Pelosi says GOP has hijacked 'tea party' movement

[SpringerRider]

The Complete Story

This lady could have played Edith in "All in the Family!"

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is questioning whether the conservative "tea party" coalition truly represents a grass-roots movement.

In a broadcast interview, Pelosi calls tea party voters the "astroturf" movement. She says many of those voters have good intentions but that the Republican Party has hijacked the movement for its gain.

The San Francisco Democrat says the tea party coalition shares some common ground with Democrats, such as their dislike of special interests in Washington. She cited public disdain for the recent Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance that allows companies and unions to spend freely on ads that promote or target particular candidates by name.

I guess we are no longer owned by the insurance companies.

[Whrlwnd13]

Typical Pelosi, she can't even come up with a new slam against us, she called us astroturf almost a year ago.

I'm just curious why on the attached link they repeat the story twice?

[Owl]

If by "hijacked" she means that they realize they better get on board with the Constitutional Restoration movement, then they can "hijack" it all they want.

In 1-2 more years, we may have our conservative Republican party back. Either that or both parties will be out in the cold. I see no stopping the new conservative movement.....and as things get worse( which they will), the movement will only grow and become more powerful.


Nancy just sees the writing on the wall for her liberal....well, you know.

[GrumpyOldGoat]

Well, actually the ugly little gremlin is partly correct.

Just days after the first widespread tea party demonstrators hit the streets a year ago Thursday, Joe Wierzbicki, a Republican political consultant with the Sacramento firm Russo Marsh + Rogers, made a proposal to his colleagues that he said could “give a boost to our PAC and position us as a growing force/leading force as the 2010 elections come into focus.”

The proposal, obtained by POLITICO, was for a nationwide tea party bus tour, to be called the Tea Party Express, which over the past seven months has become among the most identifiable brands of the tea party movement.
Buses emblazoned with the Tea Party Express logo have brought speakers and entertainers to rallies in dozens of small towns and big cities, including one in Boston on Wednesday that will feature former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Aided by campaign-style advance work and event planning, slick ads cut by Russo Marsh, impressive crowds and a savvy media operation, the political action committee run by Wierzbicki, Russo Marsh founder Sal Russo and a handful of other Republican operatives has also emerged as among the prolific fundraising vehicles under the tea party banner.

Known as Our Country Deserves Better when it was founded during the 2008 election as a vehicle to oppose Barack Obama’s campaign for president, the PAC saw its fundraising more than quadruple after it took the Tea Party Express public in July, raising nearly $2.7 million in roughly the following six months, compared with less than $600,000 in the preceding six months, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Its fundraising success has made the PAC — which formally filed with the FEC in October to change its name to “Our Country Deserves Better PAC–TeaPartyExpress.org” — a power player in the tea party and beyond, airing hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads supporting Republican campaigns such as Scott Brown’s successful special election for Senate in Massachusetts and blasting Democratic ones, such as Senate Majority Leader Reid’s reelection bid in Nevada.

And that fundraising success has also meant a brisk business for Russo March, which essentially runs the PAC.

In that capacity, Russo Marsh and a sister firm called King Media Group have received $1.9 million of the $4.1 million in payments made by the committee — a financial relationship that is not uncommon between political action committees run by consultants and their consulting firms.

But the Tea Party Express’s high profile has angered tea party leaders who are suspicious of its big payments to Russo Marsh, view the bus tours as distractions from meaningful grass-roots organizing headed into the 2010 midterm elections and say the Republican ties of both the firm and PAC are wrong for a movement that has prided itself on independence from the political establishment and has fiercely rejected what it sees as GOP efforts to co-opt it

“We’ve worked hard to distance ourselves from the Tea Party Express because of their close affiliation with the Republican Party, the Republican establishment and their PAC,” said Debbie Dooley, a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella group of local activists.

The Patriots have supported a strict nonpartisan posture but also have struggled to raise money, and Dooley contends that’s partly because of Tea Party Express.

