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Ta-Nehisi Coates: Because there are no racists...

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Sean Hannity latest teabagging event has come to a violent halt when he pulled out at the last minute. WLWT reported that there were some technical issues and then it would seem that Hannity blamed it on personal reasons.

Fox News commentator Sean Hannity has cancelled his appearance and broadcast at a Tea Party rally at Fifth Third Arena.Hannity planned to tape his television show from the event, which starts at 6 p.m. at the University of Cincinnati.Organizers of the rally said there were technical issues, but that the overriding factor for the cancellation was a personal matter that Hannity needed to attend to in New York. WLWT was the first to report that there were issues when Hannity failed to appear at a book signing at 4:30 p.m. Minutes later, Hannity's bus was seen leaving the campus.Hannity's newscast will broadcast from New York with a guest host.

However that story isn't holding water. The LA Times is reporting that Sean took a scolding from FOX News execs and they are making him do his show tonight from his studio.

Angry Fox News executives ordered host Sean Hannity to abandon plans to broadcast his nightly show as part of a Tea Party rally in Cincinnati on Thursday after top executives learned that he was set to headline the event, proceeds from which would benefit the local Tea Party organization.

Rally organizers had listed Hannity, who is on a book tour, as the headliner of the four-hour Tax Day event at the University of Cincinnati. The rally, expected to draw as many as 13,000 people, was set feature speakers such as “Liberal Facism” author Jonah Goldberg and local Tea Party leaders. Participants were being charged a minimum of $5, with seats near Hannity’s set going for $20, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, which reported that any profits would go to future Tea Party events. Media Matters for America noted that Hannity’s personal website directed supporters to a link to buy tickets for the Cincinnati rally.

But senior Fox News executives said they were not aware Hannity was being billed as the centerpiece of the event or that Tea Party organizers were charging for admission to Hannity’s show as part of the rally. They first learned of it Thursday morning from John Finley, Hannity's executive producer, who was in Cincinnati to produce Hannity's show.

Furious, top officials recalled Hannity back to New York to do his show in his regular studio. The network plans to do an extensive post-mortem about the incident with Finley and Hannity's staff.

“Fox News never agreed to allow the Cincinnati Tea Party organizers to use Sean Hannity’s television program to profit from broadcasting his show from the event," said Bill Shine, the network’s executive vice president of programming. "When senior executives in New York were made aware of this, we changed our plans for tonight’s show.”

Before the tea party movement got going, FOX News was very excited to use their entire network to promote them because a Democratic politician was elected to the White House. Now, they are trying to make believe that never happened. I wonder if their legal department got involved when money was changing hands with the teabaggers?

UPDATE: More News from FOX 19:

A statement was released by the Vice president of Programming of FOX News, Bill Shine.

"FOX News never agreed to allow the Cincinnati Tea Party Organizers to use Sean Hannity's television program to profit from broadcasting his show from the event. When senior executives in New York were made aware, we changed our plans for tonight's show." FOX News has confirmed that Sean Hannity's broadcast of tonight's show from New York City.

Yep, it's all about the cash. Well they still have Joe the Plumber and Bill Cunningham to entertain them...

Poor Glenn Reynolds of Pajamas Media has been there waiting for Hannity to arrive and now can be counted as the people who were surely disappointed by Hannity's sudden departure.

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Sure, Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher may have seemed to have stabbed the man who made him famous in the back with his comments the other day that John McCain had "ruined my life."

But he went on Sean Hannity's show last night to explain that he was taken out of context -- he was really only talking about how the media had ruined his former life by making it impossible to go back to. "The housewife" didn't want him coming home with TV crews, he said.

But then he threw John McCain -- whose candidacy he avidly supported by going on the trail with him, while McCain cited him in every stump speech he made for a month -- right under the Tea Party Express anyway:

Wurzelbacher: Now, like I said, it gave me the opportunity to get out there and ask Americans to get educated on the facts of what's going on -- get informed about the decisions they're making and the people that they're voting in to elect them. And uh, you know, I went around with John McCain because it was the lesser of two evils, to be quite frank. Ahm, you know, I'm not afraid to say that.

John McCain exactly doesn't represent true conservatism -- he does represent the Republicans, but not true conservatism.

Hannity: Well, he certainly frustrates me -- I battled with him on campaign finance, on immigration reform, the Gang of 12, we've had a number of issues. Do you now not support him? He's up for re-election in the Senate. Are you supporting him?

