Saturday, April 18, 2009

All You Need To Know About The Tea Parties

Nate Silver has compiled a list of non-partisan estimates of attendance at last Wednesday's anti-tax "tea parties." Being a good Arkie who is interested in the dealings of my home state, I perused his list for the figures for cities in Arkansas. There's an interesting name at the top of the list. Here are the figures:

Baxter, Ark. 1000
Fayetteville, Ark. 700
Little Rock, Ark. 500
Fort Smith, Ark. 500
El Dorado, Ark. 300
Harrison, Ark. 300

Little Rock is the capital and largest city of the state. Fort Smith and Fayetteville are the second and third largest cities, respectively. El Dorado and Harrison are medium-sized towns (15 to 20 thousand residents). Where is Baxter? Why is it on the list? It's a tiny little community in northern Arkansas that is the home of the greatest concentration of Klan members in the state.

I'm sure it's just coincidence.

4 comments:

Cindy said...

Really. Racist crap gets a whole new breath of life from the tea parties.

Most of the posters and flyers I saw had pictures of the President as a monkey, and other references to black people taking over the country.

I can only hope that they get smaller and smaller.

Aaron said...

More political bigotry in action. I suspect we'll see more and more of this sort of thing as the electorate becomes increasingly polarized.

twif said...

i didn't pay much attention, given how the willful misunderstanding of history annoyed the hell out of me. there is a vast difference between not having representation and having your prefered canidate lose. the only people who would have had a claim to a "tea party" would be residents of DC.

catnapping said...

It's been a couple of weeks, now. I think it's safe to say their attempt to start some "grassroots" revolution is a flat out failure.

The right wingnuts have become the laughing stock. I can't remember the name of what we call a scoff that's also a smothered laugh, but that's the noise so many Americans are making when they see these images, or hear about the latest remarks by Cheney, Rove, or any of the propagandists at Fox.

I'm not that big a fan of Obermann, but I think his presentations of worst persons, etc...have actually helped in shaping the way the rest of the media reports some of the christianist/neocon/racist antics.

It seems to me too, that since the GOP isn't controlling whitehouse talking points these days, any attempts to fake rightwing groundswells isn't gonna as much media support.