SELLOUT POLITICIANS, FOR-PROFIT “LEADERS”
“Join the movement.”
Remember that? It was the rallying cry of “Tea Party” candidate Nikki Haley in the 2010 South Carolina gubernatorial election. What happened to Haley? Um, yeah … safe to say she’s not Tea Party anymore, having fully embraced the “Republican” establishment.
But what of the Tea Party movement that Haley rode to victory?
According to a new report from ProPublica , another Tea Party organization – Move America Forward – is being exposed as nothing but a scam led by a Washington insider.
“An examination of its fundraising appeals, tax records and other documents shows that Move America Forward has repeatedly misled donors and inflated its charitable accomplishments, while funneling millions of dollars in revenue to the men behind the group and their political consulting firms,” the report states.
The group even lied about helping U.S. service members.
Sound familiar?
This is the same sort of report we’ve heard regarding the Tea Party Express, another national group associated with Sal Russo – a “Republican” consultant who has made millions of dollars off of the gullibility of “conservatives.”
Earlier this year, The Daily Caller ran an expose on the Tea Party Express in which it was revealed that the organization and another Tea Party group, the Tea Party Patriots, spent “more than 80 percent of the money they raised in 2013 not on the causes and candidates that they say it is their mission to support, but on operating expenditures, like paying consultants, companies who produce mailing materials and renting mailing lists.”
Sheesh …
We’ve been sour on the Tea Party for some time. Not necessarily the people who flocked to its banner, but the politicians who exploited their gullibility and the operatives who are picking their pockets.
A true limited government movement needs leaders committed to advancing ideas and candidates, not their own financial interests.
47 comments
Too many hate-everything Liberal-tarians infiltrated the Tea Party. They attack everybody but Democrats…the base of all policy failure.
Allen Olsen – and FITS- war against Amazon is a good example of a liberaltaran fight against job producers…while they are complacent about 50 million more on food stamps or $90 billion on failed green energy schemes.
You are out of touch. You want to return to the gold standard yesterday….while people are begging for job to make a dollar…and you are clueless…
Gullible Tea Bagger^^^
You are correct, he is the poster boy.
Olsen is a paid by Nikki Haley activist. He betrayed the movement, like so many others.
Nothing new about any of this, except that the Tea Party folks were supposed to be better than that.
If it is true it is repugnant to think about. However, you failed to mention who ProPublica is and why that should come into context here.
http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/7464
Have you peeked at the US economy in the last 6 years….Dumb@$$….
It was a joke from the beginning.
Those IDIOTS who donated their money to these obvious frauds?The DESERVE to get taken.
“Dont tread on me?”
No just take my money PLEASE take my money.Im agin big guvmint!…….”
Hahahahaha!
I wouldn’t send money to any organization headed by a “Sal” anything.
Or anything with “Patriots” in the title either.
That’s just another gimmick for pulling in the baggers and right wing-nuts as well.
Excepting New England Patriots – that is……………
Go Falcons and Panthers!!!!!!! The true teams of of the I-85 corridor!!!!!!!!!
Well, actually the only ones, but that’s beside the point………………
Show the picture of the governor giving a speech to no one. Classic.
I asked NIMRATA to sign a picture of that event.
She never responded.
The Tea Party is a creation of the Koch brothers. It never was a grass-roots movement.
Umm, no. The titular heads were sucked in, perhaps…,but not the masses who still believe in the major tenets. They live on, grazing in the grass.
Yea, I don’t know about that.
I think it had some real grass roots for a while, before co-opted. Sure, it’s mostly old folk that know something’s wrong with the country and can’t figure out what needs to be done to fix it…so in that regard they are gullible for believing that pols were the solution.
But it seems like kicking old people for giving a shit is like making fun of retards….maybe fun among close friends but something everyone deep down is a little ashamed of if they have an ounce of empathy/compassion.
The Evil Koch Brothers(TM) the left’s favorite boogie men. Harry Reid can’t say more than 3 words with out saying the word Koch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP7V0hrt1aw
Your point ?
Spot on!
So Tea Partiers are “Gullible”. Well, stop the presses. That’s a real newsflash. What next, that they are “misinformed?”
Tea Party began as a cause, became a business, and is now a racket.
I think that is the best statement I have seen in regards to the Tea Party.Grass roots conservatives started it and sent money in good faith to the “leaders” who started out on the right side but soon succumbed to the big bucks. Here again honesty tempered with business knowledge would have gone a long way. I still consider myself a Tea Party supporter as well as a Republican from the days when our creed was more than words we say a every meeting. Just like everything else these days : follow the money.
You’re just another one they duped.
Looks like Slim (the guy who Rouge Elephant responded to in this thread) duped him as well. Slim plagiarized a famous quote by longshoreman/philosopher, Eric Hoffer. All one has to do is google “cause, business, racket” to discover that. He appears to have plenty of clueless company, however, as Slim has sucked in 12 up votes.
Ideas are like ebola.
You did mean to mention that you lifted the bulk of your statement from Eric Hoffer?
But isn’t that the way of all movements: the unions, rainbow coalition, occupy, green peace, peta, religion…?
Baggers clearly ain’t the brainiest folks. That’s been obvious for a while.
But they sure does loves them a peck a molasses and salt pork fer dinner and supper!
The Tea Party gave us Haley…thats all you need to know…….worst Governor ever.
