Organizing for America - the continuation of the Obama campaign - will be holding “listening tours” throughout Tennessee in the coming weeks to continue to engage their supporters in a dialogue about the issues most important to them - at a national level (healthcare, energy, education, etc.) as well as issues specific to their own communities.
Tonight they are in Nashville from 7 to 9 pm at Scarritt Bennett (1008 19th Ave S.).
Attendees, including supporters and volunteers from the general election, will be invited to offer ideas on how OFA should organize in their communities to make their voices heard in Washington and help bring about the long-term change voters asked for so overwhelmingly last November.
On September 8th a ‘Care-A-Van’ of Oregon Doctors began a cross-country trip to Washington DC. Today the Mad as Hell physicians will be in Nashville to deliver their clear and simple message to our elected officials in Washington:
“HEALTH CARE FOR PEOPLE - NOT PROFIT!”
You can hear the doctors at 1:30pm on WVOL’s 1470AM “Open Forum” hosted by Rev. T.J. Graham. Listen online at wvol1470.com.
Dinner with the Doctors at 6:30 will be at the Shoney’s on White Bridge Road.
For more info contact Warren Duzak at wduzak@hotmail.com ot 615-292-5608
The Mad as Hell Doctors visit to Nashville is sponsored by Healthcare-NOW, Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, National Nurses Organizing Committee, Nashville Peace and Justice Center, Nashville Peace Coalition, Green Party of Middle Tennessee & others.
Last week, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander claimed that cap-and-trade will cost consumer $1,761 a year - a little tidbit of info he got from Beck who got it from Drudge who got it from lyin’ right wing blogger who got it from a fuzzy-math fueled right-wing “think tank.”
His [Alexander's] statement that households will pay $1,761 in new taxes every year is based on a blogger’s incorrect assumptions and overly simple math. The estimate does not account for revenue that will be returned to consumers in the form of rebates and other efficiency measures. Furthermore, the number is based on old numbers; the Treasury estimate was written on the premise that all permits would be sold, which, ultimately, is not the form that the Waxman-Markey legislation has taken. Finally, both Alexander and McCullagh portray money raised by selling these permits as a tax. We rate Alexander’s claim False.
And while doing so, they also note that Alexander “is relying not on a study by an economist, but on an estimate from a blogger.”
Which makes me wonder, does Senator Alexander have staff that can fact-check his assertions before they are sent out in a press release or is he so caught up in taking his marching orders from radical right-wing cable news hosts and bloggers that he can’t be bothered with silly concepts like “truth?”
Tomorrow and Saturday two of the Tea Party movement’s corporate shills, Eric Odom and Allen Fuller, will bring their unique brand of right-wing astroturf to their hometown of Nashville.
The two-day conference, RootsHQ2009, is being billed as a “center-right new media summit” and will cover “social media, new media technology, internet marketing, search engine optimization, collaborative information movements and NOW media.”
But the attention should be on the motivation of both Odom and Fuller and their willingness to misrepresent themselves in order to manipulate the people. The TNDP has the scoop:
Eric Odom and Alan Fuller founded two firms, Strategic Activism and Flat Creek Management, to provide strategic communications and on-line training for Tea Party activists.
“Tea Party demonstrators have been receiving how-to-disrupt packets from organizers like Odom and Fuller, who get paid to stop legislation opposed by their corporate benefactors,” Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Chip Forrester said.
“People need to stop for a moment and consider who organizes these events and the origins of this movement. It’s beginning to look more and more like corporate interests are fueling the Tea Party movement.”
Last February, Eric Odom was exposed as having ties to Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC that “spontaneously” launched the Tea Party movement. On the same day of the rant, a website called Officialchicagoteaparty.com and registered to Odom went live. The summer before, Odom had organized DontGo.com, a fake grassroots campaign meant to pressure Congress and Nancy Pelosi to pass an offshore oil drilling bill. And who would this kind of bill benefit? Meet Fred Koch and his family, “multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America,” “funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks,” and “co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.”
Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake produced a Tea Bag movement timeline that prominently features Mr. Odom:
February 19 — Rick Santelli rant: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.” First mention of the term “tea party.” Clip goes straight onto Drudge.
Within hours, a site called officialchicagoteaparty.com went up, with the domain name registered to Eric Odom. At the time he was working for a group called the Sam Adams Alliance, a 501 c(3) non-profit that legally can’t engage in political activity. Its chairman, Eric O’Keeffe, is on the board of the Club for Growth. He’s since been taken off the website, but it’s cached here.
