Just a few moments ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find a rather even-handed AP article on the Tea Parties linked on Yahoo!’s home page.

While referencing some of the extremists on the fringes of the movement, AP writer David A. Lieb reports, “Some tea party organizers have taken steps to distance themselves from those espousing potentially controversial views“:

Sensitive that poor public perception could sink their movement, some rally planners have uninvited controversial speakers, beefed up security and urged participants to pack cameras to capture evidence of any disrupters. Organizers want to project a peaceful image of people upset by what they consider to be a growing and burdensome federal government.

“We don’t want to be misrepresented, whether it’s by someone who is not part of the group and has their own agenda, or whether it’s by some fringe extremist who may actually be a racist,” said Jim Hoft, a political blogger and tea party activist who is one of the speakers for a rally in suburban St. Louis.

Nice to see that the AP is quoting one of the leading conservative bloggers (and a nice guy to boot–I met Jim in 2007 when I was passing through St. Louis).

Lieb was at pains not just to quote swell folks like Jim, but also to reference other level-headed Tea Party protesters.  And he reported, “Tea party leaders also are concerned that opponents may pose as tea party participants and cause a ruckus to damage the reputation of the movement.”

Job well done, Mr. Lieb.  Thanks for reporting our rallies rathe than distorting them!

It’s part and parcel of this Administration’s New Kind of Chicago Politics.  Law Professor William A. Jacobson elucidates this pattern in reference to Obama’s attitude toward Israel:

Finding demons is the stock-in-trade of this administration. I called them on it at the beginning of the Obama presidency, Barack Got Enemy.

Whether it is the “rich,” the insurance companies, the “lobbyists,” the “extremist” and “dangerous” Tea Parties, or whomever, there always is an enemy against whom a policy is directed.

That’s hope and change for you!

We’ve been mentioning for a couple days how some anti-Tea Party (“anti-anti-Big Government”?) provocateurs were planning to pose as Tea Partiers and try to make them look bad. My take was that it shows both how their negative caricature of the movement is clearly inaccurate (otherwise, why would they need to infiltrate to inject it), and that this is how desperate they’ve become. Both are good news.

Jim Geraghty at NRO has an interesting take on the Tea Party infiltrators. From this morning’s “Morning Jolt” email update (subscribe here):

So, just to clarify, the contention of these liberals is that the tea parties must be demonized and discredited because they’re full of violent, angry, often gun-toting extremists with temper-control issues, and their plan to expose this fact is to walk into the middle of a large crowd of said short fuses, who are fed up with being painted as lunatics, carrying obviously outlandish and offensive signs, and then start making racist comments. I presume these liberals think everyone around them will nod approvingly as they insist that the rally’s focus is not runaway spending and the growth of government, but the importance of exposing the president’s role as the greatest Kenyan Deep Cover Agent ever.

Okay, Poli-Cylons, go for it. I just hope you folks studied up on how to make a tourniquet out of a Gadsden flag.

What they lack in intelligence, the Left seems to make up for in subtlty. (That previous sentence, by the way, was intended to be ironic.)

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

One of our readers (and a fine blogger in his own right) won’t be able to attend the Tea Party today, but methinks it’s because his pup wants to crash the party:

If you’re in LA and your pup doesn’t want a handout of his own, join me and at least 4 other GayPatriot readers at the Rally today outside Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, 11111 Santa Monica Boulevard, Suite 915 in Los Angeles, CA 90025-3343, at 5:30pm.

Perhaps, the richest thing about listening to various liberal pundits and their ideological confrères in Congress denigrating the Tea Parties is their attempts to lecture Tea Party protesters on civility.  Now, I certainly agree with their concern for rhetorical decorum and their opposition to hateful epithets, but I question their sincerity.

If they’re so concerned about rhetorical excess, I want to know when they, to borrow an expression, differentiated themselves from the hateful speech spewed during the Bush Era.  Note that all of a sudden when we have a Democrat in the Oval Office, promoting a vast expansion of government, they’re concerned with the level of discourse.  Guess it didn’t bother them too much when countless protesters compared a Republican president to Hitler.

Not to mention the hateful speech spewing from elected Democrats and from MSNBC anchormen.

Now, to show that our movement in reality is as hateful as the one in their imagination, some left-wingers are trying to crash the Tea Parties, masquerading as hateful bigots.  Whatever you do, if you see such folk, don’t play their game.  Tell them that you’re there to promote freedom, not to denigrate any group or individual.

Be civil.  Be courteous.

