A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

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On March 7, the Georgia Senate passed SB 469, a bill backed by the state’s Chamber of Commerce and introduced by state senators including Waffle House executive Don Balfour. Along with a battery of other anti-union measures, the bill bans picketing that targets private residences and causes “intimidation” or disturbs the “quiet enjoyment” of local residents. (“Quiet enjoyment” apparently being a more fundamental right than freedom of speech.) SB 469 would increase potential punishments for picketing or “conspiracy,” and it would make it easier for companies to request and receive injunctions from judges halting demonstrations. In a letter to Balfour, Ted Jackson, the sheriff of Georgia’s largest county, wrote that “The role of law enforcement shouldn’t be to police free speech but the intent of this bill seems to be just that.” (Balfour did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.)

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For the last few months, the world has been fascinated by your frenzied search for a presidential candidate who is not Mitt Romney. We know that you find the man inauthentic and that you have buoyed up a string of anti-Mitts in the Iowa polling -- Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich -- buffoons all, preposterous figures whom you have rightfully changed your minds about as soon as you got to know them.

It was quite a spectacle, your quest for the non-Romney -- and I think we all know why you undertook it. In ways that matter, Romney is clearly a problem for you. His views on abortion, for example, change with the winds. Ditto, gay rights. He designed the Massachusetts health insurance system that was the model for Obamacare. And he’s even said that he approved of the TARP bank bailout, the abomination that ignited the Tea Party uprising in the first place.

Grievous offenses all, I have no doubt. Still, my advice to you idealists of the right is this: Get over it. Not for sell-out reasons like: Romney has the best chance of beating Obama. No. You should get behind the charging Massachusetts RINO (your favorite term for a Republican-In-Name-Only sellout type) because, in a certain paradoxical way, he may turn out to be the truest of all the candidates to the spirit of your movement.

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Frank, author of the bestselling book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" provides a pithy and nuanced explanation of what he calls the "hard-times swindle." He spoke with Salon from his father's home in Kansas City, Mo.

Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, "We're all socialists now." What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?

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The crackup isn’t just Romney the smooth versus Gingrich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Republicans who just scotched the deal to continue payroll tax relief and extended unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of the year, versus Senate Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for it.

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps making agreements he can’t keep, versus Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who keeps making trouble he can’t control.

And not just venerable Republican senators like Indiana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of foreign policy for more than three decades, versus primary challenger state treasurer Richard Mourdock, who apparently misplaced and then rediscovered $320 million in state tax revenues.

Some describe the underlying conflict as Tea Partiers versus the Republican establishment. But this just begs the question of who the Tea Partiers really are and where they came from.

The underlying conflict lies deep into the nature and structure of the Republican Party. And its roots are very old.

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But first and foremost, the 12 men and women from seemingly polar spots on the political spectrum agreed on this: The meeting never happened.

“I think it’s all very, very important that we state very clearly that this was not a meeting between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement,” declared Donald Rallis, an Occupy Richmond member, as the meeting wound to a close. His sotto-voce assertion meets with a flurry of “up twinkle” hands -- or vigorous head nods -- depending on the individual's political leanings.

In the context of two political movements where individual thought is prized -- and where surreal events often influence outcomes – Rallis' denial of reality made perfect sense.

“None of us want to be open to the accusation that we are trying to hijack the movement,” he explained.

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Having gone through Michele “the founding Fathers ended slavery” Bachmann, Rick “I’d close down the federal government if only I could remember what it is" Perry, and Herman “all this stuff twirling around in my head” Cain, Republican voters have now embraced their latest unelectable stooge, a narcissistic, ethically challenged trough-feeder and third-rate history professor whose  brilliant ideas include a ludicrous two-track Social Security option and undermining the Supreme Court.

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The film's producers have released an apologetic press release explaining what went wrong:

The 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is known in philosophical and political circles for presenting a cogent argument advocating a society driven by rational self-interest. On the back of the film's retail DVD and Blu-ray however, the movie's synopsis contradictorily states "AYN RAND's timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life..."

Did you spot the error there? Rand's Objectivism is staunchly opposed to "courage and self-sacrifice," along every other essential component of basic human empathy, because it is a philosophy for angry teenage boys who imagine that they're intellectually superior to everyone around them.

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"Today marks the beginning of a new era in Arizona politics," declared Randy Parraz, the co-founder of the Citizens for a Better Arizona, which spearheaded the recall campaign to great derision last January. "The reign of Senate president Russell Pearce has finally come to an end."

As the darling of the right-wing  American Legislative Exchange Council and an influential ideologue in the nativist-tinged anti-immigrant movement, however, Pearce is not the only loser in the election upset.  With more than 90 percent of his campaign funds coming from corporate lobbyists and out-of-district contributions, allowing him to vastly outspend his opponent, Pearce lost by a nearly 10 percent margin -- 53.4 percent to 45.3 percent -- to Republican newcomer Jerry Lewis, a moderate Mormon leader who largely ran his grass-roots campaign as a referendum on Pearce's extremist views.

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Walker was behind the successful push to restrict collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin earlier this year, and he has now become tbe target of a recall campaign. Unions have been emboldened by the win in Ohio, and they must now collect 540,000 signatures by Jan. 17 to force a recall vote, the AP reports.

Here's the email from Tea Party Express, a prominent Sacramento-based Tea Party group run by longtime GOP operatives. It arrived under the subject line, "We have some very bad news!"

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Andrew Jackson, nicknamed “Old Hickory” because he had a wooden leg, was a hero of the War of 1812. Where everyone else had been busy fighting the English and Canadians, Jackson wisely spent the war battling Indians, who had been planning to use the distraction of the war to continue existing on land that rightfully belonged to citizens of the American Republic.

