“The Tea Party’s Rank Amateurism” by Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic (h/t to Phil Campbell)

I hear GOP folks and Tea Partiers bemoaning the fact that media and Democrats are using the extremes of their movement for ratings and to score points. This is like Drew Brees complaining that Dwight Freeney keeps trying to sack him. If that were Martin Luther King’s response to media coverage, the South might still be segregated. I exaggerate, but my point is that the whining reflects a basic misunderstanding of the rules of protest. When you lead a protest you lead it, you own it, and your opponents, and the media, will hold you responsible for whatever happens in the course of that protest. This isn’t left-wing bias, it’s the nature of the threat.

Here’s the great Richard Kim at The Nation–I live for his articles & blogposts there; wish they came with anything like regularity–who gets in up past his elbows with “The Cloward-Piven Strategy,” a kind of Teabagger Da Vinci Code. (Also, the artwork above is borrowed from this article.)

Why does the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory hold such appeal? And what, if anything, does it accomplish? On one level it’s entertainment. It allows believers to tease out the left’s secrets and sinister patterns. Since none of the evidence that supposedly confirms the existence of the Cloward-Piven strategy is, in fact, secret, this proves rather easy to do, and so the puzzle is both thrilling and gratifying.

Over at the Times, meanwhile, they’re wondering about the link between Tea Party membership and unemployment. “With No Jobs, Time for Tea Party.”

The fact that many Tea Party supporters joined after losing their jobs raises questions of whether the movement can survive an upturn in the economy.

And from the great Crooks & Liars, “Glenn Beck is actually freaking out Fox News staffers. Roger Ailes steps in–on Beck’s side.” (Note that the below-quoted is C&L’s quote from a New York Daily News article.)

A column in the Washington Post on Monday revealed that some Fox staffers are concerned the celebrity pundit is “becoming the face of the network.”

Ailes pointed out that the information in The Post’s column was leaked by Fox’s Washington bureau.

“For the first time in our 14 years, we’ve had people apparently shooting in the tent, from within the tent,” he told them.

And because we actually live in the weird alternate reality where Gawker is at least as good a political blog as they are a gossip blog, here’s their take on James O’Keefe, the Teabagger who was caught trying to infiltrate a Senator’s office and bug her phone. They’ve got his facebook photos! Also, Scientologists run sweatshops, duh.