Explore our content

All types | All dates | All authors
Tea party
Quick Hit
by David Milton Brent
2:33pm
Mon Feb 6

New Super PAC Readying For Battle With Illinois Tea Party Congressman

CREDO Mobile, a San Francisco-based company that sells cell phones and phone plans, has started a super PAC aimed at defeating Tea Party congress members in the 2012 election cycle. One of their primary targets? Illinois’ 8th district representative Joe Walsh.

”This is a guy who self-identifies as a ‘crazy Tea Party freshman’ [congressman],” Becky Bond, CREDO’s Political Director and the head of CREDO SuperPAC, said of Walsh. “This guy is concerned that government spending is gonna put too much of a burden on our children in the future, and yet [he] doesn’t even pay his own child support. This guy shouldn’t be in Congress.”
Read more »

Quick Hit
by Matthew Blake
11:03am
Fri Dec 9, 2011

Walsh Stays In The Eighth (VIDEO)

Second-year Congressman and nationally prominent Tea Party mouthpiece Joe Walsh announced Thursday that he would run for re-election in Illinois’ re-drawn 8th Congressional district – his current district, discarding earlier intentions to run in the 14th. This is despite the fact that his home county of McHenry is now in the 14th District and a newly redrawn 8th district is now made up of majority Democratic voters.

In a relentlessly over-the-top speech to the Chicago Tea Party Thursday night, Walsh kept saying that the country was at war, fighting a, presumably, figurative battle over the size of government. He believed that he could keep his Congressional seat because 8th district voters will join him in the fight to shrink government.
Read more »

Quick Hit
by Aricka Flowers
1:57pm
Fri Aug 13, 2010

Immigrant Group Asks Brady, Hultgren Not To Campaign With Pulido

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights is calling on GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady to cancel his plans to appear onstage with Illinois Minuteman leader Rosanna Pulido at a Tea Party event this Saturday in Bartlett. Pulido, a one-time congressional candidate, is known for her inflammatory language and hard-right views on immigration policy, a subject Brady broached on the trail last week. The group asked the same of 14th District Congressional GOP nominee candidate Randy Hultgren, who is also a confirmed speaker for the event.

PI Original
by Josh Kalven
11:18am
Mon Jun 14, 2010
13 comments

Pollak Cites Gun-Toter As Example Of Tea Party Diversity (VIDEO)

Tea Partiers

When challenged about the tea party's image as predominantly "white and middle-class," 9th Congressional District GOP candidate Joel Pollak chose a questionable example of diversity.

Quick Hit
by Josh Kalven
12:42pm
Fri Apr 16, 2010

Tea Partyin'

Both the Tribune's Eric Zorn and local blogger Carl Nyberg have interesting posts up on yesterday's Tea Party rallies in Chicagoland. 

Zorn recalls his discussion with the Illinois Policy Institute's John Tillman and comes away thinking that he heard "an endorsement of populist ignorance, of unfocused anger and simple thinking about complex problems."  Nyberg, meanwhile, profiles some of the characters he encountered at the Daley Plaza rally.