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If the Tea Party is coronating its own third-party candidate next summer, the moment of schism will likely be traced back to this week of debate on raising the debt ceiling.

The fissures are already evident. House Speaker John Boehner and his No.2, majority leader Eric Cantor, split on a grand bargain for deficit reduction. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan of last resort was met with outright hostility by the House Republican conference. And the House Republicans’ preferred plan — Cut, Cap and Balance – is less than popular with the Republican pundit class who openly acknowledge it’s a PR stunt that has zero chance of becoming law.

To hear Democrats tell it, House Republicans are “isolationist,” “extreme” and “spend more time listening to each other than their leaders.” Of course, it behooves Democrats to push the idea of a Republican Party in disarray. But Republicans have given them plenty of fodder.

As two roads diverge before the GOP on the debt ceiling, it’s increasingly hard to see a path that leads to party unity. Go right and the GOP risks default and, as McConnell has warned, being blamed by the center for an economic disaster. Take the center path – there is no left turn here – and Republicans risk an angry Tea Party base and potential primary threats. From the advent of the Tea Party to purity tests and the 2010 primary challenges, the split has been a long time coming.

As Karl Rove noted, the debate is now between a package that is mostly spending cuts versus 100% spending cuts and polls have consistently shown Obama has public opinion on his side in that debate. Five recent polls have shown overwhelming support for a “balanced approach” that includes a mix of tax increases and spending cuts. As David Brooks wrote two weeks ago, Republicans would be crazy to walk away from what will likely be the best offer for deficit reduction on their terms in a generation. But Republicans seem intent on not only walking away from a deal, but handing Democrats electoral gifts as they go.

Even if a grand bargain doesn’t happen now, Obama can claim he put everything on the table and Republicans walked away. And on a congressional level, Democrats were delighted with the GOP’s vote on Cut, Cap and Balance, which cuts half a trillion dollars more than Paul Ryan’s budget. “After polling and town hall meetings where voters rejected this plan to end Medicare, House Republicans doubled down on it — cutting, capping and ending it again,” says Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to Congress. “That’s just wrong and an example of House Republican’s misguided priorities: ending Medicare instead of creating jobs.”

Even Grover Norquist on Thursday told the Washington Post he didn’t consider allowing George W. Bush’s tax cuts to lapse a tax increase. When the anti-tax guy is encouraging a compromise that would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, you know the GOP’s reached the precipice.

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But at some point – whether it’s next week or in six months – the GOP will face a hard decision on revenue increases. And when that road splits, the Republican party might just do the same. http://swampland.time.com/2011/07/21/the-coming-gop-split/#ixzz1T2wmAC
Qb

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As word broke that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner may be nearing a deal that would raise the debt limit while cutting $3.5 trillion over the next decade, a large group of Republicans were serving notice that the pact likely won’t be enough to mollify the party’s conservative wing. A bicameral cadre of some 20 GOP lawmakers streamed into a studio on the third floor of the Senate, spilling into the periphery of the audience, to tout the Cut, Cap and Balance proposal that Democratic leader Harry Reid says doesn’t have “one chance in a million” of passing the Senate on Saturday. And many of them seemed prepared to go down along with it.
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“This is not just the best plan. This is the only plan,” said Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Tea Party favorite. But it is not a viable one. Nor is the only plan, even if it’s the only legislation that’s been formally drafted. The faint outlines of the pact Obama and Boehner are reportedly working toward — aides to both men dispute the characterization that a deal is close — look favorable to Republicans: no revenue increases in the deal’s first tranche, no end to the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, and cuts to beneficiaries of entitlement programs, which will enrage progressive Democrats. And yet, judging from the stridency of the rhetoric on display, Boehner will struggle to coax his Hell No Caucus into backing even a plum deal.
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Illinois Tea Partyer Joe Walsh, who has been circulating a letter inveighing against the McConnell fallback plan, stood on stage, a white “Cut, Cap and Balance” button pinned to his lapel, as Senate Republicans like Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham praised their House counterparts. When it was his turn to speak, Walsh invoked the “tide of history.” He and his fellow freshmen seem certain they are on the right side. Their leader may be ready to abandon them there. http://swampland.time.com/2011/07/21/as-the-debt-debate-shifts-tea-par
tyers-plan-to-hold-their-ground/

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Hating the TEA party is essentially hating America, hating freedom, and pretty much all that's worth while with this great country

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GOP turns on Tea Party

Conservatives have spent the past year or so gleefully citing the Tea Party phenomenon as evidence of the president's unpopularity. This was always a fantastical claim: the arrival of a new political movement doesn't tell us more about public opinion than, you know, actual measures of public opinion. But it was an easy weapon to hand, so there it was.

But in wielding the Tea Party as a rhetorical cudgel against the president and his party, Republicans made a crucial miscalculation. By making the approval of the Tea Partiers the measure of legitimacy, they entrusted their own fate to this new group of activists. And now the establishment of the GOP is stuck trying to wrest control of the party back from these ruffians, whom they wanted to exploit without actually empowering.
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The state Republican Party has been publicizing D'Annunzio's past run-ins with the law and his questionable sanity. Apparently, the guy went through a phase in the 1990s in which he claimed to be the messiah and had a lot of theories about the Ark of the Covenant, 1,000-mile-high pyramids, the New Jerusalem -- you get the picture.

