I. History

I’d like to start with a comparison which, hopefully, which demonstrate just how incredible the tea party movement’s capture of the willing Republican Party has been.

In January 2001, George W. Bush assumed the presidency after an election that a sizable number of Americans – including pluralities of self-described Democrats and liberals – thought he had won illegitimately. Bush began with a diminished Republican force of 50 senators and 222 members of the House. Nonetheless, Bush achieved the first items on his agenda with cooperation from Democrats and not much effective opposition from liberals. He passed tax cuts and education reform with Democratic support, while MoveOn.org, the fastest-growing liberal grassroots group, focused on some piecemeal issues. It campaigned for campaign finance reform, and it organized energy boycotts as responses to rolling blackouts in California. In the first eight months of the Bush presidency, before 9/11, liberals failed to present a coherent challenge to Republicans.

In January 2009, Barack Obama assumed the presidency after the biggest popular vote victory since 1988, bringing with him 58 Democratic senators and 256 Democratic members of the House. He passed his first agenda item, a $787 billion stimulus package, without any Republican votes in the House and a massive struggle in the Senate. That Republican opposition was buttressed by immediate and effective grassroots protests.

The day of the Senate vote, an activist named Mary Rakovich organized a protest against the stimulus in Fort Myers, Fla. One day before Obama signed the stimulus legislation into law, an activist named Kelli Carender organized a protest of the stimulus in Seattle. Two days after Obama signed the legislation, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli launched into an on-air screed about the $75 billion Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, and that directly inspired the first tea party protests on February 27, 2009. Republicans immediately glommed on to the movement, to the extent that RNC Chairman Michael Steele asks but is not allowed to speak at a Chicago event. April 15, 2009, hundreds of tea party protests were held around America, and many of them featured appearances by Republican leaders. John Boehner, the GOP leader in the House, spent the day traveling to tea party rallies across California.

I’m truncating a lot of history here. The Senate of 2001 included many Democrats who were interested, for ideological and electoral reasons, in working with the Republicans. The Senate of 2009 included 40 Republicans, none of whom had any interest in working with Democrats. But it’s important to note how quickly the Republican Party assumed an oppositional stance and how quickly the conservative base rallied to support that stance.

Why did this happen? Two reasons. First, the base of the Republican Party had been demanding this kind of opposition for a very long time, and the perception that John McCain was, like George W. Bush, a big government collaborator, depressed some Republican turnout in 2010. (One good example of this is Ohio, which has a fairly static population, and where the GOP vote fell from 2,859,768 in 2004 to 2,677,820 in 2008.) In my own reporting on the Tea Party movement, I’ve encountered dozens of self-identified conservatives who either didn’t vote in 2008 or tamped down their usual level of involvement.

The second reason: Media. The conservatives who would make up the Tea Party movement had immediate access to an immense number of organizations and social networks. I’m not just talking about the new tools that existed in January 2009, such as Facebook and Twitter. I’m talking about the conservative organizations that had developed over decades starting with the Heritage Foundation, continuing with talk radio, and culminating in Fox News. The Tea Party movement had a strong ideological foundation and a welcoming, listening major party from its inception.

II. Media

There really hasn’t ever been anything before in our politics like that instant access to organizations that can supplement your work and even do your organizing for you. The reporter Will Bunch, in his book “The Backlash,” uses an interesting example to demonstrate just how much access to new information and like-minded people has changed since conservative rebellions of the past. He contrasts the ease with which tea party activists can find information with a billboard from the 1950s that tells motorists the address of a PO Box they can send a letter to in order to find out about an “Impeach Earl Warren” campaign.

Compare that to the information flow of 2009. I’ve mentioned the Internet already, and you can’t understate its importance, but I think the importance of television has been underrated in explaining the movement. The New York Times poll of Tea Party activists than ran in April 2010 found that 47 percent of activists got most of their information from TV, which is about double the number that get their news from the Internet. Again, that Internet number is huge, and I’ll address it in a bit, but that TV number tells us just how many activists watch Fox News. And what was on Fox News in early 2009? Glenn Beck’s program, which started the day before Obama’s inauguration. Hours of interview shows that gave safe platforms to Republicans and critics of the Obama administration. And plenty of promotional segments for the Tea Party movement.

