The Washington Post has a big write up about a new and growing “grassroots” [more on this word in a minute] movement, The Coffee Party. Supposedly the Coffee Party is for all those disenfranchised citizens who are unhappy with government but do not subscribe to Tea Party tenets of small and limited government.
From the Coffee Party’s Facebook page, they state who they are:
We are diverse--ethnically, geographically, politically, in age and in experience.
We are 100% grassroots. No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a political culture that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented.
We demand a government that responds to the needs of the majority of its citizens as expressed by our votes and by our voices; NOT corporate interests as expressed by misleading advertisements and campaign contributions.
We want a society in which democracy is treated as sacrosanct and ordinary citizens participate out of a sense of civic duty, civic pride, and a desire to contribute to society. The Coffee Party is a call to action. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift --Democracy-- and we must use it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation.
The only real thing you have to know about the Coffee Party is that it isn’t 100% grassroots. As Left Coast Rebel easily found out, it is just another left wing Astroturf effort. The Founder of the Coffee Party movement is Annabel Park and as Left Coast Rebel discovers:
According to the article, the founder is Annabel Park. Of course it took only five minutes of google searching to expose the Astroturfhere. According to a youtube account, Park is also associated with Asian Americans for Obama. Below is a video of Parks interviewing Kal Penn, an actor who left the TV show House to work for Obama.
Dig a little further and you find that Left Coast Rebel is correct. I went to The Coffee Party’s website and sure enough it is a snappy looking social network site, but the thing that immediately caught my eye was a poll they have there. The poll asks “in your opinion what is the most urgent issue”. What do you think the majority of them picked? Health care, of course!
The poll isn’t the only place where you find them pushing hard for health care reform. A look at the comments on their Facebook page and you find heath care all over the place. Even this polished video by their LA chapter has all these folks talking about health care
How is it that all the major polls show the vast majority of Americans are concerned about jobs, the economy and the deficit, yet this so-called grassroots movement has health care as its number one concern? It is also very convenient that health care is also Obama’s number one concern.
If I had to guess, The Coffee Party is nothing more than another Astroturf effort designed to cultivate a new breed of Hope Dopes for 2012.
Via: Memeorandum
Via: The Washington Post
Via: Left Coast Rebel
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