Activist Hub Radio 11/14/10

This week Adam and I continued our discussion of the fallout from the Republican takeover of the House. We featured Jon Stewart's interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, and the false equivalences between liberal opposition to Bush, and the Tea Party's opposition to the government. We also talked about the deficit commission and attempts to pass the Bush Tax cuts during the lame duck session.






Links
Washington Post Oped calling for President Barack Obama not to serve a second term

Digby's post

Maddow/Stewart Interview

How Sad Are They? Tea Party Leaders Lie About Restore Sanity Rally

I'm not sure how empty your life would have to be to think this is a good idea.

Leaders of the St. Louis Tea Party, including Bill Hennessy, Jim Hoft, Darin Morley, and Ben Evans, went to the arch grounds after the main Restore Sanity satellite rally was over to take pictures pretending that the crowd size was small. Here's a picture Hennessy took with the caption: "tens rally for democrats on steps of the arch:"



The St. Louis tea party official Twitter account also posted this picture with the caption"Restoring Sanity 10 people at a time"



Except that, unfortunately for the tea party, the Post-Dispatch was there during the actual rally, and they reported that 1,000 people were there:


(image credit: Post-Dispatch. BTW, this crowd is roughly half of what the tea party had when they hosted a rally for the entire middle third of the country)

For the life of me, I don't even understand why they would care about a comedy rally. Isn't it obvious that their best option would be to focus on Get Out the Vote efforts and simply ignore Stewart and Colbert? I think they look incredibly petty by getting so upset about a rally by a couple of Comedy Central comedians (however great those comedians are) asking for sanity in political discourse.

Sheryl Crow to Perform At Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear

According to a National Park Service document, Missouri-born singer Sheryl Crow will be performing at the Jon Stewart/Stephan Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington D.C. this weekend. Other performers include the Roots as well as Jeff Tweedy and Mavis Staple.

Crow also recorded an automated phone call for Democratic candidate Tommy Sowers last week.

St. Louis Rally to Restore Sanity at 1000+ RSVPs: Tea Party Express Draws About 100

The St. Louis "Gateway to Sanity" even in conjunction with John Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity has now drawn over 1,000 RSVPs. This is in addition to hundreds of people from St. Louis going to Washington D.C. for the weekend to attend the actual rally.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party Express was in town and could only attract about 100 people:

Local Tea Party members are blaming “location confusion” for the relatively low turnout at Wednesday’s rally in downtown St. Louis.

It was slated to be held in St. Charles, but was switched to Kiener Plaza at the last minute.

About 100 ralliers did show up, and they remain optimistic about next week’s election.

In fairness, there was also another event last night with such luminaries (or should I say obscureraries?) as Dick Morris, Dana Loesch, and #pdk in attendence. That event had about 100 RSVPs according to facebook.

Now I predict that the tea party and lazy media will reference the 9/12 Tea Party event in St. Louis which drew a couple thousand people as evidence of the local strength of the tea party. However, that event was one of three national tea party events across the country organized by national groups like the Tea Party Patriots (the other two were in Sacremento and D.C.). It was representative of the tea party membership across the Midwest, and not the St. Louis area. Yesterday's events, however, were representative of the local tea party. Nevertheless, you just know the local media will continue to use that 9/12 number to pretend that the St. Louis tea party is more influential locally than they actually are.

h/t RFT.