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              620-322 1025      end_of_the_skype_highlighting Rose Creek Dr. Woodstock GEORGIA 30189." This is apparently as close to "official" headquarters as it is possible to identify.[9]

According to TPMMuckraker: "FreedomWorks Says Jump, Tea Partiers Ask How High.[10] ... But the discussion was soon cut short by Amy Kremer, the Tea Party Patriot national coordinator ... told the group: "Hey All, Not to be a pain, but this is not Tea Party Patriots logo to change. This is FreedomWorks logo and they have said they are keeping the original design."

SourceWatch resources

• Freedomworks
• Tea Party Express
• Tea Party movement funding

External resources

• Tim Dickinson, The Lie Machine, Rolling Stone magazine, September 23, 2009.
• Jonathan Raban, At the Tea Party, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2010
• Jane Mayer, Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama, The New Yorker, August 30, 2010

Contact

References

1. ↑ Tim Dickinson The Lie Machine: GOP operatives are running a secret campaign to kill health care reform, and it's based on Karl Rove's old playbook Rolling Stone, September 23, 2009
2. ↑ [1].
3. ↑ [2]

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tea_Party_Patriots"

Categories: Front groups | Astroturf | Tea Party Movement

Tea Party Express

From SourceWatch

Jump to: navigation, search

Tea Party Express is the name for a public relations blitz in 2009 via a cross-country caravan of buses and cars making 35 stops for rallies featured on conservative media. Tea Party Patriots (TPP) is a conservative group initially organized by Freedomworks, which was responsible for organizing the anti-healthcare reform town hall mobs that occurred during the congressional recess period in August, 2009.

This is one tour among several recent, simultaneous, or future scheduled tours. There are several astroturf organizations sending buses around in their own names. See also Americans For Prosperity's Hot Air Balloon Tour^[1]; Americans For Prosperity's Patients First Bus Tour^[2]; and the American Energy Alliance's American Energy Express.^[3]

The Tea Party Express Unfolds

• In what appears to be the earliest news listing for the Tea Party Express, a Talking Points Memo post of August 3rd, 2009 mentioned that sponsors of the tour were Our Country Deserves Better PAC, and Americans for Prosperity^[4];

• Subsequently, the Washington Times Moonie paper revealed more details, including that the tour would finish at Bridgeport, Connecticut where Moon's Unification Church USA is headquartered.^[5] Additional sponsors were revealed: FreedomWorks, the conservative advocacy group headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, the National Tax Limitation Committee, and Tea Party Patriots. Americans for Prosperity, which has launched a Patients First bus trip,American Conservative Union Club for Growth. All of these groups are involved in The 912 Project's 912dc.org March on Washington.

• By August 19th, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News had shown it's hand that it was part of the bus tour promotion.^[6][7][8]

• August 28th, 2009, bus tour begins with fanfare in Sacramento, California.^[9]

Tour Partners Logos on website homepage

On its website, the Tea Party Express lists its "tour partners" as comprising:^[10]

• http://www.ourcountrydeservesbetter.com/ -- Our Country Deserves Better
• http://www.marktalk.com/ -- MarkTalk.com, the website of radio talk show presenter Mark Williams;
• http://www.lloydmarcus.com/ -- Lloyd Marcus who describes himself on his website as a "proud Black Conservative Entertainer/Speaker "American Tea Party Anthem"'
• http://www.limittaxes.com/ -- National Tax Limitation Committee Bronze Sponsor 912dc.org, The 912 Project
• http://www.freerepublic.com/:{ -- Free Republic}:
• http://www.freedomworks.org/:{ -- FreedomWorks, was Citizens for a Sound Economy}:, Sponsor 912dc.org, The 912 Project
• http://www.parcbench.com/ -- ParcBench, which is also a Bronze Sponsor of 912dc.org's, The 912 Project
• http://www.multiccc.org/ -- MultiCultural Conservative Coalition
• http://www.teapartyexpress.org

Contact details

Website: http://www.teapartyexpress.org

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Tea Party Patriots
• Tea Party Nation

References

1. ↑ "AFP Takes Its Hot Air Balloon Tour Out West to Expose the Hidden Energy Tax Hike in:{ Cap-and-Trade:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Legislation", Media Release, August 2009.
2. ↑ "Events", Americans for Prosperity website, accessed September 2009.
3. ↑ Mark Svenvold, "The dirtiest bus tour in America attacks cap and trade bill", Daily Finance, August 28, 2009.
4. ↑ Brian Beutler, "August Recess: A Breakdown Of The Health Care Fight Ahead", Talking Points Memo, August 3, 2009
5. ↑ "Obama health plans revive tea parties", Washington Times, August 11, 2009.
6. ↑ "Fox News hosts birther Mark Williams to promote "how you can join" anti-Dem Tea Party Express", Media Matters of America, August 19, 2009.
7. ↑ Thomas Segel, "From Tea Parties to The 912 Project, Americans Are Challenging The Government", Wilson County News, Auust 21, 2009
8. ↑ "Fox News "hops" aboard Tea Party Express with rampant promotions, live coverage", Media Matters of America, August 28, 2009.
9. ↑ Michael B. Farrell,"‘Tea party’ in California, including a dump truck brigade", Christian Science Monitor, August 28, 2009.
10. ↑ "Tea Party Express", Tea Party Express website, accessed September 2009.

