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July 05, 2009 06:08 PM UTC

Colorado "Tea Parties" Awfully Short On Press Coverage

  • 43 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

We’ve been checking our regular news sources and Google Alerts like we do every morning, but today we were especially looking for coverage of yesterday’s “Tea Party” protest events–a number of which were scheduled to take place in Colorado. As we mentioned a couple of days ago a “Tea Party” in Grand Junction was of particular interest, with Senate candidate Ken Buck speaking and all-but-announced gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry possibly even declaring his candidacy on a Gadsden flag-draped stage.

What surprises us the most today is the lack of coverage. There’s a brief story from 9NEWS about the protest in Castle Rock that begins this way:

The Tea Parties that took place this 4th of July were smaller than the massive ones we saw this spring but the message was the same…

There’s another relatively short story in the Pueblo Chieftain that more or less reads like a press release (a Chieftain columnist was the headline speaker at the local rally apparently), proudly hailing the “strong crowd” of “100-plus.” Curiously, there’s not a lot else–nothing we’ve found yet on the Grand Junction “Tea Party” (we assume that means Penry pushed back his announcement to a better news cycle than July 4th weekend), nothing in the Denver Post, no scurrilous photos of children carrying “Obama is a monkey” signs from Progress Now, hardly a peep out of the Colorado right-wing blogs as of this writing. Did everybody stay out partying past deadline?

Because it’s either that, or this thing was a flop. Help us out, folks, as (or if) links emerge proving that “Tea Parties” were in fact held “across Colorado” yesterday, post them in this thread.

Comments

43 thoughts on “Colorado “Tea Parties” Awfully Short On Press Coverage

  1. about the castle rock event. I wouldn’t normally post a link to that site because it’s absolutely terrible, but it was one of the only things I could find on yesterday’s teabagging.

    Here’s my favorite part, emphasis mine:

    [T]he event … ended with the huge crowd enthusiastically singing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”.

    I’m sure there were literally dozens of people there.

    1. what the heck Robinson was talking about with the huge crowd, because the photo of Tea Party-waving protesters depicts all of TWO people, with another half dozen in the background who appear to be celebrating an old-fashioned Fourth of July.

      No doubt there were some others (whoever took the photo, and the blogger lists a few office-holders who hate government), but I wonder if they did the same thing in rock-ribbed Castle Rock as they did elsewhere — showed up at an existing Fourth celebration and waved a few flags and counted everyone who showed up for the fireworks as an attendee.

    2. We hadn’t seen that post, Rocky Mountain Right must not participate in the vaunted People’s Press Collective™. Thanks for the link.

    3. …whatever you want about the protests.  I would agree that attendance dropped way off for these events.  I explained why below.  If you want to call them “crazy,” “right-wing,” “morons,” go for it.  But can’t you grow up enough to quit pulling stunts from the MSNBC play book?  They weren’t “tea bagging.”  They aren’t “tea baggers.”

      1. or Hitler or Lenin or what have you, they don’t earn derision?

        I don’t think they are tea baggers, I think they are more tea baggees.

          1. most of those people are clowns. I would agree with two things in those pictures: The Iraq war made us less safe and Bush/Cheney violated the constitution and need to be held accountable to the law.

            But watch as I agree with you.

            Truthers (911 was a government plot) are just as ridiculous as Birthers (Obama wasn’t born in America).

            I am generally opposed to anti globalization protesters–they hold the same type of anti government ideas as the minutemen and militia movements of the right.  If you’ll note Recreate 68, a front for these types, was roundly criticized by Democrats last year.

            Here’s the big difference: the Democratic party in general rejects these elements while the GOP encourages the racist anti government fringers.

            I am not a hypocrite, not by a long shot.  Please keep exercising your free speech and I will keep exercising mine.  The funniest thing about conservatives is they pretend to be tough, but they are the most fearful group of self indulgent victims in the political world.

            I don’t think you guys are tea baggers–I think you lack the proper equipment to engage in the practice.

            1. We do embrace the so-called “fringe” groups that promote smaller government, but they’re not “fringe” and certainly aren’t racist.  I wont try to argue with you that the Democrat party embraces groups like Code Pink, ACORN, etc…

              The ‘victims’ are the groups that vote for Democrats based on promises of new benefits paid for by the “ultra rich,” “big oil,” and multi-national corporations.  Unfortunately, those same rich people are leaving New York and California in droves, and those business (Google “Tim Hortons” for this morning’s news) are leaving the country to take advantage of corporate tax rates that are almost 70% lower.

              And just as a side note:  I do think it’s weird that Obama wont release his birth certificate, but I believe he was born on U.S. soil.  I just don’t understand why he wont shut those people up by releasing it.  It would do us all some good if we could move on to his more substantial problems…

              1. This is a sad moment, for a while there I was almost prepared to take you seriously. Unfortunately, you appear to be right at home in the tea party conspiracy lunatic crowd you’re defending. Have a nice day.

                1. …I was so disinterested in the argument that Barack Obama wasn’t a citizen of the United States that I never bothered to Google search for a copy of his birth certificate.  I read news from more than half a dozen sources every day and not one of them has ever even commented on the issue.

                  To the person above–it’s not that I can’t move on.  I was never stuck on that issue in the first place.  But the people who continue to question his citizenship don’t do the vast majority of conservatives any good.  They distract liberals from the legitimate debates.

                  1. Sorry, just trying to get people out of the way of your backpedaling.

                    This conversation is really entertaining, I will say that much.

              2. And just as a side note:  I do think it’s weird that Obama wont release his birth certificate, but I believe he was born on U.S. soil.  I just don’t understand why he wont shut those people up by releasing it.  

                Because, apparently, when he released it, he didn’t address it to you personally?

                Obama’s birth certificate examined and verified

                The Associated Press quoted Chiyome Fukino as saying that both she and the  registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama’s original birth certificate.

                Your imperviousness to facts reminds me of a Creationist I know, who said Evolution is wrong because she’d never personally seen anything evolve…

              3. http://www.factcheck.org/elect

                FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as “supporting documents” to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.

                Some folks just can’t let go…but don’t blame Obama for that.  

              4. In the US we have these things called deductions.   When looking at marginal rates it is important to look at the deductions to calculate the true tax burden. If corporations want to lower their marginal rates then they have to give up their deductions.

                This has been offered to them, but they won’t take the deal.  Why?  because us corporations pay one of the lowest tax rates in the world when measured by the actual rates paid.

                Now that the tax lesson is done lets move on to the rest.

                I think a belief in smaller government is a valid belief, and at times the government has intruded too far in to the economy.  However, this is not one of those times.  This economic collapse has everything to do with the failure of the government to regulate the banking industry.

                When Bush nationalized the banking system (it was done under Bush) I supported it even though it was his (and Clinton and Reagan for that matter) mistake that made it necessary.

                I really hate taking over the auto companies, I don’t even think that is a place  that needs a lot of regulation, but the failure to regulate the banking industry has caused such a massive death spiral that we can’t afford the unemployment that would have come with a collapse of GM.

                So you see, your religious devotion to the idea of “limited government” was such an abject failure, that it actually made it necessary for the government to step in with a heavy hand. However, if you looked at the evidence and concluded that some government is necessary to a healthy nation and that there are some thing the government does better than the private sector we wouldn’t have had to inject ourselves so radically into the economy.

                And before you hyperventilate and reflexively bloviate that “there is nothing that the government does better than private sector,” let me ask you one question:  “why do you hate the military?” That is the biggest piece of the “big government” you hate so much.

                I am pretty happy with the performance of the military and whilst there are areas I believe the private sector exceeds the performance of the government, it is clear there are areas that the government exceeds the performance of the private sector.

                Now if you and the tea baggies would like to a discussion about what the proper scope of the government should be and how we should pay for it: fire away.  Yell “we hate the military,” “we hate schools,” “we hate roads,” “we hate social security,” “we hate courts,” “we hate prisons.” Wait you do yell that stuff so I credit you folks with a degree of honesty–too bad most rational people disagree with you.  

                I wouldn’t mock you guy if you just kept the racist and anti American rhetoric at home.

                1. …what anti-American or racist rhetoric I’ve been evoking.  I’m as pro-American as they come and I couldn’t give a $hit if our president was a smurf.  Blue skin, black skin, white skin…it’s all the same to me.  I just disagree with all of the man’s policies.

                  As for the economic crisis, I think the root issue was the housing industry.  And the problem was caused by mortgages offered by Fannie & Freddie (i.e. the government) to those who couldn’t afford them, at the direction of Barney Frank (i.e. the government).

                  1. Fannie and Freddie, though founded as government entities, were privatized in the 90’s.

                    In actuality Fannie and Freddie used to control about 90% of the mortgage market in the 90’s, but they were down to about 35% in 2006.

                    So perhaps the problem was too much private sector lending?  I kid I kid.

