GOP tries to upend NC campaign backed by tea party … Republican officials are working to derail the campaign of a tea party supported candidate in North Carolina — circulating documents from the man's messy divorce that depict him as a pot smoker who has called himself the messiah. It's a risky move for state and national party leaders trying to harness the power of the tea party movement without letting it spin out of their control. Tim D'Annunzio, a congressional candidate in North Carolina's most competitive district, has run an anti-establishment campaign with vows to dismantle entire branches of the federal government. His ideas have drawn support from tea party activists, and he has raised more money from individuals than his GOP rival while also contributing more than $1 million to his own campaign. Republican leaders in both Raleigh and Washington, however, are worried about his electability in November if he wins a primary runoff next month. They're publicizing court documents about D'Annunzio's past legal, martial and business troubles and denouncing him as unfit for office. – AP

Dominant Social Theme: The US Tea Party is full of well-meaning voter who will soon understand that it is in their best interest to seek shelter in the waiting arms of the Republican Party.

Free-Market Analysis: In numerous articles, we have reported on the rise of the US Tea Party movement and its planned demise by the Republican party. We have pointed out how in our opinion Sarah Palin was being groomed to take over as a leader of the more "radical" faction of the Republican party's "big tent" and how militaristic patriotism was woven into Tea Party preoccupations so as to vitiate its anti-establishment bona fides. (After all, it is most difficult to have a genuine free-market movement that includes as a central platform the endorsement of a trillion-dollar military industrial complex.)

And yet, as we thought it might, all the planning, scheming and plain old hard work may have come to naught for the powers-that-be. The usual methodologies of controlling the argument and outcome are not running so smoothly. Sarah Palin may not, after all, have co-opted the Tea Party masses, which are Democratic as well as Republican, or not yet anyway. The potential elite plan – to have Palin emerge like some sort of Alaskan version of Joan of Arc, leading the Tea Party hordes to the doors of the White House as America's first female president – has likely gone awry (at least a bit), foundering on the genuine anger of those within and around the amorphous movement.

It is not just any single one occurrence that has "thrown a spanner in the works" – but a host of unexpected results. Libertarian-conservative Rand Paul winning the Kentucky Republican primary was perhaps one unexpected and dispiriting event. But other victories and potential victories are also casting doubt on the idea that this time around the Republican Party can co-opt the anger and the support of millions of conservative voters who are voting to throw out business-as-usual candidates and incumbents on both sides of the aisle. Here's some more from the AP article excerpted above:

A judge wrote in a child support ruling a few years later that D'Annunzio was a self-described "religious zealot" who believed the government was the "Antichrist." The judge said he was willfully failing to make child support payments. D'Annunzio declined Monday to discuss the specifics of his past and refused to confirm or deny the details of the court documents. He acknowledged having "a troubled upbringing" but that he got himself out of it and changed his life 16 years ago, when he had a religious conversion. "The bigger story is that the power brokers in Raleigh and in Washington are willing to go to any length and use any unscrupulous tactic to try to destroy somebody," he said. "They think that they're losing their control." …

Indeed, there is much that is fairly un-manipulatable about the current incarnation of what the mainstream media has chosen to call the "Tea Party." In an age when Anglo-American power-elite memes and methodologies of control are splattered across the worldwide web, the elite's insistence on business as usual is almost quaint. It is like watching buggy whip manufacturers plan promotional programs at a time when Henry Ford has begun to build his first mass-production auto-facility. (Somebody is out of touch, and it ain't Ford.)

There have in the US been three post-Internet presidencies, and we are not sure of the success of any of them. In fact, we would argue that there has been progressively more alienation from both political parties as the Internet itself has evolved and the information about what is obviously a manipulated and miserable political process has spread.

The presidency of Bill Clinton was most certainly undermined by the Internet and the 'Net-based revelations about Monica Lewinsky. But we would argue that the George Bush presidency was equally undermined – first by the 9/11 truth movement which to this day points out fallacies in the official story, and then by a steady drip-drip of criticism about the regime's inherent untruthfulness and general incompetence when it came to handling both the economy and its serial wars. The result has been the "change-making" election of Barack Obama, America's first black president and a graceful man of considerable "cool" whose approval ratings have apparently degraded as fast or faster than any American president in history.

Does the US stand at a kind of political cross-roads? The issues that have fired up the electorate (everything from over-taxation, to two wasteful, murderous wars, to endless deficit spending in the teeth of a catastrophic economic downturn, to the general incompetence and regulatory overkill of both state and federal governments) are not going away any time soon. And given that both parties have had their chances in the past two decades and have been exposed via the Internet as equally maladroit, duplicitous and corrupt, the idea that Republicans can merely sweep back into power again at the expense of the Democrats seems to be somewhat questionable in our opinion.

It may be that Republicans do well in November, as expected. But if so, it will likely be in large part because there are few other options, not because voters have any expectations that Republicans are going to be "better" than Democrats. The two-party dominant social theme in the US – cultivated for 150 years by the powers-that-be is eroding from a credibility standpoint. In fact, a number of important power elite promotions either have unraveled or are in danger of unraveling. Global warming is limping badly; the EU itself is on the ropes, the war in Afghanistan seems to be failing; central banking is under attack … and the political system in the US, the lynchpin of Anglo-American military and economic power, is struggling, too.

So many of the fundamental processes put in place by the power elite and sustained by a vast matrix of educational, media, military and civilian authorities are foundering that it is difficult to know exactly what is going to happen next. But we will predict that any Republican co-opting of the inchoate and angry American Tea Party will be tenuous at best. Discontent in the Internet era is a moving target, not something to be corralled and brought easily under control. Times have changed.