External resources

External articles

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tea_Party_Express"

Categories: United States | Health | Politics (U.S.) | Tea Party Movement

https://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-tea-party-and-religious-right-movements-frenemies-with-benefits

The Tea Party and Religious Right Movements: Frenemies with Benefits

Peter Montgomery

Senior Fellow

People For the American Way

November 2010

Note: This paper was prepared for"Fractures, Alliances And Mobilizations In The Age Of Obama: Emerging Analyses Of The Tea Party Movement," an October 22, 2010 conference convened by the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at the University of California Berkeley. This report and other papers will be updated after the November 2010 elections.

Table of Contents:

• Summary
• Introduction and Context
• Tensions & Rivalries
• National Leadership Connections
• Local Activist-Level Connections
• Candidates and Electoral Strategies
• Conclusion

Summary

The explosive growth, visibility and political impact of the Tea Party political movement in less than two years has inevitably led to tensions, jealousies, and jockeying for political position with the Religious Right movement, whose leaders have until now enjoyed being the self-declared voice of the Republican Party's most active and engaged base. These institutional rivalries, and the ongoing debate about whether conservative candidates should highlight their positions on social issues important to Religious Right leaders as well as the small-government, low-tax message of the Tea Party movement, can mask the extensive overlapping and symbiotic relationships between the two movements at the leadership and activist levels. Despite some disagreements over priorities and political strategies, the two movements are pursuing shared political goals (defeating Democratic candidates and weakening the Obama administration) and policy objectives (most notably the repeal of health care reform legislation) as well as the long-term cultural goal of promoting an "American exceptionalism" that claims a divine mandate for limited government.Most of the federal candidates being backed by the Tea Party movement and being supported by vast sums of money from corporate coffers and anti-government billionaires are not in fact libertarians, but "complete conservatives" who share the Religious Right's opposition to legal abortion and legal equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

Introduction and Context

The 2008 election of President Barack Obama and large Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress sent shockwaves through the entire conservative political establishment. Religious Right leaders, who were largely unenthusiastic backers of GOP nominee John McCain until the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, announced well before Obama's inauguration that they now viewed themselves, in the words of Concerned Women for America's Wendy Wright, as part of a "resistance movement."1

Some conservative strategists began calling immediately for a grassroots movement that would challenge insufficiently conservative Republicans. Just weeks after the 2008 election, reports journalist Sarah Posner, the secretive Council for National Policy heard from Richard Viguerie that "there needs to be a flowering of grass-roots conservative activism and local groups, local PACs." She quotes an attendee recounting Viguerie's strategy: "He's basically saying you've got a Republican county commissioner in Buzzard's Breath, Texas, and he's not a conservative? Run a conservative against him."2

At the same time, some conservative commentators challenged the prominent public role played by the Religious Right base of the Republican Party. Shortly after the election, pundit Kathleen Parker declared that "Armband religion is killing the Republican Party." Parker declared that "The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it," even as she acknowledged the GOP's dilemma: "But they need those votes!"[emphasis in original].3

So the stage was set for a conservative backlash to the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leadership that was separate from the traditional Religious Right groups which had not proven themselves capable of delivering a sufficient electoral impact in 2008.

Some consider CNBC commentator Rick Santelli's February 19, 2009 rant against the Obama administration's planned intervention in the mortgage market4to be a pivotal spark for the Tea Party movement. A week later, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Sen. Jim DeMint, the Religious Right's point man in the U.S. Senate, declared that Americans were ready to "take to the streets to stop America's slide into socialism."5

Public anger at the extraordinary "bailout" of Wall Street and other interventions in the financial markets was quickly exploited by corporate-funded conservative groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity who helped mobilize anti-tax protests around the country on April 15, 2009.6At this nascent moment of the Tea Party Movement, the Religious Right was there. The American Family Association, one of the oldest and largest Religious Right organizations, used its extensive online networks to encourage activists to participate in the Taxed Enough Already protests.6Journalist Adele Stan concludes:

In truth, these two movements have been intertwined since the dawn of the Tea Party movement in 2009, when Republicans with a religious-right constituency saw a way to seize greater power within their party by playing to the Tea Party crowd.8

By the summer of 2009, Religious Right leaders had enthusiastically joined GOP-led and Tea Party-fueled opposition to health care reform efforts. As People For the American Way Foundation noted, 9Religious Right leaders moved well beyond their claims that reform would lead to taxpayer funding of abortions to fully embrace the Tea Party's anti-government talking points. For example, whenFocus on the Family's James Dobson took part in a conference call for anti-choice activists, he denounced the legislation both as a "huge abortion industry bailout" and as a "health care power grab by the federal government." The anti-abortion Operation Rescue urged activists to "stop Obama's radical, socialistic abortion agenda."10

This rhetoric reflects conservative leaders' belief that the fight against health care reform was a way to reinvigorate the off-again, on-again coalition between social and economic conservatives that is essential to advancing right-wing political objectives. (DeMint famously said that defeating health care reform would be President Obama's "Waterloo.") The movement-straddling Heritage Foundation, the behemoth think tank and marketing firm for right-wing causes, has been pushing that agenda hard. It published Indivisible,11a book of essays with a gimmick: people known primarily for "social issue" activism were asked to contribute essays on an economic topic and vice versa. So it includes an essay from anti-gay activist Harry Jackson on the moral evils of the minimum wage, whileClub for Growth founder (and current Wall Street Journal editorialist) Steven Moore opined on the importance of the family.

