Courtesy Roanoke Tea Party

“In 2010 when we started, there was nobody that would even primary Goodlatte. We actually helped out a guy that was a libertarian run, and he got about 8 percent of the vote. Two years later, Karen Kwiatkowski ran as a Republican and got about 35 percent of the vote. If we can keep that train going, we’ll have him out of office in a year and a half.”
Chip Tarbutton, president of the Roanoke Tea Party, in Rollcall.

Mcturcotte | Wikimedia Commons | Text by Dan

Update: Read The Roanoke Tea Party’s report on this loss, (and bonus: see the nifty “WANTED for impersonating a congressional conservative” posters they’ve designed to slam Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke County).

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The House Rules Committee this evening tabled Del. Ben Cline’s bill that would have forced any Virginia localities that are members of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiative to drop their memberships.

The action happened on a voice vote. It likely means it’s dead for this year. It might have been folded into another bill, though. I’m checking, and if that’s the case I’ll update this post.

Here’s the report from the Virginia General Assembly Legislative Information System, and Thursday’s column on the bill.

Grafit by Dan | Notice the right tilt

I’m (so far still) on the emailing list for the Roanoke Tea Party. God bless them. And here’s an urgent email they just sent out, from President Chip Tarbutton, one of many who got snookered by the polls-are-biased-in-favor-of-Obama scam.

Here it is:

I have been inundated with questions and concerns. What are we going to do? Is their any hope left? First of all everyone needs to take a big deep breath. There are things we can do and we have a plan for this. But we need to approach this in an organized and smart way.

We are planning on doing some paid advertising for our December meeting. This is a critical moment. We HAVE A PLAN AND WE NEED A LOT OF HELP. BRING EVERYONE YOU CAN TO OUR DECEMBER 6 meeting. It is at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood at 6:30 PM.

Well, golly gee whilickers I know where I’m gonna be on Dec. 6 at 6:30 p.m. Seriously. Hope to see y’all there, among those quite welcoming folks.

Dan Radmacher, are you with me? Read more »

From rpcva.org

Wednesday and Thursday I was down at Mountain Lake, the 150-year-old resort in Giles County, as a guest speaker for the Rural Planning Caucus of Virginia.

That 34-year-old group shares information about the unique planning needs of small towns and rural areas, and it has many knowledgeable and welcoming members. They invited me to talk about columns I had written on the Roanoke Tea Party.

Those have mostly focused on the Tea Party’s long and unsuccessful campaign to persuade the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors to drop its $1,200-a-year membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

What I learned from the folks at the RPC was probably more interesting than anything they learned from me. It was essentially this: the battleground over the ICLEI-membership issue is likely to soon shift to Richmond. Read more »

Note from Dan: Herb Detweiler is a retired white guy who lives in Roanoke County and I’ve known him for years. He’s smart enough never to have sipped the Tea Party’s Kool-Aid.

By Herb Detweiler

I do enjoy your columns so much. You are one of the few who still “tells it as it is” and seems to enjoy “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

You mentioned the “Tea Party Movement” in your Sunday column and that triggered a response in me to share with you some of the info that I gathered on that “movement” from reading a most informative and disturbing book: “The Obama Hate Machine” by Bill Press.

It came out earlier this year. Wow, talk about telling it as it is! Press has done some heavy research in his journalistic career and really digs up a lot of little-known info about how the Repubs and their sympathizers and supporters have been working since before Obama was inaugurated to make sure he failed and did not get re-elected. If you haven’t read that book you really ought to hurry to the library and get a copy. It is right up your alley!

The basic fact, which we all pretty much know, is that the Republicans pledged from day one to block everything Obama tried to do in the way of legislation, even when some of the proposals were makeovers of ideas which the Republicans themselves had previously endorsed. The point was to limit Obama’s successes to as little as possible. (Reminds me of that old saying, “It’s amazing what can be accomplished if nobody cares who gets the credit”). Read more »

From Wikimedia Commons | Alterations by Tyler Witten

He is part Tea Party “patriot,” part creature from the Black Lagoon. Meet the Virginia Green Menace superhero!

Reader Tyler Witten passed along this pic he snagged off Wikimedia Commons, with some alterations — the breastplate emblem and tri-cornered Revolutionary-era lid.

Thursday VGM-man handed out an award for “Environmental Exceptionalism” to Roanoke Tea Party boss Chip Tarbutton (who registered the Virginia Green Menace website last year).

This superhero has amazing powers. He can turn a blue sky red with the blink of any eye. He can make fiction into fact simply by pointing his finger. He can turn summer into winter and vice versa, and instantly make crazy sane.

Next, he’s going to hand out an award to Roanoke Mayor David Bowers for being “Exceptionally Taciturn.”

RoCo Supervisor Ed Elswick and former RC Clear chair Nell Boyle

Last year and this year, the Roanoke Tea Party waged a long and so far losing fight against the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors. That concerns the county’s membership in a do-gooder environmental group, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

The first casualty in this months-long battle has been the truth. That’s because Tea Partiers have trotted out every ridiculous assertion and eye-rolling conspiracy theory they can invent to argue against ICLEI and the $1,200-a-year membership.

