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These citizens luckily aren't described in the WSJ article as Tea Partiers. Recently active persons known as Tea Partiers are likely 'racists' and transplants from "Dixie," per polls extolled by NJ Star-Ledger.
8/27/11, "Taxpayers Strike Back," WSJ, Douglas Belkin, Wheatland Twp., Illinois
- "Residents Overturn Township's Plan for New $1.5 Million Office"
But those gathered in this Chicago suburb earlier this month weren't facing off against impassive town officials. In a rare expression of direct democracy that invoked a 100-year-old state law, all 200 people present got to vote, and resoundingly
- overturned the township's plan to build a new $1.5 million civic office.
"We directed an out-of-control government to listen to the people," said Debra Holscher, the campaign's leader, who kicked off the insurrection by scribbling out a petition and getting 17 people to sign it at the town's annual meeting in April.
Keri-Lyn Krafthefer, attorney for the township of 45,000, says she is studying whether the vote is legally binding.
"It's a tricky mess to unravel," she said. "On both sides there are these sophisticated requirements that need to be followed and may not have been."
Townships have long been the odd ducks of state government. They date to an order by the Continental Congress that divided the nation into six-by-six mile tracts. Today, in many states, townships have disappeared. In others, they maintain roads and provide other services in unincorporated areas.
In Illinois, whose fiscal problems rival those of California, townships are among the 6,000 units of government with taxing authority, the most in the nation, said James Nowlan, a senior fellow at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs of the University of Illinois. Virginia, by contrast, has 343....
The plan to build new government offices for the township some 40 miles west of Chicago was born in 2004. Residents gathered for the annual meeting, as dictated by Illinois law, in which all citizens have a right to show up and vote.
Just 20 people attended that year, and 18 voted to endorse the plan to replace the homely, metal-skinned building in an industrial area next to a car shop that
- houses the township's nine full-time employees.
"We need something new because what we have now is not a building that best represents the people that we represent," said Wheatland Township Supervisor Todd Morse, who has championed the new building.
Back in 2004, subdivisions were rapidly sprouting up in the township's cornfields and its finances looked strong. Today, homes in surrounding Will County have lost 29% of their value on average since August 2006 and one in 10 homeowners is 90 days or more behind on their mortgage, according to CoreLogic, a real-estate data firm.
Nationally, voters are denying referendums to float bonds for public projects twice as often as they did during the boom years, according to the Bond Buyer, a trade journal.
"There's a lot of people out here who are unemployed and have no money for food," said Chuck Miller, a field representative for a roofing company.
The plan to forge ahead with a new building of up to 7,300 square feet didn't sit well with Ms. Holscher, who learned about it at a township meeting last summer. A 54-year-old retired professor of occupational therapy, Ms. Holscher is a veteran local political activist who rails against government waste. She called the planned building the Taj Mahal and started rounding up allies by
- sending an email blast to more than 700 like-minded fiscal conservatives.
At this year's annual meeting in April, she brought about 100 people with her. But she was turned down for procedural reasons when she tried to introduce a motion to conduct a study of the need for the building....
An ally in the crowd asked what the opposition could do to force a reassessment. Ms. Krafthefer, the township attorney, said they could petition for a new meeting.
Ms. Holscher hastily scratched out this sentence on a legal pad: "Petition for a special meeting to discuss overturning the new building." She passed the pad around and collected 17 signatures, two more than required. By submitting it, she leveraged a 100-year-old law granting citizens unusual power in township governance.
At the meeting earlier this month, which had been posted at the local YMCA and library, Ms. Holscher and a committee she organized laid out options A through E, for
- an alternative town hall with price tags ranging from $300,000 to $700,000.
Amid a sea of Holscher backers, one person tried to stop them: Mr. Morse's wife, Barbara (Morse the Wheatland Township Supervisor who championed the building).
- "There is no statute here that you can point to that this is a legal meeting," she said, waving three laminated posters bearing the town bylaws.
Ms. Holscher's attorney, Doug Ibendahl, responded: "Actually this is a model of transparency." The crowd applauded.
Andy Parker, a vice president at a software company, said there should be a sixth option: "Do nothing."
So Ms. Holscher walked to an easel set in the front of the auditorium and with a black marker wrote, "Option F, do nothing."
When it was time to vote, everyone in the auditorium headed to the area of the room where a sign for the plan they favored was posted. One hundred and twenty seven people crowded around "Option F."
"This is even better than what I expected," Ms. Holscher said after the vote."
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- Rick Moran and his pals in the GOP establishment would no doubt call these people "dirty-finger nailed, anti-science Luddite galoots" whose money and time would be accepted but not their opinion.
