The Tea Party Is Over According To – Bill O’Reilly!

Posted by Mark NC on October 28, 2013 at 9:13 am. 8 Comments :

The astroturf fraud known as the Tea Party was literally invented by a cabal of uber-rightist millionaires and corporations with interests in tobacco and oil. The prime movers were the Koch brothers, who transited from their father’s John Birch Society to their own front groups, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

The financial firepower of these entities, however, was still not enough to elevate the Tea Party “movement.” It required an aggressive media sponsor to flood the news zone with faux-populist themes and give birth to the puppetized pundits and politicians who would carry the message. For that mission Fox News was all too ready to volunteer and even went to great lengths to brand the Tea Party as a Fox News subsidiary with promos touting their “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” There can be no doubt that without Fox News there would be no Tea Party.

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That makes the new column by Fox’s star attraction, Bill O’Reilly, all the more startling. His own headline reads “Is the Tea Party Over?” And by the end he answers the question with a resounding “Yes.”

“The only way the Tea Party can resurrect itself is for it to coalesce around a strong leader. There has to be a central message delivered by someone with charisma, a person who is reasonable and persuasive. The movement has been damaged both inside and out. Only a very intense public relations campaign will turn the tide.

“I don’t think that will happen. It would take millions of dollars in TV ads and organizational infrastructure for the Tea Party to negate the national media’s contempt. And that kind of big money operation goes directly against what the Tea Party people want to be – a citizen movement that operates independent of party structure.”

O’Reilly’s opinion, in short, is that “The only way the Tea Party can resurrect itself is for it to coalesce around a strong leader,” and “I don’t think that will happen.” O’Reilly is throwing recent Tea Darlings like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul under the bus, along with baggers like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann who are already there.

I’m not going to argue with O’Reilly’s conclusion because the Tea Party has always been a constructed reality. It never existed outside of the power structure of the Republican elite. There were no Tea Party candidates, conventions, voter registrations, or platforms. They were all Republican politicians, voters, and policies. However, there is much to disagree with in the path to O’Reilly’s eulogy.

First of all, O’Reilly’s contention that the Tea Party’s problem is a lack of leaders can only be taken seriously by a deaf and blind pundit who lives in a Himalayan cave. There are many who do, and who aspire to, lead the phony parade. Their problem is that they advocate a broadly unpopular set of policies that the American people emphatically reject. People like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin have favorable ratings that scrape the sea floor at record low levels, as does the Tea Party itself. The Tea Party doesn’t have a public relations problem, it has an agenda problem.

Secondly, O’Reilly seems to think that there hasn’t been enough money thrown at advancing the Tea Party mission. When he said that it “would take millions of dollars” which conflicts with the Tea Party’s alleged aversion to “big money operations,” he ignores the fact that the Tea Party has always been a big money operation financed with hundreds of millions of dollars by everyone from the Koch brothers to Karl Rove to the Republican National Committee, and dozens of mysterious Super PACs that keep their donor’s identities secret.

The central theme of O’Reilly’s column is that the Tea Party’s woes are all the result of the contempt of the media (as opposed to the contempt of the people). He says that “the Tea Party finds itself with an image problem and there are two primary reasons why.” The first of O’Reilly’s gripes is with the media, who he says “is at odds with Tea Party beliefs,” and that “demonizes the Tea Party all day long calling it racist, stupid and even worse – unsophisticated!” It’s telling that O’Reilly thinks it’s worse to be called unsophisticated than racist or stupid. But he may be onto something because, based on their behavior, most Tea Partiers don’t seem to be concerned about public displays of racism or stupidity.

The second of O’Reilly’s grips is with the media (just like the first gripe), but in this case it’s “the right wing media, which generally loves the party.” Here O’Reilly lays into the birther nutjobs who call the President a communist and a Muslim. In other words, most of the Tea Party and much of Fox News. O’Reilly attempts to take a stand for comity by declaring that “Hate is hate no matter what ideology you embrace.” This from the guy who opened the column by implying that the supporters of Occupy Wall Street “embrace violent tactics [and] infringe on the rights of the folks.”

