TP 2 NOTES

See main /1st Tea Party page, this is newer info (see also teaparty2, more on class of 2010?)

NO MERRI

see TEA PARTY 2

---

---

an 7 25

Over the weekend, Vox posted an interview with Vox journalist Christian Paz, who’d reported previously that the Democrats were ripe for a grassroots takeover like the alleged one that overtook the GOP. The headline claimed to explain “the Democrats’ Tea Party moment.”

But unlike the headline, in the interview Paz was more circumspect about the actual existence of a Tea Party-style movement inside the party. The best that can be said, he said, is that “the base has never really been as angry as it is right now. What we’re seeing is a combination of anti-Trump anger, wanting a change in direction, wanting a change in leadership, and also some folks who are like, maybe we should become more progressive as a party” (his stress).

What are they angry about?

To hear Paz tell it, Democratic voters are angry with party leaders for failing to concentrate on “a working-class vision for Americans. They should be more focused on kitchen table affordability issues” (his italics).

But if you listen to Democratic leaders, like Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, that’s all they talk about. They speak endlessly about the need for the parties to come together and solve economic problems that all Americans share, and to rise above the bickering and the partisanship, and find common ground.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

But despite that, the Democratic base is still angry.

Why?

Brad Lander suggested it’s because the real division in the party isn’t, as Paz suggested, between “the establishment” and progressives, but between “fighters and folders.” New York City’s comptroller said that’s what voters saw in candidate Zohran Mamdani when they gave him victory over Andrew Cuomo in that city’s Democratic mayoral primary.

“People want someone to go to bat for working people, paint a real vision of a city people can afford, fight for it and get on the field,” Lander told CNN last month. “And that’s what I think Zohran did.”

I have my own theories about the Democratic leadership. You can read more about them here, here, here and especially here. Basically, it’s that leaders don’t want to fight, because fighting is risky. But I wanted to bring into the conversation someone who has deep insight into the party, and who understands its mechanics and what it takes to win.

So I got in touch with Dana Houle. He has worked in organized labor, was once a congressional chief of staff, and managed campaigns from the local to the statewide level. His Bluesky feed is indispensable.

In this first of two parts of our conversation, Dana explained the true root of the problem: defeat in November. Whenever the Democrats, or the Republicans, lose a presidential election, Dana told me, there’s always a period of anger and distrust between the base and the elites.

Dana told me that as a consequence of this fundamental, it’s tempting to look for an “insurrection” of some kind, like the one that took place in 2010, when the Tea Party destabilized the old GOP establishment.

But, as Dana told me, the Tea Party is a terrible analogy. For one thing, it was a phony “revolt.” For another, it represented a serious policy fracture between Republican elites over the issue of immigration. Dana told me that the Democrats, meanwhile, agree on virtually everything, policy-wise. What they disagree on is style and strategy. More than anything else, however, the Democrats still believe in democracy.

“I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what the base-leadership tension will create, but I don't think it will lead to nihilism, and the Tea Party definitely was part of the GOP's devolution into nihilism.”

Do the Democrats have a trust problem? The base of the party is restless and its leaders don't seem to be hearing it. I am thinking of Zohran Mamdani's victory in New York City, but not only that.

Whenever a party is locked out of power at the national level, there's a trust problem. It was different in 2021 with the Republicans, because, well, almost everything is different with Trump. But Democrats in 2017, Republicans in 2009, Democrats in 2001-2006 – people get mad at their party for losing. And obviously the stakes are much higher now.

I'm not sure Mamdani fits here. First, it's a local race, in a city that's unique and that gets far more attention than LA or Chicago or Houston or Phoenix, because that's where the national media and the financial industry are based. Second, it was a weird race; other than Jerry Brown, it's hard to think of an ex-governor who ran for mayor.

Unlike Brown, Andrew Cuomo was disgraced, and he was also widely loathed. That's how the race started. Mamdani and Brad Lander joining together on the "don't rank Cuomo" and then seeing the results shows a lot of that race was "anyone but the sex pest." That's probably one of the reasons all the big players except Tish James stayed out of it.

There is, of course, the fact that both Democratic congressional leaders are in New York, but I don't think they were factors in the race, and I don't think the mayoral race has anything to do with their challenges and what people think of their performance as leaders.

https://bsky.app/profile/kenklippenstein.bsky.social/post/3lsmxrs4z3k2w

To what extent is the Tea Party angle within the Democratic Party real or imaginary? Lander said the true fault line in the party is not between moderates and progressives, but "fighters and folders." No is really saying "tea party" because it was mostly astro-turf, but lots of people want confrontation by the Democrats, a la the tea party.

That's an important point – that the Tea Party was largely astro-turf. I think Lander is correct, but if I had to look for a recent analogy I'd go back to 2002-2005, when disgust over too many Democrats supporting the Iraq War contributed to the rise of the Netroots, propelled the campaigns of General Wesley Clark and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and led to the election of Dean as DNC chair.

I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what the base-leadership tension will create, but I don't think it will lead to nihilism, and the Tea Party definitely was part of the GOP's devolution into nihilism.

Voxposted a headline recently thatasserted as fact the existence of a Tea Party-type movementwithin the Democratic Party. But the interview was highly informed by Bernie Sanders' rhetoric, especially understanding the problem as between progressives and "the establishment." What are the real fault lines in the party?

The Tea Party is a horrible analogy for the current Democratic Party. The Vox piece made it sound like it was a response to deficits. That was part of the astroturf messaging, but that wasn't and isn't a fault line in the Republican Party: elites and the base care about deficits when Democrats are in charge, not when Republicans are in charge.

But there was a big policy rift in the Republican Party.

Remember when George W Bush, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback and most of the Republican leaders tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of what the United States Chamber of Congress had wanted? That was a policy rift.

And it remained one that Trump exploited. In that first Republican primary debate, he mentioned ending birthright citizenship and most of the other Republicans on the stage were dumbfounded.

With Democrats, there really aren't those kinds of policy rifts.

In Congress, there's wide agreement on most policy matters, from the most moderate Democrat to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That's in part, because much of the last 15 years has been about the ruralification and dumbification of the Republican Party.

In 2010, Democrats held three of the four Senate seats and both House seats in the Dakotas. They held both Senate seats and two of three House seats in West Virginia. They held three of the four House seats in Mississippi. Their congressional majority was still, as it had been since the Civil War, rooted in the South. That's all changed.

There are hardly any Democrats representing large numbers of rural whites. Democrats are no longer split between northern/urban liberals and white rural southerners. They're now the party of cities and suburbs, with some rural Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.

And they largely agree on policy!

There's no simmering conflict between Democratic elites and the Democratic base like there was within the GOP on immigration, which was also a class and status revolt. Democrats are mostly arguing about style, tactics, rhetoric, personalities, what issues to prioritize, our modes of communication and organizing – that kind of thing.

NOW READ:Bloodthirsty Republicans need to stop their praying

---

---

420 the conv

...

seeking authentic feelings

Dissent – and the freedom to do it – is a crucial element of democracy. Political leaders are rightly influenced by public opinion. But it’s important to know when protests are sparked by special-interest groups seeking to manipulate officials’ perception of public sentiment.

As a journalist who has covered politics for 20 years and now studies how people process uncertainty, I note that the questions about the current protests raise echoes of the Tea Party movement a decade ago.

In February 2009, the Obama administration was grappling with a severe economic crisis caused by a collapse in the mortgage market. A reporter on CNBC, Rick Santelli, began to complain that one part of the federal bailout plan, the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, might let people out of their mortgage obligations even if they should have anticipated they wouldn’t be able to afford them and would face foreclosure.

Santelli made this point on TV while standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange,. It was compelling entertainment, and the speech spread rapidly through conservative media. Radio host Rush Limbaugh replayed it on his show; conservative strategists admired it, and millions of conservatives heard it.

Santelli called for a modern-day “tea party” to object to unfair government rules.

Within months, a coalition of anti-immigration reform activists, fiscal hawks, regulation opponents and social conservatives pulled together behind a common set of grievances: Barack Obama’s alleged profligate spending, his willingness to let certain groups get ahead in the economy over other groups – policies that many of them viewed as putting racial minorities at a perceived advantage to white people.

Calling themselves the Tea Party movement, most members were Republicans – but the Republican Party wasn’t speaking for them, so the nation’s two-party structure itself became a common enemy, too. When the Tea Party held its first protests, thousands of people showed up. As the protests spread, motivated partisans who look for opportunities to change attitudes and behaviors, backed by a conservative political funding machine, developed a way to capture the protest energy and channel it effectively.

Authentic protest – like how the Tea Party movement began – is a longstanding American tradition. AP Photo/Matt Rourke]

Enduring sentiments, new moments

Social scientists who study new movements in politics find that the underlying sentiments are as old as civilization itself: Who gets the stuff that the government gives out? What’s fair? Who’s jumped the line?

What, then, makes a movement into something real?

It starts with a galvanizing event, like the Tea Party’s public protest gatherings, when hundreds of thousands of people saw that other people were willing to work together for a cause.

The movement needs a common enemy – in that case, Obama, his policies and a political structure that permitted them – and the potential for real change, not just politically but socially as well. For those joining the Tea Party, the goal became clear: They could take over the Republican Party.

