MoJo Turns Spotlight On Far-Right Doctors' Group

Zachary Roth | November 18, 2009, 12:14PM

Dr. David McKalip

Mother Jones takes a close look at the far-right doctor's group to which David McKalip -- the Florida neurosurgeon who sent that racist picture of President Obama as a witch doctor -- belongs.

Lately, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) has been teaming up with the Tea Partiers to fight health-care reform. But as Mother Jones shows, the group is so far out there it makes its Tea Party allies look like David Broder.

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Topics: Barack Obama, David McKalip, Health Care, Right-wing extremism, Tea Parties

Tea Party Express

Party Foul! Tea Partiers Eat Their Own In Bitter Internal Feud

Zachary Roth | November 12, 2009, 5:08PM

The Tea Party movement is being ripped apart by bitter internal rancor, highlighted by a lawsuit against a former leader, vituperative name-calling, and charges of financial mismanagement and corruption.

As we told you this morning, board members for the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) this week filed suit against Amy Kremer, a former TPP leader who fell out with the group over her involvement with a rival Tea Party faction, the Tea Party Express. And on Tuesday, a judge granted a preliminary injunction, ordering Kremer to return control of the TPP websites to the board, and to stop representing herself as a TPP spokeswoman.

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Topics: Amy Kremer, Health Care, Right-wing extremism, Tea Parties, Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots

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

Steve King

Patriot Games: GOP Reps Pick Tea Party Rally Over National-Security Votes

Zachary Roth | November 6, 2009, 12:29PM

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) at the Capitol Hill tea party.

When it's a choice between strengthening the Patriot Act, or showing up for the Tea Party Patriots, what's a GOP lawmaker to do? We'll give you one guess...

Several Republican members of Congress yesterday blew off votes on the signature anti-terror legislation of the post 9/11 era to attend Michele Bachmann's Tea Party rally against health-care reform.

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Topics: House Judiciary, Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann, Patriot Act, Randy Forbes, Steve King, Tea Parties, Teabaggers, Ted Poe, Trent Franks

David McKalip

In Tea Party Civil War, McKalip Appears To Ditch Former Comrades In Favor Of GOP Consultants

Zachary Roth | October 21, 2009, 4:13PM

Tea-Partiers, and Dr. David McKalip (inset)

In a bitter internecine feud that is creating serious divisions in the Tea Party movement, David McKalip -- the Florida doctor and health-care reform foe who got in hot water this summer after forwarding a racist picture showing President Obama as a witch doctor -- appears to have sided with a group run by GOP consultants, rather than with his former grassroots allies.

In an email to fellow members of the Tea Party Patriots, sent yesterday and obtained by TPMmuckraker, Texas-based activist Gerald Merits wrote that he has been "approached by a neurosurgeon very active in the movement in Florida asking for me to get involved with the Tea Party Express because the Tea Party Patriots just don't seem to get it."

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Topics: Amy Kremer, David McKalip, Howard Kaloogian, Right-wing extremism, Sal Russo, Tea Parties, Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots, Teabaggers

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

Gary Kreep

Man Behind Birthermercial First Teabagged In Mid-1970s

Justin Elliott | September 28, 2009, 5:49PM

Gary Kreep

The attorney behind the first-ever Birther infomercial started teabagging way before it was cool.

Back in the mid 1970s, Gary Kreep spearheaded a national tea bag-based movement to protest the Ford Administration's tax policies, he confirmed to TPMmuckraker today.

"To protest unreasonably high taxes, people stapled tea bags to their tax returns," explains Kreep, now director of the United States Justice Foundation, but then a law student and an officer in the California chapter of the Reaganite Young Americans for Freedom.