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Now here's some news to warm the cockles of your heart:

Three guys named Joe are teaming up to try and help defeat one guy named Barack.

The Joes, three figures popular among many conservatives, are Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, 2010 GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller of Alaska and Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known during the 2008 presidential campaign as "Joe the Plumber."

They are teaming up Thursday night at a launch party and fundraiser in Montara, California for "The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama," a group which is dedicated, as the name explains, to trying to beat President Barack Obama in the 2012 election.

The organization was launched by the "Our Country Deserves Better Committee," a conservative political action committee that's also the parent organization of the Tea Party Express, one of the leading national Tea Party groups.

The new organization hopes to raise money to run ads and build a grassroots network of up to one million supporters by next year's election.

Also scheduled to attend the event are Sharron Angle, last year's Republican Senate nominee in Nevada, and conservative activist Melanie Morgan.

The newly formed group recently ran television ads in Wisconsin supporting Scott Walker, the new Republican governor whose battles with the state's public sector unions made national headlines.

Miller went on Neil Cavuto's Fox show last week to promote the alliance. (It was a pretty lame performance, actually; Miller just yammered his rehearsed talking points, as he usually does, and insisted that the Tea Party movement is alive and festering. Or something like that.)

But this really is quite a remarkable trio, considering that all three of them have been associated to one degree or other with the dark side of the conservative movement:

-- Miller actually hired militia goons to rough up journalists during the 2010 campaign, and had numerous Patriot movement connections, including a long association with Schaeffer Cox, the militiaman just arrested a couple of weeks ago for plotting to kill cops and judges. (More on that from David Holthouse at Media Matters.)

-- Arpaio also has a long record of playing footsie with neo-Nazis and other extremists, not to mention implementing their agenda and aping their tactics.

-- Wurzelbacher the Plumber hasn't gone quite so far to the right. Instead he's just tossed the guy who made him famous, John McCain, under the bus, and indulged in the same ignorant incendiarism that brought him all that attention in the first place, including vicious and violent eliminationist rhetoric:

Wurzelbacher has a reputation for being a blunt, politically incorrect speaker. Referring to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., more than once, Wurzelbacher asked, "Why hasn't he been strung up?"

...Referring to the Constitution as "almost like the Bible," Wurzelbacher said of the Founding Fathers: "They knew socialism doesn't work. They knew communism doesn't work."

You'll notice that joining them on the bill in California are two past masters of wingnuttery and eliminationism, Sharron "Second Amendment Remedies" Angle and Melanie "Hang em!" Morgan. That's quite a cast.

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Joe Miller of Alaska thinks the election he's running in should not be held, government spending needs to be cut except for his farm subsidy, and unemployment compensation is unconstitutional except when his wife gets it. Like virtually all tea party Republicans, Miller is a study in cognitive dissonance.

It's a big, fifty-cent word, I know. But cognitive dissonance is the reason you find a sign calling Obama a "long-legged mack daddy" just fifteen feet in front of a woman telling a tea party crowd to keep their eye out for saboteurs pretending to be racist tea partiers. It causes three hundred people to yell about federal spending underneath a mock-up of the Space Shuttle on federal property. It is the primary characteristic of Town Hall Zombie Syndrome.

Wikipedia calls it "an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously." Prolonged exposure can produce terminal irony deficiency. Much more after the jump and a video...

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(h/t The Reid Report)

If this audio weren't so amazing, I wouldn't subject you to the crummy quality. Despite my best efforts to clean it up, it's difficult listening. If you can, listen to the whole thing. If not, at least listen to the last 10 minutes. You won't regret it.

I disagree with just about everything Scott Ashjian stands for, but one thing: We both despise the Tea Party Express. Ashjian despises them because they've gone above and beyond the call of duty in their effort to destroy him. I despise them because they are nothing more than a Republican party front group to funnel money to ultra-conservative TeaBirchers (as John Amato likes to say). During the primaries, the Tea Party Express put a lot of money into Sharron Angle's campaign as well as a horribly defamatory campaign against Ashjian and harassing lawsuits to try and force him off the November ballot.

Sharron Angle owes the Tea Party Express (and Sue Lowden) her primary victory. But Scott Ashjian doesn't owe her anything, and this conversation between Angle, Ashjian and their campaign managers puts everything right on the line. At 27 minutes, we hear that is "the moment of truth" for Ashjian, where he can support Angle "as a person" as someone who represents what "we want to accomplish." Ashjian's response? No endorsement for the Republican party. But it's not personal, really. Angle and her campaign manager are straight up with Ashjian in their final try: If he quits the race, Angle will "be able to do so much for [Ashjian]" from Washington DC. Her "juice" will be his "juice". Yes, she really says that.