Via Glenn comes this suggestion from Ann Althouse:

Tea Partiers should look around and listen and notice people who might be Crashers. Whether they are Crashers or actual fringe Tea Partiers, talk with them. It’s good for people at these gatherings to talk to each other and be friendly anyway. It helps project the image of normality, which, I think, is the reality with most Tea Partiers.

Read the rest.

And should you confront such folk, ask yourselves (but not them), why right-wingers didn’t feel any compulsion during the Bush Era to crash the anti-war rallies.

Thanks to VtheK for the tip.  I believe this story speaks for itself.

The death, of an AIDS-related illness, of a 25-year-old barebacking porn star is the latest twist in several episodes that have roiled the adult entertainment industry in recent years.

Chad Noel’s March 17 death was reported on at GayPornGossip on March 26. The posting read, “Chad Noel age 25, a former ’twink genre’ gay porn performer using the stage names of Donny Price & Craven Cox passed away in New York City, on March 17, 2010 following a brief illness associated with complications of HIV.” The article also noted that Noel had worked for an adult entertainment company that makes videos of men barebacking–a euphemism for unprotected anal sex. Noel had also performed under the names Craven Cox and Donny Price. Noel was a native of Laramie, Wyoming, the town outside of which Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die.

I presume the gay leftist community will immediately rally behind safer sex efforts as a response to Mr. Noel’s passing equal to their rallies against hate crimes.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

. . . than coming out conservative in the gay community.

So reports one of our readers from a Tea Party in Boston:

Great crowd, everyone reacted positively. They wanted to take photos and gave me thumbs up. Some asked how I felt about being there. My most frequent response was I feel better coming out gay here today with the tea party people then coming out conservative in my gay community. Tried to turn the crowd away from the alinsky provacteurs, they were all there with the racist mispelled signs, so sad they were so young.

Recall how from sometime in 2002 until they won back control of Congress, Democrats in Washington defined themselves by opposing then-President Bush’s agenda? It was they who started the process of filibustering nominees to the federal bunch and they who used every procedural gimmick in the book to slow down or stop Republican legislative reforms, including plans to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) which were the catalyst for the financial meltdown.

Back then, however, we didn’t hear many people calling them the “Party of No.” Liberal pundits weren’t asking them to put forward an alternative agenda, merely commending them for blocking the initiatives of then-majority party.

So, if today, while protesting the Obama Democrats big government policies at Tea Parties across the nation, people criticize you for being the “party of no,” then ask them (politely without raising your voice), if they criticized the minority Democrats for “obstructing” the Republican agenda in the Bush Era.

Just tell them you’re saying, “No” to big government and by doing so, you’re affirming the values our founders fought for, from the first Tea Party just over 236 years ago until the inauguration of George Washington nearly sixteen years later–and for which American patriots kept fighting for the next two hundred years and change.

And if your critics style themselves as intellectuals, then tell them about the great French philosopher Albert Camus who defined “a rebel” as an individual who says “No.”  This non affirms the existence of a limit:  ”the categorical refusal of an interference deemed intolerable”.  Your “No” affirms all that you want to preserve.

In short, you’re not just saying, “No,” you’re making a philosophical statement.

I’m very psyched. Clayton, a loyal GP reader from the Mountain States, has made this sign he will carry tomorrow in DC!!

Here is a handy guide to Tea Party Protests around the nation tomorrow.

Oh, if you are a homophobic, socialist, racist liberal — please do not attend.  Your hatred of your fellow Americans who believe in the Constitution is not welcome.

UPDATE: A special plug for the Tea Party protest in San Francisco on Thursday!

Thursday April 15th

UNION SQUARE

4:00 PM to 7:00 PM

(between Macy’s and Tiffany’s)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I’m delighting in the serendipity of preparing for my college reunion while reading about left-wing attacks on the Tea Parties.  One (of the many, many) reason(s) I so grew to love my alma mater, America’s finest liberal arts college, was the presence of so many broad-minded liberals.  Yeah, there were a few narrow-minded leftists there, including a number of the faculty, but, by and large, people with differing political views politely agreed to disagree.

I recall so many heated discussions which ended not with recrimination, but respect.  We understood that our ideological adversaries had reached their conclusions in a thoughtful manner and held to said convictions with sincerity.  We didn’t end friendships because of political differences.

So, why, I wonder, can’t White House officials, Democratic Congressman and Senators and left-of-center opinion-makers show the same respect for the Tea Party movement? To be sure, many do, but they appear drowned out by a narrow-minded multitude.

We’ve got reports of Democratic officials in one state bending over backwards to deploy Tea Party Crashers.*   And we’ve got one guy boasting of his efforts to do the same.  Should they succeed, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that some in the MSM will report the left-wingers’ masquerade as genuine tea party hatred.

Unfortunately, too many of the Tea Party haters lack the respect for different viewpoints that was a hallmark of my undergraduate education.  Instead, it appears they were reeducated at graduated from the school of Saul Alinsky where intellectual discourse takes a back seat to political agitprop:

If you can’t make your enemies go away by ignoring them, call them racists. And if you can’t provide any evidence for your accusations of racism, just manufacture some. And you can always justify it to yourself, because if they’re not bad people, why don’t you like them?

*UPDATE: Michelle reports, “A denial from NH Democrat Kathy Sullivan at TPM. Waiting for response from Now Hampshire…” NH was the state in question.

One of the things I most enjoy about reading Michael Petrelis’ blog is that that leftist blogger minces no words when talking about the various gay organizations.  I believe he has called them Gay, Inc.

Now, while Michael and I agree that it would be a good thing (very good indeed) for gay Americans if Joe Solmonese stepped down as head of HRC and Geoff Kors left “Equality California,” we would certainly lock horns when the time came to pick their replacements.  He’d likely favor someone from the activist mold; I’d pick someone who didn’t have ties to left-wing organizations and Democratic politics.  And who knew how to speak Republican.

That said, Petrelis has a post today where he makes a great point about the gulf between gay bloggers (mostly on the left) and gay organizations (also on the left):

Yes, I know this blog post by SF Weekly’s gay writer Patrick O’Connor, who describes himself as “an uppity fag who is sick of everyone making a buck off his marriage,” is one more snark entry against the leading professional gay orgs at the state and federal level and doesn’t break new ground, but it’s still worthy of attention. Why?

Because it’s a shining example of how there are so few gay bloggers, okay, gays in general, who have either EQCA or HRC’s back. It’s damn near impossible to find pro-EQCA or pro-HRC blog posts, or independent thinkers who proudly back the orgs and their way of operating.

Emphasis added.  Petrelis then quotes Patrick Connors’ piece in the SF Weekly

Like the Human Rights Campaign’s Joe Solmonese, Geoff Kors from EQCA runs a gay ponzi scheme. Trust them! Invest in the organizations that provide their leaders with fat paychecks and watch the social justice trickle down back to the community. Unfortunately they are gay versions of Bernie Madoff. No on 8 was a multi-million dollar disaster. Why would any sane person support a repeal effort in the hands of EQCA? (more…)

Ever since I have begun intense work on my dissertation, I have not had the time to check all the blogs I normally do, so I try to first scan those sites, e.g., Memeorandum, Instapundit, the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential, Yahoo! and AOL’s main page, which are a ready source of information and opinion. To that mix, I usually add Michelle Malkin, not merely for her Buzzworthy Sidebar, but also because I know I can rely on that blogress to check her facts.

When a number of conservative bloggers (including some at this site) were quick to jump on an alleged hate crime committed against a Pennsylvania woman volunteering for the McCain campaign in 2008, Michelle threw cold water on our rush to judgment, contending that the “story smells awfully weird“. She was right to be skeptical as the story proved, just as that blogress had suspected, to be a hoax.

When some blogs reported that when “Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign fundraising chief, Allee Bautsch, and her boyfriend in the French Quarter of New Orleans” were assaulted in New Orleans because they were wearing Palin pins, Malkin offered a “cautionary note“.  She was right to express caution, as we learned soon after the story surfaced that “Bautsch and her boyfriend were NOT wearing Palin pins.”

While the two people were assaulted, the “the detail about the Palin buttons,” was as Allahpundit points out, “simply wrong“.

I don’t always agree with Michelle Malkin and can find her rhetoric a bit overheated at times, but her blog remains an excellent source of information and her commitment to fact-checking a textbook example in how to blog.  And in this busy time for me, combined with the other sources listed above, she helps us learn what’s going on in the world while offering a unique conservative perspective, with clever visuals and witty asides.

Seeing how well it worked out for them to run against then-President George W. Bush in ’06 and ’08, Democrats are hoping to repeat that strategy this fall.

Well, now Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm, has found that in a matchup with his successor, W. is within in the margin of error:

Americans are now pretty evenly divided about whether they would rather have Barack Obama or George W. Bush in the White House. 48% prefer Obama while 46% say they would rather have the old President back.

Pretty astounding numbers given W’s unfavorables when he left office.  Pollster Tom Jensen concludes, “Figuring out a way to make voters change their minds about the current President would be a much more effective strategy for Democrats than continuing to try to score points off the former one.”

I’d been wondering when W. would catch up with Obama in polling.  It’s happening sooner than a lot of people expected.

(H/t:  Jim Geraghty.)

(In a matchup with Ron Paul, Obama leads by a similarly slim margin.)

Last June, as the Senate was about to consider the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Mark Tapscott reminded us of something the thenjunior Senator from Illinois, a Mr. B. Obama, said:

And here is what he said in 2006 on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” regarding Senate Democrats who were then considering filibustering President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel Alito:

“Well, I will be supporting the filibuster because I think Judge Alito, in fact, is somebody who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values, you know.”

Can you imagine how commentators in the news media and left-wing bloggers will tie themselves in knots if a Republican Senator said a Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court was “contrary to core American values.”

Normally, I wouldn’t think it appropriate to filibuster the president’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, but, well, in judicial procedures, we often rely upon precedent.  And a certain Democratic Senator joined his colleagues in setting one.

Republican Senators who filibustered an Obama nominee would just be following in that Democrat’s footsteps.

Of late, I’ve been impressed that the opinion pieces AOL has linked on furnished on its main page come from sensible folk on both sides of the political aisle, but yesterday, they linked a piece by a writer from the left-wing publication, The Nation, which offered the standard, dishonest narrative about the Tea Party movement.  This wasn’t an opinion piece based on the movement, but yet another opinion piece based on the movement as defined by its extremes.

Telling us just exactly Why Tea Partiers Can’t Shake the Racism Label, Paul Wachter dredges up a few examples of obscure tea party activists who said some rather hateful things.  Now, by the Wachter standard, the Democratic Party is sure having a tough time proving that its rank-and-file don’t believe Barack Obama is the Messiah or that the president’s supporters don’t believe opponents of Obamacare are domestic terrorists.

Not just that, this left-winger, while bashing Tea Parties, presumes to tell us just exactly what our problem is, “What might help the tea party avoid accusations of racism would be if it were more forthcoming about what exactly it stands for.”

Um, Paul, we’re against Obama’s big expansion of the federal government and for freedom.  Other reporters who took the time to talk to Tea Party activists figured it out.  He might have also figured it out had he done the some instead of writing about the angry right-wingers who live inside his head.

Wow, this guy is just plain filled with bile.  Expect to see more such screeds on so-called mainstream news outlets in the coming days.

To the credit of AOL, while they did publish this silly screed, they posted it together with a report of the attempts to crash the Tea Party:  ”Opponents of the Tea Party movement are planning to crash the group’s rallies this week as a way to portray the conservative activists as out of touch with ordinary Americans.”

Christopher Weber who wrote the piece did some reporting; Wachter did a lot of projecting.

Just got a note from the Carly Fiorina campaign that the candidate Tom Coburn is backing to replace the big-spending Barbara Boxer in the United States Senate will be attending a Tea Party this Thursday, April 15 in San Diego from 10 to 11 AM at Tuna Harbor Park.

Wonder if her leading opponent will be protesting excessive government spending that day?

For those on the Left who have no problem with our president’s past own personal affiliations with the likes of Wm. Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, and Saul Alinsky who are constantly haranguing anybody to the right of Charles Schumer who doesn’t repudiate their own made-up contrivances of what the Tea Party movement is, comes a thoughtful objection from conservative John Podhoretz to David Goldman’s castigation of Obama.

Podhoretz takes issue with this conclusion to Goldman’s scathing piece (which, BTW, was about Obama’s destruction of our special relationship with Israel…a topic for another day):

Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

In fairness, Podhoretz rightly excoriates Goldman for his attack on the president’s mother, and even makes this poignant observation:

Spewing repellent nonsense about Obama’s mother and spinning bizarre notions about his innate foreignness — when he is in fact the possessor of one of the great and enduring American stories, and is in his own person a demonstration of precisely the kind of American exceptionalism that Obama so pointedly pooh-poohs — can be used to discredit his opposition.

My slight quibble with John’s objection is simply that, while I agree with him that Ms. Dunham’s predelictions or other vices are a non-sequitur and frankly unbecoming and inappropriate, one can take Goldman’s characterization of Obama being “a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs” can be taken metaphorically. I’d definitely see it that way. That description, I think, fits to a T Obama’s view of America (and espeicially Her exceptionalism), which can be seen as such, even for those among us who aren’t birthers.

Punch-line to this is, to the trolls who haunt our comments section, we are having the discussion about those among us who use false accusations and inflammatory rhetoric that cloud our shared disdain for the current president’s socialist proclivities. But perhaps it’s simply happening above the plane of imagined “N-word” accusations and spitting incidents, so they’re not noticing it.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Over the past seven years, there have been several grassroots protest movement of some significance and considerable staying power.  And each of these movements, like all large political movements, contain their fair share of nuts.  But, with several notable exceptions, the mainstream media (echoing the views of left-wing bloggers and the Democratic Party) has seen fit to define one by its extremes.

Lately, as I’ve been doing my cardio, I have been toting along Michael Graham’s That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom: Team Obama’s Assault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans.  On page 27, he writes,

Now, there are kooks in any big movement, and that includes the tea party movement.  Undoubtedly, when you have thousand of people at a tea party rally, you’re going to have a few “Obama Muslim Agent of Kenyan Commies!” signs to balance out the “Halliburton Hurricane Machines Caused Katrina!” banners you find at leftwing protests.

But, did the mainstream media and those who are thumping their chests in mock outrage, demanding that Republicans “differentiate themselves” from the isolated extremist in the Tea Party midst, ever dare differentiate themselves from the loons amidst the anti-war protesters (the most moderate of whom (most moderate of the loons, that is) were telling us that Bush lied us into a war for oil) or those devotees of candidate Obama calling the Democrat the Messiah?

The anti-war movement was indeed as grassroots phenomenon, with people genuinely opposed to our involvement in Iraq.  Obama’s campaign generated a genuine grassroots following, particularly among young people, wanting a new kind of politics, a change from the divisive politics of the Bush Era.

So, why must the spin this narrative, that Tea Parties are defined by their extremes while refusing to so define the anti-war movement and the Obama campaign, even going so far as trying to “crash” our protests so we fit their definition of what we’re supposed to be? Here, Graham provides the answer.  It’s their absence (to borrow a moose-hunting term) of intellectual ammunition.  Y’all in this Tea Party movement, like that talk-show host’s Mom, are right, because “instead of answering your concerns about bailouts, stimulus spending, and healthcare, they [i.e., Tea Party haters] just attack you.”

Seems name-calling is their means of ignoring our concerns.

And they accuse us of an absence of civility.

…the president of France makes more sense on national security than the president of the United States.

Why this comment on The Corner?  Because of this statement of reason by French President Sarkozy today.

WASHINGTON – France will not give up nuclear weapons because doing so would “jeopardise” its security, President Nicolas Sarkozy said this morning as global leaders gathered for a summit on nuclear security.

“I cannot jeopardise the security and safety of my country,” Sarkozy told CBS News here hours before US President Barack Obama opened the landmark summit of 47 nations in Washington.

The French leader said he could not abandon his nation’s nuclear weapons programme “on a unilateral basis in a world as dangerous as the one in which we live today”.

The Corner reader added to Jonah Goldberg that, “Sarkozy’s announcement on nukes demonstrates that we’ve crossed some sort of line, and not a good one.”

Obama is no Reagan.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Well, it was bound to happen.

Not satisfied with making a mockery of the Democratic Party, a group of Leftists is now working toward infiltrating the Tea Party movement by showing up and fabricating the heretofore completely unsubstantiated fantasy that the entire movement is predicated on racism, homophobia, misogyny, bla bla bla.

Great things here are easy to find:

First of all, they’re finally admitting their caricature of the Tea Party movement is so ludicrous that they have to contrive its existence for their pawns in the media.

Secondly, as this story goes viral, it will finally put to rest the hallucinations of the likes of those who see spitting and hear racial epithets at the events.

We may be reaching critical mass for the Tea Party movement wherein its detractors are so discredited, the genuine and grass-roots nature of its origins can no longer be deined by the sheep of the old-school media. Ironically, by this flagrant and pathetic attempt, the Tea Party enemies will likely undermine their own efforts.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Law Professor William A. Jacobson has a great short post on Jason Levin, the left-winger behind the attempt to crash the Tea Parties.  So, my question for Mr. Levin is this:  if you’re so convinced that the Tea Parties are “absolutely” full of “homophobes, racists or morons”, why then do you need to infiltrate the rallies to “to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic and moronic”?

(Maybe this update merits a post of its own.)