On Friday, the Washington Post first reported about an upstart political group that's taking on the Tea Party and escalating the political beverage wars: the Maryland-based "Coffee Party." Now, others in press are beginning to take note. The Coffee Party was started by Annabel Park, a 41-year-old documentary filmmaker who inadvertently started the movement via a Facebook status update: "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 ..." The movement claims to "promote civility and inclusiveness in political discourse, engage the government not as an enemy but as the collective will of the people" and has gained more than 37,000 Facebook fans followers in a matter of days. Chapters have sprung up in more than 30 states, and Coffee Partiers held their first meet-ups in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles over the weekend. While the movement was designed to counter (and satirize) the Tea Party, the groups is still getting its political footing: Its manifesto has been critiqued as overly vague, and it's motto—"espresso yourself"—could definitely use a little work. At the moment, the Post says, the group is "not so much a party or movement as a slow-drip ripple through online nano-politics."
Read original story in The Washington Post | Monday, March 1, 2010
I joined their facebook group after reading what they're about, and although it tends to be a bit preachy, I didn't dislike any of it. Hopefully it'll be able to grow and succeed and really help bring about change.
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