Tea Party

If it has accomplished nothing else, the tea party insurgency has made Republicans vastly more newsworthy than Democrats. While the party of the left plods along performing the boring old tasks of governing, the party of the right is engaged in high drama worthy of Shakespeare. The latest plot twist comes from Nebraska, where three conservatives have been vying to be the GOP's nominee for the U.S. Senate. The "establishment" candidate, state Attorney General Jon Bruning is, by traditional measures, a conservative.

That pop you may or may not have heard the other day was the bursting pipedream of a centrist presidential candidate outside the establishment parties. The organizers of a group calling itself Americans Elect decided to close shop after failing to find anyone who would qualify to be its standard-bearer in November. No one who met the group's eligibility requirements to become its presidential nominee was able to corral the threshold 10,000 endorsements needed from "delegates" in an online nationwide convention.

I REMEMBER WHEN I was young, one of the yearly rituals was a shopping expedition to look for an Easter outfit. It usually meant a new suit, shoes, pocketbook, gloves -- and, of course, a hat. In those days, hats were important, worn not only on Sundays to church but on other special dress-up occasions, such as a formal tea. A hat is not a requirement to attend the "French Country Tea Party -- Featuring Chapeaux Extraordinaire," sponsored by the Woman's...

If it has accomplished nothing else, the tea party insurgency has made Republicans vastly more newsworthy than Democrats. While the party of the left plods along performing the boring old tasks of governing, the party of the right is engaged in high drama worthy of Shakespeare. The latest plot twist comes from Nebraska, where three conservatives have been vying to be the GOP's nominee for the U.S. Senate. The "establishment" candidate, state Attorney General Jon Bruning is, by traditional measures, a conservative.

I am offended by columnist Leonard Pitts' applause for Rep. Maxine Waters' telling the tea party to "go straight to hell," as well as by letter writer Thad Paulhamus' remark that "the tea party, and by extension, the entire Republican Party with which it is almost unanimously affiliated, has made no secret of its aim to cripple and foreshorten the administration of our current president" - blah, blah, blah. Both comments are specious and irresponsible. I, and 99 percent of my Republican friends, are "affiliated" with the tea party on one issue and one issue only: Out of control congressional spending.

Doug Mainwaring's article about the tea party, "Why the name calling?" (Aug. 10), was highly amusing. If name-calling is the problem, I'd suggest hey start with themselves. Whether it is Sarah Palin talking about "death panels" or Tea Party Nation CEO Judson Phillips calling anti-Scott Walker protestors "Nazi storm troopers," name-calling is the typical tea party message. We've seen the tea party's intransigence, we've seen how it was willing to destroy the country just to gain power, and we know that it wants to destroy this president.

Like Garrison Keillor, whose column used to appear in The Sun, Dan Rodricks underestimates the power of the tea party in American politics ("Question for tea party: What now?" Aug. 4). He should have read John Malagrin's letter right across the fold ("Tea party congressmen are the last great hope," Aug. 4). The tea party isn't Republican or Democrat, but the embodiment of the American peoples' frustration with the current direction our country is heading and the continued growth of government.

Editor: A recent editorial in The Aegis expressed the opinion that the Tea Party is comprised of the "grass roots" right while the "Occupy" movement is comprised of the "grass roots" left. There seems to be an implication that these two groups are comparable in nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Tea Party's central purpose is to rein in out of control government spending and excessive taxation as expressed in their TEA acronym, Taxed Enough Already.

I have to agree with the tea party advocate who wrote complaining that his movement, and sometimes the Republicans in general, have been recently linked to the word "terrorist" ("Why the name calling?" Aug. 10). I know from personal experience this is wildly inaccurate. As a resident of New York City on 9/11, I watched in horror as real terrorists attacked my own city and killed nearly 3,000 of my neighbors, including the father of one of my youngest daughter's 10th grade classmates.

Editor: The writer from Bel Air who recently wanted to distance the Tea Party from the Occupy Movement. He disagreed with your editorial portraying the Tea Party as grass roots right and the Occupy Movement as grass roots left. He attempted to make very convincing arguments distancing the Tea Party from the Occupy Movement. We then get to his last paragraph where he reverts to the extreme rights' playbook. Accusations without any attempt to provide any facts to back up the accusations.

