Between now and 2012, Michele Bachmann and others will have to defend a movement many see as extreme. How do their answers stack up?

A firestorm on the US right has erupted after the Guardian reported that Sarah Palin will be denied a meeting with Lady Thatcher on the grounds that it would be "belittling" for her to meet the darling of the Tea Party movement.

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, devoted the opening section of his radio show to denouncing the "preposterous" Guardian report, as Palin supporters accused Thatcher's circle of disgracing the former prime minister.

The US conservative right reacted furiously after the Guardian reported that Thatcher's aides had decided it would be inappropriate for her to meet Palin, who is planning to visit London next month en route to Sudan. Palin has been touring US historical sites (an excursion that saw her slip up this week on the subject of Paul Revere, the American patriot who made a famous "midnight ride" to warn of approaching British forces).

According to WISER, the study, "Led by Prof. Christopher Parker... examines what Americans think about the issues of race, public policy, national politics, and President Obama, one year after the inauguration of the first African American president." In this study, Tea Party adherents were found to be the most dismissive of racial and sexual oppression, and the most accepting of government intrusion into the private lives of citizens, in the areas of sexuality, religion, race and politics.

Remember those town hall events in August of 2009 where tea party activists created extremely hostile atmospheres, scaring the bejesus out of Democratic members of Congress on health reform? Well, after voting to privatize and slash Medicare, there are stirrings of a similar …

In an era of racism without racists, the Tea Party GOP Birther brigands provide one more lesson in the permanence of the social evil known as White privilege.

Yet again, the right-wing has largely proven that its own bias knows no bounds.  Literally within minutes of CNN breaking the news last night that the President's then-pending late evening speech would inform the world that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, a person on my Fa …

All around the land, Republicans who strode smugly into town hall meetings for a relaxed meet-and-greet with the little folks who made it all possible were greeted by jeers and sneers.

  For anyone who’s been following the events here in Wisconsin, it’s common knowledge that Koch Industries’ oil/energy billionaire owners, David and Charles Koch, have been the object of scrutiny for their involvement with GOP Governor Scott Walker.

If there’s one constant in the elite national discourse of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This most conventional “wisdom”—increasingly accepted at least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine—has held that everything public is inferior to everything private, that corporations are always good and unions always bad, that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that the best economic model is the one that allows the wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they choose before anything trickles down to the great mass of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical” to the nation’s original intent and that Barack Obama’s reforms are “destroying this country as it was founded.”

A new USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 47 percent of Americans have unfavorable views of the tea party, compared with just 33 percent who said they have favorable views. Americans have soured on the tea party, as their views of the right-wing movement have grown increasingly negative over the past year.

ThinkProgress's Lee Fang has been delving into the Wall Street sponsored astroturf effort to push repeal of the Dodd-Frank reform law. He describes attending the Tea Party Patriot Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. Prominently displayed was the new group "Dodd-Frank Exposed," with a big booth running this video in a continuous loop.

West first weaved the ancient society of Sparta — a culture that practiced eugenics and inspired Adolf Hitler — into an example of the role of women. “What made the Spartan men strong, it was the Spartan women,” he said. “Because the Spartan women at the age of nine gave up their male sons” to train for the army. West then exulted conservative women to come forth and “lock shields” to “strengthen up the men who are going to the fight for you.” Painting women’s rights advocates as “women that have been neutering American men,” West charged attendees to fight these apparent castrators who want to force male subservience:

Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer took to the steps of the state capitol last week with three custom-made "Veto" cattle brands to shoot down 16 pieces of legislation. "Frivolous, unconstitutional and just bad ideas," he told a cheering crowd before he systematically rejected bills that would have repealed the state's medical marijuana law and empowered the state to claim eminent domain authority on federal land, along with a series of GOP-backed health care laws.

Everybody's favorite progressive weekly, The Nation, just released a leaked internal "election packet" from—you guessed it—Koch Industries. This packet included many "helpful items," including (for most Koch employees) a list of who to vote for in the November 2010 election. Also enclosed was a large amount of corporate propaganda, extolling the virtues of a free-market system, & enumerating the ways in which Koch Industries is entangled in a struggle for liberty against Big Government. Courtesy to the pro-business Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, all this is possible. In fact, the cover memo from David Robertson, COO, sort of acknowledges this, noting that for the very first time, all 50,000 US employees would receive this propaganda.

