I do not like this Uncle Sam,

I do not like this Uncle Sam, I do not like his health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks,or how they lie and cook the books. I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their secret deals. I do not like this speaker Nan , I do not like this ‘YES, WE CAN’. I do not like this spending spree— I’m smart, I know that nothing’s free. I do not like your smug replies, when I complain about your lies. I do not like this change and hope. I do not like it. nope, nope, nope! Go green – recycle Congress in 2012!

Green Pigs Don’t Fly

By Jeffrey
Folks

Reportedly, Obama’s jobs speech will focus on
infrastructure spending, and much of that spending will undoubtedly be tied to
the creation of “green jobs.”  The problem is, what he has already spent has not
created jobs.  According to the Heritage Foundation, it may well have
cost
jobs.  It has, however, enriched some of his wealthiest political
contributors.  And that seems to be the real motive behind the president’s
infrastructure spending.  Not green jobs, but green pork.

That appears to be the case with Obama’s $535-million
loan guarantees to Solyndra Inc.  During a 2010 visit to Solyndra’s plant in
Fremont, California, Obama insisted that the solar panel company would create
“one thousand long-term jobs.”  Solyndra has since declared bankruptcy, and it
seems unlikely that the taxpayer will recover any of the $535 million in
loans.

The half-billion that Obama threw away on Solyndra is
only a small part of $60 billion earmarked for alternative energy in Obama’s
2009 stimulus bill, and that $60 billion is only a fraction of the $100 billion
that Energy Secretary Stephen Chu envisions “investing” in alternative energy.
Solyndra is not the only green jobs company to receive stimulus funding —
hundreds of them did.  And dozens of them have gone bankrupt already, including
Evergreen Solar, taking billions of taxpayer money with them.

The GAO’s Franklin Rusco has raised questions
about the transparency and rigor of the approval process for the Solyndra loan
guarantees.  It has been suggested that the White House took a special interest
in Solyndra during the loan guarantee application process, monitoring the
process, and perhaps communicating with officials in charge.

That should be a question for congressional
investigations, and thankfully the investigations have begun.  The House
Committee on Energy and Commerce is seeking White House documents regarding
Obama’s role in obtaining the loan guarantees for Solyndra.  So far, the White
House has stonewalled, refusing to supply the requested
documents.

Reportedly, Solyndra CEO Christian M. Gronet, who
received ten
million stock options on the same day the $535-million loan
guarantee was approved, donated to “Friends of Barbara Boxer” in 2009/2010.
According to other reports, Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser, a
prominent Obama campaign contributor and bundler, was a major Solyndra investor
as well.  It is an open question as to whether political contributions from
Solyndra executives and investors influenced the administration’s decision to
back the loans.

The latest green power company to receive federal loan
guarantees is SoloPower Inc., which just this month revived a $197-million loan
guarantee to build a solar film factory in Oregon.  The initial phase of the
project, funded with the help of the federal loans, along with $40 million in
loans and tax credits from the state of Oregon, is expected to create
170
new jobs,
according to company projections.  By my calculation, that is $1.4 million per
job — not exactly a bargain for taxpayers who will then also have to pay higher
fuel bills as a result of green energy mandates.

Before coming to SoloPower, CEO Tim Harris was a
successful executive at Seagate Technology, where he is credited with setting up
an operation creating 15,000 jobs.  Those jobs were not in America, however;
they were in Malaysia, the same country where First Solar, another major
recipient of Obama loan guarantees, has located most of its new
jobs.

In fact, Obama’s green energy stimulus has done more
for job-creation in Malaysia and China than it will ever do in the U.S.  Under
Obama’s massive loan guarantee program, the American taxpayer has footed a
$60-billion bill largely for Asian job creation.

Ironically — or perversely — the president is doing
everything possible to kill off the one industry that is producing jobs that
cannot be exported to Asia.  America possesses vast new reserves of oil and gas
that can be developed only with American labor.  If only the administration
would rescind unnecessary regulation, those jobs would double virtually
overnight.  Not only that, but federal and state royalty collections would
double as well, and the U.S. trade balance would stabilize as less oil and gas
was imported.  But so far, the president continues to press for more taxes on
conventional energy companies.  And never at any time has it occurred to him
that it might be in the national interest to support energy independence by
making it easier for American energy companies to drill right here in
America.

