The weirdos, losers and mutations who make up the Occupy movement showed the world their glass jaw when their Denver branch descended upon the FreedomWorks BlogCon 2011 new media convention on Friday.  There’s a lot for conservatives to learn from this close encounter of the dumbass kind.

Sure, we learned that their personal hygiene leaves much to be desired – like, well, personal hygiene.  We learned that their concept of private property is shaky at best; radio host Tony Katz hilariously schooled one shaggy gentleman on the air at length about who owned a particular chair the Occupier attempted to occupy.  And we learned that they wear Guy Fawkes masks not because of any particular affinity for the noted radical Catholic terrorist but because some guy wore it in the movie V For Vendetta and it was apparently a really bitchin’ movie.

These are not deep thinkers.

But the most important lesson is that the Occupiers are a joke; they are nothing but coddled, Potemkin protesters who collapse at the first sign of resistance.

These clowns have been treated with kid gloves by gutless (or even sympathetic) politicians from Zuccotti Park to the Port of Oakland.  They’ve been allowed to live in filth, dominate public spaces and generally descend into a festering petri dish of social, criminal and epidemiological pathologies by cowardly mayors and other enablers unwilling to do the most basic job of any government leader and keep order.

The mainstream media adores them, viewing them as advancing their shared left-wing agenda while also recalling the activist Sixties of legend.  And, of course, the media helpfully covers up the ever-growing roster of outrages perpetrated by these nimrods.  No accountability there.  Even the cops are required to treat these geniuses with professional respect.

It’s been all up-twinkles for them – until now.

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He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

I interviewed Congressman Connie Mack (R-FL), via telephone, about his new “Mack Penny Plan,” which is gaining considerable support from both House and Senate Republicans, and even some Democrats.

Congressman Connie Mack did not vote to raise the debt ceiling before the August recess. He was looking for a long-term solution to the nation’s deficits, which are leading to unsustainable debt.

After working with some grass-roots groups, Mr. Mack designed the “One Percent Spending Reduction Act,” or, the “Mack Penny Plan,” which, he says, will cut and cap federal spending, and balance the federal budget in eight years.

In short, the “Mack Penny Plan” would:

• Cut federal spending by 1% each year for 6 years
• Cap spending at 18% of GDP in the 7th year
• Balance the federal budget in the 8th year
• Save taxpayers $7.5 trillion over 10 years

“What’s different about this plan,” the Florida congressman says, “is that it’s pretty simple. We freeze spending at the 2011 level- about $3.6 trillion- and cut 1% of spending for six years- that’s one penny out of every dollar. Everyone has had to cut at least one penny out of every dollar, whether in family or business budgets, so that’s not too hard for the federal government to do.”

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Whether you agree with Ayn Rand’s philosophy or not, her novel Atlas Shrugged has touched the lives of millions and influenced many of today’s center-right thinkers. The Wall Street Journal noted this morning:

Book sales for “Atlas” have always been brisk—and all the more so in the past few years, as actual events have mirrored Rand’s nightmare vision of economic collapse amid massive government expansion.

Rand’s belief in the primacy of the individual over the collective has garnered her vilification from some on the Right and many, especially, on the Left.

Yet, there is no denying that Atlas Shrugged’s portrayal on the devolution of society at the hands of the Left was prescient as it was one of the most cogent attacks on the excesses of liberalism. Today, it seems as though the lines of fiction and reality have blurred in our nation.

Tomorrow, the film Atlas Shrugged, Part One opens nationwide, which is a faithful adaptation of Part One of her 1957 novel.

Today, we offer you, Atlas is Shrugging, a new short film by Ben Howe.

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Tabitha Hale, a FreedomWorks employee, got in a heated exchange while filming a union member outside of her office when she was attacked by the thug. We at Eyeblast personally know Tabitha, and she is one of the nicest people you will ever meet and is definitely not an instigator. Not to mention hitting a girl is one of the most cowardly things a man can do.

Just imagine if a Tea Party member were caught on video doing this. All the major media outlets would been looping this for the next 6 months.

Take a look this cowardly act:

At this very moment, the battle for America’s future is happening in states all around the country as newly-elected governors try to wrest control from tax-eating unions. Today’s battle is just the beginning of what America will be facing through 2012 and beyond. It is a battle that, if lost, will likely have catastrophic consequences on the fiscal well being of many of the states and, as a result, the nation as a whole.

