Sharpton Marches, Teabaggers Sit; Honor Restored, Dream Reclaimed

Word Of The Day: "Doughy"



Mike Flugennock writes:

From Our Better Late Than Never Department:

The Washington Post, possibly suffering a massive brain seizure due to the heat, referred to the Beckapalooza at the Lincoln Memorial as a “grassroots” event. Oh, absolutely; I’ve lost track of how many up-by-the-bootstraps, grassroots mobilizations had rallies with custom-built stages, state-of-the-art sound, high-end multi-camera video production and five or six Jumbotrons.

And, oh, did they use those Jumbotrons — to crank out a steady diet of smarmy, syrupy video trailers full of classically empty nationalistic propaganda language about the Greatest Country In The World and the Greatest People On Earth. The stage production may have been pure Albert Speer, but the video pieces were pure Reifenstahl. For a bunch of people who cherished freedom and hated being made to do something, they sure did enjoy being told what to do. Not even the most craven, tweedy Liberals enjoyed being bossed around more than this bunch.


The Posse and I could only stand in awe at the high number of pasty, doughy, Twinkie-fed folks who turned out to help Restore Honor. It’s almost a good thing Glenn Beck didn’t schedule a march, because he’d have been sued by the families of the nearly 100,000 heart attack and heatstroke victims among the roughly 200,000 who Restored Honor on Saturday. It was at this rally that the folding camp chair would become symbolic and synonymous with your slackly-rallying Teabagger.

I thought it was interesting that Beck made such a bit deal about his people not bringing signs. Did they honestly think they could cover up the rank hate and racism that oozes out of them? They may not have had signs, but we saw some nasty t-shirts at that rally. Besides, we’ve already seen plenty of them for the past year and a half, so it’s not like the rest of us don’t know who they are, and where they’re from, and what they stand for, and what they’re about... >more

NY Teabagger Platform: Relocate Welfare Recipients to Prison Dorms

Racist Email Blasting Gubernatorial Candidate to go Head-to-Head with Fellow Asshole Rick Lazio in Sept. 14 Primary


Beth Fouhy reports from Associated Press:

NEW YORK — Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they would work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."

Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many tea party activists, is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio. The primary is Sept. 14.

Paladino first described the idea in June at a meeting of The Journal News of White Plains and spoke about it again this week with The Associated Press.

Throughout his campaign, Paladino has criticized New York's rich menu of social service benefits, which he says encourages illegal immigrants and needy people to live in the state. He has promised a 20 percent reduction in the state budget and a 10 percent income tax cut if elected.

Asked at the meeting how he would achieve those savings, Paladino laid out several plans that included converting underused state prisons into centers that would house welfare recipients. There, they would do work for the state — "military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service," he said — while prison guards would be retrained to work as counselors.

"Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we'll teach people how to earn their check. We'll teach them personal hygiene ... the personal things they don't get when they come from dysfunctional homes," Paladino said. ...>more

When "Unity" Is Spelled Wrong

The "Uni-Tea" Party Facade


Last Saturday, July 31, was a day made of FAIL. The “Uni-Tea” rally was an event organized by New Jersey neo-con Jeffrey Weingarten to prove that the Tea Party wasn’t a hotbed of racism by pushing the microscopic numbers of black people who are willing to teabag for Republicans into the front lines.




Still, there were probably twice as many black people on the speakers list as there were in the actual crowd. And oh, what a crowd — an event which predicted attendance in the thousands was lucky to have two hundred people, of which less than half a dozen were people of color.

The Tea Party protests too much, we think; the more noise they make about how they aren’t racist, the less everybody believes them, especially while they continue to step on their own cranks as their supporters show up at public rallies with racist signs and their candidates for elected office pop off in public about blacks and Muslims.

An endless procession of pro-rightist shills lead by black Republican David Webb, were paraded across the stage mouthing the standard rightist tropes about free enterprise and picking one’s self up by one’s bootstraps — basically, saying what the crowd of pudgy Caucasians in folding camp chairs wanted to hear. Deneen Borelli ranted about Obama’s supposed “war on fossil fuels” and the offshore drilling moratorium even as Gulf Coast ecosystems and economies are devastated by the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Black Republican David Webb Was MC For the Event

The most gob-smacking of the bunch, though, had to be Janks Morton who, after going on for so long about God that we found ourselves silently begging him to stop, looked us all right square in the eye and told us that “healthcare is a privilege”. Yes, that’s right; this tool was basically telling us that people with catastrophic injuries and illnesses should be allowed to remain sick and debilitated — and probably die — because they aren’t rich enough to afford the “privilege” of healthcare.


The day’s headliner, Little Andy Breitbart, was in fine form, accusing the opposition of doing everything he’s guilty of — including the ham-handed doctoring of video footage — and accusing his opposition of (wait for it) slandering “the good name of Karl Rove”, while totally avoiding the issue of his own attempt to slander USDA employee Shirley Sharrod with hacked-up video footage edited to make Sherrod seem to be saying the opposite of what she actually said. He continued to hammer on that tired old “politics of personal destruction” riff while totally ignoring his destruction of ACORN with James O’Keefe’s video footage which was edited in the manner of an old Benny Hill sketch. He pissed and moaned about how the mainstream media was mistreating the Tea Party, even as he and the Tea Party were relentlessly fawned over by Fox News and now he is gaining a crowd of fans from the neo-Nazi crowd on Stormfront.com.