So according to O’Reilly, the billionaire-backed Tea Party is not a big money operation, it has no national leaders unless you count the Cruzes and Palins and Pauls, and Limbaughs and Hannitys, etc., but it is plagued by a contemptuous media that hates them and an adoring media that loves them. [Warning: Don’t try to make any sense of this. It can only lead to confusion, severe mental anguish, logical disorientation, and acute migraines]. However, if O’Reilly’s tortured contention is that what it all adds up to is that the Tea Party is over, let’s just cross our fingers hope that he stumbled onto the truth for a change. But in all likelihood, he is just carrying water for the establishment GOP who are trying desperately to distance themselves from Tea Party crackpottery out of fear that it is going to be a big loser for them in the 2014 elections. He, and they, are too late. Now they have to live (or perish, as the case may be) with the monster they created.

The Cost Of Winning: Shutting Down The GOP/Tea Party Shutdown

Posted by Mark NC on October 17, 2013 at 3:24 am. 13 Comments :

Last night the Senate finally crafted a bipartisan resolution to raise the debt ceiling and end the GOP/Tea Party driven shutdown. The sixteen days that government was closed had a materially negative impact on millions of Americans. Nearly 800,000 were furloughed from work. Many more were turned away from federal agencies that provide aid and public services for parks, education, etc.

The media will now spend days/weeks analyzing the repercussions and adjudicating winners and losers. While it may be apparent that the Republican Party and its extremist Tea Party wing have suffered a hobbling blow (their favorability has sunk to historic lows), the harm to the public at large cannot be dismissed. Although, sadly, it may be as the media ignores the ongoing strife in favor of reporting on horse-race style politics. Despite the relief we all feel that the immediate crisis was averted, there is still a price to be paid. And it isn’t cheap:

Yep, the shutdown cost America about $24 billion. That is courtesy of the allegedly fiscally responsible Republicans in Congress. Voters need to remember this in November 2014, and Democrats need to repeatedly remind them between now and then. Democrats only need to gain 17 seats in order to take the Speaker’s gavel out of John Boehner’s inept hands. Doing so will improve the prospects for economic recovery, job growth, infrastructure repair, environmental action, and progress on civil rights and income equality.

A change in party control of Congress won’t solve all of the nation’s problems. It won’t end radical Tea Party demands to repeal ObamaCare or for severe cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It won’t stop the birthers and the racists who disparage President Obama and oppose every policy put forth by Democrats. It won’t keep pseudo-patriots from advocating for war at every turn. And it won’t restore sanity to the global financial system that evades criminal responsibilities and exploits average people throughout the world.

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However, it will remove from power a gang of nutjobs who hate Obama more than they love their country. It will bring Nancy Pelosi back to the Speaker’s office. It will install Democrats as the chairmen of all committees, replacing corrupt GOP ideologues like Darrell Issa, Dave Camp, and Paul Ryan. And it will put us on surer footing and give us a more productive legislative branch that actually has an interest in governing positively, and in building up America rather than in tearing it down. That’s progress.

Weak Tea: Fox News Sponsored Tea Party Protests Fizzle Out

Posted by Mark NC on October 11, 2013 at 1:00 pm. 5 Comments :

Remember back in 2009 when Fox News was pulling out all the stops to promote the newborn Tea Party? They broadcast every town howl and invited an endless stream of tri-cornered hat wearing crackpots to rant about tyranny and Kenyan usurpers. Fox even branded the Tea Party movement as its own entity while beseeching viewers to attend rallies.

Well, this year they have not had much success pushing their fringe agenda. They spent months hammering away on Benghazi, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and a bevy of second-tier scandalettes, but have been met with yawns. After Fox launched a campaign to hype the false allegation that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups for harassment, the national protest to “Rein In the IRS” drew tens of angry Teabaggers to IRS offices across the country.

