Armey to GOPers: Support teabagger legislation or you'll lose

Apparently, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are not the leaders of the GOP. Dick Armey is.

Yesterday, on Meet the Press, Armey, who started FreedomWorks and is an instigator of the teabaggers, issued a warning to House and Senate GOPers: Get on board with the teabagger's agenda, which is enshrined in legislation sponsored by Rep. Paul "Flim-Flam man" Ryan.

Armey talks like he's got the power to defeat Republicans who don't get on board:

"The fact that he has only 13 cosponsors is a big reason why our folks are agitated against the Republicans as well as the Democrats," said Armey, who called Ryan "probably the most creative-thinking and most courageaous guy in Washington."

"The difference between being a cosponsor of Ryan and not is a thing called courage," Armey said. "And we have watched American public policy dominated by Democrats that don't care and Republicans that don't dare for a long time."

That, Armey said, could result in significant losses for Republicans as well as Democrats during the midterm elections.

"We're saying to the Republican Party, get some courage to stand up for the things that are right for this country. Don't stand there and hide from the issue because you're afraid of the politics," Armey said. "The issue of public policy that governs the future of my children is more important than your politics, and if you can't see that we'll replace you."

I love a good intra-GOP battle.

Ryan's legislation is extreme. On August 5th, Krugman deconstructed it noting, "The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." But, when the teabaggers say "jump," most Republicans will say "How high?" Read More......

Teabaggers take over Colorado GOP

It's a mess. And one of their own making. The GOP, and their propaganda organ, FOX, fed this beast. And now it's taking over their primaries. We can laugh, but as I wrote a good year ago, if the Dems screw up enough to convince the voters that they need another "change," we could very well get these nutjobs in office. Read More......

Eric Boehlert thinks the Tea Party movement has collapsed

Eric Boehlert:

Optimistic organizers, who boasted that their website had attracted 2 million hits during the run-up to the big rally, predicted a crowd of 3,000-4,000 people for the Philadelphia event. And they had every reason to be confident. After all, right-wing celebrity Andrew Breitbart, fresh off his Shirley Sherrod star turn, was scheduled to speak at the event, which was held on a gorgeous summer day in downtown Philadelphia on Independence Mall, where throngs of tourists would already be milling around. So it made sense, as Talking Points Memo reported, that organizers had 1,500 bottles of water on ice to hand out for the throngs who descended on the rally to cheer the Tea Party message.

But how many people actually showed up last Saturday for the national Tea Party rally? One local report put the number at 300. That's right, 300, or less than one-tenth of the expected turnout. In fact, it's possible more people showed up in Philadelphia last week to commemorate the opening of the new Apple computer store than showed up at the nationally promoted Tea Party rally featuring Andrew Breitbart.

Memo to the media: The Tea Party movement has collapsed.

And its collapse means it's time for the press to rethink the way it covers the political equivalent of the Pet Rock, a fad that appears to be in its waning days of popularity.

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Dems continue to press Rs on whether they'll join new Teabagger caucus

Great idea.

Democrats began a push Thursday to press Republican congressmen and candidates to say whether or not they will join the newly-formed House Tea Party Caucus.

The effort, headed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is a follow-up to their effort last week tying Republican candidates to the Tea Party movement, which they say is too extreme and out of touch with the goals of mainstream Americans. Last week, the Democrats launched a "Tea Party Contract with America," riffing off the 1994 document put out by Republicans which helped them win back the House.

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Tea Party leery of Tea Party Caucus in the House

And that's okay, since a lot of the House is quite leery of the Teabaggers as well:

It didn’t help when one House member, whom neither Meckler nor others interviewed for this story would identify, said he felt he was taking a political risk by affiliating with the caucus and the movement.

That struck a lot of activists as “fairly patronizing,” said Andrew Ian Dodge, the Patriots state coordinator for Maine, who did not attend the conference but did participate the next day in a Patriots conference call at which Meckler and another attendee recounted the unnamed member’s trepidation.

“How is this a risk for the politicians?” said Dodge. “The tea party movement is made up of very engaged, well-informed, intelligent people. It should be the politicians’ pleasure to meet with us.”

Technically, it's not "patronizing." The House Repubs simply think you're f'g nuts. Read More......

The Teabaggers hold a 'we're not racist, really' rally, hilarity ensues

TPMDC:

Apparently, Uni-Tea wasn't only bridging the racial gap. Brendan Kissam and Matt Hissey wandered into the event carrying signs that said "proud gay conservative" and "freedom is fabulous." They said they were "the Gayborhood's envoy to the tea party."

