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History Lessons With Dick Armey: Tea Parties Predate Obama, Clarence Thomas Was 'Lynched'

Megan Carpentier | October 2, 2010, 3:00PM

Dick Armey, FreedomWorks chairman

Speaking to a largely unfriendly -- and often openly hostile -- audience at The New Yorker Festival's Tea Party panel on Saturday morning, former House Majority Leader and current FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey attempted to explain to those in attendance the true origins of the tea party and why so many people seem to be so angry right now. And, despite sharing the stage with Harvard history professor and author Jill Lepore, CNBC's Rick Santelli and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), he openly attempted to rewrite more than a little history to fit his preferred narrative.

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Topics: Americans For Prosperity, Anita Hill, Anthony Weiner, Clarence Thomas, Dick Armey, FreedomWorks, HAMP, J.C. Watts, Koch Industries, Rick Santelli, TARP , Taxes, Tea Parties, Teabaggers

Tea Parties

Is There A Tea Party Movement?

Zachary Roth | March 24, 2010, 12:59PM

Tea party in Washington, D.C.

At first it seems absurd even to ask the question in the title. After all, the emergence of the Tea Partiers has been among the hottest political stories of the past year, and the group just came within inches of stymieing President Obama's major agenda item.

But lately, it's begun to appear that the Tea Partiers -- at least as defined by the media -- aren't so much a new force of previously apolitical regular folks, stirred from their apathy by an expansion of government and Rick Santelli's famous rant. Rather, they're essentially conservative Republican base voters, who were demoralized by the failures of the Bush years and have been re-energized by Democratic control of Washington. And they're part of a strain of the conservative movement that has long been driven by cultural resentment and racial paranoia.

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Topics: Bailout, Barack Obama, Michael Patrick Leahy, Michael Steele, Racism, Republican National Committee, Rick Santelli, Right-wing extremism, Tea Parties, Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation

Tea Parties

Tea Party Leader Launches PAC To Back Small-Government Candidates

Zachary Roth | November 10, 2009, 1:20PM

A leading Tea Party activist is launching a political action committee to back candidates who run on a limited-government platform -- perhaps the most serious effort yet to to channel the Tea Partiers' grassroots energy toward electoral politics.

Eric Odom, a conservative online organizer who played a key role in sparking the original Tea Party movement this spring, is unveiling Liberty First PAC. The goal, said Odom in an interview with TPMmuckraker, is to raise $1 million to defeat incumbents who supported health-care reform -- which he called "very dangerous to the fabric of this country" -- and to elect a new crop of lawmakers committed to small-government principles in 2010.

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Topics: Eric Odom, Rick Santelli, Tea Parties, Tea Party Patriots

Jenny Beth Martin

Top Tea Partier, Husband, Owed IRS Half A Million Dollars

Zachary Roth | October 8, 2009, 2:36PM

Jenny Beth Martin

A top activist with the anti-tax Tea Party movement has had a personal brush with federal tax collectors. Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and national co-ordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, owed, with her husband, over half a million dollars to the IRS when the pair filed for bankruptcy last year, according to filings examined by TPMmuckraker.

The couple's bankruptcy filing, made in August 2008 to the US Bankruptcy Court for Georgia's Northern District, stated that Martin and her husband Lee Martin, of Woodstock, Georgia, owed the IRS $510,000, after making a payment of $16,640 that June. The couple also owed just over $71,000 to Ford Motor Credit, the automaker's financing arm.

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Topics: Bailout, Financial Crisis, IRS, Jenny Beth Martin, Rick Santelli, Tea Parties, Teabaggers

GE

CNBC Under Corporate Pressure To Stop Bashing Obama?

Moe Tkacik | April 16, 2009, 8:48PM

Earlier this month Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein gave a speech condemning Wall Street's systemic greed and sloppiness, prompting pundits to wonder if Wall Street was finally starting to "get it." Could Wall Street's preeminent mouthpiece CNBC be starting to "get it" as well?

A unnamed source at the network told this morning's New York Post that NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker and Jeff Immelt, CEO of parent company GE, had recently convened a dinner with the network's top brass and some of its high-profile reporters to discuss whether the network that launched a thousand search engine queries into the meaning of teabag should start distancing itself from the "grassroots" war it started with the Obama administration two months ago. Indeed, yesterday the network mentioned the T-word by far the fewest times of any of the major cable news networks. The Post source, an anonymous "insider," said dispatches from the dinner had been filtering down to reporters, who were concerned about being "muzzled by GE."

Quoting the Post ...

"It was an intensive, three-hour dinner at 30 Rock which Zucker himself was behind," a source familiar with the powwow told us. "There was a long discussion about whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much. There's great concern that CNBC is now the anti-Obama network. The whole meeting was really kind of creepy."

Media bias at CNBC has been a hot topic since CNBC anchor Rick Santelli, a former options trader who reports on the arcana driving interest rates and futures from the pit of the Chicago Board of Trade, touched off the tea party madness when he used one of his live spots in February to deliver an impassioned and incoherent speech predicting the "collectivist" path pursued by the Obama mortgage modification bill would impoverish the country such that Americans, like Cubans, would soon be driving "54 Chevys" (which he added was "maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.")

Santelli's rant, in turn, fueled a campaign led by The Daily Show host Jon Stewart to hold the network "accountable," a sentiment echoed in an online petition signed by dozens of prominent economists exhorting network execs to Fix CNBC:

Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism - asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies, and reporting the truth. Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You've been so obsessed with getting "access" to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today.

So are Zucker and Immelt really coming down on CNBC to lighten up on Obama? Not so, says a CNBC staffer who attended the dinner...