Civil rights activists are calling on an Orange County Republic party official to step down after she sent an email with a picture depicting President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee.

CNN has a new poll out showing their highest-ever level of unfavorable views for the Tea Party movement. According to the poll, 47 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party, as compared to 32 percent with a favorable one.

Second, let's take a look at that "socialized medicine." What people advocate in its best form is modeled after places like Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Germany...perfectly capitalist, SUCCESSFUL nations. This is what Teabagger Hypocrite Supreme Santarpia is railing against, a healthcare system like they have in Sweden or Germany...which COSTS LESS than America's and yet delivers BETETR CARE.

Millions of Americans rely on social security to live. For many, it's their only income. For others, it's the difference between comfort and extreme poverty.  More than twenty million Americans rely on it. I repeat: 20,000,000 people. I somehow doubt that Wal-mart stands ready to employ 20M additional greeters. What do you think would happen if you cut social security off for those twenty million people? I mean outside of having seniors living (and dying) in the streets. (If you think I'm exaggerating on that, think again. Before social security went into play, well over 50% of seniors were living in poverty in the US. Many studies say that number is actually VERY low and could be as high as 80 percent, while only around 9% are in poverty now.)  Think about it. Twenty million people with their income evaporated. That's like twenty million people getting laid off overnight, with no unemployment insurance.  What do you think would happen to the economy then?

The interest on the United States National Debt is approaching almost $2 Billion Dollars per day, if you listen to the Republicans they agreed to cut $38 Billion Dollars in spending and to them that is like mom's apple pie and Chevrolet.

He's losing it. It's only a matter of time before the men with the strait jacket show up. In Beckistan, not only is world controlled by Soros-funded liberals, but the GOP now wants to "politically assassinate" him and his fellow truth tellers, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.

Andrew Breitbart  came onstage amidst the polarizing crowd at the capitol — after a time consuming amount of berating  union supporters, booing commenced from the crowd, and a Breitbart hissy fit ensued with him screaming, "GO TO HELL!" (I can't tell if he was stomping his feet at the same time.)
 
Ms. Palin entered the stage — she was also continually booed mixed in with Tea Party cheering after saying, "I feel like I'm at home."

If this strikes some as an example of the type of governmental tyranny that the Tea Party deplored (but never existed before in a state as far as we know), that is because it is.

The Tea Party - and the Republican Party - have shouted to the rooftops that local government and individual liberties are the true "patriotic" freedoms in America.

Yet, they elect a governor in Michigan who - as one of his first pieces of legislation - empowers himself to take those rights away, nullifying the will of the voters in a given town or city.

Republicans seem to have a really, really narrow idea of what constitutes racism -- which is how they're able to claim that the Tea Parties aren't riddled with racism throughout.

But then little stories like this one from Orange County keep bubbling up to the surface of their fetid little Tea Party cesspool:

The Weekly has obtained a copy of an email sent to fellow conservatives this week by Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party.

Under the words, "Now you know why no birth certificate," there's an Obama family portrait showing them as apes.

This is from today's Wisconsin teabagger shindig and is just excellent. There is nothing more delicious than seeing Progressives so unified. Thank you tea party, and thank you too, Scott Walker.

Referring to herself as a former union member and the wife of a union member, Palin said, "He's not trying to hurt union members. Hey, folks, he's trying to save your jobs and your pensions!"

She said union leaders don't care if their members are laid off, in order to protect their own power.

She also criticized President Obama for his budget plans, including proposals to invest in "really fast trains and solar shingles."

Prior to her appearance, labor supporters still smarting from the passage of Walker's polarizing bill eliminating most public employees' collective bargaining rights drowned out Palin's supporters, shouting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Scott Walker's got to go."

Donald Trump says he will "probably" run for president as an independent if he doesn't win the Republican nomination. More Seeds :: JCAtom

Once more the Republican Party showed us who they are and have always been. It would seem that "the past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Yesterday, (April 10, 2011) the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, CNN released a poll that showed that 25 percent of the general public and some 40 percent of Southerners sympathize more with the rebellious Confederacy than with the Union. And in a particularly revealing inversion of the historical record--more than half of the Republicans surveyed believe that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.