The pair said the tea party is welcoming to their minority group, too. "The Tea Party is accepting of everybody," said Hissey, adding that "Skin color diversity -- that's not real diversity. Everyone here has a different life experience." Hissey recognized that the tea party "might be against gay marriage," but that's ok, he said, because he is too.

Uni-Tea reached out the hand of tea party acceptance to young people, too -- in the form of white conservative rapper Hi-Caliber and a band of veterans called The Bangers. "This reaches out to the 18-34 year-olds," organizer Jeffrey Weingarten said. It should be noted that Weingarten was successful in getting at least one 18-34 year-old to join him for the day: his son, Freedom Weingarten.

David Webb, an African American top official with Tea Party Federation and the man who shamed Mark Williams and the Tea Party Express for being racist a couple weeks ago, emceed the event and told the tea party crowd that it didn't matter if only a few minorities joined the cause.

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Dems tie Republicans to Tea Party: 'They are one and the same'

Heck of a change from last summer when Democrats were running scared from these morons disrupting health care reform rallies. From Hotline:

As part of its initiative, the DNC is launching a website accusing Republicans of supporting a legislative blueprint in line with the Tea Party movement that includes repeal of the health care law and Wall Street reform, extending tax breaks, privatization of Social Security and the elimination of the Department of Education and the Department of Energy.

"The Tea Party is now an institutionalized part of the Republican party. They are one and the same," a DNC operative said, previewing Kaine's speech. "The positions espoused by the Tea Party is the governing platform of the Republican party. And as voters make their choice this fall it's important to understand what the Republican-Tea Party wants to do if elected."

Here's the DNC's web ad laying out the Republican Tea Party agenda:
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Politico executive editor says those who attack Teabaggers as racist are creating a dangerous political climate

Yes, because now suddenly Politico is worried about getting too extreme and hurting the culture. Putting that aside for a moment, calling the Teabaggers on their racism - anyone remember people spitting on John Lewis and using the n-word? - suddenly makes you the back guy and them the victim. As if this dangerous political climate started because people are standing up to the far right of the Republican party. Or rather, Dick Armey, the guy behind the Teabaggers, was part of the Gingrich revolution in the early 90s that perfected dangerous political climates and raised them to a fine art. Does anyone remember the Teabaggers shutting down townhall meetings last year, and making fun of people for telling their heart-wrenching health care stories?

It seems the Politico has now bought into the religious right's favorite insult: You're intolerant of intolerance. Yes, we are. Read More......

Teabagger racism

From Eugene Robinson at the Wash Post:

Have the rest of the movement's leaders never noticed Williams's rhetoric before now? His most recent obsession, before the NAACP flap, has been a crusade to halt construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan near Ground Zero. He has called the proposed structure a place where Muslims would honor the al-Qaeda hijackers and "worship the terrorists' monkey-god." He has called President Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug."

If Williams is now a pariah in Tea Party circles, that's progress. But this episode should prompt the national leadership to look inward and acknowledge -- not just to the rest of us, but also to themselves -- that ugly, racially charged rhetoric has been part of the movement's stock in trade all along. If the Tea Party groundswell is to mature into something important and lasting, it needs to purge itself of this poison.

And if the Republican Party is going to try to harness the Tea Party's passion on behalf of GOP candidates, responsible leaders need to make clear that racism will not be tolerated. Yet Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to talk about the NAACP flap when asked about it Sunday, and Sen. John Cornyn volunteered that accusing the Tea Party of racism is "slanderous."

It's not slander if it's the truth, senator.

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Gallup discovers that the Teabaggers are actually conservative Republicans

Wait, so all of those health care reform protests were actually partisan? From Gallup, via Digby:

There is significant overlap between Americans who identify as supporters of the Tea Party movement and those who identify as conservative Republicans. Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene.

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Lindsey Graham says Tea Part will die out

From Sam Stein at Huff Post:

"The problem with the Tea Party, I think it's just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out."

Oh, and he's totally not gay. Read More......

Marco Rubio hasn't made mortgage payments since January

Those funny Teabaggers are such good role models. Foreclosure isn't normally what one would considers to be a conservative value but the times they are a changin'.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio and another Miami politician are facing foreclosure on a Tallahassee home they co-own for failing to make mortgage payments since January, Leon County court records show.

The Deutsche Bank National Trust Company initiated foreclosure proceedings on the home owned by Rubio and state Rep. David Rivera, who is running for Congress. Rubio, a former state House speaker, and Rivera lived in the home when they were in Tallahassee for legislative sessions and other business.

Rivera is running for the U.S. District 25 seat, which spans eastern Collier, western Miami-Dade and mainland Monroe counties.

