Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Glenn Beck of Faux News as the Mad Hatter. (h/t driftglass at crooksandliars.com)
"I have never seen a network so devoted to a wingnut cause like FOX is with their BIG coverage of the teabaggers tea party scheduled for April 15th." Fox News 'all in' on freak show coverage: They are leading the charge for the tea-baggers
It's the rich and out-of-power Republicans who are organizing these events, and it's not an accident. They are trying to kick-start a broken conservative movement by making a huge effort to tap into the 25% of people who hate President Obama. Roger Ailes has gone "all in" and is waiting for the river card as he uses Beck, Cavuto and his merry band of disenfranchised conservatives to lead them on their disingenuous mission.
So this will come as no surprise. The Tea Party Movement: Who's In Charge?
Here is the organizational landscape of the April 15 tea party movement, in a nutshell: three national-level conservative groups, all with slightly different agendas, are guiding it. . .
They are: FreedomWorks, the conservative action group led by Dick Armey; dontGO, a tech savvy free-market action group that sprung out of last August's oil-drilling debate in the House of Representatives; and Americans for Prosperity, an issue advocacy/activist group based on free market principles. Conservative bloggers, talk show hosts, and other media figures have attached themselves to the movement in peripheral capacities. Armey will appear at a major rally in Atlanta, FreedomWorks said.* * *
FreedomWorks and dontGO seem to have taken ownership of the bulk of this coordination. The homepage of FreedomWorks' website now offers visitors a Google map of protests taking place across the country. They say they know of 600 Tax Day protests for which they are providing resources. The group has used its e-mail list to augment the work of dontGO, which created the website www.taxdayteaparty.com in February. dontGO, which was formed as an online rapid response team during the House of Representatives oil drilling debate last year, says it is "tracking" 700 events under its aegis. Americans for Prosperity says it has 24 state chapters that are organizing events. Overlap between all those numbers is quite likely: FreedomWorks told me a lot of its activity has been clueing its members to other protests in the area, so protesters can cooperate and conglomerate their events.
The movement is not tied to the Republican Party, group spokesmen said, despite a report that at least 10 House Republicans will be speaking at events across the country. Eric Odom, founder of dontGO, has infamously turned down a request from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to speak at the group's Chicago event.
* * *
As far as Fox News's promotion of the tea parties, promising coverage on Tax Day (and Glenn Beck's encouragement of viewers to attend), Odom said: "I love it. I think it's a very wise business plan. It's about ratings, that's what's going on now. Many people are looking for coverage."
As Digby explains:
This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization. While working to promote Social Security privatization, Freedom Works was caught planting one of its operatives as a “single mom” to ask questions to President Bush in a town hall on the subject. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed Freedom Works for similarly building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Dick Armey, the former Republican Majority Leader who now leads Freedom Works and is a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.
Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, who was Ralph Reed’s former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations — a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.
If any members of the press are reading this, I hope you realize the real story here is that this is a corporate sponsored astroturf campaign masquerading as a grassroots populist movement, it is not the sad little fools who are calling themselves "tea-baggers," happily unaware of the sexual double entendre.
On April 15th these fringe anti-tax, anti-government, and various and sundry hate groups on the conservative right will be "going off the rails on a crazy train," sponsored by the GOP's entertainment division at Faux News.