Jackson eventually won so many battles that the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States, which was amazing because the U.S. was not even at war with Spain and had not even particularly wanted Florida that much.

Jackson was wildly popular across the United States, and his supporters urged him to run for president. But the corrupt big-city elites wouldn’t let a regular guy like Jackson, who preferred simple domestic ale to fancy imported ale and enjoyed the occasional stock-carriage race, anywhere near the White House. In 1824, these elites conspired to deny Jackson the presidency through a shady backroom deal in the House of Representatives. But Jackson would not be denied. He spent the next four years organizing grass-roots events across the nation, where true patriots declared their intent to take their country back. At his famous 8/25 rally, he urged Americans to remember how they felt the day after the British burning of Washington, 10 years earlier, and said America should always be as it was on that day.

Jackson’s brilliance lay in his support for Democracy. Jackson appealed to Real Americans -- middle-class and even poor white males, who knew, because Jackson told them, that all their problems were the fault of bankers, rich merchants and other elitists. These freedom lovers also knew that Jackson’s various opponents were all in the pocket of the National Bank, and these bankers wanted to give their jobs to freed slaves and possibly Indians.

Jackson’s opponent was President John Quincy Adams, an effete big city intellectual with a fancy degree, who wanted to spend taxpayer money on frivolous endeavours like “science” and so forth. Jackson, on the other hand, was full of bullets from getting shot all the time, and swore a lot, and had a parrot.

Jackson campaigned on commonsense solutions like cutting the deficit, ending the Bank, and killing more Indians, and voters turned out for him in droves. His inauguration was an awesome ‘80s teen movie-style party that everyone in America was invited to, and the rudeness of the revelers caused high society types to say “my word” shortly before they were thrown, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. Jackson was presented with a giant wheel of cheese, which he invited all Americans to come and eat. He was shot another time but still didn’t die. He killed more Indians and censored anti-slavery materials sent through the U.S. mail.

Jackson followed through on his No. 1 campaign promise, and ended the Second National Bank. It was widely known at the time that the Bank was responsible for the recent Great Panic, and was manipulating currency on behalf of the wealthy and connected. In addition, the bank was plainly unconstitutional. As Jackson wrote:

“But if [Congress] have other power to regulate the currency, it was conferred to be exercised by themselves, and not to be transferred to a corporation. If the bank be established for that purpose, with a charter unalterable without its consent, Congress have parted with their power for a term of years, during which the Constitution is a dead letter. It is neither necessary nor proper to transfer its legislative power to such a bank, and therefore unconstitutional. Swag me the fuck out.”

So Jackson vetoed the bank. Wrong-headed historians blame the following period of easy credit and rampant speculation followed by inflation, panic and lengthy depression on the bank veto and Jackson’s requirement that government land be purchased with gold instead of suddenly worthless currency, but all of that was actually Martin Van Buren’s fault.

After his presidency, Jackson went on to invent outlaw country music.

"A Tea People's History" is available for $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes.

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In fact many icons of the American Revolution were worried about the same thing and battled mightily against the unfettered power of the banks more than 250 years ago -- a struggle that continues to this day.

Even before the Declaration of Independence, the passage of an obscure British law called the Currency Act of 1764 was a major colonial grievance that contributed to the American Revolution. This law prohibited American colonies from issuing their own legal tender and was seen as an effort to lock the colonies under the monetary control of the Bank of England. Benjamin Franklin was a colonial agent in London at the time and lobbied strenuously to have the law repealed.

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Conservative by nature, I dislike big cities, and tend to avoid crowds. Even in my 20s, I’d no more have joined the drug-addled migration to Woodstock than volunteered for sex-change surgery. We spent that week in Dublin, visiting Jonathan Swift’s tomb—the 18th century Irish satirist who took a dim view of human nature.

Everything else being equal, all it might have taken to put me off Occupy Wall Street was a widely circulated photo of an overweight Jerry Garcia lookalike wearing nothing but a loincloth, dancing barefoot and tootling on a flute.

That said, things are very far from being equal. Or even halfway fair.

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Definitely not. This is not a party, like the Tea Party, that seeks to directly shape the policy and electoral process. Because it is explicitly leaderless, it is difficult to imagine a Michele Bachmann or Eric Cantor emerging as a standard bearer of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Given their reliance on Wall Street money, as well as radical demands from many protesters, the Democrats will find it almost impossible to channel “the 99%” into an electoral tidal wave next year, the way the Republicans rode the Tea Party to victory in 2010.

But that does not mean comparisons to the Tea Party should be dismissed. There are striking parallels between the two movements when viewed through the lenses of politics, society and history.

Some similarities are obvious. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street both oppose the bailouts of the banks orchestrated by the two parties in Washington. The two movements are thick with people who feel they have little say in the political process. And supporters on each side think the middle-class “American dream” is nearly extinct.

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He's a very likable person. He works very hard. He's very smart. And he is a Massachusetts moderate Republican. It is the Nelson Rockefeller problem. I mean, there is a natural ceiling.

This is not actually an original observation. Others have drawn parallels between Romney's current effort and Rockefeller's failed bid for the GOP nomination in 1964, when he lost out to Barry Goldwater, and there's plenty of superficial appeal to this thinking: Two men from the Northeast, each with a gubernatorial background, each personally wealthy, and both widely perceived as moderates. And there is a chance that Gingrich will ultimately be proven correct, that this perception will make it impossible for Romney to win over the GOP's Tea Party base and capture the nomination.

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