Tag Archives: tea party

Florida Congressman Arrested on Cocaine Charges Has History With Sex-Themed Websites

by happyed014 Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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Who could have anticipated that the former owner of sexguideonline.com might get into trouble as a congressman? On Tuesday, Politico broke the news that freshman congressman Henry “Trey” Radel (R-Fla.) was arrested on cocaine possession charges in DC last month and is scheduled for arraignment Wednesday. (DC Superior Court records on the charges can be found here.)

Radel, a tea party favorite and a Fox News radio host, came to office with an unusual background, having run a business that bought somewhat pornographic sex-themed domain names in both English and Spanish, as Mother Jones reported last year. Radel’s business snagged all sorts of un-family friendly domain names, including www.casadelasputas.com (whorehouse) and www.mamadita.com (little blow job).

During the campaign he brushed aside whispers of “domain-gate,” but eventually admitted to buying the site names after Mother Jones reported their existence. (After our story, he sent an email to supporters attacking Mother Jones as an “ultra-liberal San Francisco rag” whose “attack” on him he wore like a “badge of honor.”) Tea partiers I interviewed at the time insisted that the business was no reflection on Radel’s family values, and said they were behind him completely. From that story:

Radel supporter George Miller, the president of the Cape 9/12 group, a conservative tea-party-type organization inspired by Glenn Beck, says that he doesn’t believe Radel would register raunchy web sites to begin with. “I stand by him 100 percent,” he says. “He’s an honest guy. He’s a family guy. He’s the kind of guy I want representing me.”

Radel was hand-picked by former Rep. Connie Mack IV (R-Fla.) to fill Mack’s seat when Mack challenged Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla) for Senate in 2012. Radel won a crowded Republican primary. Among those he defeated: Establishment candidate Chauncy Goss, son of former CIA director Porter Goss. Chauncy Goss was endorsed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Tea partiers dismissed Goss as too much of an insider and threw their weight behind Radel, who had never held elected office before.

Just weeks ago, Radel won some accolades for becoming one of the few Republicans to support drug sentencing reform. He co-sponsored the Justice Safety Valve Act, which would provide an exception to mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws to allow shorter sentences for non-violent, low-level offenders. Radel may get a chance to see how such a law works first hand. He was arrested in DC, which has a special drug court that is designed to funnel low-level addicts into rehab rather than long-term jail time.

Tuesday night, Radel released a statement apologizing to his family and blaming his troubles on alcoholism, a problem he said he would be able to get help with thanks to his arrest. He hasn’t said whether he’ll try to keep his seat.

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Florida Congressman Arrested on Cocaine Charges Has History With Sex-Themed Websites

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Tea Partiers Explain How to Properly Celebrate the 4th of July

by olekdd3 Posted on July 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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The modern Independence Day celebration typically involves things like parades, fireworks, and backyard barbecuing. For the Tea Party Patriots, though, the 4th is a much more solemn occasion, a time for reflecting on all the history that the rest of us tend to gloss over while wilting in the summer heat over the grill. The group has helpfully provided an “Independence Day Tool Kit” with detailed instructions on how to celebrate the holiday, tea party-style.

According to the Tea Party Patriots, a proper 4th of July celebration should naturally kick off with the reading of the Declaration of Independence (or, if time is an issue, just the important parts). A prayer might also be in order, and the program outline helpfully advises that “smaller families might want to invite another family to join them.” The extra people are important because the tea partiers recommend that American families spend their day off acting out a play called Unite or Die, whose text on TPP’s website is accompanied by a pattern for making tri-corner hats out of construction paper.

Unite or Die, an Independence Day play for the whole family recommended by Tea Party Patriots. Charlesbridge

For the kids, TPP recommends “colonial games” including leapfrog and hopscotch. Once they’ve worked up an appetite jumping over each other, the kids might be ready for a colonial refreshment, such as Swamp Yankee Applesauce Cake or 1776 molasses dumplings (recipes included).

