The Wall Street Journal reports today about the growing anger among Tea Partiers with Republican American Constitution Party candidate for Governor Tom Tancredo:
Six months ago, former GOP Rep. Tom Tancredo was cheered at the National Tea Party Convention. On Monday, he announced a third-party run for governor of Colorado-and many in the state’s tea-party movement responded with disdain.
Although Mr. Tancredo’s support for sealing the U.S. border against illegal immigrants, slashing government spending and taking on the Republican Party’s elite have resonated with tea-party activists, his decision to run for governor as the candidate of the tiny American Constitution Party set many of his former fans fuming.
Given Tancredo’s apparent change-of-heart with the Tea Party group, coupled with Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck’s middle finger to the Tea Party, it seems that the Tea Party in Colorado has a pretty obvious solution to all of this: Run their own candidates.
Several states have official “Tea Party” candidates on the ballot, including 23 who were nominated in Michigan over the weekend.
Forming a political party in Colorado isn’t all that difficult, and while it couldn’t be done in time for the 2010 elections, the Tea Party could easily make the threshold in time for the 2011 ballots. Here’s the process:
1. Create bylaws, rules, etc. for the party to follow
2. Find 1,000 registered voters and get them to affiliate with the Tea Party (before July 1 in a given calendar year)
The law in Colorado says that minor political parties are supposed to collect 10,000 signatures for ballot qualification, but that requirement can be superseded by getting those 1,000 voters to affiliate with the Tea Party. Given how the Tea Party folks have been jerked around by Republicans in 2010, it seems like a pretty simple solution for them to just go it on their own.
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But Tea Partiers don’t seem to want to DO anything.
They just want to hate and complain.
It’s Tancredo’s turn to be hated and complained about.
It’s interesting to note that the Tea Party Movement, which heralds itself as neither “Pro-Democrat nor Pro-Republican” is upset at the entrance of a third-party candidate to a campaign. Even though that candidate perfectly embodies Tea Party ideals, I’m sure Tea Parties are “fuming” because Tancredo’s candidacy does detriment to the Republicans in this state.
It’s just another example of Tea Party hyopcrisy; the tea party movement is nothing but a Republican movement, not some grassroots campaign for smaller government. If it was, well, I imagine that the Tea Partiers would be rallying behind the candidate of the American Constitution Party, a party that almost perfectly expresses Tea Party ideals.
I’m sure Barron X has something to say on the matter.
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I rise to the bait.
Jack knows that there are really at least two entirely distinct entities parading around under the “Tea Party” rubric.
First, and best known, are the thousands of disgruntled, disenfranchised and – face it – largely irrelevant individual people who self-identify with a vague notion of a mythic revolt in the distant past over “taxation without representation,” or some such thing.
They (we) don’t like the fact/theory that the federal government is completely in the service of mega-corporations and bankers who extort bailouts and run up public debt in order to enrich an economic elite, with no thought of the nation’s future.
Another “Tea Party”, which in no way agrees with the first one described above, is the party organization, established surreptitiously by powerful GOP operatives like Dick Armey, Pat Toomey and Grover Norquist. These structured Tea Party organizations and their leaders are funded by the very same elite that is destroying the nation for their own aggrandizement, organizations and people like Koch Industries, Phil Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. Heck, considering the actual effect of these GOP efforts, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pat Stryker and Tim Gill were also funding this effort.
This distinct “Tea Party” acts to channel the energy and anger of the first “Tea Party” so that the angry ignoramuses (including me) end up working to aid the very same elites that are doing us harm. It’s brilliant.
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….and a very funny beginning!
Heck, I’d join or support that first Tea Party. Oh, wait, the Dems in Congress trying to limit the power of corporations are now called Socialists or off of the scale to the Left.
The second Tea Party doesn’t even notice the marionnette strings on their legs and arms.
And mouths.
Though, to be honest, the first tea parties (there were several in several coastal cities) were protests largely stoked by smugglers who resented that the British had just lowered the tax on British tea, in order to make it in the colonists own interests to buy tea legally from the British East India Company rather than from smugglers hawking Dutch East India Company tea (a law which had been in place for over a century already, if I’m not mistaken, though which had not been enforced by the British in order to give the colonists a chance to develop economically, as part of a policy called “salutary neglect”).
