When Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin in 2008, he drew a crowd of 200,000. Wednesday's speech at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate was a little less popular. White House pool reporter Elmar Jakobs estimated the crowd at only 4,500.
Obama's Berlin crowd may also have been smaller than the crowd of several thousand who turned out for the Tea Party Patriots' 'Audit the IRS' rally and for a rally against the immigration bill held at the Capitol on Wednesday. One unofficial estimate put the crowd size at 7,000 to 10,000 at its peak. Both rallies lasted several hours."
Ever Seen A Bigger Lame Duck Than Barry Sotereo?
A Deplorable Bitter Clinger
It was an invite-only event ffs!Originally Posted by Boon Mee
At least he wasn't greeted by 20,000 protesters like Bush was in 2002.
A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption.
The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.
Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, 'To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts': the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:
"Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry's anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda."
The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now "supporting the tobacco companies' political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws." Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.
In 1990, Tim Hyde, RJR Tobacco's head of national field operations, in an eerily similar description of the Tea Party today, explained why groups like CSE were important to the tobacco industry's fight against government regulation. Hyde wrote:
"... coalition building should proceed along two tracks: a) a grassroots organizational and largely local track,; b) and a national, intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are talking about a "movement," a national effort to change the way people think about government's (and big business) role in our lives. Any such effort requires an intellectual foundation - a set of theoretical and ideological arguments on its behalf."
The common public understanding of the origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.
However, the Quarterback study reveals that in 2002, the Kochs and tobacco-backed CSE designed and made public the first Tea Party Movement website under the web address www.usteaparty.com. Here's a screenshot of the archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002:
CSE describes the U.S. Tea Party site, "In 2002, our U.S. Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online, and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated." The site features a "Patriot Guest book" where supporters can write a message of support for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.
Sometime around September 2011, the U.S. Tea Party site was taken offline. According to the DNS registry, the web address www.usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks.
The implications of the UCSF Quarterback report are widespread. The main concern expressed by the authors lies in what they see happening overseas as the Tea Party movement expands internationally, training activists in 30 countries including Israel, Georgia, Japan and Serbia.
As the authors explain:
"This international expansion makes it likely that Tea Party organizations will be mounting opposition to tobacco control (and other health) policies as they have done in the USA."
Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity are both multi-issue organizations that have expanded their battles to include other policies they see as threats to the free market principles they claim to defend, namely fighting health care reform and regulations on global warming pollution. The report's warning about overseas expansion efforts by Freedomworks should therefore also be heeded by groups in the health and environment arenas.
Finally, this report might serve as a wake-up call to some people in the Tea Party itself, who would find it a little disturbing that the "grassroots" movement they are so emotionally attached to, is in fact a pawn created by billionaires and large corporations with little interest in fighting for the rights of the common person, but instead using the common person to fight for their own unfettered profits.
link
No doubt for use against those violent Tea Partiers, eh?
Jeez, wot bullshit- get some fots of the detention centres. There may just be a wave of jihdi's swimming the rio grande, i guess.
u supported this stuff booner.
Check this out:
26% of Obama supporters believe the nation's top terrorist threat is The Tea Party,
Most of them probably work for the IRS.
Big Government lovers - Statists like Nanny Bloomberg who wants to limit the size of your soft drink...
paul krugman destroys teabagging blogger ---with facts.
Krugman hits Erickson for 'fake populism' - POLITICO.comin response to Erick Erickson's latest us-versus-them screed against the Acela-corridor...The rest of America is nervous about where their next meal and paycheck are coming from, how they are going to afford to bail their kids out of crumbling schools, and the price of a gallon of milk and loaf of bread that keep going up though Ben Bernanke tells them there is no inflation.Paul Krugman drops some Bureau of Labor Statistics data to show that the price of milk and bread haven't actually gone up at all. And asks:So, how does Erickson know that the prices of bread and milk are soaring? Has he been carefully keeping track? Or is it just fake populism, an attempt to sound like Everyman while actually just whining?UPDATE (9:43 a.m.): Erickson emails POLITICO:Paul uses a chart to try to disprove the reality that Americans with small kids actually experience at the grocery store. His problem is he thinks I'm attacking the Democrats and wants to defend them, when the criticism is broader and bipartisan. And if he hung around moms and dads with kids more often he'd hear a lot more real world complaining about bread, milk, and other grocery item prices going up while paychecks are staying the same. Not everything is academic or chartable and sometimes the accuracy of the chart isn't as real to people as the perception they have that their grocery store bills are getting more expensive though their shopping habits haven't changed.And later adds...Seriously, Paul's point is correct, but it is an issue of perception of people versus the reality of his chart. He can certainly go tell people milk prices haven't gone up, but good luck getting them to believe him.UPDATE (12:59 p.m.): Krugman responds on his blog: "Ok, this is awesome":...Erickson’s response is, hey, it isn’t true, but people feel that it’s true... Notice, by the way, the implication that I don’t appreciate the problems real people (who don’t eat quiche or ride the Acela) are facing; actually, I do, but those problems are lack of jobs and stagnant wages, not rising prices. And if you want to solve problems, getting the nature of those problems right matters.