The publication's editor summarized its thesis saying "in the long run, economic prosperity and limited government depends on moral principles like respect for the property of others and social institutions such as marriage."12Heritage has been promoting that book at Religious Right gatherings, and hosted a panel discussion at this year's Values Voter Summit in September.

The same strategy is apparent in the creation of the Freedom Federation, a confederation of Religious Right groups launched in the summer of 2009. The Federation published a Declaration of American Values that declared groups' allegiance not only to the social agenda of the Religious Right but also to a system of taxes that "are not progressive in nature, and within a limited government framework, to encourage economic opportunity, free enterprise, and free market competition."13

The How to Take Back America conference in September 2009, convened by Phyllis Schlafly and Religious Right radio host Janet Porter, also demonstrated a merging of messaging and organizing strategies among the Religious Right and Tea Party right. For example, a session about health care reform focused less on the threat of publicly funded abortion than on the "fascist" government "takeover" of the economy as a "power grab" by the president.14

The overriding shared goals of economic and social conservatives in the wake of President Obama's election have been to diminish his administration's ability to advance its policy goals and to build toward the defeat of Democratic lawmakers in 2010. The importance of those electoral goals to both groups ultimately overwhelms the significance of the sometimes public squabbles over priorities or the question of the visibility or invisibility of the Religious Right's social agenda at Tea Party events and in Tea Party documents.

As Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said in March, "I don't see the tea party movement as a threat at all – I see it as additional allies and fellow travelers."15Or, as Mississippi Governor and former GOP chair Haley Barbour bluntly wrote in September in the Wall Street Journal, "Republican and tea party voters united means Mr. Obama defeated."16

WASHINGTON — It seems the ultimate thumb in the eye: that Glenn Beck would summon the Tea Party faithful to a rally on the anniversary of the March on Washington, and address them from the very place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech 47 years ago. After all, the Tea Party and its critics have been facing off for months over accusations of racism.

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Glenn Beck, in baseball cap, was greeted by supporters there on Friday.

“Thank you, Glenn!” Brenda Herr of Grant-Valkaria, Fla., shouted Friday as she waved to Glenn Beck near the rally site.

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But many of the busloads of Tea Party activists expected in Washington this weekend do not see any irony or offense. In fact, they have come to see the Tea Party as the aggrieved — its loosely affiliated members unfairly characterized, even persecuted, as extremists.

Eighteen months ago, many were moved to the streets by a belief that they had been not listened to by their representatives in Washington. (“How dare they ignore us?” reads a sign often seen at Tea Party rallies.) Now, encouraged by Tea Party leaders and people like Mr. Beck and Andrew Breitbart, whose http://BigGovernment.com is a source of news for many Tea Party supporters, they have adopted the language of the civil rights movement to describe their cause. Their sense of persecution has become a galvanizing force.

Consider the response last month when the N.A.A.C.P., the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, called on Tea Party leaders to denounce racist elements in their ranks — citing signs with racist slogans at Tea Party rallies.

Tea Party Patriots, the largest umbrella organization for thousands of local groups across the country, posted a petition on its Web site calling for the N.A.A.C.P. to revoke its resolution “condemning the Tea Party movement as ‘racist.’ ”

“It is nothing less than ‘hate speech’ for the N.A.A.C.P. to be smearing us as ‘racists’ and ‘bigots,’ ” the petition declared. “We believe, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a colorblind, postracial society. And we believe that when an organization lies and resorts to desperate tactics of racial division and hatred, they should be publicly called on it.”

On his radio show, Mr. Beck said he had not intended to choose the anniversary for his “Restoring Honor” rally on Saturday but had since decided it was “divine providence.”

Dr. King’s dream, he told listeners, “has been so corrupted.”

“Judge a man by the content of his character?” he said. “Character doesn’t even matter in this country. It’s time we picked back up the job.”

He later added: “We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it.”

It has become an article of faith among Tea Party groups that any racist signs at rallies — “Go back to Kenya,” directed at President Obama, is just one example — are carried by Democratic plants sent in to make the Tea Party look bad.

In March, when members of the Congressional Black Caucus accused protesters at a Tea Party rally against health care of spitting on them and shouting racist epithets, Tea Party leaders suggested that those episodes had not occurred, saying there was no video proof.

At a rally in Searchlight, Nev., a week later, Mr. Breitbart argued that black Democratic lawmakers had set out to provoke the protesters. When they did not make racist comments, Mr. Breitbart said, the Democrats simply accused them of doing so.

He looked into the crowd and said it proved that the Tea Party was not racist. “I see black faces, Hispanic faces. I’m Jewish,” he said. “Shalom, Nevada!”

In response to the N.A.A.C.P. resolution last month, Mr. Breitbart claimed reverse racism. He publicized a video of an Agriculture Department official, Shirley Sherrod, saying that she had discriminated against a white farmer. The video turned out to be heavily edited — in fact, Ms. Sherrod had helped the farmer and had actually been telling a longer story to make a point about the need for racial understanding.

