Quote:
Originally Posted by BFT3K
Good old revisionist history!
How about some reality...
The Tea Party Movement gained national attention in the summer of 2009 when organized protests occurred at Congressional "town hall" meetings that discussed healthcare reform.
While promoted as a spontaneous "grassroots" movement, many of the activities of Tea Party groups were organized by corporate lobbying groups.
In an article in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, author Jane Mayer links the billionaire brothers David Koch and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries to tea party movement funding. Mayer writes,
The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to ?educate,? fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, ?The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it?s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven?t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.? With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, ?everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there?people who can provide real ideological power.? The Kochs, he said, are ?trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.
But feel free to spin away, spin away!  |
My facts are better then your facts...
First national protests
On February 19, 2009, in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC Business News editor Rick Santelli criticized the government plan to refinance mortgages, which had just been announced the day before. He said that those plans were "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages". He suggested holding a tea party for traders to gather and dump the derivatives in the Chicago River on July 1. A number of the floor traders around him cheered on his proposal, to the amusement of the hosts in the studio. Santelli's "rant" became a viral video after being featured on the Drudge Report.
In response to Santelli, websites such as ChicagoTeaParty.com (registered in August 2008 by Chicago radio producer Zack Christenson) were live within 12 hours. About 10 hours after Santelli's remarks, reTeaParty.com was bought to coordinate Tea Parties scheduled for Independence Day and, as of March 4, was reported to be receiving 11,000 visitors a day.
According to The New Yorker writer Ben McGrath and New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, this is where the movement was first inspired to coalesce under the collective banner of "Tea Party". By the next day, guests on Fox News had already begun to mention this new "Tea Party".
As reported by The Huffington Post, a Facebook page was developed on February 20 calling for Tea Party protests across the country. Soon, the "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across over 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, thus establishing the first national modern Tea Party protest.
The movement has been supported nationally by at least 12 prominent individuals and their associated organizations. (as you can see, the koch brothers are 1 of 12 different sources of support...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Par...ional_protests