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Rand Paul doesn't appear on Meet the Press, and MTP gets even

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Racism, homophobia and the history of the Rand/Ron Paul family

Joe Conason in Salon:

The last time that anyone examined the details of the Paul family's gamy history was back in 2008, when the New Republic dug up copies of newsletters sent out under Ron's name to raise money, and found that they were replete with ugly references to blacks, Martin Luther King, homosexuals and other targets of the racist far right. At the time, Reason magazine, a libertarian magazine that opposed the "paleo" deviation, gave the most revealing account of its movement's degenerate element in a long article by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel.

According to Sanchez and Weigel, the tone of Paul's newsletters shifted to reflect his political circumstances. Between his first presidential campaign and his return to Congress in 1996 as a Republican, they were filled with slurs against blacks generally and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, including the accusation that the civil rights leader "seduced underage girls and boys." Rothbard hated King deeply, describing him in November 1994 as "a socialist, egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and vicious opponent of private-property rights ... who was long under close Communist Party control," and concluding that "there is one excellent litmus test which can set up a clear dividing line between genuine conservatives and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and what we can now call 'left-libertarians.' And that test is where one stands on 'Doctor' King." (Then again, he hated Lincoln too, whom he disparaged in the same essay as "one of the major despots of American history.")

No wonder Sanchez and Weigel concluded with a forthright condemnation of Ron Paul's dishonesty on race. "Ron Paul may not be a racist," they wrote, "but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists." The same polite formulation could be applied to the hard-line activists behind the Goldwater campaign in 1964, or the "Southern strategists" of the Nixon White House, or the "populist conservatives" of the George Wallace campaign, many of whom still remain active on the right today.

Despite the persistent efforts of Buchanan, Rockwell and many others on the far right, their deranged "dream" of political advancement through racial conflict never developed into a full-scale national nightmare. Instead, King's dream has since drawn closer to fulfillment with the election of Barack Obama. But the profound resentment of the first black president symbolized by Rand Paul and his Tea Party supporters arose from an old political fever swamp that has never been drained.

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Lots more on GOP Teabagger Rand Paul's racist comments

Lots and lots of stories about Rand Pauls refusal to say he'd vote for the Civil Rights Act.

WSJ: Paul's Civil-Rights Remarks Ignite Row
Wash Post: Rand Paul comments about civil rights stir controversy
Eugene Robinson: GOP's Tea Party invite might still be in the mail
The Hill: Rand Paul causes Civil Rights Act controversy with desegregation remarks
AP: Rand Paul Is 'Kentucky Fried Candidate' Over Civil Rights Comments
Lexington Herald-Leader: Paul's statements on discrimination stir controversy
NYT: Tea Party Pick Causes Uproar on Civil Rights
Salon: More historic legislation Rand Paul wouldn't have supported
PoliticsDaily: Rand Paul: An Anti-Government Conspiracy Theorist? Read More......

Rand Paul: The Rosa Parks of big business

What better definition of "Republican" than GOP Teabagger Senate candidate Rand Paul. He's not a big fan of protecting black people from discrimination, but boy oh boy, if you take on big oil, especially while they're dumping tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf, Rand Paul gets vewy vewy angwy.

What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, you know, “I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.” I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. I’ve heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault. Instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen.

Rand Paul: The Rosa Parks of big business. He's not gonna sit on the back of the gushing oil platform. Read More......

Rachel Maddow on why Rand Paul matters

(Hat tip, Crooks and Liars.) Read More......

GOP teabagger candidate Rand Paul also believes 'a free society' will allow 'hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin'

He's not a racist. He just believes people should be free to discriminate against black people. And the difference in practice is?

In a May 30, 2002, letter to the Bowling Green Daily News, Paul's hometown newspaper, he criticized the paper for endorsing the Fair Housing Act, and explained that "a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin."

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Teabagger base ticked at Palin

I love how the writer points out that the mis-spellings are in the original. LOL

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has made her Facebook page into a bully pulpit, issuing policy statements on such issues as nuclear proliferation and oil drilling. Now she's learning that social media can be more than a one-way system of message delivery — thanks to an avalanche of comments from tea party supporters taking issue with her Facebook endorsement of Carly Fiorina in California's upcoming GOP Senate primary.

Many of the supporters of the small-government tea party insurgency regard Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who stumped for the McCain-Palin ticket while serving as its adviser on financial issues in 2008, as a RINO, or "Republican in name only" — a term generally applied to pro-business moderates who don't always support socially conservative positions.

That was very much a dominant sentiment in the hundreds of comments weighing in on Palin's characterization of Fiorina as a "Commonsense Conservative." (Spelling, punctuation and grammar in the originals are retained throughout.)

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Teabaggers plan tea party on September 11

Rather inappropriate day for a "party." Read More......