Sorry I got distracted and didn't reply right away. It wasn't that your post wasn't worth responding to, rest assured.

By now you should have access to the inside of TPN. I don't see any posts furiously denouncing me for lying about them, so I think I can safely assume you found that I've been scrupulously accurate. How else could I be, considering that I consistently urge other people to join up to verify what I say? That was the whole point of my joining up: I got tired of wingers accusing me of ignorance about the tea partiers and of blindly swallowing the "mainstream media's lies and distortions". I get my information direct from the first tea party organization set up by Dick Armey.

Everything I quote came from the email newsletter I receive every couple of days from TPN; and only from the month of June. That includes the soccer rant, which I don't recall was credited to The Spectator. It doesn't get any better when read in full, and it still is a good illustration of the loopy obsessions of tea partiers. They think the US is about to be taken over by socialists, and they have the time to bitch about the popularity of soccer?

Next to the loopiness, the squeals about too-high taxes and too-big government seem distinctly pro forma. They're on the checklist of standard rants, but you can tell that tea partiers don't find the boring ideological stuff nearly as engaging as the paranoia and hatemongering.

Over the course of the last half year I watched as TPN struggled with the task of writing a manifesto. Look around, and you still won't find one. Their first few attempts were awful, and the best they managed to produce was a mishmash of generic rightwing slogans, to wit "smaller government!" and "lower taxes NOW!". What's apparent is that the tea party "movement" is as much a social club as it is a political movement, and it's the social aspect, the "birds of a feather" thing, that's sufficient to explain the uniform age and ethnicity of tea partiers.