Joe Klein's current Swampland piece is worth a read. In it he castigates the left, criticizes the Obama communications shop for not taking more credit for the administration's achievements, and urges Democrats to take pride in those considerable accomplishments.

As the Washington Post's Chris Cilliza reported earlier this month, media coverage characterizing the so-called tea party movement as politically independent is wrong. A July 2 Gallup poll found that nearly 70% of tea party supporters identified themselves as "conservative Republicans."

Surprise! (Not really.) The conservative movement doesn't oppose deficit spending, they oppose deficit spending by Democrats.

Think Progress's Matt Yglesias has a succinct summary. Some key points:

1. There have been two presidents who were members of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and they both presided over massive increases in both present and projected deficits.
2. The major deficit reduction packages of the modern era, in 1990 and 1993, were both uniformly opposed by the conservative movement.
3. When the deficit was temporarily eliminated in the late-1990s, the mainstream conservative view was that this showed that the deficit was too low and needed to be increased via large tax cuts.
4. Senator Mitch McConnell says it’s a uniform view in his caucus that tax cuts needn’t be offset by other changes in spending.
5. The deficit reduction commission is having trouble because they think conservative politicians won’t vote for any form of tax increase.

Check out the new site that highlights Republican support for BP and big oil: http://www.bprepublicans.com

As July 4, 2010 approaches wrong-headedness seems to have seized legislators and policy makers around the world.

Paul Krugman highlights this in his recent NY Times piece, The Third Depression:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy.

Politico's Ben Smith noted yesterday that Tampa, FL, site of the 2012 Republican Presidential Convention, has been called the "lap dance capital of the world." The city is home to 56 "adult-oriented" clubs, and three of the four agencies in the US that book featured erotic dancers.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a must-read blog post at HuffingtonPost.com. It specifically attacks the right-wing labeling the BP oil spill "Obama's Katrina." In fact, as Kennedy shows, the disaster can be traced to the once-secret Cheney energy task force meetings, after which the Minerals Management Service, which regulates the oil industry, recommended against using acoustically triggered switches that "might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed."

Guy Fawkes was a 17th-century British soldier who spent ten years fighting for the Spanish Catholics in the Netherlands. During that time he became an explosives expert. In 1604 Catholic hopes for greater tolerance in the UK, and relief from the strictures established under Queen Elizabeth, were ended at a conference at Hampton Court. In 1605 Fawkes became part of a plot to kill King James I, his family and members of the government by blowing up Westminster Place at the opening of Parliament. The plot was foiled by an anonymous tip; Fawkes was arrested, but November 5 has been celebrated in the UK ever since as "Guy Fawkes Day."

The Republican Governor's Association (RGA) has now apparently, and inexplicably, adopted the symbolism of this historic terrorist plot as a rallying point.

Earlier this week FiveThirtyEight.com's Andrew Gelman looked at three different political analyses that are demonstrably incorrect, but get echoed in the media and repeated by otherwise apparently reasonable people.

One such argument, recently addressed more-or-less simultaneously by two Washington Post columnists describes the tea partiers as successors to Ross Perot's third party movement from the 90s.

The end-game of the House passing the Senate health care bill brought to light a new level of hatred and vitriol, encouraged and in some cases apparently perpetrated by congressional Republicans.

The first salvo came on Saturday, March 20. As Democratic congressmen John Lewis (D-GA) and Andre Carson (D-IN) emerged from a Democratic caucus meeting in the Cannon House office building, a large crowd surrounded them and several shouts of "kill the bill" and the "N-word" were heard.

A tea partier also spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo).

On Saturday afternoon a similar scenario unfolded as Rep. Barney Frank, (D-MA) left a whip meeting in the Longworth House office building and made his way through a crowd of protesters, and elderly white man shouted "Barney, you faggot," as his fellow protesters erupted in laughter.

"Republican lawmakers are trying their best to show the tea party activists outside the Capitol that they're on their side," wrote Salon's Mike Madden. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind) walked through the crowd shaking hands, smiling, and thanking them. He condemned "the kind of language and statements that have been reported," but denied that the GOP shared any responsibility. "I think the American people are rising up with one voice and saying, 'Enough is enough.'"

Meanwhile Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Ky) and a group of Republicans borrowed a "Don't Tread on Me" flag from a tea partier, and displayed it from a balcony on the second floor of the Capitol, adjacent to the House floor.