Salon: Teabaggers embrace billboards for anti-Obama message delivery

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Tuesday, Jul 27, 2010 13:01 ET
Tea Party embraces billboards for anti-Obama message delivery
Anti-Obama messages sprouting up around U.S. Why? "Ever been in Houston traffic?"

By Justin Elliott

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/07/27/freedom_billboards_of_texas/index.html



The Tea Party is increasingly embracing the billboard as a means of getting its conservative message out around the country, with a new Texas group organizing as a political action committee to raise money for more signs.

"I'm fighting back -- the only way I know how," Dennis Frakes, co-founder of Freedom Billboards of Texas and vice-president of a Houston oil and gas engineering firm, told Salon today. "We're going to take care of people like Sheila Jackson Lee ," he said.

Frakes' group touts billboards on its website that portray a range of messages from inspirational Ronald Reagan quotes to a picture of President Obama shredding the Constitution to one that simply shows the Statue of Liberty weeping. He said the first sign will go up Aug. 15 in the Houston area, though the group is still mulling which message it will carry.



Frakes said in the few weeks since Freedom Billboards registered as a PAC with the Federal Election Commission, he has already raised in the neighborhood of $10,000 -- much of it from Tea Party activists in the Houston area. Frakes, who is angry about the healthcare overhaul bill and the moratorium on deep water drilling off the Gulf Coast, said he is not a member of any Tea Party himself, but he fully supports the movement's goals. Freedom Billboards currently shares a mailing address with his company, Oil and Gas Solutions.

Asked why he is focusing on billboards in particular, Frakes countered: "Ever been in Houston traffic?"

In fact, the tactic has been used by Tea Partiers around the country. The North Iowa Tea Party last month put up (and later took down) a billboard explicitly comparing Obama to Hitler and Lenin.



In March, a billboard showing Reagan in a cowboy hat with the message "Remember real hope and change?" showed up on a highway in Minnesota. The group that designed that sign -- which is also helping Frakes -- is Freedom Boards Across America. Its billboards have shown up in Arizona and elsewhere in Minnesota in the past few months.

[louis-t]

1. Being a republican is a sickness.

Worse than cooties.

[thereismore]

5. It's a self-reinforcing delusion removed from reality, kinda like religion. nt

[Winterblues]

7. More like a cult.

:shrug:

[thereismore]

10. Yes, well, the Christian religion used to be a cult. nt

[Kurovski]

2. Not that teabaggers give a shit, but

The cheney/bush era torture, domestic spying, habeus corpus dismissal, and an illegal war are still going strong. Or what?

They're worried that people might actually get some healthcare. Nutty, to be certain.

Mr. Frakes reveals the corporate goals of the teabagger's movement, he's vice-president of a Houston oil and gas engineering co. He is angry about the the moratorium on deep water drilling off the Gulf Coast.

He's not a teabagger, but is using the teabagger product for its created purpose of solidifying corporate power and expansion.

[Ezlivin]

3. Oh boy! More paintball targets!

Not that I have a paintball gun or anything...

[WingDinger]

4. All the crazy symbology has already been invoked. They are DONE!

The envelope is about to close on them. Midstream, with all their messages wrapped up in insane alarmism. They will have no plan, but to repeal all that Obama touched. No vision, but shining city on a hill. The only answer to how they will create jobs, will be to give tax breaks to corps. The answer to the deficit that would necessarily create, cut all social safety net, and sell off all the commons, and then allow our very breathing and eating to be at the whim of privatized pricing, to serve the shareholders, not the eaters and drinkers. I'm sold, how bout you?

Ain't gonna fly. Now is just lob an insult time. Wait till they must stay in Obama, and crew's gaze, and answer back. And wait till they spew in earnest, that the minority party, thru a f*#@got spy, and a hapless boob, stopped the majority party, from instituting the reforms they wanted for Fannie and Freddie, caused by Clintons actions, and that ladies and gentlemen is the explanation in its entirety, for the collapse. Had we just not paid any money to anyone, let them fail, and told people to just get a mcjob, we all would be counting our money piles.

No sir, aint gonna fly.

[rbrnmw]

6. disgusting and some of these same fools

were shouting from the rooftops about how Paul McCartney should apologize to Bush over a joke when he said, after 8 years there is a President who knows what a library is. Are they going to apologize to the President?

[arcane1]

8. I bet $100 that this fool knows not a word of the Constitution

nor does he know the definition of "socialism".

[Skittles]

11. yup

they sure didn't give a rat's ass when george w bush wiped his ass with the Constitution for eight fucking years

[Erose999]

9. Theres one South of Atlanta on I75 that says "Jesus was not a socialist" or something like that.

I want to tell the people responsible for it that Jesus isn't REAL either. Lol.