But nearly three weeks after the Dec. 14 bloodbath, the American far right – from elements of the Tea Party to bigoted bloggers to conspiracy theorists – is working itself into an absolute frothy uproar at even the possibility that it may become more difficult to purchase a military-style assault rifle or a magazine that carries dozens of bullets.

It’s reminiscent of the reaction that surrounded the 1994 assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. That legislation, which applied only to newly manufactured guns, helped fuel a powerful militia movement – one that has been eclipsed by the recent surge in the anti-government “Patriot” movement, which includes armed militias.

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Boehner has been hearing it from both flanks of his caucus, with 151 members of his own party voting against the "fiscal cliff" deal, and Republican New York Reps. Peter King and Michael Grimm expressing outrage that Republican leadership failed to call a vote over Hurricane Sandy relief aid.

The Hill reported this morning:

Boehner could also face opposition from the four Republicans punished this month for bucking leadership. Reps. Justin Amash (Mich.), Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), Walter Jones (N.C.) and Dave Schweikert (Ariz.) were all stripped of their committee posts by the Boehner-led GOP Steering Committee, and they've been grumbling ever since.

There has been speculation that 17 Republicans could join forces and deny Boehner the majority he needs to become Speaker. House rules dictate that a lawmaker must receive a majority of the votes in order to get the Speaker's gavel. Republican lawmakers, including one who is not fond of Boehner, said no such effort is under way.

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Nick Carey of Reuters reports that in the Senate, Tea Party groups are eyeing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ky., Saxby Chambliss, Ga., Lindsey Graham, S.C., and Lamar Alexander, Tenn., all of whom are up for reelection in 2014.

"Many people here have watched Mitch McConnell's voting record and are dissatisfied with what they've seen," Eric Wilson, executive director of the Tea Party group the Kentucky 9/12 Project, told Reuters. "There are some potential candidates working in the background and doing the right thing."

"If a credible candidate comes forward, then Saxby Chambliss is in major trouble," said Debbie Dooley, a founder of the Atlanta Tea Party.

"I am over 90 percent certain that if there is a reliably conservative candidate in 2014 he will have my total support," Joe Dugan of the Myrtle Beach Tea Party in South Carolina also told Reuters.

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The story first came to public attention in early December, when David Corn and Andy Kroll at Mother Jones magazine reported that “former Rep. Dick Armey, the folksy conservative leader, has resigned as chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the main political outfits of the conservative movement and an instrumental force within the Tea Party.

“Armey, the former House majority leader who helped develop and promote the GOP’s Contract with America in the 1990s, tendered his resignation in a memo sent to Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks, on Nov. 30. Mother Jones obtained the email on Monday, and Armey has confirmed he sent it. The tone of the memo suggests that this was not an amicable separation … Armey demanded that he be paid until his contract ended on Dec. 31; that FreedomWorks remove his name, image or signature ‘from all its letters, print media, postings, web sites, videos, testimonials, endorsements, fund raising materials, and social media, including but not limited to Facebook and Twitter’; and that FreedomWorks deliver the copy of his official congressional portrait to his home in Texas.”

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Don’t bet on it.

Even if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cooperates by not mounting a filibuster and allows the Senate to pass a bill extending the Bush tax cuts to the first $250,000 of everyone’s income, Boehner may not bring it to the House floor.

On a Thursday conference call with House Republicans he assured conservatives he was “not interested” in allowing such a vote if most House Republicans would reject the bill, according to a source on the call.

Democrats are confident that even if the nation technically goes over the cliff January 1, Boehner will bring such a bill to the floor soon after January 3 — once House Republicans have reelected him Speaker – and it will get passed.

But this assumes Boehner and the GOP will be any more swayed by public opinion than they are now.

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I hope that includes the president.

On a day marked by rumors of action that mainly turned out to be false – thanks in part to a Facebook post by soon-to-be-former Sen. Scott Brown – it was easy to believe the phony blame game that apportions equal responsibility to both sides, even though it's perfectly clear that Democrats have compromised to a fault, while the GOP won't. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid misdiagnosed the problem when he said House Speaker John Boehner was running a "dictatorship" – if he was a dictator, he could have at least passed Plan B. Reid's playing Dueling Floor Rants with the impotent Mitch McConnell could make anyone say "a pox on both their houses."

Of course, Reid was right on one point: The simplest way to resolve at least the looming tax hike problem is for the House to pass the Senate bill that extends the Bush tax cuts for everyone but the top 2 percent of taxpayers. I'm not sure I trust Reid or House Democrats who claim it would get enough Republican votes, plus all the Democrats, to pass the House – never underestimate the power of Tea Party dead-enders in the caucus -- but it would be an interesting test, for all sides.

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The problem, of course, is that the Tea Party’s power resides in Republican primaries, where conservative purists wreaked considerable havoc in the past two election cycles. This included, famously, McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, where the minority leader’s protégé was crushed in a 2010 GOP Senate primary by Rand Paul. Now McConnell has to worry about suffering a similar fate in two years, especially if his handling of the current fiscal impasse evokes cries of treason from the base. How could this square with claims of fading clout for the Tea Party?

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Since the failure of his Plan B proposal for extending the Bush-era tax cuts for all but the riches Americans -- those with an annual income of $1 million or more -- pundits and pols have been raising the spectre of a new speaker of the House come the next Congress. The pundits, for once, appear to be onto something.