The conservative media made would-be Tea Partyers aware that they had plenty of like-minded people out there, and provided them with the information that proved their doubts about the Obama agenda had merit. It was the Internet that really drilled this in. Activists tell pollsters – and have frequently told me – that they often hear about ominous programs via Glenn Beck or talk radio and then they go to the web to get more information. That information can be provided by think tanks but it can just as easily be provided by politicians or their staffs, operating Twitter accounts and cutting through the media filter, or by other Tea Partyers filming their events and uploading the content to YouTube. According to the Times poll, more Tea Partyers trust their fellow activists than trust information from newspapers.

This media effect should have clear from the very start of the movement. Kelli Carender, that Seattle activist, had no idea how to organize a rally or why, specifically, she opposed the stimulus. She organized it by going online and finding conservative activists and scholars who backed her up and could help her cause. She found a list of economists who opposed the stimulus that had been compiled by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank funded in part by the Koch family fortune, and she got Fox News contributor and conservative columnist Michelle Malkin to promote the rally online. She did all this by googling. And if she kept googling she could have found a stimulus money-tracking site set up by a staffer at George Mason University, or social networking tools like Ning that connected different conservative activists.

III. Politics

So, that’s how the tea party got organized. How is changing the Republican Party? We’re probably all familiar with a few cases in which tea party activists aided insurgent candidates to the detriment of candidates recruited by Republican leaders. But I’d argue that there’s been too much focus on how these candidates are upsetting Republican plans. Whether they’ve been winning or losing, they’ve enforced a conservative orthodoxy that Republicans generally believe in anyway. In this sense, tea party activists have been pushing on open doors.

What do Tea Partyers demand from the GOP? Let’s use, as a screen for tea party belief, the “Contract from America.” This is a 10-point plan for leadership that tea party activists, helped by FreedomWorks, put together after months of voting online to decide the most important issues. Here they are:

1. Protect the Constitution

2. Reject Cap & Trade

3. Demand a Balanced Budget

4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform

5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government

6. End Runaway Government Spending

7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care

8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy

9. Stop the Pork

10. Stop the Tax Hikes

The first thing you probably notice about this list is the overlap – items one and five are basically the same, as are items three and six. The second thing you notice is that the legislative agenda items basically sync up with agenda that congressional Republicans had at the start of the Obama presidency – extension of the Bush tax cuts, more drilling, and no carbon tax or carbon regulation legislation.

What effect has the tea party had on this agenda, considering that Republicans have been supporting it anyway? The Tea Party provided pressure and cover for Republicans to support this – and to oppose Obama initiatives, even when the president was very popular. It also laundered (I’m using that word neutrally) the arguments that libertarian and conservative think tanks and media were making for the Republican agenda and against the Democratic agenda. You can see one example of how this works in Kate Zernike’s new book on the tea party movement, “Boiling Mad.” At one point Zernike notes that Tea Partyers refer to cap-and-trade as “cap-and-tax.” That’s true, but they use that term because organizations like Americans for Prosperity and guests on Fox News use it. With the rise of the Tea Party movement, messaging like this took on credibility, because regular Americans were using it and repeating it back to reporters.

And what effect has the Tea Party had on the Republican Party’s nominees? There’s a popular misunderstanding that the Washington political establishment prefers compromised, moderate Republicans to conservative Republicans, because it can control the former and not the latter. I just don’t think this matches up with reality, especially because of what the tea party movement is about. Are “establishment” Republicans often more liberal on social issues than the Republican base? Yes. But the tea party isn’t about social issues. Establishment Republicans are, with some rare exceptions, just as conservative as Tea Partyers on economic issues. But until the bottom fell out of the economy and voters turned on the Democrats, Republican strategists assumed that will reluctantly endorse people like Charlie Crist because polls tell them they can win.

I encounter very few Tea Partyers who actually believe this, but my conversations with Republican strategists tell me that it’s true. Crist is a great example – Republicans like Jon Cornyn wanted him to run, honestly, because polls showed him easily keeping the seat while Marco Rubio was in a dead heat with Democrats. They wanted to keep an expensive Florida race off the map. They miscalculated, and that had a lot to do with the collapse of faith in the administration and stimulus that Obama supported.

IV.
The Future

So if the Tea Partyers were right about what the Republican Party needed to do to win, and if the establishment was too worried about standing for what the party wanted but is now back on the ball, what happens next?

