aaaaand paranoia sets in with the tea baggers

underpants

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Tue Apr-14-09 04:31 AM
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aaaaand paranoia sets in with the tea baggers

Malkin wrote that she's “heard” reports that groups like ACORN may send in "ringers" to disrupt the anti-tax demonstrations. Except, those rumors seem to have been started by her. According to The American Prospect, “I don't mean that someone reported ACORN activists showing up at a tea party and wrote about it on their blog, or that some local newspaper published a story to that effect, I literally mean it started on the Internet. Michelle Malkin linked to this post on a conservative blog, which linked to this post on an online tea party Internet forum. Meanwhile, Malkin has been twittering about this for days, hyping the ACORN/Kos/Obama conspiracy axis.”

Justin Higgins, an organizer for a protest in Columbus, Ohio, where up to 1,500 people are expected, said he'll be watching for dissenters, too. "We're worried about people involved with ACORN doing 'gatebusting,' or trying to get in front of the TV cameras," Higgins told FOXNews.com. "We're going to have people looking out for that." Wow, they've got people. I'm still trying to figure out, though, why Fair and Balanced Fox News' Cavuto, Malkin and the organizers of this “non-partisan” event are so concerned about the possibility of someone who DISAGREES showing up. What's so bad about a Fair and Balanced approach to both sides of this right-wing-driven issue by some very un-Fox-like media outlet?

John O'Hara, membership manager for the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank promoting limited government, keeps insisting, despite the party-goers' desperation to admit only participants in lock-step with the right-wing agenda, that the event is non-partisan. “The thing about this movement is that nobody owns this,” O'Hara said. “It's a nonpartisan thing . . . .”

But, contrary to the right-wingers' conspiracy theories, Charles Jackson, ACORN's national communications director, told FOXNews.com that the organization will actually be holding rallies of its own. "ACORN is going to be engaged in a series of rallies across the country on April 15th in support of the priorities outlined in President Obama's first budget -- investments in education, health care, and getting Americans back to work," Jackson wrote in a statement. "This is the first we've heard of these 'tea parties' and, frankly, a gripe-fest by a bunch of conservatives who's preferred economic policies got us in this mess in the first place is of no interest to us." Couldn't have said it better myself.

http://www.newshounds.us/2009/04/12/relax_fox_news_acorn_has_other_plans_on_tax_day.php

Malkin went on to warn, “It’s already happened once before — at the Denver anti-porkulus rally last month, when the Media Matters/Daily Kos crowd shifted media attention away from the policy message by manufacturing fake outrage about some stunt-puller who showed up with a sign comparing Obama to Hitler that I didn’t see and asked for a picture. The local newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, took the bait.” Wow, they took the bait. You mean they actually reported both sides of a story? Horrifying. And, for the record, Malkin didn’t exactly look like she was being hoodwinked. The sign with the swastika was proudly displayed right under her nose as the camera clicked. And Malkin's initial response was not outrage at the guy who got her to pose with the sign but to attack those who criticized her for posing with him