Day Two of Netroots: Is the Tea Party Racist, Van Jones?

A full day of making friends.

I had admitted Marxist Van Jones sign his Occupy-heavy book at which time I also asked him if he thought the tea party was still racist.

“I’m not sure that I ever said the tea party was racist,” he explained.

He’s called libertarians, conservatives, and others as much before:

“They say they’re Patriots but they hate everybody in America who looks like us.  They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, ya know ya’ll.”

After his short book signing, he showed me several parts of his book wherein he discussed the tea party and proceeded to tell me that he never said that the tea party was racist except that they are racist.

“I never said they they were racist, but I do think they have racial anxiety,” he said. In his book he writes:

Tea Partiers were media savvy and found support with the media; they focused on scaring the bejeebers out of elected officials; they had the ability to pivot from protest to electoral politics; they capitalized on the racial anxiety surrounding the election of the first African American president …”

Jones writes that the tea party was:

“not particularly big or new, but they were newly presented and newly branded. They punk’d the world, Ashton Kutcher-style.

Not particularly big? Is Jones unaware that well over a million tea partiers marched in Washington DC in 2009? Is he unaware of how many congressional seats the tea party has flipped, how the movement is to credit for the GOP majority in the House? There is no measure of equal, or close-to-equal success from the Occupy movement — this much he begrudgingly admitted. There is, however, a massive rap sheet from the Occupy movement. They don’t have legislative or any successes otherwise, but they have defecated on cop cars, spray painted landmarks, and were caught on camera trying to cover up rapes which happened at their encampments. No “anxiety” about anything there that bears mentioning?

Gateway Pundit finally got to meet his hero.

Occupiers … occupied outside while the one-percenters conferenced inside. A one day pass to Netroots was around $100, weekend pass ran about $450. Why not spread the wealth and let all attend for free? Occupy Netroots! This poor, oppressed Occupier had a $6,000+ Segway.

We marched with the Occupiers as they led us down one of the main streets where we could find a good spot for lunch. With Tabitha Hale of the Franklin Center:

Manwich: The two factions of the Democrat party: the Former “first black” President and the current “first gay” President.

Andrew Marcus of “Hating Breitbart” and a recipient of one of the first Breitbart Awards, a.k.a. Brandon Darby according to some kooky Kossacks, in front of the Democrat Socialists’ table.

From my Netroots swag bag: a made in China iPhone case (look for the union label!) in front of the plethora of labor sponsors listed in their literature. Also interesting the manufacturing country on a product for an abortion advocacy group.

Gateway Pundit notes the empty room to which panelist Paul Krugman spoke.

The conference had all the energy of a tomb, when participants weren’t discussing their dismay over the way in which Obama and Democrats abandoned them in Wisconsin. The attendance seemed anemic. I’m not sure how it compared to attendance at past Netroots conferences, but you would think in an election year when their embattled incumbent needs as much defense as possible that they would see greater numbers.

About That Tea Party History Stuff

There’s been a lot said about where the Tea Party came from and how closely the modern day Tea Partiers associate themselves with the original Boston Tea Party Patriots.  Needless to say, the views on the origin are as varied as the millions of Americans who view themselves as Tea Party supporters and members – but the basic principle of freedom is the binding agent.

This post on the origins of the Boston Tea Party points out the original furor over the Tea Party was caused by a tax cut, not tax raises.  This is true, if you want to parse words, but the colonists didn’t dump tea in the harbor because it was going to cost them less – it’s because they say the Townshend duties for what they really were – big government attempting to buy them off to favor the politically connected. The British East India Tea Company was able to get tea to the colonists cheaply, but at the price of being the only supplier.  Small businesses and entrepreneurs would have been wiped out, and the monopoly pricing that at first seemed cheap would later be raised on the whims of the same government that wiped out the competition.

This scenario is exactly the scam run by the Left when it comes to healthcare and “tax cuts.”

St. Louis Townhall Tea Party protest

Thank you for continuing on the journey with us. We had 2-300 that stood strong with us today. We stood for fiscal responsibility, plain and simple. There was a small group of counter-protesters and a few fabulous individuals who cussed at me and flipped off me and my children which provided a wonderful teaching moment for the car ride back home, let me tell you.

(Yes, that’s one of my boys.) Our presence outside finally forced President Obama to acknowledge the unrest. He had this to say from inside as we were standing outside:

“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, Obama said, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”

That’s what we have been advocating: having a serious discussion about why economic policies which have failed in Russia, China, Spain, Romania, et al. If the president is genuine about having this conversation then I welcome it. If he’s serious, that is, or just posturing.

More of the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition’s protest outside the townhall meeting here and here.

Me vs. Jaco

This morning I called into Charles Jaco’s show; he spent his hour of airtime talking to an embarrassingly partisan “criminologist” who asserted that the people at the tea parties were extremists and dangerous and that the MIAC and DHS reports were perfectly fine and that Lt. Governor Peter Kinder was out of line to issue a retraction of the MIAC report. I wrote about that report here. (View Jaco’s past work here.)

I told the call screener that my name was “Tina” because so far, Jaco has ignored my emails (he says he doesn’t know to where I sent them? I sent them to his KTVI email account, another one last night):

So logic dictated that since Jaco chose not to interview myself or Bill about the St. Louis Tea Party before running his smear piece, and also because he’s ignored my emails, that he would not take a call from some woman named Dana who disagreed with him.

I was the final call of his show at which point I replied that I disagreed with him and I also introduced myself. His last guest analogized white supremacists to protesters by way of a report released under the Bush administration which said that white supremacists would try to recruit those fresh off duty. The guest seemed to think that white supremacists were equal to us common citizens in the street, which is just not so; thus his premise flawed and argument invalid. Jaco, of course, agreed with this. I informed Jaco that I read both reports, along with the MIAC report, and argued that it too broadly identified groups and this was unfair. He of course disagreed, potted me down, and then dropped my call altogether before half-heartedly saying that he liked my writing, which he described as Erma Bombeck meets Ann Coulter, said something condescending, and then went on a diatribe about Timothy McVeigh before ending his show. Sigh.

Jaco does well only when no one is there to counter his points, which begs the question of whether he does well at all. I’ve invited him to appear on my radio show where I wouldn’t pot him down and dump his call but so far, no dice.

Why am I doing this? I want an apology. I find it wildly inappropriate for a “journalist” to host a politically-charged radio show and use that show as a way to shore up the pieces he does for television, even when his associates are forced to apologize for him. I want an apology from him – not from his colleagues, not from a subordinate, but from him, on KTVI’s 10 p.m. news. I want Jaco to apologize for his irresponsible reporting, for drumming up fear and insinuating that protesters are racists, extremists, et al. If you can’t disagree with someone’s position without resorting to name-calling and the like, then you do not deserve inclusion in political discussion.

I’ll keep you updated.

My show tonight will melt your face

Packed show tonight kids – the official Tea Party Radio Wrap Up.

Tonight I’m joined in studio by Bill Hennessy, my co-conspirator, as well as Gina Loudon; Michael Patrick Leahy of TCOT, another conspirator “extremist” behind the tea parties, joins me; I’ll also talk to John Ziegler, the man behind “Media Malpractice.” Ziegler was recently arrested outside the Walter Kronkite awards for practicing journalism and raising questions about Katie Couric’s notorious camera-side manner with Sarah Palin during the campaign.

Oh, and I want this on a t-shirt: