Keith D. Milby :: blog

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an November 30, 2009, interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

via President Obama: GOP Opposition to Stimulus ‘Helped to Create the Tea-Baggers’ – Political Punch.

The Utah Tea Party movement was started after sports car builder David Kirkham saw blog reports of the very first protest marches against President Obama's bailouts, back in February of 2009. Kirkham figured he could do the same, quickly organized a rally at the Utah State Capitol, and helped build an organization that has held many similar events since. But what to do beyond rallies?

In deep-red Utah, electing Republicans wasn't a challenge. But, Kirkham concluded, electing small-government Republicans wasn't to be taken for granted. His group decided to target the nominating process for Bennett's seat, which in Utah involves a convention process.

via Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Tea Party movement likely to have unglamorous but effective future | Washington Examiner.

Last week, Matt Kibbe posted the voicemail from voiceover actor Lance Baxter (A.K.A D.C. Douglas). The voicemail was very calm, very steady, asking how many FreedomWorks employees were “mentally retarded”, and then goes on to ask what our spin will be when one of our members finally kills someone. And then he left his name and phone number.

Let’s state the obvious: This is sheer stupidity. If you’re even remotely recognizable and you are representing a company, you don’t alienate customers. It’s as simple as that. GEICO obviously saw the damage, and fired him.

via GEICO vs. FreedomWorks? | RedState.

They’ve been called Oreos, traitors and Uncle Toms, and are used to having to defend their values. Now black conservatives are really taking heat for their involvement in the mostly white tea party movement—and for having the audacity to oppose the policies of the nation’s first black president.

“I’ve been told I hate myself. I’ve been called an Uncle Tom. I’ve been told I’m a spook at the door,” said Timothy F. Johnson, chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group of black conservatives who support free market principles and limited government.

via Black conservative tea party backers take heat.

On major issues, 48% of voters say that the average Tea Party member is closer to their views than President Barack Obama. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 44% hold the opposite view and believe the president’s views are closer to their own.

Not surprisingly, Republicans overwhelmingly feel closer to the Tea Party and most Democrats say that their views are more like Obama’s. Among voters not affiliated with either major political party, 50% say they’re closer to the Tea Party while 38% side with the President.

via Tea Party 48% Obama 44% – Rasmussen Reports™.

After 14 months of committing 100% to health care reform, the day after the signing of the Health Care bill was to mark the Democratic Party’s new primary concern: destroy the uprising, annihilate by all means necessary, the Tea Party movement.

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the most controversial members of the Democratic caucus walking through the peaceful but animated “Tea Party” demonstrators on Capitol Hill. There is no reason for these elected officials to walk above ground through the media circus amid their ideological foes. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a highly symbolic walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the majority white crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they made it up.

via » Barack Obama’s Helter-Skelter, Insane Clown Posse, Alinsky Plans to ‘Deconstruct’ America – Big Journalism.

Their faces sometimes twisted in anger, ‘tea party’ followers have been called neo-Klansmen and knuckle-dragging hillbillies.

To be sure, angry town halls, the N-word thrown at black congressmen, and signs comparing President Obama to Adolph Hitler play into the hands of the movement’s critics. And demonizing tea party activists tends to energize the Democrats’ left-of-center base.

But political experts say that many such criticisms are near-sighted, if not outright inappropriate – and ultimately may miss the point. Indeed, polls suggest that tea party activists are not only more mainstream than many critics suggest, but that a majority of them are women (primarily mothers), not angry white men.

via Amid harsh criticisms, ‘tea party’ slips into the mainstream / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com.

They are not typical Tea Party activists: A woman who voted for President Obama and believes he’s a “phenomenal speaker.” Another who said she was a “knee-jerk, bleeding heart liberal.”

These two women are not alone.

Some Americans who say they have been sympathetic to Democratic causes in the past — some even voted for Democratic candidates — are angry with President Obama and his party. They say they are now supporting the Tea Party — a movement that champions less government, lower taxes and the defeat of Democrats even though it’s not formally aligned with the Republican Party.

via Disgruntled Democrats join the Tea Party – CNN.com.

Buses en route to a mega Tea Party event in Nevada — centered around protesting against Democratic Sen. Harry Reid — were egged by the senator’s supporters Saturday, the Tea Party Express claimed.

via Tea Party Express: buses egged by Reid supporters | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

Sarah Palin told thousands of tea party activists assembled in the dusty Nevada desert Saturday that Sen. Harry Reid will have to explain his votes when he comes back to his hometown to campaign.

The wind whipped U.S. flags behind the former Alaska governor as she stood on a makeshift stage, holding a microphone and her notes as she spoke to the cheering crowd. She told them Reid, fighting for re-election, is “gambling away our future.”

“Someone needs to tell him, this is not a crapshoot,” Palin said.

About 7,000 people streamed into tiny Searchlight, a former mining town 60 miles south of Las Vegas, bringing American flags, “Don’t Tread on Me” signs and outspoken anger toward Reid, President Barack Obama and the health care overhaul.

via My Way News – Palin to tea party rally: Don’t sit down, shut up.

A national Tea Party group is calling for voters in Nevada to reject the candidacy of Scott Ashjian, whose challenge of Democratic Sen. Harry Reid on the Tea Party ticket has been called a “fraud.”

“We at the Tea Party Express have a message for Scott Ashjian, whose been trying to pretend he’s in the Tea Party Movement: Get lost,” Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams says in the ad that’s set to be released Thursday by the group and its Our Country Deserves Better PAC.

via Tea Party group tells Harry Reid challenger running on Tea Party ticket to ‘get lost’ | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

President Obama’s winning passage of national health care is both exhilarating and sobering. Covering so many uninsured Americans is a historic achievement. But the president had to postpone trips, buy off companies and cut every conceivable side deal to just barely make it happen, without a single Republican vote. If the Democrats now lose seats in the midterm elections, we’re headed for even worse gridlock, even though we still have so much more nation-building for America to do — from education to energy to environment to innovation to tax policy. That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center.

