News Flash! Five months after Yasha Levine and I broke the story linking the rightwing billionaire-PR nexus between FreedomWorks, the Koch family, CNBC, Eric Odom and the Tea Party movement, the Washington Post finally caught up with us. In an article in today’s Sunday edition, the WaPo repeats our allegation that billionaires are posing as “grassroots” groups to oppose anything that isn’t in the billionaires’ interests, including health care reform and mortgage relief for homeowners: (more…)
The right-wing anti-Obama-care movement is OK with killing off tens of thousands of Americans each year.
That’s what this is all about: The right-wingers and their corporate sponsors are protecting a medieval and violent health care system that kills more Americans each year than all the Americans who have died in the war on terror since 2001, including the 3,000 victims of 9/11, and the 5,000-plus U.S. service members who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
St. Gladney de St. Louis clutches a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and suffers quietly…
Those Tea Party thugs are a lot like Colonel Klink’s Nazis: they’d be funny in a cheap sitcom way if they weren’t causing the rest of us so much real-world harm. Latest example: one of the anti-Obamacare townhall meeting crashers, Kenneth Gladney, claims that liberal meanies beat him up just for expressing his First Amendment rights, and they gave 38-year-old martyr a boo-boo on his knee (not so “Gladney” after all, are we? [cue laugh-track]). But here’s the real punchline: the Tea Party martyr doesn’t have health insurance to cover injuries sustained while fighting against a health care plan that would offer unemployed zeroes like him medical insurance. (more…)
VICTORVILLE, CA—It was a clear bright day, but the desert wind was roaring, chilling the air to what felt like the freezing point, when I got to the Victorville, California, Tea Party protest. I arrived late for the noontime protest, with the goal of finding out if this thing had really grown legs after the comedy I witnessed at the Santa Monica Tea Party in February.
A crowd of roughly 150 people formed a compact semi-circle in the small yard between Victorville’s brand new court house and the city’s administration building. Battling the gusts of wind that blew dirt and dust from an unpaved lot across the street, I made my way towards the crowd. I was wearing a flimsy jacket, totally unprepared for this kind of weather on a bright sunny day in the middle of April out here in the California desert. (more…)
This afternoon, groups of angry conservatives will gather on street corners and in parks across the country to protest.
They will carry signs and deliver speeches expressing outrage over the Democrats’ stimulus bill, over entitlements, over budget pork, over taxes. They will dump boxes of tea on the ground and wear three-cornered hats. The leading lights of the Republican Party will be on hand to cheer them on.
But as with so much on the right, these apparent displays of populist rage are not what they will seem.
Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an investigation exposing the nascent “Tea Party” protest movement for what it really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or “fake grassroots”) lobby campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core. (more…)
Thanks to the slam dunk investigative piece by your humble correspondents, Rick Santelli was forced to cancel his appearance on the Daily Show last night, leading to this massively-blogged segment ripping Santelli and CNBC a gigantic bleeding asshole. If words could be giant foam hands with pointing index fingers, then these words would be jabbing annoyingly into the ears of every Michelle Malkin/Freedomworks/rightwing tool who tried to cover up their half-baked “grassroots tea party” flop. As the stadiums of foam index finger-waggers chant, “You! You! You!” As in “the whole fucking country is laughing at you idiots!” Ah-ha-ha-hahahahahahaha!!! (more…)
Our article last Friday exposing the familiar old rightwing corporate machine behind the fake “tea party” protests, and Rick Santelli’s highly questionable role as the one-man MC for the protests’ launch event, wound up crashing the tea party’s mojo, and forcing Santelli to issue a giant apologia on CNBC’s site. It’s titled “I Want To Set The Record Straight,” but it should be called, “I want to keep my shitty second-fiddle job and not get thrown out of my 2,500 square foot house.” You can hear Rick’s pain as the spiked CNBC legal department butt-plug is shoved deeper and deeper in, paragraph after paragraph… especially this one line that will have Santelli sleeping on his stomach for months, where he bleats: “I hope that the President and the final stimulus plan succeed.” Thank you sir, may I have another!(more…)
Koch Industries’ one-man teabag revolution in Santa Monica
As soon as Ames and I sent off our Santelli-FreedomWorks connection article to the editors at Playboy, I rushed out the door. I was already 10 minutes late to a tea party event being held just a few miles from my house.
The protest was scheduled to take place at the very end of the Santa Monica pier at 9:00 am Friday, February 27 — sharp — and would last until exactly 9:45 am. Tony Katz, the event organizer, had the whole thing mapped out on a Facebook page he set up: meet and greet, three keynote speakers (some no-name actor, a writer and an alleged comedian), a quick teabagging ceremony and then goodbye. It wasn’t the best time slot to attract protesters. (more…)
Chris Matthews: “You’re up there with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity… It’s quite a team.”
Rick Santelli (smiling and nodding): “It is quite a team!” Hardball, MSNBC, Feb 20, 2009
Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies. (more…)
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