They Won’t Ever Be Satisfied

“Dozens” of Tea Party crazies “rallied” at the Tennessee State Capitol, not to protest Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid as was the stated purpose of the event, but really just to protest Obama. Because the Teanuts will never, ever be happy as long as the Kenyan Usurper Nobummer Blackety Black Man is in “their” house:

DesJarlais spoke at the rally, which was sparsely attended. And in the crowd of around 100, most of the discontent was less with expanding Medicaid, and more with President Obama. Linda Tomasik traveled from Memphis.

“The only reason I’m here is not to protest Obamacare. I’ll put it that way. It’s just because I don’t think he should be president.”

Is this not hilarious? The last gasps of the disgraced Tea Party show up to hear disgraced Rep. Scott DesJarlaid talk about being “principled” in a protest of a president who just got overwhelmingly re-elected.

DesJarlais, of course, is the pro-life serial philanderer who begged his mistress to get an abortion. Yes, do tell me about how Tennessee needs to lead the nation in being “principled.” I’m all ears.

Also: There’s nothing like a pro-life doctor protesting providing healthcare to the poor. That, my friends, is the definition of fail.

I’ve said from day one that the Tea Party stands for nothing more than an inchoate rage at their cultural irrelevance, with a dash of fear of change. Doesn’t seem like the message has “evolved” in any way.

Payback, Republican Style?

Oh my God, how did I not know that the WWE had created a villainous Tea Party wrestling character, with an evil manager sidekick? To wit:

Appearing on Monday Night Raw last week, Swagger and Colter were booed by the crowd as they overzealously talked about the Constitution, the scourge of illegal immigration, and “true patriotism.” Other promotional videos of the two show them talking about freeloading immigrants and welfare recipients in front of the Gadsden flag, which has become symbolic of the Tea Party movement.

Swagger is set to battle for the “World Heavyweight Championship” (or whatever it’s called) against Mexican wrestler Alberto Del Rio — clearly a play on the stereotypical tension between anti-immigration types and Mexicans.

Further hyping the “Tea Party” gimmick, during one match ringside commentators Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler continually referred to Colter as Swagger’s “nutjob” manager, and said that the pair had received “fan mail” from controversial conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones.

Conservative blog Twitchy hit back at the WWE with a clever swipe at pro-”wrestling” itself: “WWE’s racist Tea Party villain as realistic as pro wrestling.”

Oooh yes, clever indeed. Nobody ever made that joke before!

Trying to think of why WWE would make fun of the Tea Party. I wonder if it has anything to do with Linda McMahon’s failed run for Connecticut Senate? McMahon, whose husband owns and operates WWE, lost handily to Democrat Chris Murphy. But I had thought McMahon was the Tea Party candidate?

Odd, but there’s no fuck you like a Republican fuck you.

The Great Tea Party Con

UN-believable. Anyone who gave so much as $1 to the Tea Party got fleeced in a well-orchestrated conservative con job:

“The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air,” Armey, the former House majority leader, told Media Matters Friday. “I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure.”

Armey, who left the organization this past fall after a dispute over its internal operations, said a similar arrangement was also in place with Rush Limbaugh, but did not know the exact financial details.

Wow. So the Tea Party was basically a massive shake-down by the conservative media. Beck and Limbaugh get all the white folks in a lather about some invented Obama conspiracy they cooked up, then they tell everyone to donate to FreedomWorks to fight said manufactured horrible thing, and all the money goes straight back to Beck and Limabugh.

You know what gets me? That Dick Armey had nooo problem with this little scam as long as he was in charge of FreedomWorks. But he obviously knew the whole set-up was a grift, because he wouldn’t be spilling the beans about it now.

These people have no shame. Every damn one of them should be thrown in jail for fraud. The syndicators and networks who aired their programming were complicit in the fraud, and they need to be held accountable too. And finally, the MSM which decided the Tea Party was some shiny-sparkly political toy deserve to go out of business for their negligence.

