'Coffee Party' Brews Up Progressive Answer to Tea

User known only as 'El Shaheed' fueled protests

(NEWSER) - The protests rocking Egypt have been fueled in part by a man who died before they began: Khaled Said, who was reportedly killed by police last summer. That’s the name that heads a Facebook page that has been helping to organize the demonstrations—but the page’s creator, who goes by the name El Shaheed, or martyr, remains completely anonymous, Newsweek reports. “There is no name. There is no leader. It is purely about the thought,” says an activist. More»

Obama 'swinging wildly' at them, needs to co-opt energy

(NEWSER) - The Tea Party is mad as hell and ... that's about it, writes Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. Beyond anger, the Tea Party "has no leader. It has no address, no phone, and no Washington headquarters. It is everywhere and nowhere." When a Post posse tried to track down 2,300 local tea-drinking groups, it could verify only 647. Cohen writes that "the Tea Party exists in the vapors," bound only by anger and the Internet. The latter eliminates the middleman—"in this case an actual political party, which was once called the organization because it actually organized." More»

Ex-governor takes aim at NAACP

(NEWSER) - The NAACP’s accusation that the Tea Party movement “ harbors racist elements ” got Sarah Palin so fired up that she had to write a Facebook post. “All decent Americans abhor racism,” she wrote , and with the election of Barack Obama “we, as a united people, applauded” the idea that we’d become a “post-racial” society. But now, 18 months later, the NAACP was trying to resurrect “the divisive politics of the past.” More»

Most can't exactly explain

(NEWSER) - Why does the tea party hate Barack Obama? For a vast number of reasons—most of which apparently aren't rooted deeply in reality. New Left Media asked protesters at the National Tax Day demonstration to explain their motivations, and perhaps predictably gathered some less-than-well-thought-out answers in this video, picked up by the Huffington Post . “Did you know president Obama is considering banning fishing in America? Fishing!” says one wide-eyed woman. More»

Haven't tea partiers ever heard of sharing?

(NEWSER) - Steve Almond used to hate taxes. But now he hates the Tea Party movement (or, more accurately, the Tea Party's “series of highly publicized tantrums”) even more…and he’s ready to confess something “almost heretical”: He actually loves Tax Day. Here’s why:

• It made him organized: Not only does this newfound organization protect him from an IRS audit or, you know, prison…it also helps him to analyze his spending, which makes it “much harder to fall prey to the junk mail come-ons of credit card companies," he writes on Salon .