Okay. Now it’s a heat wave.

Posted: August 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: energy, Environment, just because | Tags: , , | 27 Comments

The interior of Southern California has been slow-roasting, like everybody else in the U. S. of A. It’s so bad, people are being told to use their A/C less, to let their houses go all the way up to 78°F (25°C). The utilities have been moaning about having barely enough power to meet needs and many AC repair companies are totally booked.

They’ve been bewailing the temporary shutdown of the San Onofre nuke like the loss of the last drop of drinking water. (The thing has cracks in hundreds of steam pipes due to design flaws.) It provides 2200 Megawatts. It’s loss is terrible. We’re all dying out here.

A complete load of horsefeathers. I live near two natural gas power stations, and they’re barely ever even on. If it’s as bad as all that, you’d think they’d have to use them, yes? One produces 560 Megawatts, the other 1516MW. But they don’t. Especially the 1516MW one. If I see it running two days out of the year, that’s a lot. Admittedly, I don’t spend my life staring at it, so I might miss a day or two, but not much more than that. The other one seems to run maybe 14 days out of the year.

Then, yesterday I went for a hike and saw this:

view of Pt. Mugu

Nice, you say? What are you complaining about, you say? Well, look at those two wisps coming out of the two power plants. They’re running! They’re producing power!

Ormond Beach Generating Station

Half of it is down right now due to a fire, so it’s only producing about 730MW. (Notice also that line of photochemical smog.)

Mandalay Generating Station

The neat thing about natural gas plants is the utlities get pollution credits for them because they’re so (relatively) clean. So — this is just a wild guess — by not running them, they can use those credits for dirtier plants of theirs. Or sell them to other needy utilities.

Meanwhile, they can weep and wail and gnash their teeth over how we must turn the nukes back on now now now! Or else we might have to turn the A/C all the way to 79°F.

Afternoon Open Thread: Did Mitt Romney Lie About His 1968 Car Crash?

Posted: August 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Mitt Romney, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 28 Comments

Mitt Romney recovering after emerging a head-on car crash

Joseph Cannon has a fascinating piece up on the car crash that Mitt Romney was involved in when he was a Mormon missionary in France in the 1960s. (Thanks to RalphB for sending me over to Cannonfire this morning.) Here’s Cannon’s brief summary of the events in question:

In 1968, Romney was a Mormon missionary in France, zooming his Citroen through the small town of Bernos-Beaulac, when he slammed headlong into a car driven by a Bishop named Jean Vilnet.

Romney was in a coma for days afterwards, or so he says. (The point has been disputed.) One of his passengers died — and therein lies a scandal.

For many years, Mitt claimed that the accident killed a drunken priest named Albert Marie, who had caused the collision by swerving at high speed into Romney’s lane. That story was not true. The “priest” did not die, was not drunk, was not traveling at high speed, and was not at fault.

For what it’s worth, the “priest” was then, and is now, a bishop; his name is not Albert Marie. Although Mitt Romney spoke French well, he apparently didn’t understand how nomenclature works in France: The final part of a male first name may be a traditionally female name, attached with a hyphen — and in religious families, that name is usually Marie. As it happens, the full name of the man Romney hit is Jean-Félix-Albert-Marie Vilnet.

A woman died in the crash, Leola Anderson. She was the wife of Duane Anderson, Romney’s superior in the Paris mission. Romney had been tasked with driving his boss and the other passengers to another mission where Duane Anderson was needed to solve a crisis.

Please read the whole post at Cannonfire if you can. Cannon provides a number of links, which I followed. This one provides the most evidence for Romney lying about the accident. The author argues, based on photographic evidence, that the accident could not have occurred as Romney described it.

Bishop Vilnet recovering from injuries sustained in the collision with Mitt Romney’s car

Details from Mr. Romney and his supporters are not consistent with photographic evidence and follow up interviews. A view of the impact site tells us the rest of the story:

— The cover story has the driver of the other car presented as a “drunk priest” identified by the various missionary sources with the name “Albert Marie, age 46” in 1968 and in 2007 said to be dead.

