Holy F*ckamoly - TeaParty movement started here???

Here is Bakersfield, CA. I knew I was living in the reddest part of Cali...but the whole friggin movement found life here? From The NewYorker writeup, sent to me by my blogger bud RJ:

John Boehner’s introduction to the political force that would make him the Speaker of the House of Representatives came on a cool April afternoon in 2009, on the streets of Bakersfield, California. Boehner, the Republican House leader, had come to town for a fund-raiser for his colleague Kevin McCarthy, who represents the area. The event was scheduled for tax day, April 15th—the date targeted for a series of nationwide protest rallies organized by a loosely joined populist movement that called itself the Tea Party. One rally was to take place in Bakersfield, and Boehner and McCarthy decided to make an appearance. “They were expecting a couple of hundred people,” Boehner recalls. “A couple of thousand showed up.”

The two congressmen witnessed a scene of the sort that played in an endless loop across the country for the next eighteen months: people in funny hats waving Gadsden flags and wearing T-shirts saying “No taxation with crappy representation,” venting about bailouts, taxes, entrenched political élites, and an expanding and seemingly pampered public sector. (Noticing an open window in a nearby government office building, some in the Bakersfield crowd shouted, “Shut that window! You’re wasting my air-conditioning!”) Although Bakersfield is in one of the most conservative districts in California, the Tea Party speakers assigned fault to Republicans as well as to Democrats. The event’s organizers had been advised that Boehner and McCarthy would be there but did not invite them to speak.

For Boehner, the Bakersfield rally was a revelation. “I could see that there was this rebellion starting to grow,” he says now. “And I didn’t want our members taking a shellacking as a result.”

Bakersfield, and Kern County in general, is loaded with uneducated, bigoted rightwing nutters. An example: the percentage of high school students that go on to college is a pathetic 19% here, our dropout rate is 26%. If that doesn't tell you something about the area, nothing will.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, during his reign as Governor, came here at least once a month to speak to the big corporate farmers and the oil barons. California's horrible employer-favoring Workers Compensation laws, which were changed by Ahnold, were hatched here by Ahnold and fuckers that own Grimmway Farms.

So, blame it on Bakersfield folks...John Crocodile-tears Boehner loves Bako and it's unwashed masses that consistently vote against their own self-interests and probably always will.

Video: Rand's Teaparty Thugs stomp activist from MoveOn

Sick batshit bastards...yeah, they just can't handle anything out of their own little world can they? And these fuckers vote? Scary shit...very scary how our country has turned to this type of violence. Free speech? Not at a Rand Paul event evidently. MoJo has more detailed story here.



Sign the statement here to demand that the assholes that run the Republican Party, Rand Paul and all their fuckwitted candidates denounce these batshit teabaggers and their violence.

This is a shocker: NAACP exposes ties between teabaggers and hate grps.

Nationalism is not always a good thing. From Alternet:

The Tea Party movement has links to white supremacists, anti-immigration groups, "birthers" and other "extremists," according to a report released by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The 94 page report, entitled Tea Party Nationalism (.pdf), investigates six national organizations "at the core" of the Tea Party: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and the Tea Party Express.

*snip*

Although members of the Tea Party claim the movement is focused on dismantling an out of control federal government, reducing taxes, and balancing the budget, the report claims that the movement is permeated with concerns about national identity and race.

"In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a 'real American,'" says the report. "Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Citing one of the links between the movement and extremists, the report says Dale Robertson, the chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, invited Martin "Red" Beckman to be a guest on the Tea Party Radio hour that he co-hosts. Beckman, who was introduced as a "great guy" and "an authority on the Constitution" has been publishing anti-Semitic writings for over twenty years.

There is much more, and the report is very long and detailed...so check it out. Personally, I have seen and heard enough of these fuckwads here in the San Joaquin valley to know they are a batshit-crazy bag of bigots, racists and just all-around haters of everything that isn't white or against those that speak out against injustice against all people of color, nationality, religion, poor folks or sexual orientation.

Joe Miller's thugs arrest AK reporter asking questions.

From C&L's VideoCafe:

From the Alaska Daily News:

    The editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was arrested by U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller's private security guards Sunday as the editor attempted to interview Miller at the end of a public event in an Anchorage school.

    Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by the guards and detained in a hallway at Central Middle School until Anchorage police came and told the guards to release Hopfinger.