Nowhere is the fight the loudest than in Wisconsin, where over 10,000 union supporters protested Madison’s Capitol Square on Tuesday and about 1,000 protesters demonstrated outside Governor Scott Walker’s private home Tuesday night. Hundreds of union protesters also packed Ohio’s statehouse on Tuesday to condemn Governor Kasich’s efforts to stem the union bosses’ power and reign in out of control spending. In Indiana, hundreds of Steelworkers descended on the Hoosier’ statehouse to protest unemployment reform as well. Even in New York, with a Democrat governor, unions are spending millions on fighting reform.

Make no mistake, this is a battle for America’s economic future. It is one that will ultimately decide whether Americans will be enslaved by debt created by a government beholden to public-sector union bosses, or whether some sort of fiscal sanity can be restored before the system collapses due to the weight from years of cronyism.

As labor activists strategize for “class war,” Leftist union bosses also know they may be losing their grip on taxpayers’ throats and they are desperate to keep it there. They’re not going to let go easily either. They’re organized and they have millions to spend on marches, sickouts, protests, candlelight vigils, and advertising.

So, the question becomes, what are YOU going to do about it?

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Yesterday, FreedomWorks and the Conservative Steering Committee brought together four top contenders to potentially replace Michael Steele as head of a cash-strapped RNC.

While the race is presumably wide-open and the event may have little bearing on how it ultimately turns out, there are two very good reasons to suggest the next RNC Chair could be female and the fact that Tea Party activists figured so prominently in yesterday’s event indicates the movement will likely continue to be a player in Republican politics going forward.

“I was encouraged by the responses from some of the candidates yesterday who seemed to understand that the Tea Party movement is not here to be an arm of the GOP, but can function best as an outside force to keep the party on the right track. Today was further validation that the movement is having an impact, and will continue to be a powerful force in the political landscape,” said FreedomWorks president and CEO Matt Kibbe.

As NRO’s Jim Geraghty point out, with more via the Campaign Spot, the RNC’s 168 members, each with their own concerns, will ultimately decide who heads the RNC going into 2012, not some consensus from yesterday’s event. However, the stagecraft around a January election is beginning to shape up. It doesn’t look good for current chair, Michael Steele, though yesterday’s participants were mostly careful to avoid any harsh, direct criticism. Steele seems to genuinely remain well-liked, if perhaps considered not ideally suited for the job.

The discussion on Wednesday suggested a group of GOP leaders who have largely moved beyond questions of identity. They seemed more interested in the actions of the Obama administration and the reaction of the Tea Party. The GOP, as this crop of candidates sees it, is the tool to channel Tea Partiers’ objections, a process that began in 2009, continued and intensified in 2010, and, they hope, will reach full fruition in 2012.

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On September 12, 2010 in Washington, D.C.,  FreedomWorks sponsored its second annual 9/12 rally, based on the theme of “Remember in November.” Among the speakers were FreedomWorks’ Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe (go here for Reason.tv’s interview with them about their best-selling Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto); former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (go here for an interview about his Our America initiative); “Tito the Builder,” a Colombian immigrant and contractor who is an outspoken defender of free enterprise; Deneen Borelli of Project 21 and Tom Borelli of the Free Enterprise Project; and new media impresario Andrew Breitbart of Big Government.

This year’s event drew a smaller but arguably more intense crowd than last year’s demonstration. Attendees’ attitudes toward President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress were sharply negative and sometimes strayed from the Tea Party’s traditionally narrow focus on curbing federal spending to issues such as illegal immigration and race relations. Yet there was no mistaking the main thrust of the day’s event, which was, as Matt Kibbe stressed, that “November 3 is even more important than November 2.” As Andrew Breitbart put it, “The beauty of the Tea Party movement is watching it hold Republicans accountable…These people are not going to stop holding their government and elected officials accountable, especially those that claim to represent their values.”

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Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is the latest victim of the Tea Party insurgency that’s trying to take over the Republican Party. Tea Party favorite Joe Miller defeated Murkowski in The North Star State’s primary by hammering away at (among other things) her support for TARP and lack of zeal for overturning Obamacare.

Miller joins a new breed of anti-spending candidates such as Maine’s Paul LePage, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, Florida’s Marco Rubio, and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, who promise to bring a new passion for shrinking government to D.C. and state capitals.

Here’s how Freedom Works’ Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe sum up what the Tea Party stands for in their new book, Give us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto: “It doesn’t take a lot of words to say that we just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we don’t infringe on the same freedom of others.”