She also has a few things to say about the Republican Party, including an arrogant declaration that she has them "in a box", giving her the power to access anyone she wants because of their desperation to remove Reid from office.

However, the most remarkable exchange is in the last 10 minutes, when Angle tells him that if he stays on the ballot, Reid will win. But, she says, if he drops his place on the ballot, she will be able to help him advance his Tea Party agenda. Ashjian makes clear his goal is the Senate seat as a true independent grassroots candidate, that he only planned for one term, and he has no intention of merging with the Republican party.

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Mark Williams -- having seen his Tea Party Express booted from the National Tea Party Foundation for his nakedly racist screed about "coloreds" -- went on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon yesterday and announced he was stepping down as the TPE spokesman. In the process, demonstrated exactly why the Tea Parties cannot distance themselves from their racists within quite as easily as they'd like:

LEMON: So I want to ask you, why did you resign from the Tea Party Express?

WILLIAMS: To take the spotlight off of me. It's a movement. It's not about me. It's not about my ego. It's not about my fat head. I did succeed in getting the NAACP to the table. And by the way this tea party federation which represents exactly 40 groups out of 5,000, I was never a member of. I have no idea who they are, but they threw me out.

Hmmmm. This is most peculiar, since the press release announcing the formation of the National Tea Party Foundation in April 2009 lists the Tea Party Express as one of its founding member organizations. And I can't find any indication the Tea Party Express ever indicated that this listing was in error.

In any event, Williams then went on to explain that he was still very much a Tea Party activist:

LEMON: OK. So listen, if you say that you wanted to take the spotlight off of you, I have to ask you then why did you accept this interview if you don't want to be in the spotlight?

WILLIAMS: I weaselled on you last time. The reason why I canceled last time was because the day before David Webb went on TV and did all this nonsense about kicking me out of a group I never belonged to, I had sat down with the Urban League, the NAACP, Reverend Al and a bunch of other people and we reached an agreement to put all the rancor behind us and find common ground.

This guy Webb, looking for headlines, cashing in, whatever it was, decided he would chime in. That makes me the issue when the issue should really be America and what we're working to save.

LEMON: OK.

WILLIAMS: I am still a Tea Partier. I just don't speak officially for the Tea Party Express.

And then he demonstrated exactly the kind of racist ignorance that is embedded deeply in the movement he formerly represented:

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This reminds me of that old joke about the guy who killed both his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan...

Lindsay Beyerstein did some great reporting on this. Don't miss the hypocritical Republican punchline!*

One of the featured corporate sponsors of the Tea Party Express had to pay millions of dollars to settle lawsuits for its role in a bus fire that killed 23 elderly nursing home residents fleeing Hurricane Rita in 2005.

The BusBank, a Chicago-based charter company, a "Tour Partner" of the Tea Party Express, a rolling protest sponsored by the Our Country Deserves Better PAC under the supervision of former Republican state legislator Howard Kaloogian, now a PR exec for the GOP-linked firm Russo, Marsh & Rogers.

BusBank is also arranging to ferry Tea Baggers to their 9/12 march on Washington to voice their demands for unfettered capitalism. (Update: Commenter Casual Observer asks if there's a Dick Armey connection here. There is. Dick Armey's FreedomWorks Foundation is the premiere sponsor of the 9/12 march; and Kaloogian's OCDB PAC is a "Gold Co-Sponsor.")

In 2005, a bus carrying seniors fleeing Hurricane Rita burst into flame outside of Dallas, immolating 23 nursing home residents. Investigators later found that the bus was: driven by an undocumented migrant without a valid U.S. driver's license, lacking adequate fire extinguishers, and not registered to operate in Texas. When the bus had mechanical problems before the crash, the driver took it to an unqualified mechanic who failed to notice the critical fault--an unlubricated axle that eventually melted and caught fire.

BusBank (aka Global Charters) hired the subcontractor, Global Limo. BusBank boasted on its website that it had a "rigorous operator certification process" to ensure the safety of contracted bus drivers. BusBank used Global even though the subcontractor had a long record of federal and state safety violations, had entered bankruptcy, and was being sued.

BusBank's association with Global appears to have been more than a one-off, Global Limo's owner Jim Maples even listed Global Charters as his employer when he gave $5000 to the RNC in 2004.