Contrary to the cover up tale he is Bishop Jean Vilnet. Full name: Bishop Jean-Félix-Albert-Marie Vilnet. Born in 1922. By American count that did make him 46.

[The photo above] was taken as he recovered from his injuries in the hospital at Bazas, up the road from Beaulac. He was driving the Mercedes Benz 180 in this accident. He is not dead, not yet anyway. He was not blamed by anyone in a responsible position for the accident. That blame was invented (as “woven from whole cloth” in legal parlance) by the missionary team.

— The cover story asserts further that this “drunk priest” was speeding at “120 kph” and swerved out of lane to hit the blameless Mr. Romney. This is the story that was told to the children of Mrs. Anderson all the way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Photo of Vilnet’s and Romney’s cars after the crash

At this link, there is a photo of a Citroen DS just like the one Romney was driving. This one was actually in a high-speed, head-on collision.

Citroen DS after high-speed, head-on collision

The author of the post writes:

Romney was driving at normal highway speed. He has said repeatedly that he did not hit his brakes. If the Mercedes 180 had been going normal highway speed (much less the alleged “120 kph” claim), then Romney’s Citroën DS would have been annihilated — all six of the people in the Citroën would have been killed.

Given that we are analyzing a collision, the fact that Bishop Vilnet had slowed down entering the southbound Left Turn lane — from N524 into Rue de la Poste — that slowing down is what saved their lives. The accident described in Romney’s false-witness tale and now echoed in Wikipedia is physically impossible.

This article from Le Monde repeats the Romney version of the accident, but contains quotes from a couple who were in the car with Romney during the accident as saying they have been asked not to comment about the events that took place back in 1968.

More than 40 years later, André and Paulette Salarnier, French Mormons who often cooked “coq au vin” and mushroom-stuffed crepes for the young Romney, say they received several emails from the candidate’s entourage asking them to no longer speak to reporters about the 1968 accident.

They just remember “an open and charming young man speaking French almost without an accent.” André Salarnier also makes sure to prevent any backlash regarding his famous “coq au vin,” a dish that could be forbidden to water-drinking Mormons and shatter Romney’s image as a pious Mormon: “The wine being cooked, it no longer contains alcohol.” A way to stop anyone from thinking that “Young Mitt” may have been corrupted by the French and their famous Bordeaux vintages.

Many thanks to Joseph Cannon for digging up another great story about Mitt Romney. I’m not sure if there is any way to actually prove that Mitt lied about the accident, but it would certainly be in character with what we know about his incessant lying during the presidential campaign. So what do you think?

Again, this is an open thread.

Tuesday Reads: Learning about Paul Ryan

Posted: August 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 51 Comments

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday reading about Paul Ryan. There was so much information out there! I guess that’s what happens when you start rolling out a big news story late on Friday night and early Saturday morning.

Late Friday is the time that politicians generally use to release stories that they don’t want too many people to hear about. I have no idea why Romney chose that time, but it seems that it allowed writers to dig up lots of background over the weekend to publish on Monday. So I’m going to share some of the more interesting Ryan pieces I came across yesterday.

First, The New York Times had a lengthy puff piece: Conservative Star’s Small Town Roots. The best thing about this story was Charlie Pierce’s takedown of it: The Ryan Family’s History of Fakery

Still, the NYT article is worth reading to get the adoring media perspective on the mysteriously popular Ryan. The story reveals that Ryan and his wife are each quite wealthy through inheritance. Other than losing his father when he was in high school, which is tragic, Ryan seems never to have experienced a single setback along his education and career tracks.

Ryan studied under a conservative professor at Miami of Ohio–he paid for his college education with Social Security survivors’ benefits–and that professor pulled strings to get Ryan a political job. recommended Ryan for an internship with Wisconsin’s then Republican Senator Bob Kasten. Ryan has been sucking on the government teat ever since.