Tea party advocates in Indiana are congratulating themselves on the Republican primary victory of one of their own, Richard Mourdock, over six-term Senate veteran Richard Lugar. But the rest of the country should be mourning the departure of the epitome of what Washington needs much more of: conscientious bipartisanship. The 80-year-old Mr. Lugar is being kicked out in part because of his age, his alleged failure to keep a real residence in Indiana, and his penchant for putting common sense and national security ahead of party labels.

The tea party's waning impact on the country's politics has been continuously reported since the movement's success in the 2010 elections. Well, the tea party has not gone away. In Indiana's primary election May 8, liberal Republican Senator Richard Lugar was beaten handily after 35 years in office by conservative rival Richard Mourdock, who was backed by the tea party ("GOP Senate stalwart falls," May 9). The liberal media and their supporters seem to believe that if they keep reporting tea party's death, it will simply go away.

The hit men of the tea party can carve another notch in their collective gun belts this week with the ouster of Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar, a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Senate. Whatever mojo the conservative firebrands had in the 2010 GOP primaries, when they ousted party moderates right and left, is apparently still working for them. Longtime incumbents are not easily toppled, but Mr. Lugar's vulnerabilities were well-documented prior to Tuesday's Indiana primary: The six-term senator is 80 years old, has lived in Northern Virginia for decades (despite using a 1970s-era address for voting purposes)

The last thing you'd think Maryland's Republican party needs would be a nasty internecine fight, but that's what it got at its annual convention over the weekend. Rather than unity in the effort to overcome a massive voter registration disadvantage, chronic fundraising problems and a frequent lack of competitive candidates for state-wide offices, the party became focused on a divisive race for an obscure position: national committeewoman. In the end, Audrey Scott, a GOP stalwart who has held a variety of elected and appointed posts, including a stint as state Republican chairwoman, was defeated by a heretofore little known, 37-year-old Baltimore woman, Nicolee Ambrose.

SOLOMONS — A conservative activist running an insurgent candidacy against the Maryland Republican establishment seized the post of national committeewoman at the state GOP convention Saturday, beating longtime party stalwart Audrey E. Scott. The victory by Nicolee Ambrose of Baltimore represents a generational changing of the guard for Maryland Republicans. Her win came after a bitterly fought internal struggle that played out in blogs and on Facebook. The race pitted Scott, a 76-year-old pillar of Maryland Republican politics for decades, against a 37-year-old activist with experience in national presidential campaigns.

Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That's what an outsider looking at the country's first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is très compliquée . The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May 6 final: Socialist Francois Hollande (28.6 percent) and incumbent center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy (27.2 percent). This isn't the story, though. The most striking news is the 17.9 percent score by Marine Le Pen's National Front party.

Dan Rodricks has it exactly right in his column on Dec. 2nd ( " Tea party and GOP: Defending indefensible tax cuts" the so-called "tea party" is just a front group for the richest of the rich Republicans, and they advocate more tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires because that is who funds the tea party, billionaires like Charles and David Koch. Jane Mayer's Aug. 30 New Yorker article describes how the Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity, a major tea party funding and training institution.

The thrust of the "Tea Party" movement is fast becoming clear as it expresses it's purposes in party-line rhetoric, such as "We are going to take our country back. " ("Tea party predicts 'storm,'" Sept. 13.) Not unlike the old bigoted anti-gay-rights slogans, e.g. "Take back Vermont," the Tea Party movement shows its true colors to be entirely regressive in nature, opposed to any change from what we have experienced in the past, and rejecting out of hand any progressive hopes for the future of middle America.

If this year's competition for the Republican presidential nomination were a real horserace rather than a figurative one, Mitt Romneywould be rounding the backstretch and heading for home. Only if he suffers the political equivalent of throwing a shoe or breaking a leg in the homestretch is he likely now to lose the race. The three remaining walking wounded -- Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul -- all avow their intentions to keep competing all the way to the convention in Tampa.

For all the difficult problems the nation faces, from high unemployment to mounting national debt to the vexing war in Afghanistan, the contest for the Republican presidential nomination process has produced far more distractions than solutions. Primary voters and caucus-goers have elevated and rejected a string of front-runners, each seemingly more improbable than the last. And fueling it all has been the corrosive influence of millions in unlimited and unregulated campaign spending through super PACs that has propped some candidates up past their shelf lives and allowed for barrages of negative advertising the likes of which voters have rarely seen.