*BusBank CEO Bill Maulsby blamed insufficient federal oversight, "We're not safety experts," he said. "We clearly need to depend on the federal government."

In November 2006, a federal court convicted Maples and sentenced him to five years' probation for failure to maintain his buses. Investigators found 168 violations in Maples' four-bus fleet.

The following month, US Fed News reported that BusBank had been awarded a Homeland Security contract worth up to $55 million.

In June, BusBank and Global Limo settled out of court for a total of $11 million, a pittance when split between the families of the 23 victims and the patients who survived the crash. BusBank's legal troubles are far from over. According to one report, more lawsuits are getting underway this month.

The firm filed for bankruptcy in Delaware in August.

If you gave a Tea Party and no one came, would it still be news? If, on the other hand, Koch Industries and the RNC gave a Tea Party and a handful of people came, would it still be news? Or would reporting it three or four times a day make it news?

Shoq and StopBeck pointed me to something I hadn't noticed: CNN is serving as a built-in PR machine for the Tea Party Express.

Since the kickoff of the TeaParty Express Tour, CNN has embedded a small press corps in their custom-painted "CNN Express" press bus for the sole purpose of following teabaggers around the country , reporting 3-4 times daily on the activities of the corporate-funded, RNC-connected Tea Party Express.

This clip from Wednesday boggled my mind. You can see how few there are at this rally, but watch as Ali Velshi and Ed Lavandera turn it into a "movement".

LAVANDERA: But these other rallies that have take been place in St. George, Utah, in Phoenix, and in Salt Lake City, now in Grand Junction, have had -- one of the ones we went to had close to 2,000 people. The last couple that we've been to have been around 500, a couple hundred people or so. This one's a little bit smaller.

They are packing up here shortly and headed to Denver tonight, so we'll see how that works. Some of these other rallies have been held during the days, so obviously people have to work and that sort of thing. But in Denver, it will be an interesting one to check out. It will be after work, and see what kind of turnout that they draw there.

The organizers here maintain that they are very happy with the turnout that they've been getting, but I think as they push forward and move closer to Washington, D.C., the numbers and the intensity of the turnout --

VELSHI: Yes.

LAVANDERA: -- will be important to keep an eye on just to get a sense of how much people are engaging and joining into this effort.

VELSHI: All right. Well, maybe when you get closer to Washington, D.C., do you mind if I join you for a couple days? I'll come on the bus, ride along with you.

In one short clip, we have two reporters apologizing for low turnouts, promising more, and watching for it to grow as it gets closer to "Washington, DC". Nowhere do they mention how the Tea Party Express is funded or who the major players are. It begs the question: If CNN weren't embedded with the Tea Party Express, would we call it a 'movement'? Who is the story? TPE, or CNN's invention of the TPE?

The Tea Party Express is not -- I repeat -- NOT a grass roots movement. It's a professionally coordinated corporate PR effort funded and founded by professional PR hacks, principally from the firm of Russo Marsh & Rogers (also known as King Media Group) in Sacramento, CA.

New FEC disclosures have just been filed, so let's have a look at the money trail.

The TeaParty Express is primarily a Howard Kaloogian project. Howard Kaloogian was featured in an earlier Crooks and Liars report on paid agitator Deborah Johns and in this report about bus tour co-sponsor, the BusBank, who was found negligent and responsible for the deaths of 23 passengers.

Or maybe you recall Kaloogian as one of the architects of the Gray Davis recall/Arnold Schwarzenegger coup of 2003.

According to the most recent Tea Party Express FEC disclosures (PDF), employees of the Tea Party Express include Mormon mom Tiffiny Reugner, Amy Kremer, former Tea Party Patriot, Marine Mom Deborah Johns, and Joe Weirzbicki. These are the paid hacks comprising the face of the "Tea Party Express" campaign.

The newcomer to the Tea Party Express group is Frontline Strategies and Media, LLC. A visit to their website is, well...interesting. It's a shell site, with a front page and a lot of "coming soon" pages underneath. The domain frontlinestrat.com was registered in June, 2008 to Brent Lowder. Brent Lowder is COO of the California Republican Party.

California Department of Corporations lists Frontline Strategies and Media LLC's primary contact as Eric Beach. And look what Eric Beach's bio on Mercury Public Affairs says:

Mr. Beach's political background is extensive in California. Prior to becoming Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Beach was Campaign Director for Bill Jones for United States Senate in California. During California's historic recall, Mr. Beach served as a senior staff member for Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful run for Governor in California and as a member of the California Gubernatorial Transition Team.

