Tag: Tea Party Express

Tea Party Announces It Will Focus on Helping Republicans Win Senate

Jon Ponder

photo-teabag-liberal-demsAs you read through the Reuters story excerpted here, keep in mind that the two national tea party spokespeople quoted here are actually employees of Republican Party shadow groups:

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) – With their favored candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination lagging or out of the race, many U.S. Tea Party activists are shifting focus to the struggle for control of the U.S. Senate.

The fizz has gone out of the presidential contest for some supporters of the fiscally conservative movement now that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is not running and Texas Governor Rick Perry and congresswoman Michele Bachmann are slipping in polls.

“No one is going to get perfect in a general election candidate. That is why we think the Senate is a better place to focus,” said Matt Kibbe, president and chief executive of the libertarian FreedomWorks, a Tea Party group.

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Did Michele Bachmann Deliberately Sugarcoat the History of Slavery in America?

Jon Ponder

Around the time that “Good News for Modern Man,” the modern-English version of the New Testament, was published in the mid-1970s, I was spending a summer out of college in the Southern, suburban small town where I’d gone to high school.

No one I knew personally objected to (or cared about) the new translation, but among a vocal minority out in the hustings who believed that the Bible was the dictated word of God, there was outrage. One of their leaders, a country preacher called Rev. Johnny, found the “Good News” to be so blasphemous that he scheduled an old-fashioned book burning in front of the courthouse.

Being young, irreligious and bored, my friends and I tuned in to the reverend’s pre-conflagration sermon on a fuzzy AM radio station, during which he made this unforgettable statement:

REV. JOHNNY: The King James version of the Bible is the only true version of the Bible because it’s the version of the Bible that Jesus carried with him on the Crusades. (Emphasis his.)

For the history challenged, what Rev. Johnny asserted here was that Jesus, who is said to have died about 33 A.D., led the Crusades against the Muslim infidels in the Holy Land, circa 1000 to 1300 A.D., and that he had in hand an edition of the King James Version of the Bible — an English translation from the original Greek commissioned in 1604 by England’s James I.

I was reminded of Rev. Johnny’s rewrite of the first 1,600 years of the Christian era when I heard GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, who is running for president, rewrite the history of slavery in speech to potential Iowa caucus-goers over the weekend:

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Verbatim

Pensito Editors

What happened in my particular race, you had the Tea Party Express, this California-based group, come in at the last minute in a campaign, run a mudslinging, smear — just a terrible, terrible campaign, with lies and fabrications and mischaracterization.They came in, they dumped $600,000 into a small market here in Alaska, and they absolutely clearly influenced the outcome of that election … I don’t think that it’s particularly helpful [for Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)] to undercut fellow Republicans, but as I say, it’s his prerogative … I think that he has made people uncomfortable. I think that he has kind of rattled the cages. Whether it advances to a full-on civil war, I don’t know.

– Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on CNN’s “State of the Union,” on Sunday.

NV Sen: Tea Bagger Endorsed by Joe the Plumber Leads ‘Chicken Lady’ in GOP Race to Challenge Harry Reid

Jon Ponder

Poll Also Shows That Sen. Reid Leads All Republican Candidates for the First Time

Earlier this year, Republicans announced they were targeting three “trophy” Senate seats — the seats formerly held by Pres. Obama in Illinois and Vice Pres. Biden in Delaware, as well as the Nevada seat currently held by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Tea Party Express is operated by the Republican Party astroturf organizing firm Russo Marsh + Rogers

The Delaware seat is likely to flip to Rep. Mike Castle, a liberal Republican, but Rep. Mark Kirk, the GOP candidate in Illinois, is having trouble, most of which stems from his service as a commander in the Naval Reserves. Not only has he been caught lying about his military record, his recent vote in favor of the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy prompted a Washington blog editor to out him.

Now it appears Republicans may have gloated too soon about picking up Nevada. A new poll finds that now Reid leads all Republican opponents for the first time, and one-time frontrunner Sue Lowden has taken a major hit in the wake of nationwide ridicule of her proposal that the United States health-care crisis could be resolved by bartering medical services for live chickens:

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