The White House continues to insist that the $60
billion in alternative energy funding, along with tens of billions approved in
other legislation, was a wise “investment.”  Most real investors,
having lost billions on alternative energy, would shy away from solar and wind
projects.  But Obama continues to throw money away.  In September alone, the
president approved an additional $622 million in loan guarantees for solar
companies.  Even Democrats like Senator Jeff Bingaman admit
that Obama’s loan guarantees “have not worked.”  Yet Bingaman himself introduced
a bill to fund a “clean-energy bank” to make more loans to the same kind of
companies.  Apparently, Bingaman’s logic is, “It doesn’t work, so let’s do it
again.”

That seems to be the rationale for Obama’s latest
green jobs initiative.  Bingaman is asking for $10 billion for his clean-energy
bank.  I’m sure Obama will top that by a couple hundred billion.  That funding,
if approved, will disappear into the pockets of Democratic Party supporters,
just as surely as it has in the past, though much of it will be passed along to
Democratic candidates in the 2012 elections.  If that sounds like “pay to play,”
you can draw your own conclusions.

After all, the guiding principle behind Obama’s green
jobs initiative all along has been how much it will contribute to his own
reelection.  The fantasy of green jobs presented him with a unique opportunity
to please environmentalist supporters while at the same time rewarding wealthy
contributors who also happen to be investors and executives in alternative
energy companies.

It is unlikely that Obama will ever desert this
winning combination, even as his scandalous relationship with one bankrupt
company after another comes to light.  No matter how many billions end up being
wasted, the president will continue to insist, as did an official at the
Department of Energy just last week, that the green jobs program “is on pace to
create thousands of jobs.”  Already Obama has spent as much as $10 million each
for the thousands of green jobs, he claims to have created.  Is there no limit,
and no shame?

Actually, there is not.  Because more important than
actual green jobs is green pork.  Obama is relying on green pork, along with
union pork and trial lawyer pork, to get him reelected.  Green jobs are at the
heart of his domestic agenda because green pork results in donations to the
Democratic Party.  Whether it results in any jobs, to say nothing of “long-term”
jobs, is irrelevant.  It’s his own job that Obama is focused on
saving.

Jeffrey Folks is author of many
books and articles on American culture, most recently
Heartland of the
Imagination
(2011).

Stop the Democrats’Plan for Electoral Chaos

Jan Ting,FloydReports.com

During the 2000 presidential election,Al Gore won the popular vote but George
W. Bush won the presidency by winning the majority of votes in the Electoral
College. Since then,a predictable but misguided
effort has been underway to try to make the popular vote determinative of
presidential elections,instead of relying on the Electoral College as
provided in the Constitution and as traditionally counted.

Recognizing that such a proposal could never command the support of
three-quarters of the states required for a constitutional amendment,proponents
have instead proposed an interstate compact by which states commanding a
majority of votes in the Electoral College agree to cast all their votes for the
winner of the national popular vote in a presidential election. States would
legally bind themselves to cast their electoral votes for the national popular
vote winner regardless of the actual vote in that state. And by mutual
agreement,the legislation in each state would become effective as soon as states
commanding a majority of the electoral votes enact the same legislation.

The flaw in the proposal is the possibility of a close result in the national
popular vote. Under the current system,a close vote in the Electoral College
could trigger a recount and protracted litigation in a single state,as we
experienced in Florida in 2000,or at worst in a couple of states where the close
popular vote could affect the electoral votes.

But under the national popular vote proposal,a close national vote could
result in recounts and protracted litigation in all 50 states and in the
District of Columbia,because….

Read
more.

The Failure of Obamanomics

Monty
Pelerin

 

The monthly jobs numbers are both tragic and telling.
Each report brings forth spin from the White House asserting how the economy has
turned the corner and the recovery is occurring. Nothing could be further from
the truth! Jobs are not being created, certainly not at the rate which would be
consistent with a recovering economy.

Nor are jobs being created at a
rate sufficient enough to deal with growth in the labor force. As a result,
despite all the political puffery, the unemployment problem is not going away
any time soon. From the Wall Street Journal, with emboldening added, comes a blunt
assessment of job creation:

The latest employment reports have not been encouraging. At the rate
of 36,000 new jobs a month-the number gained in January-we will never
get back to full employment. Even if we keep adding jobs at the
December rate of 121,000 new jobs, we wouldn’t achieve full employment
in this millennium.

