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Tea Party redux

Nick Carey was invited on MSNBC last night to talk about his Tea Party special report. Here’s what he had to say:

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Hell hath no fury like a Tea Party scorned

Here’s what Nick Carey had to say today about his special report “Stuck between the Tea Party and a hard place.”

By Nick Carey

Not long after the battle over the 2011 fiscal budget in Washington ended in mid-April, I received a few emails from Tea Party groups expressing frustration with the apparent failure by the Republican Party establishment to follow through on promises that they would cut spending in that budget by $100 billion.

I passed on one of those emails to an editor in Washington and we agreed that it would be a worthwhile exercise to talk to Tea Party groups across the country to see if that frustration was widespread, or if it was merely restricted to a few groups.

My very first call was to a Tea Party member in the South whom I had talked to before for previous special reports on the movement. I told him about the emails I had received and asked if he was frustrated by the budget deal. His answer: “Frustrated? I’m f***ing angry!”

At that point, I knew I was onto something. Dozens more interviews followed with Tea Partiers in 20 states, with all of them to varying degrees expressing anger and disappointment at what they see as an act of betrayal by the Republican Party.

Tea Partiers worked hard for a Republican win last November, driven by rage at President Barack Obama’s health reforms and egged on by Republicans many of whom professed that they, too, were Tea Partiers who would fix the mess in Washington with massive spending cuts. That message was simple and clean cut.

Following the money in O’Donnell’s campaign

Mark Hosenball has been in Delaware and Pennsylvania reporting on the midterm election campaign for our special report “Conservative donors let Christine O’Donnell sink.”

If that’s not enough O’Donnell for you, here’s his report from a bastion of conservative thinking in Delaware:

By Mark Hosenball

Republican Delaware senate candidate Christine O’Donnell may be the darling of both national and local Tea Party groups. But she’s not particularly beloved at one of Delaware’s most august and esteemed conservative organizations.

Among the more venerable institutions of modern American conservatism is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization based in a mansion in suburban Wilmington. The Institute, dedicated to the promotion of conservative principles on American college campuses, has an impeccable pedigree: its first president was the godfather of American conservative thought, William F. Buckley Jr.

But if records filed in Federal court in Wilmington are any guide, it is one of the Delaware conservative organizations least likely to be campaigning aggressively in support of Christine O’Donnell’s Senate bid. This is because both the Institute and O’Donnell are still smarting over an ugly lawsuit O’Donnell filed against the group after she claimed that they had unlawfully fired her as their director of communications and public affairs in 2004.

Highlights from O’Donnell’s grievance against the Institute, originally written up by O’Donnell herself in a rambling 55 page Federal Court complaint, were reported in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine shortly before the Delaware GOP primary and then given added publicity on the Delaware Republican Party’s official website. 

Winning the popular vote in Venezuela

The results of Venezuela’s parliamentary election are in and, as we said in last week’s special report, it’s not enough to win the popular vote. The opposition to President Hugo Chavez say they have won 52 percent of the vote, but that gives them only a third of the seats in parliament. Read our latest story here.

Still, it was a major blow to Chavez and raises opposition hopes of defeating him at the next presidential election in 2012.

To see the special report on the opposition in PDF format, click here.

In case you missed them

Just because it was summer, doesn’t mean we weren’t busy here at Reuters. Here are a few of our recent special reports that you might have missed.

Tracking Iran’s nuclear money trail to Turkey. U.N. correspondent Lou Charbonneau – who used to cover the IAEA for Reuters –  followed the money to Turkey where an Iranian bank under U.S. and EU sanctions is operating freely. Nice to see the New York Times follow up on this today, and the Washington Post also quizzed Turkey’s president about it.

Blue-collar, unemployed and seeing red – Chicago correspondent James Kelleher went on the road for this story about the long-term unemployed and what that means for Obama and the Democrats at November’s midterm elections.

Even though he’s been forced to move back in with his parents and has virtually no income, Stevenson opposes Obama’s proposal to let some tax cuts for the wealthy, dating back to George W. Bush’s presidency, expire at year’s end in order to raise revenue and reduce the deficit. 

“How is more people, keeping more of the money they earn, bad for the economy?” he said. “The answer is — it’s not.”   

Enter stage left — Brazil’s next president?

Not every president has a police mugshot, but it’s not so surprising in Latin America.

A special report out of Brazil today sheds new light on Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla leader who is likely to be elected the booming country’s next president. She spent nearly three years in jail in the early 1970s and was tortured by her military captors. She’s come a long way since then.

The product of more than a dozen interviews with Rousseff and her top advisers, the story gives a glimpse of how Rousseff could govern at the helm of a country that, with India, Russia and China, is among the worlds few economic bright spots.

The upshot: while Rousseff is not the leftist-in-waiting that many investors fear, there is legitimate concern that hers could be a status-quo presidency, unable or unwilling to push through major reforms to Brazil’s tax, labor or fiscal structure. As a result, there is a risk that Latin America’s biggest economy could eventually stagnate under her administration.

Watch Brian Winter discuss the October 3 election on Reuters Insider here.

Dive in, the water’s fine

Special reports are the best of the best from Reuters, and this is the place to find them. We’ll be featuring investigative stories, in-depth profiles and long-form narrative stories here.

Reuters has a global Enteprise Reporting team with editors in New York, London and Singapore, drawing on the work of some 2,900 journalists in 200 bureaus around the world.

To kick it off, take a look at this story from Frank Jack Daniel in Caracas. Venezuelans will elect a new parliament on Sunday and the opposition is hoping to make a dent in President Hugo Chavez’s power.

Chavez has dominated politics for more than a decade — as one opposition figure put it: “In Venezuela, you have to win elections like David beat Goliath.” FULL STORY

We’ll have more on Latin America tomorrow with a profile of Dilma Rousseff, the frontrunner in Brazil’s presidential elections.