Unfortunately, they’ve won over two of the five members on the Board of Supervisors, Butch Church from the Catawba District and Ed Elswick, who represents Windsor Hills.

Now we have the second casualty. Her name is Nell Boyle and she lives in the Windsor Hills District. Until very recently, she’s served as a volunteer on RC Clear, a 13-member group that includes 10 citizen volunteers. The volunteers are appointed by supervisors, two per district. Read more »

Chip Tarbutton and Greg Aldridge

Thursday we brought you the hilarious news that Roanoke Tea Party President Chip Tarbutton was the recipient of an award for “Environmental Exceptionalism.” It came from a bizarre outfit called Virginia Green Menace, which in fact has close ties to the Roanoke Tea Party.

I knew this because Tea Party honcho Greg Aldridge is Tarbutton’s ever-present sidekick. And it was Aldridge who presented the award on behalf the Virginia Green Menace.

Well, it turns out, the ties are even more incestuous than that. For this information I have to credit J.M. White, a relatively recent — and valued — regular here. JM did some digging, and this is what turned up:

1. VirginiaGreenMenace.com seems to be little more than a seldom visited hole in the wall where around four or five people pass links back and forth (very rarely) to one another in fits of obsessive, paranoid, atta-boy grab-assing. They’ve had five comments on their posts since November of last year, with the most recent one being posted in January of this year. Two of those comments are from the site’s four regular contributors. Basically, when [Aldridge] told Dan he couldn’t talk because he was setting up an event, they were probably just waiting in line for a six-top to open up at Ryan’s.

2. And to put away forever the assertion that this is in any way a legitimate award: a whois search reveals that the VGM website was registered by one Leslie “Chip” Tarbutton on 5-30-2011. Surprise! Surprise!

Basically, this “Environmental Exceptionalism” prize is the equivalent of a bank president instructing his VP to give him a “Best Boss” award. So … I go back to my original comment on this thread:

“When they get tired of blowing smoke up others’ butts, they just blow it up their own.”

Thanks, J.M.! So it seems what we have here is an internet circle-jerk populated by a handful of people from the Roanoke Tea Party.

By the way folks, here’s the Network Solutions whois page where you can see for yourself who registered the domain.

On the same thread, Greg Aldridge responded:

“As for Chip registering the website, that is false. The website resides on My personal server because I started it. The Domain name got registered by Chip because I was locked out of my domain account the day I was setting it up and he offered to help using his account.”

Note: When I called Greg Aldridge about the award Thursday he said he couldn’t talk because he was too busy. But he denied the award was an outrageous joke, no matter how much it seemed to be. (He was in the middle of setting up a Tea Party luncheon in Roanoke for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli).

In comments on the original post, Aldridge at first suggested the award was a satire aimed at Gene Marrano, for writing an article in the The Roanoke Star about himself (and others) receiving an award from the Cool Cities Coalition. But in later comments he insisted the award from VGM is real.

Chip Tarbutton and Greg Aldridge

Probably you have never heard of Virginia Green Menace. They’re a group with strong ties to the Roanoke Tea Party, which despite its avowals of independence is affiliated with the Koch Bros.-founded Americans For Prosperity. The VGM propagates every crackpot conspiracy theory out there regarding environmental protection. That’s their singular mission.

The central one, the “Mother Theory,” is that the United Nations is is running a dastardly and Orwellian plot to force home dwellers in Roanoke County off their land and into Motel 6-sized apartments in cluster villages, kind of like in that famously paranoid (and fictional) 1960s TV show, “The Prisoner.” (Bike lanes are part of this conspiracy, too, they believe).

Virginia Green Menace has always been an unintentional laugh riot. Now it looks like they’re going for intentional laughs. Or perhaps they’re simply 5-1/2 months late with an April Fool’s joke. Read more »

Note from Dan: The regular here known as “Warren” dusted off his crystal ball and posted the forecast below as a comment to this thread. Here it is, lightly edited. Good stuff!

Because it’s so predictable what regressives will say in the event of an Obama re-election and failure by regressives to substantially change the composition of Congress, we can already identify some likely post-election excuses as November approaches. Here are a few:

1. “The polls oversample Democrats” in pre-election speak translates into “There was widespread voter fraud and intimidation by Democrats” in post-election speak.

2. “The GOP would have won in a landslide if they’d nominated a ‘true conservative’ for president.”

Mitt Romney has called himself “severely conservative,” and he picked an Ayn Rand disciple as his running mate. Has Mitt’s GOP base fallen for a lie that he’s told, or do most American voters want leaders even more regressive than Ayn Rand?

3. “The Tea Party is a huge silent majority.” If so, they must learn what actually affects change, and that dressing up in tri-cornered hats and claiming the founders would entirely endorse their prejudices does not.

4. “The mainstream media wanted Obama to be president.” Read more »