Today (4-10-11) is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War's beginning, when secessionists fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. According to a new poll from CNN, the Civil War's legacy remains unresolved. The poll finds that Republicans and Tea Party supporters are more likely to support the Confederacy and confederate leaders than Democrats or Independents.

It seems our politicians especially the Republicans in Wisconsin and a few other states are selling out not only their constituents, but the environment and our precious mineral resources.

In his latest embrace of the birther strategy, Mr. Trump has invited Tea Party leaders and a legislator from Arizona to his office in Manhattan on Friday morning to discuss a bill moving through the Arizona legislature that would require candidates for president to prove that they are natural born citizens.

The Arizona group said the call from Mr. Trump on Wednesday came unexpectedly, and the group had spent much of the day Thursday scurrying to make travel arrangements to New York.

the final element holding up a deal, outside of the relatively pedestrian task of agreeing on a number for cuts when the parties were only a few billion dollars a part, was in fact the House GOP's rider to defund Planned Parenthood:

With the midnight deadline to avert a United States government shutdown only two hours away, and House Republicans attending an unusual late-night meeting to discuss the budget negotiations, rumors are swirling that the two sides are nearing at least a temporary agreement to keep government running.

The Tea Party certainly believe this is the case. At just past 9:30 EST, Judson Phillips of Tea Party nation twittered, "Boehner is selling us out tonight. We will primary Boehner next year."

As I surf the channels, the discussion concerning the government shutdown debate is predictably lacking. FOX news's stance is entirely predetermined. Largely blame the Democrats, and hardly mention the REAL issue which is the "policy riders".

Glenn Beck's show has a definitive end date, which is sometime 'later this year,' according to a press release posted on his website, The Blaze. But don't get too excited yet... in the wake of the cancellation, his media company, Mercury Radio Arts, and Fox can start a new venture in which Beck will be producing 'a variety of television projects' for the Fox Channel. Lifetime-style afterschool specials, perhaps?

Stop talking about jobs? It's apparent in the video House Republicans are increasingly irritated when Democrats point out that Republican have done nothing to address creating jobs and want to do things that will take away jobs. Rep.

David Barton and Mike Huckabee traded compliments at the Rediscovering God conference in Iowa over the weekend, with Huckabee going to far as to say that every single American student should have to read the welter of lies Barton puts out about American history.

Tea Party Nation is a major (for-profit) Tea Party organization that gained prominence after its convention last year hosted Republican leaders like Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo, along with Religious Right figures Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough.

What do Tea Party rallies, Republican victories, climate-change deniers, Wisconsin's anti-union push, and attacks on a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions have in common? They're all fueled in part by profits derived from Alberta, Canada's oil sands.

The bronze: Coultergeist. The bad news for Ann is that she has finally jumped the shark even among Conservatives. The good news is, there may finally be an explanation. She has written, and repeated on television, that the tense, terrifying, and still uncertain nuclear calamity in Japan is being hyped, because…large amounts of radiation are good for you:

First, they hate any successful public sector - non-corporate venture. It flies in the face of radical conservative belief that the "private sector" always does things better.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who signed sweeping curbs on public unions into law on March 11, may be emerging as a potential 2012 Republican presidential contender, according to a poll issued on Thursday.

The Kochs are right up there now with the great plutocrats of American history, a 21st century version of the robber barons.

Among other truths made completely clear by the showdown in Wisconsin: the outsized role of the Koch brothers in American politics.

The House Rules Committee will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to consider legislation to permanently prohibit federal funding of National Public Radio (NPR) after conservative activist James O'Keefe released a video smearing the news organization.

Last week, a Project Veritas "sting" operation directed at National Public Radio cost some NPR executives their jobs. Beginning with Senior Vice President for Fundraising Ron Schiller, who was depicted on tape disparaging the Tea Party movement and suggesting that NPR should move away from federal funding (a position with arguable merit, but probably very unpopular at NPR), the fallout eventually cost NPR CEO Vivian Schiller her job as well.

That's sort of the NPR way: when one of the humans under their employ gets in trouble for expressing their opinions, everyone starts panicking and people start getting fired. Further analysis of the original video, however, demonstrates the wisdom of the old maxim, "act in haste, repent in leisure."