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New polls by Campbell and Putnam "two academic political scientists" along with a CBS/NY Times poll allegedly prove Tea Party supporters to be the opposite of what they are, including of course that they are RACISTS.
- 8/28/11, "Studies shed light on the people behind the tea party," NJ Star-Ledger, John Farmer, Star-Ledger columnist
"Just who are the people of the tea party, the big “new thing” in American politics — or at least in the Republican Party?
Lots of claims are made for them. They’re newcomers to electoral politics, some say. Conservatives to be sure, but independents, too, spread pretty evenly throughout the country, largely devoid of racial animus, and broadly representative of a large portion of the whole population.
That’s the stereotype. But a vastly different description emerges in a pair of studies, one by two academic political scientists and a second by a CBS/New York Times poll,
- both based on extensive interviews with tea partiers.
“Early on, tea partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes,” write political scientists David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam. “Actually, tea party supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the tea party was born. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of tea party support today.”
The tea party cohort is overwhelmingly white, male and older — on that, the stereotype is on the mark — but it “had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president,” Campbell and Putnam report.
Or, as the CBS/Times poll found when tea partiers were asked what specifically they didn’t like about Obama, “the top answer was that they just don’t like him.”
From the standpoint of future politics and the 2012 presidential race, the most significant finding from the studies may involve the geographical distribution of the tea party loyalists.
If the CBS/Times study has it right, the tea party participation is principally a Southern phenomenon. More than a third “hail from the South, far more than any other region,” it found, and that has important implications for the GOP next year and perhaps beyond.
It’s no secret the modern Republican Party has moved dramatically to the right. Less clear, however, is how much the GOP already is a Dixie-dominated party....
It may be a sign of what’s ahead for the GOP that the ultra-right Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another Southerner preferred by tea partiers, has just displaced Mitt Romney as the favored candidate of Republicans. Perry went overnight from virtually unknown to a double-digit poll lead over the mostly moderate Romney.
The Texas governor benefits from another preoccupation of the tea party crowd — its preference, like his, for a politics rooted in religion. Tea party leaders may parade under the banner of smaller government, but the rank and file, Campbell and Putnam stress, “are more concerned about putting God in government,” something
- most Americans say they oppose.
While it’s clear the tea party has a chokehold on the GOP at the moment, that’s no guarantee it will hold true through the 2012 election....
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8/28, "Opening Day: Tea Party Express V," Lloyd Marcus, American Thinker
Lloyd is as Tea Party as you can get, but it doesn't sound like pollsters have found him. Poll cited above says tricky Tea Partiers aren't the novices they claim to be, they've secretly been long time operatives. Lloyd mentions a typical Tea Party lady. She was new to the political world and found it so interesting she wrote a book about it:
"One such patriot I met today at our Napa rally is author, Robin Bohr. Robin's husband Mike got tired of her yelling at the TV. He suggested Robin write a book. Robin penned, "Tea Party: American Revolution 2.0". It is the compelling history of average Americans entering the political arena for the first time."...
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I'm a Tea Party supporter and am nothing like the findings in the polls described by the Star-Ledger. I live in Manhattan (not 'Dixie'), am female, would be a registered Independent but the law here would prevent me from voting in primaries so I'm a registered Republican. At one time I was a registered democrat. When I switched to Republican I always referred to myself as "a liberal, pro-Choice Republican" never a conservative. Religion is not important but respecting that we are founded on Judeo-Christian values is. Evangelical Christianity had nothing to do with the formation of the Tea Party. Rick Perry has been on the national scene for only a few weeks but his presence is now seized upon as "proof" the Tea Party is mostly Evangelical Christians from "Dixie." I voted for Bill Clinton the first time. My views haven't changed in over 20 years. What has changed is the people who control the mechanisms of the Republican Party. Some of whom advance the insane "neo-con" philosophy. They are in business for themselves, don't care about the country, and are contemptuous of voters. Since I am not like them I have to call myself something different. Today I say I'm a 'conservative.' The only thing that has changed is today the internet exists. ed.
via Behind the Black by Robert Zimmerman, photo Sun-Times media, Star-Ledger article via Hot Air
I think the case that this was political is a bit thin, but not out of the realm of possibilities. I think its much more likely this is nut case in Justice department that thought they were going to make a name for themselves taking down a well know company, than a form of intimidation. That is not to say it wasn’t only that evidence is mostly circumstantial.
In this case government incompetence is a lot easier to believe in this case not knowing any of details from the Justice departments side of things than a political attack.
Gibson was taken down for using East Indian Rosewood in the manufacture of their guitars. That’s interesting because the other 2 players in the high quality acoustic guitar market are C. F. Martin and Taylor. Both of these manufacturers proudly advertise using East Indian Rosewood. Both contribute heavily to Democrats, and neither are being harrassed."