Tea Party

This morning, on ABC, reporter Brian Ross suggested the Colorado movie theater shooter might be a Tea Party member:  

George Stephanolpoulos: "I'm going to go to Brian Ross. You've been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant."

In Parma, Ohio, President Obama talked about dressing up like a Tea Party member to get votes in Hyde Park, Chicago:

With the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare, the issue now shifts to the elected branches of government and raises this question: Will the intense opposition dissipate or will it lead to a fervent new effort to repeal the liberal health care law?

James Piereson has an important article in the June New Criterion on the "forthcoming political revolution" in America. Here's the heart of the argument:

O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
 So frolic, so gay....
—Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632), "The Merry Month of May."

The poet Thomas Dekker is surely set to become a Tea Party favorite, anticipating as he did the merry and gay (in the old-fashioned sense) month of May 2012: Merry and gay for all who'd like to see a more conservative, more reform-minded, more populist (but responsibly populist) Republican party.

Richard Mourdock’s big primary victory over incumbent senator Dick Lugar in Indiana suggests that the insurgent Tea Party conservatism of 2009-2010 is alive and well in the 2012 Republican party.

President Barack Obama's reelection campaign released another campaign ad this morning, a 60-second spot that will run in battleground states Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. "While the campaign has done a number of response spots, this is the first proactive, paid spot in battleground states," Politico says. But the Obama campaign also takes a little time to take a whack at the Tea Party.

The Obama campaign has released a new web ad that lists every apparent accomplishment of the president's three years in office. The seven minute spot begins by showing how bad the economy was when the president took office, and suggests that President Obama saved America with the stimulus, the auto bailout, guaranteed contraception, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, Obamacare, killing Osama bin Laden, and more: 

Senator Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) is fighting for survival in his contentious Republican primary with state treasurer Richard Mourdock, a conservative with broad Tea Party support. Speaking with reporters in the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, Lugar seemed to be unsure about whether or not the Tea Party has been a force for good in the GOP.

In many ways, the story of the 2012 Republican primary has been the inability of Mitt Romney to win over more than a third of self-identified “strong Tea Party supporters” or “very conservative” voters. If he had received the support of those voters, even a slim majority of them, the race would almost certainly have been over weeks ago. 

The world came unhinged in the fall of 2008.

The United States had been in recession since the previous December, according to the Bureau of Economic Research, and in March 2008 the Fed had brokered a panicked fire sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase. But the real drama did not begin until September, when the government nationalized mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the government took over AIG, global credit markets froze, and a run began on money market funds.

The Richmond Tea Party group is blasting the IRS for allegedly failing to grant tax exempt status to the pro-limited government organization.