Today Brave New Foundation announces our latest campaign. A campaign where we will take on one of the single greatest threats to our democracy: The Koch Brothers.

According to the survey, Teabaggers…

…are 18% of Americans and tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.  More than half (54%) identify as Republicans, and another 41 percent say they are independents. Just five percent call themselves Democrats, compared to 31 percent of adults nationwide.

What a shock. Teabaggers are largely the same old rich white guys that have traditionally dominated the Republican Party.

Via Andy Towle, we learn that Tim Ravndal is the president of Montana's Big Sky Tea Party Association. This happened on his Facebook page:

From fissures in the Palin marriage ("We don't talk") to giggles over a doctored nude photo and the governor in an open bathrobe, Shushannah Walshe unearths more gems from the ex-Sarah Palin aide's leaked manuscript. Plus, more tidbits about Bristol, Troopergate, and other Palin scoops.

He still has numbers that just about any cable news host would envy and, with about two million viewers a night, outdraws all his competition combined.

As always, take whatever you want for seeds, articles, comments, emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Spread the word! ------------------------- REPUBS SHUT DOWN TOWN HALL, FLEE PROTEST

Tea Party logic seems just as regressive as it ever was. This cartoon was made before the Wisconsin protests!

Charles and David Koch, who co-own Koch Industries Inc. and whose combined worth is estimated at $43 billion, have been recently tied by many media outlets to Walker's push to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers. The two have long backed conservative causes and groups including Americans for Prosperity, which organized the tea party rally Saturday in support of Walker's plan to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights and recently launched the Stand with Scott Walker website.

There can be no clearer sign that the GOP/TP wish to kill poor people to save a buck than SB1519 in Arizona.

Bill wants protesters to believe that they are making a mistake when they chant "Fox lies!" behind every Fox reporter.

On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn't end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: "Use live ammunition."

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class - pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

The political storm over worker's rights in Wisconsin has entered its seventh day. In the largest rally yet, an estimated 80,000 protesters rallied in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday against cuts to their collective bargaining rights that have been proposed by Republican Governor Scott Walker. Several thousand supporters of the bill also rallied in Madison on Saturday during a much smaller event organized by the Tea Party and backed by the Koch brothers, among others. The state's democratic Senators–now calling themselves the Wisconsin 14–sent a letter to Governor Walker on Friday telling him labor would accept cuts to pensions and increased contributions to health and retirement plans. But Walker has refused to meet and says he will not negotiate on cuts to collective bargaining rights.

Yes, the Tea Partiers came, many bused in, courtesy of the Koch brothers who had contributed $100,000 to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's campaign.

After an all-night session, House Republicans early Saturday morning passed legislation that would slash $60 billion in government spending between now and the end of September, setting up a showdown with President Barack Obama, who has vowed to veto the measure.

The cuts, which were passed without a single Democratic vote, are aimed primarily at domestic social spending but also have policy goals -- going after the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

As events in Egypt showed, you never know what will set off mass protest.

Here at home, over-reaching by a novice Republican governor of Wisconsin has finally triggered the protest marches that have been eerily missing during the more than three years of an economic crisis that has savaged the middle and bottom and rewarded the top.

It's not as if we lack a politics of class. As mega-investor Warren Buffett famously said, there is plenty of class warfare in America, but the billionaire class is winning.

From behind the imposing marble walls of Washington's majestic Supreme Court building, this slim majority of five unelected, unaccountable government officials with lifelong tenure has been hurling bombs at our democracy.

Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker, whose bill to kill collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions has caused an uproar among state employees, might not be where he is today without the Koch brothers.

"Tea Party Patriots don't really do anything for the local groups," she says."There are a lot of frustrated people. There are a lot of other people in the country who've done events and have gotten screwed over. We are all volunteers. We do not get paid like [Martin] does. They don't say, 'Thank you.' They use you and abuse you."**

Two years ago, Tea Party Patriots got its start as a scrappy, ground-up conservative organization. Its rowdy activists demanded more transparency and less business-as-usual in the nation's capital, and they worked hard to elect candidates who they believed wouldn't succumb to the ways of Washington. But it didn't take long for the grassroots tea party organization to embrace the DC establishment—and some of its more questionable practices.