The White House keeps hoping for monthly job
gains of 250,000. But even gains of that magnitude-more than double the average
gain last year- would not get America back to full employment until
2018.

This assessment of the lack of job creation
is indicative of the failure of the Administration’s economic policy. The policy
has been tragic, producing the following outcomes:

• A poorer America as a result of a seriously under-performing economy for now
  and apparently well into the future
• Economic suffering and hardship for those unable to find work
• Bankruptcies and foreclosures as a result of loss of income
• Trillions of dollars wasted on useless “stimulus”
• Trillions of dollars of debt imposed on future generations

One
might hope, probably in vain, that two positive lessons might be gleaned from
this terribly tragic and expensive experience:

1. Keynesian economics (again!!!!!) does not work!
2. Never elect an inexperienced unknown to the highest office in the
   land

Monty Pelerin at www.economicnoise.com

The Hate Speech Inquisition

Lead Story

The Hate Speech Inquisition

By Michelle Malkin  •  January 19, 2011 08:36 AM

Tucson massacre + Red Queen politics = Hate Speech Inquisition.

I noticed a new game the blamestream media is playing this week. It’s the same game they played with Sarah Palin last week: Blame the victim. After a slew of Democrat leaders issued open threats against talk radio, conservative radio hosts rose up to defend themselves. And now, the BSM is deriding those who work in talk radio for inserting themselves into the Tucson massacre story and for having a “persecution complex.”  No, really.

This week’s column also spotlights the repeated attempts by Red Queen open-borders radicals to insert themselves into the Tucson shooting rampage that had no more to do with illegal immigration than it did with talk radio.

On a related note: The worst sheriff in America is still mugging for the cameras.

***

The Hate Speech Inquisition
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

There isn’t a shred of evidence that deranged Tucson massacre suspect Jared Loughner ever listened to talk radio or cared about illegal immigration. Indeed, after 300 exhaustive interviews, the feds “remain stumped” about his motives, according to Tuesday’s Washington Post. But that hasn’t stopped a coalition of power-grabbing politicians, progressive activists and open-borders lobbyists from plying their quack cure for the American body politic: government-sponsored speech suppression.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting rampage, Democratic leaders mused openly about reintroducing the Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine” – a legislative sledgehammer targeting conservative viewpoints on public airwaves. New York Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter assailed the Federal Communications Commission for failing to police broadcast content and vowed to “look into” more aggressive language monitoring. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey blamed “incendiary rhetoric” for triggering “unstable individuals to take violent action.” In his own manifesto calling for resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn pressed public officials to “rethink parameters on free speech.”

This week’s fashionable new media meme is to deride talk radio hosts for taking these speech-squelching threats seriously. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman sneered at the “persecution complex” of conservative broadcasters who reacted to Slaughter and company. Politico’s Keach Hagey dismissed concerns about the Democrats’ chilling campaign against right-leaning media outlets and knocked conservative talkers’ “defensive posture.” (Sound familiar? This is the same tactic they used against Sarah Palin and all those on the right falsely accused of being accessories to the Tucson massacre: Attack ‘em. Attack ‘em for responding. Accuse the smear victims of playing the victim card. Repeat.)

Make no mistake: The Hate Speech Inquisition is real. And it’s being fought on all fronts. Last week, using the non-radio-inspired Tucson massacre as fuel, the National Hispanic Media Coalition called on the FCC to gather evidence for the left’s preconceived conclusion that conservative talk radio “hate speech” causes violence. It’s Red Queen science — sentence first, research validation later.

The head of the NHMC is Alex Nogales, who has filed more than 50 petitions to deny broadcast licenses and has led anti-corporate crusades to “force” broadcast stations across the country “to hire Latino reporters and anchors” and adopt “diversity initiatives.” Grabbing the Tucson shooting limelight, Nogales told Broadcasting and Cable magazine last week:

“We can’t stand there with our arms crossed and make like there isn’t a reason why this is happening. … We started this dialog(ue) in the last immigration debate four years ago. We could see that it was just out of control. It started with just an issue of immigration, then every pundit on radio and TV who wanted an audience started talking about it and started using the worst of language, and now it has spilled out into mainstream.”