If it isn't already obvious what a sham this outfit is, it should be now. It's probably not much of a surprise either, but tell me this: Where does CNN ever disclose the nature of this "movement" or who is behind it? Look at the transcript up there. It says "organizers". It makes it sound like a bunch of really committed citizens got together and are taking the country by storm. A real American grassroots movement!

CNN's decision to embed themselves in the Tea Party Express Great American PR and Propaganda tour while failing to specifically report who sponsors and orchestrates these events points to the bankruptcy of our corporate media and their willingness to mislead viewers about what they are doing and why they are there.

This isn't just my usual round of press indignation. These people have ruined California and left a leading-edge state in a pile of dust and rubble. Now they want to do it to the country, and they've enlisted CNN to help them. It's just one more reason to dump CNN.

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We wondered, back when the Tea Party Express was running ads on Fox, why they bothered, since they'd soon be getting all the free advertising they could ask for.

And sure enough, Griff Jenkins has been filing reports from the multiple cross-country stops for the tour since its outset, provided for all the various Fox anchors (Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Neal Cavuto, Bill O'Reilly, the Fox and Friends crew) to feature in their regular broadcasts.

Quelle surprise: they haven't had to run any ads on Fox since they started touring.

Most of the time, Jenkins -- who's clearly cheerleading this effort and not trying in the least to act like an actual reporter -- at least has bothered to mostly feature interviews with attending teabaggers, so as to at least create the appearance of some semblage of journalism in these reports.

But last night, on Sean Hannity's show, Jenkins just dropped the pretense, and gathered the teabaggers in New York behind him as props and launched into a rant about how these events were all about average Americans taking back America from an out-of-control federal government. He wasn't reporting; he was essentially being a paid propagandist for the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which is the sponsor of this event.

And the funny thing is, as we reported earlier, the Our Country Deserves Better PAC has ALWAYS been about opposing whatever policies President Obama pursues. That is, this is a specifically anti-Obama campaign, and the rhetoric about "out of control government" is a fig leaf:

The "Our Country Deserves Better" PAC, in fact, was founded in August 2008 -- before the election -- specifically to oppose Barack Obama and his policies. (They called it "drawing contrasts between Senator Barack Obama and John McCain".) In October 2008, for instance, Williams was out on the stump campaigning against Obama as a "socialist" on a previous bus tour called the "Stop Obama Express". They've also runs ads comparing Obama to Hitler.

Jenkins claimed this was "black and white," but the crowd shots are almost completely of white faces. Moreover, I'll wager that every single one of them is a disappointed Republican -- if not a McCain voter, then a Ron Paul voter.

In fact, a better name for the whole enterprise would be The Sore Loser Express. Because that's who's coming out for these things -- people who think they can get a do-over on the election.

Including the fine folks at Fox, evidently.

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[H/t David]

Well, now that Mark Williams dropped the mask and revealed the rotten racist core of the Tea Party movement's authoritarian base, the movement's defenders have been scrambling to distance themselves from him.

So today on Face the Nation, one of the movement's only black spokesmen -- David Webb of the National Tea Party Foundation -- and announced that Williams and his Tea Party Express have been "expelled" from their would-be umbrella organization:

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, it do-- it does seem to me that-- that-- that part of what this is about is--is he’s saying to you, you really need to police your-- your organization. And that some of these signs we’ve seen them that have shown up at some of these parties really are objectionable. What are you doing about that?

DAVID WEBB: Well-- well, we have it and that’s a very good question. We, in the last twenty-four hours have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote which, he, I guess, may have considered satire but which was clearly offensive. And that is what we do--self-policing is the right and the responsibility of any movement or organization. I denounce any acts that I see many leaders do and for Mister Jealous, to say that these elements, when millions have been out there, represent the Tea Party is blatantly false and they’re simply playing the race card.

It's hard to say just how much pull the NTPF actually has. As you can see from their press release announcing their formation last April, the outfit comprises most of the movement's heavy hitters -- which included the Tea Party Express folks.

Note that Fox particularly promoted the Tea Party Express when it was organizing that bus tour in the runup to Glenn Beck's "912 March on Washington", though CNN had a hand in it too. Funny how the Williams story is getting relatively little play there, isn't it?

Fact is, the Tea Parties can't just denounce Williams and pretend that they haven't been playing the "race card" all along. And now the NAACP is playing that card -- for calling them out? Just more up-is-down Planet Bizarro garbage from these folks.