                    The problem was actually a failure to regulate the rating agencies.  The congress actually offered the SEC the authority after Enron, but the anti government people in the Bush white house didn’t want the authority.

                    You see without the rating agencies (a private sector regulator) green lighting the MBS and CDOs they neer would hae been able to place the debt that fed the housing sector.

                    The other was a failure to regulate CDS which Cheney and his pal Phil Graham lobbied hard to block from regulatory oversight in 2004.

                    And before you go blaming the CRA.  CRA wasn’t a problem until, wait for it, 2004 when the Bush treasury deregulated the standards that banks could use to meet CRA.

                    1. the guy is a communist.  A real one, not one like the the tea baggees like to call the president. (note the website on his sign).  

                      I wouldn’t stand next to this guy nor would he be welcome in the Democratic party.

                      This is my point–Democrats don’t embrace the fringe like the GOP does.

                      So I don’t really see your point.

              5. put out there on the internet and how many times does the state of Hawaii have to attest to its authenticity? What’s weird is that none of the other candidates have ever been asked to produce theirs.

                The whole thing is so clearly just part of the racist wacko contigent’s agenda to paint Obama as “other”. It’s the birther wackos who are weird, as evidenced by Obama’s decisive win in spite of all their ridiculous garbage.

              6. FYI…these are from “restore democracy.org” and refer to “American” corporations.

                •Eighty-two of the 275 companies, almost a third of the total, paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2001 to 2003. In the years they paid no income tax, these companies earned $102 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But instead of paying $35.6 billion in income taxes as the statutory 35 percent corporate tax rate seems to require, these companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they received outright tax rebate checks from the U.S. Treasury, totaling $12.6 billion. These companies’ “negative tax rates” meant that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years.

                •Twenty-eight corporations enjoyed negative federal income tax rates over the entire 2001-2003 period. These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $44.9 billion over the three years, included, among others: Pepco Holdings (-59.6 percent tax rate), Prudential Financial (-46.2 percent), ITT Industries (-22.3 percent), Boeing (-18.8 percent), Unisys (-16.0 percent), Fluor (-9.2 percent) and CSX (-7.5 percent), the company previously headed by current Secretary of the Treasury John Snow.

                •In 2003 alone, 46 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes. These 46 companies told their shareholders they earned U.S. pretax profits in 2003 of $42.6 billion, yet they received tax rebates totaling $5.4 billion. Almost as many companies, 42, paid no tax in 2002, reporting $43.5 billion in pretax profits, yet receiving $4.9 billion in tax rebates. From 2001 to 2003, the number of no-tax companies jumped from 33 to 46, an increase of 40 percent.

                •In 2001, the Treasury paid corporations $40 billion in tax refunds, a third more than the 1998-2000 average.

                •Then in 2002 and 2003, after the law was changed to expand tax subsidies and make it easier for corporations to carry back excess tax breaks to earlier years, corporate tax refunds skyrocketed to an average of $63 billion a year – more than double the 1998-2000 average.

                Corporations are now paying the lowest levels of taxes in the post-World War II era.

              7. BR, google the utube accounts of the Mccain rally at the National Western last fall.

                As the red party withers into teabaggers, homophobes, racists, and “anti-entitlementists”, (unless it’s them getting the entitlement), that same party is getting meaner, nastier, and more vitriolic.

                Palin is the perfect example of today’s red. Comes out swingin’. Viscious, snarky, accusational, self agrandizing, all about family values and the moral high ground as opposed to “the other party”, and pugilistic. “If it’s President Obama’s idea, it must be a bad idea. After all, he’s black AND a Democrat”. Hoping and praying we get hit again so they can blame the President. (Ask shooter cheney).That’s the republican plank today.

                Until………..somebody, anybody, punches back. Now it’s different. Poor repub. Picked on, unfairly criticized, backshot, misunderstood. Clusterfox news and it’s minions like Billo and Beck, Hannity and Rove, have turned the republican base into whining, sniveling sissies. By today’s standards, Ike would have been a conservative Democrat, snickering at the cowardice of the current republican party. Those “brave Americans” willing to commit our military to any armed conflict as long as it doesn’t involve them or theirs.

                 

          2. Aren’t you guys the party of “personal responsibility?”

            Why not just take responsibility for the fact that your message resonates with damned near nobody?

            If you actually took responsibility without name-calling, I might listen to you.

            But you haven’t, so I won’t.

            Better luck with a different message–one that actually means more to Real People than taking the day off.  That’s a pretty low bar to clear, but you haven’t quite cleared it yet.