Fairly quickly, the Tea Party was co-opted by wealthier interests hoping to channel its energy toward slightly different ends – although much of the movement resisted the corporate takeover of its message. Public opinion surveys backed up the intuition that the movement had force.

pix A North Carolina protest was ostensibly coordinated by ReopenNC, whose website was registered by a Florida resident and focuses on selling T-shirts and stickers. [AP Photo/Gerry Broome

A viral ideology

In mid-April 2020, it appeared, a new movement was rising to express frustration with the restrictions and uncertain endpoint to the pandemic, and the economic toll the lockdown has caused.

In the space of several days, there were protests in a dozen states, ranging from a crowd of more than 2,000 who gathered in Olympia, Washington, to several dozen in Annapolis, Maryland.

The available evidence suggests that the demonstrations were organized by paid political operatives using Facebook and new websites to encourage conservatives to protest in specific places against specific governors who had imposed strong public health restrictions on economic activity. This context indicates that one real intention of the protests was to create the illusion of an organic movement that had arisen to object to the restrictions. Evidence is to the contrary: Polling shows that just 12% of Americans think their local restrictions have gone too far – and 26% think they don’t go far enough.

Sparked by citizen inquiries first posted on Reddit, independent investigative reporter Brian Krebs has confirmed that most of the web domains that had been registered around the idea of “reopening” the economy belonged to a very small number of people. He used a cybersecurity search tool to search for “any and all domains registered in the past month that begin with "reopen” and end in “.com.” He found that many of them were created on the same day.

He found that many of these websites, whose registration records you can see yourself at Whois.com, were owned by anti-gun-control groups that are run by the same family of brothers that organized the demonstrations through Facebook groups they run.

Several others of the “reopen” websites were registered with addresses or phone numbers used by longstanding conservative enterprises like Freedom Works. A surprising number belonged to an activist who told Mother Jones that he registered the domains to keep conservatives from using them to counter the recommendation of public health officials.

[pix

The ‘Reopen North Carolina’ website focuses on selling merchandise. Screenshot of ReopenNC.com by The Conversation, CC BY-ND]

The threat of fake grassroots

For the people who took part, the protests were no doubt real.

But media coverage can inflate or distort their size and meaning. On its main protest story, ABC News put a headline suggesting protests had “spread” to new places.

But that creates a sense that these protests grew quickly, spontaneously, and organically. The fact that protests happened in different places at different times doesn’t actually mean they’re spreading. When organized by the same small group of political operatives, sequential protests reflect the creators’ skill at mobilizing people – not a naturally rising level of frustration that ultimately pushes people to act.

Many political movements use these tactics. The problem comes from how the media presents the resulting events. On April 21, a labor union organized a protest by nurses at the White House – and media reports noted the event was created by a particular group with a specific purpose. That’s different from how the media treated the “reopen” gatherings.

By covering a contrived protest as though it is an organic movement, the media could, even unintentionally, create the illusion of a popular force that doesn’t really exist.

That could result in politicians feeling nonexistent or exaggerated pressure to make decisions that threaten Americans’ public health.

---

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.

---

---

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.”

==

==

2013 wishful think RS?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-republican-suicide-machine-20131009

==

https://www.amazon.com/Poison-Tea-Tobacco-Invented-Captured/dp/1250076102

==

A new study from professors at Oklahoma State University has found that Republicans and Democrats have never been so far apart on climate issues.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2016.1208995

img

Fox News' Megyn Kelly interviews The Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman

"What was once a modest tendency for Congressional Republicans to be less pro-environmental than their Democratic counterparts has become a chasm—with Republicans taking near-unanimous anti-environmental stances on relevant legislation in recent years, especially 2015," the study said.

This distance between the parties wasfurther exacerbated by the rise of the Koch-funded Tea Party,which took the hard line of fully dismissing the climate change threat, often making climate change a lightning rod for voters who were outraged at Washington.

As they stoked fears about the U.S. government attempting to pass legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the Tea Party normalized climate denial throughout the Republican Party, according to Ohio State University's Prof. Riley E. Dunlap and Jerrod H. Yarosh, and Michigan State Associate Professor Aaron M. McCright.

==

wiki, reads like brochure:

2012 election

For the 2012 election, four of the 16 Tea Party candidates won a seat on the Senate, and Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann was re-elected to the House.^[47] The media, such as ABC and Bloomberg, commented that Tea Party candidates had less success in 2012 than in 2010.^[48][49]

In February 2011, the Tea Party Patriots organized and hosted the American Policy Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. The 1,600 attendees were polled regarding their preference for a 2012 presidential candidate. Herman Cain, the first of the 2012 candidates to form a presidential exploratory committee, won the poll with 22%. Runners up were Tim Pawlenty (16%), Ron Paul (15%) and Sarah Palin (10%). Ron Paul won the Summit's online poll.^[50]

In September 2011, CNN and Tea Party Express co-hosted a Republican primary debate among presidential candidates that featured questions from various Tea Party groups.^[51]

• In March 2012, Incumbent Rep. Jean Schmidt was defeated in the primary for Ohio's 2nd congressional district by tea-party backed Brad Wenstrup, an Iraq Veteran and podiatrist.^[52] Wenstrup went on to win the general election.^[53]

• Also in March 2012, tea-party backed Incumbent Rep. Don Manzullo was defeated in the primary election for the newIllinois's 16th congressional district by first-term incumbent and former tea-party favourite Rep. Adam Kinzinger.^[54]

• In April 2012, Sen. Orrin Hatch, seeking renomination, received less than 60% of the vote of the Utah state Republican convention, forcing a primary election.^[55] Hatch easily defeated the Tea Party candidate Dan Liljenquist ^[56]

• In May 2012, tea party favorite Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock defeated long-serving Sen. Richard Lugar in the Indiana Senate GOP primary with a 20% margin of victory.^[57] After making controversial comments about rape, Mourdock lost to Democratic challenger Rep. Joe Donnelly.^[58]

• With an endorsement from Sarah Palin and the help of the Tea Party, Nebraska's State Sen. Deb Fischer pulled off an upset victory in the 2012 Republican primary for the Senate.^[59] Her Republican opponents, Attorney General of NebraskaJon Bruning, and State Treasurer Don Stenberg, each spent well in excess of $1 million, where as Fischer spent $100,000, augmented by twice that much in SuperPAC spending from Chicago Cubs part-owner Joe Ricketts. Fischer then defeated Democratic challenger former Sen. Bob Kerrey in a landslide in the November election.^[60]

• Tea party candidate for Senate Ted Cruz got enough of the primary vote in Texas to force a run-off vote against establishment GOP candidate Lieutenant Governor of Texas David Dewhurst in May 2012.^[61] Cruz defeated Dewhurst in the runoff election with a 14% margin of victory.^[62] Cruz defeated Democratic challenger Paul Sadler, 57 percent to 41 percent.^[63]

• The "grass-roots activists who identify to a large extent with the leaderless tea party movement" played a part in Scott Walker's election to Governor of Wisconsin in 2010 as well as his recall election victory in 2012.^[64][65] A FOX News exit poll showed Tea Party support was a key part of Walker's win in 2012, just as it was in 2010.^[66]

• In Atlanta, the Tea Party partnered with the NAACP and the Sierra Club to defeat the $7.2 billion Transportation Investment Act in June 2012.^[67] The act had the support of both Democratic and Republican "establishment" politicians. The act was supported with $8 million used to sell the project to the public, while the Tea Party had only $15,000.00 to oppose it. With concerns that much of the act would do little to improve Atlanta's transportation problems, it was defeated with a 63% "no" vote.

• In Pennsylvania, Tea Party activists and FreedomWorks pushed for a law that would allow businesses to provide student tuition grants for school-choice in return for tax credits. The law was signed by Gov. Tom Corbett on June 30.^[68]

• In August, presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney selected Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his vice-presidential running mate.^[69] The move was praised by the Tea Party Express,^[70] the Tea Party Patriots,^[71] Sarah Palin,^[72] as well as many other Tea Party groups.^[73][74][75] Romney lost the general election to Barack Obama by 3.85% (approximately five million votes) in an electoral college landslide.^[76][77]

• In Wisconsin, establishment Republican and former governor Tommy Thompson won that state's GOP Senate primary, defeating Eric Hovde and former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann, in August. Hovde, who finished second, had the backing ofFreedomworks. Neumann, who finished third, had the backing of the Tea Party Express, the Club for Growth, and Sen. Jim DeMint^[78] Thompson was defeated by Democrat Tammy Baldwin in the general election.

