Not that anybody really cares, but the Tea Party Express and its video partner are finally going to release video of what this was supposed to have looked like:
Michele Bachmann stares off-camera during the Tea Party Express response to the SOTU
According to Kevin Diaz of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, TeaPartyHD, the internet video partner of the Tea Party Express, will release its recording of Bachmann's response featuring the Minnesota congresswoman staring straight into the camera. The reason she looks into the lens? It was the TeaPartyHD camera that had the teleprompter from which Bachmann read her response. (Insert your Sarah Palin/Marco Rubio teleprompter joke here.)
Bachmann or her staff should have realized there was a problem from the moment they saw two cameras in the room, but if the Tea Party Express were competent in the slightest, it never would have gotten to the point it did. Of course, given that the Tea Party Express is basically a sham of an organization whose greatest political victories include nominating Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell, it's not really all that big a surprise that they didn't think through the problem that having two cameras was going to create.
Rachel Maddow did a great segment last night on how big a fraud the Tea Party Express is -- it's worth watching the whole thing at AMERICAblog. She not only lays out how the organization exists primarily to funnel money from unsuspecting tea party supporters into the pockets of political consultants, but she also blasts CNN for forging a partnership with what amounts to a scam operation.
As Maddow points out, in addition to being the only network to broadcast the Tea Party Express response to the SOTU live, CNN is co-sponsoring a presidential debate with the group and last year agreed to cover the tea party by "embedding" a reporter on the Tea Party Express bus tour. That pretty much puts CNN in the same position as Fox when Fox hyped the tax day tea parties of 2009, though even then Fox wasn't tapping a single tea party group as the "official" voice of teapartiers.
There's nothing wrong with covering teapartiers, but as Maddow argued, there really is something unseemly about news organizations forming partnership with a single tea party PAC. The Tea Party Express is getting Bachmann straightened out...now it's time for CNN to straighten itself out.