IS THE "TEA PARTY" REALLY A POPULIST MOVEMENT?

I won't deny that the Guardian is a left -leaning newspaper. And what's wrong with that? What's wrong with a counter to Fox News for some balance? I find it a very informative publication, actually, on all sorts of material & refer to it often. (I have no recollection of you objecting to Guardian articles in the "whales" thread, which you participated in. But apparently this newspaper's material regarding the Tea Party is an issue for you now)

I don't know that they have illicitly attempted to hide their contributions

or at least to hide them any more than lawfully do national and international labor unions.

Privacy Rights Inc.
Your right to personal privacy is shrinking even as Corporate America's is growing.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010, at 6:42 PM ET

Once upon a time, you had to be a person to assert a right to personal privacy. But more and more it seems that the demand for personal privacy flows from large blurry advocacy groups and even larger, blurrier corporations. This trend would be alarming under any circumstances. As it happens, individual privacy rights for real humans seem to be shrinking at the same time corporate privacy rights are expanding.

Disclosure of contributors to political campaigns, and campaign advertisements, used to be an unobjectionable proposition. Now, resisting it is a matter of highest principle. Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs for the United States Chamber of Commerce, told Jake Tapper, "We're under no obligation, as any organization or association in the United States is, to divulge who its members are, who its contributors are." Why? Explained Josten: "We're not going to subject our contributors to harassment, to intimidation, and to threats and to invasions of privacy at their houses and at their places of business, which is what has happened every time there's been disclosure here."

Then there is the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay marriage group that regularly sues state governments for the right to run election ads (most recently in Rhode Island) without having to abide by the state's disclosure laws. NOM also claims that disclosure would lead to harassment of donors. NOM will not be heartened to hear about what happened to Human Life of Washington, which had challenged Washington state's public disclosure law using a similar argument. They lost.

But it's not just advocacy groups claiming that they need to protect their members' privacy rights from leagues of nameless nosy bullies. The Supreme Court has now agreed to hear a case in which AT&T prevailed in its efforts to evade a Freedom of Information Act request because Exemption 7(C) of FOIA, protecting "personal privacy," also now protects the privacy of corporate entities. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals held that FOIA "unambiguously indicates that a corporation may have a "personal privacy" interest within the meaning of Exemption 7 (C)" and noted in a footnote that "corporations, like human beings, face public embarrassment, harassment, and stigma."

It used to be the case that embarrassment, harassment, and stigma were the best check against corporate wrongdoing. But that was before corporations had feelings. Of course the 3rd Circuit's solicitude for the tender feelings of corporations might well eviscerate one of the core purposes of FOIA, but given the Supreme Court's solicitude for the First Amendment rights of corporations in Citizens United, perhaps it's time to recognize that for purposes of privacy rights, corporations are now people, too.

This growing deference to trembling corporate sensitivity would be merely amusing were it not for the fact that, as the idea of corporate privacy and dignity catches hold in the American judiciary, basic notions of privacy and dignity for actual human beings seem to be on the wane. I am thinking here, just for instance, of an Oklahoma statute that would make available on the Internet identifying information about women who have obtained an abortion. (An earlier version of the bill was struck down, but it was hastily enacted again.) The purpose of the Oklahoma law is to embarrass, harass, and stigmatize women seeking abortions—the precise argument now being used to bar the disclosure of the names of campaign contributors. How can it possibly be the case that campaign contributions are entitled to a greater measure of privacy and protection from alleged opponents than the personal information of women seeking to make the most difficult and intimate decision of their lives?

Or consider the meteoric rise of whole-body imaging—machines that produce virtual strip searches of air travelers. Or the Supreme Court's deeply weird and inconclusive holding in last year's big electronic-privacy case, finding that state employees don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the text messages sent on government-issued pagers. Or the recent Inspector General report that found the FBI had spied on American citizens who engaged in protests, demonstrations, or other activities protected by the First Amendment. Or North Carolina's efforts to force Amazon to disclose its customers' purchasing habits. I could go on.

Look. Nation. You can go ahead and anthropomorphize big corporations all you want. Pretend that AT&T has delicate feelings and that Wal-Mart has a just-barely-manageable phobia of spiders. But before we extend each and every protection granted in the Bill of Rights to the good folks at ExxonMobil, I have one small suggestion: Might we contemplate what's happened to our own individual privacy in this country in recent years? That the government should have more and more access to our personal information, while we have less and less access to corporate information defies all logic. It's one thing to ask us to give up personal liberty for greater safety or security. It's another matter entirely to slowly take away privacy and dignity from living, breathing humans, while giving more and more of it to faceless interest groups and corporations.

I did find the Guardian article you pasted, repeating a current very partisan (and exaggerated) domestic U.S. political mantra about international firms attempting to influence our domestic politics, and the supposed activities of BP in this area, highly hypocritical in that the tone of their reporting involved precisely the same thing for which they were scolding others. Indeed I found the whole context about the horror of "foreigners" attempting to influence U.S. elections a bit odd and amusing ... and highly ironic.

