New breakaway tea party group forms in RI

PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Leading members of Rhode Island's statewide tea party have defected to form a new group that will focus on issues in the state legislature.

The Providence Journal reports ( http://bit.ly/pI9S8X) that on Friday, Lisa Blais, a board member of the RI Tea Party, announced the formation of the Ocean State Tea Party in Action.

Blais said her new group would not compete with the RI Tea Party. She said it would instead put a "constant spotlight" on Rhode Island state officials and their voting records.

Tea party groups are generally in favor of reduced government spending and against tax increases.

The union-backed Ocean State Action, which opposes the tea party, joked the new group had stolen its name and stressed the importance of defeating the tea party in elections.

Information from: The Providence Journal, http://www.projo.com/

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Some R.I. tea party leaders form new group focused on State House

Leading members of Rhode Island’s statewide tea party group have defected to form their own organization focused on state legislative issues.

Lisa Blais, a board member of the two-year-old RI Tea Party, announced Friday the formation of Ocean State Tea Party in Action.

Blais said the group formed out of a growing unhappiness with the direction of the RI Tea Party, which was founded by Colleen Conley in 2009 as the tea party movement –– generally in favor of reduced government spending and against tax increases –– gained momentum across the country.

“We’re going to continue the work that has proven effective,” Blais said Friday. “We’re not looking to compete with the RI Tea Party, but, organizationally, it took a different direction.”

Ocean State Tea Party in Action, which filed with the state earlier this week as a domestic nonprofit corporation, expects to be a “strong voice” at the State House and provide a “constant spotlight” on elected officials and their voting records, according to Blais.

She and other members of the new group were among the tea party advocates most vocal this past legislative session, strongly opposing a proposed overhaul of the state sales tax as well as the creation of binding arbitration for teachers, two proposals that ultimately did not pass.

Both Blais and Conley denied that there was any open hostility between the two tea party factions.

“We look forward to collaboration with all good-government groups, tea parties and citizen advocates,” said Blais, a Providence resident who worked at the now-defunct advocacy group The Education Partnership. “We’re all really working towards many of the same goals.”

Said Conley: “I know they’ll do a fantastic job. They are very passionate, focused and detail-oriented women.”

She says RI Tea Party, which last April said it had more than 2,500 people on its e-mail list, will continue to focus on the national debt and federal spending, help coordinate the state’s many local tea party and “patriot” groups (which mostly focus on municipal or regional issues) and push a statewide agenda through its media presence and its own State House lobbying.

“RI Tea is the core,” Conley said. “You got to think of it as the mother ship. And it just launched another ship.”

The union-backed progressive coalition Ocean State Action poked fun at the apparent splintering of its philosophical foil in an e-mail to supporters Friday.

“We’re flattered that the RI Tea Party likes us so much that they would stick their name in the middle of ours. Who knew that they wanted to be us when they grew up?” Kate Brock, the group’s executive director, wrote. “We thought about calling the press. We thought about calling a lawyer for name infringement. But the most important place to beat the Tea Party is at the ballot box in 2012. We need progressive champions in the General Assembly, not ‘Tea Party Patriots’ who are committed to dismantling our state one piece at a time.”

Among those involved in Ocean State Tea Party in Action are four members of the RI Tea Party steering committee, who, like Blais, resigned from their volunteer posts recently.

They include Lyn Jennings, who this year helped found an advocacy group of her own: RI Salons United, which represented hair salon owners opposed to Governor Chafee’s proposal to lower the state sales tax but broaden it to a number of currently exempt items and services, like haircuts.

Blais says state Rep. Doreen Costa, R-North Kingstown, who has been active in the RI Tea Party, is also expected to join the new group’s board of directors.

Costa says she’ll also continue to be involved with RI Tea Party. “The more groups we have, the better,” she said. “That’s the way I look at it.”

RI Tea Party, meanwhile, is still set to organize the Tax Day rally at the State House in April, produce the “TeaTV” show that started airing in this past April on the same channel that airs sessions of the state General Assembly (Cox Channel 15), as well as prepare for the coming election, according to Conley.

