Tea Party : féministes et machos, c'est possible... pour eux. Op-Ed Columnist - The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party. ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier. Vive la révolution! There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer.
Photo Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). The billionaire Koch brothers? war against Obama. Jonathan Raban: Sipping with the Tea Party | World news. These are unhappy days for the Obama presidency and for the Democratic party, which is very likely to lose its majority in the House of Representatives, and may lose its majority in the Senate, in the midterm elections on 2 November.
In an otherwise cheerless predicament, Democrats comfort themselves by seizing on idiocies uttered and extremist positions embraced by Republican nominees such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, who came through their primaries backed by the Tea Party movement. So Angle uses her fingers to frame satirical quotation marks around the word "autism" which, she implies, is the latest fictitious medical condition to be covered by Nevada health insurance, or talks of "second amendment remedies" (armed insurrection) to which citizens are being driven by the Obama administration, or denounces the federal department of education as "unconstitutional".
Five months later, I was on the inside, looking out. Le Tea Party : obstacle à une victoire républicaine ? Depuis un certain temps, les élections « midterm » s’annonçaient prometteuses pour les républicains. Deux ans après le triomphe historique de Barack Obama et la consolidation de la majorité législative des démocrates (avec une avance de 8 sièges au Sénat et de 21 à la Chambre des représentants), les républicains sont persuadés que désormais une revanche est à portée de main : la reconquête de la chambre basse (où l’ensemble des 435 sièges sont en jeu) semble probable, et celle de la chambre haute (avec 37 sièges sur 100 à pourvoir) est plausible. La lenteur de la reprise économique, le taux de chômage élevé, l’impopularité de certaines initiatives de l’administration (la réforme de la santé) contribuent à l’amertume de l’opinion publique et attisent (pour une énième fois) une fougue anti-sortants, dont les républicains comptent être les bénéficiaires.
Mais voilà qu’arrive sur la scène politique une femme de 41 ans nommée Christine O’Donnell. Christine O'Donnell's church and state gaffe makes voters laugh | World news. Christine O'Donnell debates with Chris Coons at Widener Law School. Source: YouTube The US constitution has its quirks but it is crystal clear on one issue: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," begins the first amendment, adopted in 1791. But more than 200 years later, its meaning appears to be lost on Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party favourite running for a US Senate seat. At a debate today for the Delaware Senate seat once occupied by Vice President Joe Biden, O'Donnell appeared to be nonplussed by the wording of the first amendment, repeatedly returning to the subject and sounding incredulous after her Democratic opponent Chris Coons attempted to explain it to her.
When Coons told her the text of the constitution prohibited government from establishing any religion, O'Donnell replied in apparent bewilderment: "You're telling me that's in the first amendment? " • This article was amended on 20 October 2010. Prejudice and principle brew at tea party meet | World news. America's disparate army of angry conservatives assembled under one roof yesterday at the first national tea party convention in Nashville, amid controversy over an opening speech which preached bigotry bordering on racism.
Up to 600 delegates from all over the US descended on the cavernous Gaylord hotel to plot a strategy on how to take back the country from the perceived threat of the Obama administration. Sporting a shirt made from the Stars and Stripes, Tim Peak from Arizona said he had travelled so far because it was "time for the silent majority to stand up and start speaking". But amid talk about fiscal conservatism and the "subversive threat" of the green movement, there was also a strong undercurrent of a cultural bigotry which previously had been kept to the margins of the tea party phenomenon. Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman from Denver in Colorado who ran for president in 2008, devoted most of his opening speech on Thursday night to illegal immigration.