Are you ever afraid that fundamentalist Muslim extremists will take over your state court house? That's the idea behind the radical right's peddling of the myth that the Islamic legal code Sharia law will somehow make its way to the United States.

While income inequality in Egypt is more dangerous for its government, as the last two weeks of protests amply demonstrates, the fact is, it's  worse in the United States, as ThinkProgress's Pat Garofalo writes.

Only weeks have passed since the new Tea Party Republicans stormed into power promising to bring what they see as the hallmarks of good governance -- greater accountability, fiscal restraint and an ill-defined but unwavering devotion to the Constitution.

In January, ThinkProgress interviewed billionaire plutocrat David Koch about his views on climate science, his Tea Party movement, and his political plans for the future. On the day of our interview, we also discovered that he planned to hold a party for the new Republicans he helped elect. As we have documented, Koch not only financed the rise of the anti-Obama Tea Party, he has also helped guide the movement to support the narrow business priorities of his conglomerate Koch Industries: Koch funds rallies for young children that attack the EPA, Koch's front groups spread doubt about climate change, and Koch's Americans for Prosperity hands out Tea Party talking points attacking clean energy. Building on this research, the Los Angeles Times reported this weekend about the central influence of Koch in the new GOP Congress.

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

Why can't we have people willing to revolt against wealthy tax cheats in the United States? Instead, we get Tea Partiers who want to help the wealthy tax cheats make even more!

The image of Reagan as a conservative superhero is myth, created to unite the various factions of the right behind a common leader.

This is not an argument there is no hatred, no inappropriate and even violent rhetoric, among US leftists. There is.

Tonight Sarah Palin didn't celebrate the legacy of Ronald Reagan. She sodomized it with a snarl, a wink, and a smile.

--David & Charles Koch
Charges: In a land filthy with noxious liars, these two are the filthiest. Their dad founded the ridiculous John Birch Society which claimed fluoridated tap water was a Communist mind-control plot—while his company built oil refineries for Stalin. And they've not fallen far from the despicable hypocrite tree. Koch Industries, the second biggest privately-held company in the country, generates its annual $98 billion in profits from coal mining, stealing oil from Indian reservations, refining and piping Canadian tar sands oil, and every other clear-cut, mountaintop-removing environmental abomination under the sun. How they make money is dirty; how they spend it is dirtier. From free-market-humping think tanks CATO and Heartland to Tea Party-backing Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, they invest vulgar amounts of money in misappropriating populist rage and misinforming the ignorant masses on climate change, tax reform, environmental policy, health care, and any other issue that could cut into their fat bottom line.

They made lots of promises -- and they already have broken many as they came out of the gate.

Rep. Michele Bachmann earned her law degree from televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University, but that doesn't necessarily mean her alma mater backs her possible presidential bid. The dean of the university's Pat Robertson School of Government thinks her response to President Obama's State of the Union address was unwise and stated that she's too inexperienced to make it to the Oval Office just yet.

Dr. Charles W. Dunn, dean of Regent University's Robertson School of Government, spoke with the American Family Association's OneNewsNow, and said he thinks that Bachmann is "articulate, attractive, and bright" but her tea party response to Obama was "unwise."

David and Charles Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries and primary financiers of the Tea Party, have amassed one of the world's largest private fortunes and Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in America. Koch sycophants in the media have attacked anyone daring to criticize the company because Koch Industries employs nearly 50,000 people, according to a study produced by Koch Industries last week. In the last two years, David and Charles Koch have jumped from each being worth $16 billion to now being worth $21.5 billion.

However, at a time when the Koch brothers were enjoying spectacular financial gains, Koch Industries laid off well over 2,000 people. Using the same approximate "jobs multiplier" Koch Industries used in its study last week, that means Koch Industries extinguished nearly 8,000 jobs in recent years:

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:

If they weren't so nasty most of the time I'd start to feel sorry for the Tea Party. They are getting taken for such a ride by hucksters, snake oil salesmen and billionaire puppeteers that it's getting sort of pathetic.

You might think I'm talking about Michelle Bachman last night. But no. It's this:

Bachmann's Republican critics may be sick of her grandstanding, but they're more terrified of her tea party following.