Loughner’s wild Internet rants and creepy campus meltdowns clearly demonstrate that crazy doesn’t need a motive. But progressive censors need their bogeymen, and Nogales isn’t about to give them up for reality’s sake. The NHMC first filed a petition in October 2009 demanding that the FCC collect data, seek public comment and “explore options” for combating “hate speech” from staunch critics of illegal immigration. The petition followed on National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia’s call for media outlets to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves “even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights.”

Nogales’ group is part of a larger “media justice” coalition dedicated to curtailing and redistributing conservatives’ political speech under the guise of diversity and decency. As left-wing philanthropists at the Media Justice Fund put it: The movement “is grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.” But, hey, we better just ignore these communications control freaks lest we be accused of suffering a “persecution complex.”

The Praetorian Guards of civility keep telling us that “words matter.” Threats should be taken seriously, they insist. Except, of course, when those words and threats are uttered by those hell-bent on regulating their opponents’ discourse out of existence.

Will AZ Shooter Kill the First Amendment?

January 11th, 2011

Joe Guzzardi, FloydReports.com

Immediately after crazed gunman Jared Lee Loughner gravely wounded Arizona U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, killed U.S. Judge John M. Roll, and six other people while wounding 12 innocent bystanders, the immigration rhetoric subtly ratcheted up.

Denouncing Gifford’s shooting, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik and others made it clear that what they referred to as “inflammatory speech” had made the political atmosphere in Arizona so toxic that acts of violence were inevitable.

Referring to talk radio hosts, Dupnik charged them with “inflaming the American public by those who get paid to do that. It might be free speech but it does not come without consequences.”

Ironically, Dupnik is the most skilled flamethrower of all.

Last year, at the height of the S.B. 1070 controversy, Dupnik called it “racist” and “disgusting” while claiming that Arizona is “the mecca of prejudice and bigotry.” Furthermore, Dupnik went on record that he would not enforce the measure if it became law, a blatant violation of his oath of office.

Dupnik never directly claimed that S.B. 1070 and Giffords’ support of it were linked to the shootings. But a close read between the lines strongly suggests that Dupnik blames Loughner’s multiple murders on “the haters,” a label that many automatically apply to Americans who favor enforcing federal immigration law.

Even though only a few hours had passed after the massacre before Dupnik pointed his finger and no evidence has yet surfaced that Loughner is anything other than deranged, more “hate” charges flew.

Read more.

Jared Loughner is a product of Sheriff Dupnik’s office

from The Cholla Jumps Blog

http://thechollajumps.wordpress.com/

by James Kelley

with 234 comments

This is the report that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been dreading since the tragic event on Saturday January 8.

The sheriff has been editorializing and politicizing the event since he took the podium to report on the incident. His blaming of radio personalities and bloggers is a pre-emptive strike because Mr. Dupnik knows this tragedy lays at his feet and his office. Six people died on his watch and he could have prevented it.  He needs to step up and start apologizing to the families of the victims instead of spinning this event to serve his own political agenda.

Jared Loughner, pronounced by the Sheriff as Lock-ner, saying it was the Polish pronunciation. Of course he meant Scott or Irish but that isn’t the point. The point is he and his office have had previous contact with the alleged assailant in the past and that is how he knows how to pronounce the name.

Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County. Amy Loughner is a Natural Resource specialist for the Pima County Parks and Recreation. My sympathies and my heart goes out to her and the rest of Mr. Loughner’s family. This tragedy must be tearing them up inside wondering if they had done the right things in trying to manage Jared’s obvious mental instability.

Every victim of his threats previously must also be wondering if this tragedy could have been prevented if they had been more aggressive in pursuing charges against Mr. Loughner. Perhaps with a felony conviction he would never have been able to lawfully by the Glock 9mm Model 19 that he used to strike down the lives of six people and decimate 14 more.

This was not an act of politics. This was an act of a mentally disturbed young man hell bent on getting his 15 minutes of infamy. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department was aware of his violent nature and they failed to act appropriately. This tragedy leads right back to Sherriff Dupnik and all the spin in the world is not going to change that fact.

Alinsky’s rhetoric

K.E. Campbell

Leftist journalists, politicians, and activists have made much of conservatives’ use of certain symbols or metaphors, targets and crosshairs in particular. Weaponry and military metaphors are part of political campaigns and political discourse and probably always will be. Think “battleground states”, “targeting for defeat”, “kill the bill”, even the word “campaign” for that matter.

