The Tea Party Nation appears to be coming apart. Plans for the National Tea Party Unity Convention have been in turmoil since it was first announced last February. Their original date was in mid-July, but that was scuttled for a variety of reasons that all sounded like excuses to me. So they rescheduled for October. At the time I wrote that the convention’s prospects were dim and I predicted their demise.
“This looks bad for the Tea Party Convention and for the Tea Party in general. If they can’t whip up enough excitement to populate their big ‘unity’ conference, they are going to have a hard time motivating voters who are not nearly as engaged as the sort of people who flock to these gatherings. Time will tell if the rescheduling has the desired effect. If not, the next press release we see may be the one announcing that the convention was canceled.”
Guess what? The web site for the convention is gone. Disappeared. Ceased to be. There is no remnant of it or explanation. There is no announcement of its demise, nor that of the event. The site and the convention have dissolved into the ether. There is also no mention of the event on the site of its sponsor, Tea Party Nation. (Here is a cached copy of the convention web site).
Raven Brooks, the executive director of Netroots Nation, dug a little further and confirmed the that Tea Partiers have indeed been left high and dry. He called the hotel who told him that “the room block had been canceled and the Mirage had no record of the event.” Netroots Nation, it should be noted, recently held a very successful convention in Las Vegas. Perhaps the Tea Party Nation would like to contact Brooks and get some advice on how it’s done.
I also called the Mirage and they told me the same thing they told Brooks. In addition, I asked if the event had been canceled or if it had never been scheduled in the first place. They told me that they had no contract at all for the event. The cached copy of the convention web site has the Palazzo as the event’s hotel, although that was the first location in July. The October booking was for the Mirage. I called the Palazzo anyway and they also had no record of the event.
This is beginning to sound like a scam. The promoter, Judson Phillips, was broadly criticized when he mounted his first convention for turning the Tea Party movement into a for-profit affair and for paying Sarah Palin $100,000 to read platitudes off of her hand. So it would be interesting to find out what will happen to any registration fees that were collected for the convention (at $400.00 a pop)? Were the speakers, who included Sharron Angle, Lou Dobbs, and Andrew Breitbart, paid for committing to appear? Will the sorry dupes who shelled out for hotel room deposits or airfare just have to eat their losses?
Back in June I wondered about the possibility of a future press release announcing that this convention would be canceled. I guess I gave them too much credit because it appears they’ve decided to just pretend it never existed. That’s pretty much what we’ll be saying about the Tea Party in a couple of years.
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin appeared together at a for-profit Arctic Circle Jerk yesterday, the ninth anniversary of the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States. Although Beck said that his speaking fees would be donated to a charity, and that Palin was not being paid, no one explained where the estimated half million dollar ticket receipts would end up. (Hint: Beck’s nose and Palin’s shoe pantry).
That is vintage Beck, announcing some 