We’re coming to the end of the intra-Republican electoral wins. The biggest electoral triumphs of the Tea Party occurred in May and August – the latter one just ended this week. I’m talking about the defeats of Bob Bennett and Lisa Murkowski. But it’s important to understand just how few votes were required to oust those two senators. Bennett’s defeat was decided by a majority of around 3,500 activists who attended the Utah GOP convention. Murkowski’s defeat was at the hands of around 100,000 Alaska GOP primary voters. We’re talking about decisions that ended the careers of two senators made by a total of around 53,000 people. That’s just not repeatable many more times on a much larger scale. In the remaining primary states, mostly in Delaware, New Hampshire, and New York, the Tea Party has a few chances to get its candidates over the finish line, but we’re seeing evidence that the establishment sees this coming and has its antibodies already working to protect it.

So the next thing to look at is the Republican class that will arrive in Congress in 2010. Its members will either owe their jobs to Tea Party activists or have gotten their issue stances in order to protect against the Tea Party. So what do they do?

The politician who’s rightly seen as the ideological vessel of the tea party movement is Sen. Jim DeMint. I’d argue that he’s more important to the movement than its bigger star, Sarah Palin, because DeMint has actually gotten specific about what he wants to do in power and why he thinks tea party activists can help him do it. He thinks that Congress needs to reckon with popular entitlements and spending programs, and it needs to cut them even though this has been, consistently, politically disastrous. His theory is that things are bad enough that Americans understand what needs to be cut. They are ready to give up benefits and programs that, in the past, they’ve supported, because they realize how bad things are. That was the not-so-hidden subtext of Glenn Beck’s big rally on the mall last week. Beck, who’s done so much to inform the Tea Parties, told a crowd of 100,000 or so people in person, and many in the TV audience, that they needed to look inward and look back to God and be ready to restore the pre-New Deal vision of America.

Is this good for the Republican Party? I think it is. When is an active and powerful base bad for a political party? The issue that activists and Republicans have to deal with, as they look to power, is whether they can be as successful at convincing Americans of their agenda as they have been at convincing themselves. They need a country that has given up on Democratic policies largely because of high unemployment to be convinced that their policies will hurt in the short term and work in the long term. If all the Tea Party does is help the GOP create momentum for tax cuts, it will have failed. It’s spending cuts, painful ones, that 40 years of conservative activism have been asking for, and 2 years of Tea Party activism have tried to convince the country that it needs.

Let’s take some questions.

21. Shutter Island
20. The Human Centipede
19. Daybreakers
18. Chloe
17. Alice in Wonderland
16. Youth in Revolt
15. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
14. The Book of Eli
13. The Crazies
12. Iron Man 2
11. The Runaways
10. Hot Tub Time Machine
9. Get Him to the Greek
8. Life During Wartime
7. Greenberg
6. Kick-Ass
5. The Kids Are All Right
4. Toy Story 3
3. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
2. Inception
1. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

1. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life

Basically, it’s all in the film. Back-of-the-envelope guess: The first 35 minutes of this 110 minute film are based on this first book. That makes perfect sense, because the film rights were optioned after this book, surprisingly, took off. And this is the story that a million nerds who are too cool for Twilight* fell in love with. So we only get a few unimportant amputations and changes. We don’t get the creepy meeting between Scott and Knives on the bus, although I can swear a scene from this (Scott winking) was used in trailers, so it may have been shot. The movie takes away some dialogue I liked, and I think would have worked (Wallace comparing Scott’s Knives quandary with that of Ewan MacGregor in “Trainspotting”) while adding a scene in which Scott and Knives play a made-up ninja dancing game. This was obviously added to establish that we’re going to be seeing a lot of video game logic in the film, so fine, whatever.

2. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Aha! Here’s the first big, successful change — the 30-page high school flashback that opens the book was cut from the film but used for a totally excellent Adult Swim animation. And here come some more changes, because the film takes place over, I think, seven days, while the comics take place over a year. That’s fine by me. Instead of losing money from a miniseries that will be adored for decades, some studio is losing money on a movie that will be adored for decades. But it obviously alters the rhythm from the languid, slackerish, pace of the comics, a pace that makes the romance so believable and relatable. So all of the Book 2 scenes wherein Ramona integrates into Scott’s world are scrapped, as are the characters of Hollie and Lisa. The battle between Ramona and Knives is moved, in the film, all the way to the finale, where it’s part of the setpiece battle at the Chaos club.

3. Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness

From now on let’s just assume that time is passing in these books that doesn’t pass in the movies. So there’s no confrontation with Todd at Honest Ed’s, and the battle between Ramona and Envy never happens. (The film trims a lot of girl problem plotlines, actually.) I’m a bit sad about the loss of this exchange:

RAMONA: What the hell is this? Why are they all rooting for you when you’re obviously a huge bitch?

