The tea party is underwritten by big Coal, if the result of the election is a divided paralyzed house this suits big coal just fine.

adam
do you know the lines by Yeats:

We have fed the heart on fantasy
the hearts grown brutal on the fare
more substance in our enmities,
than in our loves
Oh honey bees come build your nests
in the empty house of the stare.

America sure could do with some "honey and wax" right now.

Yes the USA body politic could do with some soothing/healing honey balm. Of course you find it via the applied politics of the Tea Party.

Speaking of Yeats I think these lines sum up the mood, or the murderously reasonable demands and intentions, of the Tea Party and right-wing politics in the USA, and elsewhere.

Written in 1920 after WWI.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Yeats was acutely sensitive to the world situation, and how the old "order" was disintegrating (or had already done so). This sensitivity was reflected in his poetry and writings in which he tried to create an explanation for and a synthesis of the deep psychic forces that were being dramatized on to the world stage during his life.

As I expect you know, both poems were written in a 'Time of Civil war'.

Remember the Bush flunky that years ago spoke of an end to 'reality politics' ?
They have had a lot of phantasmal meals over the past twenty odd years

gosh, since we're quoting on the USA, here's some from probably the clearest thinker they ever had, Thomas Jefferson.

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
---
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
---
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
---
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
---
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
---
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."

Americans are conservative by nature, they made a mistake with Obama and he was much more left than he had indicated before the election, this is being corrected.

It's not the Tea Party's fault, nor the voter's fault - it's Obama and the Democrats, making excuses for poor government, doesn't fix it.

It's Obama's watch, and he wears the blame, regardless - let's see some of that "the buck stops here" stuff, man up tot he job and stop blaming everyone else.

Amicus
Come off it. It was Bush who put the bill for the war in Iraq on credit. It was Junior that undid Anglo American foreign policy in the gulf( policy that went back to 1912 and I reckon he did it simply to try and prove that he was smarter that his dad) The endless bail outs every time the inflationary bubble looked set to burst were under republican rule.
The truth is the Republicans under Bush threw out all of the conservative rules; neo- for them meant anything but prudent .
Under their watch the biggest fraud the world has ever seen took place.
Pull the other one its got bells on it,
"Conservative" my arse.