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The Tea Party has the folks on the far left so badly rattled that their major benefactor, George Soros, is putting his money behind an effort to malign the movement:

Soros and the foundation left have launched a website designed to go after the growing Tea Party movement. Teapartytracker.org will post video interviews and blog entries gathered by folks on the false left who never grow weary of demonstrating their outrage over the very idea of a grassroots political effort overthrowing establishment Democrats and Republicans in the district of corporate criminals.


Teapartytracker.org will be sponsored by the NAACP, Think Progress, New Left Media and Media Matters for America. Think Progress is a George Soros operation connected to John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Podesta is Clinton’s former chief of staff. Media Matters for America is the brainchild of a MoveOn consultant and Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Soros is a major supporter of MoveOn.

What this website will do, of course, is send people to Tea Party-related events where they will try to find the most outrageous signs they can declare as racist or violent, and interview the extreme fringe that shows up for those events and try to portray them as a mainstream part of the movement.

Take your best shot, George.  The only people reading the site will be the other wacky lefties who get off on that sort of stuff.

There’s a whole flock of these stories coming out now from various media sources.  This comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

The defeat of Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski by a little-known conservative lawyer is the latest evidence of a tidal wave building that may sweep aside an out-of-touch establishment. “We the people” won’t be ignored.

Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising of 1,200 farmers led by one Daniel Shays, angry over conditions in Massachusetts in 1786, prompted Thomas Jefferson to write to James Madison that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing” for America.

A more peaceful rebellion is now occurring across the country, and we believe it’s a good thing for America. Considering the excesses of this administration and Congress and their abuse of power to the point of ignoring the Constitution itself, it’s also a very necessary thing, an idea whose time has come.

Read the rest of it here.

While it feels pretty good to see this movement really taking shape in American politics it would be wise to read Erick Erickson’s reminder:

Conservatives Have Won Nothing. You Read It Right. NOTHING.

Erick’s point? So far all we have are conservative candidates in a number of places where they may not have been expected to survive the primary. What we don’t have yet are conservative election winners. That will hopefully come in November, but we can’t sit back and hope for a win – we’ve got to earn it.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, incumbent Republican, has lost her renomination bid to the Tea Party and Sarah Palin-backed Joe Miller:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) conceded her primary race Tuesday night after she failed to close the gap on attorney Joe Miller in the ongoing vote-counting process.

Murkowski gained 199 votes on Tuesday, but she came up well shy of what she needs to win her party’s nomination.

With new votes tallied across the state, Murkowski cut her deficit, but she still trailed Miller by 1,469 votes after approximately 15,000 ballots were counted Tuesday. Another 10,000 or so are to be counted later.

By conceding, Murkowski becomes the third incumbent senator to lose re-nomination this year and the second to lose a primary. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) lost a primary in April, while Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) fell at his party’s May convention.

Murkowski’s dad was the sitting governor who Sarah Palin beat, so there’s not a lot of love lost between those two Alaska political families.  For awhile there it looked like Murkowski might try a third party bid, but she seems to have given that up, and that’s good for everybody.

UPDATE:  Welcome Instapundit readers, and thanks Glenn!

UPDATE 2:  Larry Sabato adds this via Twitter:

AK SEN: With LisaM bowing out, Miller is R nominee. Likely R in Nov. Very doubtful McAdams(D) can beat Miller unless R self-destructs.

Sarah Palin adds this via Twitter:

Do you believe in miracles?! http://u.nu/72z2f Congratulations, @JoeWMiller! Thank you for your service, Sen. Murkowski. On to November!

John Hawkins is perhaps a little less gracious:

Sarah Palin blasted Lisa “RINO” Murkowski’s political career like it was a wolf running from her helicopter & I love it!

Both Bob Bennett, defeated in Utah earlier this year, and Murkowski whose Senate career effectively ends tonight, were part of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s inner circle. He’s gonna have to start looking for some conservative friends…or the conservatives will start looking for a new Minority…or possibly Majority…Leader.

Larry Sabato again:

Miller, Lee, Paul, Buck, Angle…Friends of Mitch McConnell, early Christmas gift idea: Case of Extra Strength Excedrin.

Those wascally conservatives keep ousting RINO Senate incumbents:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s apparent defeat in Alaska’s Republican primary isn’t just a defeat for the Republican establishment and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which — in keeping with standard practice — backed her renomination.

The Alaska result is above all a blow to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. As with the primary defeat of Utah’s Bob Bennett in the spring, challenger Joe Miller’s likely win replaces a close McConnell confidant with an unaccommodating conservative.

