{"id":486518,"date":"2010-03-29T22:15:07","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T02:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=75754"},"modified":"2010-03-29T22:15:07","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T02:15:07","slug":"astroturf-express-calls-%e2%80%9ctea-party%e2%80%9d-candidate-a-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/486518","title":{"rendered":"Astroturf Express Calls \u201cTea Party\u201d Candidate a Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Nevada Senate race took an interesting turn when Scott Ashjian announced his intention to run as an independent “Tea Party” candidate. The presence of a third party taking votes from the substantial anti-Harry Reid faction could save Reid’s re-election<\/a> by enabling him to win with less than a majority.<\/p>\n

In recent days, however, Ashjian has been stung by felony theft charges<\/a> over writing bad checks to local businesses. The fact that the head of the Clark County bad check unit seeking the arrest of Ashjian is also a former head of the Clark County GOP has led to dueling charges of political motivations on all sides.<\/p>\n

The Tea Party Express, which just held a big rally in Reid’s hometown of Searchlight over the weekend, released a Web ad<\/a> accusing Ashjian of being a “fraud” trying to split the vote and deliver the Senate seat back to Reid. They’ve threatened to run the ad on television if Ashjian doesn’t drop out of the race.<\/p>\n

Now, it’s extremely rich to see the Tea Party Express accuse someone else of being a fraud. The term could not be applied more perfectly to anyone but them. In reality, the Tea Party Express is composed of California-based Republican political consultants<\/a>, cashing in on the name “Tea Party” for personal gain. In fact, over two-thirds of their PAC money, over $850,000, went directly to their political consulting firm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The spectacle of a Republican operative-run PAC calling a Tea Party candidate an inauthentic fraud is something special.<\/p>\n

\"Share <\/a>\n<\/p>\n


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The Nevada Senate race took an interesting turn when Scott Ashjian announced his intention to run as an independent “Tea Party” candidate. The presence of a third party taking votes from the substantial anti-Harry Reid faction could save Reid’s re-election by enabling him to win with less than a majority. In recent days, however, Ashjian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}