The latest effort by Fox to pump up the right-wing wrath was a planned protest by America’s truckers to create the “biggest traffic jam in history” in Washington, D.C. Their promises ranged from thousands of truckers jamming the capital’s highways and arresting members of Congress, to hundreds of millions of citizens nationwide participating in a show of solidarity. This morning the protest began with nothing more than a trickle of trucks that failed to have any noticeable impact on traffic. Even Fox News posted a story reporting that “Dozens, not thousands, show up for DC trucker protest.”

The “Truckers Ride for the Constitution” was supposed to send a message to Washington that they were “sick and tired of the corruption that is destroying America!” Apparently, the hordes of sickly, fatigued protesters never materialized. This will surely cut into their comically delusional list of demands that include that President Obama immediately resign from office.

Next up for the Fox News Protest Committee is an event targeting the closure of American memorials and monuments due to the Tea Party driven government shutdown (or slimdown, as Fox is calling it). On Fox’s community web site, the lie-riddled Fox Nation, they have posted an item that can hardly be characterized as news. It concerns something called the “Million Vet March” that is scheduled for this Sunday. That seems like bad planning on Fox’s part, because if the truckers rally had successfully stopped traffic in D.C., how would the vets get to their event?

The Fox Nationalists promotion of the Million Vet March was not actually a story about the proposed rally. It was a link to the web site of the political action committee that is sponsoring it, the Special Operations Speaks PAC. The PAC’s web site indicates that it was formed to lobby for a Watergate-style congressional committee to investigate Benghazi. Now they are taking a detour to protest the “vicious tyrant” in the White House who “shut down our nation’s war memorials and declared a war on our veterans!”

Never mind that it was the House Republicans who shut down the government and the memorials. The The bigger problem is that Fox is posting links to partisan activist organizations in the guise of reporting the news. If Fox had written a story about this march, or linked to a story written by another news outlet, that would be bad enough and they would still be guilty of proselytizing on behalf of a political cause. But Fox didn’t even bother to put that much distance between themselves and the fringe group organizing the march. They just linked directly to the organizer’s web site where you are greeted with a solicitation to donate.

It is pretty unlikely that anywhere near a million veterans are going to show up in D.C. on Sunday. So this event will be just as big a flop as the trucker rally. But both events demonstrate that Fox is not a news network, and they aren’t even pretending to be one anymore. They are a political advocacy enterprise and, measuring by their recent efforts, they aren’t even any good at that.

Fox News Carries Articles From Koch Bros-Funded “News” Service

Posted by Mark NC on September 30, 2013 at 1:34 pm. 2 Comments :

An odd item appeared this morning on the Fox News web site attacking the progressive organization MoveOn.org. It was the sort of substanceless filler that generally appears on rabid anti-Obama fringe sites. Beneath a headline reading “MoveOn.org tries to sideline Tea Party over shutdown fears,” the article revealed the shocking news that MoveOn.org is a liberal outfit that is seeking donations. You don’t say?

In the few paragraphs posted, Fox included a defamatory reference to a passage in MoveOn’s email that said “If we play our cards right, 2013 could become known as the year the tea party relegated itself to the dustbin of history.” In an effort to manufacture a negative association, the article asserted that the phrase “dustbin of history” was “borrowed” from Leon Trotsky. In fact, the phrase and its variations had been in use long before Trotsky uttered it, and it has even been used by Republican candidate for sainthood, Ronald Reagan, who said in June of 1982 “The march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.”

The reason that this article was loaded with such blatant conservative rhetoric quickly became apparent. The item was sourced to a web site called Watchdog.org that presents itself as sort of a wire service. However, Watchdog.org is actually a right-wing, propaganda-spewing project that is funded by the Koch brothers through their Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. It is an unabashedly partisan source of slanted opinions and attack pieces. But now Fox is utilizing it as an affiliated reporting service. In effect, the Koch brothers have co-opted Fox to get their Tea Party agenda disseminated to Fox’s national audience in the guise of journalism.

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As an example of the deceit employed by Watchdog.org, they castigated MoveOn for its early support from George Soros and for “putting a bulls-eye on the conservative Koch Brothers.” However, while defending the Koch brothers, nowhere in the article did the authors disclose that they actually work for the Koch brothers. That’s a pretty egregious omission. Furthermore, as a measure of their journalistic neutrality, the Watchdog reporter sought out quotes from four people for the article: the chair of the Tea Party Express, the chair and vice-chair of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation, and the chair of Tea Party Fort Lauderdale. Fair and balanced, my ass.

