According to the corporate media in early 2009, the tea party "movement" was a spontaneous, nonpartisan response to TARP and the Obama stimulus bills.
In retrospect, it's obvious that tea party was just a clever, Republican operatives-connived rebranding of the conservative Republican base, which responded overwhelmingly to the 24/7 promotion of the new brand on Fox "News" and Republican radio.
Rarely have the corporate media reported more than a few sentences worth about who local tea party leaders were before 2009.
But when they decide to run for office, as many have, they tend to tout their Republican bona fides.
Like Steve Flanagan, founder of the Conservative Society for Action, perhaps the largest tea party group in New York state, who announced a campaign for state Senate on Long Island this week.
Newly minted front-runner Newt Gingrich spoke before a few hundred tea partiers on Staten Island, the Republican borough of NYC, this afternoon.
The local tea party group, which fancies itself one of the "premier" tea parties in the country, had invited all the GOP primary candidates -- only Newt said yes, though he naturally combined his speech with a book-signing (with Callista!) and a Manhattan fund-raiser.
According to Tom Wrobleski of the Staten Island Advance, Gingrich the historian lectured that 2012 is "the most important election since 1860," after which Southern white conservatives like him became traitors responsible for the Civil War.
(FNS - Washington, New Germany, April 17, 1947) America's new Führer, Adolf Hitler, announced today that his official War History would in fact acknowledge that one of the biggest contributing factors to the defeat of the Allies was the insistence of the former United States of America on sticking to its Balanced Budget Amendment, which left them unable to fund the wartime conversion of the US economy for the benefit of the Alliance.
"All those ideas Mr. Roosevelt spoke of", said Hitler, "Lend-Lease, modular shipbuilding, War Bonds, secret weapons...in the end, all of them were just words, since the Americans' Congress was never willing to allow the country to fully fund its war effort."
Back in the summer of 2009, tea partiers, egged on by the Republican cable "news" channel and Republican astroturf groups, turned out en masse to disrupt town hall meetings, shout down Democratic Members of Congress, and denounce the pending health care reform bill.
Tonko more than held his own, explaining the obvious need for HCR and liberally citing the general welfare clause, to the frustration of the tea partiers.
About 600 people attended that town hall, about equally divided between tea partiers and HCR supporters.
Today, Tonko held a town hall in East Greenbush (just east of Albany), and the scene was very different -- about 100 people in a firehouse, only a handful of them tea partiers.
New York has a few dozen tea party groups, with a few thousand activists involved. So it's not a major tea party state, though, give them their due, the tea party types did have some impact on the GOP picking up six Congressional seats last year.
But their favorite statewide candidate, Carl Paladino, lost in a landslide to Andrew Cuomo, who, as governor, has proposed reducing state spending for the first time in 16 years, capping property taxes, laying off 10,000 state workers, and letting the millionaires' tax sunset.
Caputo met with 50 or so statewide tea partiers five weeks ago in Oneonta, and argued that tea partiers should support the obviously conservative parts of Cuomo's budget.
Nassau County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country.
But, after electing a tea party Republican county executive in 2009, it cannot balance its budget, and today a state financial oversight agency (imposed after decades of GOP misrule led to a $100 million bailout in 2000) seized control of the county's finances.
The new tea party county executive, Ed Mangano, had cut taxes, but not much spending, leaving a deficit of at least $50 million in its $2.7 billion budget. So the Nassau Interim Finance Authority (NIFA) now controls the county's books.
As more absentees are counted in the tight race between Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop and Randy Altschuler, Bishop has grabbed a very narrow lead, according to the Sag Harbor Express (h/t Todd Beeton).
The story has just one source, Bishop spokesman Jon Schneider, who tells the Express that Bishop now leads by 15 votes.
After an Election Night reporting snafu was corrected, Altschuler had been leading by several hundred votes.
Cuomo is there to praise Foley, but it's what he has to say about who those people outside are and what they want that really struck me.
And forget the labels. Forget the labels. Look at what they are saying and look at what they would do to this state. Look at what they believe in! Look at their platform. Listen to them when they tell you what they want to do.
I think Cuomo is exactly right. Listen to them when they tell you what they want to do. It's not like they are being coy or secretive. It's right out in the open, especially with a certified nut like Paladino at the top of the ticket.
Women's tight to choose? Gone. Not even in the case of rape or incest. Poor people shipped to reconditioned prisons to be taught hygiene. Brown folks? Not welcome. Marriage equality? Not chance.
That's what Carl Paladino wants. That's what Lee Zeldin wants. That's what proto-teabagger Greg Ball wants. That's what that David DiPietro wants. That's what Jim Russell wants
Listen to these people when they tell you what they want to do.
Like crazy Aunt Agatha holed up in the attic, the Rockland Republican Party is hiding and even denying the existence of its more eccentric candidates.
In New City, GOP headquarters is notably devoid of signs for the winner of the Congressional primary in the 17th District, Anthony Mele. Instead, headquarters is still festooned with signs for York Kleinhandler, who won the booby prize as the Conservative Party candidate.
It has been widely reported that there is no love lost between Rockland County Republican Chair Vincent Reda and Mele. Bob Fois of NewsCopy.org, a Tea Party blog, reported that Reda once physically threatened him with "a Bronx beating" because of a disagreement involving Mele.