Before the Left goes too far down this road of casting aspersions at the language of their political opponents, they might want to take a fresh look at the president’s own community organizing playbook, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, a book the author dedicated to Lucifer.

Using Amazon.com’s search inside the book feature, I cursorily noted the use of the word “target” 12 times, “attack” 26 times, “enemy” 32 times, and “weapon” 11 times. The Prologue includes the following: “you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low.” Alinsky’s Rules include the following (bold added):

Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside… every positive has its negative.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

In his book Alinsky also wrote, “Before men can act, an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.”

48 Hours

• Posted by Judson Phillips on January 10, 2011 at 8:41am in Tea Party Nation Forum
• Send Message   View Discussions

It has been almost 48 hours since a liberal lunatic shot and killed six people and grievously wounded Congressman Gabrielle Giffords.    The left immediately jumped into action, trying to blame this on the Tea Party.  That did not work out too well when the killer was identified and his friends started saying he was liberal.

Then the message changed, not because the facts changed, but because Conservatives fought back.  Remembering what happened in the past, conservatives refused to let liberals try to claim this was the act of someone on the right.  Conservatives refused to let the lunatic left define us or this tragedy.  And as it turns out, the killer was not a member of the Tea Party movement, so they’ve been forced to change the message.    Their message became this tragedy was triggered by the “hate speech” and “violent rhetoric” from conservatives.   Again, they ignore the facts, but since when have liberals ever let the facts get in their way?

The liberal hotheads have been flooding twitter and other social media outlets with claims that conservatives are “heartless” because we are talking about the facts.  What the really mean is that they are upset with us because we are not simply rolling over and letting them define us or this tragedy to suit their agenda.

The danger is not from the hotheads who run their mouths on social media.  The danger comes from those who are in a position to do some real damage and they are now starting to come out of the woodwork. 

The first is Congressman Carolyn McCarthy (Socialist-NY).  In 1993, her husband was murdered and son seriously injured by a gunman on a Long Island commuter train.   Since then she has turned that tragedy into her personal platform to try and strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights. 

McCarthy complains that the killer, Jared Loughner, should not have been able to purchase the gun because of his mental instability.   Guess what?   There are already laws in effect for that.  What McCarthy really wants is to prevent Americans from owning firearms. 

Congressman Robert Brady (Socialist-PA) wants to make it a federal crime to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening to a federal official or a member of congress.

Perhaps this bill could be called the First Amendment repeal act. 

Senators and Congressmen from the party of treason have a real problem.  They do not like criticism.  They do not want to be accountable to the people.  Their definition of something that is perceived as threatening is simply disagreeing with them or calling for them to be replaced. 

Does anyone remember the Health Care debate?   When the members of congress from the party of treason decided to walk down the road to Capitol Hill to try and provoke the Tea Party protesters into doing something?

It did not work, so what did they do? They lied.  First they claimed they were spit on and when video disproved that, and they claimed Tea Party protesters had used racial epithets against them.  Funny, that got disproved too.

This type of lunatic legislation exists for one reason only – to try and silence political speech from conservatives.  Liberals are quite willing to lie about these things, while conservatives have enough respect for America and the rule of law, not to lie.

Finally, the left is out to destroy Sarah Palin.  We have known this for two years.   Now they are trying to use this incident to end her political career.

With the possible exception of Rush Limbaugh, there is no bigger name in conservative political circles.   The left wing media has gone after her, while ignoring identical comments from far left groups, such as the Daily Kos. 

At Tea Party Nation, we know something about having the left try to destroy you.

A year ago, as we were preparing for the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, a group of liberal journalists, led by David Weigel, now of Slate.com, tried to destroy our convention.  Sarah Palin could have cut and run because of the heat.  She did not.

Now is the time we need to stand with Sarah Palin against the left.  If the left can use this incident to destroy her, they can destroy anyone in the conservative movement. 

We need to keep turning the tables on the left and keep the pressure on them.  This shooter was a liberal lunatic.   Democratic operatives have already said they are trying to pin this on the Tea Party movement.  We need to fight back and put the blame for this anti-conservative propaganda where it belongs.

The liberal left.