Armey and Kibbe say that the Tea Party coheres around spending and that other issues are not central to its mission. Perhaps. Joe Miller is also pro-life, pro border fence, and wants to outlaw the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research. Maine gubernatorial hopeful LePage believes the “traditional definition of marriage should be preserved.” Haley, who will probably be South Carolina’s next governor, has campaigned on tough enforcement against illegal immigrants. And the closest thing to a Tea Party spokesperson is Sarah Palin, the former “Bridge to Nowhere” supporter who oversaw a 16 percent increase in spending during her time as governor of Alaska.

Can this coalition stay together, stick to its anti-spending message, and actually change American politics? Or will it be co-opted by the very party upon which it seeks to perform a “hostile takeover?”

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In our new book, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and I discuss the fundamental problems with assuming that public officials have our best interests at heart.

Excerpt from Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto:

The Tea Party movement adds a welcome addition to the fundamental debate over the size and scope of government: grassroots activists armed with the intellectual arguments they need to make a difference in political debates, not just scholarly discussions. What is happening is a dramatic increase in the physical infrastructure and on-the-ground personal politicking that can turn ideas into action. The new generation of limited government scholars, and the internet, provides an even wider audience for good ideas. But unlike earlier generations, the new generation as the muscle to make things happen in the political arena.

While standing for the right ideas and values is vitally important, it is naive to think that politicians will do the right thing simply because a proposed polict will benefit the general citizenry, creating the conditions for economic opportunity and individual prosperity for all. That’s simply not how things work.If there was doubt about the proposition before, today it is painfully obvious that politicians in power often act in their own self-interest at the expense of the “public interest”.

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I’ve been joking recently that the political climate was moving into territory where it would be impossible for even the GOP to screw up the November elections. I was wrong. Tuesday’s special election to replace the deceased Rep. John Murtha, where a credible GOP candidate lost by almost ten points, proves that we should never underestimate the GOP’s ability to squander its advantages and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

First, lets dismiss with a few of the challenges the GOP faced in the special election. The district, Pennsylvania 12, is a gerrymandered mess, designed to elect a Democrat. There are twice as many registered Democrats in the district as Republicans. Although the Presidential election in 2008 was close, in prior years the Democrat candidate won the district in a walk.

The special election was scheduled on the same day as a hotly-contested Democrat primary, guaranteeing a boost in the party’s turnout. There was a gadfly “tea party” candidate auditioning for the role of spoiler and a somewhat complicated voting process where supporters of the GOP candidate, Tim Burns, had to vote twice; once in the GOP primary and again in the actual special election. And, the Democrat candidate had the full support of the left’s political machine and an army of supporters from Big Labor, in one of the few remaining districts where that matters.

All of these dynamics pointed to a close race. They do not, however, add up to the blowout suffered by Burns on Tuesday. Remember, Burns’ opponent, Mark Critz, was a former staffer for John Murtha. He actually campaigned that he was the economic development director for the former Congressman. He negotiated the earmark deals that cast an ethical cloud above the Congressman and filled a grand jury docket. He said he was a pro-life Democrat, as if that means anything in a post-Stupak world. Oh, and he said he opposed ObamaCare but wouldn’t vote to repeal it. It seems he was against it before he was for it.

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You’ve no doubt heard liberal Members of Congress and other interest groups calling the Tea Party movement “Astroturf,” a play on the term grassroots.  Like our good friend Nancy, for example…

Or the liberal pro-net neutrality group Free Press, which has an entire section on its site devoted to “outing” so-called Astroturf operations.  This page includes a handy-dandy widget with a graphic of large corporations pulling the strings of Congress. Pretty clever, really.

They claim that the whole movement is the invention of a bunch of Beltway insiders backed by piles of corporate cash.  For them, it simply does not compute that ordinary Americans could be fed up with trillions of dollars in debt, tax hikes, and runaway regulation.  It MUST be the orchestrations of rich puppet-masters in DC, right?  Instead of spending hours debunking those claims, I’ll point to a post I made on the National Taxpayers Union’s old blog after the massive 9/12 March on Washington.  Several hundred thousand people from all across the country, none of whom were paid, will do a better job of dismissing these silly claims than I could here.  Instead, let’s focus on liberal activists employing exactly the kind of shady strategies that they accuse us of using.

