Day: July 15, 2010

Case Closed: Tea Party Ex-Chair Issues Racist Rant in ‘Colored People’ Letter to Abraham Lincoln

Jon Ponder

photo-black-faceOn Wednesday, Mark Williams, the outgoing chairman of Tea Party Express — the astroturf group operated by the Republican Party PR firm Russo Marsh & Rogers that organized the three, secretly corporate-funded nationwide tea party bus tours last year — made headlines by calling the NAACP “professional race baiters” and a “vile racist group.” On Thursday, he upped the ante by posting a satiric letter (available, at least for now, on his blog at marktalk.com) from the “Colored People” of today to Pres. Abraham Lincoln:

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

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Beck: Jesus Conquered Death But If He Hadn’t, He Would ‘Make the Jews Pay’ for Killing Him

Jon Ponder

There’s so much packed into Glenn Beck’s latest peroration on religion that it’s hard to know where to begin:

“This is kind of complex, because Jesus did identify with the victims. But Jesus was not a victim. He was a conqueror…Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life….If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would’ve come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did. That’s an abomination.”

Of course, right up front — if you believe the story of Jesus, the Gospels are unequivocal about who had Jesus put to death: the Italians. Here’s Elizabeth Dias in Time Magazine:

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Bush Policies’ Oil Disaster: Gusher Stopped Today for First Time Since Explosion in April

Jon Ponder

Los Angeles Times:

For the first time in months, no oil is flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s troubled well.

BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said Thursday afternoon that the last of a series of valves on a cap atop the well was fully closed around 12:25 p.m. PDT, shutting off the flow.

The total seal is a temporary measure while BP tests the integrity of the well to determine if the pipes below the sea floor are in good enough shape to allow the seal to stay in place.

The test could also show that the well is too compromised to withstand the seal. In that case, the valves would be opened, releasing oil into the ocean again. BP would use a series of pipes and ships to suck up some — and perhaps all — of the leaking oil, estimated to be 60,000 barrels per day.

Our Bush Policies Oil Disaster widget (in the right-hand column) stopped at 92.2 million gallons.

Irony on Parade: Tea Party Hotheads Turn on One of the Men Who Invented Them

Trish

RickScott
Rick Scott, the light of crazy ablaze in his eyes
Be careful what you provoke, Tea Party exploiters. Florida governor hopeful Rick Scott recently discovered it’s one thing to gin up the teabagging crowds, and something else to be on the receiving end of all that anger.

Scott made millions as CEO of Columbia/HCA. The hospital chain founded by the Frist family (as in former Senate majority leader Bill Frist) swallowed competitors in the ’90s by dictating terms to suppliers. They’d merge with most of the hospitals in a given area, then tell vendors how much they wanted to pay for products. If a vendor balked, they simply switched to a lower bidder, leaving the first one with nobody to sell to. One of the repercussions of this strategy was the trend toward labor outsourcing by American companies, with medical product suppliers moving facilities to Mexico in order to meet pricing demands.

A “shouting, finger-pointing” crowd demands an explanation

Columbia was found guilty in 2000 of bilking Medicare and Medicaid in a massive, concerted, company-wide fraud effort under Scott. The chain was fined $1.7 billion, the largest penalty ever, and Scott was forced to resign or face criminal charges. He soon bounced back, founding the Solantic chain of urgent care clinics, which mainly serves the uninsured. Scott and several confederates have been the big bucks behind the so-called “astroturf” (meaning it looks like grassroots but it isn’t) opposition to health care reform.

Which brings us to the ironic position in which he recently found himself at a Tea Party gathering on the campaign trail.

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

Because he was smart enough to die in 2010, there is zero tax liability on the estate tax. If he had died in 2009, or 2011, there would have been a $500 million tax liability to his estate in 2009, and in 2011 — under the proposal that we have — there would have been a $600 million liability.

— Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), quoted by The Hill, providing some badly needed perspective on the passing of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.

Speaking without a Teleprompter for Once, Palin Demands That Obama ‘Refudiate’ NAACP Charge That Tea Baggers Are Racists

Jon Ponder
At minute 2:37, Palin: (The Obamas) have power in their words. They could refudiate what it is that this group is saying.

See what happens when she speaks without a teleprompter? (See here, here and here for more on Palin’s teleprompter addiction.)

As we’ve often said: George Bush in a skirt.

Fox cleaned up the transcript, of course:

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FL Sen: Rubio’s Polling Lags – What Happened to Tea Baggers’ Great White Hope?

Jon Ponder

Orlando Sentinel:

In the U.S. Senate race, the [new Reuters/Ipsos] poll shows Gov. Charlie Crist – the ex-Republican now running as an independent — with a 35-to-28 percent lead over Republican former House Speaker Marco Rubio, with Democrat Kendrick Meek trailing with 17 percent. Should billionaire challenger Jeff Greene take out Meek in the Democratic primary, those percentages would be basically unchanged.

Other polls also have showed Crist and Rubio locked in a tight race, with the Democrat well behind each of them. The Reuters/Ipsos poll of 600 registered voters was taken July 9-11.

But Crist was supposed to have been flattened now by the enormous anger and energy on the right and Rubio’s ascendancy as the tea baggers’ great white hope. What happened?

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NV Sen: Angle Says She Avoids Legit Media Because They Won’t Let Her Shill for Donations

Jon Ponder

Via Daily Dish, David Brody, a reporter for Pat Robertson’s Christianist television network, asked Nevada tea-bagger senate candidate Sharron Angle why she only did interviews on Fox and other right-wing propaganda outlets:

DAVID BRODY: I just want to understand. You’re saying that you’re not willing to play this mainstream media “gotcha” game basically? Is that what you’re saying?

SHARRON ANGLE: No. There’s no earnings for me there. We’re looking at how can we best benefit from the media. We get so many requests. I do sometimes 7 interviews a day so it’s not like we’re running from the media. It’s just that we’re earning with that media.

DB: Not to harp on the point but when you’re on Fox News or talking to more conservative outlets but maybe not going on “Meet the Press” or a “This Week”, those type of news shows, then the perception and the narrative starts to be like you are avoiding those mainstream media outlets.

SA: Well, in that audience will they let me say, “I need $25 dollars from a million people, go to Sharron Angle.com, send money?” Will they let me say that?

To make a donation to Angle’s opponent, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., visit his website at harryreid.com.

Tea Party Leader Says NAACP Has Made More Money off Blacks Than ‘Any Slave Trader Ever’

Jon Ponder

photo-naacp-colored-water-fountain

Tea Party Express is the astroturf group operated by the Republican Party PR group, Russo Marsh & Rogers, that coordinated corporate-funded bus tour rallies around the country last year. Mark Williams, who resigned as the group’s chairman last month but is still deeply involved in the astroturfing activities, attacked the NAACP in an NPR interview yesterday, after the venerable civil rights group passed a resolution at its annual meeting condemning tea party leaders for coddling racists:

“You’re dealing with people who are professional race-baiters, who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history,” Williams said.

Sarah Palin, the tea party’s de facto supreme leader, went on Fox and demanded that Pres. Obama, whom she described as “half-white” and “half black,” refudiate the NAACP resolution. She also issued a rebuke of the resolution on her Facebook page:

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