A quick Google search on Fox News, and their related Fib Factory Fox Nation, turned up dozens of previous Watchdog-sourced articles that were published by Fox. Many of these articles are hit pieces on unions and environmental science, two issues that deeply interest the Koch brothers whose businesses have fought workers rights and have contributed to dirtying the air and water of every place they have a presence. In none of the articles did Fox provide disclosure of the Koch affiliation to the reporting.

It is clear that the infiltration by the Koch activists is complete. Fox News has long been associated with the conservative politics of the GOP, the Tea Party, and right-wing enterprises like Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, and even WorldNetDaily. But now they have turned a corner and embraced the brazen biases of an activist corporation with vested interests in the stories they pretend to cover. So now, in the warped universe of Fox News, corporations are not only people, they are also journalists. And if, like the Koch brothers, you can afford to create your own fake wire service, you can get fake news networks like Fox to distribute your PR.

Pravda (Hearts) Tea Party: American Conservatism Embraced By Russian Propaganda Press

Posted by Mark NC on September 17, 2013 at 1:47 pm. 10 Comments :

If this doesn’t cause Tea Party heads to explode, I don’t know what will.

[Actually, I do know what will: Anything President Obama says; or showing that the health care law is working; or suggesting that billionaires be tapped for more taxes instead of poor people; or saying anything bad about Sarah Palin. Actually, lots of things make Tea Party heads explode]

Today the Russian Communist Party’s internal organ, Pravda, published an article extolling the virtues of American conservatism and its natural harmony with the politburo mouthpiece. The article by Xavier Lerma was titled “Why Conservative Americans Admire Putin.” This is a rather astute observation considering how the GOP has so lovingly embraced the Russian president during the Syrian crisis. They have hailed him as a true leader and even proposed that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize be given to Putin instead.

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It has long been recognized that the authoritarian Russian right shares much in common with their comrades in the Tea Party. From subjugating women and opposing reproductive freedom, to denying rights to homosexuals and forbidding marriage equality, to clinging to radical nationalism; to replacing education with indoctrination and science denial; and most of all, they share a common hatred for the U.S. government. Now we can add religious fundamentalism and Obama Derangement Syndrome to the mix. Here is how the Pravda article opened:

“America’s president has torn his land into a thousand pieces. The propaganda media machine covers Obama’s trail of blood and shows the president in a good way without a word of dissent.”

That could have been copied almost verbatim from a Rush Limbaugh broadcast. But it gets even worse. After Pravda laments that “The modern Tea Party’s success was short lived by Obama’s illegal interference,” they pivot to a conspiracy theory of election theft that would make the late Andrew Breitbart proud. The article swallows whole the phony IRS scandal and offers it as evidence of Obama’s corruption, despite the utter lack of any evidence connecting him to it. Then the author asserts that “Americans watch Obama destroying their own country and the world […and…] With no hero to save them they become frustrated and look to Putin,” whom they see…

“…kneeling at Christ’s Holy Sepulcher which Obama never does when visiting Jerusalem. They see him going to church when they know Obama favors Muslims who attack Christians and their churches. They see Putin establishing laws to protect the church and laws against homosexuality. This they admire and this brings them hope. Hope in their upside down world where there is a leader willing to follow Christ. They have no Reagan but they see Putin whom they wish was their president.”

There you have it. Obama is an anti-Christian, Muslim lover, while Putin is the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. A devout, law and order Christian who can inspire the Teabagging masses. Putin is their 21st century savior who can restore America and the world. The article even includes emails that the author received from Americans wishing Putin could be the U.S. president. And to top it all off, it closes with an evangelical sermon lambasting the “lamestream” media and exalting Putin’s piety and the glory of Christ’s guidance to the “Truth.” [FYI: Pravda, in Russian, means truth].