• In Florida, former veterinarian and Tea Party supporter Ted Yoho defeated 12-term GOP Rep. Cliff Stearns in the GOP primary in August^[79] Yoho easily defeated Democrat J.R. Gaillot, 64.8 percent to 32.4 percent in the general election.^[80]

• Also in Florida, Tea Party favorite Allen West lost to Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy. After demanding a recount,^[81]West finally conceded the election to Murphy on November 20, 2012.^[82]

• In Illinois, Tea Party Representative Joe Walsh lost to Democrat Lt. Colonel Tammy Duckworth, a 20-year veteran of the military who earned a Purple Heart, an Air Medal and an Army Commendation Medal after losing both of her legs in 2004, when her helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq.^[83]

• In Indiana, Tea Party politician U.S. Representative Mike Pence was elected Governor and provided with Republican super majorities in both the state's House and Senate.^[84]

2014 election cycle: Tea Party shifts focus to ground game/GOTV

The Washington Post said in July 2012 that the Tea Party "is no longer the rising tsunami it appeared to be in 2010. Largely gone are the disorderly rallies, colonial-era costumes and fixations on fringe issues, such as the provenance of the president's birth certificate. Instead, the movement has retooled into a loosely organized network of field operations that, as in Texas, pushes Republicans toward more strident conservative positions and candidates, while supplying ground troops across the country for candidates and big-money conservative groups, such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity."^[85]

Tea Party members now tell stories of mailing literature from their laundry rooms, manning phone banks, knocking on doors,^[85] and driving over 34,000 miles in their cars to build support for legislation.^[68] The Tea Party Patriots now offer free, on-demand, online grassroots training programs.^[86] 

links to http://teapartytraining.org/

The Leadership Institute trains conservatives

Founded in 1979 by its president, Morton C. Blackwell,

• See more at: http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/aboutus/#sthash.bRP9H2Xc.dpuf

The Tea Party has partnered with seemingly unlikely groups, such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club.^[67]

In the 2014 elections in Texas, the Tea Party made large gains, with numerous Tea Party favorites being elected into office, like Dan Patrick as Lieutenant Governor,^[87][88]:{ Ken Paxton as Attorney Genera:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:l:{,}:^[87][89]:{ in addition to numerous other candidates.}:^[89]

Ground game and Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts

Tea Party ground game/GOTV before 2012

On November 2, 2010, Fox News reported that the Democrats did not dispute expectations that they would lose the House, and that their vaunted campaign operation faced a less polished ground game infused with the energy of the new Tea Party.^[92] The Tea Party helped deliver to Democrats what President Obama called a "shellacking" in the mid-term elections.^[93] On November 10, 2010, FreedomWorks announced the national rollout of "FreedomConnect", which they touted as a "grassroots action center that will revolutionize the ways in which FreedomWorks members, 9/12ers and tea party groups across the country communicate and organize in 2011 and beyond".^[94]The Tea Party began life as a protest movement, not as an organization that works on political ground games or Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts.[citation ^needed] One of the first national signs of the Tea Party's efforts to organize voters came with the election of Scott Brown in the contest to fill the remaining two-year term of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.[citation ^needed] Tea Party activists nationwide made a mass pilgrimage to the Bay State to support his unlikely campaign and ultimate win over Democrat Martha Coakley.^[90]Democrats have said as late as September 2010 that the Tea Party could not match their ground game and was mostly hype. The Democrats have the advantage in better organization, an older volunteer organization and personal connections between volunteers and voters.^[91]

---

4/15

That film was mocked and dismissed by climate deniers. For instance, an editorial in the *Wall Street Journal*, written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, argued that Gore falsely claimed there was scientific consensus around the reality of climate change. We’re currently observing the spectacle of Republicans in Congress fighting tooth and nail to sink President Obama’s Clean Power Plant proposal, even going so far as to suggest to governors that their states break the law to defy the federal government and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

So when you find Democrat Al Gore on the same side of an environmental issue as a far-right Tea Party leader, it’s eye-opening. But left and right are coming together over the issue of distributed solar power and the right of homeowners and businesses to install rooftop photovoltaic solar panels.

That shared interest was highlighted this week when Gore spoke at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York this week back-to-back with Debbie Dooley, a national Tea Party activist, chairman of the Atlanta Tea Party and founder of Conservatives for Energy Freedom.

But while Gore has focused on the climate impacts of dirty energy and the need to switch to clean energy sources to prevent global catastrophe, Dooley ignores climate change altogether to focus on individual freedom and the “free market.”

“She is an activist for solar energy and decentralizing the grid, working with conservatives across the country who believe expanding renewable energy markets and customer choice are consistent with free-market principles,” says her bio. “She believes our nation is in the midst of a clean-energy revolution that unites grassroots activists from the left and right.”

An article in Bloomberg News called Gore and Dooley a “political odd couple” and noted that Dooley never mentioned climate change in her presentation, focusing rather on consumer choice.

“Solar equals independence—solar equals freedom,” she said, using a favorite Tea Party word. “Tea Party activists don’t like strong centralized units. There’s nothing more centralized than a utility, than the government telling you what power to buy. This is a battle that we will win. I am literally floored with the response I have been getting from conservatives with the right message.”

Gore had a startlingly similar message.

“People want their own opportunity to shape their own future, and renewable energy is part of that,” he said. “There is a war on solar with these legacy utilities, and coal companies using their historic political power, campaign contributions and lobbying to pass the most ridiculous laws and tax the people who want to put solar panels on their roof.”

Dooley’s activism began when she joined forces with the Sierra Club to prevent Georgia Power from billing customers in advance for two nuclear plants projected to have huge cost overruns. She also helped fight off an effort by Georgia utilities to charge owners of rooftop solar an extra fee on their monthly bill, something utilities, backed by conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, are pushing around the country. Currently, Dooley is one of the leaders of a battle in Florida to protect and expand the ability of homeowners and businesses to generate their own rooftop solar and sell it to their neighbors, bypassing big utility companies. The effort isengaging both conservative and liberal environmentalists.

“They have a lot of policies in Florida that actually effectively block the sun,” Dooley told Yale Environment 360. “So you have the Sunshine State that has policies put in place by these powerful utilities to stifle competition, and I just felt like something needed to be done.”

“We’re going to work together to accomplish something,” she said. “Those on the left believe in climate change and coal’s bad. Those on the right don’t like government-created monopolies— we believe in free-market choice and national security. It doesn’t matter what your reasons are, as long as we work together to accomplish a common goal. That’s all that matters, and we’re much more successful when we’re able to do that.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Al Gore at SXSW: We Need to ‘Punish Climate-Change Deniers’ and ‘Put a Price on Carbon’

Tea Party Members and Environmentalists Join Forces in Support of Solar Energy

4 States Where Solar is Under Attack by Koch-Funded Front Groups

==

3/15

---

pro-solar conservative group in Florida cleared a major hurdle this week in its journey to make solar more accessible in the state.

Floridians for Solar Choice reached 72,000 signatures on a petition that seeks to allow Floridians to purchase solar power directly from other consumers — something that isn’t currently allowed in the state. That number of signatures clears the way for the petition to be reviewed by the state’s Supreme Court, which will decide whether or not the petition’s language legally qualifies it to be a ballot initiative for Floridians in 2016. Getting its petition on the 2016 ballot is the main goal for Floridians for Solar Choice.

“We are thrilled to reach this important milestone,” Tory Perfetti, founder of Floridians for Solar Choice, said in a statement. “It shows broad support among Florida’ families and businesses for removing barriers to commerce in solar power.”

The petition for the initiative seeks to “encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers.” Under Florida’s current law, only utilities can sell electricity directly to consumers. Florida is one of only five states in the country with a law like that, and solar advocates say that it’s holding the Sunshine State back from its solar potential. If the ballot initiative is successful in 2016, businesses and property owners in the state would be able to produce up to 2 megawatts of solar power and sell it directly to consumers.

If the state Supreme Court does approve the petition’s language for a ballot initiative, Floridians for Solar Choice will still have some work to do. In order to get on the ballot in Florida, an initiative must collect 683,149 signatures from Floridians in at least seven congressional districts by February 1. Any delays in the Supreme Court’s approval of the petition means there’s less time for Floridians for Solar Choice to collect signatures. Already, supporters have expressed frustration that the state took too long to acknowledge that they had received enough signatures for Supreme Court review.

Perfetti’s group began circulating the petition in January, and he said at the time that he received “overwhelming” response to it. Perfetti and Debbie Dooley, a tea party activist who founded the original chapter of Conservatives for Energy Freedom in Georgia, say that they’re tackling solar in Florida because increasing access to the energy source makes sense from a conservative standpoint.

“Free market and the freedom to choose — those are core conservative principles,” Dooley told ThinkProgress in January. “Unless you cherry-pick your principles, if you’re a true conservative, this is something that resonates with you. I think the residents are fed up with the government telling them who to purchase their power from.”

Floridians from Solar Choice has gained multiple backers of the ballot initiative. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) voiced its support of the initiative earlier this week, and it’s also gained the support of the Tea Party Network, the Christian Coalition, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Florida Retail Federation, theSierra Club, and other groups.

“This fight is about consumer choice and private property rights — cherished, long-standing American principals that we strongly support as an organization and an industry,” Rhone Resch, president and CEO of SEIA, said in a statement. “We urge Floridians to sign this critically important, freedom-of-choice petition, allowing it to be placed on next year’s ballot.”

Conservative group Americans for Prosperity has attacked the initiative, however, sayingthat it’s “about money, and using government and taxpayers to prop up the solar industry.” Supporters reject that claim, saying the measure isn’t calling for solar subsidies or mandates; instead, it simply wants to make it easier for Floridians to gain access to solar.

==

TP

Border Politics

Deana Rohlinger (fla state univ)  on how a Tea Party movement responded to electoral success and to the emergence of Occupy

Against the Grain 1/12/15 also TP.

http://www.deanarohlinger.com/

Naples and Mendez, eds., Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identities, and Globalization NYU Press, 2014

Deana Rohlinger's blog

Anthony moderated FB page, defined ethos (marco rubio wd not be endorsed, b/c did not want to alienate anyone) but got burned out

3 groups (2 relig) one fiscal conserve but F2F closed doors different

n fla after seeing --- then org'd TP event DC w/ dick cheney

500 ppl accepted invite social network, 300 showed up Facebook gp

tried for broad base, played down ideology, get DC elitists out, also state level, to rep us

governor spoke, we won, demobilized had caucus, small gov not really the main aim of bill, other stuff conserv snuck in led ppl to bail, so hadto bring back....