    Hopfinger has not been charged but the owner of the Drop Zone, the private security firm that's been providing Miller's security, accused Hopfinger of trespassing at the public event, a town hall sponsored by the Miller campaign. The owner, William Fulton, also said Hopfinger assaulted a man by shoving him.

    Anchorage Police who responded to the call said they would leave it to the District Attorney's office to decide whether to prosecute. They spent more than an hour taking statements, then left.

Dave N.: Gee, one can only imagine what the anguished screams would be sounding like if, say, this were a Democrat at a public event at a public school using thugs to rough up an accredited journalist -- which Hopfinger is.(emphasis mine)

The must-read on this: Shannyn Moore at Mudflats. Does it not surprise anyone that Blackwater and far-right extremism figure into this?

Don't you just love when Rethugs/Teabaggers and their brownshirts have a meltdown over simple questions they are asked? Video below.

Matt Taibbi: Tea & Crackers.

He calls them Tea Party 2.0 and he's right of course. His newest at RS is a great read. A short excerpt:

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.

"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."

Gawd, I swear you could not pay me enough to attend a Sarah/Rand Paul get-together. My fucking head would explode.

He goes on to describe the crowd: White and crippled. No shit, they got a shit-load of hover-rounds and scooters there. wtf? They are all paid for by medicare...aka the federal government! And these fuckers bitch about big government and freeloaders? Fuck me running...

The best line in the piece:  But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters....

Read it, Taibbi never lets me down. Bless his little black journalistic heart. ;)

One of Drifty's finest vids!

Kudos to Tengrain for tweeting about it. It's a teabagger deluxe called SNEETCHES:

Koch bros fund the Tea Partys? Is this supposed to be news?

From The New Yorker,  CNN via C&L, another shot at showing people that the teabaggers are bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers who have given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes.:

CNN has finally, even belatedly, with the publication of Jane Mayer's background piece in The New Yorker (COVERT OPERATIONS: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama) begun to acknowledge that the so-called "grassroots" Tea Party has some powerful and extremely wealthy backers (or as Matt Kibbe puts it, "patrons").

Now, as a background piece, a 7-minute interview on weekend CNN isn't going to be highly informative, and this is not Rachel Maddow or 60 Minutes. But it's still worthwhile getting out there who really pulls the strings in American politics and who are the willing dupes. The Kochs will spend $45 million for the coming midterms alone, funneling the cash through such organizations as Americans for Prosperity. They have also given the Republican Governor's Association (RGA) another million, joining FOX News in that dubious distinction. In short, they are the ultimate power players within Republican ranks.

Read the Jane Mayer 10-page article online here.

That name, Koch,  should be on the lips of every liberal when discussing the astroturfing assholes known as Tea Partiers. The Koch's are evil incarnate and a big part of the whole founding members of the rightwing nutter university group.  They buy everyone and everything in their path and with nuts like Dick Armey, these fuckers can pull it off.

Teabaggers hit a new low in DC

From C&L's video site:

 Even by Tea Party standards this one seems pretty low. Report by Dave Harding at Progress Ohio.

Video shot by the Columbus Dispatch from today's Honk and Wave in Support of Health Care at Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy's district office contains a segment wherein the teabaggers mock and scorn an apparent Parkinsen's victim telling him "he's in the wrong end of town to ask for handouts", calling him a communist and throwing money at him to "pay for his health care".
The segment starts at 51 seconds into the video.

Video and report from the Columbus Dispatch. Here's a sampling of Teabagger "logic":

"I don't see anyone laying in the street dying. We provide care for everyone," said Janet Popa, 61, of Upper Arlington.

"No one is turned away," said her friend, Ruth Phelps, 50, of Upper Arlington.

The women and others noted that hospitals cannot deny care to those who show up at emergency rooms.

Supporters dismissed concerns about cost and expanding the role of government.

"If we can find the money to kill people in wars, we can pay for this," said a Republican business owner from Westerville who declined to give her name.

"We are paying anyway (with charity care for the uninsured)."

There are some seriously sick fucks at that...cough..rally. 

Maher: Teabaggers are a cult.

Last night saw the return of Bill Maher and his HBO show, Real Time w/Bill Maher. His New Rules section had the following pronouncement on the teabaggers and I agree!

The Teabagger part starts at 2:22 if you are in a hurry.