McConnell, since becoming minority leader in 2007, has built his own “kitchen Cabinet,” consisting of two or three official “counsels” — senators, handpicked by him, who attend GOP leadership meetings along with the elected party leadership. Both Bennett and Murkowski are in this inner circle. And both lost their primaries this year to conservatives running against Washington.

Hello Mitch, it’s the Tea Party calling. We’re not interested in getting along with Democrats. We’re interested in defeating them and implementing conservative policies and governance. Time to get on board or we’ll be looking for a new majority leader.

I guess they figure if they keep screaming it sooner or later it will be true:

A civil rights activist and former congressman equated the Tea Party with the Ku Klux Klan today as he blasted a conservative rally planned in Washington, D.C., this weekend.

The Rev. Walter Fauntroy, the non-voting delegate who represented the District of Columbia from 1971 to 1991, called on African-Americans to organize a “new coalition of conscience” to rebut the rally scheduled for Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial featuring Fox News pundit Glenn Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“We are going to take on the barbarism of war, the decadence of racism, and the scourge of poverty, that the Ku Klux — I meant to say the Tea Party,” Fauntroy told a news conference today at the National Press Club. “You all forgive me, but I — you have to use them interchangeably.”

Fauntroy attempted to explain the comparison to white supremacists by saying that organizers behind the “Restoring Honor” rally are the same people who cut audio cables from a sound system the night before the historic March on Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

“The same people who cut the cables on the night before the march, that we paid $66,000 for a sound system, they cut it,” Fauntroy said. “Now from Fox News and elsewhere, they are seeking to turn the world back.”

Fauntroy, who is credited as one of the chief organizers of the March on Washington, remembers Aug. 28, 1963, as the “most important date of the 20th century.”

Important, yes. Most important…hardly.

This event really has the old school racial grievance crowd in a tizzy. The idea that a conservative would hold a major rally in that place on that date just is more than they can handle. It’s too bad they never listened and learned from what Dr. King actually said that day.

Bill Kristol discusses their demise:

The left has collapsed.

Its political support has collapsed. Public opinion polls point to a historic repudiation of the president and the Democratic party this fall—something on the order of a 60-seat Republican gain in the House. The GOP has an outside shot at taking the Senate as well.

Its claim to intellectual integrity has collapsed. Paul Krugman—Ivy League professor, New York Times columnist, and Nobel laureate (the holy trinity of the liberal establishment)—has humiliated himself with a startlingly dishonest attack on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. Krugman, called out by Ryan, rebuked by honest analysts, and unwilling to concede his errors, has retreated into uncharacteristic abashed silence.

Its Leninist discipline has collapsed. Last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs complained about the craziness of the “professional left” in the punditocracy. “Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs explained. “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality. .  .  . They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.” Members of the professional left hit back at Gibbs, dubbing the Obama White House the “amateur left.”

Its democratic credibility has collapsed. In recent weeks, the left has the arbitrary rulings and sophistic arguments of federal judges who have overturned an immigration statute that mirrors federal law passed by the state legislature in Arizona, and a constitutional amendment, defining marriage as it has been defined for all of American history, enacted by the citizens of California. The left has also heaped praise on New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, as he, having bought his way to a narrow reelection, showered disdain and contempt on the majority of his fellow New Yorkers who object to a mosque next to Ground Zero.

And its good humor (such as it was) has collapsed. As Politico’s Ben Smith reported last week,

the Agenda Project, a new, progressive group with roots in New York’s fundraising scene and a goal of strengthening the progressive movement, has launched the “F*ck Tea” project, which is aimed, the group’s founder Erica Payne wrote in an e-mail this morning, “to dismiss the Tea Party and promote the progressive cause.”

“We will be launching new products in the next several months to help people all over the country F*ck Tea,” Payne told Politico.

Is Erica Payne a loony nobody? No, she’s a lefty somebody—a former Democratic National Committee official, a veteran of many progressive groups, and one of the founders of the Democracy Alliance, the group of big donors who have spent over $100 million to fund “progressive” organizations like the Center for American Progress.

Payne says she launched her effort to push back against “the rhetoric over results paradigm that is holding our country hostage.” She wasn’t being ironic. As the estimable Allahpundit commented, “Because, you see, if there’s any movement that’s about results over rhetoric, it’s clearly the f*ck tea movement.”

The “f*ck tea” movement—that’s what the left has come to. They can’t defend the results of Obama’s policies or the validity of Krugman’s arguments. They know it’s hard to sustain an antidemocratic ethos in a democracy. They realize they’ve degenerated into pro-am levels of whining and squabbling. So they curse their opponents.

