The National Tea Party Federation has expelled a prominent activist group, the Tea Party Express, because it wouldn't rebuke and fire one of its leaders for writing an offensive blog post.
Mark Williams, a California radio host who is leading protests in New York against a proposed mosque near Ground Zero and has drawn Sarah Palin to his rallies, had previously called the President an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug" and said Muslims were "animals" who worship "a monkey god."
But when he posted a satirical letter this week from "the Colored People" to President Lincoln about how little they want to work, that apparently crossed the line - especially after the NAACP called on Tea Party leaders to oust racists from their ranks...
J. D. Hayworth, currently campaigning for John McCain’s Arizona senate seat, has been touting his ultra conservative stop-government-spending credentials to the Arizona Tea Party crowd for several months. However, it appears his views on this issue were considerably different three years ago when he shilled for an “Easy Money Scheme” promoted by a now-defunct Florida-based company.
In a 2007 infomercial for National Grants Conferences (see YouTube video below), Hayworth said the following about the potential for individuals being able to receive “free (federal) money grants:”
"Now, you may think what you've heard is too good to be true, but let me assure you, it is real, it's available, and it's something you should take advantage of.
You should come to one of the National Grants Conferences. Because there, you receive information, information that equates with power. And knowledge to make you a better business owner, to make you a wiser investor, to make you, perhaps, a first-time homeowner."
None of this was true, of course. As noted on the U.S. Government website grants.gov:
"We have all seen them: late night infomercials, websites and reference guides, advertising 'millions in free money.' Don't believe the hype! Although there are many grants on Grants.gov, few of them are available to individuals and none of them are available for personal financial assistance."
...[C]orporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.
From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.
So what President Obama and his party now face isn’t just, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. For grass-roots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the G.O.P. does well in November.
If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security. It comes as no surprise to learn that American Crossroads, a new organization whose goal is to deploy large amounts of corporate cash on behalf of Republican candidates, is the brainchild of none other than Karl Rove.
But won’t the grass-roots rebel at being used? Don’t count on it. Last week Rand Paul, the Tea Party darling who is now the Republican nominee for senator from Kentucky, declared that the president’s criticism of BP over the disastrous oil spill in the gulf is “un-American,” that “sometimes accidents happen.” The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations...
Apr 15, 2010 The Tea Partiers: Older, richer and more resentful We're learning more about the people who are a part of the Tea Party movement -- and what's really motivating them By David Jarman Salon.com
Slowly but surely, a demographic profile of the Tea Party movement – which began just over a year ago and is now dominating the news as Tax Day arrives – is emerging.
A comprehensive poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS News and released late Monday CBS News/New York Times essentially found what anyone watching a couple minutes of news footage of a rally would intuit: the 18 percent of the nation that identifies with the Tea Party movement tends to be white, male, older than 45 and Republican. And also hypocritical: despite their anti-spending rhetoric, Tea Party supporters told pollsters that two of the federal government’s most money-consuming programs, Social Security and Medicare, are worth the cost to taxpayers (maybe not a surprise, given the Tea Partiers’ average age)...
What's up with the nasty anti-Obama emails I've been receiving? I think sometimes people are actually angry about something different from what they're talking about, whether it's health care or the local elementary school.
ANGRY PARENTS, TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS: TOO MUCH IN COMMON?
A lot of kids have been given less-than-stellar educations by our local school districts, and many of their parents are angry. I agree entirely with these parents' demands for better treatment for students. I also agree that many parents who complain have been bullied shamefully by school lawyers. Some of these lawyers have violated professional codes of conduct and state law to the extent that they deserve severe reprimands, even disbarment or jail time. Of course, these lawyers are unlikely to be called to account for their unethical and illegal actions.
But some of these parents are too angry, in my opinion.
I suspect that some parents are angry about situations that have nothing to do with schools, but they unleash this anger on a handy, accessible target: their kids' school. Sometimes it's really hard to keep track of exactly what these people are furious about.
Recently one of these parents sent me, for no apparent reason, an email claiming that President Obama was "first born"* in Kenya. Apparently the theory is that he was first born in Kenya, then born for a second time in Honolulu. (Sometimes it's hard to figure out exactly what these "Birthers" are trying to say.) The email I received included a photo of Obama's elementary school application to an Indonesian Catholic school. Very clearly on the application, right after his name, Obama's place of birth was listed as Honolulu. The person who filled out the form, Obama's Indonesian stepfather, was in no way trying to make his stepson sound more American. Obama's birthplace was a matter of record, and no one had yet cooked up a plan to pretend otherwise. Yet this email was sent to me, as the sender indicated in the subject line, "to fuel the debate over Obama's qualifications." How does the human brain malfunction so spectacularly?
If anything, this San Diego parent should be angry at her own teachers for not training her adequately as a critical thinker.
But I must say that many teachers and administrators were not taught how to be critical thinkers, either. During my years of teaching I saw plenty of teachers and adminstrators spewing anger (at kids, parents and each other). Many of them made no more sense than the confused parent who emailed me. To top it off, I heard teachers make disparaging remarks about high intelligence itself. Smart people were not considered cool by the most popular and powerful teachers at my schools.
My suggestion? Critical thinking classes for school professionals.
Everyone involved would benefit from better decision-making by school personnel, and students would benefit from the improved thinking skills of their teachers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Full quote from email: "This document provides the smoking gun that many of Obama's detractors have been seeking - that he is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States - necessary to be President of these United States . Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya , here we see that there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship...Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation has released the results of their investigation..."