....Much of the speculation has focused on Karl Rove, the mastermind of George Bush's victories, who has raised $15m for Republican candidates since September through a new organisation, American Crossroads. An NBC report warned that Rove was spearheading an effort to inject some $250m in television advertising for Republican candidates in the final days before the 2 November elections.

But Rove, appearing today on CBS television's Face the Nation, accused Democrats of deploying the same tactics in 2008. "The president of the US had no problem at all when the Democrats did this," he said. "It was not a threat to democracy when it helped him get elected."

The Cane report said the companies, including BP, BASF, Bayer and Solvay, which are some of Europe's biggest emitters, had collectively donated $240,200 to senators who blocked action on global warming – more even than the $217,000 the oil billionaires and Tea Party bankrollers, David and Charles Koch, have donated to Senate campaigns.

The biggest single donor was the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, which gave $108,100 to senators. BP made $25,000 in campaign donations, of which $18,000 went to senators who opposed action on climate change. Recipients of the European campaign donations included some of the biggest climate deniers in the Senate, such as Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has called global warming a hoax.

The foreign corporate interest in America's midterms is not restricted to Europe. A report by ThinkProgress, operated by the Centre for American Progress, tracked donations to the Chamber of Commerce from a number of Indian and Middle Eastern oil coal and electricity companies.

Foreign interest does not stop with the elections. The Guardian reported earlier this year that a Belgian-based chemical company, Solvay, was behind a front group that is suing to strip the Obama administration of its powers to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

If Tea Partiers want to be taken seriously as a political group, they probably should avoid stomping on people's heads.

Cycloptichorn

The Lexington Division of Police has identified a suspect in connection to the October 25, 2010 assault of a woman at 600 Cooper Drive.

On the 25th, at approximately 7:00p.m., officers were alerted to an active assault at 600 Cooper Drive (Kentucky Educational Television Studios).

Officers responded to the scene of the assault and made contact with the victim. She identified herself as a member of MoveOn.org and stated she was assaulted while attempting to take a picture with candidate Rand Paul. Division of Police patrol officers took an assault report and forwarded the case to the Division of Police Bureau of Investigation.

Today, October 26, 2010, detectives identified the suspect, involved in the assault, as Tim Profitt. Mr. Profitt is currently being served with a criminal summons ordering him to appear before a Fayette County District Court Judge.

Paul Supporter Says Attack Victim Owes Him Apology
(CBS News)

Lauren Valle was trying to offer a satiric award to Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul when Paul supporter Tim Proffitt stepped on her head.
CBS News/CBS
Tim Profitt, the former Rand Paul volunteer who stepped on the head of a MoveOn.org-affiliated activist outside of a debate on Monday, said he thinks the woman, Lauren Valle, owes him an apology.

"I don't think it's that big of a deal," Profitt said of the incident in an interview with CBS affiliate WKYT. "I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you."

Profitt, a Rand Paul supporter who used to serve as a campaign coordinator for the Kentucky Senate hopeful's campaign, was caught on video on Monday stepping on Valle's head after she had been wrestled to the ground. Valle had been trying to offer a satiric award to the candidate.

Profitt later said he was sorry "that it came to that," but he argued to WKYT that Valle was not an innocent bystander.

Further highlighting Tea Party honor and personal responsibility today, the chief woman-fighter at the scene, Tim Profitt, demanded that Valle apologize to him. I can only assume Profitt is suffering from the post-traumatic stress that resulted from Valle's head thwacking him on the sole of his defenseless shoe. Poor baby. (Appropriately posted on Twitter today: "BP to seek apology from Gulf of Mexico.")

Meanwhile, scores of far-right AM radio talkers, far-right bloggers and far-right blog commenters swung into action in a unified effort to blame the victim on this attack.

Erectile-dysfunction sufferer Rush Limbaugh, for example, implied that the attack was justified given the fact that Tea Party crazies are refusing to "grab the ankles" and "play nice." So if I'm correctly following Limbaugh's reasoning, one way to avoid (metaphorical?) anal rape is to wrestle a woman to the curb, American History X style, and step on her face. Nice. No wonder he's been married four times. He obviously has tremendous respect for women.

I have been at a bunch of events before, the previous debate, and the Rand Paul campaign knows me and they have expressed their distastes for my work before. What happened last night was that about five minutes before Rand Paul's car arrived they identified me and my partner, Alex, who was with me. They surrounded me. There was five of them. They motioned to each other and got behind me. My partner Alex heard them say 'We are here to do crowd control we might have to take someone out.'

When Rand Paul's car arrived a couple of them stepped in front of me so I stepped off the curb to get around them to get back out front. At that point they started grabbing for me and I ran all the way around the car with them in pursuit. The footage is after I've run all the way around the car and I'm in front of the car and that is when they took me down. One or two people twisted my arms behind my back and took me down... It was about two-to-three second after that that another person stomped on my head. And I lay there for 20 seconds or so and my partner Alex came and got me up and that's the point where there is the media clip of me speaking.