Crow also made some predictions for the November elections (listen up, Karl Rove!), and threatened to move to Canada if the Democrats suffered major losses. “The Tea Party is going to split the Republican vote,” she estimated. “[W]hich can only be good for the Democrats. That has to be the hope. Either that, or we all move to Canada.”
Here’s the thing Sheryl: We’re not splitting any vote. We’re not a third party. I love watching lefties scramble to categorize the movement. The Democrat Party marches in lockstep with all of the liberal factions – the idea that the Republicans are not connected to the Tea Party movement and are largely being replaced and endangered by completely escapes them. That can’t get their stories straight. Sometimes we’re nothing but a GOP shill, sometimes we’re fringey third party wingnuts.
From Megyn Kelley: “This was not at the bank’s corporate offices – it was at a man’s home.”
Mark Sawyer is completely insane, first of all, so this clip is a little rough. I apologize in advance.
First of all, he claim the Black Panthers haven’t been around since 1968? What? Did he forget this? Or this? Or this? And this was just this month! That’s right y’all. A Black Panther is on the ballot as a Democrat in Philly.
But I digress: This is the SEIU. The same SEIU that is soconnectedto the White House. They’re pissed off about the bailouts. I get it. I understand. I am too, for clearly different reasons. They’re free to protest – I’m a huge fan of protests myself. I’m grateful that we still live in a place where we CAN protest.
The line gets crossed when you take a protest from a public venue and place it on someone’s doorstep. When you invade someone’s home and trap their kid inside while 500 people rage on their front lawn, it ceases to be a protest, and becomes a mob. Continue reading →
Who remembers Dale Robertson? Well, if you don’t know his name (which I’d honestly forgotten), I’m certain you remember his notoriously ignorant, humiliating moment at a Tea Party in Texas.
The Washington Times has managed to give credibility to this delusional racist who claims to be the founder of the Tea Party. As Tommy Christopher points out, they’ve consistently quoted him as a Tea Party leader, and now they’re showing no qualms about him signing up to write on their Tea Party Report blog. I shouldn’t even have to say this out loud, but for the sake of argument I will: Dale Robertson is not the founder of the Tea Party movement. He happened to register TeaParty.org. It probably cost him $9 on GoDaddy. That does NOT a Tea Party leader make. In fact, many Tea Party players have shunned him and uninvited him from any related events. However, none of this seems to matter to Dale. From the TeaParty.org site (read the whole thing if you have time, it’s a gem):
Being frustrated by “Politics As Usual” this brave man decided to create a new voice, a voice that echoed from the pages of history. The Tea Party was the perfect choice… Why not an organization called the Tea Party? It was too obvious. Our American heritage held the key to unleashing the American Spirit.
The amount of crazy in that paragraph alone makes my head hurt. The name came from Rick Santelli’s rant in February of 2009. He no more came up with that name than I did. He is not a “brave man”, he is crazypants, and an opportunist. Washington Times: If you’re looking for an actual Tea Party columnist, I’d be happy to oblige. If you hate me, I have dozens of others who are legitimate members of the movement who would love to help out. May I offer my boss, Matt Kibbe? Any of our allies? There are HUNDREDS who have done so much more work than Dale Robertson ever could. Oh, and who aren’t going to show up holding signs that say “N***ar” while giving a quote about not being racist.
I was on the ground in DC all weekend. I got down there early on Saturday and had the opportunity to speak to the crowd of around 30,000 people, if only briefly. Saturday was beautiful. The weather, the attitude – people had come on short notice from everywhere to be in town to hold Congress accountable. We were overwhelmed by the turnout, and just stunned that that many had come together on such short notice to fight.
The magnitude of this was not lost on anyone in DC this weekend. Everyone understood the ramifications of what was happening. Everyone came ready to talk to whoever they needed to talk to, to yell and make noise and remind Congress that we are currently experiencing the consequences of our votes, and come November, they’ll experience the consequence of theirs.
Here’s a quick clip of Brendan and I speaking, which I posted earlier, but will repost, just because.
I spent most the of the day on the West Lawn. Here are some photos from the rally:
We represent millions of voters.
A woman with her fist in the air. I love this.
We the People
The crowd from the back of the West Lawn
I’m going to express some of my inherent girly-ness with the next statement, but I don’t much care. I teared up several times watching people come in, and was really just overwhelmed by the crowd. I hate that people have had to come back to Washington over and over again. I want to stop asking them to… but we didn’t have much of a choice. People just keep showing up. There was nothing we could do about it. For all the accusations we get from people of controlling the movement, we have no ability to control anything, and this weekend was proof positive that this is bottom up – because we honestly had very little idea of what to do at the top. We encircled the Capitol around 5pm, and then wound up on the east steps, chanting and rallying until the Congressmen went home, and then moved over to the Supreme Court, where we held a candlelight vigil and marched around the Capitol one more time. That was when I split off and fell asleep on the train on the way home.
