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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.

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