Trouble Brewing in Teabaggerland!

From Hot Dish Politics at the Star Tribune:

In Missouri, it’s Rep. Michele Bachmann vs. Joe the Plumber and the Tea Party.

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Hanni-tea Insani-tea

From the Cincinnatti Enquirer:

CINCINNATI – Fox News unexpectedly canceled conservative talk show host Sean Hannity’s appearance Thursday night at the Cincinnati Tea Party Tax Day rally, leaving a lot of disappointed fans – and a lot of confusion.

Hannity was scheduled to hold a book-signing and a live taping of his talk show during the event.

Fox News Executive Vice President of Programming Bill Shine issued a statement to the media Thursday evening saying Fox had decided to call Hannity back to New York to do the show because officials believed the Tea Party was using Hannity to make a profit at the event.

Because the tea parties are supposed to make money for Faux News, not the other way around.

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Express Yourself

From The Arizona Republic:

The “Tea Party Express” was greeted by about 1,200 to 1,500 supporters as it rolled into Phoenix on Sunday, the third stop on a three-week, cross-country tour that ends in Washington, D.C., on April 15.

Activists from across Arizona and from as far as Seattle gathered at the Arizona State Capitol complex to sing, chant and voice their distaste of taxes, health-care reform and big government.

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U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Hayworth, who is challenging U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told protesters that a rancher in southern Arizona had just been found shot to death on his property near the Mexican border.

While admitting that “we do not know who perpetrated this attack,” Hayworth strongly suggested “illegal aliens” were to blame.

The federal government failed to protect that rancher, who was “one of the good guys,” Hayworth said.

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Another Romance Down the Drain

From TIME:

These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities

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So are the Republicans going extinct?

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Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he’s so outraged by GOP overspending, he’s quitting the party — and he’s the bull’s-eye of its target audience.

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The GOP Displays its Testicular Fortitude

From The New York Times:

On a day when the government deadline for filing income tax returns offered some Americans a timely excuse to vent their frustrations over the sagging economy and ride a metaphor two centuries in the making, 773 Tax Day tea parties were scheduled in cities from Boston to Washington, East Hampton, N.Y., to Yakima, Wash., to protest government spending — namely the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package and $3 trillion budget.

Although organizers insisted they had created a non-partisan grassroots movement, it was argued by others that these parties were more of the synthetic “Game Day Grass” variety, since the occasion was largely created by the clamor of cable news and fueled with the financial and political support of current and former Republican leaders.

Fox News was covering the events and streaming live video as its own commentators Neil Cavuto and Michelle Malkin were headlining the protests in Sacramento, Sean Hannity appeared in Atlanta, and Newt Gingrich showed up at City Hall Park in New York. The web site TaxDayTeaParty.com listed its sponsors, which ranged from FreedomWorks, founded by former House Majority Leader, Dick Armey (R-Texas), Top Conservatives on Twitter, to RNC Radio.com, to the book from Senator Jim Demint of South Carolina, “Saving Freedom,” giving his “firsthand account of the unsettling socialist shift.”

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Turds of a Feather Stick Together

From The Washington Post:

GOP May Be Stuck on Cohesion

On the House floor Thursday, Republicans registered their unanimous opposition to President Obama’s budget proposal. Led by Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.), the GOP adopted a simple and oft-repeated mantra: The Democrats’ fiscal blueprint “spends too much, borrows too much and taxes too much.”

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Joe the Plumber’s Popularity Plunges Yet Again

From The Patriot News:

Joe Wurzelbacher would not say who paid for him to come to Harrisburg to speak out against the proposed Employee Free Choice Act. Neither would organizers of the rally, Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit that takes donations from conservative donors.

But that doesn’t mean “Joe the Plumber” — who drove his own pickup from Toledo, Ohio, to Harrisburg and was eager to drive home again — didn’t earn his money on Tuesday.

Before he could utter his first words, Wurzelbacher was jeered and heckled by dozens of central Pennsylvania union members who flocked to the Capitol steps to give a rowdy voice of support for the legislation better known as “card check.”

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