So, that group I mentioned, Free Press?  The ones that have a page on their site to expose “Astroturfing?”  Last week, they were outed as being the true authors behind a letter supposedly written by Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA).  The letter is being passed around to various Congressional offices to solicit support for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s radical effort to thumb his nose at the limits of his regulatory authority, which I blogged about here recently.  But the properties of the electronic file itself show that the real author of the letter was not Mr. Inslee or a member of his staff, but none other than Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott!

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We have sought to call out haters and those that would cynically use race and the other political cards from the Democrats’ stacked deck because it is destructive our social fabric.  These phony charges create real hate, and do real damage to the cause of a civil, tolerant and colorblind society.

From day one, the good men and women who have risen up in peaceful dissent against the big government policies of the Democrats in power have been subjected to the worst kinds of ridicule, name-calling and downright hate.

DC Douglas is simply repeating the Liberal/Democrat talking points when he levels the false charges against “teabaggers” and FreedomWorks.

He says “If you have ire about this, focus it on FreedomWorks.”  That’s exactly what the Democrats and their friends on the left did.  The resulting emails and voicemails prove the point about the real damage caused by the Democrats tactics. (Warning: extremely offensive content.)

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Why would the voice of Geico Insurance (“Save $50 dollars or more…”) attack the staff and followers of FreedomWorks as “mentally retarded?”  Does he really think that the good men and women who make up the tea party movement – mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren – are all potential murderers that will inevitably “actually kill someone?”

Better yet, how many of these “mentally retarded” killers opted to save $50 dollars or more on their car insurance.

Last week, the FreedomWorks press department received a voicemail from a man identifying himself as Lance Baxter. This is what Lance has to say:

Click to Listen: Lance Baxter’s Voicemail

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The Left is escalating their attacks against Republicans, conservatives and the Tea Party movement. The movement that the Left and the media have laughed off for over a year now as a radical fringe of racists, bigots, homophobes, and domestic terrorists has come to pose a serious threat to the entitlement establishment and to the agenda that the Democrats promised their base. Now, they’re lashing out. They’re fabricating stories which are later disavowed. There is talk of infiltrating upcoming events. Attacks on organizations and individuals have increased.

To provide an example, the FreedomWorks office recently received this postcard in the mail (offensive language):

The return address listed Kim Hendren. Kim Hendren is a Republican in the Arkansas state legislature who is running for US Senate in 2010. To state the obvious, it would bring stupid to a new level to send something like this on an open postcard and list your name and address – especially if you were running for office. After we received a second installment of the hate-filled postcards, the FreedomWorks staff did some digging. We contacted Kim Hernden’s office and questioned him about it, and he filled us in on the smear campaigns against him. He’s been on the receiving end of relentless political attacks throughout his campaign, and was honestly not surprised that someone had taken to writing hate-speech in his name.

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The Tea Party folks keep getting mad at me for saying that in the end they might prove ineffective in races at levels higher than local because they aren’t organized enough. They puff up their chests proudly proclaiming that they intend to resist being organized and they claim that being organized is precisely what they are fighting against. I understand the feeling, even sympathize quite a lot, but there is a problem with this obstinacy. It means they won’t win on a statewide ballot very often. The Illinois primary just proved me correct, too.

Let’s take the race for Senate in Illinois as exhibit “A.” Of course the good old boys in the state party went with Mark Kirk, the center left candidate from a northern suburb of Chicago. He was the he-can-win candidate and the establishment choice. Not one Tea Party group, though, wants Kirk and for good reason — and I heartily concur with them, as it happens. So who was the “Tea Party candidate,” the one meant to beat out Kirk, the one backed by the newly found power of the Tea Party movement? There wasn’t one. There were three.

Sadly, the Tea Partiers in Illinois split their vote all up. Some Tea Party Groups went with Don Lowery and some went with Patrick Hughes. A few even went with John Arrington. Hughes, of course, was the only one that had even a remote chance as far as voter polls were concerned. Hughes at least registered in the polls, Lowery and Arrington barely showed up at all.

Now, I like Mr. Lowery to be sure. He is a great fellow and has some fantastic principles. I can see why Tea Party groups are attracted to him. I feel the same way about Mr. Arrington. On the other hand, the same can be said of Hughes (disclosure, I endorsed Hughes). The problem is not that one or the other Tea Party group chose the wrong candidate, it’s that they didn’t choose the same candidate. They petered away their votes by choosing three candidates allowing Mark Kirk to run away with it.

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