Did you know that The Tea Party Patriots was “birthed” in the NorCal foothills – in Grass Valley?
If you are not a Tea Party Member the following will, if nothing else, get your full attention and may just move you from “just a voter” to a citizen now moved to keep the America that belongs to all of us, not just the angry few you are about to read about. This will go down a little better with a stiff cup of hot coffee.
MONDAY, 18 APRIL 2011 11:02
by DEVIN BURGHARTA year ago, Pam Stout, a soft-spoken 67 year-old retiree from Bonners Ferry, Idaho was featured in theNew York Times and asked to appear on the David Letterman show. She performed swimmingly, and portrayed the Tea Party as a wholesome movement of Middle Americans concerned about issues like TARRP and health care reform.
An inside look at a recent Tea Party event organized by Stout shows a very different side of the Tea Parties, and highlights a disturbing direction taken by many local groups.
This piece continues:
Little talk of repealing “Obamacare” or of modifying objectionable provisions of healthcare legislation took place at Stout’s “Patriots Unite” event, held March 26. The impending possibility of a government shutdown due to an impasse over the budget was hardly mentioned. Nary a word was spoken about bailouts or taxes. Instead, speakers at this Tea Party event gave the crowd a heavy dose of racist “birther” attacks on President Obama, discussions of the conspiracy behind the problem facing America (complete with anti-Semitic illustration), Christian nationalism, anti-environmentalism, and serious calls for legislation promoting states’ rights and “nullification.”
Stout, the Idaho state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots attracted around seventy Tea Party activists from Idaho, Montana, and Washington to the Coeur D’Alene Inn for the conference. The goal: to bring isolated Tea Party groups together. Originally scheduled as a two-day conference, Stout noted that the event was shortened because, “our workshop presenters are still in Wisconsin” presumably engaged in Tea Party anti-union organizing efforts.
The morning’s first speaker was Matt Shea, a state representative from nearby Spokane Valley, Washington. Stout introduced Shea by thanking him and mentioning how she’s been trying to convince him to move to Idaho to run for Attorney General. And Shea opened with a crack about how he had his birth certificate if anyone wanted to see. He returned to the birther issue later in his speech when he commented, “one of my favorite bills is, if you are running for elected office, you need to have a copy of your birth certificate on file – all elected offices – which I think would be good for 2012.”
Much of Shea’s talk was dedicated to demonizing his opponents, saying that progressives “want to seize every piece of property that you have at the local level, and they want to give it back to you as they see fit because they know better than you do how to use property,” and that “the ones on the other side really are motivated by hate.”
“We need to go on the attack and not be defending and reacting all the time. Make them react to us. If we continue to go on the attack, we win,” he encouraged. “And a lot of people have asked me, Matt, what can we do? Here’s my point today, if you take anything away, and it’s this: the Achilles heel of government, particularly the federal government, they don’t have enough manpower to enforce these things at the local level. They have to rely on us to comply, and if we don’t comply, they can’t push their agenda forward.”
In respect of Calitics’ post and quote limits, this article continued at: curtiswalker.posterous.com