“American conservatives hear only lies from their TV but what they see on the internet from Russia regarding Putin is true because Christ guides them to see the Truth. The Holy Spirit does not fail them and inspires them to see Russia. They know a tree by its fruit. Putin obviously respects the Christian Church but Obama and their American government does not.”

Apparently Glenn Beck has been moonlighting as a ghostwriter for Pravda. The lunacy of this article proves that the Russians are just as capable of composing dishonest blather as the world champions at Fox News and, especially, Fox Nation (see my ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality for a collection of documented falsehoods put out by Fox’s professional lie-mongers). But the ideological affinity expressed in the article reveals that, whatever distance separates Pravda from the American wingnut, the doctrine espoused is just their cup of tea.

The Wacko Caucus: Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz Ties Syria To ObamaCare

Posted by Mark NC on August 30, 2013 at 2:47 pm. 8 Comments :

In 2012 the Tea Party lost some of its key figures in congress. Allen West and Joe Walsh were rejected by voters. Michele Bachmann hung on by a thread, but is now so tainted by scandal that she announced her retirement shortly after the election. Folks like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump continue to be little more than comic relief.

For more craziness found at Fox Nation, check out the ebook from News Corpse:
Fox Nation vs. Reality.

Consequently, the second string of the Tea Party bench has had to step up their game. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is one of those vying for the role of Grand Teabagger. His latest attempt to distinguish himself from the pack is a monumentally perverse analysis of the crisis in Syria:

“Fundamentally, actually, these two issues, you look at Syria, you look at Obamacare. They’re tied together. They’re tied together by an arrogance of this administration, that they don’t believe they’re accountable to the American people, and they are going to jam their agenda down the throats of the American people.

And on both of them, the answer is the same as it was on guns; it’s the same as it is on stopping amnesty, which is the American people have to rise up and hold every elected official accountable, Democrat and Republican. Every one of us, including me.”

Syria and ObamaCare are tied together? I wonder why he didn’t also include Benghazi, the IRS, food stamps, and birth certificates. Bachmann would have. Cruz may not be up to this challenge.

The generous portion of ignorance that Cruz is serving up extends beyond the obvious delusional conflation of two completely unrelated issues. His assertion that ObamaCare was jammed down the throats of the American people is easily refuted by the fact that it was passed by a majority of the people’s representatives in both the House and the Senate, signed by the popularly elected President, and affirmed by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

Then Cruz escalates the craziness by attempting to shore up his argument with examples that rip his twisted logic to shreds. On the matter of guns, the American people support the President’s proposal on background checks by an unprecedented 90%. And what Cruz derisively refers to as amnesty, but which is actually a balanced approach to immigration reform, is also favored by a wide majority of Americans.

This is the pathetically low level of discourse that Republicans are engaging in with regard to the complex situation in Syria. They have instituted their typical strategy of being against anything and everything that might emerge from the White House. One faction of the GOP says that if Obama does not strike Syria, then he is weak. Simultaneously, another faction warns that such an attack would be an unconstitutional abuse of power. One side says he must strike because he drew a “red line” last year over chemical weapons. The other side says attacking for that reason would be an act of vanity. One side says he must wait for allies and the United Nations to sanction any attack. The other side says that doing so would be an abdication of our sovereignty.

There is one thing missing from every right-wing criticism: what they would do. I have yet to hear what Ted Cruz’s plan is; or John Boehner’s; or Don Rumsfeld’s; or Rush Limbaugh’s. These people have nothing but complaints and no ideas or solutions. It’s pretty much the same way they deal with health care, immigration reform, the economy, etc. They bitch relentlessly and offer nothing constructive.

For the critics in congress who think the President should not act without congressional approval, if they are so concerned why don’t they just come back to Washington and vote on it? They don’t need Obama to do that. The truth is, they are deathly afraid of actually having to go on the record because they don’t have any solutions and they don’t want to be held accountable regardless of the actions taken or the outcome.