Wurzelbacher: Ah, absolutely not. I mean, that's what the Tea Party movement is against. You know, John McCain is of Washington, he's a career politician, he's had plenty of -- ample opportunity to fix things and get things done, and yet here we are. I mean, he's just the face of what's going on in Washington -- and I'm not necessarily trying to pick on John McCain, I mean, we need to get rid of most of those guys that are in there that are career politicians.

Ah, nothing like conservative ethics in action: Bogus talking points before basic decency.

Oh noes! If you can't hold on to your basic, "queer"-hatin', low-information, unlicensed plumber not really named Joe that you hold up for WAAAAYYYY past his fifteen minutes as the epitome of the Republican Party, who can you hold on to?

Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party — and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits. It's no coincidence that many Republicans who voted against the stimulus have claimed credit for stimulus projects in their district — or that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal stopped ridiculing volcano-monitoring programs after a volcano erupted in Alaska. "We can't be the antigovernment party," Snowe says. "That's not what people want."

All this while the Republicans back-pedal off their "listening tour" to find out how real Republicans want their party to move towards because they can't bear the thought of upsetting Rush Limbaugh. Tellingly, the enabling and complicit Time Magazine completely buries the lede deep within the article--fourteen paragraphs down--that the man who owes his entire fame to the Republican Party is now taking his ball and going home.

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OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Uppity Negro Network, BuzzChurn, Guilty Planet, Lab Kat

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: Putting the "offensive" in charm offensive ...Karen Hughes is pissing people off all over the Middle East. And this is the woman who's supposed to make the Arab world like America again? Uhh, yeah, good luck with that.
The Dan Report: Criticized Cafferty Joke about DeLay ends up being prophetic

Have you seen the teabaggers in action during Rep. Lloyd Doggett's (D-TX)town hall on health care? These are standard right-wing tactics -- attack any kind of meaningful change in health care, or even any kind of meaningful discourse around it. They remind me of a gathering of Joe the Plumbers.

Today, House members are back home to begin their month-long recess. The far right has indicated that they plan to welcome many of their representatives with large, angry throngs (“town halls gone wild”). The corporate lobbyists engineering these “grassroots” efforts have indicated their harassment strategy is to “yell,” “stand up and shout,” and “rattle” the members. Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being confronted by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls. This past weekend, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) was the latest victim of the right’s strategy, where protesters followed him and chanted “just say no” to health care.

We've all seen it before. I wonder how many of these teabaggers actually have health insurance and are working. This should have been expected because it's all too familiar. Digby links to this piece by PBS that charts the fight for health care. A Detailed Timeline of the Healthcare Debate portrayed in "The System." It's a facinating look at the time line of events.You'll notice that Newt Gingrich raised the flag that health care was coming and republicans should do everything they could to destroy it.

Spring 1991 - Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, in a private discussion about long-term Republican political strategy, predicts that the "next great offensive of the Left," as he puts it, will be "socializing health care." Gingrich declares the need for hardline Republicans to begin positioning themselves now to keep Democrats from winning in the future.

Digby writes:

I'm sure the Democrats all remember this and are prepared for it this time. Right?

If you haven't read the entire PBS timeline on how health care reform was derailed in 1994 recently, do yourself a favor and read it. The legislative side has an eerily familiar feel to it, especially the part where the Democrats in the Senate preen egomaniacally while selling out reform to the insurance industry and the Republicans. You'll recall that the Republicans consciously pumped Whitewater in the press to create a distraction for the public and fuel mass protest among their own base. It's a sign of their impotence that the best they could come up with this time was a fringy clown show like the birthers, but it's certainly done its job among the 58% of Republicans who now aren't sure if Obama is actually an illegal alien. This stuff is evergreen.

If you can, please attend any town hall meeting in your area and try to bring some sanity to it or expose these phony populists for what they are. If you can, interview the teabaggers and send me the video at crooksandliars@gmail.com or crooksandliarsvideos@gmail.com. It will be up to the progressive groups also to organize activists to offset what Republicans hope to accomplish. The Democratic party should have expected this. That's why I asked President Obama to demand that Congress work through the August recess. You can depend on Max Baucus to do his part and screw up health care for all Americans. He sold us out before.

August will be littered with images of the Zombie Plumbers disrupting town hall meetings because the media just loves this stuff. As usual, they won't give proper context or explain who these teabaggers are, and Americans will view these wackos on the news as a legitimate effort by patriotic Americans who are against changes to the health care system instead of explaining who they really are. I hate to bring this up, but do you remember how the media handled the six weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania Democratic primary? It was pretty frightening. That's what we can expect this month, and it won't be pretty.