tea party

WASHINGTON– “Might as well not even be here,” grumbled Georgia Holliday. “I can’t believe that Dick Armey screwed up like this!”

Holliday was not alone. Having traveled into the city from the suburbs for the 10 a.m. “Code Red” rally on the Capitol grounds, she got more and more annoyed that she couldn’t hear any of the speakers. (She was also annoyed at the wrong Tea Party activist — the Code Red rally was sponsored by a coalition of Tea Party groups, while a different, 9 a.m. rally had been organized by Armey’s FreedomWorks.) As Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) waved a copy the massive Senate version health care bill — “I brought an abortion to show you!” — Holliday winced and chanted her disapproval.

Tonight is Caucus night in Colorado. Thousands of political junkies and activists will turn out to elect delegates to represent candidates at the party state assemblies in May.

Nothing goes over at a Tea Party forum quite like jokes about Al Gore and global warming. National Guardsman Diggs Brown, who is running for Betsy Markey’s 4th District Congressional seat, drew laughs Thursday at the Northern Colorado Tea Party candidate forum in Loveland with his folksy response to a question on climate change. Brown [...]

Apparently one of the favorite Tea Party pastimes is hanging out with a few thousand of your best, most conservative friends and flooding the voice mail and email inboxes of out-of-state moderate Democrats who may be on the fence about Obama’s health care plan.
That way the actual constituents of such Dems – like Colorado’s John [...]

At last week’s 4th congressional district candidate forum in Loveland, theoretical anti-tax anti-government consensus broke down briefly during discussion of Referendum C, Colorado’s 2005 voter-supported “TABOR timeout,” which has become a litmus-test topic for state Republican candidates this year.

DENVER– As Tea Partiers at the capitol here Wednesday railed against Obama’s “government takeover” of health care and met with legislative leaders to further their movement for liberty from taxes, roughly 30 supporters of Tibetan independence circumambulated the building. The slow circling and chanting marked the anniversary of the murderous 1959 Chinese crackdown [...]

WASHINGTON– Pro-immigration reform advocates may be applauding President Obama’s immigration meetings at the White House today, but anti-immigration groups are pushing back hard. The meetings came in advance of a planned March 21 immigration reform rally on the mall and just as several anti-immigration groups have unveiled new campaigns and strategies to obstruct any coming “amnesty” legislation.

In a strategy conference call with supporters Monday, anti-illegal immigrant group NumbersUSA geared up to counter a large immigration reform rally planned for next week in Washington. Conference call participants suggested Mexican women in the States should be branded as “the new welfare queens” and that their children should not be referred to as “babies” [...]

DENVER–Members of Colorado Tea Party and 912 groups and the libertarian think tank Independence Institute attended a “grassroots session” and rally sponsored by Americans For Prosperity at the Capitol Wednesday. The activists met with GOP lawmakers for a strategy session in the Old Senate chambers and then gathered on the capitol steps. The rally lured a familiar group of Republican lawmakers, led this time by Yuma state Rep. Cory Gardner, who is also running to represent the Fourth Congressional district in Washington.

Republican candidates for Colorado’s top offices have been spurred at Tea Party primary-election events to take strong anti-government positions that have alarmed moderate and liberal voters and that in the YouTube era might compromise their standing with general election voters in the summer and fall.