Maryland-based documentary filmmaker Annabel Park founded the movement earlier this year getting a big response to this Facebook post: let’s start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. geez. ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss ‘em off bec it sounds elitist . . . let’s get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.

In January, Park started a Facebook fan page for the Coffee Party, which attracted over 35,000 fans by the end of February and is growing quickly.  The Washington Post profiled her and the movement in last Friday’s paper.

So what does the Coffee Party stand for?  By its own admission, it doesn’t yet have a platform, but the official web site offers the following:

The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

Hmm.  While the Coffee Party eschews terms like “liberal” and “progressive,” a little reading between the lines suggests that the group’s desire is to counteract the influence of the Tea Party while working outside of the existing structures (the Democratic Party, MoveOn, etc.)

Firedoglake offers an account of the group’s first meeting.  Here’s an excerpt:

Yesterday, I joined about 30-40 people at the first meeting of the Coffee Party Movement’s Washington, D.C., chapter at Potter’s House in Columbia Heights. Because these groups are still in their infancy, and not yet established in each neighborhood, folks from all over the metro area attended. There were participants from as far away as Baltimore and Annapolis. A diverse mix of white, African American, and Asian American residents, most were current or former Obama supporters, dismayed by the Tea Party movement, and leaned left of center. Everyone, organizers included, was there as a volunteer – no one was on any organization’s payroll or working for a specific political cause. In that sense, this was probably the most grassroots meeting I’ve ever been to.

Despite the crowd’s progressive inclinations, the meeting was not in any way ideological – unless commitment to participatory democracy and civil discourse is an ideology. The Coffee Party organizers – and Annabel Park, the “accidental” founder of the effort – emphasized a vision that is very much about changing our nation’s political culture and, in particular, the way we talk about politics. It is an alternative to the Tea Party in that it seeks to counteract the Tea Party’s discourse and tone. It also seeks to “get beyond sound bites” that have made the national political conversation stale and slowed our nation’s progress to a halt. Ms. Park’s description of the event as a “self-help meeting for sane people” seemed accurate – there was a noticeable absence of crazy people who are usually drawn to meetings where they may have a chance to complain.

LiberalArtsDude reflects on the group’s potential:

The real test for the Coffee Party will come when they have reached critical mass, have established an organizational structure and then are in a position to DO something. Either support or oppose some political measure, or apply pressure on a politician by giving or withholding support. Once the Coffee Party Movement has passed the stage of conversations and meetings and are in a position to execute their ideas into practice will determine what type of organization and movement they will be.

Have liberals, a year into the Obama Presidency, been reduced to aping a right-wing populist rebellion?  Or are we seeing a flowering of multiparty democracy outside of the sclerotic two-party system?

One thing’s for sure:  Americans of many political stripes are certain that the existing political structures are rotten to the core.

• A genuine documentary film on the Tea Party movement?
• The Tea Party takes over?
• Tea-Party: The Documentary Film

The answer to the riddle is as plain as the caviar on a lobbyist’s spoon. Democrats don’t speak to angry, working-class people because a lot of them can’t speak to angry, working-class people. They don’t know how. Many of the party’s resident geniuses gave up on that constituency long ago, preferring instead to remodel their organization as the vanguard of enlightened professionals and the shrine of purest globaloney. They worked hard to convince Wall Street that new-style Democrats could be trusted. They accepted, for the most part, the deregulatory agenda of the Reagan administration; in fact, in some fields—banking, telecommunications, free trade—they went farther than Ronald Reagan dared.

Along the way, these new-style Democrats did little as their allies in organized labor were scythed down by organized money; last year they watched as the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector sank lower than any point in the 20th century. The fatuity of it all is surely plain to Democrats by now: They have permitted nothing less than the decimation of their own grass-roots social movement. As a result, in large parts of America, there is no liberal presence at all, no economic narrative to counterbalance the wisdom of Rush Limbaugh.

President Barack Obama might have helped in this regard, using the biggest megaphone in the land to tell us, in the Times’s words, “why it happened and whom to blame.” He might have explained to us how financial regulation was systematically undermined by his predecessors, how the prospect of quick profits bred conflicts of interest throughout the system, and how a delusional free-market superstition blinded the nation to the unsoundness of the financial structure.

