Remember when the Tea Party was supposed to be a grass roots organization, unaffiliated with either party, just a group of folks who were fed up with corruption in Washington? To all those who didn’t buy it, you win. From Mother Jones:  FreedomWorks, the national conservative group that helped launch the tea party movement, sells [...]

The plot thickens in the Tea Party Civil War. Apparently Dick Armey did not go quietly into that good night. In fact, he first tried to muscle his opponents out: The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall. Richard [...]

When the “tea party” phenomenon broke out, believed to be inspired by Rick Santelli’s painfully oblivious Post-TARP rant about the pitfalls of helping those in financial distress, I was like many Americans – confused but interested. Maybe this was more than the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party finding an excuse to demonize a [...]

This clown show on the House floor just got more hilarious. At some point in the last four hours or so, Freedomworks, a key tea party group, abandoned their support of Plan B, this Boehner proposal to create what looks like a conservative wish list. They wrote a long encomium to Plan B at 9am [...]

As I noted, John Boehner got as much flak from his right flank on his three-page “counter-offer” as he did from his left. Conservative groups groused at the inclusion of $800 billion in revenue collection increases, even as it followed the Romney campaign pattern of lowering rates while broadening the base. Obviously they would rather [...]

The UN conference on climate change kicked off in Cancun with virtually no hope for a resolution mutually agreeable to all nations. The heady days of a new treaty to follow Kyoto are gone. They’ve shifted to cutting industrial chemicals, soot and methane, instead of carbon emissions. Whatever progress can be made stateside will happen [...]