The ostensible reason for Paladino's outburst was his claim that Dicker sent a Post "goon" to try to photograph his 10-year-old out-of-wedlock daughter, which he had only fessed up to his wife about a year ago.
Paladino's concern for his daughter's privacy seems to be selective, since he brought her to a tea party event Saturday and introduced her to the crowd of several hundred.
While Elections officials are still too skittish to call it, Tea Party poster boy Anthony Melé has pulled off an improbable victory over the GOP blessed York Kleinhandler in their primary for the 17th Congressional District. A full 11 days after the Sept 14 primary, absentee and other miscellaneous uncounted ballots in Westchester were unsealed and Melé has emerged victorious by 84 votes.
Along with parts of Rockland and the Bronx, the 17th District includes thin slivers of several towns and villages in Westchester, and all of Mount Vernon.
Melé and Kleinhandler are both vying to lose to longtime Democratic incumbent Eliot Engel in November.
Kleinhandler remains on the Convservative Party line and said he plans to continue his congressional run on that line in a message to supporters. However, Kleinhandler has not conceded the primary, which is probably the decent thing to do at this point. Kleinhandler, not Melé, is currently listed as the GOP nominee on the State Party's "Republican Spotlights" page.
Even drastic [spending] cuts will still leave us behind governments in our neighboring states - Ohio and Pennsylvania - which spend about 70 cents to the New York dollar. So I will work tirelessly each and every day of my administration to make more spending and tax cuts to provide New Yorkers the relief they need.
This is - and more - long, long overdue.
There are apparently two Carl Paladinos. One of them is running for governor of New York and has a problem with Jews, Muslims and, I hope just so I'm not left out, gays as well. This Carl Paladino proposes to slash state taxation and spending much as you might mow your lawn.
The other Carl Paladino is a multi-millionaire developer sucking energetically at the public teat. Michael Daly in today's Daily News has the numbers:
Just cut the $5,251,415 in rent you collect each year on 28 leases with 17 state agencies.
How about 20%?
That's your target for cutting the budget.
Surely, you can slice that much off your annual take from the Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance ($454,363), the Office of Mental Retardation & Developmental Disabilities ($128,425) and the Office of Children & Family Services ($362,028).
There's also the Office of Vocational & Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities ($337,606). You scored big using that agency as the anchor tenant needed to develop a shuttered Buffalo department store into a mixed-use complex you grandly named the Belesario.
I don't think anyone has a problem with smarter state spending. It just seems rather self-serving to hang from the rafters screaming about it with one hand and taking literally millions of dollars every year from the state with the other.
This morning, the Republican leaderhsip-- or whatever passes for it-- is saying a collective "oh, $#*!".
As of yesterday, with Mike Castle, they are officially "eating their young". Maybe not so young in Castle's case-- he is 71, after all-- but the basic point is correct.
The question is: how and why did they get here, what does it mean for them in the long term, and what are they going to do about it?
There has always been a far-right fringe in very-blue New York state, and Birchers, gun nuts, tax resisters, militia types, etc., have been active in the tea party movement across the state.
That is true in spades around Albany, NY, where the locals helped organize and promote "A Rally in support of the U.S. Constitution and New York State Sovereignty" Saturday at the Capitol, featuring sovereignty/militia/gun-rights hero Richard Mack, aka "Sheriff Mack," formerly of Graham County, AZ.
Mack is now a full-time far-right lecturer, expounding on his unique, absurd view that county sheriffs have the power to stop the federal government from doing anything in his/her county.
So, Mack must have drawn a big crowd, especially since this event was promoted by-e-mail and social media to many thousands of people in scores of right-wing/tea party groups.
Well, he did not -- it was another BIG FAIL, with a crowd that did not come close to breaking into three digits.
Those who are regular visitors to this space know that I post stories across the country, and to do that I have to follow stories from a number of states.
Because I post at Kentucky's Hillbilly Report, I've been paying particular attention to the Rand Paul campaign, and the news from the Bluegrass State (via "The Rush Limbaugh Show") is that Paul's planning to write his own balanced budget proposal for the Federal Government.
But there's a catch.
He doesn't plan on doing it until after the election.
Well, now, why in the world would a guy who's running for office based on his really good ideas want to hold back the best one?
That's not a bad question, and if we make the effort we can probably figure out the most likely answers.
We don't have a lot of time for a big discussion today, but I wanted to take a second and talk about basic Federal Government economics as they apply to Rand Paul.
It is his stated vision to reduce the size of Government...and it is an undeniable reality that the vast majority of the Federal Budget is focused on only a few areas of spending.
Today, we'll quickly run through that economic reality, and we'll challenge Dr. Paul to tell us where he stands.
This promises to be a bizarre political year, with GOP candidates not only running to the far right, but veering way off track. Earlier this week, Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden of Nevada grabbed the crazy baton from Rep. Michele Bachmann when she suggested that people should barter and haggle with their doctors for health care, rather than rely on insurance. But what she said is nothing compared to what the newly minted challenger to Congressman John Hall said in her candidacy's opening days.
Like crazy Aunt Agatha holed up in the attic, the Rockland Republican Party is hiding and even denying the existence of its more eccentric candidates.
While Elections officials are still too 