TPP’s Independence Day toolkit also includes coloring books for the kids, which illustrate the great sacrifices made by the Founders and educate children on the birth of the nation—at least from the perspective of the National Center for Constitutional Studies. The group was founded by Glenn Beck’s favorite anti-communist Mormon author, the late W. Cleon Skousen, whose work is quoted in an “Independence Day Message” that the toolkit recommends reading to holiday guests. The message conveys a rather different interpretation of the Declaration of Independence than most Americans might have come to understand. In it, for instance, Earl Taylor, the head of NCCS, declares that “Acceptance of the Declaration of Independence is Acceptance of God as Our King,” and that the founding document is a “declaration of our individual belief that God is our one and only King.”

Viewed that way, of course, the 4th of July is no longer a day for fireworks, but a religious holiday, which sort of explains TPP’s rather dour prescriptions for celebrating it. I’m guessing that not many Americans will trade their beer, burgers, and lounge chairs for colonial cakes and a few rounds of leapfrog. But hey, that’s the great thing about living in a free country: The Declaration of Independence means that the tea partiers can tell the rest of us how to celebrate the 4th, and we are free to utterly ignore them.

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Tea Partiers Explain How to Properly Celebrate the 4th of July

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Anti-Consumer Tea Partier Nominated For Consumer Protection Job

by Lubomyr21t Posted on May 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, President Barack Obama nominated a former member of the congressional tea party caucus with an anti-consumer legislative record to a seat on the Consumer Product Safety Commission. If confirmed, Ann Marie Buerkle, who served a single term as a Republican congresswoman from upstate New York, will join the five-member bipartisan commission for a seven-year appointment.

In a way, this fox-in-a-chicken-house move is not truly Obama’s fault. The commission has five members, and no more than three can be from the same party. So when it’s time to pick a GOPer for such a position and there’s a Democrat in the White House, it is the responsibility of Republican congressional leaders. Buerkle was the choice of Senate minority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has been stealthily placing conservative loyalists in the far reaches of the federal regulatory apparatus.

Buerkle spent her brief time in Congress battling measures that would help consumers file complaints about a defective product with the CPSC and supporting proposals that would make it more difficult to remove dangerous products from the market. She opposed a bill that would have prevented convicted fraudsters from advertising non-publicly traded securities; she fought measures that would have empowered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect seniors from abusive practices. And, by the way, she’s a climate-change denier.

Buerkle’s nomination has many consumer activists scratching their heads, but not for the obvious reasons. That Republicans would pick someone hostile to the agency as a commissioner isn’t surprising. McConnell has all but said his stealth nominees are basically there to gum up the works for a Democratic administration. But what’s curious about Buerkle’s selection for the job is that she has said she still hasn’t given up on the idea of running for her old seat in upstate New York next year.

In 2010, Buerkle narrowly defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei (D) in a wave of tea party activism, with heavy backing from the National Rifle Association, which has given her an A-rating for her pro-gun views. The district, though, leans Democrat, and in 2012, she lost to Maffei in a hotly-contested rematch. She hasn’t ruled out another run against him, and there’s no telling whether she’s now truly committed to making mischief on the CPSC or intending to put in a short stint before returning to the electoral battlefield.

Buerkle also recently started hosting a new radio show on WSYR in Syracuse, and she notes that she will need private sponsors to stay on the air. That poses a potential conflict of interest for her commission post, which involves regulating private companies. Some of these firms might see sponsoring her radio show as a way of currying favor with the commissioner.

Obama has to nominate a Republican to the commission—which now has two Democratic members and one Republican—if he has any hope of getting a new Democrat to fill one of two current vacancies. Last year, he nominated Michigan trial lawyer Marietta Robinson to fill the Democratic vacancy, and the Senate held a hearing on the nomination. But the nomination went nowhere, as Republicans resisted. Now that Obama has put forward a GOP nominee, Robinson might have a shot at getting confirmed—though the price is putting a tea partier where she can cause some serious disruption.

