Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Holland on Thursday called on his Republican opponent, Sam Brownback, to denounce Lou Engle, a controversial anti-homosexual minister, whom Holland compared to Fred Phelps.
"I am calling on Sam Brownback to formally denounce Lou Engle -- not just `some' of his statements -- but his entire message of violence, hate and bigotry.
"Lou Engle sounds a lot like Fred Phelps," Holland said referring to the anti-homosexual preacher known for his protests at the funerals of soldiers killed in war. "But the difference is unlike Fred Phelps, Lou Engle lived with Sam Brownback in Washington, D.C.," Holland said.
Brownback can't and won't denounce Engle...
Brownback/Engle: Making Kansas the next Uganda?
It's very rude of Holland to draw attention to Brownback's fundamentalist faith and close relationship with someone who was intimately involved with the leadership of Uganda ("the first purpose driven nation") and its laws which made homosexuality a capital crime. After all, you can't compare such things to really terrible people who ... kill homosexuals.
The editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was arrested by U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller's private security guards Sunday as the editor attempted to interview Miller on camera at the end of a public event in an Anchorage school.
Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by the guards and detained in a hallway at Central Middle School until Anchorage police came and told the guards to release him.
Hopfinger has not been charged but the owner of the Drop Zone, private security firm that's been providing Miller's security, accused Hopfinger of trespassing at the public event, a "town hall" meeting sponsored by the Miller campaign. The owner, William Fulton, also said Hopfinger assaulted a man by shoving him.
Anchorage Police who responded to the call said they would leave it up to the District Attorney's office to decide whether to prosecute.
Hopfinger, who was holding a small video camera, said he was attempting to get Miller to answer questions about why he was disciplined when he worked as a part-time attorney at the Fairbanks North Star Borough. He said he pushed the man away after he was surrounded by Miller supporters and security guards and felt threatened.
Fulton said the man who was shoved was not hurt.
Joe Miller is such a stickler about the constitution there must be a right for political candidates to arrest citizens to keep them from asking questions in there somewhere, right?
I keep hearing that the problem with these Tea Partiers is that they are just average citizens who don't have any experience. Joe Miller is a lawyer and a magistrate who went to Yale Law. I think he knows very well what he's doing.
Man, Chris Wallace really, really wants to make my old age nasty, brutish and short. (Sadly, at my age, my chances of becoming a millionaire are almost a high as my chances of becoming an Olympic gold medal ice dancer.)
WALLACE: "So now, as a non-career politician, as the anti-Barbara Boxer, you tell me specifically what are you going to do to cut the billions, the trillions, of dollars in entitlements?"
FIORINA: ... See, Chris, I have to -- you know, Chris, I have to say, with all due respect, you're asking a typical political question. [...]
WALLACE: Ms. Fiorina, but that's where the money is. The money is in Medicare. The money is in Social Security. We've got the baby boomers coming. There is going to be a huge explosion of entitlement spending, and you call it a political question when I ask you to name one single entitlement expenditure you're willing to cut.
FIORINA: Chris, I believe that to deal with entitlement reform, which we must deal with, we ought to put every possible solution up on the table, except we should be very clear that we are not going to cut benefits to those nearing retirement or those in retirement.
But having said all of that, for years and years, career politicians, frankly, of both parties have said, Oh, no, the only way to cut spending is to deal with entitlements. It's the political third rail. And then they never get about the business of cutting out waste and inefficiency. They never get to the point of banning earmarks.
WALLACE: But we've been talking about waste, fraud and inefficiency --
FIORINA: Exactly. Exactly.
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WALLACE: -- for 30 years. I covered Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he talked about it. There isn't that kind of money in waste, fraud, and inefficiency.
FIORINA: But you know what, Chris? The budget just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And every year as it gets bigger, particularly in the last two, there is more waste, fraud and inefficiency. And you're right, nobody ever gets around to it. It's why voters in California and, I believe, a lot of voters all across the country are tired of career politicians. [...]
WALLACE: I'm going to try -- I'm going to try one last time and if you don't want to answer it, Ms. Fiorina, you don't have to. [...] You're not willing to put forward a single benefit -- I'm not even talking about the people that are 60 or, let alone, 65 or 70. I'm talking about people under 55.
You're not willing to say there's a single benefit eligibility for Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security that you're willing to say, Yeah, I would cut that?