Mr. Ryan’s trickle-down economic theories were already in place, said Professor Rich Hart, who would help Mr. Ryan hone his political persona.

“I think Paul came to Miami University with these core conservative beliefs from an economic standpoint,” said Professor Hart, an outspoken libertarian who taught an intermediate macroeconomic theory course that Mr. Ryan took in his junior year. “He was reading Locke and Hayek, and I don’t know if he was reading Ayn Rand, but I had certainly read Ayn Rand, and I talked to him about it.”

The two would often meet outside class, not to talk about the course, Mr. Hart said, but to discuss political philosophy. “We had these discussions about the role of government. We both believed in the conservative view that government should be limited, because the most important thing is individual freedom, individual liberty, and along with that freedom goes individual responsibility.”

Professor Hart helped Ryan get a job working for Republican Senator Bob Kasten, and through Kasten Ryan met his “mentor,” Jack Kemp. They became close, and when Ryan ran for the House in 1998, Kemp campaigned for him. I’m sure Ryan worked hard, but he has certainly never had to worry about where his next meal was coming from. And where did the family money come from? Charlie Pierce found out via the Rude Pundit:

Where does the family dough come from? A construction company founded by Great Grandpa Ryan. The Rude Pundit went a’wandering through Googlestan, and what did he find? Among other great nuggets, this thing right here:

“The Ryan workload from 1910 until the rural interstate Highway System was completed 60 years later, was mostly Highway construction.”

IOW, Ryan’s multimillion dollar nest egg was built on taxpayer funds from We the People. So much for all that self-reliance Ryan is always touting.

There was another interesting tidbit in the NYT piece that Sam Stein wrote about at HuffPo. Here’s the relevant quote from the NYT:

Mr. Ryan is a strict supply-side budget expert and social conservative who counts fans across the Republican spectrum. He has been a driving force, if not always a visible one, in the party’s biggest fights with President Obama, including last year’s budget impasse that took the nation to the brink of default.

Mr. Ryan’s enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan “grand bargain” that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama’s easy re-election, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.

So did Ryan oppose a bipartisan deal for political reasons–fearing that it would help Obama? It’s an interesting question.

Here are a couple of interesting pieces on the Ryan plan for Medicare that I found helpful–both are relatively brief and informative.

Bloomberg: Ryan Plan To Redo Medicare With Private Choices Stirs Doubts

Forbes: Why Ryan’s Medicare Fantasy Doesn’t Merit Adult Conversation

I loved this piece at the Guardian by Giles Fraser about Ryan’s Ayn Rand obsession.

When I was a teenager, my American girlfriend at the time gave me Ayn Rand’s cult novel Atlas Shrugged to read. It changed her life, she said. It changed mine, too. She was not my girlfriend by the morning. It was the most unpleasant thing I’d ever had the misfortune to read.

As a work of literature, Atlas Shrugged is drivel, and not simply because it is so up itself with its own perceived radicalism; fundamentally, all propaganda is drivel, even if it is propaganda in a good cause. Rand’s cause was to celebrate what she called “the virtue of selfishness”, to denigrate the poor as scroungers and to celebrate the muscular individualism of the creative heroes of capitalism. Altruism, she contends, is “complete evil”. The question she poses: what would happen if all the bankers and captains of industry went on strike? What would happen if these Atlas-like gods, who hold up the world, decided one day to shrug and refuse to support everyone else? Then the world would be buggered, she contends. Atlas Shrugged is cheap pornography for the nastiest side of capitalism.

Fraser discusses the obvious clashes between Rand’s philosophy and Ryan’s Catholic faith.

By your deeds shall you know them. And Ryan’s deeds, and in particular his budget plan for slashing the role of the state, are pure Rand, as a group of Jesuits from Georgetown University have insisted: “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favourite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.” The US Catholic bishops’ conference, not well-known for its progressive politics, has said much the same.

