TPM’s story about the lily white Uni-Tea “diversity” rally this weekend might give one the misimpression that all of the Tea Party’s candidates are white. In my own district, NY-29, formerly held by Eric Massa, an African American tea party candidate, Janice Volk, has emerged to challenge Republican shoo-in Tom Reed in the September primary.
Volk has filed a few dozen more signatures than necessary to make the ballot, which means she’ll probably have them challenged and won’t be an official candidate in a few days. Until then, her campaign manager is emphasizing the fact that she’s a “black female Republican” and making unsubstantiated claims of racist and sexist posts in local blogs.
me
It’s nice to see that despite their differences in gender and ethnicity the teabaggers can come together and embrace what unites them, their complete insanity.
cathyx
A black female republican. She’s already voting against her best interest. Doesn’t she realize that people talk against her behind her back?
Mumphrey
Ugh. I don’t understand why any black person would ever even be a run-of-the-mill Republican, much less a teabagger. And, for the record, lest Breitbart or somebody troll through here looking for “proof” that liberals don’t think blacks have the right to be Republicans, yes, blacks do have the right to be Republicans. What I don’t get is why any minority would choose to belong to a party that, 1: welcomed all the unreconstructed racists into the party, beginning in the 60’s; 2: is dead set against any programs that would help minorities; and , 3: still plays sleazy racist games, even today.
I could ask the same thing about women and gays, I guess, but even white Republicans know, and are sometimes kin to, women and gays, so it doesn’t seem so weird that women or gays are sometimes Republicans, even teabaggers, as it does that minorities would be…
JGabriel
Which, in terms of being against your own self-interest, is like running for office as a gay jewish Nazi.
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gnomedad
This totally proves the teabaggers are hella diverse. So there.
JGabriel
It’s probably a scam. The consultants know there aren’t any black Republicans in the House or the Senate, because Republicans won’t vote for blacks.
But they can still advertise for donations and funnel them back into consulting fees. Thus the scam.
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Comrade Javamanphil
Rocking the suburbs indeed.
mistermix
@JGabriel: I wondered about that, too, but she hasn’t filed a FEC report, so she hasn’t spent more than $5K (or she wants to go to federal prison).
Keith
Good lord, it took me 5 minutes to read this post because IE8 will…not…stop…crashing…on…BJ.com. Why on earth does WP use javascript for layout? (ie6sux.js throws errors, and whatever is running in non-compat mode is flat-out crashing the browser)
harlana
You should check out Vanessa Jean Louis’ blog where she defends what Brietbart did because he was “in pain” over the teabag movement and all giddy about receiving Glenn Beck love. Who is this woman and by whom is she being paid? And how much?
meepmeep09
@JGabriel:
Been known to happen. Seems like a pretty good racket for amoral parasitic types.
mistermix
@Keith: My copy of IE8 immediately put B-J into “compatibility view” and it works fine. Maybe you’ve disabled that feature? I dunno, because I don’t use IE.
Bella Q
@harlana: Wasn’t she the Great Northern Grifter’s token conservative of color who’s a big fan of all things Palin?
flukebucket
@harlana:
I had never heard of her until you mentioned her so I had to take a trip over to her blog. It is lots of fun. I think she is only 24 years old or something like that and says that she knows her political views will evolve. God, let’s hope so.
rickstersherpa
The race game is one we liberals love to play, and thereby ignoring the bigger elephant in the room “Class.” Why all the hostility to brown immigrants, legal and illegal? Why the increase tension between Blacks and White, there is a great story in the Financial Times, linked at Mark Thoma’s Economist View blog, from which this quote is drawn.
“….The barometer is economic. But the anger is human and increasingly political. “I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America,” says Spence. “When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years….”
My own view for sometime is that money bags who finance the Conservative Movement, people like the Kochs, Wyleys, and Waltons have a vision for the U.S. that sees the Latin American system as their goal. It is certainly is for the Grover Norquist and Hayley Barbour types, although perhaps more of a permanent bourbon rule, with Mississippi as exemplar, and like Mississippi, use race conflicts to keep the working and middle classes divided into different tribes.