FIORINA: blah, blah, blah, conversation, bipartisan, yadda yadda yadda.
Granted, Fiorina is a typical Republican putz and she loves to talk about cutting spending and eliminating the deficit and yet has no answers for how we're supposed to do it. But the arrogant and wealthy Wallace's lies, distortions and arrogant insistence that "that's where the money is" and that people are gonna have to pony up is just sickening.
Sadly, his point of view isn't a FOX phenomenon. It's beltway conventional wisdom.
He stood at the plate all slim and slight in his San Francisco Giants uniform, hair flowing from beneath the helmet, and there came the whistles for Tim Lincecum(notes). At first he didn’t realize what they were for, no fans had never done such a thing. But as the shrill noise wafted into the frosty night like so many construction workers saluting a pretty woman. it was impossible to ignore.
And when someone yelled, “Your hair looks like a girl’s!” that’s when Lincecum knew. These Phillies fans were whistling at him.
Fergawdsakes. It just doesn't get any stupider than that. Of course, he does play for San Francisco, and we know about those guys.
But seriously, I haven't heard that crap in about 30 years. And back in those days, my retort was always, "if you can't tell the difference between men and women, I'd say your the one with the problem."
Lincecum was way cooler than that though:
”I must have a nice butt or something,” he said Saturday night as he sat in the clubhouse after fighting his way through a 4-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 1 of the National League championship series.
He smiled as he shook out his hair that dangled just above his shoulders.
”Those Phillies fans must like something about me,” he added. ”I took it as a joke.”
Then he thought for a moment.
”I’m not sure that’s the reaction they were trying to get,” he said.
It’s easy to forget after the two consecutive Cy Young awards, the brilliant start in the first game of last week’s division series and all the other wonderful things Tim Lincecum has done, that he is just 26 years old, that he is barely more than a kid. And as such, he can find humor in the biggest moments, where his name blared for days on the marquee of this opening game of the LCS – the co-headliner in a pitching matchup with Roy Halladay(notes) that was supposed to be a duel for the ages. And that as a kid, with all of a sellout crowd at Citizens Bank Park mocking his locks, he could be amused by the scorn when many an older player, lacking in his same sense of ease, would be furious.
But this is Lincecum, running his fingers through his hair, chuckling at the thought that the Phillies fans might have found him ”hot” and spotting teammate Aubrey Huff(notes) as he strutted through the clubhouse wearing nothing but a red thong and a cutoff shirt, and blurting ”No, that’s hot.”
And, of course, he won the game, which was really hot. (And he does have a nice butt --- those neanderthals have surprisingly good taste.)
Whatever. It's just so damned dumb that it's hard for me to have a sense of humor about it. This retrograde era is going to be very tough to take.
They discuss the obvious fact that the right is predictably batshit insane and the Democrats are predictably lame in response. And so it goes.
But Rebecca Traistor made the observation that despite the all the right wing political power, much of their anger and vitriol stems from liberal successes -- civil rights particularly. This is true. And it occurred to me it could explain the jarring and bizarre responses in this recent poll asking which party is more extremist. (I won't ruin it for you. But you might want to have a stiff shot of Tequila handy before you read it.) If that's not it, I'm afraid we are so far down the rabbit hole there's no going back.
Robert Parry is a journalist who' been covering politics for many years. He has been clear headed from the beginning about the psychology and institutional imbalances that have led the country ever rightward for the past 40 years.
In this recent piece he takes us on a little trip down memory lane, explaining what anyone who has closely observed the way politics works in this era has long ago concluded: when the Democrats lose to Republicans --- for whatever reason --- they never, ever conclude that it was because they weren't liberal enough. Indeed, they take the opposite lesson.
The reasons for this are complicated and Parry explains them well. They have to do with money and media. But in my view this phenomenon is mostly due to psychology. The two political tribes in America attract different kinds of people. Let's call them the Lovers and the Fighters. (I think you can figure out who's who.)
The majority of people in those tribes tend to react to pain differently. When the fighters feel pain they instinctively hit back. When the lovers feel pain they instinctively withdraw. Both are very human reactions and I'm not placing a value judgment on it. There are times when each of those reactions lead to greater survival. But Parry's point is that for the last 40 years, the minority fighters in the Lovers tribe have thought that if they inflicted pain by withholding their vote that the leaders would understand that they cannot take them for granted. But that's just not the psychology of the Lovers. They feel that they are being hit from all sides and withdraw into what they feel is safer territory.