Odom is one of the organizers of the Tax Day Tea Party group, and Matt Stoller accused him of astroturfing during the Drill Drill Drill campaign. Last year the Alliance started “an ambitious project … to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.”
February 20: A Facebook page goes up calling for Tea Party demonstrations across the country:
Rick Santelli is right, we need a Taxpayer (Chicago) Tea Party
Rick Santelli is dead right! Enough bailouts of everyone who acted recklessly! It’s time to stand up for all the regular people who played by the rules! Taxpayer Tea Party!
Listed admins include Odom and Brendan Steinhauser of Dick Armey’s Freedomworks. The creator is Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity, and the Facebook Group leads back to a site called taxpayerteaparty.com, run by Americans for Prosperity.
February 27 — the first official “Tea Parties” are held in eight cities across the country. According to John Hendrix, who organized the Tampa Bay event, the original idea came from Tom Gaithens of Newt Gingrich’s Freedomworks.
The idea that the Tea Baggers are a “grassroots” movement that Right Wing infrastructure subsequently tried to exploit is not supported by the facts.
Supported by facts or not, Odom and Fuller will insist that they are grassroots activists and not paid corporate shills.
They’re delusional, writes Matt Stoller at Open Left, “I mean, according to their theory, Newt Gingrich and House Republicans did the messaging and organizing work on a campaign, which was funded by billionaires, and used essentially the same playbook the right has used since 1978, but it finally tipped because some GOP junior consultants with blogs signed up for Twitter. F**king morons.”
Without your well-placed tax dollars, the Tea Parties would have to rescue their own kittehs.
Proving that all hypocrisy is local, the Tennessee Tea Party is organizing a rally this Friday to protest “big government” at the Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium - a venue funded and maintained by the taxpayers of Davidson County.
You can view the history of Municipal Aud and see just how much “big government” has put into the building to make it safe, comfortable, and affordable so organizations like the TN Tea Party can protest its intrusion into our lives. For example, in 1978 the Metro Council designated $200,000 to paint the interior and update seat upholstery. In 1993 they allocated $1.159 million in repairs and renovations for the auditorium. And in 2001, a brand new one-million dollar sprinkler and fire alarm system was installed.
In other words, Tennessee Tea Partiers, it’s not about “big government,” it’s about smart government. And without a smart government believing that it’s a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars to keep conventioneers from being burned to a crisp, the Tea Partiers wouldn’t have a safe place to peaceably assemble.
We won’t hold our breath waiting for a “thank you.”
UPDATE: Mark NoChaser expounds: “While we’re at it, Mary, let’s not forget that the Teabaggers will drive to the auditorium on taxpayer-funded roads. While they’re at the event, their cars will be protected by taxpayer-funded police officers. They will scurry home Friday night and bang out blog posts claiming the Municipal Auditorium was filled by 3 MILLION protesters. Of course, their lights and their computers will be run on taxpayer-subsidized electricity.”
What’s the difference between the loud white guys on the radio yelling me that “it’s not about race, we just hate his policies” and this loud white guy telling me that, in the words of Jimmy Carter, the “intensely demonstrated animosity towards Barack Obama” certainly is about race?
This loud white guy backs up his assertion with, you know, actual facts put into context:
If you listened to the radio or watched the cable yesterday you were hit with the false equivalency Olbermann outlines: if you say that anything critical of President Obama is racial then your words will be twisted into, “all criticism of Obama is racial.” Then if the deniers find one instance that isn’t racial, they will exaggerate that lone proof into proof that all criticism isn’t racial.
That’s how the screaming tightie righties roll. Twisted. And so you got to ask, which of the President’s policies do comments like Glen Beck’s “Obama is a racist” and Rush Limbaugh’s “Barack the Magic Negro” and Michael DelGiorno’s “Obama is the antichrist” address? Which policies are they arguments for or against?
Antiracist writer and educator (and Tennessean) Tim Wise gets some air time on CNN to ask the question that’s on everyone’s mind, “when will Republican leaders take a stand against the kind of rhetoric that stokes white racial resentment?” Or, I might add, are they so desperate for power that they will continue to allow the most radical fringe to speak for them?