Primary Lessons

Posted By Jacob Laksin On June 10, 2010 @ 1:00 am In FrontPage | 2 Comments

As President Obama’s poll ratings tumble and the Democratic majority in Congress continues to post record disapproval numbers, some on the Left have consoled themselves with the thought that the growing grassroots hostility to incumbent candidates transcends party and ideology. In this exegesis, liberal and progressive discontents are just as wound up – and just as influential – as their conservative Tea Party counterparts. If this week’s primary election results proved anything, it’s that this reading of the nation’s political map won’t wash. While the Tea Parties continued to notch victories in pivotal primary races, the Left’s insurgents were rebuffed.

The most prominent example came from Arkansas, where embattled Senator Blanche Lincoln staved off a bruising challenge from her union-backed rival, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. Lincoln drew Big Labor’s wrath for heresies like opposing “card check ^[1]” legislation, which would have eliminated secret ballots to facilitate union organizing. As payback, unions, aided by a battery of progressive political action groups, put their full political clout into the race, sponsoring Halter to the tune of $10 million. But while the lavishly funded challenge did force Lincoln into a runoff, the unions’ purchasing power came up short. As one agonized Obama White House official told Politico: “Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise.” Lincoln remains deeply vulnerable. Polls show she trails her Republican opponent John Boozman by some 25 points. But her defeat, if it comes, will be punishment for being too loyal to the Left’s agenda (Lincoln cast the decisive 60^th vote to pass ObamaCare) rather than for straying too far from it.

Lest one dismiss Arkansas as a one-off from conservative country, liberal bastions proved no more receptive to left-wing insurgents. In California’s 36^th district, far-Left candidate Marcy Winograd lost her second successive bid to oust Democratic centrist Jane Harman. Winograd, who styles herself as a “peace” activist, ran a campaign that sounded the full range of the angry Left’s talking points: Harman was variously portrayed as a corporate shill, a warmonger, and a traitor to the Left. An outspoken foe of Israel, Winograd even tried to capitalize on Harman’s pro-Israel record in the context of the recent clash between Israeli commandos and armed Turkish activists attempting to run Israel’s naval blockade. Winograd boasted ^[2] that as a sign of “solidarity” with the activists, her campaign had sent a Winograd for Congress T-Shirt that had been “worn on the flotilla.” As primary day neared, progressive blogs began trumpeting ^[3] Winograd as the new Joe Sestak – a true progressive who would oust the incumbent impostor. The hype proved just that, as Harman won by a comfortable 18-point ^[4] margin.

While primary challenges from the Left sputtered, Tea Party-backed conservatives scored several successes. Most prominently, Sharron Angle ^[5], until recently a relative unknown, rode the Tea Party movement’s support to victory in a crowded field for Nevada’s Republican nomination for the Senate. Although Tea Party spending to support Angle’s candidacy was limited compared to Big Labor’s efforts in Arkansas – the Tea Party political action committee spent just $550,000 to boost her name recognition – it was far more effective: From a 5 percent approval rating as recently as April, Angle went on to win the nomination. Tea Party-backed candidates also won ^[6] in Georgia, Maine and South Carolina.

It was not all glory for the Tea Party. In California and New Jersey, Tea Party favorites failed to break through. (A too-close-to-call race ^[7] between Tea Party candidate Anna Little and establishment rival Diana Gooch in New Jersey’s 6^th Congressional district was one notable exception.) Even in defeat, though, there was encouraging news for the movement, as Tea Party candidates ran strongly in almost all races in which they were involved. At the very least, their generally strong showing indicated that despite their now-stale slogans of “change,” the Left is not nearly as energized, and not nearly the same force in primary races, as the surging conservative opposition.

Still, those determined to rain on the Tea Party’s parade ask a pertinent question: Can the movement replicate its strong success in primaries in general election races, where it must court a more ideologically diverse electorate? Democratic strategists and the mainstream media have professed glee over the prospect of Democratic incumbents facing candidates like Sharron Angle, whom they deem too far out of the mainstream. One Democratic strategist suggested ^[8] that Harry Reid would be “dancing in the streets” were Angle to win the GOP nomination. The Washington Post even did Reid the unsolicited favor of producing a list of allegedly damning quotes ^[9] that Reid could use to paint Angle as an extremist. But if early poll results are any guide, the Angle-Reid matchup won’t be the cakewalk that Democrats suppose. Indeed, a recent Mason-Dixon poll has Angle beating Reid by 44 percent to 41 percent. The Tea Party, it seems, is just getting started.