The opposite is true on the other side. The minority lovers among the Fighter tribe try to smooth things out and be accommodating and they are backed into the corner by the leaders in the Fighter tribe. (At this point they are being completely driven out of the party.)
None of this means the Fighters are always going to be the winners. They often suffer from arrogance and hubris and become so unpleasant that the majority rejects them. (Of course they, being fighters, don't go home and lick their wounds they come right back at the winners and start scrapping again --- something which the Lovers never seem to be prepared for.) The Lovers on the other hand, when they are led by smart people, understand that human beings actually prefer seduction to coercion and figure outways to make themselves loved (freedom plus groceries) and the other side feared ("I welcome their hatred".) Sadly, we haven't seen much of that in last few decades. (My suspicion is that money has compromised them so much that they no longer have any confidence.
Parry clearly lays out the case in his piece that this technique of "teaching the Democrats a lesson" has resulted in failure over and over again. They learn the opposite lesson we are seeking to teach them every time. And I guarantee you that once again, the lesson they will learn from this upcoming election will not be that they weren't liberal enough.
So, we activist types (who tend to be the fighters in the Lover tribe) can keep banging our heads against the wall and hoping that this tactic will work some day or we can figure out a new strategy.
Has there ever been a more slimy, lugubrious piece of work than Orrin Hatch? The man has no center at all -- he's filled with some kind of toxic oleaginous substance. He has always portrayed himself as one of the "reasonable" Republicans, fashioning his image as a mediator, if not a moderate. And every time, when called upon to fulfill that role, he's ended up being a dick.
For instance, during the Lewinsky affair, Hatch ran himself ragged rushing from one TV camera to the next as the lead "more than sorrow in anger" Republican hand wringer, insisting that all the American people wanted was for the president to apologize for his behavior so the nation could finally forgive and carry on. He was omnipresent for weeks going on and on about how nobody wanted to persecute the president, it's just a matter of him coming forward and admitting what he did and saying he was sorry. So the president finally did that in a national address following his (recorded!) grand jury testimony. The cameras rushed to Hatch, the leading "judge" for the thumbs up or thumbs down and his answer was --- "what a jerk."
Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch sees fewer prospects for bipartisanship in the next Congress and says he’s more conservative than fellow Utah Sen. Robert Bennett, who lost his renomination to tea party opposition.
Hatch, who will be seeking a seventh term in 2012, said he’s reaching out to activists in the political movement and is more closely aligned with their views than Bennett was.
“I’m no Bob Bennett,” Hatch said in an interview on “Political Capital with Al Hunt” over the weekend on Bloomberg Television. “I’m meeting with these folks, the tea party people and others, and I’m holding extensive town hall meetings.” Bennett lost his renomination bid in May at the state Republican convention.
Hatch is in line to be chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee if Republicans win control of the chamber in the Nov. 2 elections — an outcome that he said is unlikely. He has a reputation for working with Democrats, particularly the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, on matters such as health care and civil-rights legislation.
Still, Hatch said Democrats have dampened his enthusiasm for bipartisan deals. He said Democrats have created strains by expanding government during the past two years, particularly taking power from states under a health-care program he helped establish for lower-income children.
“I’ve got to say, that was almost the final straw to me,” he said.
“But I’ll work with any Democrat that’s willing to work in good faith on good issues in the right way and do it in a fiscally responsible way.”
What a jerk.
He is a good indication of how the establishment Republicans are going to react to the tea party victories. They are going to continue to move as hard right as humanly possible, seeing these elections as a mandate from their voters to do so.
The Democrats, you may have noticed, do things a little bit differently. When they win huge in a couple of big elections with strong progressive support, they do everything they can to prove that they aren't beholden to those voters. It's a slightly different dynamic.
The results, of course, are that we either move to the right or the far right. If Hatch is any example, we're moving far right. He's the perfect bellweather.