Photos by Isis and The Cubster. Find more photos here and here.

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

GOP Rep. Bob Inglis slams Republican demagoguery, bemoans anti-Semitic tea party conspiracy nonsense, decries Sarah Palin’s ignorance, and looks for a job.

David Corn writes at Mother Jones:

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.

As he tells this story, the veteran lawmaker is sitting in his congressional office, which he will have to vacate in a few months. On June 22, he was defeated in the primary runoff by Spartanburg County 7th Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy, who had assailed Inglis for supposedly straying from his conservative roots, pointing to his vote for the bank bailout and against George W. Bush's surge in Iraq. Inglis, who served six years in Congress during the 1990s as a conservative firebrand before being reelected to the House in 2004, had also ticked off right-wingers in the state's 4th Congressional District by urging tea-party activists to "turn Glenn Beck off" and by calling on Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) to apologize for shouting "You lie!" at Obama during the president's State of the Union address. For this, Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven "demagoguery" that he believes will undermine the GOP's long-term credibility. And he's freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance... >more

How Dummies Consume Their Tea Party

Comical Senate Candidate Sharron Angle to Fox News: "Press Should Be My Friend"

The Real Shocker: Even Fox News Isn't Buying It



Tony Gatto writes:

Sharron Angle was featured in one of those hard-hitting Fox News political pieces. And she believes the news media should stop all this siliness that they’ve been engaging in over the years — investigating, collecting facts, and being a watchdog over our elected officials. No — Sharron Angle says the media should be the “friend” of the elected official:

Angle: We needed to have the press be our friend.

Cameron: Wait a minute! Hold on a second… to be your friend?

Angle: Well truly…

Cameron: It sounds lame…

Angle: Well, no, no, we wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported and when I get on a show and I say send me money to SharronAngle.com, so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.

A Tea Party Fairy Tale

Fearful Old White Men

Don Monkerud writes at CounterPunch:

Current attempts to revive that Boston Tea Party of 1773 are marketing gimmicks to masquerade conservative forces bent on defeating Obama and destroying any attempt to reform the present gridlock political system. Examining the history of this faux-movement reveals the actors behind the curtain.

One of the earliest revivals of the Tea Party involved 100 people meeting in Seattle to protest the stimulus bill passed by Congress to keep the U.S. from descending into another Great Depression. After bloggers and libertarians spread a call for protest on the Internet, the media blew it into a major event.

Right-wing groups poured funding into the nascent movement. These groups included: Americans for Prosperity, a pro-tobacco, anti-healthcare and anti-tax lobbying organization; and FreedomWorks, a lobbying firm devoted to opposing taxes, immigration, healthcare reform and solutions to global warming. Koch Industries, an oil, mineral, ranching and securities conglomerate, funds both of these groups, while the Sarah Mellon Scaife foundation, with interests in oil, industry and banking, funds FreedomWorks.

After Fox News began promoting the Tea Party as a social movement, their crowds grew. Fox News entertainer, Glenn Beck, invited viewers to "celebrate with Fox News," by attending tax protests in Washington on April 15, the date federal tax returns are due.

A mere 3,000 Tea Party supporters attended the rally and grabbed the headlines. More people rallied across the country in support of Single Payer Healthcare Reform but they received few headlines. After much smaller groups of Tea Partiers protested in several cities, right-wing entertainers such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly giddily talked about "a growing movement" for weeks. Soon Republicans Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, Ron Paul, Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich jumped on board, hoping to revive their failed political careers.

Seldom has so much been made about so little... >more

Teabaggers Bent On Ruining Americans' Family Vacations

Ignorant Yahoos Insist On Posing Questions To Actors Dressed As Washington, Franklin, Patrick Henry


Jeff Neumann writes at Gawker:

Unsatisfied with being belligerent at town hall meetings and creating racist signs, Tea Party activists are swarming on Williamsburg, Virginia this summer to ruin educational family vacations by yelling and asking costumed reenactors how to overthrow the government. Ugh.

There's always a guy on a guided tour who's wearing a fanny pack and knee high socks, asking really stupid questions and embarrassing the rest of his family, right? Now add some loud, uninformed right wing zealotry, and you've got Colonial Williamsburg Summer 2010! The Washington Post went to Williamsburg and described the scene there these days, as Tea Party activists take in the sights and look to meet the Founding Fathers in person:

They stand in the crowd listening closely as the costumed actors relive dramatic moments in the founding of our country. They clap loudly when an actor portraying Patrick Henry delivers his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. They cheer and hoot when Gen. George Washington surveys the troops behind the original 18th-century courthouse. And they shout out about the tyranny of our current government during scenes depicting the nation's struggle for freedom from Britain.

"General, when is it appropriate to resort to arms to fight for our liberty?" asked a tourist on a recent weekday during "A Conversation with George Washington," a hugely popular dialogue between actor and audience in the shaded backyard of Charlton's Coffeehouse...>more