As in the very nice smuggling bidness that the colonists had. The East India Company couldn’t sell their warehouses of tea because of the tax and resultant pricing.
However, all these historical facts are unknown to the marionettes.
Quite another to splinter from the party you’re really supporting in the background.
With 28 GOP House members signing up to the Tea Party caucus, and Dick Armey running one of the biggest Tea Party branches, and FOX News being essentially a Republican propaganda arm while supposedly promoting Tea Party activism, it simply wouldn’t do to have an actual Tea Party split.
http://bachmann.house.gov/News…
Including Doug Lamborn (charter member) and Puxatawny Mike Coffman (Mikey come lately).
And, for the record, Michelle says it’s bipartisan.
I didn’t see a Democratic Party member on the list, though it could have been someone I don’t know very well. Democrats tend to gripe when one of their own is crossing the aisle, so I thought I’d recognize a name.
Or is it just that Bachmann is inviting Democrats to join the caucus? Of course that would make it bipartisan…
Again, you would just love this wouldn’t you. As Tancredo noted, 3rd parties just split the conservative vote. And true Tea Partiers know Ken Buck is still on their side despite these cynical attacks from Democrat trackers designed to divide the Tea Party.
Those dimmycrat trackers! I don’t like to out people but I just want to say excellent job on this one as well:
Your grasp on reality is firmer than ever.
Yes. What’s your point?
“Why doesn’t the Tea Party do this in Colorado?”
…because it would ensure the destruction of the Tea Party and conservatives in general. Just pointing out the typical Democrat disingenuity.
Ahem.
not to be confused with democracy.
Democrat is singular…
I am a Democrat I belong to the Democratic party.
Really you English only folks really need to learn the intricacies of the English Language.
and yet it is a
republicanconstitutionalist in this very election cycle openly advocating selecting the next governor nominee from that party.then theirs the selection by the SCOUS of the last failure of a president in 2000.
Republicans Loathe elections and the total electorate.
“Democratic” is an adjective and “Democrat” is a noun. “Democrats” is the plural of “Democrat”.
Democratic is not plural, it is an adjective. Also, you need to study articles (in the grammatical sense). It’s SCOTUS, not SCOUS.
Their fundamental problem is that they have no central organization. What the southern Colorado Tea Party wants might be totally different than what the Northern Colorado Tea Party wants.
I’m surprised that BJ vs. Libby isn’t on the “Big Line.”
if you think that forming an actual Tea Party wouldn’t just split the conservative vote. Hello, Tancredo anyone?
It is called the mob and mob rules apply when you talk about Tea Party intelligence.
If the mob decides to storm the cell and hang whoever is inside that is their justice. If the mob decides to ignore children living in poverty so they can an extra bottle of Jack Daniels a month then there can be no argument. The mob rules and individuals who seek to lead the Tea Party had better be subordinate to the mob.
who comes from the actual Chicago mafia.
Lots of other states have an official “Tea Party” Party. Why not Colorado?
You’re going to get your degrees revoked if you keep abusing the English language by using nouns when you’re supposed to be using adjectives. (And you’ve voice support for “official English” elsewhere. Why can’t you guys master it before forcing everyone to adapt it?)
They are not democratic. They are totalitarian.
This coming from the guy who supports the teabagging brownshirts who disrupt town hall meetings. Oh, that’s a good one, beej.
You can use that unoriginal epithet all you want, beej, but it’s grammatically incorrect and you soil your degree in letters every time you do.
It is the duty of every patriotic American to resist tyranny. How the heck can you even call us brownshirts when we are not in power, you Nazi?
And you’re in violation of Godwin’s Law.
Since you need a history lesson, here it is: The Sturmarbeitelung (SA for short, or brownshirts because of their, well, brown shirts) were the thug arm of the Nazis long before they were in power. So not being in power has nothing to do with the fact that teabaggers act just like brownshirts. It’s the intimidation and chilling of free speech, stupid.
that is advocating for the fairness doctrine, net neutrality, power to shut down the internet, etc. All liberty loving patriots want to do is make their voice heard (you guys call it yelling). Free speech people.
Net Neutrality is equivalent to equal phone system access – something already guaranteed by Federal law (backed by FCC rules). Arguing against it is like arguing that FedEx trucks should get to drive 10mph faster on all roads (or even all toll roads) than anyone else.
Joe Lieberman is the ‘shut down the Internet’ advocate, and most liberals agree with him on that about as much as they thought he should win re-election. Hence his party affiliation of ‘
EgotistsConnecticut For Lieberman’.Finally, I haven’t heard much call for the Fairness Doctrine lately other than from the minds of paranoid right wingers. Oh, wait…
That one was specifically targeted at the Tea Party. Thank God a few Dems weren’t drinking the kool aid.
A good idea is at it’s heart, but it is poorly written. (BTW, someone – perhaps you – incorrectly indicated that it exempted unions; the Senate version, which is the ‘final’ version, does not exempt unions…)
If the Tea Party is “unfairly” affected, it’s only because its activities fall under the umbrella of poorly disclosed contributions to political expenditures, whereas most political expenditures to/for major party candidates are already well covered by disclosure rules (though that is likely to change thanks to the SCOTUS ruling in Citizens United).
No Democrats oppose DISCLOSE – the 57-41 vote went like this:
57 Democrats YEA
1 Lieberman NOT PRESENT (friend’s funeral)
1 Sen. Reid NAY
40 Republicans NAY
Senator Reid voted NAY because under Senate Rules, only a Senator voting in opposition can bring the bill up for reconsideration.
Lieberman has expressed his desire to cast his vote in favor of DISCLOSE, leaving the Republicans as the only hold-up to passage.
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for this discussion, I postulate 2 types of laws.
TYPE 1 – enacted law, written by the legislature to prohibit certain conduct, or encourage certain conduct. This type of law can be either obeyed or violated.
TYPE 2 – observed correlation in nature, such as the “law” of gravity or the “law” of entropy,” which to my thinking cannot be violated, or it never really was a law in the first place.
“Godwin’s Law” purports to describe a fact of nature, that whoever cites Hitler first in an argument loses the argument, or something like that.
To my ear, it would be less jarring to assert that BJ had just proven that law, or demonstrated it.
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once the Nazis were/i> in power, the leadership found the SA to be a liability and destroyed their power by murdering many of the leaders in the so called Night of the Long Knives.
Beware helping the tea party, beej. They might not be as grateful for your work as you expect.
That’s the left. If you helped Obama get elected, you probably got thrown under the bus at some point. Didn’t he just fire somebody he thought would make him look bad without checking out the full context of the remarks?
That was the decision of the Secretary of Agriculture – actually, it might have been someone further down the chain of command who did that. Either way, not Obama.
Why does it take you hours to come up with your replies? Don’t tell me you only just now saw these comments because I won’t believe it.
nothing is Obama’s fault. Plausible deniability, plausible deniability. Believe it or not, I don’t spend all day on ColoradoPols. I’m also pretty busy walking precincts for Buck (among other things).
on both counts. The President really goes around making personnel decisions at that level. And you spend enough time here to reply quickly, but you don’t.
Maybe I just don’t care about what you have to say that much.
So I’ll recycle my response – if that were true, you wouldn’t reply to anything.
Nice try, but it’s still bullshit. Not as bad as any conspiracy theories about Obama’s involvement in dismissing mid-level bureaucrats, but bullshit anyway.
It’s all good.
Result: the Green Tea Party.
The White Tea Party. That’ll sell in the heartland — and in swanky East and West Coast venues!
The Iced Tea Party.
Because they’ll be frozen out — get it?
with little china cups and saucers.
however
the brown teddy bears wont be invited…
and call themselves the Tea-HC Party.
Creating a party takes a lot of hard work and requires compromises to accomplish anything. What most tea par tiers seem to want to do is just yell about not having government work exactly as they think it should.
The lack of donations to Maes and Buck show they aren’t even willing to invest a couple of bucks.
Actually, the tea partiers are the ones without the money. That’s why they’re against bailouts for the big business people.
Now you’re just being boring, beej.
because now they have to compete with Tancredo to take away votes.