You know-us dogs aren’t really so much of the dogs that we think we are. -Marty Pilleti, to his date; from the 1955 film Marty
When you hear the phrase “star athlete”, it invariably conjures up visualization of a man or a woman with sinewy arms and legs, attached to a V-shaped torso reinforced by abs of steel. In other words, nothing akin to the doughy and mockingly anti-Olympian specimen that gawks back at us from our full-length mirror (er, well…speaking for myself). Granted, there is the odd exception-Babe Ruth, CC Sabathia, David Wells, George Foreman, John Daly and Charles Barkley come to mind (and give some of us hope). Not that I ever even considered pro sports as a career path-but at some point in our lives, those of us who are “persons of size” must make peace with the cards we have been dealt.
Herzl (Itzak Cohen), the unlikely “sports hero” of a delightful new Full Monty-esque audience-pleaser from Israel called A Matter of Size has been dealing with his “cards” for some thirty-odd years, and has yet to come up with a winning hand. Sweet-natured, puppy-eyed and tipping the scales at 340 pounds, he lives with his overbearing mother, Mona (Levana Finkelstein) and works at a restaurant, commandeering a salad bar. Mona loves her son, but has odd ways of expressing it (chiefly due to her lack of a social filter). “You’re getting too fat!” she scolds, belaboring the obvious; but then in the next breath she’s encouraging him to finish up some delicious leftovers in the fridge (eating and complaining-two things my people excel at). Poor Herzl can’t even get a self-esteem boost from the one place you would expect encouragement from- his weight watchers group, lorded over by the passive-aggressive Geula (Evelyn Hagoel) who runs meetings more like Ilsa the She-Wolf of the SS than an empathetic counselor. She makes no bones about her disappointment with Herzl’s recent weight gain, threatening to eighty-six him.
Just when you think the situation couldn’t get more demoralizing for the hapless Herzl, he gets fired from his job, essentially for being visually unaesthetic to the workplace (read: Management objects to having a morbidly obese employee tending the salad bar). But then, two things happen to Herzl that could potentially turn his present state of gloom around: he experiences a mutual spark of attraction with a lovely woman in his weight watchers group (Irit Kaplan) and finds a new job at a Japanese restaurant, managed by an ex-pro sumo coach (Togo Igawa). Guess what happens? (Hint: As you probably know, sumo is a sport that celebrates and reveres big fellers, elevating them to rock star status).
It would have been easy for directors Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor to wring cheap laughs from such a predominately corpulent cast, but much to their credit (and Danny Cohen-Solal, who co-scripted with Maymon) the characters (and actors who play them) ultimately emerge from their trials and tribulations with dignity and humanity fully intact. Even the sight of four supersized Israeli gentlemen bounding through a grassy field, garbed in naught but their lipstick-red mawashis makes you want to stand up and cheer (as opposed to pointing and snickering). Ditto for an endearing, sensitively directed seduction scene between Herzl and his girlfriend, and a subplot concerning one of Herzl’s buddies who, empowered via the sumo training, begins his journey of coming out as a gay man. Needless to say, the film is ultimately about self-acceptance, in all of its guises.
And that’s a good thing.
Yes you can-I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, The Tao of Steve, Heavy, Turtle Diary, Paprika, Zelig, Muriel’s Wedding, Georgy Girl, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Now Voyager, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, Heavy Weights, Rocky, Bend it Like Beckham, Laagan: Once Upon a Time in India, Brassed Off, Cool Runnings, Mystery Alaska, Cosi, Billy Elliot.
Does it surprise you that this fellow would be involved with violent bikers? Not me. After all, he was forced out of the service after being accused of torturing Iraqis. You can see why the teabaggers love him.
If you aren't familiar with the Oath Keepers, read:
Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason. Glenn Beck loves them. Tea Partiers court them. Congressmen listen to them. Meet the fast-growing "patriot" group that's recruiting soldiers to resist the Obama administration.
In Pray's estimate, it might not be long (months, perhaps a year) before President Obama finds some pretext—a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack—to impose martial law, ban interstate travel, and begin detaining citizens en masse. One of his fellow Oath Keepers, a former infantryman, advised me to prepare a "bug out" bag with 39 items including gas masks, ammo, and water purification tablets, so that I'd be ready to go "when the shit hits the fan."
When it does, Pray and his buddies plan to go AWOL and make their way to their "fortified bunker"—the home of one comrade's parents in rural Idaho—where they've stocked survival gear, generators, food, and weapons. If it becomes necessary, they say, they will turn those guns against their fellow soldiers.