Nothing was planned for Sunday, but Rep. King and Rep. Bachmann had called us back to the Capitol at 11am, so I showed up. We did church on the West Lawn through bullhorns before breaking off again and disbursing through the House offices, gallery, and West Lawn. There was no stage or PA system. There were people everywhere, and it was just chaos. I covered what I could on Twitter, but the tension was something I am not sure I can really communicate effectively. Let me just paint a picture for you:
We’re in Washington, DC, among the monuments, the Capitol, the White House, and every other historic landmark that resides here. Over the course of the weekend, there were anti-war and SEIU funded amnesty rallies in the same space. So when Sunday rolls around, and the country-shaping vote on health care reform is looming, people are riled up. The SEIU thugs start infiltrating the crowd that had gathered on the south lawn. Some GOP Congressmen had hung a Gadsden flag from the balcony of the Capitol, and everyone was going nuts. I turned to my left to ask a woman standing next to me who it was, and she responded with “Someone who’s being f***ed in the a** by insurance companies…” and began yelling at me. I walked away. It was shortly after that I needed to retreat for a bit and we went to a pub not far from the action. People were having heated conversations at the bar. In the midst of March Madness, Fox News was on to monitor the Stupak announcement. The tension was physically draining.
I was so worn out by 5pm that I couldn’t go back down to the battle field. I one point I sent out a tweet that said “I feel like I’m reporting from a war zone”, and that’s the best way I could describe it. I got shouted at by people on the street that overheard my conversations with my boss, so I was literally crossing the street to call my friends, because I couldn’t do so among any crowd at that point. It was funny on some level, because I was looking for a Gadsden flag or an American flag or something to identify a friendly face. Honestly, that part was relatively easy as the amnesty marchers were all in matching shirts with pre-printed signs.
Amnesty marchers.
I also feel like I should speak to the accusations that have been flying about racist and homophobic remarks. Any time you get that many people together, there will be fringers who go over the edge. Like the LaRouchies that we can’t seem to shake. However, I was all over the place all weekend and heard nothing of the sort. All of the “evidence” I have seen has proved that it never happened. And when it comes down to it, some idiot saying something discriminatory doesn’t change what’s right, and freedom is what’s right. That’s what we’re fighting for, and even when we lose, I’m heartened to know that there are so many who still are willing to show up to battle.
This fight is not over. We are far from done. I have taken a few days to catch my breath, and I’m back on the road on Friday. Y’all ready to do this with me?
So at first, when I heard what Steele said this week I just rolled my eyes and moved on. It didn’t bother me. But I thought about it yesterday. And then I went to the RNC and heard him speak at their “tea party” yesterday and blame everything on the Democrats over and over. And I realized how clueless he really is.
At the risk of sounding too much like our President, let me be clear. I don’t want to see the party split. But I also think it’s silly to have half the party running like Barack Obama and the other half running like Ronald Reagan. We can’t win in that situation either. I kind of view the Tea Party as an outside force that keeps Republicans accountable. The party cannot refine itself from within. It takes pressure from the outside – from those who can speak freely about officials and hold their feet to the fire.
This is nothing but a clear illustration of how incredibly out of touch Steele is with this movement. He’s figured out that it’s significant and it’s not going anywhere. I will give him credit for that much. He isn’t trying to ignore us anymore, but there is no doubt that they’re all nervous. Him telling the movement to “come home” to the GOP is the equivalent of a parent looking at someone else’s kid and telling them to stop throwing a tantrum.
People are not angry because of the Democrats. Democrats are just doing what Lefties do. It’s their thing. What we’re angry about is the fact that the GOP, who SHOULD be representing a smaller government and more freedom, forgot what they were supposed to be doing. They’re the ones that left us, not the other way around. There is no excuse for starting Bailoutpalooza or “suspending free market principles to save the market” or whatever crap line Bush fed us last year. THAT’s what we’re angry about. It has every bit as much to do with the Republicans as with the Democrats. In fact, I’d wager that the crowds at these rallies are even more hostile to liberal Republicans than they are toward Democrats. The outcry is non-partisan.
I have to re-iterate that this is not about being anti-GOP. It needs to be noted that every Republican who has been a freedom fighter and had the cajones to show up at the rallies and face the people has been embraced. Michele Bachmann, Joe Wilson, Jim DeMint, Marsha Blackburn, Mike Pence, and other have shown up time and again to take on the establishment and do the right thing. They are what the GOP needs to be. As long as the RNC is giving $900k to help people like Dede Scozzafava, it is hard take them seriously. The NY-23 race was the ultimate punk for the RNC. She took their money, was an embarrassment, and then threw her support behind the opponent. They have no credibility. The “Republican” name is a liability.
Michael Steele fails to realize that in order for us to “come home” the Tea Party would have had to be a Republican movement to begin with, which is just false. He’s saying things that play directly into the media’s caricature of what it is. Really, it is the GOP that needs to come home. The people that have become the Tea Party never went anywhere.