He might, in other words, have contested the right’s monopoly on the word “elite.” He might have reached out to working-class voters in the only way Democrats can.

But that would have been divisive. That would have disturbed the confidence of the markets.

Watching the victory of 2008 appear to slip through the Democrats’ fingers is disheartening, but not because it is a story of opportunism and selling out. After all, if Democrats were opportunists, they would be pushing the still-popular “public option” in the health-care debate. Something might yet be salvaged.

No, the Democrats’ problems arise from their convictions, from the botched centrist faith to which so many of their leaders still cling. They do what they do because they believe that those hearty fellows on the Sunday talk shows really know the answer; that the truth really resides in the dusty globalization clichés of the ’90s.

Read the whole column here.

• Who cares What’s the Matter with Kansas?
• What’s the Matter with Massachusetts?
• Proposed 10-point purity test for Republican candidates

American political documentaries tend to either center around campaigns (“Primary” and its many heirs), specific issue-focused activism, preaching to the choir (Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald) or retroactive explanations like “Standard Operating Procedure,” “No End In Sight” and the other films that try to put the pieces together after the damage is done. That’s why I have no hope that right now someone’s out there, prowling the vérité beat around the Tea Party.

The boat was missed during the the last big conservative movement in the ’80s, when Jerry Falwell’s buddy — the Rev. James Robinson — exhorted a nation with the stirring words “I’m sick and tired about hearing about all of the radicals, and the perverts, and the liberals, and the leftists, and the communists coming out of the closet. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet, out of the churches and change America.” And so they did — and what do we have to show for it in footage that wasn’t grabbed from TV news? Not a thing.

This week the New York Times decided it was finally time to give the Tea Party some serious attention and served up five pages of the best, concluding with a quote from one Pam Stout, who said “I would give up my life for my country. [...] Peaceful means are the best way of going about it. But sometimes you are not given a choice.” Given that, according to the Washington Independent, 11% of Americans now identify in some way or other as Tea Party supporters, it’s about time someone started paying comprehensive attention from the outside. And cobbled together a movie about it.

Where are the documentaries on the biggest thing in conservative politics since the religious right’s emergence in the ’80s? If film history has anything to teach us, it’s that there won’t be any for four or five years.

Of course, “Tea Party: The Documentary” is already out on DVD, but that’s essentially an extended infomercial created by some of the movement’s funders.

Maybe this time around filmmakers will move more quickly – esp. since there are so many more of us making documentaries.  But we agree that it might take some time for a good one to emerge — a little historical perspective really helps to get past the shouting of the day.

Pundits on the left can’t even agree one what the Tea Party movement is – is it a centrally coordinated campaign of “astroturfing”?  (Thomas Frank suggests so in this week’s Journal column.)  A genuine grass-roots outpouring of populist anger, as the New York Times implies?  A Fox News sideshow with racist undertones?

In our movie, we cover the conservative movement of the Bush years at the moment its ties to the Republican Party begin to unravel.  The Tea Parties, whether or not they last, seem to signify the next chapter.  As the fallout from the recent economic meltdown spreads, the stakes rise, and the debate gets uglier and uglier.

• Tea-Party: The Documentary Film
• The Tea Party takes over?
• The Coffee Party

Fast forward to 2010 where conservative activism is explicitly angrier, economically populist and increasingly organized as in the rise of the Tea Party movement. I go back to my original question: does the film shed new insights to Thomas Frank’s basic question of why the right wing and the Republican Party are so popular among people who are being steamrolled and whose interests are being gutted by the policies of politicians who subscribe to conservative ideology and who belong to that political party?

I think a What’s the Matter with Kansas Part II is crying to be made in light of the events I described above. Yes, the film is relevant to presenting the values voter and the sway Republican Party and conservative ideology continues to have for a significant numbers of working and middle class Americans. In the post-Obama era in the wake of the economic collapse of Wall Street in 2007, bailouts and widespread populist anger, conservatism and the Republican Party, rather than be weakened and get marginalized to irrelevance, has experienced a resurgence with a vengeance.