In just her third term, she has developed a fan base like 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's: Energized, fiercely loyal and capable of making a critic's life miserable with threats of political retribution. She's also a huge media draw — whether it's MSNBC, which lampoons her, Fox News, which promotes her, or CNN, which aired her entire State of the Union rebuttal Tuesday night. All that's missing is a Saturday Night Live spoof.

It's enough to make most Republicans think twice before crossing her — or at least wish they had.

Teabaggers, like LePage, are always trashing government. But, it sounds like LePage's aide, Dan DeMerritt, actually thinks government employees exist for their political benefit. How Tammany Hall of him. Might have worked in 1911, but it's not true in 2011:

Nassau's ills exemplify the growing tension across the country as dozens of freshly-elected Tea Party lawmakers, many of whom promised to cut taxes, must find ways to slash record budget gaps as revenues dwindle.

"A lot of people who got elected on this type of anti-tax platform are running into the brick wall of fiscal reality," said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington.

Besides being a cautionary tale, the setback in Nassau County is a black eye for the Tea Party, the grassroots movement built around the core principles of constitutionally limited government, free-market ideology and low taxes.

CNN's decision to air Bachmann's speech, interestingly, is angering liberals and Republicans alike. Steve Benen notes this morning that Bachmann's Tea Party brew could end up making Ryan's speech look moderate and reasonable in comparison. Both Benen and Atrios also point out that it could create a fundamental imbalance -- two Republicans responding to one speech from Obama -- and that there's no way CNN would allow a liberal Dem to offer a response from the left, as Bachmann is doing from the hard right.

In substance, Bachmann's message was essentially the same as Ryan's -- a series of misleading statements about Obama's steering of the economy, dire warnings about the national debt -- but her tone was more strident. Where Ryan opened with a conciliatory-sounding acknowledgment that Obama inherited "a severe fiscal and economic situation," Bachmann trotted out a chart (PDF) of unemployment numbers under Bush and Obama that nowhere noted the crash of the stock market under the Bush administration. And Bachmann, unlike Ryan, failed to send a kind word out to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who is struggling to recover from a gunshot wound to the head.

As I watched the 2011 State of the Union Address, which ended at 10:13 tonight, Eastern Time, one thing that came to mind was how much more I enjoyed watching and listening to an intelligent speaker like President Barack Obama after eight years of listening to President George W. Bush trying to speak. President Barack Obama is a very good and intelligent speaker, and has a great progressive vision for our nation's future. I give him an A- for his speech tonight.

While I don't agree 100% with everything the President had to say, I truly believe he is trying to do what's best for our country and has our country's best interests in mind.

One point I thought was silly was the President saying he would veto anything that came across his desk with earmarks, since earmarks are just guidelines for spending money that is already appropriated for a certain area, and the Republican battle cry against earmarks is a non-issue that has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent. I'm thinking the President was giving this to the misinformed right wingers as a sign that he is willing to compromise on issues.

I also found it interesting to watch John Boehner's reactions to different things the President talked about.

When the president talked about taking tax cuts away from the oil companies and using that money to promote the development of renewable energy, Boehner didn't appear to like that one bit. I can understand, though, since Boehner felt it necessary to apologize to BP for the President making them pay up for their disaster in the Gulf. John Boehner gets a lot of campaign contributions from big oil, and he wants to keep his sugar daddies happy.

Also from watching John Boehner's reactions, it appears that he likes having the military go to college campuses to recruit students to go in the military, just as long as they are NOT gay. He didn't seem happy at all about the repeal of "Don't Ask. Don't Tell".

On a lighter note, when President Barack Obama talked about Boehner coming from a background of sweeping floors for his father's business, the first thing that popped into my mind was that Boehner should go back to a job like that... He would be better suited for it than for being Speaker of The House.

One thing that always annoys me is the rebuttal by the opposition Party after the President's address. I don't like it, no matter which Party the President belongs to. I feel that the focus after the State of the Union Address should be on the President's vision of the future for this country. All the opposition Party does in the rebuttal, is say how most of the speech by the President is wrong and you should listen to what the opposition Party says instead.

This year, they did something even more stupid. They allowed the Tea Party to give a rebuttal, too! That's allowing two right wing speakers to refute what the President has said, the right wing and the ultra right wing. In my opinion, this is completely WRONG!