Still, Tea Party leaders say they are outraged, as anyone would be, by accusations of racism: they do not see themselves that way.

FreedomWorks, a Washington advocacy group that has encouraged the growth of the Tea Party, is planning to take out full-page newspaper advertisements highlighting black, Hispanic and Jewish Tea Party members to make the point that the movement is diverse. It is also sponsoring a new documentary about black involvement in the cause....

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/us/politics/28beck.html?_r=1&ref=andrewbreitbart

By KATE ZERNIKE

Published: August 27, 2010

Michelle Malkin has a teabagger timeline. She seems to have left a few things out:

December 16, 2007 -- Ron Paul supporters have the first anti-tax Tea Party, reenact dumping of tea into Boston Harbor by tossing banners into a box.

August 2008 -- ChicagoTeaParty.com registered by Zack Christenson, "a producer for a conservative radio talk show host" (Milt Rosengerg) according to the New York Times. On August 28th, he also emails Michelle Malkin after the NRO's Stanley Kurtz goes on his program to talk about his investigation into the Obama/Bill Ayers relationship.

January 25 2009 -- Seattle school teacher, former actress and Young Republican Keli Carender starts her blog, Redistributing Knowledge. Calling herself Liberty Belle, her first post says conservatives need something "BOLD and DIFFERENT and REAL."

January 26 -- In her second post, Liberty Belle says "There are tens of millions of us, if not more. I think if we chose a day to show the world, scary coworkers be damned, that we exist and we are just as passionate about the direction of our country, that we could maybe finally find each other."

February 1 -- FedUpUSA calls for people to send tea bags to members of Congress -- "a Commemorative Tea Party."

February 10 -- At 10:06 am, Liberty Belle says "Anyone in the Seattle area? I would like to stage a Porkulus Protest here." It gets one comment in response. At 12:52 pm, she puts up another post to announce that the protest is on. The first comment comes the next morning.

February 11 or 12 -- Liberty Belle appears on the local Fox News radio show hosted by Kirby Wilbur, who is on the board of the**Young America's Foundation**(which produces CPAC). Makes no mention on her blog.

February 12 -- At 1:28 pm, Steve Beren, the GOP candidate who ran against Jim McDermott in 08 who works for an internet marketing firm, starts promoting the event. Says that Carender has appeared on the Kirby Wilbur and David Boze (KIRO radio) shows. Does not mention that he'll be speaking at the event.

February 12 -- At 2:27 pm, Liberty Belle says she will appear the next day on KIRO radio and announces that Steve Beren will be speaking at the event.

February 15 -- Michelle Malkin picks up Liberty Belle's announcement. Suggests Coloradans need to do the same.

**First rally organized on a three week-old blog with help from folks from Fox News Radio, the Young Republicans, The Young Americans Foundation (CPAC), and a GOP House candidate who works for an internet marketing firm.**

February 16 -- Malkin apparently first to use the term "tea party," but she uses it for comparison to theprotests: "From the Boston Tea Party to your neighborhood pork protest." Announces there will be a protest in Denver the next day. Links to a post that says she will be speaking at it. Instapundit links to Malkin's protest photos, says there will be one in Denver the next day and that "people are trying to organize them in Nashville and NYC."

February 16 -- Denver Metro Young Republicans put up a post (since disappeared, but cached here) saying Americans for Prosperity "will be holding a protest on the ColoradoCapitol steps tomorrow (Tuesday) from 12:15-2:00." Americans for Prosperity is the right wing think tank where David Koch, billionaire co-owner of Koch Industries, is Chairman of the Board. :{Ed Frank of Frank Strategies:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, who sent a videographer after me last weekend, is a consultant for Americans for Prosperity.

February 17 -- Malkin goes to Colorado for the event, still called a "porkulus protest." She says: "Jim Pfaff of Colorado Americans for Prosp:{erity:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Jon Caldara and the Independence Institute, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, and several GOP officials and state legislators spearheaded the event. The Independence Institute is funded by the Coors Foundation's Castle Rock Foundation, and "operates as a mini Heritage Foundation in Colorado." Jeffrey Coors sits on the board.

**According to Michelle Malkin, second rally organized by Koch/Americans For Prosperity, Coors/Independence Institute, Former GOP Congressman and Independence Institute Fellow Tom Tancredo**

February 17 -- Malkin announces that there will be a protest in Mesa, Arizona when Obama is there the next day. "KFYI is taking the lead," she says. KFYI is the Clear Channel station that kicked "Goldwater Republican" Charles Goyette off for speaking out against the war.

February 18 -- Mesa Arizona "porkulus" rally (still no mention of tea). ," KFYI shock jock Bruce Jacobs says, pointing to Hispanic demonstrators. He hosts the event with fellow KFYI host, former GOP Congressman JD Hayworth.

**Third rally in Mesa, Arizona organized by right wing Clear Channel radio station and hosted by six term GOP Congresmman**

February 19 -- Malkin announces "anti-porkulus" Kansas protest on Saturday the 21st (8:56 am). Glenn Reynolds and Malkin promote it on Pajamas TV. Not one mention of "tea party" yet.