ENVY: Ramona, sweetie, I’m famous.

But it’s gone — the whole book is dealt with in basically 10 minutes of movie time.

4. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together

Everything’s different! Roxy is introduced before Todd. The Ramona battle is inserted into this storyline — she fights Roxy, not Envy — and the adorable sequence from the full-color Scott Pilgrim comic, where Ramona guides Scott’s fists for him because he doesn’t want to punch a girl, is slotted into there. The Lisa plotline is cut, as is the character of Mr. Chau. Fine by me. Oh, and in the movie Scott and Ramona don’t move in together — he wins the “power of love sword” in the final fight, not in the fight here.

5. Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe

Behold, the most perfunctory use of source material! Almost nothing from this, the most depressing volume, makes it into the movie. Instead of fighting with robots and Double Dragon moves as they do here, the twins fight with a sound deck that creates a sonic dragon of some kind. (The “amp to amp” fight is a great Wright invention, though.) Ramona does not disappear — and it’s really goddamn hard to understate how sad her disappearance was for those of us who read the book as it came out — but instead gets with Gideon.

6. Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour

Remember what I was saying about truncation? This book opens with Scott recuperating from a monthlong depression over Ramona leaving. He clumsily tries to make out with his exes, Knives and Kim, and confronts what an asshole he was to them. He defeats the “Nega-Scott.” (The Nega-Scott appears in the movie in an extremely Wrightian manner.) He defeats Gideon Graves inside of Ramona’s head, then he and Ramona team up to beat Graves in reality. The movie takes the last part of this, sort of, and you can’t say it “changes” it because the script was finished before O’Malley’s comic was. Wright just makes the decision to involve both Knives and Ramona in the fight, and — in the only change I find unsatisfying — lets Scott make the final move on Gideon. In the comic, Ramona and Scott do a Chrono Trigger-style X-slash that slices Gideon. And goddamn it, that tells us they’re soul mates more than Wright’s version.

*We think!

Who cares if Scott winds up with Ramona, Knives, or anyone else? Described by his own sister (Anna Kendrick) as “chronically enfeebled,” he makes an implausible lady-killer—and even less of a fighter, despite his innumerable bouts against Ramona’s other beaux. These are staged and filmed as if they were video games, all painless panic, and they are best taken as Scott’s inward reveries of a power that he will never possess. I strongly suspect, in fact, that he stayed in bed and dreamed the whole sweet movie. Call it “Inception” for geeks.

Stupid geeks! What’s wrong with you idiots, taking all this pleasure from silly fight scenes and an inscrutable love story? Go back to ComicCon, and clean your rooms!

It’s a goddamn shame that “Scott Pilgrim” (do you mind if I call it that?) hits just as the movie-critiquing profession gets over a couple of the nerdy trends that made it marketable when it was optioned a few years ago. The indie geek-who-gets-girl-despite-being-an-”ass” (as Pilgrim calls himself at one point) genre hit the reef sometime after “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Michael Cera, who became a beloved critics’ kewpie doll after “Arrested Development,” wore out his welcome with a series of mediocre roles, led by “Year One.” What to take out the anger on? “Scott Pilgrim,” obviously.

All the criticism is wrong. Judged as its own movie, and judged as an adaptation, this is a complete success. There is no weak performance; the songs, by Beck, Broken Social Scene, and Metric, are not just catchy but appropriate for the “bands” playing them; the visuals are really unlike anything ever seen in the movies. I’m talking about the effects ripped right out of 8-bit (and occasionally 16-bit) video games, but I’m also talking about director Edgar Wright’s dizzy editing, where conversations are finished across multiple scene changes, and title cards and narrations pop on and off the screen informing us without distracting us.

Let’s talk about the adaptation first. Wright was tasked with compressing a story that takes more than 1100 comic pages to tell — adapt every scene for a movie and it’s probably 6 hours — into around 110 minutes. He gets rid of some dross and loses almost nothing. Yes, I like the comics for the way they drag Scott’s romance with Ramona out over the course of a year, so you see them grow together, but Wright does a better job of making this action convincingly happen over the course of a few weeks than I thought would have been possible. He’s also extremely good at 1) adding jokes that jibe with the material and 2) adapting jokes that you thought only worked in sequential art. For the first example, I’m thinking of the lines he gives Brian Comeau in the double-shot scene (don’t ask) when Scott confronts Gideon. One of the times that Scott walks past him, we hear Brian in a snobby conversation saying “well, the comic was better than the movie.” That’s funny, but it’s the kind of joke you could put in any comic book movie. The other time we overhear Brian, he’s saying “the first album is better than the… first album.” That’s the kind of joke you’d laugh at in a smart indie comedy, the kind of joke that made readers love the “Scott Pilgrim’ comics, and Wright just threw it in there.