TP hated //Occupy BO said too, distanced themselves, patriot duty, vs uninforned, unamerican and violent.

diff role of gov't: basic safety net vs indiv oppor/mkt free/ govt enforce morality,takes/dependent bootstraps,  did not buy into 1% ideas, occupy lazy thus wanrt redistrib of $ to get some

some TP laid off, but still had faith in mkt/TP, free to fail (no bailout for indiv); indiv rightsand responibility

dirty camps, rapes = violent, criminals need contained

broad --> narrow 2010, post Occupy more partisan

occupy see capitalism --> inequality

in Fla really faded, lessons, too ez to say xenophobe and racist colors re-emerged, anthony suppressed; fell back on fear rhet b/c works. strategic vs reactive thinking;

online sperfical non-partis brings divrse together, but f2f when deciding on action, gets specifics and POV clash.

"citizens" not "activists"

http://www.againstthegrain.org/

==

hampton road VA (includes brat disrtict?)

amazing that this is just links to uncurated /interpreted content, so outrage automatic?

Government Review

FEDERAL

• Tracking the US Congress:  Individualize your tracking through a number of different criteria
• Rating Congress:  Brought to you by Conservative.org
• Eagle Forum:  Your Rep’s voting record on bills of concern to conservatives
• The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget    |    Sunshine Review    |
• Discover The Networks    |    Gov’t Attic (FOIA Records)    |    FactCheck.org    |
• Open Secrets    |    Recovery.gov    |
• You Cut (Vote Weekly)    |    Become a Citizen Co-Sponsor of a bill    |

STATE

• Guide to VA Politics    |    Richmond Sunlight    |    Voting Records in VA    |
• VA Coalition for Open Government    |    Follow the Money   |    Legislative Information System    |

Election Review

Federal Election Commission    |    VA Public Access Project    |    VA Board of Elections    |

Project Vote Smart    |    Ballotpedia    |    Vetting Questions    |    American Civil Rights Union    |

Political Activism

• Americans For Prosperity    |    American Majority    |    The Leadership Institute    |
• Articles of Freedom    |    The Middle Resolution    |    State Policy Network    |
• VA Tea Party Alliance    |    Tertium Quids    |    Virginia Campaign For Liberty    |
• Virginia 10th Amendment Revolution    |    Parental Rights    |
• Freedom Of Information Act in Virginia   |    Virginia Citizen’s Defense League    |
• Start a Petition    |    Survey Monkey    |

Sustainable Development:  Agenda 21 (a United Nations Program)

General Information:

• The full text of Agenda 21 from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero
• ICLEI:  Local Governments for Sustainability, a United Nations organization
• ICLEI USA:
• Institute for Sustainable Communities:  a pro-sustainable development website
• Understanding Sustainable Development - Free Downloads from Freedom Advocates
• Morphcity:  a website which concisely explains all aspects of Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development
• Taking Liberty:  a 10-part series on how property rights are being eliminated in the USA
• Public-Private Partnerships:  why they’re not such a great idea

Environmentalism:

• Environmental Protection Agency
• Endangered Species Act
• EPA Region 3 (Mid-Atlantic)
• The Wildlands Project

Global Warming / Climate Change:

• Access to Energy
• Virginia Energy Forum
• Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (N.E. and Mid-Atlantic States based.)

Indoctrination:

• The Delphi Technique:  How the public is manipulated to arrive at a predetermined “consensus”
• The Story of Stuff: Indoctrinating children through misinformation and fear

Fighting Agenda 21:

• American Policy Center:  Tom Deweese is at the forefront of the battle against Agenda 21
• Freedom Advocates:  Michael Shaw, from San Jose, CA (the first city to implement Sustainable Development principles), is a staunch opponent
• Democrats Against Agenda 21:  it isn’t just conservatives
•      The Post Sustainability Institute:  a partner website with Democrats Against Agenda 21
• Sustainable Development Virginia:  How the people of the Commonwealth are fighting back
• America Don’t Forget:
• Stop Agenda 21:  brought to you by The John Birch Society
• Sovereignty International:  (currently under construction)
• Invoking Coordination:  making the Feds comply with your city’s plans
• Coordination America

Judicial Activism

Judicial Watch    |    National Legal and Policy Center    |    US Justice Foundation    |

American Center for Law and Justice    |    Judgepedia    |

Education

912 First Landing Patriots    |    Constituting America    |  Foundation for Educational Choice    |

Stop Common Core    |    The FIRE    |    Hillsdale College    |    Truth in American Education    |

Virginia Education Coalition    |    National Center for Constitutional Studies    |

Learn Our History Videos    |

Voting

Defend The Vote    |    Show ID To Vote    |    True The Vote    |    Virginia Voter’s Alliance    |

Taxes

Americans for Fair Taxation (Fair Tax)    |    Americans for Tax Reform   |   National Taxpayers Union   |

Taxpayers for Common Sense   |   Truth Attack   |

Health Care

Association of American Physicians and Surgeons    |    Docs for Patient Care  |    Obamacare Watch    |

Follow the Progressives

Act Blue   |    Center for American Progress    |    Congressional Progressive Caucus    |

Democracy for Virginia    |    Planners Network    |    Progressive Democrats of America    |

Project Vote    |    Virginia Progressive Politics    |    Virginia New Majority    |

===

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

It May Be Hard to Believe, But GOP Will Become Even More Extreme, Respected Political Forecasters Say

*October 8, 2013

The Republican factions leading the war on Obamacare, the federal government shutdown—and attacking other Democratic priorities such as preserving safety nets, expanding civil rights and regulating big business—are going to become more extreme and intransigent, top Democratic pollsters [3] have concluded.

“Understand that the base thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country… and [feel] a little powerless to change course,” the analysis [4] by Stan Greenberg, James Carville and Erica Seifert found after a series of focus groups in three red states this summer. “They think Obama has imposed his agenda, while Republicans in DC let him get away with it.”

Their Democracy Corps report is an illuminating profile of the GOP’s three main factions: the Tea Partiers leading today’s brinkmanship, the evangelicals lining up behind them, and overlooked but still significant moderates. At the front of this stampede are right-wingers who believe they are fighting for political survival in an era where white-run America is vanishing and they’ve lost the culture war.

In this paranoid world, Obamacare is Armageddon, the setting for the final battle between good and evil, and the rallying cry that unites the party’s factions.

“Republicans shut down the government to defund or delay Obamacare,” the report [4] said. “This goes to the heart of Republican base thinking about the essential political battle. They think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support. It starts with food stamps and unemployent benefits; expands further if you legitimize the illegals; but insuring the uninsured dramatically grows those dependant on government. They believe this is an electoral strategy—not just a political ideology or economic philosophy. If Obamacare happens, the Republican Party may be lost, in their view.”

The pollsters describe the beliefs of three distinct GOP factions whose passions and thinking are critical to understanding what’s happening in the shutdown and what may ensue in its aftermath. For example, should the White House invoke emergency powers to avoid a federal debt default—as some legal scholars and historians have suggested [5]—their analysis portends that the Tea Partiers and Evangelicals, comprising more than half of the party, will ramp up the rhetoric, accuse Obama of tyranny and possibly even pursue impeachment.

But Democracy Corps’ analysis also describes a political party in turmoil. It suggests that the right-wingers’ escalating tactics will further alienate the 25 percent of Republicans who identify as moderates, including fiscally conservative but socially liberal women who surprisingly told the focus groups they would consider voting for Hillary Clinton for president in 2016.

The report also said that, “climate change is poised to replace healthcare reform among Republicans, with the same dynamics in evidence. But that also could further isolate and divide Republicans too.” It noted, “Evangelicals and Tea Party Republicans share and are consumed by skepticism about climate science—to the point where they mistrust scientists before they begin to speak.”

Race is very much at play in right-wing politics and identity, the pollsters found.

“While few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities,” they said. They believe that “their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities.”

Three Distinct Factions

The report’s most intriguing elements were quotes from members of the various factions that reveal core beliefs and splits in GOP ranks, such as evangelicals’ fervent oppositon to gay rights and reproductive choice, while the Tea Partiers’ don’t want any government role in an individual’s private decisions.

The polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research based its report on six focus groups held among partisan Republicans during two months this summer in Raleigh, North Carolina; Roanoke, Virginia; and Colorado Springs, Colorado. All paticipants said they only or mostly voted for Republicans. The pollsters identified three GOP factions: evangelicals, Tea Partiers and moderates.   ...

==

fallin ur TP  http://lecture.ucsf.edu/special-events/billion-lives/ 1:18

FW AFP CSE 2004 split

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

tim hyde to griscom: freedo choice privacy 1990 memo, a movement to change role of gov in lives; 1992 CART industry front exise 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 mckitick;

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 tob 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 chrt

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

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

==

That scrutiny appears to have gone beyond Tea Party groups to applicants saying they wanted to educate the public to “make America a better place to live” or that criticized how the country was being run, according to a draft audit cited by many outlets. The full audit, by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, will reportedly be released this week. (ProPublica was not contacted by the inspector general’s office.) (UPDATE May 14: The audit has been released.)  

Before the 2012 election, ProPublica devoted months to showing how dozens of social-welfare nonprofits had misled the IRS about their political activity on their applications and tax returns. Social-welfare nonprofits are allowed to spend money to influence elections, as long as their primary purpose is improving social welfare. Unlike super PACs and regular political action committees, they do not have to identify their donors.