You poor bastard…

via Op-Ed Columnist – A Tea Party Without Nuts – NYTimes.com.

The Mainstream Media’s (MSM’s) latest sport is to try to accuse the Tea Party activists of being Republican hacks. The reality is that their spin is demonstrative again, of their Pavlovian simplicity and lack of vision for their own agenda.

via » Democrat-Media Complex Accuses Tea Partiers of Being On… the Other Side – Big Journalism.

Democrats are racing the clock to pass health care reform ahead of a wave of Tea Party-driven town hall meetings planned for the spring recess — the kind of gatherings that nearly derailed the package last August.

But there’s a big difference this time around. Last summer, Democrats were encouraged to hold the town hall meetings, and they were blindsided by the backlash, which was recorded and promoted in countless YouTube clips. This time around, they have a good idea of what’s coming — and they’re lying low, in case work on health care carries over into the recess.

“There’s not been the same push as there was in August to encourage members to do town halls,” said Stephanie Lundberg, spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

via FOXNews.com – Dems Race to Pass Health Care Bill as Tea Partiers Plan Town Hall Wave.

Even Mother Jones reported in January that Dale Robertson is not and never was a tea party leader and that the mainstream media had “lost its edge” in linking Robertson to the movement.

But, that didn’t stop liberal media hacks from repeating the lie that Robertson was a leader in the Tea Party movement.

via Gateway Pundit.

Have you watched with amusement as various political commentators have tried to demonize the amorphous Tea Party movement by outing behind-the-scenes bogeymen allegedly pulling the strings of this latter day Great Awakening?

Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. Dick Armey. Newt Gingrich. Grover Norquist. Jack Abramoff. Lyndon LaRouche. The John Birch Society. The list goes on.

None of it is sticking.

via RealClearMarkets – Pin the Bogeyman On the Tea Party.

When suicide pilot Andrew Stack flew his plane Thursday into a Texas building that houses the IRS, killing himself and injuring at least two others, a number of media outlets immediately connected the words of his online suicide letter to those of the Tea Party movement — despite any evidence that Stack has ever been involved in the movement.

That’s something Levi Russell, spokesman for Tea Party Express, called “absurd.”

via Austin suicide pilot reinvigorates Tea Party claim that the media is after them | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

What do today’s tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement “is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective.” Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good.

via RealClearPolitics – Party Like It’s 1773?.

Anyone who’s been to a Tea Party rally knows this is no Astroturf movement. These are ordinary citizens, rightly furious that the federal government has sold the country a junk mortgage on its future, sticking America with an unsustainable debt.

Yet there are those who doubt the new activists’ sincerity, asking, in effect, “Where were you when George W. Bush was spending faster than Lyndon Johnson?” It’s a fair question.

via Gene Healy: Tea Partiers should get serious | Washington Examiner.

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren’t the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

via Glenn Harlan Reynolds: What I Saw at the Tea Party Convention – WSJ.com.

A year ago this movement did not exist. Now it is by some accounts the most potent force in American politics. So when the “Tea Party Nation” began its first national convention in Nashville, Tennessee, on February 4th, Republicans paid particular attention.

via The tea-party convention: Scenes from a counter-revolution | The Economist.

Finally, the Tea Party movement is not some subculture of bug-eyed lunatics. Any political movement is going to have some characters ranging from colorful to occasionally unhinged, but the insulting tone of much of the coverage of the movement would have you believe that these are fringe extremists who could snap at any moment.

Well, the truth is, they have snapped already. The sound we are hearing is the proverbial camel’s back breaking after years of reckless spending, punitive taxation and usurpations of liberty that have crippled every citizen’s opportunity to enjoy the full promise of what America is supposed to be about: freedom and opportunity, with the least government necessary to maintain an ordered society.

The people drifting toward the Tea Party movement are not extreme. They are, in fact, fighting extremism – the extremism that has brought us a government that takes far too much, spends far too much and runs our lives far too much.

via RealClearPolitics – The Tea Parties Are United in Favor of Limited, Responsible Government.

America’s prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, were religious in nature. Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified, and often corrupt religious institutions, Americans responded with a bottom-up reassertion of faith, and independence.

This time, it’s different. It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It’s America’s politicians and parties. They’ve grown corrupt, venal, and out-of-touch with the values, and the people, that they’re supposed to represent. So the people, once again, are reasserting themselves.

via Glenn Reynolds: Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America’s Third Great Awakening | Washington Examiner.

The organizers of this weekend’s National Tea Party — who have been accused of trying to take a leadership role in the grassroots movement largely defined by its lack of centralized leadership — announced on Friday that they are forming a political action committee to “address the next step in the growing impact of the citizen activist movement.”

via Tea Party convention leaders announce formation of political action committee | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

The first night’s speaker said the country “put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,” referring to the president by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, and launching a tirade against the “cult of multiculturalism” that led to his election.

via Tea Party Convenes in Nashville, Speakers Assail President Obama, Republicans – ABC News.

The Tea Partiers are not a traditional third-party movement, they are instead the most visible manifestation yet of what Examiner contributor Glenn Reynolds calls “an army of Davids” made possible by the Internet and that empowers “ordinary people to beat Big Media, Big Government, and other Goliaths.”

via Mark Tapscott: Third party is the wrong party for Tea Partiers | Washington Examiner.