It's disturbing that there are so many people who have so little respect for democracy that they believe they have the right to use any means, including dishonesty or violence, to bring down the elected leader of the United States, just because they're feeling angry. See Tea Party and Christian Militia posts.
Next installment: Muslims versus Mormons: whom do Americans trust less?
Here's another story about a nasty email. The woman who first sent this racially offensive email was angry that a recipient forwarded it to the NAACP, and caused that recipient to be fired. This is just the sort of thing that happens in schools, in my experience. School officials want bad behavior covered up, and they take action NOT against the bad actors, but against those they fear might reveal the truth about the bad actions to the public. That's what Chula Vista Elementary School District and its lawyers did to cover up the crimes of Robin Donlan and Linda Watson. In the end, the district committed felonies like perjury and alteration of documents to cover misdemeanors. Things really get out of control once the cover-up starts. What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. The angriest administrator? The Jenny Mo case at WCCSD.
The NAACP says a 14-year employee was fired from SunTrust Mortgage Inc. in Richmond after she was accused of sending a chain e-mail she received at work that ultimately was forwarded to the NAACP.
The fired African-American employee said she found the e-mail offensive.
The e-mail contains pictures of 40 bumper stickers such as, "Clinton ruined a dress, Obama ruined a nation," "So I guess we're even on that slavery thing eh?" and, "Diversity -- It killed 13 at Fort Hood."...
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People released a copy of what it said was the e-mail sent by a SunTrust official to 13 office employees and one outside recipient under the subject line "FW: Bumper Stickers that Make Sense."...
Russ, an accountant, said SunTrust conducted an internal investigation and then brought her into a meeting. There, she was told she was being terminated because her supervisor had "trust issues" with her and because of the e-mail, she said in a telephone interview.
She said SunTrust accused her of trying to go public with the e-mail by forwarding it to someone who would give it to the NAACP.
The official who sent the e-mail collected Russ' belongings and escorted Russ out of the building immediately after the Feb. 18 meeting, Russ said. She said she was paid through March 4...
Mar 20, 2010 Too much tea party racism As protesters call Dem leaders "nigger" and "faggot," it's time for Republicans to denounce them. By Joan Walsh Salon.com
When the tea party movement began last year I saw it as right-wing reaction, but given the economic turmoil across the country, I tried to understand it. Maybe there was populism within the movement that the left needed to recognize. I attended a local tea party last April 15, tax day, and while I didn't find folks whose minds seemed mutable by liberal populism, at least it seemed possible to have a conversation. I wrote about a former banker and a Democrat who made common cause with some of the protesters around the bank bailout and Goldman Sachs's overall influence on government. She had some good conversations. I saw closed minds, but I didn't see violence or overt racism. Of course I was in San Francisco, so it probably wasn't representative of the tea party movement, but I still think the effort to understand the economic anxiety that's part of what's motivating the tea partiers was worth my time.
A year later, though, it's worth more of my time to say what many resist: The tea party movement is disturbingly racist and reactionary, from its roots to its highest branches. On Saturday, as a small group of protesters jammed the Capitol and the streets around it, the movement's origins in white resistance to the Civil Rights Movement was impossible to ignore. Here's only what the mainstream media is reporting, ignoring what I'm seeing on Twitter and left wing blogs:
* Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis was taunted by tea partiers who chanted "nigger" at least 15 times, according to the Associated Press (we are not cleaning up language and using "the N-word" here because it's really important to understand what was said.) First reported on The Hill blog (no hotbed of left-wing fervor), the stories of Lewis being called "nigger" were confirmed by Lewis spokeswoman Brenda Jones and Democratic Rep. Andre Carson, who was walking with Lewis. "It was like going into the time machine with John Lewis," said Carson, a former police officer. "He said it reminded him of another time." * Another Congressional Black Caucus leader, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, was spat upon by protesters. The culprit was arrested, but Cleaver declined to press charges. * House Majority Whip James Clybourn told reporters: "I heard people saying things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus." * There were many reports that Rep. Barney Frank was called a "faggot" by protesters, but the one I saw personally was by CNN's Dana Bash, who seemed rattled by the tea party fury. Frank told AP: "It's a mob mentality that doesn't work politically." * Meanwhile, a brick came through the window at Rep. Louise Slaughter's Niagara Falls office on Saturday (the day she argued for her "Slaughter solution" to pass health care reform, though it was rejected by other Democrats on the House Rules Committee).
On Thursday MSNBC's "Hardball" host Chris Matthews grilled tea party Astroturf leader Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity about supporters who taunted a man with Parkinson's disease at a tea party gathering in Ohio last week. Phillips insisted the bullies just didn't represent the tea party movement. But such demurrals don't cut it any more. At the Nashville tea party gathering last month, a proponent of the kinder, gentler tea party movement, Judson Phillips, tried to distance himself from crazed and racist elements – but later endorsed racist speaker Tom Tancredo even after he told the convention: "People who could not even spell the word 'vote', or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama." Tancredo blamed Obama's election on the fact that "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country." He got some of the loudest cheers of the weekend.
So I'm having a hard time tonight trying to believe almost uniformly white tea partiers are anything other than a racist, right-wing reaction to the election of an African American president who brings with him feminists and gays (even if he doesn't do as much for them as they would ideally like)...
The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.
Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.
Last year, in a series of "town-hall meetings" across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.
What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.
Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.
But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.
In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.
Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.
Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?
Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?
It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called "the paranoid style" of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington...
There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.
As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.
Stories not facts
In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.
He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:
Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."
Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."
Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate...
For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious...
Reverse revolution
Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an even more exasperated Democrat and he goes further than Mr Westen. He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.
...The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.
...authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made...