In 2012, nonprofits that didn’t have to report their donors poured an unprecedented $322 million into the election. Much of that money — 84 percent — came from conservative groups. 

As part of its reporting, ProPublica regularly requested applications from the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which is responsible for reviewing applications from nonprofits.

Social welfare nonprofits are not required to apply to the IRS to operate. Many politically active new conservative groups apply anyway. Getting IRS approval can help with donations and help insulate groups from further scrutiny. Many politically active new liberal nonprofits have not applied.  

Applications become public only after the IRS approves a group’s tax-exempt status.

---

alternet coverage http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right

---

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/24/tea_partiers_boycott_fox_news_for_being_too_left/

A group of Tea Partyers organized a three-day boycott of Fox News in protest of its coverage of Benghazi, tepid opposition immigration reform, and in general “turning to the left” since the election.

David Freedlander of the Daily Beast reports:

The three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership. (A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had little effect.)

A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

A leader of the boycott, Kathy Amidon, of Nashville, declined an interview, instead directing The Daily Beast to a website, Benghazi-Truth. The website, a single-page, 23,000-word manifesto complete with multicolored fonts, supposedly incriminating videos of Fox News’s complicity in a coverup, and communist propaganda photographs, is kept by someone who identifies himself online as “Proe Graphique,” and who other members of boycott described as someone who works “in New York media.”

“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” Stan Hjerlied, one of the boycotters, told the Beast. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.”

“The more I research into Fox—I saw that they donate more to Democratic candidates than conservative or Republican candidates—I was like holy cow! Maybe they are just trying to snatch our pockets. Maybe they are just talking the talk, because it sure doesn’t look like they are walking the walk,” said another boycotter, Donnie Farner.

Jillian Rayfield is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on politics. Follow her on Twitter at @jillrayfield or email her at jrayfield@salon.com.

---

Oklahoma Agenda 21 Bill Leads To Tea Party Threat Against State Senator

The Huffington Post**  |  ByJohn Celock Posted: 04/02/2013 6:04 pm EDT  |  Updated: 04/03/2013 10:46 am EDT

Oklahoma state Sen. Cliff Branan

An Oklahoma tea party leader has threatened to turn a Republican state senator into a "laughing stock" and "dig into" his family members and associates unless he backs a bill blocking the United Nations' sustainability agenda.

State Sen. Cliff Branan (R-Oklahoma City) referred a March 26 email from Al Gerhart, co-founder of the Sooner Tea Party, to the state Bureau of Investigation, newsok.com reported. The email attacks Branan for not holding an immediate hearing on a bill to ban local governments in Oklahoma from implementing parts of the U.N. sustainability agenda, better known as Agenda 21.

“Get that bill heard or I will make sure you regret not doing it," Gerhart wrote in the email. "I will make you the laughing stock of the Senate if I don't hear that this bill will be heard and passed. We will dig into your past, your family, your associates and once we start on you there will be no end to it. This is a promise.”

Gerhart told newsok.com that he sent the email and acknowledged it was a political threat. He denied he intended it as a physical threat.

“We want to know what is going on down there," Gerhart told newsok.com. "We want to know if his wife has got a criminal history. We want to know everything about him. We want to find out if this man is a responsible citizen, if he's even got his family under control much less control of his office."

The Oklahoma legislation has passed the state House of Representatives, but Branan has not brought it before the Senate Energy Committee, which he chairs.

Agenda 21, drafted in 1992 but not ratified by the U.S. Senate, encourages sustainable development, including bike paths, mass transit and walkable communities. The plan does not contain the force of law in the U.S.

Conservative groups, led by the John Birch Society, have denounced the plan, falsely claiming it would take away private property rights and force people to live in urban centers. They have also wrongly maintained that it would endgolf courses, scuba diving and floor tiles. The John Birch Society has advocated for people to pressure state and local officials to pass legislation rejecting Agenda 21, enlisting PTA presidents and milkmen in the effort.

Oklahoma state Sen. Patrick Anderson (R-Enid), sponsor of the anti-Agenda 21 bill, said in December that he wanted to preserve private property rights.

States around the country, most of them Republican-led, have taken up legislation to either prohibit the enactment of Agenda 21 by local governments or to pass resolutions opposing the plan. Democrats have largely dismissed the Agenda 21 criticism as tinfoil hat madness.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/02/oklahoma-agenda-21_n_3001579.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

--

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/gop-civil-war-continues-tea-party-groups-launch-campaign-against-karl-rove

---

theda:

My interlocutor had played a major role in efforts to get Congress to pass “cap

and trade” legislation during 2009 and 2010. Hefty DC players had worked together in

the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (otherwise known as USCAP), a coalition of

business chieftains and leaders of big environmental organizations that was publicly

launched in 2007 to push legislation to place acap on carbon emissions and create an

open market for energy producers to trade allowances under the cap. 

Once legislated,

caps were meant to be slowly ratcheted down in future decades, so U.S. companies and

citizens would have an incentive to use less carbon-based energy and invest in green

technologies. This “cap and trade” approach was seen by supporters as a quintessentially

market-oriented way to nudge the vast U.S. economy through a gradual transition to

reliance on sources of energy that would do less damage to the climate.

The model

originated with economists looking to harness market forces and found some favor with

major corporations and Republicans, so it seemed to be a good bet for building bipartisan

coalitions in Congress.1 Votes from some Republicans would be essential, because votes

for carbon caps would be hard to find among Democrats representing states with strong

coal or oil sectors or states heavily reliant on electricity generated in coal-fired plants.

To many savvy players, prospects for a legislative push for cap and trade looked

excellent during and right after the presidential campaign of 2008. Versions of this

approach were touted not just by the Democratic nominee and eventual victor Barack

2

Obama, but also by the 2008 Republican standard-bearer, John McCain – who was one of

the favorite GOPers among big environmentalists, because he had repeatedly cosponsored

carbon-control bills. Environmentalists who favored cap and trade presumed

that John McCain would be on their side – it was just a question of when they could make

it possible for him to play a pivotal role in forging a bipartisan deal in the Senate. With

Democratic president Barack Obama moving into the White House in early 2009 and

Democratic House and Senate leaders pledged to act on climate legislation, the time

looked ripe to move full speed ahead. On January 15, 2009, USCAP leaders issued a

meticulously negotiated blueprint for a new cap and trade system and geared up for nonstop

lobbying to get legislation through Congress.2

Visions danced in their heads of a

celebratory White House signing ceremony nicely timed to tee up U.S. leadership in the

next international climate confab scheduled for December 2009 in Copenhagen.

Following months of intricate bargaining, USCAP forces scored an initial, hardfought

success when, on June 29, 2009, the House of Representatives passed the

Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security” bill by a vote of 219 to 212.

Supporters were elated, but they got a big shock almost at once as oppositional lobbying

and media campaigns went into overdrive and fierce grassroots Tea Party protests broke

out. During the summer Congressional recess, telegenic older white protestors carrying

homemade signs appeared at normally sleepy “town hall” sessions to harangue

Congressional Democrats who supported health reform as well as the Waxman-Markey

bill.Protests were bolstered by generously funded advertising campaigns targeted on

Senators who would be asked to decide about cap and trade bills in the fall. In hasty

response, cap and trade supporters threw together a national “war room” and public

3

relations campaign. They plowed ahead toward what they hoped would be a bipartisan

deal in the Senate.

:{:{}:

But one coalitional effort after another fell apart in late 2009 and early 2010, as

putative Senate compromises came and went. In July 2010, Senate Leader Harry Reid

finally pulled the plug when it became clear that no variant of cap and trade or any other

kind of energy legislation had any prospect of coming close to the 60 votes needed to}:

clear his chamber’s filibuster bar. During this pivotal year, Republicans, including longtime

supposed friends of the environmental movement like John McCain, simply melted

away; and in the end GOP Senators unanimously refused to support of any variant of cap

and trade.3 In public opinion polls, Americans registered increased wariness about

government action on carbon caps – with public worries stoked by opponents claiming

that new taxes and regulations would cost jobs, reduce family incomes, and stifle

businesses struggling to recover from the Great Recession.

...In spelling out political obstacles to cap and trade, I look more closely than other

analysts at the role since 1990 of the rightward-lunging Republican Party, which was

pivotal in the collapse of bipartisan negotiations and the growing backlash against carbon

caps. For this part of the analysis, I am able to draw on not only on a wide variety of

surveys, journalistic pieces, and political science studies, but also on research I did with

my co-author Vanessa Williamson for our bookThe Tea Party and the Remaking of

Republican Conservatism.13

==

http://www.alternet.org/print/tea-party-and-right/antigovernment-patriot-movement-expands-fourth-year-row

Antigovernment ‘Patriot’ Movement Expands for the Fourth Year in a Row

March 7, 2013  |  

Capping four years of explosive growth sparked by the election of America’s first black president and anger over the economy, the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012, while the number of hard-core hate groups remained above 1,000. As President Obama enters his second term with an agenda of gun control and immigration reform, the rage on the right is likely to intensify.

The furious reaction to the Obama administration’s gun control proposals is reminiscent of the anger that greeted the passage of the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 ban on assault weapons supported by another relatively liberal Democrat — Bill Clinton. The passage of those bills, along with what was seen by the right as the federal government’s violent suppression of political dissidents at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in the early 1990s, led to the first wave of the Patriot movement that burst into public consciousness with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The number of Patriot groups in that era peaked in 1996 at 858, more than 500 groups fewer than the number active in 2012.

