I also agree with your assessment of the Tea Party, LEJ. Although, like Olddude, I'm not very well impressed with a lot of their ideas, they are at least an actual populist attempt to break the stranglehold of the Duopoly...and that's a healthy sign of at least the possibility of some genuinely democratic (small "d") activity in a mass media-dominated political landscape. If the Tea Party can do it, then there is hope that others may do it as well.

Yeah, maybe it was 23 times I told Bobert that the Dems and Repubs AREN'T the same... ;-) Or it might have been 32 times. Maybe it was 48 times. Heh! I only bother to say so, because various yoyos here keep dismissing what I say on the basis that I supposedly say those 2 parties are "the same", which I most certainly do not. I wouldn't hate the Republicans utterly to the very marrow of my bones...while merely having contempt and mild loathing for the Democrats...if they were the same! They're not. Anyway, it never seems to stick in the short memories of people around here. They just fall back on the usual tired old attack.

Sort of like whenever you mention in a discussion that something (anything at all) is better set up in France or Cuba or Denmark or wherever else than it is in the USA....the standard American defensive yoyo's response is a truculent..."WELL, If ya like France/Cuba/Denmark/etc better than ya like it HERE, then why don't ya MOVE there?" (as if ONE single issue or facet of some issue could make one decide to pull up stakes, leave one's own home, and move lock, stock, and barrel to some complete other society! Good lord. What a stupid question!)

But that's the way playground bullies "think". In kneejerk cliches. Or in other words, they don't really think at all...they just emote fiercely.