Endless “Time for talk is over” tour hits Cleveland, Ohio on Monday; Update: More signs of No-mentum | read this item
Calling all Tea Party activists: Make sure to make your voices heard in Cleveland, Ohio, on Monday when President Obama comes to town.
They’re piggy-backing Democrat fundraisers onto the Demcare salvation road show — just as they did in St. Louis, Missouri.
Will Dems flee from the Reverse Midas White House touch like they did yesterday?
At [...]
Making their voices heard, some of our readers made the road trip from Chicago to St. Louis to protest the Obamacare Road Show at the St. Charles High School. Every voice counts:
One group of folks on Bennett Avenue journeyed from Chicago to hold signs protesting health care reform. Stefanie Wilson, 44, daughters Ellery, 18, and [...]
Today Politico has a lengthly article out about the lack of success by teabagger candidates. Basically, it’s three long pages of wondering why, oh why:
… success at the ballot box has been elusive for these grass-roots conservative activists — if not entirely nonexistent.
Speculation abounds as to why teabagger candidates have been complete failures around the country:
Some observers raise the question of whether the tea party crowd is cut out to achieve electoral success — or whether it is more influential as a more radical, guerrilla movement.
The main reason seems to be a predictable growing pain of any new political movement. While tea party partisans have proved effective in organizing rallies and protests, they have yet to show they possess the bread-and-butter on-the-ground campaign skills it takes to win races …
Then there is the question of fundraising …
But the tea party electoral losses are also indicative of a broader challenge: Tea party leaders must find a way to define its platform and communicate to mainstream voters just what it stands for.
As they seek to dislodge establishment Republican candidates in primaries across the country, tea party-inspired contenders are facing yet another challenge: fractured fields of like-minded, grass-roots conservative hopefuls that result in a splitting of the tea party vote.
… but the most obvious explanation isn’t explored. That the teabagger “movement” is nothing but a collection of right-wing extremists who were initially given a platform by Fox News and that the rest of the sheep-like traditional media ran with.
The traditional media was happy to ignore the hundreds of thousands who protested against the Iraq War or for immigration reform, but a few thousand lunatics, that the Republican Party gleefully leeched onto, screamed at town hall meetings and suddenly, a movement was born? Pfft.
Make your voice heard: Counter-protest the Obamacare Road Show; St. Louis Oba-Kabuki event is closed-door, invitation-only | read this item
This is it, Tea Party people. This is the week for your on-the-ground mobilization to help drive a final nail into the Obamacare coffin. The perpetual campaigner-in-chief will be in Philadelphia today and St. Louis on Wednesday to rally his troops/stage props on a taxpayer-funded road show.
He said “make your voice heard” last week.
Make sure [...]
Dems: Screw bipartisanship, full steam ahead on Obamacare hara-kiri | read this item
Scroll for updates…GOP Rep. Deal resignation makes House magic number 216….
They’re all in — and they’ve convinced themselves that you do not care about the process. They’ve learned nothing from the Tea Party protests, the town hall revolts, or the Massachusetts election. The White House/Democrat message: Screw you!
The White House called for a “simple up-or-down” [...]
Fox 'News' vs. Ron Paul and the tea partiers | read this item
Everybody who has paid any attention to politics over the last year knows that Fox has been trying to absorb the tea party movement into the Republican Party, but the real energy of the tea partiers comes from Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, a campaign that challenged enough Republican orthodoxy that Fox banned Paul from the presidential debates.
Two years later, Fox still has a Ron Paul problem. On Saturday, Ron Paul won CPAC’s 2012 straw poll, delivering a clear message that Ron Paul and the tea partiers who support him aren’t interested in being absorbed — instead, they are intent on remaking the G.O.P.
Not surprisingly, Fox’s coverage of Paul’s CPAC win was dismissive, repeatedly hammering home the message that Paul’s victory wasn’t significant and that he wasn’t really a serious candidate. Fox even suggested that had Glenn Beck been on the straw poll ballot, he’d likely have beaten out Ron Paul.
Watch:
Fox’s dismissive coverage of Paul is just the latest evidence that Fox doesn’t want to empower the tea partiers — they want the tea partiers to empower them. FNC hacks like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck pretend to be tea partiers on TV, but at the end of the day, Fox, Palin, and Beck care more about what the tea party movement can do for them than what they can do for the tea party movement.