These developments are counter-intuitive to me who sees conservative economic polices and the political party that largely advocated those policies as having been completely discredited by the economic collapse. Yet here we are in 2010 with Sarah Palin becoming a major player in national politics, the grassroots, anti-establishment energy of the Tea Party movement has become mainstream and co-opted by the Republican Party, right wing TV and radio as popular as ever. 2010 is about economic policy and how conservatism and the Republican Party continues to hold sway over a significant part of the population. What does this mean in terms of the American voter, the political choices that we have and the prospects of a radical uprising in the manner of the 19th century Kansas radicalism? If there ever were a time for 19th-century style Populist resurgence, it would be now. Yet the Right, inexplicably, seems to have the advantage on that end. Why?

Thomas Frank thinks that the Right keeps winning control of the public debate because honest liberalism never gets a chance to be put into practice – as he reflects on in this week’s column in the Wall Street Journal:

What a difference a year has made for conservatism.

By the end of 2008, the wars and scandals of the George W. Bush years had turned the public against the Republican Party. The financial crisis had invalidated central assumptions of neoclassical economics and even the hottest of culture-war conflicts was cooling off.

But somehow the right’s single greatest idea—the essential villainy of government—came through the deluge unscathed.

Our movie shows the power of populist movements, and how they can serve either liberal and conservative agendas.  In 2010, a right-wing populist movement is attracting legions of followers who feel besieged by shadowy, powerful interests.  The left is stuck with Barack Obama, who doesn’t begrudge a banker’s $17 million bonus.

• The Coffee Party
• A genuine documentary film on the Tea Party movement?
• The Tea Party takes over?

In his 2004 book, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank probed the psyches of Midwestern “values voters” to explain why blue-collar Americans abandoned economic self-interest to vote for George W. Bush. This eponymous documentary begins as a retelling of Frank’s book but ends as a timely exploration of how an obsession with a narrow moral agenda can be self-defeating.

You can read the full review here.

Mary Harris Jones, 1837–1930

• Great review in Variety
• 3 1/2 Stars from Roger Ebert!

Thomas Frank and Joe Winston will hold a Q & A after the 7:30 show on Friday.  Frank will introduce the Friday 10:00 show and Winston will hold Q & As afterwards, as well as both evening shows on Saturday, March 20.

SHOW TIMES:

Friday, March 19 1:30-3:30-5:30-7:30*-10:00*
Saturday March 20 11:30 AM – 1:30-3:30-5:30-7:30*-10:00*
Sunday March 21 11:30 AM – 1:30-3:30-5:30-7:30-10:00
Monday, March 22 – Thursday, March 25 1:30-3:30-5:30-7:30-10:00

* Appearances by director Joe Winston and (Friday only) author Thomas Frank

E Street Cinema
555 11th Street NW
Washington, DC 20004
(202) 452-7672
web site

Located one block from Metro Center Station and four blocks from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Station, it is the District’s most Metro-accessible movie theatre, within easy walking distance from all five Metro lines.  Click here for a map.

$10.00 GENERAL; $8.00 BARGAIN (M-F ALL SHOWS BEFORE 6PM, SAT-SUN-HOLIDAYS 1ST SHOW OF DAY); $8.00 SENIOR (62+); $8.00 CHILD (-12); $8.50 STUDENT (W/VALID ID)

• Kansas City screenings begin Friday, March 12, 2010
• Rochester, NY – March 13, 2010 – one night only!
• San Francisco engagement – must close Thursday, January 14, 2010

Check with the theater closer to the date for the exact show time:

Dryden Theater
George Eastman House
900 East Avenue
Rochester, NY 14607
http://dryden.eastmanhouse.org/

General line – 585.271.3361
Advance ticket information – 585.271.3361 x295
General Film Information – 585.271.4090

Online ticket orders here.

Ticket Prices: Adults – $10 / Seniors (60+) – $8 / Students (with ID) – $6 /
Children (Ages 5 – 12) – $4 / Children (Ages 0 – 4) – Free

• Kansas City screenings begin Friday, March 12, 2010
• Washington, D.C. starting March 19, 2010
• San Francisco engagement – must close Thursday, January 14, 2010

Thomas Frank and director Joe Winston will appear on opening night to take questions from the audience.  Tom will sign books as well.  Joe will return for the Saturday night screenings.