“When people donate to Tea Party Express, they think that they are donating to a tea party, because they don’t read the fine print at the bottom of their e-mails that says it is a PAC,” she said. “And that hurts the local grass-roots tea party organizers, since a lot of that is actually taking some money away from them.”

Adds Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, a nonprofit group that trains local tea party organizers: “I’m concerned that they’re using (Tea Party Express) as a marketing gimmick to line the pockets of consultants instead of actually helping the tea party movement. People are already pretty fired up, so enough protesting and rallying — they need to be empowered to go back and organize their communities.”

In a draft of his proposal last April, Wierzbicki seemed to anticipate some of the criticism, broaching the idea of recruiting Eric Odom and Michael Patrick Leahy, among the organizers of the April 15, 2009, rallies, or FreedomWorks, the Washington-based nonprofit that has helped organize local tea party groups and events across the country.

“We can probably pull off a phenomenally successful tour without these big-ego establishment types,” Wierzbicki wrote in his proposal, cautioning his colleagues that in any effort to woo them “We have to be very, very careful about discussing amongst ourselves anyone we include ‘outside of the family’ because quite frankly, we are not only not part of the political establishment or conservative establishment, but we are also sadly not currently a part of the ‘tea party’ establishment.”

Wierzbicki posited that his PAC’s lack of establishment tea party backing could be offset by winning over “local tea party leaders and grass-roots conservatives” and also by generating buzz including “mentions and possibly even promotion from conservative/pro-tea party bloggers, talk radio hosts, Fox News  commentators, etc…”

And the PAC’s focus had to change to reflect the tea party movement. Wierzbicki told POLITICO that Our Country Deserves Better did this primarily by eschewing some of the national security and social issues on which it focused during the campaign in favor of a narrower concentration on the fiscal issues that unite much of the tea party movement. But he defends the PAC as having “a commitment to honoring the principles of the tea party movement.”

“There is an integrity to the work we do with Tea Party Express,” said Wierzbicki, asserting the Express adheres to the five principles emblazoned on the side of its bus, which he summarized as “end the bailouts, lower taxes, stop government-run health care, end the out-of-control deficits and reduce the size and intrusiveness of the federal government.”

Before its tea party days, however, the PAC aired ads praising Palin, both during and after her unsuccessful GOP vice presidential campaign, “for serving the people of America with a servant’s heart,” standing up to “the liberal media” and teaching her son about “the honor and valor of serving in our nation’s armed forces.”

Other Our Country ads aggressively attacked Obama, sometimes using themes Palin’s running mate, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, had declared out of bounds. One reminded voters of “hateful sermons from Obama's pastor for over 20 years,” while footage played featuring former Obama pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright preaching the words “God damn America!”

Russo — who helped elect former Govs. George Deukmejian of California and George Pataki of New York, among other Republicans, and helped engineer the recall of Democratic California Gov. Gray Davis — said he was actually planning to shutter Our Country Deserves Better after the 2008 election, “but so many people were telling us that somebody had to stay active and do something. So we decided that we would do that, but we weren’t clear on exactly what we would do.”

So, yes certain portions of the "Tea Party Movement" have been hijacked. If you look at the cash flow, you will see the reason.

In that capacity, Russo Marsh and a sister firm called King Media Group have received $1.9 million of the $4.1 million in payments made by the committee — a financial relationship that is not uncommon between political action committees run by consultants and their consulting firms.

[Owl]

After watching the SHEEPLE cast their votes a couple of nights ago....I'd say she was right.


So, how long before we face the fact that neither party is doing us any good? ( Despite what Rush said today on his show -and although I love the man dearly, he is wrong on one thing ( just like Hannity is) - there is NOT a breath's worth of difference between 99% of the Republicans in office and 100% of the democrats.

[GrumpyOldGoat]

I would put the separation about one percent closer.....

[SpringerRider]

there is NOT a breath's worth of difference between 99% of the Republicans in office and 100% of the democrats.