The Democrat Party gave us Obama…and you’re b!t*h!ng about Haley…Now that’s funny…
Wrong again, George Bush gave us Obama.
No, the DNC and millions of numbskulls gave us Obama.
Still a better Governor than Obama is a President.
No one ever claimed the Tea party was any more than a bunch of old people who thought they were smarter than the city folk and their new fangled idears.
You want he should be eating a bagel with cream cheese?
How does a fish tread on a snake?
And the IRS is investigating the right wing non-profits, why?
Taxed enough already… sort of like why would you suspect an Arab or Persian before a Swede in a terrorist plot against Israel?
If the criteria for audits is based on whether the subject wants lower taxes or not, they are going to need a lot more agents to investigate a lot more people.
I think you need to read up on the issue – it was the protected speech of “political action committees,” not “people.”
Because they are fraudulent? Under the law and IRS code, none of the 501 (C) (4) “charities” are supposed to be engaged in political activities. They should all lose their tax exemptions, as should the left wing political PACS. But that will not happen because both sides are guilty of abuses and too busy sucking down illegal campaing contributions from them.
A REMINDER WHERE WE WERE IN 2001
(required for Tea Party types who woke up in 2009)!
President Bush said that the most important number in the budget he sends to Congress is the $5.6 trillion surplus it projects over the next 10 years.
That huge projected surplus provides the underpinning of all the administration’s tax-cut and spending plans, Mr. Bush said in his recorded weekly radio address.
“A surplus in tax revenue, after all, means that taxpayers have been overcharged,” the president said. “And usually when you’ve been overcharged, you expect to get something back.” The surplus figure “counts more than any other” in the budget, he said.
Democrats cautioned that surpluses projected over so long a period can turn into elusive fool’s gold. They continued to insist that as it stands the Bush tax-cut plan unfairly favors the wealthy over those of more modest means.”
Yes, we were on schedule to be debt free by 2011, paying off the Reagan debt! Instead Repubs used up the $5.6 trillion surplus, they acknowledged, and turned that into $6 trillion in new debt ($11.6 trillion swing). On top of that handed Obama a $1.7 trillion deficit and $12 trillion in new projected debt along with an economy that was losing 820K jobs/month, 60,000 closed factories, and no private sector jobs created in a decade.
MINUS one million private sector jobs created under Bush when the norm would be 23 million… 300% increases in energy, food and health insurance. 17 trillion in assets lost, huge repair bill, ½ of high tech jobs outsourced. The wrong country invaded at a cost of $4 trillion and thousands of lives based on known lies. 3K killed here on 911 as all warnings were ignored, and 51 in 13 Embassy attacks.
The Tea Party started with a rallying cry of, “Take My Country Back.” All of us remember that the cry came along with photo shopped pictures of Obama. Soon we had to listen to people from the Tea Party to John Boehner claim that Obama is not an American. (Sure, it’s not a racist movement.) The uninformed rubes came out in 2010 and voted in some real questionable characters into US House from various little gerrymandered districts in the land and SC got stuck with Nikki Haley. Thanks a lot Tea Party.
Let’s not forget the last republican administration resulted in a stock market losing 5000 points, the disastrous and shameful response to Katrina, 100 billion in contractor fraud that went unpunished, no bid contracts to Halliburton and execs of Halliburton. Not one anti trust suit, a first in 80 years, allowing huge mergers of oil, bank and health insurance companies. No enforcement of regulation by MMS, FDA, the Justice Department turned into a political organization of religious school graduates, back rubs for the German Chancellor, the outing of CIA agent by the sitting Vice President (who let is aide take the fall).
The Republicans are still pushing the idea that if we will just cut taxes, then the economy will expand. In the mean time, governments do not have enough funding for basics like building and maintaining roads and bridges or adequate police and fire services. The Republican solution to reducing wasteful government spending does not include eliminating tax credits to multi-billion dollar corporations, but does include cuts to food stamps to poor South Carolina families.
Somehow I just knew it would all be Bush’s fault. And you criticize the Tea Party for being gullible. Dumbasses
Then cut the damned social programs and education. That’s where the bulk of the money goes.
In the mean time, governments do not have enough funding for basics like building and maintaining roads and bridges or adequate police and fire services.
Yeah. Because what the Tea Party has clearly demonstrated is that Americans have too much education already. If they just hadn’t been forced to complete kindergarden, the country would not be in the mess it is in now.
BTW Bubba…those social programs you want cut. I am guessing they don’t include your social security or medicare.
Think about it…the TEA Party came into existence because of CNBC right winger Rick Santelli on the floor the Chicago commodities exchange responding to an idea floating around that the best response to the 2008 Crash was NOT to bail out the banks directly, but to work with the homeowners to refinance their underwater loans based on what their homes were really worth instead of the fraudulent valuations on which their loans were based with the banks taking a haircut.
Santelli – and, talk radio and Fox jumped on board – stirred up the uninformed by appealing to their fear/hatred that some undeserving people might get some deal THEY might not get. Santelli didn’t think the banks should be on the hook for part of the mortgage scam that they had perpetrated.
So, the TEA Partiers bought into the idea that under no circumstances should they and their fellow citizens get a square deal and were so vehement in their ignorance, THEY ended up being the one insuring that the bank bailouts took place the way they did. Of course, that made Wall Street shills like Santelli happy.
All political front groups are like this, unfortunately. That said, Constitutional conservatives are not going away anytime soon.
gullible’s travels.