For many, the election of America’s first black president symbolizes the country’s changing demographics, with the loss of its white majority predicted by 2043. (In 2011, for the first time, non-white births outnumbered the births of white children.) But the backlash to that trend predates Obama’s presidency by many years. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of hate groups rose from 602 to more than 1,000, where the count remains today. Now that comprehensive immigration reform is poised to legitimize and potentially accelerate the country’s demographic change, the backlash to that change may accelerate as well.

While the number of hate groups remained essentially unchanged last year — going from 1,018 in 2011 to 1,007 in 2012 — the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) count of 1,360 Patriot groups in 2012 was up about 7% from the 1,274 active in 2011. And that was only the latest growth spurt in the Patriot movement, which generally believes that the federal government is conspiring to take Americans’ guns and destroy their liberties as it paves the way for a global “one-world government.” From a mere 149 organizations in 2008, the number of Patriot groups shot up to 512 in 2009, jumped again to 824 in 2010, and then skyrocketed to 1,274 in 2011 before hitting their all-time high last year.

Now, in the wake of the mass murder of 26 children and adults at a Connecticut school and the Obama-led gun control efforts that followed, it seems likely that that growth will pick up speed once again.

---

watch 3; 1/4 of US does 135

==

Produced by HuffPost's Eyes & Ears Citizen Journalism Unit

Samuel Adams was the brewer and patriot who, in 1773, ginned up a mob of Bostonians dressed as Native Americans which conducted history's original Tea Party. The president of Sam Adams Alliance is John Tsarpalas, former executive director of the Illinois State Republican party. Eric O'Keefe, SAA's chairman and CEO, is a former executive director of the National Libertarian Party. He once worked for Citizens for Congressional Reform (pdf), a project of David Koch's Citizens for a Sound Economy. Along with noted Libertarian financier Howard Rich, O'Keefe sits on the board of directors of Americans for Limited Government.

Shortly before online activist Eric Odom helped kick-start the Tea Party movement, he was new media director for Sam Adams Alliance. This put him in charge of (among other things) setting up websites, coordinating Facebook groups, managing Twitter accounts and other social networking tasks. Odom's first known acts as a Tea Partier were to set up the OfficialChicagoTeaParty.com site and Facebook pages within hours of Rick Santelli's February rant, then spreading word through Twitter, initially utilizing #TCOT, a Twitter list and hashtag for Top Conservatives on Twitter.

Both Odom and another former Sam Adams Alliance staffer, Ken Marrero, are now leaders of American Liberty Alliance. Odom is executive director and Marrero is director of grassroots outreach and coalitions. Marrero was a regional new media specialist with Sam Adams Alliance. In July 2008 he described Sam Adams Alliance as "an outgrowth of, I think, visions and dreams from some people who started at Americans for Limited Government."

John Tillman served as president and director of Americans for Limited Governmentduring its start-up phase as well. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, Tillman grew Americans for Limited Government "from a single, part-time employee in May of 2004 to a staff of approximately 25 that had a significant impact on political activity in 13 states in 2006."

Tillman is also president and CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute. Within hours of Rick Santelli's rant, Kristina Rasmussen, who had just been hired as the Executive Vice President by the Illinois Policy Institute that morning, helped kick start the Chicago Tea Party by participating in a February 19 conference call to plan the event. Rasmussen, who was then the Director of Government Affairs at National Taxpayers Union, was the second speaker on the call. Tillman also serves on Sam Adams Alliance's board of directors and was president and COO of Sam Adams Alliance during its start up phase.

Odom formed American Liberty Alliance in March of this year through a combination of the gift of Sam Adams Alliance's blogivists.com, a conservative blog hosting hub, and the #DontGo movement, founded by Odom in 2008 to support offshore drilling.

American Liberty Alliance is not the only Sam Adams Alliance affiliate in this fight, however. American Majority,a self-described "political training institute", is a "concept" of Sam Adams Alliance, which in turn describes itself as AM's "sponsor". American Majority staff includes former George W Bush speechwriter Ned Ryun, regional field director for Bush/Cheney '04 Lonny Leitner, former Republican state legislator Shari Weber, and former director of operations at the Oklahoma RepublicanParty, Matt Pinnell.

American Majority also got involved this summer on Sam Adams Alliance's American Liberty Tour, offering organizer trainings prior to each tour event. The Tour itself was billed as a project of American Liberty Alliance, Sam Adams Alliance and Americans for Limited Government.

Long before Sam Adams Alliance's recent website redesign, they altered an internship recruitment page that connected Sam Adams Alliance to Koch Industries: "Interested parties can apply for a Sam Adams Alliance internship through the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program administered by the Institute for Humane Studies and the State Policy Network." The internship is still listed on the IHS website. Charles Koch founded the IHS. The internship page existed up until the site's ongoing redesign, but recently the Koch reference was absent from the Sam Adams Alliance website. An article in Playboy Magazine, taken down almost as soon as it was posted, claimed the Koch reference was scrubbed:{on Feb. 16. Three days later, Santelli's }:{ rant kick-started the Tea Party movement, enabled by Odom's on-line assistance.}:

Read full coverage detailing the various parts of the Anatomy of the Tea Party Movement:

• Tea Party Patriots
• FreedomWorks
• Tea Party Express
• Americans for Prosperity
• American Liberty Alliance
• Sam Adams Alliance
• American Future Fund
• RecessRally.com
• The Media

==

books

---

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism 

Theda Skocpol(Author), Vanessa Williamson(Author)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Remaking-Republican-Conservatism/dp/0199832633/ref=pd_sim_b_2

3/16/11 tempe pink slip met w/ nra-ish 2nd amend sisters and afp AZ TP

drudge, twitter imp early

--

The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (The Public Square)

Jill Lepore(Author)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0691150273/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

---

NAACP Report Ties Tea Party to Militia and Racist Groups http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/20/naacp_report_ties_tea_party_to

Less than two weeks before the midterms elections, the NAACP has published a new report that exposes what it calls links between various Tea Party organizations and racist hate groups in the United States. The report, 'Tea Party Nationalism,' analyzes each of the six most active Tea Party organizations in the country and describes links between Tea Party factions and various white supremacist groups, anti-immigrant organizations and militias. We speak with Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president and CEO of the NAACP; and one of the authors of the report, Leonard Zeskind, the president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights  oct 2010

===

ACOSTA: Global warming, is it manmade? Does human activity contribute to global warming?

O’DONNELL: I don’t have an opinion on that. I would have to look at a specific piece of legislation when it comes to cap and trade, the bill that has been pout there supposedly out there to combat climate change. I’m opposed to cap and trade because of the economic consequences. What it will do to the individual household, skyrocketing our utility bills beyond what we can afford, and it doesn’t address the real issue it was intended to address.

===

Members of House Caucus

There are 59 members of the Tea Party Caucus, all Republicans.^[16]

1. Sandy Adams (FL-24)
2. Robert Aderholt (AL-4)
3. Todd Akin (MO-2)
4. Rodney Alexander (LA-5)
5. Michele Bachmann (MN-6)
6. Roscoe Bartlett (MD-6)
7. Joe Barton (TX-6)
8. Gus Bilirakis (FL-9)
9. Rob Bishop (UT-1)
10. Diane Black (TN-6)
11. Michael Burgess (TX-26)
12. Paul Broun (GA-10)
13. Dan Burton (IN-5)
14. John Carter (TX-31)
15. Bill Cassidy (LA-6)
16. Howard Coble (NC-6)
17. Mike Coffman (CO-6)
18. Ander Crenshaw (FL-4)
19. John Culberson (TX-7)
20. Jeff Duncan (SC-3)
21. Blake Farenthold (TX-27)
22. Stephen Fincher (TN-8)
23. John Fleming (LA-4)
24. Trent Franks (AZ-2)
25. Phil Gingrey (GA-11)
26. Louie Gohmert (TX-1)
27. Vicky Hartzler (MO-4)
28. Wally Herger (CA-2)
29. Tim Huelskamp (KS-1)
30. Lynn Jenkins (KS-2)
31. Steve King (IA-5)
32. Doug Lamborn (CO-5)
33. Jeff Landry (LA-3)
34. Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-9)
35. Kenny Marchant (TX-24)
36. Tom McClintock (CA-4)
37. David McKinley (WV-1)
38. Gary Miller (CA-42)
39. Mick Mulvaney (SC-5)
40. Randy Neugebauer (TX-19)
41. Rich Nugent (FL-5)
42. Steve Pearce (NM-2)
43. Mike Pence (IN-6)
44. Ted Poe (TX-2)
45. Tom Price (GA-6)
46. Denny Rehberg (MT-AL)
47. Phil Roe (TN-1)
48. Dennis Ross (FL-12)
49. Ed Royce (CA-40)
50. Steve Scalise (LA-1)
51. Pete Sessions (TX-32)
52. Adrian M. Smith (NE-3)
53. Lamar Smith (TX-21)
54. Cliff Stearns (FL-6)
55. Tim Walberg (MI-7)
56. Joe Walsh (IL-8)
57. Allen West (FL-22)
58. Lynn Westmoreland (GA-3)
59. Joe Wilson (SC-2)

[edit] Members of Senate Caucus

1. Jim DeMint (South Carolina)^[6]
2. Rand Paul (Kentucky)^[6]
3. Mike Lee (Utah)^[6]
4. Jerry Moran (Kansas)

---

Tea Party Patriots Investigated: "They Use You and Abuse You"

Pricey consultants, constant fundraising, fame-seeking leaders: A grassroots group cozies up the DC establishment and angers the activists who put it on the map. Part 1 of 3.