February 19 --: "We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing." First mention of the term "tea party." Clip goes straight onto Drudge.

Within hours, a site called officialchicagoteaparty.com went up, with the domain name registered to Eric Odom. At the time he was working for a group called the Sam Adams Alliance, a501 c(3) non-profit that legally can't engage in political activity. Its chairman, Eric O'Keeffe, is on the board of the Club for Growth. He's since been taken off the website, but it's cached here.

Odom is one of the organizers of the Tax Day Tea Party group, and Matt Stoller accused him of astroturfing during the Drill Drill Drill campaign. Last year the Alliance started "an ambitious project ... to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues."

February 20: A Facebook page goes up calling for Tea Party demonstrations across the country:

Rick Santelli is right, we need a Taxpayer (Chicago) Tea Party

Rick Santelli is dead right! Enough bailouts of everyone who acted recklessly! It's time to stand up for all the regular people who played by the rules! Taxpayer Tea Party!

Listed admins include Odom and Brendan Steinhauser of Dick Armey's Freedomworks. The creator is Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity, and the Facebook Group leads back to a site called taxpayerteaparty.com, run by Americans for Prosperity.

February 27 -- the first official "Tea Parties" are held in eight cities across the country. According to John Hendrix, who organized the Tampa Bay event, the original idea came from Tom Gaithens of Newt Gingrich's Freedomworks.

The idea that the Tea Baggers are a "grassroots" movement that Right Wing infrastructure subsequently tried to exploit is not supported by the facts.

Jane Hamsher blogs at firedoglake.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/a-teabagger-timeline-koch_b_187312.html

see thom hartmann in huffpo and book

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/the-real-boston-tea-party_b_187189.html

QE largerst shareholder in  financed drake 5K% ROI so EI chartered 1600; mayflower chartered/rented from EI co.  EI her 2nd attempt to use corp to catch eur.

1681 Ch 2? made privateers illegal, killed w/o clergy (lic very expensive). Brit navy could not be bothered to enforce, so they hired Capt Kidd to chase; hanged him when they found he was selling seized cargo.  Hired Cornwallis after Yorktown to run India

Putting the Far Right into Perspective

Paul de Armond

Research director

Public Good Project

©1997 by Public Good.

Political Behaviors

• Electoral behavior is constrained by election and financial disclosure laws. Theoretically, elections where gross violations have occurred can be overturned in court. In practice, the laws are widely flouted and unenforced.
• Protest behavior is constrained by public opinion, civil rights laws and tort actions. The most extreme form of protest includes civil disobedience, but does not challenge the legitimacy of legal authority.
• Resistance behavior is constrained by criminal law. Resistance challenges the legitimacy of legal authority. The extremes of resistance behavior extend to harassment, defamation, property crimes, fraud, and barratry.
• Terrorist behavior is constrained by criminal law. Terrorism begins where crimes of violence are involved.

Rationalizations for Misbehavior

CheatingThe actor knows that the behavior is wrong and can feel guilt and remorse before being caught.

DisobedienceThe actor proclaims a moral imperative for misconduct, but stops short of serious felonies or violent resistance to legal authority.

CrimeThe actions are committed covertly, evidence is concealed or destroyed and legal authority may be violently resisted.

WarThe actor seeks to destroy all authority that thwarts attaining goals.

Right Wing Strategies

Leaderless Resistance is a terrorist strategy. The movement splits itself into two components: an aboveground leadership of propagandists and an underground network of terrorist action cells. Individual cells may be prosecuted, but Leaderless Resistance networks are virtually immune from law enforcement activities.

"Paper terrorism" is a resistance/terrorist strategy. The name is misleading, but widely used. Properly speaking, the activity is barratry, the fraudulent simulation of a legal process. Most barratry consists of harassing lawsuits, filing frivolous documents in support of tax resistance and phony liens against public officials. Widely tolerated by prosecutors and county clerks. No significant enforcement activity has occurred, though many states' Attorneys General have drafted numerous opinions on right-wing barratry for the last two decades.

Tax Resistance is another name for tax fraud. Fraud is the most common form of Christian Patriot criminal activity. Cheating on taxes is widespread, but right-wingers have raised it to an elaborate art form similar to drug money-laundering operations. Rarely prosecuted.

Common law is a protest/resistance/terrorist strategy. In the milder variant, it takes the form of frivolous pro se legal actions. In its most dangerous form, it consists of kangaroo "common law" courts which use militia cells to enforce their rulings.

Right Wing Groups and Movements

Neo-nazis and the Klan merged into a single movement in the early 1970's through the agency of Richard Butler and his Aryan Nations organization. Strongly influenced by "one-seed" Identity. Neo-nazi and Klan racism is very similar to the volk theories of Hitler's Nazis.

Identity, or more properly Christian Identity, is a Bible-based but non-Christian sect. Intensely racist, Identity believes that only Anglo-Saxons (Aryans) are true "Christians" and that all other people are subhuman mongrels.

Virulently anti-Semitic, Identity has split into two factions over the nature of Jewish peoples. The larger faction (one-seedline Identity) believes that Jews worship Satan. A smaller faction (two-seedline Identity) believes that Jews are the children of Cain, whose father was Satan not Adam. Two-seed Identity believers are far more violent and apt to view Adolph Hitler as a "Christian" prophet.