Taunting The Tea Party

Ha ha ha:

The DCCC sent the above cards to freshman Republican House members today, as well as media releases to their districts which …

… identify each member as “the newest Tea Party House Republican who will put millionaires ahead of the middle class and dysfunction ahead of progress,” according to DCCC communications director Jesse Ferguson.

Love the expiration date! Seriously, every craptacular thing which happened in President Obama’s first term is because a bunch of fucking Democrats didn’t get off their asses and vote in 2010. Let’s not make that mistake in 2014, ‘mm’kay?

BTW, the NRCC taunted incoming Dems in a similar way today, so put away the Faux Umbrage Concern Kits, Teanuts.

Grand Old Graft

This story of Dick Armey trying to take over FreedomWorks with a gun-wielding enforcer in tow cracked me up. There’s a lot that’s outrageous here but the part that got me was the way they got rid of him: they wrote him an $8 million check. If only all of our gun-wielding nutjobs were appeased so easily.

Also: I’m pretty sure when a guy walks into an office with an armed accomplice and walks out with money the word for that is robbery. But I’m just an old-fashioned housewife from Tennessee. What do I know.

This is how your modern Republican Party works, people. It’s all about the Benjamins. It’s funny because just last night I read “Blues Cruise,” New York Magazine’s take on the NRO’s post-election Caribbean cruise, followed by Bruce Bartlett’s post-election bridge-burner, “Revenge Of The Reality-Based Community.” Both pieces present different sides of the same coin, which is the GOPs alternate reality problem. And what I realized after reading them both is that conservatism, and the Republican Party in particular, is no longer a political party or ideology. No, it has disintegrated into an elegant, elaborate money-making scheme. What Dick Armey did with his gun-toting friend is the apotheosis of modern, institutionalized conservatism. It’s simply perfect. Hollywood couldn’t write a better epilogue for the GOP’s election loss.

Here’s the thing: A lot of us have looked with great puzzlement at the Republican Party’s strict allegiance to an alternate conservative reality, their disinterest in facts, and their willful denialism (or, to use the wonky term, “epistemic closure”). It makes no sense to anyone looking at the GOP as a political operation. This self-sequestration into a conservative bubble is completely at odds with what a political movement should do. Don’t they want to win elections? Don’t they want broad appeal? Isn’t the point to put your policy stamp on the governing mechanism? Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about?

But no, we’ve had it all wrong. They don’t want to govern. That’s the last thing they want. They want money. End, full stop. They want to keep the national amygdala tweaked, keep telling the rich precisely what they want to hear, and keep the donations flooding in. Spend that money on renting your own mailing list to ask for more donations. Or another con, it doesn’t matter. As long as the money keeps coming. It’s really that simple. It’s all a huge grift.

This isn’t a new revelation by any means — Rick Perlstein pretty much laid it out in The Long Con: Mail Order Conservatism — but I always assumed the con referred to a few leeches sucking off the system. There will always be some Glenn Beck types playing the rubes in Missouri and Tennessee, selling their snake oil and taking advantage of the gullible in flyover states. But I didn’t realize the whole fruit was rotten. I didn’t realize, until now, that the con is the point of the Republican Party. The Republican Party and all of its ancillary operations are simply mechanisms for making money. Again: end, full stop.

This explains so much. It explains all of the petty graft at the heart of the GOP. It explains why we have dysfunction in Washington. One party doesn’t want to win the policy debate, they don’t really care about their legislation, they just want a talking point for the next fundraising letter.

And it explains the incredible infrastructure they’ve built up — the think tanks, the polling firms, the media outlets, and on and on. It’s all carefully (and expensively) crafted to reinforce a conservative alternate reality, firmly planted sometime in 1988 when Reagan was still president, whites were still a majority, the Soviets were our clear-cut enemy, and conservative ideas still had some credibility.

That reality is 25 years in the past but shh… don’t tell conservatives that. They might stop the money flow.

Grifters Gotta Grift

This whole FreedomWorks/Tea Party scam reeks worse than a 40,000-pound whale carcas rotting on a Malibu beach. How long before a little forensic accounting lands some FreedomWorks mucky muck in jail? And will one of his cellmates be from Tennessee?

