Something interesting is happening in Georgia... where the all Republican board of energy regulators just voted 3-2 in favor of expanding solar capacity by 525 Megawatts, and forcing the Georgia Power Company to purchase generated solar capacity from small producers.
How did this happen? An "unholy alliance" between the Tea Party Patriots, and the Sierra Club. And it's making the Koch brothers very nervous!
This had to happen at some point... the Tea Party would eventually wake up and realize that it's not Obama who is scamming them of their money: it's the self-appointed "leaders" of the Tea Party movement... and they'd find common cause with progressives.
Pissed off at Wall Street? So are we!
Hate incompetent government? Right back at ya!
Think we should pass a jobs bill that actually creates jobs? You betcha!
Its that latter point where progressives and the Tea Party can really find common cause... because expanding solar power capacity makes sense on pretty much every level. But it is being loudly opposed by the Koch funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP), because it would eat into their profits!
In this case, AFP attempted a scorched-earth campaign to misinform voters and the regulators about how solar would increase costs. But Debbie Dooley -- a co-founder of Atlanta's Tea Party Patriots -- saw through the scam:
“It’s an unholy alliance because they see it as a threat to them,” Dooley said, speaking ahead of the launch. “In the past, the elites on both the right and the left got away with it. On the right, they’d say, ‘This person’s on the left. Stay away from them,’ On the left, they’d say, ‘They’re radical, they’re the Tea Party. Stay away from them.’ But we got through all that bull, got to know each other, and started working together,” she said... “We agree with AFP on a lot of issues, but when it comes to energy, they’re not exactly unbiased,” said Dooley.
And it's not just the first time the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots decided to make right wing elites squirm by crossing party lines:
In 2012, the Atlanta Tea Patriot Patriots joined the NAACP and the Sierra Club to successfully defeat a $7.2 billion transit tax referendum. That same year, Tea joined forces with Occupy Atlanta and the AFL-CIO to stop an anti-union bill that would have banned protests at private residences (the bill sought to protect the “right of quiet enjoyment” of CEOs).
Lets hope this is the beginning of a larger trend... screw "bi-partisan" solutions, lets focus on "non-partisan" solutions.