Militias are overt or covert right-wing paramilitary organizations. John Trochmann, the leading militia figure today, preaches the Leaderless Resistance strategy of "public meetings and private cells." Most of the so-called "militia movement" is the armed wing of the Christian Patriot movement.

Christian Patriots (or often just Patriots) are a broad movement on the far right which extends from the John Birch Society to the Freemen. On the left, it stops short of the National Rifle Association and on the right, it does not include neo-nazis. When the movement began in the early 1960s, it was dominated by Identity and a few right-wing Mormons.

Its historical predecessors include the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin's Christian Action paramilitary organization, the Silver Shirts, and the Black Legion, all American fascist organizations. The name comes from two small Identity-led paramilitary organizations which flourished in the 1960s: the Christian Defense League and the Christian-Patriot Defense league. Other early Christian Patriot groups included the Posse Comitatus, the Minutemen, the California Rangers, the Arizona Patriots, the Committee of the States, New Nation USA (NNUSA), Committee to Restore the Constitution and Willis Carto's Populist Party.

Originally part of the alliance of racist groups who participated in the Aryan Nations conferences in the early 1970s, by the 1980's the early Christian Patriot movement began to split into two distinct factions: the revolutionary neo-nazi/Klan movement and the reactionary Christian Patriot movement. Previous to the split, both factions used the name Christian Patriot.

By the late 1980's, after the exposure of the Posse Comitatus following Gordon Kahl's murder of several law enforcement officers and his subsequent death in a shoot-out, and the exposure of Aryan Nations involvement in Robert Mathews' murder-robbery gang, The Order, the Christian Patriots began denouncing the Klan, neo-nazis and two-seed Identity as "costumed kooks" and "Hitler-worshipers." This was also reflected in the collapse of the Populist Party after Bo Gritz's 1992 presidential campaign, as the Christian Patriot and Klan/neo-nazi wings battled openly.

In the early 1990's, the Christian Patriot movement sought and found allies to its left -- but still well off-center -- in the militant wing of the Christian Right, particularly among violent anti-abortion activists and in the Wise Use Movement, a loose collection of anti-environmentalist organizations originally started by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Alan Gottlieb, a Washington State ultra-libertarian. The convergence of these groups, along with anti-gun control militants, led to the militia organizing drive of 1994.

Christian Patriot leadership continues to be dominated by "one-seed" Identity (notably John Trochmann and his Militia of Montana) and their affiliates such as Bo Gritz, Jack McLamb, Red Beckman and others. Christian Patriot racism is cultural, rather than bloodline, and sometimes described as nativism, "Afrikaaner" or "Old Settler" racism in contrast to the Nazi-style racism of the Klan. "Freemen" are mostly "two-seed" Identity and radical Mormon participants on the extreme right of the Christian Patriot movement.

According to most Christian Patriots, only white, "Christian," property-owning males can possess "first-class" citizenship. Christian Patriot anti-Semitism is mostly coded in language about the fictional "Illuminatti," "International bankers," and the New World Order. Most Christian Patriots will simultaneously deny the Holocaust and their anti-Semitism. By Patriot lights, only neo-nazis and Klan are anti-Semites and racists -- since Patriots aren't neo-nazis, they can't be anti-Semites or racists. Their theories about property ownership, federal jurisdiction, taxation, monetary systems, and the United Nations are equally baroque and self-contradictory.

Constitutionalists reject most conventional legal theory. Instead, they substitute a simplified notion a divinely inspired "organic" Constitution -- the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights -- combined with their interpretation of the Bible as the only "true law." Basically, most Constitutionalists don't want to pay taxes or recognize government authority.

Much of modern Constitutionalism comes from the writings and prophesies of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons.) The origin of the Christian Patriot term "Freemen" and the key to Constitutionalism can be found in The Book of Mormon, Alma 51: 5-6.

The foundation to Constitutionalist theory is that any alteration to the divinely inspired "organic" Constitution is contrary to God's will. This makes most American jurisprudence and case law, the abolition of slavery, income tax and votes for women, to name just a few of the things that Constitutionalists object to, not only "unconstitutional," but downright blasphemous.

Wise Use is a right-wing business lobby. It creates and uses local "property rights" groups as political fronts. Originally started as a partnership between Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Washington ultra-libertarian Alan Gottlieb, Wise Use employs writer Ron Arnold and organizer Chuck Cushman as their main propagandists. In Washington State, the two main industry supporters of Wise Use are the Washington Contract Loggers Association and the Building Industry Association. At the local level, most Wise Use support comes from extractive resource industries and real estate developers. County secession groups were started by a handful of key Wise Use operators and recruited heavily among Christian Patriot groups. Likewise, most militias in Western Washington drew heavily on Wise Use support.

Christian Right is a loose alliance of politicized religious groups with a reactionary agenda. it is mostly separate and distinct from the Patriot movement. The main Christian Right issues are opposition to progressive social programs: public education, civil liberties, reproductive choice, and women's equality. Some extreme Christian Right groups are behaviorally indistinguishable from Christian Patriot groups. The difference is that the ideological roots of Christian Right protest, resistance and terrorist activities are based on economic and social determinisms, while the Christian Patriots draw mainly on biological (racial) determinism.