            And better luck being true to yourselves and your message of personal responsibility.  Because you aren’t.

      2. Please Boulder R. You folks saddled yourselves with the whole “tea bagging” thing.  If Rs are going to come up with that kind of little gem or have Canadian mountains standing in for Colorado peaks, or hold press conferences in which they cast themselves as cover boys on their very own self-written cheap romance novels, or blather about quitting because they’re not quitters, they can expect some ribbing.  If the shoe was on the other foot Rs certainly wouldn’t be giving Ds a pass.  

  2. But I’ve got a report from Frisco.

    The teabaggers marched in Frisco’s Parade down Main Street.  Frisco is a small town, and everyone was cheering and hollering for all of the floats, marchers, and kids on bikes, etc.

    As the teabaggers passed by (only ~10 people), the crowd got notably more silent.  There was some muttering and grumbling but mostly people just waited for them to pass.

    One man in front of me, though, posed the simple question to the marchers, “But didn’t taxes pay for this parade?”

    Frisco = Total Flop

  3. How weird that they are so lackadaisical getting their content out to the world? That’s proof enough the tea parties flopped. Where are the crowd shots? Don’t have any? Why not?

    Jon Caldara’s lackey Ari Armstrong posted some video of Dildo’s speech at the Arvada tea party–don’t eat the brown acid, man!

    I scanned through it and didn’t see any crowd pans, applause sounded like maybe 50 people tops.

    I’m calling it for the July 4 Tea Parties: FAIL.

    1. Maybe they secretly held their party at Yasgur’s Farm?  No media coverage or public anoouncements?  Where are Chip Monck, John Morris and Muskrat when ya need “em? Maybe the journalists took Wavy Gravy’s annoucement of “breakfast in bed” for everyone seriously this morning?

    1. “With some work, you’ll become as irrelevant at the anti-war left was.”

      No more beer for me!

      Also, btw, how can you “drink” LSD? Does Jon know something I don’t?

      1. not the green stuff.  Would explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre activity.  Can’t blame the Colorado teabaggers for not showing up though.  Isn’t it unpatriotic to trash America on the 4th of July?

  4. First and foremost, I think the lesser attendance on the nation’s most important holiday can be easily explained by **the fact that it was the nation’s most important holiday.**  I could’ve gone to the one in Aurora, but instead I went with my family–as per tradition–to Folsom Field to listen to guys from Boulder Open Space sing about zero waste and lower carbon emissions before the fireworks show.

    The Independence Day tea parties were meant to be celebrations first, and protests second.  Also, I think the proximity to the passage of the stimulus package might’ve given the April 15th events a big boost that this one didn’t have.  But trust me…on the far off chance that cap-n-tax passes, there will be bigger protests than you have seen yet.

    In any case, the link that someone posted on Facebook about the party in Arvada:

    http://www.examiner.com/x-1174

    1. They’re supposed to get a pass for scheduling their little tea parties for July 4? That almost seems like a self-fulfilling excuse – they knew they wouldn’t get as many people this time and they needed a reason. Why not schedule it on a day you know nobody will show up?

      If not, that’s even more pathetic isn’t it?

      Most people I know who want to join a movement would rather see the second event thrown by said movement be bigger, not a fraction of the size of the first event. That’s not a movement at all actually, it’s just a FAIL.

    2. were out hiking the Appalachian Trail spending time with their precious families instead of attending their important anti-government/hate Obama meetings or maybe they were just banging their mistresses and lost track of time.  You never know with conservatives what excuse they will have for their failures.  It is always entertaining and speaks to their inner victim.  “It’s not my fault I’m a failure.  Somebody else did this to me”.

    3. Protests?

      Those aren’t protests, man. Protests go in with a new idea, something to challenge another idea that they don’t particularly like. The best way to defeat Idea A is to present Idea B and convince people that B is better than A.

      These are not protests. These are a bunch of people getting together because they’ve been fed huge quantities of misinformation about Obama, the Democrats, and the government in general. The sheer volume of ignorance and hate that I saw at those parties the first time and this time is mind-boggling.

      No one is saying, “Hey, let’s try this.” They’re saying, “Whatever it is that the Democrats do is utterly pointless and ruins babies and Jesus.”

      I’m sorry. Your astroturf parties lost ALL credibility with me when it was decided, from the top of the campaign, to be about Obama and how different he is instead of coming up with new ideas to HELP the country solve these huge problems. But I guess it is just easier to say “You suck!” than to present any alternatives. I understand. I am that lazy on Saturday mornings, too.

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