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Anti-Consumer Tea Partier Nominated For Consumer Protection Job

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Is This Big Tea Party Group Really an Innocent Victim of the IRS?

by Anatoleia3 Posted on May 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin has been all over the airwaves since the IRS story broke, talking about how her group was among those whose applications for nonprofit status were unfairly targeted for extra scrutiny. She has called the IRS’ actions a “disturbing, illegal, and outrageous abuse of government power.” She told Fox News that Tea Party Patriots wants the agency repay it for expenses it incurred as a result of the “intrusive” questions it asked, including requests for “every single post on Facebook” and “every comment that any person who’s a fan of ours on Facebook had ever made.” On Friday, lawyers for her group sent a letter to the IRS alerting the agency to coming lawsuits over its “illegal” conduct.

But while the IRS has admitted to unfairly targeting some conservative groups, Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella organization for the grassroots movement, may not have been one of them. As I reported last week, although IRS officials engaged in misconduct, they also may have had good reason in some cases to scrutinize groups whose financial and tax histories raised questions, including Tea Party Patriots. The group engaged in a type of creative accounting that the IRS said it specifically planned to crack down on, and TPP drew criticism from some of its own constituents for a lack of financial transparency. Moreover, the IRS received a formal complaint about TPP—when I filed one in 2011 after the group refused to provide me with a financial disclosure required by law.

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Is This Big Tea Party Group Really an Innocent Victim of the IRS?

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Free Wifi at CPAC Comes With a Cost: Your Email

by rakil23 Posted on March 15, 2013

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People attending the storied Conservative Political Action Conference this year were treated to free wireless internet by one of the event’s sponsors, the Tea Party News Network, which picked up the $75,000 tab at the Gaylord Hotel in Maryland. “We’re delighted that we could provide free internet for all CPAC 2013 attendees,” Scottie Nell Hughes, the news director of the Tea Party News Network, said in a press release. “We wanted to ensure that at the largest annual gathering of conservatives the thousands of bloggers and grassroots conservative activists have the ability to share their thoughts and message with the world.”

But as the saying goes, there is no free lunch, and CPAC attendees might be sorry they took advantage of TPNN’s offer.

People at the conference have been required to submit their names and email addresses to access the free wireless. Thanks to its sponsorship deal, all of that contact information is going back to the Tea Party News Network, a group that other grassroots tea party organizations have criticized as nothing but a data-mining operation.

The Tea Party News Network is a project of TheTeaParty.net, which is itself a spin-off of a nonprofit group called Stop This Insanity!. I wrote about the group last month when it was raising money for and sponsoring the “Day of Resistance” gun rallies around the country. The outfit was founded by Todd Cefaratti, who runs a “lead generation” business in Mesa, Ariz. Lead generation, for the uninitiated, is the business of finding potential contacts ripe for a sales pitch of some sort. In Cefaratti’s case, his business harvests leads for the reverse mortgage industry, which has been flagged by consumer advocates as rife with many of the same predatory lending issues as the subprime mortgage industry that helped crash the financial system in 2007.

Tea party activists have complained that after logging in to or making donations on TheTeaParty.net or related sites, they found themselves besieged with spam from precious metal dealers who’d been renting the group’s email list through Newsmax. The group has repeatedly come under fire for raising lots of money from tea party groups but failing to spend much of it on politics, and has run afoul of the FEC. During the presidential campaign, it raised $1.2 million but spent only $52,000 on candidates. Much of its money gets spent on advertising, including many TV ads that run with a variety of different tea party names on gun and hunting shows. The Tea Party News Network sent out fundraising emails asking for donations to cover the $75,000 CPAC wireless bill.

Neither the Tea Party News Network nor TheTeaParty.net have responded to requests for information about what they intend to do with the emails they collect from CPAC.

Mother Jones
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Free Wifi at CPAC Comes With a Cost: Your Email

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