Tea partiers like West are running for office proud of their membership in this group or openly sympathetic to it.
This simple little video from my former employer, the American Federation of Government Employees, seems to have hit a nerve among Tea Partying right-wingers. It simply shows a mob populated by the likes of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio; and RNC Chairman Michael Steele calling for the death of veteran’s benefits, Social Security, unspecified government services, as well as pay cuts for federal employees. Nothing there that’s really disputable.
(I reported here on Rep. Michele Bachmann’s call for an end to Social Security.)
Adele points out that the argument in the Youtube comments is very ... lively. Here's an example of the right wing pique:
Hey you fucking fed union scum bags just keep on suckin on the government tit get a real job you fucks how do you fucking federal faggots sleep at night if you actually get paid more then a military member willing to die and bleed to make the red stripes on our flag, mean while you scum bags just milk the government tit fucking progressives i never thought someone could be so proud to be victims who think your entitled when all you do is fuck our country KEEP MOOCHIN YOU FUCKIN FUCKERS
Yeah, I'd say it gets under their skin alright. There's plenty more where that came from (although there are a few "fedfuckinfuckers" fighting back.)
The level of vitriol that's coming from the right wing is escalating as they win. It's a phenomenon we've seen many times before --- the more power they get the angrier at the other side they get. The reason is that they believe that their winning requires their opponent to completely capitulate and join them. (Obviously, that rule doesn't apply to them because in their view it is impossible for their opponents to legitimately win --- that would mean that they are not in a majority and that is simply beyond their ken.) Their opponents must grovel, beg forgiveness and adopt their belief system with every fiber of their being or their victory means nothing. When the other side insists on continuing the argument, even in defeat, they simply go insane.
I've written about this at length before, perhaps most thoroughly in this post called The Resentment Tribe. This has always been one of the defining features of American political life.
I confess, that I'm feeling a little bit more battered and a little bit less optimistic than I did when I wrote it almost six years ago. But that's because we are living in an even more insane time than we were then, and I thought the Republicans had the hit the radical wall with the Bush Cheney regime. I was wrong. Globalization, rapid social change, the hardcore right wing political warfare of the past two decades and accumulated crises of this one have left our political system more unstable than it's been in a long time. And from what I can tell, liberals right now have no stomach for the kind of fighting it's going to take to beat them back. So we may be in for a rough ride.
But hey, maybe it will all work out. Keep hope alive.
A couple of posts I did for CAF called Ressentimental Journey Part I and Part II also on this topic.
One of the hallmarks of the arguments against using hyperbolic terms against our fellow American theocrats is that they aren't actually doing the crazy things that other pre-modern theocrats do, so it's unfair to compare them. Except --- they are. They just let their repressive, destructive flag fly in other countries:
Throughout Africa -- mainly in Christian countries -- vast numbers of children have been abandoned by their parents, or worse, often maimed or tortured, on suspicion of being "witches." Aggressive crusades against alleged malevolent "witches" are encouraged by the "spiritual warfare" doctrines of some major leaders of one of the world's fastest-growing international religious movements, the "apostolic and prophetic" wing of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity.
One well-known adherent of this movement is Sarah Palin, about whom see Sarah Palin's 'Witchcraft Problem' Is Bigger Than Christine O'Donnell's 'Witchcraft Problem' by Bruce Wilson, September 21, 2010, on Talk To Action -- the blog which first broke the story of how, when Sarah Palin first went into politics, she was "anointed" by Thomas Muthee, an internationally recognized (within at least one sector of the Pentecostal/charismatic world) "apostle" who gave her a blessing to protect her against "witches." Other, even more explosive aspects of this story have not yet reached the mass media, though they are well-documented here on Talk To Action. Among other things, Thomas Muthee has acted as a witch hunter in Africa.
Traditionally, to most Christians, the term "spiritual warfare" has usually referred to an internal moral struggle. However, to growing numbers of "apostolic and prophetic" leaders such as C. Peter Wagner and Ed Silvoso, "spiritual warfare" means things like exorcism, witch hunts (a.k.a. "spiritual mapping"), burning non-Christian religious artifacts, and "discipling" whole nations -- including their governments, not just individual citizens.
