Economy Alarm: Pelosi Dismisses Widespread Frustration over Taxation and Runaway Spending
Pelosi Dismisses Widespread Frustration over Taxation and Runaway Spending
Despite Massive Turnout, Pelosi Calls Middle Class TEA Party Attendees “Astroturf”
PELOSI: “What they want is a continuation of the failed economic policies of President George Bush which got us in the situation we are in now. What we want is a new direction. … This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.” (KTVU-SF (FOX) San Francisco, 4/15/09)
“Though the protests are being billed as nonpartisan, the energy and buzz surrounding them has been building on conservative (and libertarian) Web sites for weeks, even before some 30,000 Americans took the streets in about 40 cities in the first nationwide tea parties in February, and before CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s now infamous rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Jason Norrett, a 34-year-old stay-at-home dad in Boise, Idaho, created his blog,Tea Party 2009, in late January. ‘I just had to do something to voice my frustration,’ Norrett, a Republican who voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in November, said in a phone interview….”
“But for the online right, many of whom have been energized by Obama’s presidency in the same way President Bush galvanized the online left, today’s tea parties are just one step in building a conservative grassroots movement. To conservative blogger Matt Lewis, who writes for PoliticsDaily.com, today’s parties ‘are just one small step in the right direction.’
“‘Look, the online conservative movement, if you compare it to what the liberals have with MoveOn and the like, is still in its infancy,’ Lewis said in an interview. ‘And there is no one person, or one organization, controlling it.’
“That movement flexes its new muscles today.” (Jose Antonio Vargas, “Tea Parties a Test of Conservative Online Organizing,” Washington Post’s The Clickocracy, 4/15/09)
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