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April 25, 2010

Tea partiers not the cream in their coffee (updated)

Rick Moran
The so-called Coffee Party movement, putatively a grass roots spontaneously-generated reaction to the "incivility" of the Tea Parties, is actually an embarrassing Astroturf op, created by an Obama campaigner, and helped along by big bucks K Street political pros. Even more embarrassingly, when the "activists" gather, they don't practice what they preach, regarding civility.  

Jim Hoft has the skinny on the latest from the astroturfed "coffee party" movement that claims 500 meetings were held drawing 200,000 people last week.

Put aside the ridiculous over-exaggeration of their numbers; the Coffee Party was supposed to be a bastion of civility where citizens of all political persuasions could come together and talk about the issues without hate or rancor.

Whoops! Gateway Pundit links to Newsweek's Steve Tuttle:

But from the moment folks in the crowd stood up to speak their minds, Park knew these people had not come to sip cappuccinos and set an example of civility for an overheated nation. They were angry. They hated the Tea Party, and the Republican Party. They wanted to get even. One audience member said America was under the thumb of oligarchs and denounced "moneyed interests." A few people hissed when Sarah Palin's name was mentioned. Also on hand were the usual suspects drawn to the C-Span bat signal. A man representing Code Pink, the left-wing protest group, said that "racism was the basis for everything that's going on right now." He also seemed to have a real problem with "fear-based rhetoric" and Northrop Grumman.

Park, a 42-year-old Korean-American with a smile that can only be described as "kind," regularly tried to steer the talk back to the group's more centrist principles. But when someone asked how many people in the room were Republicans, all 80 hands remained down. "I like the civility idea, but I hate the Tea Party people," said attendee Karen Anderson. By the end of the event, some in the crowd had decided the movement, barely two months old at the time, needed a new leader.

Well...what do you expect when a bunch of loony leftists get together and get wired on caffeine?

Update from Thomas Lifson:

Newsweek's Tuttle accepts the narrative Park propounded, of the movement as a spontaneously generated phenomenon, not an Astroturf op, and Park as a "documentary film maker." This omits the inconvenient truth that she was a film maker for the Obama campaign, and that her website received assistance from K-street political pros. Tuttle writes:
Park didn't set out to create a political movement in the first place. She was just exhausted by all-Tea-Party-all-the-time on the news. One night in January, she signed on to her Facebook page and ranted about "the false narrative that the tea party is the real America." Her friends picked up on the post and it led to the creation of the Coffee Party. Within days, thousands of people signed up on Facebook.
This is simply inaccurate. For example (as I documented on AT):
About the time of launching the Coffee Party, Ms. Park attended what was billed as RootsCampDC at the Washington office of a liberal teachers' union called the National Education Association.

The list of attendees reads like royalty of the progressive movement: people from the White House, Harry Reid's office, the Democratic National Committee, the Center for American Progress, Change.org, the SEIU, MoveOn, La Raza, Organizing for America, the Alliance for Climate Protection, etc., etc. This Astroturf camp for progressives included people from NPR, PBS, and Firedoglake. (Was everyone at CNN and CBS busy?).
Mark J. Fitzgibbons found the fingerprints of George Soros on AT, too:
The Coffee Party website says its 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status is pending with the IRS, which must approve some, but not all, tax-exempt activist entities. Any 501(c)(4) may engage in lobbying, so contributions to them are not deductible. The contribution landing page for the Coffee Party says that it partners with Democracyinaction.org, a 501(c)(3) organization, meaning contributions to the latter are tax-deductible.

The About Page for Democracyinaction.org states that it gets funding from Open Society Institute, George Soros's organization. Because contributions to 501(c)(3)s are tax-deductible, those funds may not be transferred to 501(c)(4)s, which are allowed to lobby.organization.

Democracy in action.org offers professional services the same or similar to what many for-profit companies provide and is described at Guidestar.com as follows:
DemocracyInAction is a nonprofit dedicated to leveraging the unique power of online communications for invigorating those committed to ecology, social justice and human rights. To a broad swath of these social change leaders, we provide cutting-edge e-advocacy tools for pennies on the dollar relative to the fees demanded by the private sector. In a word, we democratize e-activism, freeing practitioners to pour resources into mission and strategy.
The Coffee Party is becoming an embarrassment to the left. It has no substance, only anger. Even though Newsweek will not admit the Astroturf roots of the Coffee Party movement, the visible reality is humiliating for those who want to portray the Tea Party as nothing but angry white people.

Posted at 10:41 AM | Email | | | Share Share