A leading network within this movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, has an explicitly theocratic goal, the "seven mountains mandate": they explicitly desire to take over seven spheres of power in society including government. And they aim to eradicate what they see as demonic influences, including gays and all non-Christian religions. Their successes in some countries, such as Uganda, have had dire consequences such as Uganda's kill-the-gays bill.
You'll recall that Rick Warren had to be dragged kicking and screaming into publicly denouncing "the first purpose driven country" Uganda's gay death penalty law last year. These African countries are serving as laboratories for Christian Reconstructionism:
Transforming Uganda is a new 20 minute documentary, by Bruce E. Wilson, that exposes immense influence that an evangelizing effort called the International Transformation Network, and the globally distributed videos of its media partner, the Sentinel Group, exert in Uganda.
The ITN is one of several global efforts, operating under the "transformation" brand, that are re-engineering along theocratic lines cities and even entire nations. For the Transformation movement, which claims homosexuals are possessed by demons and that prayer and faith healing have cured thousands of HIV and AIDS cases in the nation, Uganda is a prototype.
For over a year ITN representatives have been at work to setting up a training network spanning approximately 14,000 evangelical churches in Uganda, and ITN's head Africa representative states, as shown in the video, that the Transformation Network Uganda is "basically an ITN chapter." The International Transformation Network has active efforts underway across Africa but also in the United States, in Newark, New Jersey, Hawaii, Jacksonville, Florida, and elsewhere.
ITN representatives have enjoyed official state dinners hosted by Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni and his wife Janet Museveni, and video propagandists for the movement have enjoyed direct personal access to the Musevenis since the late 1990's.
Even more striking are Janet Museveni's extremely close ties to the International Transformation Network. Museveni attended her first ITN conference, in Kampala, in 2004. In 2006, Museveni and her daughter Patience traveled to ITN's yearly world conference, held in Argentina that year.
Unable to attend in 2008, Janet Museveni sent the head of Uganda's tax authority to speak on her behalf at the ITN's 18th world conference. Janet Museveni is personally supervising the Transformation process, which emphasizes the need to fuse church and business sectors, in one of Uganda's poorest districts. Museveni's daughter Patience runs a church whose members are being trained by ITN to transform Kampala. One of the attendees has been David Bahati, who drafted Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
Both Bahati, and Benson Obua-Ogwal, the Ugandan MP's who who introduced the internationally notorious Anti-Homosexuality bill in parliament, are closely linked, as the documentary shows, to the International Transformations effort and are members of the College of Prayer Uganda - headed by a leading Transformation movement advocate, Julius Oyet.
Oyet starred in one of the globally distributed Transformations videos, by Sentinel Group founder George Otis, Jr., which have spread the Transformation movement's eliminationalist, witch and demon-haunted ideology. College of Prayer Uganda, which played a significant role organizing and inspiring legislators who have backed the Anti Homosexuality Bill, is a chapter of the International College of Prayer, whose top leaders are Americans who operate out of a church in a suburb of Atlanta. Another American in the documentary, evangelist and Transformation advocate Os Hillman, also lives in an Atlanta suburb.
Left unexplored in the documentary, to preserve clarity and minimize length, is the wider nature of the Transformation movement, which is part of the international apostolic and prophetic movement under church growth specialist C. Peter Wagner, founder of the New Apostolic Reformation. Most of the leading figures in the video are leaders in Wagner's movement, which in turn is arising within the rapidly growing neocharismatic segment of Christianity that was estimated, by 2000, to encompass 295 million Christians worldwide.
I understand that complacent Americans think these people aren't dangerous and don't have any real influence in America. They are often referred to as "a joke" among the cogoscenti. And it's true that in everyday American life their influence is still constrained by our constitution (which a large majority of Tea Partiers believe is a sacred Christian text written to affirm Biblical law) and long history of secular culture and rule of law. At the moment they are confined to burning African witches and influencing African nations to criminalize homosexuality and abortion and require adherence to Christian beliefs.
It's hard to know what will happen if these people begin to exert even stronger influence over the Republican party in a time of great stress and transition in this country. Obviously, it's unlikely they will be able to turn the US into a nation that believes its children are possessed by witches. But I think it's fair to say they are people who will exert their influence in ways that are pernicious and regressive. I also think it's fairly foolish to be sanguine about that.