A lawyer in Tennessee who is mysteriously linked to millions of dollars in campaign contributions steered to congressional candidates doubled his investments in the weeks before Election Day and quietly funneled $6.8 million more to a prominent Tea Party group, according to new financial statements filed with the government.

William Rose of Knoxville previously said his business was a “family secret” and he was not obligated to disclose the origin of what now amounts to more than $12 million that he routed through two companies he recently created. Rose did not immediately return phone calls from the Associated Press on Friday.

The money went to the Tea Party’s most prominent Super PAC, FreedomWorks for America, which spent it on high-profile congressional races. The $12 million accounted for most of the $20 million the group raised this year.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. The all-powerful Tea Party group FreedomWorks got most of their money from one secretive East Tennessee guy this year? And do we think he raised that money by selling brownies and magazine subscriptions door to door? Hell, no. This is a handful of bazillionaire corporate hedge fund and banking guys calling their Tennessee lawyer buddy up to create some shell corporations so they can launder the funds through a now legal entity and buy a house or senate seat or two (or three, or four…). Wake up and smell the plutocracy, people.

Of course, there is no indication that anything illegal happened (yet). But take it from me, when you’re dealing with sums of money this large, and it’s the balance of power in Washington at stake, and you’ve got a man who says “his family business is a secret,” and then the FreedomWorks chairman abruptly resigns while accusing the group’s president Matt Kibbe of “misappropriating FreedomWorks resources for his own personal benefit” … well, all I can say is, grab the popcorn. Something sure is rotten somewhere in this mess. It might take an army of pointy-headed pencil pushers to find it but it defies belief that there isn’t a scam under this manure pile.

You know what the funniest part about all of this is? That money was wasted. It went toward defeating House candidates like Tammy Duckworth and Senate candidates like Joe Donnelly. And it was all for nought. Well, except for Dick Armey, who leaves FreedomWorks with an $8 million golden parachute.

I’m trying to think of any aspect of the Tea Party that hasn’t been sullied with the whiff of grift. Did you hear about the Dick Morris-Newsmax grift? That’s hilarious. And then there was the Tea Party TV Network grift, and let’s not forget the Sarah Palin Summer Holiday Bus Tour de Grift.

But the FreedomWorks grift is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. Because this wasn’t fleecing the gullible rubes over at WingNut Daily. This was fleecing Daddy Warbucks, stealing from the people who have been in charge. These are not people who spend $12 million and have nothing to show for it on the other end but prying phone calls from Associated Press reporters. And you just knew that was gonna happen, didn’t you?

Things at the country club are going to be mighty awkward. I wonder who the first plutocrat to get thrown under the bus will be?

As I said, grab the popcorn and take your seats. This show is just getting started.

I Thought They Hated The Feds?

The above photo is from a Tea Party rally going on right now at Tennessee’s Legislative Plaza. It was posted to Twitter by Tennessean state house reporter Chas Sisk. (Yeah it’s a crappy photo but it’s all we’ve got, folks.)

Tennessee is one of the few states which still has not made a decision about setting up a state health insurance exchange as part of Obamacare. The Tea Party is rallying against the state exchange, of course.

Which begs the question: they do know that if the state doesn’t set up its own exchange, the Feds will do it for them, right? Right?!? Aren’t these the “states rights” people? They really want the Feds to do this instead of letting Tennessee do it? Are they serious?

Not the first time the Tea Party hasn’t made a lick of sense.

Oh, and also from Chas Sisk’s reporting on the rally comes this gem:

Steve Gill is our local conservative radio blowhard. Hilarious. Apparently Republican votes count twice as much as Democratic ones! Must have something to do with that “real America” stuff I mentioned in my last post.

Tea Party For Obama

Yes this is a thing. It may not be a real thing, but it exists.

It’s pretty hilarious. I have no idea who is behind it, but they claim to be for real over at Facebook. But c’mon, is this a photo a legit group puts on its homepage?

Anyway, it’s kind of funny. I’m guessing some DNC operation is behind this but who the hell knows. This stuff happens every election; for years a utility pole near my house sported a hand-made “Democrats 4 Ron Paul” sign. It was placed so high, they had to bring a cherry picker out to remove it, which is probably why it stayed there for about five years.