There’s more at the link.

That last part of that excerpt which refers to the “f*ck tea” movement is so very typical of the modern left. Most of the time when I get comments from the left they’re nearly always angry and generally have to be deleted because they can’t discuss the issue at hand but instead immediately result to profanity and insults. When your whole political philosophy is based on emotion you run out of logical things to say pretty fast.

‘Tis the season of dirty tricks:

In New Jersey, a “Tea Party” candidate surfaces but local activists haven’t heard of him. In Michigan, a Democratic operative appears closely tied to a slate of candidates running under the Tea Party banner. In Florida, conservative activists are locked in court over the right to use the Tea Party name.


The list of peculiar Tea Party happenings goes on and on.


As the midterm election nears, allegations are surfacing across the country that Democrats are exploiting conservatives’ faith in the Tea Party name by putting up bogus candidates in November — the claim is that those “Tea Party” candidates will split the GOP vote and clear the way for Democratic victories.


The theories may prove to be more than just conspiracy talk. Some of the allegations are coming directly from local Tea Party activists who are trying to flag the media and election officials as soon as they smell something fishy on the ballot. And they say they’ve got proof.


“It’s obvious it’s a Democratic play,” said Jason Gillman, a Tea Party activist from Traverse City, Mich.

There’s an easy way to avoid problems with fake Tea Party candidate: Don’t vote for anyone who identifies their party as “Tea Party”. There’s no such thing as a national political party affiliated with any Tea Party movement.

Best bet:  Vote Republican.  Third-party votes are wasted whether they’re for Tea Party, Libertarian, Peace and Freedom, or whatever wacky parties might exist in your area.

Not going to work:

Democratic National Committee chairman Tim Kaine will be accusing GOP leaders of being beholden to the Tea Party’s agenda at a press conference this morning, mocking Republican plans to offer voters a legislative commitment modeled after the Contract with America.

As part of its initiative, the DNC is launching a website accusing Republicans of supporting a legislative blueprint in line with the Tea Party movement that includes repeal of the health care law and Wall Street reform, extending tax breaks, privatization of Social Security and the elimination of the Department of Education and the Department of Energy.

“The Tea Party is now an institutionalized part of the Republican party. They are one and the same,” a DNC operative said, previewing Kaine’s speech. “The positions espoused by the Tea Party is the governing platform of the Republican party. And as voters make their choice this fall it’s important to understand what the Republican-Tea Party wants to do if elected.”

Radical left-wingers think the Tea Party is full of racists and hate-mongers, but the problem for Democrats with this strategy is the most of America doesn’t agree with radical left-wingers. Most of America realizes that the Tea Party is just like…well, most of America.

There are a great many Americans who would love for the GOP to tie their policies to the small government/low taxes agenda of the Tea Party. We’ve seen what out-of-control big government does and we don’t like it.

And while we’re eliminating federal agencies, let’s dump the Commerce Dept., Labor Dept., and EPA. They’re complete wastes of money.

Coming in the highly charged racial political atmosphere we have today, this is a pretty courageous piece for a Democrat to write:

The NAACP believes the tea party is racist. The tea party believes the NAACP is racist. And Pat Buchanan got into trouble recently by pointing out that if Elena Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, there will not be a single Protestant Justice, although Protestants make up half the U.S. population and dominated the court for generations.

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

Rest the rest of it here. Sen. Webb is absolutely correct.

UPDATE:  The lefties who make a career out of racial grievances are already calling Webb a racist.

You put your statement condemning racism in, you take your statement condemning racism out…that’s what it’s all about:

On Monday night, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a statement that his organization concurred with Vilsack’s decision.

“Racism is about the abuse of power,” Jealous said. “Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race. We are appalled by her actions… Her actions were shameful. While she went on to explain in the story that she ultimately realized her mistake, as well as the common predicament of working people of all races, she gave no indication she had attempted to right the wrong she had done to this man.”

On Tuesday Jealous said “with regard to the initial media coverage of the resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias. Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.”

Jealous called his about-face an example of a “teachable moment, for activists and for journalists…Next time we are confronted by a racial controversy broken by Fox News or their allies in the Tea Party like Mr. Breitbart, we will consider the source and be more deliberate in responding. The tape of Ms. Sherrod’s speech at an NAACP banquet was deliberately edited to create a false impression of racial bias, and to create a controversy where none existed. This just shows the lengths to which extremist elements will go to discredit legitimate opposition.”

Picking on Andrew Breitbart will not turn out well for the NAACP. They would have been better to stop with last night’s statement.