At the right-wing Brietbart.com, Matthew Boyle writes of a plan by conservatives to wrest the speaker's gavel from Boehner by changing the rules of the vote to a secret ballot, under the reasoning that, if Boehner was unable to determine who voted against him, he would be unable to visit retribution on those members should his speakership survive the vote.

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From The Washington Post:

The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.

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In a letter posted on its PAC website, the group defended itself for continuing with its "Great Gun Giveaway" (a follow-up to its "Machine Gun Social"): "We have given the Federal Government permission to disarm school officials by force of law and threat of imprisonment. They are now incapable of defending the children under their care. This is the reality. Does this not need to be changed?"

"We refuse to allow the Left and the Liberal mindset to once again hijack the conversation as they have and allow the political hacks to pass laws that continue to limit our inalienable right to protect ourselves and the most defenseless among us," the group said.

Raffle tickets are $20 for the AR-15 (also the assault weapon used in the shootings), and $10 for the handgun, according to the flier for the raffle.

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From earlier:

Depending on how the "fiscal cliff" negotiations go, Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., may challenge John Boehner, R-Ohio, for his speaker spot.

The National Review Online reports that Price, who recently lost a bid to become GOP conference chair to Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., is reportedly mulling a bid for speaker, and is talking with other conservatives including anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

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Because of this No Money Rule, then, nobody should be surprised that there was almost no mention in any of the media of the real news behind Jim DeMint's announcement that he is leaving the U.S. Senate to head the Heritage Foundation. And that real news is this: His announcement is perhaps 2012's most biting message yet about the supremacy of money in American politics. Yes, even in a year whose presidential race was utterly dominated by super PAC special interest cash, nothing tells the story of where the true authority in politics lies than a sitting senator leaving a top post in the national government to lead a corporate-funded think tank.

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To be sure, there was a time a few years back when DeMint’s stature and visibility was dependent on his Senate service. His initial victory in 2004 lifted him from the obscurity of the House to a perch from which he could attract attention from the conservative movement and the national press corps. And he exploited that opportunity for all it was worth, positioning himself as an ideological purist and playing the role of conscientious objector when his fellow Republicans sold out conservative principles (as he understands them). Active involvement in Republican primary races around the country grew out of this, with DeMint launching the Senate Conservatives Fund to provide political and financial support to fellow true believers, even – or especially – if they were up against candidates with substantial establishment support.

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DesJarlais, who easily won his reelection campaign, is an antiabortion Tea Partyer, and has been embroiled in a controversy after the Huffington Post obtained a transcript of a phone call from 2000 in which DesJarlais pressured his mistress, also a patient, to have an abortion.

HuffPo reports:

After The Huffington Post reported the transcript of that recording -- which was included in filings from DesJarlais' three-year divorce proceeding -- the congressman declared that it was made without his knowledge. However, the later release of his full trial transcript showed that DesJarlais was fully involved in the recording.

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It began with Judson Phillips of TPN, who explained on World Net Daily last week that there is still hope for Romney, if 17  of the 24 states that voted for him decline to participate in the Electoral College on December 17.

Phillips wrote:

According to the 12th Amendment, for the Electoral College to be able to select the president, it must have a quorum of two-thirds of the states voting. If enough states refuse to participate, the Electoral College will not have a quorum. If the Electoral College does not have a quorum or otherwise cannot vote or decide, then the responsibility for selecting the president and vice president devolves to the Congress.

The House of Representatives selects the president and the Senate selects the vice president.

Since the Republicans hold a majority in the House, presumably they would vote for Mitt Romney, and the Democrats in the Senate would vote for Joe Biden for vice president.

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Rep.  Shelly Moore Capito , R-W.V., is a moderate Republican who announced her candidacy on Monday, and could be a strong challenger to Dem incumbent Jay Rockefeller, who will face reelection in 2014. But Capito is facing an early onslaught of criticism from the right for being "too liberal."

“Congresswoman Capito has a long record of support of bailouts, pork, and bigger government,” Club For Growth president Chris Chocola wrote in a press release. “She voted to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for massive expansions of government-run health insurance, giveaways to big labor, and repeatedly voted to continue funding for wasteful earmarks like an Exploratorium in San Francisco and an Aquarium in South Carolina. That’s not the formula for GOP success in U.S. Senate races.”

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1)  Fealty to manifestly discredited belief systems (cultural, economic, religious, and scientific);

2)  Fealty to disgraced, ideological leaders whose arteries are hardening, rhetorically-suicidal and/or slow to get demographic “death spirals;”

3)  Justified anxiety that “rebranding” different enough to engage newly-empowered centrists will alienate far more base zealots already feeling besieged from both sides.

4)  Reactionary robber barons will keep afloat any “anti-business Obama” gang, whatever the setbacks, with plenty more billions to secure favorable permits, subsidies, laws, and deregulation.

In a nutshell, how does a party of insular, rigid true believers, thrusting warlike middle fingers towards modernity, talk itself into modernizing just because it lost one election? Aside from putting lipstick on a pig, where’s the miraculous (earthbound) agency that modernizes angry, resentful Tea Partiers whose outrage targeted the very diverse, younger, secular crowds now crowning the future?

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But a fight is breaking out on the right over the precise significance of these defeats, and what can be done to avoid a repeat in 2014.

In the wake of this month’s election, the outgoing chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, suggested the committee might junk its hands-off approach to Republican primaries going forward.

“What is the goal here?” he asked. “I think the goal is to elect principled conservatives in November, not just nominate somebody in the primary that has very little chance of getting elected in November. That doesn’t advance the conservative agenda, because you have to get elected before you can govern.”

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