It’s The Sarah Palin Smoker-Sculpture

Apparently this sculpture/barbecue smoker debuted in Memphis last year, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. Why a sculpture/barbecue smoker? I’m going to guess it had something to do with the Memphis In May barbecue festival, but my Memphis friends will have to confirm that.

When it’s in barbecue mode, according to the article, Palin’s head appears to be “steaming with anger”:

J. Taylor Wallace’s work is currently on display outside Chicago’s Bridgeport Art Center. Not surprisingly, the irony has been completely lost on the perpetually aggrieved Tea Party cult. No, they are not amused, and they have directed their inchoate, homophobic rage at the artist.

From the article:

“I’ve gotten some really lovely emails, like, ‘You suck, and you’ll be the next one to burn,’” says Wallace. Here are a few choice selections from the artist’s inbox:

It is a matter of time till you are the pig, was it fun for you pig.

Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame by insulting someone. Looks more like a morph of H Clinton and R Maddow, anyway.

I noticed your work of art in the Chicago Tribune this morning. I am sure you are elated with the exposure you have received. Unfortunately, you obviously needed to accomplish this by using Sarah Palin (an easy target) as your inspiration. I hope the feminist groups in the United States take note of your efforts to humiliate a woman of intelligence, courage and leadership. The role model that these groups have promoted over the years to have the opportunity to become President or Vice President of our nation has been ridiculed by your “work of art”. I work in the art field, totally enjoy creativity, am not a feminist, and am totally not impressed by your work. I feel sorry for the people of Bridgeport and visitors that will be exposed to your art.

“Amid the hate speech, I have also been called ‘gay’ in what is I presume an attempt to insult me by a particular demographic of individuals,” Wallace says. This vehement opposition to the flavor-imparting Palin dome upset him, at first. “The point is to have a conversation…. For people to get so angry over a piece of artwork is surprising to me.”

Really? You’re surprised by this? I’m not. The lunatic fringe don’t want to have a conversation. That’s the absolute last thing they want to do. Indeed, they want to shut down the conversation. That’s the whole point, after all. That’s why their leaders talk over everyone else on shows like Meet The Press, that’s why they staged the summer Town Brawls, shouting down even the members of Congress hosting these events. That is why they are always being whipped into a frenzy, and that is why they are perpetually “steaming in anger.” The absolute last thing these people want is a conversation, because when we have a conversation reason wins. And they are the opposite of reason.

I’ve always said that art, music, comedy and literature are our best weapons against this lunatic fringe. You can’t shout down art.

Tea Party Scheme A Scam, Say Investors

Today’s schadenfreude:

Middle TN investors file suit, claim they were tricked in Tea Party TV scheme

A group of Middle Tennessee conservatives is suing a California businessman for $19 million, claiming he tricked them into investing in a sham business idea for a television network devoted to the tea party movement.

Among those suing is Bill Hemrick, the Brentwood millionaire who is the Tennessee financial director for Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Hemrick has been active in tea party circles in Williamson County, helping to organize the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville in 2010 that was headlined by Sarah Palin. He worked briefly raising money for presidential candidate Herman Cain.

Aww, that’s too bad. No one could have anticipated this, really! A network devoted to the Tea Party? Who didn’t see that spectacular fail coming?

One of the things that amazes me about modern conservatives, and the Tea Party in particular, is their overarching sense of self-importance. I mean really, nobody could have anticipated that a TV network devoted to the Tea Party — in HD, no less, none of this crappy regular resolution will do — would go down in flames.

In a June 2010 presentation to investors at the Old Natchez Country Club in Franklin, Loiacono projected the business would make $19 million within three years, according to the lawsuit.

Really? How? The fact that one of those claiming he was defrauded is Michele Bachmann’s finance director is just too perfect. Look, folks: no one needs to see the creepy-crawlies who have been hiding under the conservative rock for the past 30 years in all their HD glory, misspelled signs and all.

Who Wants To See This In HD?