Those extreme Christian Right groups which overlap the Patriots share a set of beliefs with Identity that are called "Dominion theology" -- a program of religious supremacy which places religious authority above and beyond the law. Most of the leadership for Dominion theology comes from a sect known as Reconstructionists led by R.J. Rushdooney and Gary North. These groups practice common law, tax resistance, "paper terrorism," militia organizing and Leaderless Resistance. The best known examples of the Christian Right/Patriot convergence are Identity minister Pete Peter's 1992 conference in Estes Park to organize Leaderless Resistance militias and the April 1994 convention of the Wisconsin US. Taxpayers Party.

The national example of Christian Right/Patriot overlap is Larry Pratt, one of Pat Buchanan's national campaign managers. In western Washington State, Sen. Val Stevens is the leading example. She has participated in tax resistance, and draws significant support from Wise Users and Christian Patriots in Snohomish County. US. Rep. Jack Metcalf is a Christian Patriot who has garnered most of his support from the Christian Right.

Leading Washington State Christian Right groups include the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. The Washington Republican Party is dominated by Christian Right forces.

http://www.publicgood.org/reports/spectrum/

lessighistorical take (vs progressives)

huffo lessig

TEA PARTY

It seems that just about every hundred years (or so, I'm a lawyer; cut me some slack; numbers aren't my thing), the body politic we call America swells with fever as it fights off a democracy-destroying disease. That disease is "Special Interest Government," a government captured by the economically powerful in society, as they find a way to convert economic into political power; the fever comes from the reform movement, keen to kill that disease and restore an ideal of government of, by, and for "the People."

The rise of Andrew Jackson was the first of these cycles. His fight with the Second Bank of the United States and with the "monied interests" as he called them was the romantic political struggle for most Americans for much of the 19th Century -- far more important than anything Washington or Hamilton had done.

The rise of the Progressive Movement in the late 19th, and early 20th Century was the second of these cycles. Reformer after reformer focused the American democracy on the deep corruption that had captured government. The first round of "robber barons" had completed their theft. Smart and courageous souls fought on every front to end the threat of more robber barons, and reclaim the democracy that Jackson had promised.

We have now entered the third of these cycles. The anger that has broken out across America is rightly targeted at the captured and incompetent institution that our government has become. That capture, most Americans believe, is a kind of corruption. But not the corruption of bribery, or brown paper bags of cash hidden and traded among congressmen.

Instead the corruption of today is in plain sight. The mechanism of its reach is displayed to everyone. It is the simple and pervasive economy of influence that buys access and more through campaign cash. And then without explicit recognition, the actions of our government are guided by the understanding of how those acts will affect the opportunity to raise money.

I'm sure no one in the White House had a second thought about how bizarre it was that the first deals the administration struck to get health care reform was with the insurance lobby and the pharmaceutical companies. Yet how many of the 69,456,987 votes that Obama received came from them? And so why is it so obvious that they get the first seats in the negotiation of what could be Obama's most important (and only?) significant legislative victory?

As with each of these cycles of reform, when the fever gets hot there arises a political movement to fight the infection. Sometimes that movement has a leader. Some of us thought Obama was our Jackson, a thought that feels embarrassingly naive today.

Sometimes, however, it has no single leader. The resistance instead grows in a wide range of affected contexts, and an almost magical coordination among these disparate interests has an effect.

That was the story of the 20th Century's Progressive Movement. It had no single leader. It had no single plan. Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt were both leading progressives. But the two were as different as Jefferson and Hamilton. They shared a common ideal -- to defeat the power of "the Trusts" to control government -- but they had very different ideas about how that should be done.

Thus, instead of a Jackson, the 20th Century Progressives had an army of leaders in every field of social life that finally forced onto a corrupted political stage demands for political and social reform. For the most part, they got these demands. Not all of them, and some that they got some of us wish they hadn't (the referendum process, for example). But that open source political movement achieved something extraordinary against the most powerful economic forces in the world.

Arianna Huffington has become a leader in this third feverish cycle fighting the corruption our democracy has become. Along with scholar/activists such as Elizabeth Warren, Simon Johnson, Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich, and maybe even come-back-kid politicians like Eliot Spitzer, she's building a movement to focus America again upon the once-again task to reclaim our democracy from those who would buy our franchise from beneath us. Through a powerful and clear voice, tied to a growing media empire, she is honing a message and an awareness that we have lost control of this democracy. And she is thereby motivating a Neo-Progressive Movement to respond.

Third World America is a powerful complement to this work. The book is a brief -- in honor of perhaps the wisest of the Progressives, we could call it a Brandeis Brief -- that pulls together in the most powerful way that I have seen just how bad things have become. "In the mid-1960s," Huffington writes, "only 29% thought 'big interests' ran the nation. ... [I]n 2008, 80% ... believed government was controlled by 'a few big interests looking out for themselves.'"

Most important to me, however, is that Third World America is the first in a long line of fantastic Neo-Progressive books that places at the top of the list of reform the need to end Special Interest Government with a system of Citizen Funded Elections.