"Mr. D'Annunzio has disqualified himself by his background, his record and his behavior," says the GOP state chairman, which is a pretty strong line for a party chief to take on an ongoing primary. Still, given D'Annunzio's, shall we say, colorful past, it's little wonder that the party is eager to be rid of him.
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Whether this guy is a nutcase, there's obviously something happening here. North Carolina isn't the only place where the GOP is trying to put a lid on the Tea Party. http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/05/25/tea_party_gop_e
stablishment/index.html] Republican Tim D'Annunzio, who is running for congress in North Carolina's eighth district, is being attacked as "unfit for public office at any level" by his own political party.

Tom Fetzer, who chairs the North Carolina GOP, came out swinging at D'Annunzio over the weekend as the congressional hopeful battles Harold Johnson for the Republican nomination ahead of a June 22 runoff election.

"By my personal observation of his behavior, and by acquaintance with his record and background, I consider Mr. D'Annunzio unfit for public office at any level," Fetzer explained to the Charlotte Observer. "What he could do to the party as our nominee is secondary in my view to what he could do to the country if he got elected. If he got elected, for crying out loud, that would be a disaster." http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/05/25/tea_party_gop_e
stablishment/index.html

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So it turns out that one after another of the Tea Party candidates is in one way or another mooching off the government. The latest series of hilarious disclosures center around Alaska's GI-Joe-bearded windbag Senatorial candidate, Joe Miller, who appears to have run virtually the entire gamut of government aid en route to becoming a staunch, fist-shaking opponent of the welfare state.

Miller's pomposity and piety with regard to government aid programs has all along been in line with the usual screechingly hysterical self-righteousness Tea Party candidates bring to such matters, railing against Obamacare and other "entitlement" programs and promising to end the "welfare state." That makes it all the more delicious now that he and his family have been exposed for taking state medical aid, unemployment insurance, farm subsidies, hell, even for using state equipment to run a private political campaign. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/more-tea-party-hil
arity-20101012

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The GOP Establishment Turns on Bachmann

She must be making some people nervous...A Hit Piece from a GOP Establishment Funded Media Outlet.

Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged. Story at http://ncaabbs.com/showthread.php?tid=503994 (Story is all about her migraines; pertinent point is the piece was on a GOP-funded media outlet)

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With recall elections in Wisconsin on the immediate horizon, Greg Sargent of The Washington Post looks ahead to January, when Gov. Scott Walker will likely face a recall fight of his own
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That both sides are already plotting their strategies over Walker is a sign that both recognize that a recall election against him is a near certainty and that it will be intensely fought, with an immense amount riding on the outcome.
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Dan Balz of The Washington Post writes: “Wisconsin remains in political turmoil. Recall elections are pending for nine state senators, six Republicans and three Democrats. Republicans could lose their Senate majority as a result. The governor could face a recall next year. Lawmakers, the political parties and their coalitions are now consumed with elections and recriminations, rather than being able to concentrate on finding ways to create jobs and fix the economy — the major promises of Walker’s campaign. ‘It’s tough,’ Walker said about the GOP’s prospects for holding onto the Senate. http://www.minnpost.com/dailyglean/2011/07/19/30118/wisconsin_battle_b
rews_over_date_for_walker_recall_election

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Arizona's right wing governor goes against Tea Party wishes

Governor vetoed new laws dealing with two of the great obsessions of the Tea Party movement: the right to bear arms, and the question of whether Barack Obama was actually born in the US.

Jan Brewer, who until now had been a darling of the conservative media, first threw out new legislation that would have allowed citizens to carry firearms through university campuses. Then she scrapped a "birther bill" which would have required future presidential candidates to present their birth certificates to electoral authorities.

Her move is significant because it provides evidence that leading Republicans are starting to become concerned that the party's dramatic shift rightwards during President Obama's reign might end up damaging its chances of winning support among mainstream voters at the next election, in 2012. http://politico-junkie.blogspot.com/2011/04/uk-arizonas-right-wing-gov
ernor-goes.html

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Ohio State Representative Armond Budish (D) [discussed] the unpopularity of the Republican’s union-busting law, Senate Bill 5.

“As people learn more and more about what this union stripping bill does, they get more and more angry,” he said. “Senate Bill 5 is about not letting people come together and bargain for fair wages, or for safe places to work. When people find out what this bill really does, they hate it.”

Nearly 1.3 million people in Ohio signed a recall of the union-busting bill, which was delivered to Secretary of State’s office at the end of June. http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/07/public-turns-against-union-b
usting-ohio-republicans/

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If it ever got into power it would screw up things so apocalyptically it would discredit itself forever

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My concern is that the movement implodes too soon, and that a decent moderate Republican runs against Obama in 2012

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Hating the TEA party is essentially hating America, hating freedom, and pretty much all that's worth while with this great country.

The childish temper tantrum being thrown is from the inexperienced, clueless community activist, who is in W A Y over his head here, and it shows.

Glad you've chosen your side.

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You hating America is what's pathetic. ... I have no idea from where your self loathing comes

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you are dumb...really fucking dumb

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I think Niki is really upset over whats going on with so-called "entitlements".

If we start cutting back, and we really need to, people like her would actually...*GASP*.. have to get a JOB!.

Oh the humanity!! Won't someone think of the leeches?!!

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2 things you never concern yourself with, is another guy's $ and his swinging cod.

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Given that the followers are so mentally challenged, what does that say about the philosophy?

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