I'm a but surprised no one posted this yet:
The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism:
The goal, methods and passions of the Tea Party in the House are all characteristic of the radical Southern right
BY MICHAEL LIND
The Tea Party movement takes its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American patriots dumped British tea into Boston Harbor to protest British imperial power. But while New England was the center of resistance to the British empire, there are few New Englanders to be found in today's Tea Party movement. It should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.
The mainstream media have completely missed the story, by portraying the Tea Party movement in ideological rather than regional terms. Whether by accident or design, the public faces of the Tea Party in the House are Midwesterners -- Minnesota's Michele Bachmann and Joe Walsh of Illinois. But while there may be Tea Party sympathizers throughout the country, in the House of Representatives the Tea Party faction that has used the debt ceiling issue to plunge the nation into crisis is overwhelmingly Southern in its origins:
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The Tea Party started with the Ron Paul grassroots, not Bachmann types. It's liberation in origin but more conservative now. It's not hard to find that out for yourself.
I think its true that Ron Paul supporters latched on to the Tea Party concept, and some people attracted to the Tea Party concept have latched on to him, I don't think its true that it "started" with Ron Paul "grassroots". The structure, such that it exists, of the Tea Party movement comes from traditionally conservative groups like FreedomWorks rather than C4L. Most of the Tea Party organizers I know around here are neutral on Paul, and some are downright hostile to him.
