Looks like Maine's Teapartiers are imploding....

[Old and In the Way]

http://www.downeast.com/the-tipping-point/2010/august/conflict-maine-politics (more links there)

A Tea Party Takeover: Maine Politics Turn Ugly
Submitted by Mike Tipping on Wed, 08/04/2010 - 5:55am.




Something is going on over at Maine Patriots, one of the leading Web sites for members of the Maine Tea Party.

In a message to all members last night, site owner Amy Hale told a strange tale of intimidation:

I was cornered in the parking lot by 10+ people and told that bad things would happen to me if I did not give them the password and hand over Maine Patriots. Therefore, I no longer have control of Maine Patriots.
Amy

In a forum thread on the site, member Robert Wayne Horr responds with some more information but no real answers:

Amy is fine The letter is real. More info to come but not tonight

A message posted on the sister site Maine Refounders provides some more details, including that this appears to be an internal Tea Party dispute and that the police are now involved:

Members,

It saddens me to have to make this announcement. Yesterday, a group of members of Maine Patriots extorted the passwword and took control of Maine Patriots' website. Amy is working with the parent site Ning to correct this. A police report is being filed.

Please keep Amy Hale in your thoughts and prayers. She will need our support to get through this. If you have any questions, please call or email me or Robert. We are staying in touch with Amy.

In Unity,

David Andreasen

On both a political and anthropological level, this will be interesting to watch. No word yet on if or how this will affect the newly formed Tea Party offshoot The Maine Patriot Militia, which, thankfully, has “no intentions of starting any civil unrest or attempting to over throw our govt.”

-----------------------------
That's the way the kookies crumble for the MTP....

[Crystal Clarity]

1. Mutineering Patriots

This whole thing would be funny (in an absurd kind of way) had I not spent the past hour perusing these websites. Now I just feel kind of nauseated and a bit shaken. They don't appear to be huge in number but wow, are they scary! Some of these folks seem very unstable. Eeew, and I even recognized one of them. It's a bit of a creepy feeling to know that they live among us. One woman was even advocating 'putting down' "unproductive" members of society.

And the incident itself (if true) speaks volumes about what kind of people these Teapartiers are. I hope you are right and that they are imploding. Time will tell.

[Old and In the Way]

3. Pure and simple, they are anti-socialists.

We get labeled as socialists all the time and, considering what the polar opposite is, I'm OK with that. The question everyone should ask is, can a country survive and prosper with a majority population of anti-socialists? Of course not...by definition they are the antithesis of what a society needs to function. A grand sociology experiment would be to put all of these people on Grand Manan Island for a year, with their guns, and see how many survive a year...

[RBInMaine]

2. The Tea-Idiots are REPUBLICANS. Plain and simple. Ha ha ha... Let the nuts crack !

[jpak]

4. First they came for the Teabaggers....

:evilgrin:

[luckyleftyme2]

5. who funds them

the libertarians seem to support them and the koch brothers are big supporters of the libertarians.
look up the teaparty and the koch brothers. they are the 6th richest corp. in the usa !
I believe the koch bros. live in TEXAS!

[luckyleftyme2]

6. MORE ON FUNDING

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

....

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”
THIS MAY HAVE SOME DO MORE RESEARCH BEFORE PUSHING AN AGENDA OF SOME ONE OTHER THAN THEMSELVES!