By Stephanie Mencimer | Mon Feb. 14, 2011 4:00 AM PST

---

• Part One:
• • "They Use You and Abuse You"[1]
• Part Two:
• • Don't Ask, Don't Tell[2]
• Part Three:
• •The Tax-Dodging Moneyman [3]
• Extra:
• • Who Owns the Tea Party? [4]

Two years ago, Tea Party Patriots got its start as a scrappy, ground-up conservative organization. Its rowdy activists demanded more transparency and less business-as-usual in the nation's capital, and they worked hard to elect candidates who they believed wouldn't succumb to the ways of Washington. But it didn't take long for the grassroots tea party organization to embrace the DC establishment—and some of its more questionable practices.

Lately, Tea Party Patriots5 has started to resemble the Beltway lobbying operations its members have denounced.The group's leaders have cozied up to political insiders implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal [6] and have paid themselves significant salaries. TPP accepted the use of a private jet[7]and a large donation of anonymous cash right before a key election, and its top officials have refused to discuss how the money was spent. [8] And recently, the group has hired several big-time fundraising and public relations firms that work for the who's who of the Republican political class, including some of the GOP's most secretive campaign operations.

As TPP's leaders entrench themselves in Washington, local activists the group represents have accused them of exploiting the grassroots for their own fame and fortune while failing to deliver any meaningful political results. "Tea Party Patriots? I can't attribute one victory to them at all," says Laura Boatright, a former TPP regional coordinator in Southern California who has become an outspoken critic. "Where's the success with what they've done with all this money? My view is that it's just a career plan" for its national leaders—namely Jenny Beth Martin, who in 2010 was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, [9] and Mark Meckler, now a regular commentator on Fox News. (Meckler and Martin did not respond to a request to comment for this story.)

In August, TPP inked a contract with:{ MDS Communications [10], an Arizona-based phone fundraising firm that counts as clients the Republican National Committee [11] and most of the GOP's congressional campaign organizations. MDS even handled the telephone fundraising for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. The firm specializes in working with the GOP's evangelical foot soldiers, including the National Right to Life Committee, Concerned Women for America, and the Family Research Council. It has been heavily involved in anti-gay marriage activities, once donating its services[12]to help raise more than $7 million for Arizona's Proposition 102, which created a state ban on gay marriage.}:

"Tea Party Patriots? I can't attribute one victory to them at all," says Laura Boatright, a former TPP regional coordinator.

The MDS deal with TPP is anything but cheap. Documents filed with the Colorado secretary of state indicate that MDS will keep at least 70 percent of the money it raises—nearly $3 out of every $4. In 2005, California's attorney general released a report [13] (PDF) showing that MDS was among a number of fundraising companies that returned less than 15 percent of what they raised to some of the charities they worked for. Out of more than $585,000 MDS pulled in for the Concerned Women for America, for instance, not a dime went back to the nonprofit group, according to the report.

TPP's leaders negotiated a similar deal with Capitol Resources [14], the most formidable GOP phone fundraising operation in the presidential bellwether state of Iowa. Corporate filings show the company will keep 75 percent of the money it raises hitting up tea partiers for donations.

The firm's owner, Nicole Schlinger [15], is a longtime GOP operative. She was the finance director of the Iowa Republican Party in the late 1990s, and she directed Mitt Romney's victorious 2007 Iowa presidential straw poll campaign. Schlinger also served as the original president and sole board member of the American Future Fund [16], an outside expenditure group that spent millions from anonymous donors during the 2010 midterms attacking Democratic candidates. (Earlier this month, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the IRS to investigate [17] the group for allegedly violating its tax-exempt status.)

Rounding out TPP's new stable of political consultants is the Richard Norman Company [18], a Virginia-based direct-mail fundraising and PR firm. Norman, like the other firms on TPP's payroll, represents some of the country's most prominent GOP players, including the political action committee of former uber-lobbyist and current Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour [19].

TPP has long insisted that it wants to avoid divisive social issues like abortion to focus on the core values of fiscal responsibility and limited government. But in hiring the Norman firm (and MDS, too), it has joined the ranks of a long list of evangelical organizations affiliated with the far-right wing that are represented by the company.

Norman clients include the Foundation for Moral Law, the group founded by the defrocked Alabama Supreme Court judge Roy Moore, who was kicked out of office for his refusal to remove a Ten Commandments sculpture from his courtroom. Also on the firm's client roster are several anti-immigration groups, including the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. Norman even represents a group headed by birther Gary Kreep.

TPP's new coterie of consultants and fundraisers may put the group in a new league politically—but they have sparked bitter complaints by affiliated tea party groups, whose members are tired of being hounded for money. Some see TPP morphing into the very type of slick, DC-centric special interest group they have been fighting against.

In an interview with Congress.com last month, [20] TPP's Martin tried to play down such notions. "Any possible solutions that we come up with, especially policy related, we're going to go back to the local coordinators and say, 'Do you agree with this?'" she said.

Rank-and-file tea partiers aren't buying it. Last month, Jeanie Backus Coates, then the New Mexico state coordinator for TPP, sent out an urgent email to her grassroots compatriots [21] warning that TPP was using telemarketers to raise money from local activists. In a January 13 email, she wrote:

The Tea Party Patriots national website clearly states that 100% of the funds raised go to furthering OUR efforts. Well, I guess that's true AFTER paying out salaries, consultants, telemarketers, attorneys, etc...

And yes, Jenny Beth and [coordinator] Mark Meckler hired a consultant without most of us even knowing about it and now that consultant has encouraged and those two have decided to start soliciting donations from our own local tea party participants so that they can pay themselves, their consultant, their telemarketers, and their attorneys.

Coates was particularly angered because the national TPP leaders have relentlessly pressured local affiliates to turn over their valuable membership contact lists to the national organization, which the group is now using to sic telemarketers on tea partiers.

The list controversy dates back to September, when TPP announced that it had received a $1 million grant [8] from an anonymous donor to conduct get out the vote work before the midterm elections. The money was distributed to local tea party groups, but initially only on the condition that they turn over their membership lists [22] to the national organization, a move that raised suspicions that TPP intended to sell this valuable data. (Fueling these suspicions was the fact that Meckler works for a lead-generation company [23] that provides email contacts to companies often considered to be pyramid schemes.)

"They make it seem like they help local groups. None of that money ever goes back to local groups."

Now, activists are furious to discover that TPP is leveraging those lists to mine tea partiers for money that will fund such things as Meckler and Martin's salaries, a winter conference in Phoenix [24], and of course, the high-priced fundraisers themselves.

Disgruntled former TPP volunteers and activists say that rather than partners in a movement, they have increasingly come to feel like fundraising marks. TPP's fundraising appeals, they say, can be quite deceptive.

One sent out recently by TPP's Martin pleads with "patriots" to donate to pay for sound-stage equipment, event security, travel expenses for speakers, and other tea party rally trappings. She promises that the money will fund the group's efforts to meet with local tea party groups and "to give them the advice, direction, and the logistical support they need to get off the ground." Respondents can return a form pre-addressed to Martin that reads, "Dear Jenny Beth, Thank you for sacrificing your former way of life to fight for our liberty and for the core values and principles our great nation was founded on."

Some tea partiers point out that Martin's "way of life" has improved considerably since she started making a reported $6,000 a month [25] as TPP's national coordinator. Before she became a tea party star, she was working as a maid, scrubbing toilets for Atlanta suburbanites after her husband's company went belly up.

Cindy Chafian, the co-coordinator of California's Chino Hills Tea Party in California, used to donate monthly to TPP. She has since grown disillusioned with the group [26] and its leaders. Far from helping local activists like her, Chafian says, TPP's fundraising efforts are actually diverting resources from the local groups that need them. "They make it seem like they help local groups," she says. "None of that money ever goes back to local groups."

TPP's nonstop fundraising efforts have reached the point where the group's weekly conference calls with activists have turned into little more than telethons, says the organization's former Georgia state coordinator, Joy McGraw. And, far from bolstering local groups, the national organization has left them holding the bag for bills they incur advancing the movement. Such was the case with McGraw, who says she arranged an event attended by Martin and Meckler that featured GOP talking head Dick Morris [27]. McGraw says Martin had her deal with all the logistics for the event, even signing contracts for catering and other expenses, but refused to let her handle any of the money raised to pay for it, including through ticket sales. When the $5,000 catering bill came due, the national coordinators refused to pay, she says. When creditors began to come after her, McGraw was forced to raise money from fellow activists to pay off the debt.

"Tea Party Patriots don't really do anything for the local groups," she says."There are a lot of frustrated people. There are a lot of other people in the country who've done events and have gotten screwed over. We are all volunteers. We do not get paid like [Martin] does. They don't say, 'Thank you.' They use you and abuse you."**

The money TPP has raised is significant, and the hiring of professional fundraisers should only help matters. According to a financial statement filed with the Colorado secretary of state [28], TPP raised $538,009 between June 1, 2009, and May 31, 2010. It would later receive the $1 million donation. Given the amount of cash that has sloshed through TPP's coffers in the past two years, much of it from individual grassroots donors, many activists have begun to wonder how it's been spent by an organization that doesn't even have an office. Yet TPP has proven virtually inscrutable, and its leaders have refused to answer the question: Where's all the money going?