Several area organizations are serving as screening sponsors for the opening weekend, Friday, March 12 through Sunday, March 14, including The Heartland Labor Forum, 90.1 FM KKFI, The Mainstream Coalition, The Greater Kansas City Political Women’s Caucus and the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri.

Advance tickets available on the Tivoli Cinemas web site.  We recommend buying tickets in advance, especially for the opening weekend.

SHOW TIMES:

FRIDAY, March 12: 2:00 / 4:00 / 6:45* / 9:30*
SATURDAY, March 13: 2:00 / 4:45 / 7:00* / 9:30*
SUNDAY, March 14: 2:00 / 4:45 / 7:00
MONDAY March 15: 2:15 / 4:15 / 7:00
TUESDAY, March 16:  2:15 / 4:15 / 7:00
WEDNESDAY, March 17:  Theater Closed for St. Patrick Day Parade in Westport
THURSDAY March 18: 2:15 / 4:15 / 7:00

*Appearances by Joe Winston and (Friday only) Thomas Frank.

Tivoli Cinemas
Located in Westport Manor Square
4050 Pennsylvania
Kansas City, MO
(913) 383-7756 Film Hotline
http://www.tivolikc.com/

Ticket Prices: Matinees – $6.50 / Adults (After 6 pm) – $8.50 / Seniors/Children (Anytime) – $6.50

• Rochester, NY – March 13, 2010 – one night only!
• Washington, D.C. starting March 19, 2010
• Oklahoma! “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” to play in Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

For those who feared that the trial would become a referendum on the abortion issue, or the Pro-Life movement, or that a lenient verdict would embolden future extremists to target abortion doctors — none of that happened.

The judge did permit Roeder to explain to the jury his motive for killing Dr. Tiller – his horror at abortion and the desire to prevent Tiller from performing more of them.  But the jury was unmoved by this testimony.

In the end, Roeder is being treated as a common criminal, a lone nut.

Ironically, this is the preferred outcome of both the Pro-Choice and mainstream Pro-Life movements.

UPDATE: for a much more detailed look at Scott Roeder and his crime, check out this article in, of all places, GQ Magazine.

Defendant Scott Roeder leaves the courtroom. PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Tuttle, WIchita Eagle.

• FBI was warned about Scott Roeder before he shot Dr. Tiller
• Pro-Life groups react as trial set to begin for Scott Roeder
• NY Times has more detail on Tiller and his murder

The sudden victory by a conservative politician, backed by the Tea Partiers and conservative talk show hosts, in Massachusetts of all places, is a liberal nightmare.  How could this happen?

Voters in 2008 were souring on Republican policies and furious about the disaster that overtook the economy.   Now, it seems, they’re almost as angry about the solutions — even though economists like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman think Obama isn’t doing enough.

We imagine that voters are saying, in part — if a liberal is someone who doles out billions to banks, insurance companies, and failing manufacturers, then give me a conservative any day.

We’ll leave the last word to the Brits — this from the Economist blog:

If Ms Coakley loses to Scott Brown in Tuesday’s election, though, it will be because the working-class voters who have suffered most in this recession voted against her. Ms Coakley has run a bad campaign. The gaffes on which her opponents have seized have been classic working-class cultural politics: Ms Coakley did not want to stand outside Fenway Park in the cold if it would not generate many votes; she did not know who Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling was. It is, of course, a fact that one needs to love professional sports, or profess to do so, if one wishes to be elected to higher office in America, whether or not this requirement makes any sense. In a deeper sense, Ms Coakley has come to be seen as an aloof patrician, “anointed” by the late Ted Kennedy and unwilling to engage in mere politics. Somehow this resonates with echoes of Caroline Kennedy’s abortive bid for a Senate seat from New York, and with conservative complaints that Barack Obama is treated as “the anointed one”. The real issue that hangs in the balance in the Massachusetts election is national universal health insurance modelled on the Massachusetts plan. That plan would make health insurance dramatically cheaper for the bottom half of the income distribution. But that’s obviously not going to win you an election if you insult baseball.

• Who cares What’s the Matter with Kansas?
• What’s the Matter with Democrats?
• Religious groups smack the Family Research Council over abortion