And I love you man but I have to disagree. It is easy to hip-shoot and call everyone a RINO but that is intellectual laziness. The republicans have their flaws but in the shadow of the democrats, it is like a penny shop-lifter standing next to Bernie Madoff.

We are a two party world, always. It is because we are a binary world world. All questions eventually distill down to "Yes" or "No". Put 50 people in a room and throw in volatile argument and eventually you will have two sides. As long as you are arguing about an idea, it will be Y and N. If you are arguing about people, the choices are as many as participants. But we are not a banana republic(yet) and are still a nation of laws and rule of law. Laws are ideas. From a moral perspective, I see the world in Black and White. Moral grayness is a failing.

I am not a Republican Lemming though I can hardly imagine myself ever voting Democrat in a national election. I think our only hope is to strongly influence the GOP and push it to the right. Don't let their silence frighten you. It is the same strategy that they used in 1994, leading up to the take-over. They laid low in hopes of not waking up the liberal base on the other side. The results was a historical landslide. We will win big in November. The question what we do with the win. I am hoping that the GOP learned from the post '94 fiasco and does not repeat the same mistakes, as bad.

Another aspect is geography. Rudy Giuliani would be considered a liberal down here. He is pro-choice and has other liberal social views. But he did not run for mayor of Buford, GA. He was the mayor of NY City and the best one in the history of that city. Before Rudy, you would not be on the streets of NY after dark. That has changed. The same goes with Brown in Mass. Change can only happen so fast in these places and you cannot get a Ray McBerry elected in NY City. So you take as much as you can and keep pushing the envelop. I am not talking about compromising principles. I am talking about strategy!

The GOP did a stellar fight against health care. Not one vote with an (r) went to the bill! How much more can you ask for!

The danger of replacing an old party with a new one is much as a ConCon. What you end up may be worse than what you left. Since you are opening up the party to numerous power struggles, anything goes. We can run around with 25 little parties, each with their own charismatic conservative under the banner of "Constitutionalists Christians", "Christian Constitutionalists", "Constitutionalists Popular Party" , etc., etc. while the liberals walk away with the elections.

I want a conservative Republican party that has the courage to reverse the damage done by the liberals and put safe guards in place to prevent it from happening again.

[GrumpyOldGoat]

Sorry about that Springer.

I'm looking at the politicians at all levels here in Colorado, and the people the 'republican' party is pushing.

One person they want to get elected at the State level had his home webpage on www.dnc.org. The second I put that up, the backpedaling began, the site disappeared.

One of the 'republican' delegates to a State congressional district campaigned for democrats.

Our county commissioners are 2 'republicans' and one sole democrat. Him you can trust, the 'republicans' are power mad and run roughshod over the populace everytime they get a chance.

Our 'sheriff' is in love with the idea of calling out his 'swat team' for no reason other than they need the practice putting boots on the throats of Citizens on the pretense of desperate criminals and seldom making any arrests or filing charges.

Our 'district attorney' runs unopposed because the democrats have no need to replace one of their own, but he does have an (r) behind his name.

So, if you have HONEST republicans in your neck of the woods, Congratulations!

I too do not want a 'third party' or any number above that except as a last resort.

When you split the vote, you elect losers that couldn't win in an equal race.

We keep hammering the 'republican' party people here, but I think they're just a bunch of very slow learners.

[SpringerRider]

You got a point there Grumpy. Colorado is not Georgia. In the 70s and 80s, it became real cool to live in Colorado and of course, the ski resorts were also an attraction. Colorado used to be a rugged territory that took a better breed to live there. Modern technology took that away. So you got a lot of the hippie types and now they are running the local government. Same thing happened to Oregon and poor little Vermont is almost a statewide San Francisco! If you drop something in Vermont, you leave it on the ground.

That is why I like Georgia. Hell, we ain't done with the war of northern aggression. When we secede, ya'll are welcome to come but leave the greenbacks behind. Ammo and gold will be the only legal tender here.