Tea Party infighting heats up
(CNN) -- Political bickering within the conservative Tea Party movement intensified Monday as a representative of one group, the Tea Party Express, ridiculed a decision by another, the National Tea Party Federation, to expel the Express from its ranks.
The Express has been under fire since one of its organizers, conservative talk radio host Mark Williams, wrote an incendiary blog post last week in response to an NAACP resolution calling on Tea Party leaders to crack down on racist elements in the movement. The post was a fictional letter from what Williams called "Colored People" to President Abraham Lincoln.
On Sunday, Federation spokesman David Webb announced that "in the last 24 hours,
have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation" because of the blog post.
"He doesn't represent us properly," Webb told CNN Monday. He's an "embarrassment."
Joe Wierzbicki, a spokesman for the Express, characterized the Federation on Monday as an "absurd" organization with no right to decide who can or cannot participate in a national grass-roots movement.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/07/19/tea.party.imbroglio/index.html?hpt=C1