But then, only elitists want to solve problems; true men of the people just vent, and what matters is perception, not truth.
Fixed that for you..Originally Posted by sabang
Like the rest of Obama's 'Phony Scandals', this Tea Party thing ain't going away either...
^ What was the point of putting up a pic like this and making that comment? How does it further debate? Another spam post.
Democratic party candidates everywhere will be pleased to hear that, Republicans who are going to get primary challenges from raving lunatics might not be so happy though..Originally Posted by Boon Mee
I hope the stick around as well if they keep up shit like this;
Sarah Palin Slams Chris Christie: "I’m On Team Rand"
The polls clearly show that Christie has the best chance of defeating HRC that dipshit Rand Paul has no chance.
I think the problem is that the democrats have taken the position historically taken by the republicans and the republicans well they have shifted right into fruit and nut land.
in the worse case for the republicans is that they are replaced by the dems as the party of the right and the left wing of the dems split to form the new party of the left. This would be rather good for america and 99% taking some of their country from the 1% who have stolen so much over the last 30 years. The tea party movement is just making thsi more and more likly
Personally I see parallels between the tea party in the US and the red/yellow shirt moments. common people fighting so hard and sometimes dying to make sure that the rich who exploit them stay rich at their expense.
Teakdoor CSI, TD's best post-reality thinkers
featuring Prattmaster ENT, Prattmaster Dapper and PrattmasterPseudolus
Dedicated to uncovering irrational explanations to every event and heroically
defending them against the onslaught of physics, rational logic and evidence
^ The US system is broken and gamed. I do want to see that corporapist system denied as far as the repubtards they are so bad that I have to stay with the dems. The repubtard are phycho..
The 2016 Crystal Ball
btw, it's no sure thing HRC will get the Democratic nomination.
Well, the verdict is in. CNN says Ted Cruz of Tea Party fame is eligible to run for POTUS.
VERDICT IS IN: CNN Says Ted Cruz Eligible to Run for President - YouTube
Run Ted, run!
Ted Nugent for veep.Originally Posted by Boon Mee
it should be obvious to anyone with the slightest amount of political acumen that ted cruz will never be elected president of the US. clintonland probably couldn't dream up a candidate they'd prefer to run against more than cruz.....ok, maybe ted nugent.
anyway....when i saw this thread title, i thought to myself......what exactly has the tea party done for the conservative agenda in the US?
what impact have they had on legislation? obamacare is the law, and there's not a damn thing they can do about it except for huff and puff in the corner. and now they're threatening to shut down the govt. to try and defund it......when shutting down the govt. wouldn't actually defund it. because they don't know how govt works, they believe the crap they read/hear in the right wing echo chamber....facts be damned.
and can anyone point to evidence that the tea party has reduced the size of government?
and as far as controlling govt is concerned, isn't the tea party singularly responsible for republicans not taking the senate in 2010 and 2012? the only way to win a republican primary is to the craziest right winger on the ballot. that might win elections in gerrymandered districts in texas and idaho....but it doesn't win most state wide elections in swing states, and it will never win national elections.
if you go back to the 2012 presidential primary and look at one of the debates, not a single republican candidate would agree to 1 dollar increase in taxes for every 10 dollars in cuts to reduce the debt and deficit.....and that's because they were all scared of the tea party. but real americans, rational americans thought that 10 for 1 was a very good deal.
honestly, where's the upside to this tea party nonsense? seems to me all it's done is make a few rich guys even richer....and kept conservatives from controlling the senate and living in the WH.
Heh...check this out. The newspaper that endorsed Obama admits the Tea Party was right!
Chicago Tribune: How President Obama is flouting Obamacare: More reasons to delay and rewrite this ill-conceived law.
“Granted, any president may decline to enforce statutes he believes are unconstitutional. But Obama is making no such claim here. Basically, he is admitting that parts of law are impossible to enforce on the deadlines imposed by Congress — deadlines he signed into law. He’s also admitting he doesn’t want to have Congress make these changes, for fear that if lawmakers get their mitts on this unpopular program, they would at least debate far more extensive changes than he’d like.”
Told ya so...
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