It is this central objective of killing corporate control of government that links these three progressive movements. But if this movement is to be as successful as the last, it needs to learn an important lesson from the last.

Progressivism in its best sense is not a politics of the Left. Or better, not just a politics of the Left. The 20th Century politician who struck the fatal blow to Republican William Howard Taft's presidency was not a socialist, or a Democrat. It was another Republican: Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette.La Follette was among a band insurgents in theRepublican Party of 1910 who believed the party had been taken over by corporate interests. In April, 1911, helaunched a challenge to President Taft,pushing five principles of "The National Progressive Republican League." The League had been founded upon the recognition that "popular government in America has been thwarted ... by the special interests." And all five of the principles responded to this "thwarting" with anti-corruption ideals: Four calling for stronger democratic checks on government. The fifth demanding an anti-corruption law with teeth.

La Follette failed to beat Taft, but his partial success encouraged Teddy Roosevelt to return from the wild and try his own hand at ousting a sitting president. Roosevelt too failed to win the Republican nomination, but he continued his campaign as a third party candidate, leading the "Bull Moose Party."

And then there were the Democrats. Most in the party feared it would nominate again the populist William Jennings Bryan. But Bryan recognized he couldn't win. And he instead engineered the nomination of New Jersey Governor (and former Princeton University President) Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was no populist. But he was a Progressive. As described in Melvin Urofsky's extraordinary biography, Brandeis, Wilson pushed back against Hamiltonian-Teddy Roosevelt, and pushed forward a vision sketched for him by Louis Brandeis: against the idea of a cabal of big business regulated by big government, and for the idea of small business and the liberty that would encourage for all.

The 1912 election thus gave America perhaps the most diverse menu of political options ever in the history of Presidential elections. At one extreme was Socialist Eugene Debs, pushing for a radical change in the substance of American social life. At the other was Republican William Howard Taft, insisting that the substance of pro-business politics that defined the mainstream of the Republican Party was the best policy for Republicans and for America. And in the middle were two strong Progressives, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both agreeing on the urgent need to end Special Interest Government, even if disagreeing on the vision of how government and business should interact.

Almost 70% of Americans voted for the Progressive cause (42% for Wilson, 27% for Roosevelt. Taft received just 23%). Many of them were Republicans, or former Republicans. Many more were Democrats. But they all represented an odd coalition of interests that put aside strong substantive differences about what government should do to address forcefully (and they naively thought, finally) the corruption that government had become.

The Neo-Progressive Movement needs the same catholicism. The vast majority of Americans would willingly go to war to end Special Interest Government. Disgust with Wall Street "reform" is palpable. The compromises of the bailouts and stimulus plans will just fuel that disgust even more. There is an endless reservoir of examples of government corrupted that could convince America of what it already believes: Money buys results in Congress; "the People" are no longer sovereign.

But if this Neo-Progressive Movement is to have any chance of success, it needs to be disciplined enough not to insist that all members also be members of Moveon.org. We need, to borrow and remix the insight of Cass Sunstein, an "incompletely theorized movement." We need Republicans who stand in the tradition of Reagan and Goldwater, yet who are as disgusted with the sellout that corporate money has induced as are we. How can an honest Republican vote to protect domestic sugar manufacturers? Yet many do, because the millions in campaign contributions from sugar lords is just too sweet to resist.

How can honest Republicans vote for the corporate welfare we call farm subsidies? Because, as former-Representative Leslie Byrne (D-VA) was told by a colleague when she came to Congress, "always lean to the green." That colleague "wasn't," she clarified, "an environmentalist."

The Neo-Progressive Movement must also make its case to the Tea Party, the most potent political movement in America today, far deeper than it is caricatured to be by both Fox and MSNBC. For whatever extreme social vision motivates some in that party, the belief that government has been bought motivates them all.

And most importantly, the Movement must be willing to sacrifice Democrats who don't commit to its fundamental reform. That party is filled with people who don't actually believe in this reform. The sell out of the Democrats to Wall Street during the 1990s testifies to this split.

But if the failure of Obama teaches us anything, it is that real reform for Democrats won't happen in the world of Special Interest Government. And if the failure of 20 years of Republican presidents in the last 30 to deliver on the fundamental promises of Reagan teaches the Right anything, it should be that real reform on the right won't happen in the world of Special Interest Government either.

There is an opportunity for Neo-Progressives now, much like the opportunity of a century ago. There will be open Republican primaries in 2012. In those primaries, there will be Republicans who want to distance themselves from the "sell our government to the highest bidder" policies of the Gingrich/Delay days.That candidate could well recognize that especially in light of the certain to be grotesque flood of corporate money that will define the 2010 election, America, and especially, grassroots Republicans are starving for a candidate who would deliver what Obama promised in reform, but failed to achieve. And if it becomes the Republican Party that is talking about ending Special Interest Government (again), then the race to achieve real reform will be on.

The Neo-Progressive Movement needs to encourage these Republicans. It needs to be willing to put aside part of the agenda of each within the movement, recognizing that no change, on the Right or the Left, will happen until the fever is broken, because the disease has been stopped. Mainstream parties have lost the credibility for reform. As in 1912, only a breakaway, trans-party movement, possibly with no single leader, could have an effect in 2012.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/neoprogressives_b_704715.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=090310&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureMore