Justin's Political Corner
The right-wingers have been in full-on gloat mode since the capture of the Boston Marathon bombers — not because it turned out that they were right about the nature of the perpetrators (they weren’t), but because speculation that they might be right-wing extremists was wrong. Only wingnuts can convert a sigh of relief into an attack on their opponents.
The problem is that all they’re really doing is attempting, yet again, to whitewash away the very real existence of violent extremists on their own side.
Leading the charge is William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, who published a post over the weekend titled“Add Boston Marathon Bombing to pile of Failed Eliminationist Narratives”:
Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition. It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.
The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.
In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative. And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:
James Holmes
Jared Loughner
The Cabby Stabber
The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
Amy Bishop
The Fort Hood Shooter
The IRS Plane Crasher
The Pentagon ShooterWe can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.
Of course, it would always help if people like Jacobson managed to review the posts of the people he’s attacking — since neither I nor anyone at Crooks and Liars ever speculated in print that the perps were white right-wing extremists. Others did, however — and frankly, we discussed it among ourselves. But we knew that it was irresponsible to speculate publicly until we knew more, and so we waited — unlike a few progressives, and even many, many more conservatives. (More about that in a moment.)
The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing extremism’s potential role was entirely rational, considering that in the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States, compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be publishing soon.)
Trust me on this, Mr. Jacobson, as a person who has attended their gatherings and spent time observing their ideology up close and personally: There is nothing remotely left-wing, or anything other than right wing, about the ideology promoted by people like the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan and American Renaissance and a whole bevy of other hate groups out there operating in America today. The notion that they are not from the political right is simply risible.
It just depends where on the very real spectrum of right-wing thought each happens to fall. You see, the reason they call these people right wing extremists is that they begin with simple, perhaps even mainstream, conservative positions and extend them to their most outrageous and illogical extreme.
Conservatives are, for instance, skeptical of the power of the federal government to intervene in civil-rights matters; right-wing extremists believe it has no such power whatsoever, but it has been usurped by a Jewish conspiracy that is imposing its will on white people.
Conservatives are skeptical of internationalism and entities like the United Nations. Right-wing extremists believe the U.N. represents a diabolical plot to overthrow American sovereignty and impose totalitarian rule.
Conservatives believe that abortion is murder of a living being and oppose its use on demand. Right-wing extremists believe that this justifies committing murder and various violent crimes in order to prevent it.
Conservatives believe affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination. Right-wing extremists believe it is part of a plot to oppress white people.
Conservatives oppose taxation, and tax increases in particular, on principle. Right-wing extremists believe that the IRS is an illegitimate institution imposed on the body politic by the aforementioned Jewish conspiracy.
Conservatives oppose increased immigration on principle and illegal immigration as a matter of law enforcement, and believe the borders should be secure. Right-wing extremists believe that Mexicans are coming here as part of an “Aztlan” conspiracy to retake the Southwest for Mexico, and that we should start shooting border crossers on sight.
You get the idea.
Moreover, the claim that right-wing extremists have nothing to do with the Tea Party is just flatly risible. I have two simple words regarding that claim: Oath Keepers.
But the conspiracist Oath Keepers are hardly the only extremist element that has been absorbed within the ranks of the Tea Party. The list is long, but it’s headed up by the Minutemen who have become Tea Party leaders. Moreover, as I explored in an investigative piece for AlterNet, the movement became a functional extension of the Patriot/militia movement in many precincts, especially in rural areas, away from the television crews.
Jacobson’s limitations on what constitutes “right wing” are not only ahistorical, afactual, and fully at odds with reality, they’re also predictably self-serving. So it’s not surprising that, given his criteria, even his list of “failed eliminationist narratives” is fatally flawed.
Most of the examples he provides, notably the Bill Sparkman episode, were never discussed by me or by anyone at C&L as instances of right-wing violence, because we never considered them such. However, there are three cases here that we did indeed describe as involving right-wing extremists. And you know what? We still do.
We realize, for instance, that the post-shooting narrative favored pretending that Jared Lee Loughner was somehow not a terrorist because he was mentally ill (a claim they for some reason do not make when it comes to Nidal Hasan, the mentally ill gunman in the Fort Hood shooting rampage). They also found other mitigating factors, such as Loughner’s youthful liberalism, to claim that he was not a right-wing extremist, despite the obvious liberal-ness of his targets. However, none of that can overcome the reality that at the time he acted, Loughner was carrying out what he saw as a mission on behalf of his now-adopted right-wing beliefs involving a global monetary conspiracy. He was indeed a right-wing extremist, and other experts on the subject who have examined the record have reached the same conclusion.
Similarly, we found that the IRS plane bomber was indeed a terrorist, and that he was acting on behalf of the very same extremist anti-tax ideology we described above. And the Pentagon shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was acting out on his beliefs derived from Alex Jones’s conspiracy theories — and Jones, despite many efforts to pretend otherwise, is clearly a classic right-wing conspiracy theorist and extremist from the old John Birch mold.
Yes, we recognize very much that there is a significant difference between mainstream conservatives and right-wing extremists, as we’ve outlined above — but those differences, frankly, keep diminishing, and the ideological distances keep shrinking.
We would love nothing more than to report that conservatives were bravely standing up against extremists on the right and doing their part as citizens to bring an end to their toxic contributions to our society. Believe me, as a onetime moderate Republican from a conservative state, I would love nothing more than to see mainstream conservatives stand up against right-wing extremism, as they once did in the 1980s when Idaho became one of the first states to pass a hate-crimes law.
But those days are long gone. There are still a handful of thoughtful and decent conservatives remaining who will stand up to confront this problem, but they are tiny in number and nil in influence. Instead, conservatism is dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck and William Jacobson (not to mention nearly everyone at Fox News), who instead of taking the problem of right-wing extremism seriously, dismiss its presence, downplay its influence and spread, and otherwise look the other way while viciously attacking anyone with the nerve to point it out.
Conservatives have instead made a cottage industry out of whitewashing away their extremists, most notably when decrying any efforts by law enforcement to confront the issue, and this latest effort in the wake of the Boston bombing is just the latest chapter.
In the meantime, of course, the tide is rising as the number of extremist groups in America reaches record proportions. And mainstream conservatives are aiding and abetting them — first by pretending that they don’t exist while attacking anyone who points out that they do, and second by silently giving them a warm embrace into the ranks of the Tea Party. It bodes ill for us all.
When North Carolinians elected Republican Pat McCrory in November, they thought they were getting a “moderate” Republican. Indeed, McCrory’s public record looked like a moderate Republican, he sounded like a moderate Republican and if you follow the logic about ducks, that means that as governor, McCrory would be a moderate Republican.
North Carolinians are seeing the flaw in duck logic, because something happened to their once moderate Republican governor. It’s like the moment he was handed the keys to the Governor’s mansion he turned into a Tea Party militant overnight.
Yes, the State of North Carolina is turning into a Kochtarian Utopia, with McCrory as the face of a Moderate Republican and multi-millionaire Art Pope, playing the role of Dick Cheney. Mr. Pope is the CEO of Variety Wholesalers Inc. and has been active in Republican politics throughout his adult life. That is, after he co-founded The Libertarian Party as a 20-year-old college student, studying political science at UNC – Chapel Hill.
Pope, who counts the Kochs among his friends, makes the administrations of Rick Snyder, Scott Walker, and even Florida’s Rick Scott look like amateur hour. When Republicans won control of the State’s legislature in 2010, for the first time since 1870, 75% of the funding that made it possible came from “independent” groups with ties to the personification of all that is glorious in the eyes of the Tea Party, the great, white Art Pope.
Once the Republicans gained control of the State’s legislature for the first time in over a century, Pope provided his expertise in gerrymandering which means, as is the case in the Republican controlled House of Representatives in Washington, even when they lose, they still retain control.
Since McCrory took over the Governor’s mansion with Pope as his budget director, the litany of Tea Partyesque legislation has been spell binding. Attacking women’s rights, access to education, savage cuts to unemployment benefits, voting suppression on steroids and much, much more. Also proposed under Art Pope’s watchful eye, Romneyhood, a constitutional amendment for a right to work for less, and government handouts for homeschooling.
As Think Progress said, Pope with McCrory as his face is rapidly turning North Carolina into a Tea Party Utopia.
“With no remaining checks to Republican rule in North Carolina, the state has now become a haven for some of the most ideological — and ill-considered — tea party fantasies dressed up as legislation.”
We wouldn’t see proposals to impose any religion, let alone a specific religion, on the populace of North Carolina under a “moderate” Republican Administration and it certainly doesn’t make sense under Libertarianism. Yet, that’s just one of the laws proposed by the Pope/McCrory Administration. This is particularly ironic, since Pope is familiar with the first amendment, when it comes to his “right” to throw as much money as possible at races where Republicans can’t sell their ideas.
If Pope and McCrory have their way, NC’s Racial Justice Act that sought to take racism out of North Carolina’s criminal justice system will be a thing of the past.
This is symptomatic of the Tea Party’s version of libertarianism, in which free speech applies to the uber rich when they buy politicians, but freedom of religion is reduced to “allowing” North Carolinians to choose which Church, spouting the state religion, they will attend. Somehow, the first Amendment that Pope pointed to when defending his “right” to buy the State’s government no longer matters under the Pope/McCrory Administration.
It’s the sort of “libertarianism” that frowns upon assuring civil protections of people who are vulnerable to discrimination in favor of preserving the racists’ ‘freedom’ to be racists.
But wait, there is so much more. North Carolina shows us why the Tea Party is drawn to having inexperienced “fresh faces.” It’s so much easier for Dick Cheney types to pull their strings behind the curtain.
In 2012, Pope served as the co-chair for Pat McCrory’s transition team before he was appointed to be the state’s chief budget writer in McCrory’s Administration. When his appointment as Budget Director was announced, observers of North Carolinian politics knew what lay ahead. McCrory serves as the Public face of his Administration, with Art Pope pulling his strings from behind the scenes.
Most of the proposed voter suppression legislation is the same boilerplate laws we saw passed by Republicans before the 2012 election. However, the Pope/McCrory voter suppression package has a couple of additional laws that only a Kochtarian can see as an enhancement of liberty. First up is a law to remove the child deduction from parents whose children vote where they go to college instead of in their home town. It has the same effect as a poll tax, even if Pope and McCrory would deny that it is a poll tax.
Of course, Voter Integrity Project of NC which has ties to Art Pope, are salivating over this law. Like good soldiers of the Koch controlled Tea Party, they’re armed with talking points, so they don’t have to worry their little heads by thinking about what they are advocating.
North Carolinians will be hearing about how this law, proposed by one of Art Pope’s puppets, is really just about “equalizing” the vote because college students are such a privileged lot. This message provided courtesy of one of Art Pope’s “grassroots” organizations will appear to be a “grassroots” concern, with Art Pope, once again, pulling the strings. Granted, recognizing why this policy is constitutionally problematic would mean taking a look at the 24th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. But Pope’s puppets need not worry about it. He does all the thinking, and all they have to do is propose his law and parrot his message. It’s so much more efficient when one person does the thinking and makes all the decisions, you know.
The Voter Integrity Project operates much like those other wonderful “grass roots” organizations, Americans For Prosperity and the Tea Party where Pope (and his bff’s the Koch Brothers” also have ties, in which “grassroots” really means “top down.” Their sugar daddies run the show, while the “grass roots” members act as broadcasters of their sugar daddy’s message. after legislators bought by their sugar daddies propose the policies envisioned by Art Pope and the Koch Brothers.
Pope isn’t stopping at voter suppression though. As the person responsible for writing NC’s budgets, Pope is using the budget to eliminate NC’sJudicial Public Finance Program.
In short, the program provides public financing for judicial elections, rather than the sort of “grass roots” financing that comes from people like Art Pope. Considering that Pope believes that money is speech, his opposition to this program is predictable. After all, money is only speech when the money in question belongs to the uberrich and besides, public financing of elections sort of puts a damper on the uberrich’s financial megaphone silencing the voices of everyone else. Then there’s practical reality. To assure the laws proposed by the legislators that Pope invested in remain in tact, Pope needs the ability to buy judges to rubber stamp his laws should they, somehow be subject to constitutional challenges.
Just think of it, the same guy who writes the law, buys a lawmaker to propose it and has his “grassroots’ organization broadcast his talking points. Just in case you people get uppity and decide to challenge the will of Pope, if he gets his way, he’ll have bought judges to rule in his favor. It’s so efficient and so consistent with the liberty that Kochtarianism stands for.
The lesson of North Carolina is a reminder of the sort of Republican Party we’re dealing with today. It’s a Republican Party controlled by people who believe they are entitled to buy legislators and judges to silence the voices of Americans who don’t belong to the billionaire boys club. It’s a party of plutocrats that not only can’t relate to most Americans, and all American values, but hold contempt for both. The real leaders aren’t those moderate faces on the campaign trail, they are those men hiding behind the curtain.
Presenting the next great conservative conspiracy: Obama, ALEC, the UN, Rupert Murdoch, Bill & Melinda Gates, and Jeb Bush (!) are coming for your kids.
Last week, conservative talk show host and media mogul Glenn Beck decided to let his listeners in on what he dubbed “the biggest story in American history.” It’s called System X. “If you don’t stop it,” he warned, “American history is over as you know it.”
As Beck explained it, a little-known Department of Education program, supported by rich philanthropists, business interests, and the United Nations, was turning public schools into the world’s next great data-mining frontier. Using carrots offered up in the 2009 stimulus bill, the federal government and its contractors could compile hundreds of points of data on your kids and use it for who knows what. The result: “System X: a government run by a single party in control of labor, media, education, and banking; joined by big business to further their mutual collective goals.”
Beck’s not the only person fighting Common Core. Lawmakers in 18 states have considered legislation to block the implementation of the curriculum standards. Five—Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia—have successfully rejected or partially rejected Common Core. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell reiterated his opposition to Common Core in late March, just one week after Texas Gov. Rick Perry went on Beck’s program to denounce it.
On the most basic level, the fight over Common Core is same fight parents and policymakers have been waging over public education for the last century, centering on two basic questions: What is the appropriate level of federal involvement in local schooling? And if we did settle on an umbrella curriculum, what should it actually look like? Education reformer Diane Ravitch, for one, opposes Common Core on the grounds that, while there should be a set of national education tenets, she believes “such standards should be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government.”
But in the hands of activists like Beck, Common Core has taken on a more ominous tone. The long-standing fever swamp fears of enforced secularism and multiculturalism, like those promoted by now-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in the 1990s, have been given a digital makeover.
The core itself is what it sounds like—a broad curriculum standard. States that choose to accept Common Core gain access to a pot of billions of federal dollars. Social conservatives have never liked that kind of incentive game, especially when it’s connected to a Democratic president. (GOP Rep. Rob Bishop, whose Utah district is ground zero for the anti-Common Core movement, called the Common Core a “hook” from which the state could never extricate itself.)
According to its critics, the most nefarious consequence of Common Core is a data collection program that’s part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus). The idea is to better track student demographic and achievement data to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and respond accordingly. Some of the biggest names in American politics and business support the idea. In 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up with the Carnegie Foundation and an educational subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to develop a database of student data that states can access for free until 2015. (After that it will charge an annual fee.) At a speech at the White House last November, Shawn T. Bay, CEO of the education data company eScholar, called Common Core “the glue that actually ties everything together” in the Department of Education’s Big Data push.
For now, most GOP lawmakers’ concerns about the Common Core focus on the curriculum and the idea of federal control, not Big Data. But the Obama administration is wary of Common Core taking on a life of its own in the conservative fever swamps.
That is what a number of Tea Party activists are saying and they are organizing a boycott to protest the conservative station’s coverage, especially what they view as the network’s relative silence in investigating the attacks on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.”
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.”
By way of explanation, the website reports: “People ask why not all mainstream media? Why just Boycott FOX? The answer, again, is that FOX needs the Tea Party/conservatives more than the conservatives need FOX after FOX turned left, basically selling out the people who made FOX successful in an attempt to earn an extra buck. FOX is extremely vulnerable to these boycotts while the rest of the MSM doesn’t need us at all, to speak of.”
Organizers then encourage would-be Fox News viewers to wait until the One America network, which is supposed to launch this summer as an alternative to Fox, goes on the air.
Among the demands the protesters have is that Fox News “be the right-wing CBS News: to break stories, to break information, and to do what news organizations have always done with such stories: break politicians,” that the network have at least one segment on Benghazi every night on two of its prime-time shows; that Fox similarly devote investigative resources to discovering the truth of Obama’s birth certificate; and that the network cease striving to be “fair and balanced.”
“We need Fox to turn right,” said Hjerlied. “We think this is a coverup and Fox is aiding and abetting it. This is the way Hitler started taking over Germany, by managing and manipulating the news media.”
h/t: The Daily Beast
Oy vey! Dana Loesch, a vicious far-right hatemonger and sociopath, is making up false accusations about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a highly reputable organization. The reason for this is that the SPLC truthfully wrote about the increasingly disturbing influence of radical right anti-government “Patriot” groups.
SPLC, on the reasons why the far-right “Patriot” movement is growing:The number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups on the American radical right reached an all-time high in 2012, the fourth consecutive year of powerful growth by a movement that is becoming increasingly militant as President Obama enters his second term and Congress debates gun control measures, according to a reportissued today by the SPLC.Loesch, on the other hand, used it to attack the SPLC and even falsely attacked them for allegedly aiding and abetting Floyd Lee Corkins II’s role in the Family Research Council shooting.
DanaLoeschRadio.com:Around seven months ago Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the Family Research Council headquarters and opened fire. Corkins told the FBI that he was inspired by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate lists published online. The SPLC designates groups with which it disagrees as “hate groups.” Despite having served as the inspiration for one tragedy, the SPLC is once again pushing its ironic “hate lists” in the spring issue of their publication.
The same individuals who perpetuated this association were silent when it was discovered that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s smear lists did inspire the criminal behind the FRC shooting. There have been no calls for the SPLC to cease publishing it’s hateful lists or even pull the past lists which inspired Corkins. Are we to expect more tragedies based on the SPLC “hate lists?” Will SPLC even apologize for pushing hyper-inaccurate which have already endangered the lives of one group’s members?
No, Dana, the SPLC and their hate group listings did NOT inspire the criminal behind the FRC shooting. They did condemn the FRC shooting incident.
WorldNetDaily’s Robert Ringer today maintains that President Obama’s gun control legislation is actually meant to confiscate all guns in order to blunt the rise of the Tea Party. Ringer claims that there are “many more rednecks” joining the Tea Party, and they will be the last line of defense against Obama’s plan to “grab people’s guns.”
If Obama succeeds, Ringer warns, “gulags, gas chambers and firing squads are easily put into place,” and the president will ultimately be able to accomplish his life mission: “the complete destruction of Western civilization.”
There is but one way to combat the emotional sewage of the left: Confront it – head-on – loud, clear and unequivocally. Timidity does not work. The left thrives on the timidity, cowardice and the lack of principle of statist conservatives.
What is annoying about all this is that millions of us knew the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Obama before he ever took office. We knew he would never make the original of his birth certificate available to any independent authority. We knew he would use the Cloward-Piven strategy to collapse the economy and make virtually everyone dependent on the state. And we knew he would try to ban all guns in order to make citizens defenseless.Which is why guns are now at the top of his agenda. He senses that the tea party is threatening to make a comeback, this time with many more rednecks in the mix. Rednecks are a government’s worst nightmare because they 1) own lots of guns, and 2) often live in hard to reach places – e.g., the Ozarks, the Appalachians and the Smokys. And they don’t much care for people who wear government badges.
Whenever government tries to exert absolute control over the citizenry, the use of force is a must. You cannot stop people from doing things they want to do, or make them do things they don’t want to do, without applying brute force. And that’s a dangerous tactic when there are several hundred million guns stashed away in private hands.
It would take an inestimable number of Waco-style attacks to root out every redneck in the U.S. That’s why Hitler, Stalin and every other brutal dictator has been smart enough to grab people’s guns early on. After that, gulags, gas chambers and firing squads are easily put into place.
Do I seriously believe that gulag prison camps are possible in the U.S.? Yes.
Do I seriously believe that gas chambers and mass executions are possible in the U.S.? Yes.
In fact, any kind of atrocities are possible, but only if government first accomplishes its No. 1 objective: confiscating your guns. Remember, when people fear the government, they get tyranny. But when the government fears the people, they get freedom. And government will continue to fear the people so long as the people have guns. In that vein, may God bless rednecks everywhere.
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
Zeb Colter, an anti-immigrant character from World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) that has recently drawn the ire of right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck, would be right at home in the conservative media. Many of Colter’s bigoted and flawed arguments have been the right’s stock-in-trade for years.
Beck targeted the Colter character on his radio show, arguing that Colter is “demonizing the Tea Party.” Beck also accused the WWE of “mocking me for standing up for the Constitution.” Beck’s co-host Stu Burguiere complained: “It seems that the villain, the guy you’re supposed to hate, is this stereotype of a conservative that I’ve never met.”
Colter currently appears on WWE programming alongside wrestler Jack Swagger, spouting a lot of heated anti-immigrant rhetoric in the middle of a scripted feud with Mexican-born wrestler Alberto Del Rio. According to WWE, Colter’s rhetoric is intended to “to build the Mexican American character Del Rio into a hero given WWE’s large Latino base.”
WWE explains that in order “to create compelling and relevant content for our audience, it is important to incorporate current events into our storylines.”
In a series of videos, Colter’s character (along with Swagger) expanded on his divisive philosophy, using language that would be right at home on Fox News or on conservative talk radio.
h/t: MMFA
On Saturday, gun rights advocates will be organizing at least 121 rallies across the country in a “day of resistance” to President Obama’s gun violence prevention proposals. But some tea party activists are questioning the credentials of the group organizing the rallies, a Mesa, Arizona-based outfit called TheTeaParty.net that’s been criticized as a data-harvesting operation designed to vacuum up contact information and credit card numbers from unsuspecting and largely clueless conservative activists. They’ve complained that the group raises tons of money under the tea party name but doesn’t spend much to further the movement, and they’re skeptical of its move into the gun debate.
Robin Stublen, a Florida tea party activist and gun owner, is suspicious of the Day of Resistance event. “All my life I have been around guns of some sort,” he says. “Some are truly works of art. I respect them. I would never think of using them as the next political toy to make a fast buck. I seriously doubt if any of these so-called ‘leaders’ could tell the business end of a gun, let alone take them apart and clean them. They are opportunists and should be ignored.”
TheTeaPary.net was founded by Todd Cefaratti, an Arizona man who is the CEO of a “lead generation” company for the reverse-mortgage industry and who has inserted himself into tea party politics in recent years. In 2011, TheTeaParty.net sponsored a truck at NASCAR’s Camping World Truck Series, and it made a big splash by sponsoring a tea party “unity rally” at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, last year. It’s been a sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference in DC this year and last, raising its profile among conservative activists.
Now, it’s hosting the Day of Resistance website. And the group has had an ever-changing cast of characters associated with it, including Judson Phillips, the founder of the Tea Party Nation, who’s come under fire for making racist comments and for his efforts to make a buck off the movement by scoring an appearance by Sarah Palin at a for-profit tea party convention. Donna Wiesner Keene, the wife of NRA president David Keene, also worked briefly for the group.
or years, tea party activists have complained that the group was ever so interested in collecting their personal information and their money, without spending much to support tea party political candidates. Activists griped that signing up with TheTeaParty.net would earn them nothing but spam from gold companies and other advertising. (In 2011, Roll Call reported that the group was indeed renting out its email list to gold companies and soliciting clients through NewsMax, the conservative news service, though a spokesperson says the group no longer works with NewsMax.)
The Day of Resistance was reportedly the brainchild of Dustin Stockman, whose father founded the Western Representation PAC and who logged some time on the Tea Party Express bus tours. (That PAC is most famous for helping tea party candidate Joe Miller knock off Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the 2010 Republican Senate primary in Alaska, though Murkowski went on to retain her seat as a write-in candidate.) Stockton is now TheTeaParty.net’s “chief strategist.”
Fundraising for the gun protests doesn’t seem to be going so well. The group made news last weekwhen one of its fundraising emails noted that it had failed to reach its goal of raising $100,000 to support the nationwide rallies. “Last week we announced that we needed to raise $100,000 to market the Day of Resistance to make sure that there are HUGE crowds at all of these rallies,” Dustin Stockman wrote. “Unfortunately we remain well short of our goal. As of writing we have only raised $26,125.72 towards the $100,000 goal.”
Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) made no secret of his controversial positions on everything from the dangers of science to eliminating the Voters Rights Act in his time as a Tea Party favorite. In preparation for a Senate run, however, Broun has chosen to keep his views to himself — and his potential donors.
Broun is currently the only Republican who has announced a bid to replace Sen. Saxby Chambliss in the Senate upon the latter’s retirement in 2014. In the interest of winning over a state-wide majority of voters, Broun has sought to moderate his positions somewhat, referring to bipartisan efforts in manufacturing jobs in a recent radio interview.
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has pointed out, however, his new moderate tone has yet to reach the Congressman’s fundraising efforts. AJC’s Jim Galloway highlighted a few choice paragraphs from one of Broun’s fundraising letters to potential funders:
As a Member of the House of Representatives for the last few years, I have fought tooth-and-nail against President Obama’s agenda at every turn.
I was the first Member of Congress to call him a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth….
On the Senate side, I’m a staunch ally of now retired Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina — and of course, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky….
Broun is likely right that he was the first to call Obama a Marxist back in 2008. In the same interview, he also compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler.
As recently as January, Broun said that President Obama only upholds the “Soviet Constitution.”
Shattering the public perception that the Tea Party is a spontaneous popular citizens movement, a new academic paper provides evidence that an organization founded by David and Charles Koch, attempted to launch the Tea Party movement in 2002.
The peer-reviewed study appearing in the academic journal, Tobacco Control and titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, shows that the group Citizens for a Sound Economy launched a Tea Party movement website, www.usteaparty.com, that went live in 2002.
According to the website DeSmogBlog.com, who broke this story earlier today, CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch in 1984. David Koch sat on the board of CSE for many years and the group’s first president, Richard Fink, went on to become a senior VP at Koch Industries.
(via GOP Lawmaker Rapert Behind Abortion Ban: ‘We’re Not Going To Allow Minorities To Run Roughshod’)
On Wednesday, the Arkansas Senate approved an unconstitutional bill to ban abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. As The Nation’s Lee Fang noted Friday, this is part of a larger strategy by chief sponsor Sen. Jason Rapert (R) to remake America as a arch-conservative country.
Rapert explained his long-term goals in a racist 2011 rant at a Tea Party rally, as he bashed President Obama for hosting a Ramadan celebration:
RAPERT: I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is [sic] not going to save us. We’re going to take this country back for the Lord. We’re going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in!
![quickhits:
Michele Bachmann: Tea Party favorite, GOP stalwart, deadbeat, possible thief.
Salon:
Over a year after she dropped out, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann has refused to pay five staffers from her failed presidential bid, according to a former top campaign official. Peter Waldron, her controversial former national field coordinator, told Salon the dispute started when former Iowa straw poll staffers refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would bar them from discussing any “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” they witnessed on the campaign with police or reporters.
Waldron said the staffers are owed a mere $5,000, and that Bachmann has more than $2 million in her campaign account, but has refused to pay unless the staffers sign the agreement. Negotiations over payment with Bachmann Finance Chairman James Pollack eventually broke down and Waldron decided to go public with the news, posting a press release on Christian Newswire this evening.
“I feel a moral obligation to see that my Christian brothers and sisters are paid for worked performed in good faith. I’ve continually communicated by telephone and email with Mr. Pollack for 1 year but he broke every promise made to me to pay the staff. I appealed to Dr. [Marcus] Bachmann for help. I appealed to Representative Bachmann’s Chief of Staff Robert Boland to intercede with Mrs. Bachmann on behalf of her loyal Iowa staff — all of whom are married, all have children,” Waldron said in the press release.
“It is sobering to think that a Christian member of Congress would betray her testimony to the Lord and the public by withholding earned wages from deserving staff,” Waldron added.
Wait a second; a nondisclosure agreement gagging staffers from discussing “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity?” What’s that all about?
“Reached by phone, Waldron confirmed the details and said the nondisclosure agreement stems from the campaign’s alleged misuse of an email list;” Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports. “A home-schooling group accused the Bachmann campaign of stealing the list, which was contained on a volunteer’s laptop, and then using it to fundraise for the campaign. The home-schooling group has sued the campaign and Waldron said there is also a criminal investigation pending, explaining that he spoke with police about the incident ‘several times.’”
The problem here is that Bachmann is a member of the religious right and, as such, literally believes she’s engaged in battle with Satan. All of us lefties, feminists, atheists, gays and gay-friendly folks, pro-choice people, etc. are the devil’s minions. When you’re locked in battle over the fate of humanity, nothing is out of bounds and every dirty, criminal trick is moral. When you think your adversary is literally the devil, you have no real incentive to fight fair — it’s not immoral to cheat Satan. In fact, it’s required. You can even — as is the case here — cheat allies. The end, being automatically Just and Holy, justifies the means.
Of course, this is the same psychology that terrorists use to justify murder. The difference really is only a matter of degree.
[image source]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/bd4d9b5c791ed61caf7eb3364d9f35ff/tumblr_mgh22hFvUn1qfengno1_500.jpg)
Michele Bachmann: Tea Party favorite, GOP stalwart, deadbeat, possible thief.
Over a year after she dropped out, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann has refused to pay five staffers from her failed presidential bid, according to a former top campaign official. Peter Waldron, her controversial former national field coordinator, told Salon the dispute started when former Iowa straw poll staffers refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would bar them from discussing any “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” they witnessed on the campaign with police or reporters.
Waldron said the staffers are owed a mere $5,000, and that Bachmann has more than $2 million in her campaign account, but has refused to pay unless the staffers sign the agreement. Negotiations over payment with Bachmann Finance Chairman James Pollack eventually broke down and Waldron decided to go public with the news, posting a press release on Christian Newswire this evening.
“I feel a moral obligation to see that my Christian brothers and sisters are paid for worked performed in good faith. I’ve continually communicated by telephone and email with Mr. Pollack for 1 year but he broke every promise made to me to pay the staff. I appealed to Dr. [Marcus] Bachmann for help. I appealed to Representative Bachmann’s Chief of Staff Robert Boland to intercede with Mrs. Bachmann on behalf of her loyal Iowa staff — all of whom are married, all have children,” Waldron said in the press release.
“It is sobering to think that a Christian member of Congress would betray her testimony to the Lord and the public by withholding earned wages from deserving staff,” Waldron added.
Wait a second; a nondisclosure agreement gagging staffers from discussing “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity?” What’s that all about?
“Reached by phone, Waldron confirmed the details and said the nondisclosure agreement stems from the campaign’s alleged misuse of an email list;” Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports. “A home-schooling group accused the Bachmann campaign of stealing the list, which was contained on a volunteer’s laptop, and then using it to fundraise for the campaign. The home-schooling group has sued the campaign and Waldron said there is also a criminal investigation pending, explaining that he spoke with police about the incident ‘several times.’”