It feels odd to be arguing that there ought to be more religion in US politics. In many ways, I’d prefer there to be a lot less. And certainly a lot less of the hard-right hogwash that borrows the wardrobe of Christianity but has no intention of being subject to its moral values. Jesus said nothing whatsoever about homosexuality or abortion. He said a great deal about poverty and our responsibility for the vulnerable. Which is why Paul Ryan is little more than Ayn Rand in Christian drag.

He also implies that Rand wouldn’t be too impressed with Ryan:

Ironically, he is a “second-hander” – Rand’s terminology for those who take their values, prêt-à-porter, from others. The trouble is that Christianity in the US has become so widely hijacked by the right that not enough people will actually notice.

Ayn Rand in Christian drag…I love it!

Just one more humorous tidbit on Ryan: In his speech on Saturday, Ryan used an aphorism that was very famous in the counterculture in the late 1960s.

Recalling words of advice offered by his late father, Mr. Ryan said, “I still remember a couple of things he would say that have really stuck with me. ‘Son, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.’ Regrettably, President Obama has become part of the problem, and Mitt Romney is the solution.”

That quote is famous for its use by Eldridge Cleaver in his book Soul On Ice. Cleaver was famous as one of the founders of the Black Panthers. From the NYT Campaign Stops blog:

With Cleaver’s name attached, the phrase appeared on banners, buttons and picket signs at demonstrations well into the 1970s, and was picked up by other radical leftist leaders.

It’s perhaps unlikely that Mr. Ryan’s father, a lawyer in Janesville, Wisc., was present at a political gathering in 1968 when the Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, urging his followers to smash “the American Empire,” proclaimed:

Everyone falls into two categories. You are either part of the problem – or part of the solution. Being part of the solution means you’re willing to grab a shotgun and take to the barricades, killing if necessary. Being part of the problem means you’re on the other side of the shotgun. There is no in-between.

It turns out the turn of phrase may have originated with Charlie Rossner, a graphic designer for the VISTA program in 1967, but Cleaver and the Panthers made it famous.

I’m running out of time and space, and this has been all about Paul Ryan. Oh well…I guess I’ll go with that, and let you post other news in the comments. I’ll end with this short video of Ryan’s first solo appearance–at the Iowa State Fair. It didn’t go that well.

What are you reading and blogging about today?

UPDATE: This post has been updated to correct the assertion that Professor Rich Hart of Miami University (Ohio) “pulled strings” to get Paul Ryan a job with Wisconsin Senator Bob Kasten.  Professor Hart explains in a comment that all he did was write a letter of recommendation to support Ryan’s application for an unpaid summer internship with Senator Kasten.  I had gotten the impression from The New York Times article that Professor Hart had been an important mentor who had been very instrumental in getting Ryan involved in politics.  I apologize for the misunderstanding.

 

Monday Reads: Imagine there’s no country …

Posted: August 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , | 76 Comments

good morning!

The Olympics closed last night with a beautiful tribute to John Lennon. He was truly a remarkable man.  Meanwhile, we have people with a twisted vision of the future–and little imagination–running f0r higher office here.

and no Social Security too ….

Meanwhile, we struggle to hold on to everything this country used to stand for.  Here’s a post that lets you know exactly why those nuns are on that bus are protesting the nasty Paul Ryan/Mitt Romney/Republican way to burn down the entire country. I’m just going to give you the bottom line on the social security proposal.  There’s more at the WAPO link.

Ryan’s Social Security privatization proposal,  the Social Security Personal Savings Guarantee and Prosperity Act of 2005, which he sponsored along with then-Sen. John Sununu (whose father has been a prominent Romney surrogate), would have allowed workers to funnel an average of 6.4 percent of their 12.4 percent payroll-tax contribution to a private account. Lower-income workers would be able to divert more of their wages, as the plan allows 10 percent of income up to $10,000 and 5 percent of income up to the payroll tax cap to be diverted. By default, the private account would be invested in a portfolio set by the Social Security Administration of 65 percent stocks and 35 percent bonds. Workers could choose an 80/20 stock-bond portfolio, or a 50-50 portfolio, but would not be able to pick individual stocks or bonds. At retirement, all participants in the plan would be required to buy an annuity.