LEMON: OK. So we are going to continue our discussion now over the health care rallies and the tone of what’s going on in the country. Tim Wise joins us. He’s frequent here on the show. The author of “Between Barack and a Hard Place” and among the most prominent anti- racist activist in the country. Thank you, sir. Always good to see you.
TIM WISE, AUTHOR “BETWEEN Barack AND A HARD PLACE”: You, too.
LEMON: You heard the chairman from Florida say no, it is not race.
WISE: I did.
LEMON: It does a disservice. You heard David Sirota say it is the elephant in the room.
WISE: Right. Well like I said in the show before, it is the background noise of a lot of the opposition, not all of it but a lot of it. You know, when you have someone like Glen Beck saying as he did about a month ago that the health care debate isn’t really about that. It is just reparations for black people, where you have Rush Limbaugh yesterday on the air saying first that community service is the first step towards fascism, which is bizarre even for him.
And then almost immediately after that saying one of the problems with America is too much multi culturalism [This is one of local talker Michael DelGiorno's favorite lines!]. You wouldn’t say that unless you are trying to stoke white racial resentment. And so when you say those things, I want to know when are Republican leaders going to condemn that kind of rhetoric because that is where race is being interjected. It is interjected by us, it’s interested by the leading talk show hosts in this country.
The job of Secretary of State Tre Hargett is to conduct fair elections in Tennessee. So why is hiding behind a bush-league legal opinion based soley on website research and refusing to do his job instead of implementing a law that would give Tennesseans secure and verifiable elections?
In 2008, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA), which mandates replacing the 100% unverifiable touch-screen electronic voting machines we use now in 93 out of 95 counties with paper ballots by the 2010 election. Despite efforts to gut and delay the TVCA during this year’s session, the law still stands - and it’s Tre Hargett’s job to carry it out.
But Secretary of State Hargett says he can’t. Why? Because a legislative attorney did some research on the Election Assistance Commission website and said that he couldn’t [pdf].
In other words, instead of using legal statutes for the basis of a legal opinion on the TVCA, the legislative attorney used “…references on the [EAC] website….” And it’s that flimsy website-based legal opinion - not an opinion based on legal research as he recently stated [pdf] - that Tre Hargett is using as an excuse to not follow the law.
And here is what will happen as each day ticks by and Mr. Hargett is not held accountable for not doing his job and hiding behind this flimsy legal opinion. First, he will continue to delay implementation claiming that “it is impossible to implement” right up until the General Assembly goes back in session in January. At that time, legislators will once again carry bills that will attempt to gut and then delay the Voter Confidence until 2012. If they fail and session ends, then State Election Coordinator Mark Goins will cry that he no longer has enough time to implement the law before the November 2010 election.
Tre Hargett is using a dubious and improperly sourced legal opinion as his basis for not doing his job and carrying out the law that would give Tennesseans secure and verifiable elections. Both Mr. Hargett and Mr. Goins both know that hiding behind such a flimsy and easily dismissed legal opinion is a useful delay tactic. And they know how their delay will play out. In fact, they are betting the next election on it.
Those of you in Tennessee already knew that. But today when she speaks at the 9-12 March on Washington she will clue in the rest of the world.
“Revolution.” “Succession.” “A New Civil War.” It’s all part of a days work (cha-ching!) for the sponsors of the march. And, apparently, for Blackburn.
Frankly, I’m not surprised. Congressman Blackburn was more than willing to appear on the local mouthpiece of the most extreme wing of her party, Michael DelGiorno, who every day demonstrates how irresponsible he is as a broadcaster by insinuating that the President is a very scary man who is working towards a dictatorship, trying to indoctrinate your children, and using the tactics of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany to overthrow the government. Oh, and Harry Reid is coming to kill you and Barack Obama is the antichrist.
Frankly, Congressman Blackburn is exactly where I would expect her to be today - cozying up to the most extreme members of her party who are so afraid of Barack Obama’s “otherness” that they bring guns to his public events and scream “You lie” to his face in very inappropriate settings.
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GUESTS: Monday, September 21, 2009 Greg Rabidoux, candidate for US House of Representatives 7th District , and Karl Frisch of Media Matters for America.
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Organizing for America - the continuation of the Obama campaign - will be holding “listening tours” throughout Tennessee in the coming weeks to continue to engage their supporters in a dialogue about the issues most important to them - at a national level (healthcare, energy, education, etc.) as well as issues specific to their own communities.