The problem here is that Bachmann is a member of the religious right and, as such, literally believes she’s engaged in battle with Satan. All of us lefties, feminists, atheists, gays and gay-friendly folks, pro-choice people, etc. are the devil’s minions. When you’re locked in battle over the fate of humanity, nothing is out of bounds and every dirty, criminal trick is moral. When you think your adversary is literally the devil, you have no real incentive to fight fair — it’s not immoral to cheat Satan. In fact, it’s required. You can even — as is the case here — cheat allies. The end, being automatically Just and Holy, justifies the means.
Of course, this is the same psychology that terrorists use to justify murder. The difference really is only a matter of degree.
(via recall-all-republicans)
Progressives have always strongly suspected that the Tea Party — a supposedly “grassroots” über-conservative group that’s actually funded by big business, as opposed to the genuinely grassroots Occupy Wall Street — is a sham. After all, who but a few deep-pocketed individuals would have any interest in promoting cruel and counterproductive policies which aren’t even supported by much of the 1% they’re supposed to benefit? So, it comes as no surprise that muckraking Mother Jones has gotten hold of documents that prove FreedomWorks — the Tea Party’s powerful financial backer — relies almost exclusively on a handful of wealthy donors. To peruse the documents from Andy Kroll’s article, click here.
A December 2012 report prepared for a board of directors meeting by FreedomWorks’ head honchos shows that $33 million — 81 percent of the total $41 million FreedomWorks raked in during 2012 — came from “major gifts” from rich individuals through FreedomWorks and its various non-profits. The organization is not legally required to disclose the names of its benefactors. The report — which Kroll refers to as The Board Book — also includes confidential strategy discussions, including a memo from FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe who dismissed Former GOP Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney as another “old white guy,” and stressing the need for “younger, more diverse, more substantive voices for freedom in America.”
Of course it doesn’t occur to Kibbe or his colleagues that the majority of Americans who aren’t “old white guys” are likely to find the conservative policies repellent. Nonetheless, there are plenty of “old white guys” out there and FreedomWorks has four million Facebook fans, 2.1 million members on its email list, and 81,000 small donors last year.
Mother Jones was also the first to break that bit of news, in an article by David Corn entitled “Dick Armey: ‘This Kind of Secrecy Is Why I Left’ FreedomWorks.” When an organization is so secretive even a rock-ribbed conservative can’t handle it, you’ve gotta wonder. As Maddow concluded during her segment about right wing scams, “Anybody donating to FreedomWorks was effectively paying for the staff time and the resources to produce a project that just personally profited one of the people who work there. [That’s] a scam.”
h/t: AddictingInfo.org
Until last night, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that the Tea Party was on the wane. Congressional leaders of the nascent movement, like Allen West and Joe Walsh had lost reelection, or, like Jim DeMint, had decided to leave politics altogether. House Speaker John Boehner had stripped some of the more outspoken members of the Tea Party caucus of their congressional leadership posts, a sign that the GOP establishment was no longer going to be led by its ultra-conservative tail. The big money groups backing the Tea Party were falling apart in a spate of post-election season squabbling.
But after 85 House Republicans joined Boehner in raising taxes without spending reductions during the end game of Monday night’s fiscal-cliff negotiations, Tea Party leaders and conservative activists from around the country are dusting off their tri-corner hats and “Don’t Tread On Me” signs, and now say that their members are as energized as they have ever been since the first Tax Day protests in 2009. And the Republican Party, they add, had better beware.
“We now have 85 members of the House who have shunned their noses at us,” said Dustin Stockton, a Texas- and Nevada-based operative and the chief strategist of The Tea Party.net. “Our job now is to recruit and inspire and motivate people to run against those Republicans who did it.”
For Tea Partiers and fiscally conservative Republican rank-and filers, the Congress that ended its term this week was at last a chance to get federal spending under control. Hopes were high that this class, which more than doubled the number of members in the House’s Tea Party caucus on their first day, would repudiate previous Republican tendencies to reverse campaign promises and open up the spending spigot as soon as they had their hands on it. And if these newly minted members failed, the Tea Party promised to rally its energy behind new challengers who wouldn’t.
Instead however, this Congress voted to increase spending three times, and never once to cut taxes. The final indignity, the bill to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” by raising taxes on the wealthiest, was negotiated behind closed doors and at the last minute, anathema to a group that had pledged unprecedented openness around legislation. Plus, as many Tea Party leaders around the nation pointed out, the bill that was passed this week includes $1 dollar of spending reductions for every $41 of new taxes.
h/t: The Daily Beast
