As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports, the Tea Party is trying to demonstrate that the movement is more than a bunch of Angry White Folk and actually includes people of various backgrounds and ethnicities.
Tea Party leaders Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, both of the national advocacy group FreedomWorks, were discussing the movement’s success while having coffee with reporters this week, when one of the questioners asked about the Sept. 12 rally in Washington, yet another Tea Party event distinguished by a sea of white faces.
“I’m glad you brought that question up,” replied Kibbe, “because we have a project that we’re launching this week called DiverseTea.” He said DiverseTea would highlight “African Americans, Jews, Hispanics, others that have come to this movement, because there is this nagging perception that we are not diverse.”
They’ve launched a Web site to demonstrate such diversity and as of yesterday, Milbank tells us, “the list of ‘Diverse Tea Partiers‘ on the site had reached a grand total of five.”
The list is now eight (60% growth in a day!) but what catches our eye is the site platform.
The site’s built on WordPress, the open source CMS, and the design is the freely available WP-Creativix Theme created by IWEBIX.
There’s conspiracy in here somewhere. Opponents of Open Source say it’s anti-capitalist and if there’s one thing Tea Partiers love, it’s their capitalism.
So what gives? Next thing you know they’re going to jump on the Net Neutrality bandwagon.