Shalimar
If you have personal ambition or just like reading your own name in the newspaper, which would you rather be:
A) One of a dozen black teabaggers in your district, with a party that wants to pretend they’re diverse in districts they can’t win; or
B) One of 50,000 black Democrats in a district where Democrats probably take black voters for granted because what are they going to do, vote for the party that actively hates them?
A seems to have worked pretty well for this one candidate at least. Also, having grown up white in Alabama, I have known plenty of racists who really like their black neighbors because they aren’t like “those people”. I’m sure they treat Mrs. Volk well personally.
Allison W.
I don’t get it either, but I guess there has to be a handful of Uncle Ruckus’s in any group.
Allison W.
@Shalimar:
I’m sorry. No rational minority will compare Dems and the republican tea party and choose the tea party. The tea party is not even trying hard enough to pretend to be diverse. You present it as a hard choice and its not. If she feels ignored then she should organize and get the Dem party to notice that she has a role to play. Running into enemy camp? dumb.
Keith
@mistermix: Sometimes the setting sticks, but usually it doesn’t (I currently either got it to stay in compatibility mode, or whatever was killing the browser went away). I *think* it’s all related to the javascript layout code (which I really hate to see…JS is getting overused and abused these days – see TMZ.com for a prime example; there are declarative (better) ways to fix browser-specific layout, and IE’s current production JS engine is flat-out terrible)
It’s a shame, because this site is my favorite one (seriously) out of the 50 or so favorites I have. I really cannot wait for IE9 to come out, since it has a rewritten JS engine and also has HTML5, so I should, in theory, be able to finally expunge the last of the Adobe software from my machine (Flash and Reader are horribly-written plug-ins…how they have gotten this far for so long putting out that crap is amazing to me).
parksideq
I’ve never met a tea partier (they’re few and far between in Brooklyn, thank FSM), but if I do, I’ll be sure to ask him why he thinks no black people are lining up to join. As one of “those people”, it’ll be fun just to see what one would say to my face about how I’m the “real racist” for voting Democratic.
Word to the wise: slandering the first black president in racial terms makes black people think that that’s what you think about all of us, not just him. The tea party continues to prove this assumption right; until that changes, no chance in hell the GOP gets more than 5% of the black vote ever again.
joe from Lowell
I have to remember the black woman who ran as Pat Buchanan’s running mate for President on the Reform Party ticket – the one who turned out to a revolutionary socialist.
Brachiator
@Mumphrey:
The short answer is probably that the Democrats used to be filled with racists. People fought to throw them out. There is an effort, more fitful and half-assed currently, to do the same with the Republican Party. If the GOP does not want to wither away, they are going to have to deal with the racist strain, especially now that it is being whipped up by tea baggers and others suffering from racial anxiety because America has a black president.
IM
Which, in terms of being against your own self-interest, is like running for office as a gay jewish Nazi.
She already has a proper german name: Volk. Has to work on this janice thing, though.
And a ready made campaign slogan:
“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein…”
mark boggs
And only one other comment appreciating the Ben Folds love.
You better look out because I’m gonna say f%$k!
Kenn
Were there _any_ non-whites at the uni-bagger rally?
Indie Tarheel
@parksideq:
The irony is that this message will sail safely over the head of every one of those who most need to hear it. Feature, not bug, etc.
El Cid
I think what will really lure in black votes for the GOP is efforts to repeal the 14th Amendment.
Shalimar
@Allison W.: I don’t know. For one, who said she is necessarily rational? Also, I consider myself a rational person and I compare Democrats and Republicans all the time and think “holy crap, we are so screwed.” Certainly not choosing the tea party, those people are nuts, but I really don’t think Dems are going to accomplish much either. We are a corporate elite society now, and eventually the former middle class will be ground up into food for rich people’s pets.
someguy
@Indie Tarheel:
Fortunately, slandering black Republican candidates, e.g. Uncle Ruckus, can be done a lot more cheaply, and the base won’t cotton on to the tactic, as it were.
Anne Laurie
@rickstersherpa:
Agreed. Check the Lexicon under “Banana Republican“.