While it may seem that there is no way that Obama can win under these circumstance, I have developed a three-point plan that I believe would satisfy all of his critics in the GOP, and on Fox News:

Fire bibles into Syria and turn Assad and the rest of the country into evangelical fans of the 700 Club.
Authorize a pipeline from Damascus to New Orleans so that Syrian oil could be refined in the U.S. and sold to China.
Approve an arms sales treaty with the new Syria in order to introduce more weapons into the region and create jobs in Kentucky.

Problem solved!

In one respect Cruz might actually be onto something. Syria and ObamaCare are indeed connected in that both concern agendas that Republicans wholeheartedly supported until Obama became involved. ObamaCare, complete with an individual mandate, was originally the brainchild of the uber-rightist Heritage Foundation, now headed by former Sen. Jim DeMint. And the neo-con right has long advocated military engagement with Middle East adversaries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria. So if Cruz is looking for dots to connect, I think I found them.

WSJ: Tea Party Leader Admits Political Activities, Proving The IRS Was Right

Posted by Mark NC on August 29, 2013 at 9:38 am. 9 Comments :

In a fluff piece on the head of the Tea Party Patriots, Jenny Beth Martin, the Wall Street Journal contends that the recent IRS pseudo-scandal has reinvigorated the Tea-publican movement. Never mind that their own poll shows that only 37% – of Republicans – support the Tea Party. The gist of the article’s analysis rests on the improved fundraising they have enjoyed since the GOP has fanned the phony scandal.

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Indeed, the Tea Party Patriots raised more than $20 million last year, which makes their complaint about the IRS scrutiny ring rather hollow. Martin complains that not having tax-exempt status was “a disincentive to some potential donors.” Perhaps a bigger disincentive might be that they spend 85 cents of every dollar raised on additional fundraising. Or maybe donors weren’t impressed with the fact that their candidates (e.g. Akin, Mourdock, Angle, O’Donnell, Paladino, etc.), are mostly losers.

Martin told the WSJ that “the big donors…wouldn’t give to us without our nonprofit status.” She either doesn’t know, or is deliberately lying about, the fact that the IRS permits organizations with pending applications to solicit tax-exempt donations. She also made a remarkable admission that pretty much destroys her entire argument that her operation deserves tax-exempt status at all.

Martin: “It was harassment, pure and simple, to weaken us going into the 2012 election,”

Really? If your concern is that you will be hampered going into an election year, then your activities are unambiguously political and the IRS should immediately deny your application. Martin’s confession that election outcomes are what is driving the alleged harassment is the best argument that the IRS was right to apply stricter scrutiny to her group and others like it.

Not that this would be the first indication that the Tea Party is an overtly political operation and, in fact, nothing more than an arm of the Republican Party. GOP candidate for President, Newt Gingrich called the Tea Party “the militant wing of the Republican Party.” The corrupt Tea Party Express co-hosted a GOP primary debate on CNN. It’s hard to get more political than that.

The WSJ noted the hard times that the Tea Party endured after their brief brush with fame:

By the 2012 election, the tea-party movement was in decline. Its members failed to show up to the polls in sufficient numbers, and many Senate challengers with tea-party backing were defeated. Rep. Michele Bachmann, chairwoman of the House Tea Party Caucus, barely retained her seat.

When Mrs. Martin toured chapters in California earlier this year, they told her they wanted to drop “tea party” from their names because its brand was tarnished. Mrs. Martin was presiding over a national office full of empty desks and dwindling volunteers and donations—a period she refers to as “frightening” and “disheartening.”.

Read excerpts and reviews at Amazon
Fox Nation vs. Reality

This is further evidence that their tax-exempt status had nothing to do with their misfortune, because there was no difference in their status in 2012 than in 2010. The dust up over the IRS was itself a purely political tactic, engineered by Rep. Darrell Issa and his GOP cronies in the House of Representatives. And, of course, hyped by their PR division, Fox News. The success of that tactic was heralded by Martin who told the WSJ that “From that moment, the tea party has roared back to life.”

Today the Tea Party is still an unpopular scam devised to advance the interests of the Republican Party and to enrich its principals. It enjoys an outsized measure of influence because GOP leaders in congress are too cowardly to challenge it. But anyone who thinks the Tea Party is a legitimate grassroots operation is being willfully ignorant of the facts – which kind of explains why they still support the Tea Party.

Stupid Tea Party Tricks: FreedomWorks Launches Pointless Boycott Against Comcast

Posted by Mark NC on August 23, 2013 at 12:57 pm. 16 Comments :

The Tea Party has been involved in too many idiotic escapades to count. One of their more memorable proposals was to fly a plane over the Superbowl with a banner reading “Impeach Obama.” Apparently they were not aware that the game would be played in a domed stadium and that it’s illegal to fly over it anyway. Or recall their assertion that ultra-conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist is a Muslim infiltrator. Their proof? He has a beard. And who could forget the call for Americans to rise up and burn their ObamaCare cards. No matter that ObamaCare cards do not exist, FreedomWorks will be printing them up and providing them to Tea Party pyromaniacs.

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The very same FreedomWorks is now embarking on a massive campaign to punish Comcast because their MSNBC subsidiary employees Al Sharpton. They have produced a comically amateurish video (below) declaring it “a disgrace that Sharpton has his own TV show.” They sent an email to their 2.3 million suckers…er…members urging them to cancel their cable service if Comcast is their provider. The email states that…

“By paying your Comcast cable bill, your money is helping to pay for Al Sharpton’s salary…Comcast cable subscribers can take action against Roberts and his biased media empire by changing their cable TV service provider. By exercising marketplace choice, consumers can prevent their money from supporting media propaganda.”

If you get the idea that FreedomWorks didn’t think this through very well, you’re quite right. After all, Sharpton works for MSNBC, not Comcast. Any cable customers who cancel their subscriptions will have zero effect on Sharpton’s employment status. Those customers were encouraged by FreedomWorks to switch from Comcast to DirecTV, AT&T, or some other provider. However, all of those providers also offer MSNBC, so the revenue generated to the cable network will be exactly the same. Should they opt to do without cable programming, their boycott will do just as much harm to Fox News, and every other channel, as to MSNBC.

So this threat is as impotent as Rush Limbaugh sans Viagra. When liberals mounted a successful boycott against Fox News’ Glenn Beck, they targeted Beck’s advertisers. The same tactic has drained the bank account of Limbaugh and his radio affiliates. But going after Comcast won’t have any more impact on Sharpton’s MSNBC program than it will on Donald Trump’s unreality show on NBC.

There are plenty of good reasons to boycott Comcast: It is an anti-competitive conglomerate that exploits its market power; it unfairly discriminates against progressive advertisers; it improperly uses data it collects on its customers, invading their privacy. If Tea Partiers want to shun Comcast for any of those reasons, I’m with them. But this attack on Sharpton (of whom I am not a fan), is utterly absurd. However, it is another clear indicator of just how dumb the Tea Party community can be.

Fox News Lies: Agent Did Not Confirm That IRS Is Still Targeting Tea Party

Posted by Mark NC on August 9, 2013 at 3:50 pm. 4 Comments :

A little over a week ago the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by uber-rightist Republican Dave Camp, held a closed-door hearing wherein they interviewed an anonymous IRS agent. Immediately afterward they broke for recess and left town. Now, a week later, and still on vacation, Camp released a smidgen of the transcript from that interview and declared the testimony “outrageous.”

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Committee: I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group — a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case?

IRS agent: At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy.

Committee: So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?

IRS agent: Based on my current manager’s direction, uh-huh.

Fox News, the PR arm of the GOP, predictably advanced the Republican distortion of the testimony to further inflame the phony IRS “scandal” theme that the Tea Party is still being targeted. However, before any logical characterization of this brief exchange can be made, it needs to be pointed out that Republicans have previously provided severely biased excerpts from hearing transcripts and research. They carefully redacted any information that contradicted their allegations. For instance, they deliberately withheld testimony that cleared upper-level managers of having any part in the decisions to scrutinize applications for tax exemption. They also failed to disclose that their inquiries to the Inspector General’s office specifically directed them to research only Tea Party or conservative applications. That’s why the IG didn’t find any progressive organizations at first. They were told not to look for them.