The Social Security Administration concluded that the Ryan-Sununu plan would require huge increases in general budget revenue to make up the shortfall left in payroll tax revenue. Specifically, revenue would have to increase by 1.5 percent of GDP every year, an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found, or about $225 billion at current GDP. That’s a big honking tax hike. What’s more, under the plan, investments in the stock and bond markets would skyrocket such that by 2050, every single stock or bond in the United States would be owned by a Social Security account. This would mean that the portfolio managers at the Social Security Administration would more or less control the entire means of production in the United States.

Funnily enough, Ryan also proposed a resolution in 1999 that passed the House (with only Ron Paul voting against) expressing the sense of the body that Social Security should be maintained without any changes to benefits for current retirees or increases taxes.

and Weather that we’ll die from …

Get used to the extreme weather and drought.

BY many measurements, this summer’s drought is one for the record books. But so was last year’s drought in the South Central states. And it has been only a decade since an extreme five-year drought hit the American West. Widespread annual droughts, once a rare calamity, have become more frequent and are set to become the “new normal.”

Until recently, many scientists spoke of climate change mainly as a “threat,” sometime in the future. But it is increasingly clear that we already live in the era of human-induced climate change, with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires.

Future precipitation trends, based on climate model projections for the coming fifth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that droughts of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the century unless human-induced carbon emissions are significantly reduced. Indeed, assuming business as usual, each of the next 80 years in the American West is expected to see less rainfall than the average of the five years of the drought that hit the region from 2000 to 2004.

That extreme drought (which we have analyzed in a new study in the journal Nature-Geoscience) had profound consequences for carbon sequestration, agricultural productivity and water resources: plants, for example, took in only half the carbon dioxide they do normally, thanks to a drought-induced drop in photosynthesis.

a brotherhood of the few …

A few numbers crunched at The Atlantic shows that “Mitt Romney Would Pay 0.82 Percent in Taxes Under Paul Ryan’s Plan”.

Under Paul Ryan’s plan, Mitt Romney wouldn’t pay any taxes for the next ten years — or any of the years after that. Now, do I know that that’s true. Yes, I’m certain.
Well, maybe not quite nothing. In 2010 — the only year we have seen a full return from him — Romney would have paid an effective tax rate of around 0.82 percent under the Ryan plan, rather than the 13.9 percent he actually did. How would someone with more than $21 million in taxable income pay so little? Well, the vast majority of Romney’s income came from capital gains, interest, and dividends. And Ryan wants to eliminate all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends.

Romney, of course, criticized this idea when Newt Gingrich proposed it back in January by pointing out that zeroing out taxes on savings and investment would mean zeroing out his own taxes.

Hey, they are still calling him Mitt the Twit in the UK.

Some Fun stuff to take your mind off Monday:

  • Weird Grave stuff of the day: A cache of severed right hands are found in a dig of Ancient Egypt.  Hey!  Every one needs a hobby!!

    A team of archaeologists excavating a palace in the ancient city of Avaris, in Egypt,  has made a gruesome discovery.The archaeologists have unearthed the skeletons of 16 human hands buried in four pits. Two of the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in an outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands.They are all right hands; there are no lefts.

Alright, that’s enough for me. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Meanwhile, Down Ticket …

Posted: August 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, Republican politics | Tags: , | 38 Comments

I don’t really read Margaret Carlson much but she had some interesting down ticket tidbits on Bloomberg that made me wonder if the tea bagging madness was going to carry on for a few more elections. They keep nominating and electing candidates that behave like case studies in an abnormal psychology textbook.  Unfortunately, their primary raison d’etre appears to be gumming up the national works and saying completely insane things.

