Tory teabaggers

The tea party "movement" has been an astroturf effort from the beginning. Here's my evidence: My lovable liberal email address is on their list. How did it get there? A human teabagger wouldn't put me on their email list, though a webbot harvesting email addresses for a PR firm wouldn't care about my opposing ideology as it tried to pump up the appearance of a big movement.

There's more evidence. I get teabagger email from state organizations in many different states. Since I stopped reflexively deleting the teabagger email, I've heard from:

• Colorado - via Blue Sky Factory - multiple times
  
• Arkansas - via the same email server - multiple times
  
• Texas - yep, same server - multiple times
  
• Ohio - uh-huh (previously had no idea where the hell Zanesville is, not to mention local wingnut "Coach" Dave Daubenmire)
• New York - multiple times
  
• and a Virginia/Tennessee two-fer

All these far-flung organizations just happen to have the same email provider and list.

Of course, CNN continues to imagine that it might be possible that the teabagging organizations are really grassroots eruptions of popular sentiment:

Some Tea Partiers have voiced anger and concern over whether the powerful groups are "astroturfing'' what is supposed to be a grass-roots coalition -- the idea that the movement is being organized by old-fashioned GOP bigwigs to promote their agenda.

It's plainly obvious that they're centralized exploitations of the passion of wingnut ignoramuses. But CNN won't tell its readers the plain truth. CNN has to pretend its own ignorance in order to split the difference between, in this case, corporate conservatives and teabaggers.

It's maddening to try to get news out of our media. I imagine it's a lot like reading Pravda in the Soviet days.