So until the entire transcript is released, it is fair to assume that the Republicans are selectively revealing only information that supports their false allegations. That’s how they’ve done it in the past and there is no reason to suspect that they’ve changed.

That said, the snippet of testimony they did release doesn’t even confirm their accusation that the IRS is still targeting conservatives. The anonymous agent was only asked what he would do if he received a Tea Party application. He answered that he would “send it to secondary screening.” That’s precisely what should be done for an application from an overtly political group. Notice that, at least in this excerpt, he was not asked what he would do with an application from a progressive group. If his answer to such a question is that he would also send that to a secondary screening, then there is no targeting going on. All political groups would be receiving the same scrutiny, which is how it ought to be.

When Camp was interviewed today by Neil Cavuto of Fox News, the story was presented as a confirmation of the IRS agent’s assertion that the Tea Party is still being targeted, but, as described above, there is no evidence of that in the portion of the agent’s testimony that was released. And without the missing portion of the transcript it’s impossible to make any rational analysis. But that has never stopped Fox before. Irrational analyses of incomplete data are one of their favorite tactics to advance right-wing disinformation.

Tea Party Poopers: Old, White, Evangelical, Men Spell Doom For The GOP

Posted by Mark NC on July 31, 2013 at 7:48 pm. 15 Comments :

The fortunes of the Tea Party have declined considerably since their founding a couple of years ago. Majorities of Americans view them unfavorably and they have caused some notable electoral losses where otherwise a conservative Republican was expected to win.

A new survey by Pew Research reveals an even more troubling future if you’re an aspiring Republican. The survey indicates that most Republicans want to see their Party change. As a group there is some ambiguity about the direction of the change with some wanting to shift further right, and others wanting to become more moderate. However, when looking at the Tea Party, the favored direction is crystal clear. They want Republicans to be more conservative and less willing to compromise with Democratic colleagues.

In addition to the starkly partisan bent of the Tea Party, the survey also shows that they regard themselves as more likely to vote, particularly in primaries. That’s incredibly good news for Tea Partiers – and Democrats. For example, polls show Sarah Palin as the favorite for the Republican nomination for the senate in Alaska. However, the same poll shows her getting crushed by Democratic incumbent, Mark Begich.

On almost every issue – immigration, abortion, marriage equality, guns – the Tea Party is decidedly more right-wing. They advocate the most conservative policies across the board, and are the least accommodating to negotiations with Democrats. The problem this presents to the GOP is that their current batch of representatives have actual records that contain evidence of legislative bargaining. That is anathema to the Teabaggers. Consequently, they are more likely to back opponents in Republican primaries to oust the offending members.

Stalwart conservatives like Lamar Alexander and Mitch McConnell are already drawing primary challengers. Tea Partiers are blasting them as liberals who are in league with President Obama’s mission to destroy America. It takes a pretty hefty serving of delusion to accuse McConnell, who declared that his highest priority was to make Obama a one-term president, of being a progressive partner to the President.

Should the extremist faction of the party prevail, they will create opportunities for Democrats to swoop in and grab a seat they would not have otherwise had a chance to win. Just ask Senators Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly, or even Harry Reid. And the Republicans in congress are already setting the stage for defeat. They have the lowest favorable ratings in history, and they are responding to that by threatening to shut the government down, wasting time with meaningless votes, and performing in ridiculous pseudo-scandal hearings.

The most obvious differentiating characteristics of the Tea Party is that they are older, whiter, more devoutly Christian, and more likely to be men. That puts them at odds with the general population. Therefore, while they may enjoy some primary victories, the general elections will be more problematic. They are out of sync with the electorate both demographically and ideologically.

Last year Democrats defied the odds and toughed out some unexpected wins. In a year that many predicted would be bloody for them, Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate, and of course, Obama won reelection. Some of the credit for that goes to Tea Party Republicans who simply had no chance of carrying their races. And now they seem hell-bent on repeating that performance. Democrats should be prepared to send thank you notes to the GOP in November of 2014 if this trend keeps up.

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