TOMORROW:TPP says it's a nonprofit political charity. "News to us," says the IRS.

**Update 2/14/10 Mother Jones asked a tea party spokesman to comment on this story last week but did not get a response. After the story was published, Debbie Dooley, a TPP national coordinator in Georgia, emailed Mother Jones disputing McGraw's account of events, saying that McGraw approached TPP about doing the event with Dick Morris and offered to sign a contract pledging to handle all the expenses and debt from the event, in exchange for taking a 15 percent cut of any profits, with the rest going to the Atlanta Tea Party.

---

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/tea-party-patriots-investigated

Links:

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/tea-party-patriots-investigated

[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/tea-party-patriots-investigated-part-two

[3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/tea-party-patriots-investigated-part-3

[4] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/04/tea-party-patriots-trademark-fight

[5] http://www.teapartypatriots.org

[6] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/post-beck-dc-tea-party-brings-strange-bedfellows

[7] http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/tea-party-donor-patriot-one-raymon-thompson

[8] http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/tea-party-secret-money-gotv

[9] http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1984685_1984864_1985462,00.html

[10] http://www.sos.state.co.us/ccsa/ViewReports.do?ceId=3627&evId=3627&evEntityType=SN

[11] http://www.opensecrets.org/parties/expenddetail.php?cmte=RNC&txt=MDS+COMMUNICATIONS&cycle=2002

[12] http://www.lavenderliberal.com/cgi-bin/base8v2/linfo.cgi?id=11031

[13] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fag.ca.gov%2Fcharities%2Fpublications%2F2005cfr%2FTable_1.pdf&rct=j&q=%22mds%20communications%22%202005%20california%20attorney%20general&ei=YpRYTZ-qHIGClAf0xdiZBw&usg=AFQjCNEzs4tfpvKcr6pUZwRP1oPjQcwrqA&cad=rja

[14] http://www.sos.state.co.us/ccsa/ViewReports.do?ceId=3658&evId=3658&evEntityType=SN

[15] http://www.campaign-headquarters.com/ourmanagementteam.aspx

[16] http://www.factcheck.org/2010/10/american-future-fund/

[17] http://www.citizensforethics.org/files/2-1-2011%20AFF%20IRS%20Letter.pdf

[18] http://www.richardnorman.com/

[19] http://www.richardnorman.com/clients/haleys-pac/

[20] http://www.congress.org/news/2011/01/13/tension_brews_as_tea_party_goes_pro?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

[21] http://www.scribd.com/doc/46839916/New-Mexico-Tea-Party-Patriot-Email

[22] http://www.marktalk.com/blog/2010/09/25/marktalk-com-exclusive-grassroots-mark-meckler-demands-all-tea-party-patriot-chapters-turn-over-membership-names-and-addresses/

[23] http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/tea-party-mark-meckler-herbalife

[24] http://www.summit11.org/

[25] http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-politics-elections/jenny-beth-martin-the-522344.html

[26] http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=190250214323873&topic=355

[27] http://www.teapartypatriots.org/EventDetail/5340/Atlanta%20Tea%20Party%20Take%20Back%20America%20-%20Dick%20Morris

[28] http://www.sos.state.co.us/ccsa/ViewCoRpt.do?ceId=62632

---

...

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 Abramoff.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

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....

---

The Tea Party Patriots is an American political organization and a faction within the Tea Party movement. Ideologically, the Tea Party Patriots is a conservative organization that believes in Libertarian values. The organization was founded by Jenny Beth Martin, Mark Meckler, and Amy Kremer in March 2009. The following month, the Tea Party Patriots officially gained its non-profit status ^[1]. At its inception, the Tea Party Patriots started with only a few local groups and today it includes over 2200 local groups ^[2]. The sizable membership of these 2200 groups makes the Tea Party Patriots the largest Tea Party group. As of August 2010, there are “115,311 online members on its main website” ^[3] . Of this membership, roughly 63% are male, 31% are female, and 6% choose not to identify ^[4]. The mission statement of the Tea Party Patriots is “to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values” ^[5]. The three core values of the Tea Party Patriots are: Fiscal responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Market Economics ^[6]. These three principles are shared by many Tea Party organizations. It is a common belief in these principles that led to the kinds of protests and rallies that sprung up after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and amid discussions over healthcare reform. Within the Tea Party movement, the Tea Party patriots are the most grassroots in nature. “Despite its size, Tea Party Patriots budget is considerably smaller than FreedomWorks” ^[7]. This is because the funding for the Tea Party Patriots comes from the generous donations of its members, who are predominantly middle-aged, middle-class Americans. On the other hand, FreedomWorks is funded and led by wealthier political operatives. Since its membership is the largest, Tea Party Patriots is seen as the engine or muscle of the Tea Party movement. They are a leader within the movement because they have helped local Tea Party groups create an online presence and gain membership ^[8]. In addition to that, they also help local groups organize rallies and thy provide training for the leaders of the local Tea Party groups ^[9]

Tea Party Patriots was a co-sponsor of the 9/12 March on Washington,^[10] but refused to participate in the National Tea Party Convention.^[11] Tea Party Patriots is most notable for organizing citizen opposition at the healthcare town hall meetings of 2009,^[12] as well as various other anti-government run health care protests.^[13] In 2012, the group along with the Southern Republican Leadership Conference organized a presidential debate. The debate aired on CNN. ^[14]

Along with various other conservative and libertarian organizations the Tea Party Patriots have developed a Contract from America that echoes the Republican Contract with America of 1994 stating some of the core principles and several specific goals shared by organizations and individuals involved with the tea parties.^[15][not ^in ^citation ^given]

Controversies Surrounding the Tea Party Patriots: Rolling Stone and Talking Points Memo have alleged that the organization is run with the help of Freedomworks, a conservative nonprofit led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey.^[16][17] Tea Party Patriots denies this claim.[citation ^needed]

In September 2010 the group announced it had received a $1,000,000 donation from an anonymous donor.^[18] The money will be distributed to its affiliated groups and must be spent by Election Day on November 2, though it cannot be used to directly support any candidate.^[18]

A 2011 investigation by the magazine Mother Jones alleged that the Tea Party Patriots organization was using its 501(c)(4) status to avoid disclosing its expenditures both to the IRS and to local contributors. The magazine reported that when local Tea Party groups pressed for more details on the group's expenses, they were removed from the umbrella organization and threatened with legal action.^[19]

On December 15, 2011 the group's co-founder Mark Meckler was arrested at New York's LaGuardia Airport and charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a felony.^[20] While checking baggage for a flight to Detroit, Meckler presented a Delta Airlines agent with a locked case containing ammunition and an unloaded pistol, which he is not licensed by New York City to possess. He was released following arraignment.^[21] ^[22] Meckler has since resigned from the organization. ^[23]

See also

Conservatism portal

References

1. Burghart, Devin, and Leonard Zeskind. Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions. Rep. Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, Fall 2010. Web. http://justanothercoverup.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TeaPartyNationalism.pdf
2. Zernike, Kate. Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America. New York: Times /Henry Holt and, 2010. Print.
3. Burghart, Devin, and Leonard Zeskind. Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical ExTea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions. Rep. Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, Fall 2010. Web. http://justanothercoverup.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TeaPartyNationalism.pdf
4. Burghart, Devin, and Leonard Zeskind. Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions. Rep. Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, Fall 2010. Web. http://justanothercoverup.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TeaPartyNationalism.pdf
5. "Tea Party Patriots." Tea Party Patriots. Web. http://www.teapartypatriots.org/.
6. "Tea Party Patriots." Tea Party Patriots. Web. http://www.teapartypatriots.org/.
7. Burghart, Devin, and Leonard Zeskind. Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions. Rep. Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, Fall 2010. Web
8. Williamson, Vanessa, and Theda Skocpol. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print
9. Williamson, Vanessa, and Theda Skocpol. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print
10. Tea Party Patriots: 912 March and Rally
11. Alex Brant-Zawadzki: Tea Party Convention Loses Main Sponsor
12. "Beyond Beltway, Health Debate Turns Hostile," *New York Times*, August 7, 2009.
13. Grassroots Group Grabs Attention
14. http://www.teapartypatriots.org/presidential-debate/
15. Contract from America: About Us
16. FreedomWorks Says Jump, Tea Partiers Ask How High | TPMMuckraker
17. The Lie Machine : Rolling Stone
18. ^ ^a ^b Tea Party Patriots to Hand Out $1 Million for November Election Spending
19. "Tea Party Patriots Investigated: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," *Mother Jones*, February 15, 2011.
20. Tea Party big Mark Meckler pinched for gun possession at LaGuardia Airport Thursday - NY Daily News
21. "Tea Party's Mark Meckler Arrested on Gun Charge" *CBS News*, December 16, 2011.
22. "Tea Party Leader Mark Meckler Arrested for Trying to Board Flight with a Gun" *Mediaite*, December 16, 2011.
23. http://www.conservativeactionalerts.com/2012/02/meckler-resigns-from-tea-party-patriots/

External links

• Official website
• Tea Party Patriots on Twitter

Jenny Beth Martin

• Jen's Genuine Life official blog
• Appearances on C-SPAN