Re: Tempest in the Tea Party | Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer, Wed Dec. 30, 2009 8:47 AM PST
What are taxes good for, anyway?
Would a true Tea Party patriot drop nearly $1,600 in donor money for a small meal at a fancy steakhouse? Robin Stublen says no, and he’s mad as hell about the profligate expenditures of a GOP political organization that has glommed on to his grassroots movement. Stublen is the organizer of the Punta Gorda, Florida, Tea Party and a member of Tea Party Patriots, a national grassroots organization that has no offices, no president, raises virtually no money, operates largely on volunteer efforts, and, most important, doesn’t endorse candidates. But unbeknownst to many, there’s another outfit claiming ownership of this conservative movement. It’s called the Tea Party Express, and it has dominated Fox News coverage over the past year with its multistate bus tours and political rallies.
Behind it is a well-established Republican political action committee that has raked in tons of money fundraising under the “Tea Party” banner—and it has also spent a lot of that money in a fashion unbecoming a supposedly grassroots insurrection. For instance, according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, the PAC that created Tea Party Express dropped $1,597.29 over the summer for a meal for six at a tony Sacramento Chops restaurant, an expenditure that has Stublen seeing red.
There’s a fight going on between the ordinary nut-jobs and the well organized and well funded nut-jobs. It seems that the real tea party faction, the Tea Party Patriots, have been out-maneuvered by the astroturf group, the Tea Party Express. And it looks like the Tea Party Express has emerged as the face of the tea bagger movement.
The Tea Party Express is funded by a GOP consulting firm, Russo Marsh & Rodgers which started the Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) PAC to propel false propaganda about Barack Obama during the 2008 election.
While Tea Party Express professes to be a driving force in the Tea Party movement, it was actually started by a California-based GOP political consulting firm, Russo Marsh & Rogers, which also set up OCDB.
FEC filings show that Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB), the PAC that set up the Tea Party Express, raised $1.9 million this year, $600,000 more than it took in during the heated 2008 presidential election.
According to TalkingPointsMemo in an article posted December 29th, 2009 the OCDB PAC funneled two-thirds of the money collected through donations from ordinary protesters back to the firm of Russo Marsh & Rodgers:
Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) spent around $1.33 million from July through November, according to FEC filings examined by TPMmuckraker. Of that sum, a total of $857,122 went to Sacramento-based GOP political consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates, or people associated with it.
In the “adding insult to injury” category, not only have the Tea Party Express organizers sucked all the air from the Tea Party Patriots’ balloons, one of the leaders of the TPP who switched allegiance over to the Tea Party Express seems to have grabbed up TPPs precious email list on her way out. What did the Tea Party Patriots do about this theft? They did what any good liberal, ACLU member would do.
They filed a lawsuit.
According to Politico.com’s Ben Smith:
The lawsuit, which I mentioned earlier, against former National Coordinator Amy Kremer, who lives in Atlanta, is seeking to force her to stop using the group’s name and to turn over control and passwords to e-mail lists, websites and social networking sites.
Read Amy Kremer’s side of the story here.
It looks like that she absconded all their passwords, too. Pity. An honest, grass-roots organization like the Tea Party Patriots just can’t seem to get a foothold without right-wing money foiling their efforts. The Tea Party Patriots not only have Russo Marsh & Rodgers and their OCDB PAC to compete against, another PAC, FreedomWorks, is also out there organizing tea bag protests.
An article at Firedoglake states that, “FreedomWorks was launched a [sic] GOP version of MoveOn. ‘We believe that hard work beats daddy’s money,’ said Dick Armey at the time. Armey seems to be a bit irony challenged — Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Krugman notes, their money comes from the [sic] Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin and other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.”
Just a note here from AlterNet about the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles (who founded the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation), and their involvement with tea bag party protests:
As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first “tea party” protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing “tea party” opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.
The big money heavyweights have jumped in and taken over what was to be an honest, albeit wrong-headed, grassroots movement.
______________________________________________________
Follow me on Twitter!
Progressives Have Only Themselves to Blame for Disappointments
Re: Obama Year One | The American Prospect, Paul Starr | December 24, 2009
Every president has had to walk back some of their campaign promises. Ronald Reagan had to raise taxes – 6 times.
No one president broke more campaign promises than George W. Bush, but you don’t hear about that because the main stream media sides with Republicans. Bush promised on the campaign trail, during the primaries of 2000, that he would fully fund the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). His FY 2003 budget slashed funding for LIHEAP by $300 million or 18% of the previous year’s allotment.
During the campaign of 2000, Bush said, “Every year, U.S. colleges attract the best and the brightest students from all over the world. I want to make sure that higher education is affordable and accessible to every American. And therein lie our greatest weaknesses: college tuition and the burden of student indebtedness. I am committed to helping families prepare for the cost of higher education.” Then, in 2002, Bush slashed the federal student loan program by $1.3 billion.
Bush also promised not to spend the Social Security surplus. But it was spent, anyway, on an unnecessary war.
There is something here that I have often repeated. President Obama has never been a progressive, but progressives have painted that portrait on him by somehow mistaking their agenda as something that he has promised to do, but has failed. One promise in contention is the health insurance mandate, or the requirement that everyone have health insurance. This was not his idea, but Hillary Clinton’s.
The news of late have shown snippets of the President at the podium in 2008 during the campaign lambasting Hillary Clinton’s insurance mandate. Now, the Senate health bill has the mandate and the President gets blamed for breaking the campaign promise of being against a mandate.
For starters, Obama’s plan had an insurance mandate for children, but not for all, as did Clinton’s. Studies done by the Lewin Group and others at that time suggested that Clinton’s plan would be the one closest to “universal coverage” depending on the strength of the penalties for noncompliance.
What is striking with this example is that when you compare both Obama’s and Clinton’s campaign health plans, you will quickly discover that they their focuses were on insurance reform, not health care reform. Then, compare those plans with Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s plan, you’ll see a stark difference. Kucinich promoted health care reform, not insurance reform, with his plan of Medicare For All.
Here’s my message to progressives, of which I consider myself also. If you go back and read through some of their policy statements on the campaign trail you will find that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama were progressive, but rather left-leaning centrists. If progressives wanted a progressive candidate they should have voted for one.The progressive’s disappointment is no one’s fault but their own.
_______________________________________________________________