Guns, Goons & Goofs: The Story of Dick Armey's Coup Attempt at FreedomWorks

"Dick's Army" An Entertaining FAIL

Tracy Bloom reports at Truthdig:

New reports are surfacing that former FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey attempted a power grab of the tea party organization before he left it. According to The Washington Post, the former House majority leader staged the “coup” in September, bringing along his wife and an aide who had a handgun holstered at his waist into the group’s Capitol Hill office. The goal: oust Armey’s enemies and retake control of FreedomWorks.

The Washington Post:
The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations...

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FreedomWorks PWNED!

$80k In Donations Lost At Opening Of Fund Drive Hyped By Glenn Beck

The Wall Street Journal reports:
A mysterious cyber attack apparently struck the computer servers at the pro-tea party group FreedomWorks this morning, just as it launched a major fund-raising drive.

FreedomWorks officials are investigating, but they suspect they were attacked deliberately, perhaps by a political opponent seeking the thwart its fund-raising efforts.

The attack crippled the site at about 9:45 a.m. just when the fund-raising drive was publicized on the radio by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck. The group estimates it lost about $80,000 in potential donations as it struggled to bring its site back online...>more

How Dummies Consume Their Tea Party

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

DC Tax Day Tea Party: "Don't Look, Ethel!"

Ray Stevens' Love Song To Military Breaks Smarmometer, Victoria Jackson Ensures Place As Stupidest Saturday Night Live Cast Member Ever



Mike Flugennock writes at the Washington DC Independent Media Center:

I came away yesterday evening feeling somehow disppointed; sure, there were the obligatory birthers, flat-taxers and other assorted nutbars, and yes, there was the obligatory smattering of amusingly misspelled signs, but somehow -- yesterday's crowd just wasn't as flat-out batshit as I was hoping and expecting. Michelle Bachman was her usual shrieking, shallow, ingnorant self, yet she vomited none of the off-the-hook weird statements that endear her to me; Andrew Breitbart exhibited his usual over-the-edge delivery, but neither of them seemed to really bring the crazy yesterday.

They hated socialism, yet most of them looked old enough to be on Social Security and Medicare. They hated corporations, they loved capitalism. They hated the expansion of government power into their lives, they loved the expansion of government power into Iraq and Afghanistan. They hated Saul Alinsky -- and they loved Saul Alinsky. Go figure.

Speakers galore shuffled across the stage -- so many speakers, in fact, that it almost seemed like a right-wing version of an ANSWER rally, only with music. And, oh, what music. Almost without exception, every musical performer worked to the accompaniment of a pre-recorded instrumental backup track instead of a live backup band. Ray Stevens, late-60s Jesus-rock star famous for his '70s novelty hit "The Streak", proffered a sappy, cloying love song to the military which pegged my Smarmometer™ so hard that it damn' near broke the needle off. Former Saturday Night Live fixture Victoria Jackson, who dropped out of SNL in the '90s to pursue a career as a born-again Christian nutcake, cemented her position as Stupidest SNL Cast Member Ever with "There's A Communist Living In The White House", a song featuring a tedious guilt-by-association litany of the "communists" in Barack Obama's life which, to her and all assembled, proved that the DLC corporate centrist hack currently in the Oval Office is, in fact, a dangerous Marxist.

Then, at long last, came the man I waited all evening to hear from -- Little Andy Breitbart. He only seemed to go through the motions last night, with his prerequisite loony attitude, but there just wasn't enough of the Breitbart zaniness that guarantees a full-tilt steaming-ears meltdown. This could be due to the fact that it was a "friendly" crowd without the possibility of his being confronted with any inconvenient truths, thus precluding any chance of Breitbart going over the edge. Most of his evening's rantings were spent making excuses for Clarence Thomas and bitching about MSNBC and "union thugs" -- in other words, a standard-issue rap which had none of the brilliance of his ravings at the recent CPAC conference in March. More's the pity.

Video is also downloadable as 32.8mb mpeg4 file from the DC Independent Media Center