Last week, former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, who alerted reporters that he was visiting a Chick-fil-A the day before the election, overwhelmed Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, the veteran establishment candidate, to win the nomination to replace retiring Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Dewhurst’s sins? He was Governor Rick Perry’s right-hand man and an occasional sponsor of bipartisan legislation. The most effective ad against Dewhurst accused him of being a moderate.

Three months ago conservative Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock beat six-term incumbent Senator Richard Lugar, the compromiser who’d forgotten his roots. Nebraska State Senator (and rancher) Deb Fischer beat Attorney General Jon Bruning in Nebraska in an upset to go up against Bob Kerrey, the former governor and senator, on Election Day.

Each victor campaigned against Washington insiders who had impermissible contact with the enemy. Nominating your most conservative candidate in the primary is more satisfying than letting another weak one get in. And if these candidates do get elected, inactivity is preferable to approving legislation that even contemplates the possibility that any American could get so much as a food stamp he is not entitled to.

Take Connecticut, the Yankee bastion of village squares and town-hall meetings. In the race to replace retiring Senator Joe Lieberman, the purist wing of the Republican Party prefers entrepreneur Linda McMahon, who has never run anything but a soft-porn wrestling empire, over former Representative Chris Shays, who was close to former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Reaching across the aisle from time to time — he voted for campaign- finance reform, for instance — helped lead to Shays’s defeat in 2008.

At the time, the loss left the House without a single Republican from New England. McMahon first ran for Senate in 2010, when her primary victory over former Representative Rob Simmons, a respected moderate with two Bronze Stars, essentially ceded the race to the Democrats. Now, despite losing to Richard Blumenthal two years ago, McMahon is getting a second chance.

She won the party endorsement in May, but Shays managed to scrape together enough votes to challenge her for the nomination. The primary election is next Tuesday. It will take a miracle for Shays to defeat a self-funded candidate blanketing the state with softly lit ads that present McMahon as a job creator. Airbrushed out is the fact that she got wealthy in part by making professional wrestling even more vulgar. To the play- acting in the ring, she added storylines involving necrophilia and intrafamily violence starring her husband, Vince, and daughter, Stephanie.

Remember, these are the people that are bringing us the Muslims-in-the-State House Witch Hunts right now. I’d even argue that Michelle Bachman’s not the biggest nut in the can.  Florida’s Allen West seems to live in an alternative reality also. People like this use to wind up in sanitariums, not state houses.   (WATCH: MoJo’s video roundup of “Shit Rep. Allen West Says.”)

It’s mid-April and momentarily West, the Republican congressman from Florida’s 22nd District—an imaginatively carved Tetris piece stretching from West Palm Beach to the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale—will take the stage at the Palm Beach County Tax Day Tea Party in Wellington. He’ll call the tax on tanning salons enshrined in the Affordable Care Act “racist,” the president “an abject failure,” and, directing his assembled battalion’s attention to a small group of placard-bearing liberal protesters, ruminate on his sanity: “They say Allen West is the craziest person that ever set foot on the House floor! Let me tell you who’s the craziest person to truly ever set foot on the House floor. That’s President Barack Hussein Obama.”

For now, though, everyone wants a piece of West and his Honda VTX 1800R retro cruiser. West poses for photos at a short remove, offering a firm grip and flashing an undeniably charming, gap-toothed grin. “A true patriot,” gushes a woman in a red tank top, to no one in particular. “A true patriot!”

His vest is black leather like his boots, and it’s covered in patches—”Rolling Thunder: First Amendment Demonstration Run, Washington, DC, Inc.” across the back, “Christian” on the front. Tucked in the right breast pocket is a copy of the Constitution.

“He’s our local rock star!” says a voice in the crowd. She’s holding a copy of a book about radical Islam for which West wrote the foreword. The cover features a flaming Islamic crescent and star behind the Statue of Liberty. She grows gravely serious. “Just protect him, God. Protect him, Lord.”