I mentioned the casting before — it’s one of the things that makes this work as a movie on its own, not just a faithful adaptation. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona is a little darker and harder-to-get than the Ramona we saw in the comics. I don’t think we ever see her teeth when she’s smiling, and she disappears from the movie more than she does in the comics. (When she flat-out vanishes in volume 5, it’s a huge, heart-breaking deal.) We (by which I mean nerdy guys) immediately fall for the comic version of Ramona. We fall for this Ramona, too, her huge eyes that burn with obvious intelligence. We instantly love Kieran Culkin’s Wallace and Ellen Wong’s Knives, who’s given a lot to do here — so much that the audience is clearly torn on whether Scott should be with her, even though he obviously shouldn’t. (She’s 17!)

I don’t have much to say that doesn’t sound like gushing, so just go see the damn thing. It will make less money than it cost, and the smart kids will call it a bomb, and then the rest of us will keep watching it for decades.

In April, Weigel wrote that the problem with the mainstream media is “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.”

“The NAACP has a zero tolerance policy against racial discrimination, whether practiced by blacks, whites, or any other group.

The NAACP also has long championed and embraced transformation by people who have move beyond racial bias. Most notably, we have done so for late Alabama Governor George Wallace and late US Senator Robert Byrd — each a man who had associated with and supported white supremacists and their cause before embracing civil rights for all.

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.

The fact is Ms. Sherrod did help the white farmers mentioned in her speech.  They personally credit her with helping to save their family farm.

Moreover, this incident and the lesson it prompted occurred more that 20 years before she went to work for USDA.

Finally, she was sharing this account as part of a story of transformation and redemption. In the full video, Ms.Sherrod says she realized that the dislocation of farmers is about “haves and have nots.”  ”It’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,” says Sherrod in the speech. “We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

This is a teachable moment, for activists and for journalists.

Most Americans agree that racism has no place in American Society.  We also believe that civil and human rights have to be measured by a single yardstick.

The NAACP has demonstrated its commitment to live by that standard.

The Tea Party Federation took a step in that direction when it expelled the Tea Party Express over the weekend. Unfortunately, we have yet to hear from other leaders in the Tea Party movement like Dick Armey and Sarah Palin, who have been virtually silent on the “internal bigotry” issue.

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.

According to the USDA, Sherrod’s statements prompted her dismissal. While we understand why Secretary Vilsack believes this false controversy will impede her ability to function in the role, we urge him to reconsider.

Finally, we hope this incident will heighten Congress’s urgency in dealing with the well documented findings of discrimination toward black, Latino, Asian American and Native American farmers, as well as female farmers of all races.”

Oh, but I’d still recommend it.

“It’s absurd,” he said. “People can eventually issue subpoenas and get these records. All he’s doing is preventing the people of Louisiana from seeing the records, while BP will get to see them.”

Adley, who endorsed Jindal in 2007, called the BP transparency veto the latest example of Jindal making “one ethics rule for himself and another from everyone else.” Rep. Wayne Waddell, another Republican and the supporter of the transparency legislation in the House, took that further.

“He wants to preach that he’s brought to the state more transparency and ethics than any other governor,” said Waddell. “At the levels below the governor’s office, he has. But the governor should represent the gold standard, and right now it’s just gold-plated.”

Neither pol argued that Jindal had been negligent at any level in his handling of the BP crisis. The problem, they said, was with how difficult that question was to answer. Questions about whether the National Guard members Jindal asked for have been fully deployed have been basically blown off with spokesmen criticizing the federal government.

“I don’t know if anything is being done incorrectly,” said Adley. “I just want it to be done in public.”

“We don’t really know if anything’s gone wrong,” said Waddell. “Unless you open up the records how do you know? Unless you’re open about how the National Guard is being used, or how the money BP owes is being used, how do you know? Is the money going to be used to plug a hole in the budget?”

Waddell hoped that more media exposure of the transparency issue would get Jindal to think about his own “national ambitions” and revisit it. Adley just wanted to get it right.

“When I leave the legislature,” he said, “on each and every issue I want to find myself on the right side of history, if possible.”