Want to explain to your friends and relatives how the Tea Party is corporately-financed and "grassroots" right-wing activity is not spontaneous? Here's a graphic to get you started.

Question for the tea party and everyone who voted for tea party Republicans in November: Did you enjoy your purely cosmetic vote to repeal the health care reform law? Personally, I would feel pandered to, and not particularly satisfied with all of that fiscally expensive congress …

Both Congresswoman Giffords and Dr. Tiller were gunned down in public. Congresswoman Giffords was interacting with her constituents at a "Congress on Your Corner" event and Dr.

The new RNC chair Reince Priebus, implicated in Americans for Prosperity's voter-caging scandal, carried a lot of water for the Koch-led group in Wisconsin. Now he's rewarded.

In other words, the new RNC Chair is a Tea Partier.

"We have nothing to do with this awful, tragic event in Arizona. Our prayers are with Congresswoman Giffords and the victims and families of this massacre," the Tea Party letter continued.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been a target long before an assassination attempt that left six dead and fourteen wounded. In 2010, her congressional office in Tucson was vandalized soon after an Alabama militiameister called for Democratic Party windows to broken, as Mother Jones journalist James Ridgeway recalled. A gun was dropped at a Douglas, Arizona town hall meeting on health care reform Giffords held in August 2009. Sarah Palin targeted her district with a gun sight cross hairs (err, landscaping symbol) during the last election cycle. (Robert DePugh's 1960s-era Minutemen used to send their opponents a set of crosshairs in the mail, with an ominous 'We Are Watching You" business card.) Asked who his daughter's enemies were, Giffords' father identified "the whole Tea Party."

According to his friend, Zach Osler, Loughner "didn't listen to political radio, he didn't take sides, he wasn't on the left, he wasn't on the right." Naturally, conservatives have seized upon this to exonerate themselves of charges of incitement. But it's not that simple. It's hard to place Zeitgeist and Loose Change on the conventional partisan spectrum—both come from a shadowy conspiracy-mad subculture where the far right and the far left meet. Yet it's the contemporary right, the right of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, that has mainstreamed ideas from this demimonde in an unprecedented way.

Still, it's worth asking again, in the wake of last weekend's senseless tragedy which puts a new light on her public persona. Palin's cavalier use of violent imagery may not have directly caused the Tuscon shooting that left six dead and a dozen wounded--but it seems uglier now. Her endless gambits to rule the news cycle may be grudgingly admired at other times--but when it takes precious time away from mourning those whose lives are lost forever, it has a pathetic, out-of-touch-feel.

The social fabric of Arizona seems to be deteriorating as fast as the state's population grows, driving the state to the brink of dysfunction. The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killing of U.S. District Court Judge John Roll and several other innocent bystanders by a lone gunman have brought Arizona's crisis to the fore, prompting Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik to aptly declare Arizona "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

What the Arizona Republic calls a "nasty little battle" has broken out among Republican members of Arizona's Legislative District 20 in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

According to the Associated Press, during the campaign, her opponent, Jesse Kelly, held fundraisers "where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle." Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

Fury over Giffords's position occasionally turned violent, with her Tucson office vandalized and someone showing up at a recent gathering with a weapon Law enforcement officials said members of Congress reported 42 cases of threats or violence in the first three months of 2010, nearly three times the 15 cases reported during the same period a year earlier.

It isn't true, actually. The religious right is central to the Republican coalition and more importantly, it's central to their organizing. The Tea Party is a flash in the pan compared to the churches. And while it's true that the Tea party isn't organized around social conservatism, you'll find that Tea Partiers themselves don't always know that:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' 2010 Congressional opponent Jesse Kelly held a June 12 gun event that was billed as follows on the Pima County Republican website: Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office

Sarah Palin has a special responsibility and opportunity in the wake of the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. For it was Sarah Palin and Sarah Palin alone who earlier put the crosshairs of a gun on Rep. Giffords. And so far, Palin's response has been Facebook prayers for the victims and an official denial that her widely distributed map involved gun sights at all. This is obscene duplicity at best.

As we reported this morning, House Republicans will kick-start the 112th Congress tomorrow with a spirited recitation of the Constitution, a document whose recent relevance is due largely to the ideological and sartorial interests of the Tea Party.