So, what would a few more folks as crazy as West do in the Senate?  Would they make Rand Paul look reasonable?

Tea Party Candidates are up for US Senator in Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas, and Missouri among other states.  NPR looked at the gains in a variety of states.

Suddenly, some are describing the Tea Party as resurgent, just months after it seemed all but irrelevant.

But political scientist Alan Abramowitz says both characterizations are inaccurate.

“In general, the Tea Party has a pretty negative image among the general public, but it remains, I think, a very potent force within the Republican Party,” he says.

Abramowitz, who teaches at Emory University, says polls peg Tea Party approval at just 25 percent among the public at large but he says, “When you have a Republican primary electorate, you have a group of voters who are quite conservative and in many cases a majority of those Republican primary voters identify with the Tea Party movement.”

But that only shakes things up when the Tea Party votes as a block. That’s what worked for Cruz and Mourdock. The Republican presidential primaries were a different story. There were simply too many candidates staking a claim to Tea Party votes.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., speaking in Iowa before the state’s caucuses said her conservative coalition was made up of the Tea Party movement of which “I am one.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a similar declaration. Others sought Tea Party support as well, but in the end the GOP’s presidential nominee will be Mitt Romney, the father of the Massachusetts health care plan that became Obamacare, and the GOP candidate the movement was least happy with.

Amy Kremer, of the Tea Party Express, says the group’s voters will turn out this fall, even if the big motivation is not support for Romney but dislike of President Obama.

“I think that you’ll see the people rise up and … work really hard to make sure that he is a one-term president,” she says.

The Tea Party can also say it made many Republican candidates, including Romney, move to the right to secure their nominations this year. After the Supreme Court’s health care decision, the GOP candidate immediately expressed his disapproval of Obama’s health care plan, saying if elected he would repeal the law.

The movement also boasts a direct connection to the other big story of 2012 — money. From its beginnings, it’s had ties to such wealthy conservative donors as the Koch brothers. It’s big institutional ties include groups such as FreedomWorks led by Dick Armey, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives.

Is this the force behind the Ryan VP candidacy? The Charlotte Observer has a good piece up on their “evolution” at the state level.

ATLANTA Tea party activists in Georgia helped kill a proposed sales tax increase that would have raised billions of dollars for transportation projects. In Pennsylvania, tea partyers pushed to have taxpayers send public school children to private schools. In Ohio, they drove a referendum to block state health insurance mandates.

These and other battles are evidence of the latest phase of the conservative movement, influencing state and local policy, perhaps more effectively than on a national level. Tea party organizers are refocusing, sometimes without the party label, to build broader support for their initiatives. The strategy has produced victories that activists say prove their staying power.

“I call it Tea Party 2.0,” said Amy Kremer, a Delta flight attendant who leads Tea Party Express. The California-based group, co-founded by GOP strategist Sal Russo, claims it’s the largest tea party political action committee.

The movement first showed its strength in Washington in 2009 as an umbrella for voters angry over President George W. Bush’s Wall Street rescue and President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and auto manufacturer bailout, as well as the health care debate.

The tea party has helped elect members of the House, but they’ve contributed to the stalemate on Capitol Hill. No single Republican presidential candidate captured tea partyers’ wholehearted support, despite angst over Mitt Romney and his moderate record while Massachusetts governor. Without a clear rival, Romney, author of the state health care overhaul that served as a model for Obama’s, emerged from a crowded field to challenge the Democratic incumbent in November. Romney gave the hard right at least a symbolic win by announcing Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a tea party hero, as his running mate Saturday.

They seem to be a bunch pron to cults of personality.  Many of them also run in the religious right circles.  Most appear to be white.  They also don’t appear to be the sharpest tacks in the toolbox.  The question is can they do to the US Senate what they’ve done to the US House?  How long with this little group of crazies get their run of the Republican party before the Wall Street Crowd tires of them all?

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