The group recently announced that the national Tea Party Express Bus Tour is making a stop in North Kingstown’s Wilson Park on Sept. 7. That bus may potentially bring a presidential candidate or two to the Ocean State, according to the announcement.

pmarcelo@projo.com

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New tea group is ‘somewhat of a split’ from South Florida Tea Party and Wilkinson

 

Pam Wohlschlegel, who quit Monday as Palm Beach County director of the South Florida Tea Party, announced this morning that she’s heading a new group called the Palm Beach County Tea Party.

Wohlshclegel resigned after South Florida Tea Party Chairman Everett Wilkinson ripped the House GOP Medicare overhaul plan as a “public policy nightmare.” Wilkinson’s comments were the latest example of his tendency to butt heads with others in the tea party movement.

In a video Q&A about her new group, Wohlschlegel says the Palm Beach Tea Party wants to “work more cooperatively and coordinate with other like-minded groups…Given that several of us who are forming this group did start out with the South Florida Tea Party, I guess it does constitute somewhat of a split, but we do wish Everett well in what he does. We just want to take a slightly different tack to meeting the same goals.”

Wohlschlegel also addresses the flap between Wilkinson and the city of Boca Raton over an outstanding bill of more than $6,000 the city says the South Florida Tea Party owes for police and barricades deployed for an April rally with Donald Trump.

“I’m sure that Everett will meet his responsibilities and pay the bills,” Wohlschlegel says.

Tags: Everett Wilkinson, Pam Wohlschlegel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 8:07 am and is filed under George Bennett, Tea Party movement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Top tea party group tied to extremism, report charges

Since the tea party movement exploded onto the political scene over two years ago, one of its key players has been the advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Founded and run by Dick Armey, a former top Republican congressman, FreedomWorks isn't exactly a tea party group itself. Rather, it's a well-funded Washington-based lobbying organization that has played a crucial role in supporting and co-ordinating the grassroots activism of the movement's far-flung factions. FreedomWorks was a central organizer, for instance, of the 9/12 March that last year brought tens of thousands of conservative activists to Washington.

FreedomWorks also has helped defend the tea party movement against charges of racism. "Ours is a colorblind movement based on principles not race," the group's president, Matt Kibbe, has said.

But a new report questions FreedomWorks' commitment to keeping bigotry on the margins of the movement.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), a group that monitors extremism, has taken a close look at FreedomConnector, a new site created by FreedomWorks that's designed to help put conservative activists in touch with each other. Since launching FreedomConnector in February, FreedomWorks' online membership has roughly quintupled, rising to more than 94,000.

But IREHR charges that to reach this kind of online following, FreedomWorks "took down what little firewall it had constructed between itself and the farthest edges of the far-right." The report's researchers claim to have found at least 59 cases over the last five months in which FreedomConnector announced events being held by the John Birch Society, a group with a history of bigoted views, IREHR contends.

Those events have taken place in California, Florida, Idaho, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. In one case, according to the report, a local coordinator with the Birch Society even was able to create a Bircher group -- described by IREHR as "a hub for area Birchers to gather on the FreedomConnector site."

Launched as an anti-communist organization in the 1950s, the Birch Society opposed the civil rights movement in part on the grounds that mixing black and white people would lead to a "mongrelization" of the races. Since the mid 1960s, it has been relegated to the fringes of the conservative movement. Indeed, the Birchers' reputation for radicalism is so well-established that when Armey was asked last year about Birchers getting involved with the tea tarty movement, he was keen to deny any link.

"The John Birch Society has been very little evident in my association with the tea party. ?I have not seen anybody, have not encountered anybody who says I'm here and I'm from the John Birch Society," Armey told Charlie Rose of PBS. "So I mean, I know it's alleged that they're there. ?I've not encountered them. But I do think that John Birch Society historically has had a good deal of people that have regretted them."

Could Armey come to regret his own group's association with the Birch organization? A spokeswoman for FreedomWorks didn't respond to a call from The Lookout seeking to find out.

(Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey addresses a Tea Party rally in Washington, April 2010: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

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