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But it's no use trying to talk sense to folk who want to hate so badly they go looking for a reason, an excuse, no matter what it is - when our society starts rewarding them with a rubber room and a nice white coat instead of positions of power and authority, violent conflict will generally end itself soon thereafter.

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Islam in America is at a crossroads. One path is continued confusion, hatred, intolerance and discrimination, and the other is the truth and beauty of the Quran.

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A new analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In addition, they are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues. And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.

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"There is a significantly outsized proportion of white evangelical Christians in the tea party movement." Those were the words of Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research, the polling firm that yesterday released the first comprehensive survey on the religious and theo-political beliefs of voters aligned with the tea party movement.

According to the survey, nearly half of all respondents who considered themselves part of the tea party movement also considered themselves part of the religious right. "Among the more than 8-in-10 (81%) who identify as Christian within the Tea Party movement," the survey found, "57% also consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement."

One third of tea partiers are white evangelical Christians, Jones said the survey showed, compared to one in five voters in the general population. But one in three Republicans are white evangelical Christians, too, more proof that supporters of the tea party and the GOP -- despite the tea party claims to be an outside force -- share many of the same beliefs.

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White evangelicals comprise nearly 30% of all voters, Voted 78% for GOP; 52% of all Tea Party Supporters are Born-Again Evangelical Christians, According to a Post-Election Survey ( http://www.ffcoalition.com/2010/11/03/ffc-national-survey/) conducted by Public Opinion Strategies for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the largest single constituency in the electorate in the 2010 midterm elections was self-identified evangelicals, who comprised 29% of the vote and cast an astonishing 78% of their ballots for Republican candidates. This is consistent with polling data by other organizations conducted before Election Day.

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The demographic breakdowns: Tea Party activists are 60 percent male and 80 percent white, with 77 percent of them self-identifying as “conservatives” and 44 percent identifying as “Republicans.”

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Several polls are now out, assessing the demographics of the Tea Party Movement that largely agree the majority of its members are Republican, largely white, above the mean in age. A poll conducted March 19-22 by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, Iowa.... "Tea Party supporters are likely to be older, white and male. Forty percent are age 55 and over, compared with 32 percent of all poll respondents; just 22 percent are under the age of 35, 79 percent are white, and 61 percent are men. Many are also Christian fundamentalists, with 44 percent identifying themselves as “born-again,” compared with 33 percent of all respondents."

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About two dozen gun-toting Tea Party activists staged a rally at the Montana statehouse on Friday to support the Second Amendment right to bear arms and limiting the reach of the federal government.

Outnumbered by the media and politicians in attendance, the protesters spoke in favor of conservative-backed bills to nullify various U.S. laws, such as the Endangered Species Act...

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“We are turning our guns on anyone who doesn’t support constitutional conservative candidates,” said Dale Robertson, who operates TeaParty.org out of Houston and helped start the movement nearly two years ago. He declined to say which states are next on the tea party’s hit list. He said party leaders in those states would be warned privately, but the movement’s wrath “will be very clear publicly” if they don’t listen.”

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I[/u} see it as those, with education or not, are uneducated about the FACTS of what’s happening, uneducated because they buy things such as FauxNews’ lies, fraud and outright propaganda, and don’t get educated anywhere else.

I could go on, but it’s not worth the effort, given objective and intelligent people recognize all this, and the others will decry it for one reason or another. The point is: Nothing was said that isn’t true, with the possible exception of when Schiller said CLEARLY he was speaking for himself and not NPR, and even then said many true things. But in today’s world, if you say ANYTHING the right can twist and sensationalize, you’re screwed. It has nothing to do with whether it’s true, you’re fair game to be attacked. Rarely are such attacks, or perpetrated fakes, shown committed by the other side. All the insane things THEY say, on their own, tricked by nobody, are ignored by the right and Tea Party, and never called out by Republican politicians, leaders or legislators.

Gawd forbid one should speak the truth in America today; we HAVE been hijacked, too many of us, by fear, hatred, xenophobia and plays to racism. It's a form of censorship that's working quite well.

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On Tuesday, National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller lost her job, thanks to the antics of conservative trickster James O'Keefe. O'Keefe, you may remember, is the guy who tried (unsuccessfully) to lure a CNN reporter onto a boat under false pretenses, so he could record a seduction scene.

Last year, he was arrested while dressed up as a telephone worker to gain entry to Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office. He pleaded guilty to entering federal property on false pretenses.

O'Keefe's most famous exploit was to dress in a pimp costume and attempt to coax representatives of ACORN, the progressive community organization, to offer tips on getting away with child prostitution.

Only it turned out he didn't actually wear his outrageous duds while talking to, and recording, the ACORN employees. Like so much of O'Keefe's work, that was a trick of the editing. Even his false pretenses have false pretenses.

In the NPR affair, O'Keefe's confederates posed as representatives of a phony Muslim organization, offered a bogus $5 million donation, and recorded some ill-considered lunchtime chitchat with Ron Schiller, NPR's top fundraiser. Schiller called Tea Party supporters "racist" and suggested that NPR might be better off in the long run without federal money.

Once the Web lit up with an excerpted video of the lunch (later supplemented by an ostensibly complete two-hour version), Schiller got fired -- and, in less than 24 hours, his boss Vivian Schiller (no relation) joined him out the door.

Ron Schiller behaved recklessly and stupidly, no question. Shouldn't he have smelled a rat? How could his sniffer fail him so spectacularly? Why would he talk so unguardedly? As NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard put it in a post mortem, "We live in public. The mic is always on."

O'Keefe's success at toppling NPR's brass has put us on notice: Deceit is now an acceptable tactic in the culture wars. Liars rule our discourse.

I use that word consciously and deliberately to describe O'Keefe. His organization is named, ludicrously, Project Veritas, and his fans view him as a truth-teller, but he's the inverse of a trustworthy narrator.

Deception is the very core of his act.

This kind of deception is becoming depressingly common, and you'd think we'd be learning to react more cautiously. Instead, just as the Obama administration dumped Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod the moment Andrew Breitbart framed her with a deceitfully edited video, NPR's board caved at lightning speed.

Given O'Keefe's record, you'd think the organization might have waited to assess whether this video was, like its predecessors, edited with ill intent. But the NPR board went straight to the crisis playbook: Act fast, cut your losses, try to move past a fiasco. In doing so, NPR empowered O'Keefe's brand of charlatanry and opened the door for others who might feel like deceiving and surreptitiously recording anyone who presents a target.

In the long run O'Keefe is likely to flame out in some embarrassing overreach. But he'll leave a long trail of suspicion and distrust. And in the short run a lot of us are going to be stuck in his mendacious world. The next time he springs some tawdry gotcha trap, we can only hope our employers take a little more care and time to consider the source than NPR did.

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