general

"Tea partiers" come from the omnipresent group of homegrown racists that always resents redistribution of tax income to help the poor. But who don't begrudge the money to blow up non-whites in parts of the world they will never visit. There wouldn't be any "tea parties" if the US had a caucasian president--the current activism of these whiners is exacerbated by their fear of a "minority takeover."
The US media supports this ostensible movement to (a) sell papers, and (b) create an appearance of "balance" even though progressives have yet to enact any legislation that couldn't have been passed in the Bush era.

The reason we read blogs and stopped taking the corporate media seriously is they keep spinning fiction to sell papers. From Alternet:

Four years ago, when millions of Americans took to the streets to support the human and civil rights of immigrants and, by association in the public mind, Latinos, the news media scarcely covered the marches -- even though they drew larger crowds than any other marches in the history of the nation, including the oft-dramatized culture-changing protests over the Vietnam War.

Fast-forward four years, to the Tea Party Convention, which boasted all of 600 registrants and [Sarah Palin] and the contrast in news coverage is astonishing. The news media, including progressive talk radio and blogs, have been crowing about the big Tea Party "movement" for days now. USA Today has taken a poll about a Tea Party candidate’s viability in presidential elections.

In short, what we are seeing is a mind-boggling double standard, and a wholehearted swallowing of right-wing propaganda as fact, in an American news media whose mathematics deem one Tea Party member to be greater than 4,000 human rights marchers.

This seems completely self-evident, but there's the New York Times this morning with a photo of teabaggers on its web site front page. The same paper that "reported" on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction but managed to underplay the size of the antiwar rallies in the streets of its own city.

E.B.E.

"E.B.E. is Lucas Rodenbush, from California (and originally Carrollton, Texas, I seem to recall reading in a bio somewhere). His tech-house tracks from various EPs from 1999 to the present feature very subtle minimal melodies and a lot of attention to the craft of the sound. Lush, trippy pads; abstract tones as hooks; solid danceable beats. He is like a god to me." - Tom Moody, Deep Grooves magazine

Tony Williams Lifetime, "Something Spiritual"

"...a track from Lifetime's first LP, Emergency! It's Tony, John McLaughlin, and Larry Young with one of the all time great seven note riffs. From the 'jazz fission' era, as Kodwo Eshun calls it, before what became Fusion gelled and grew codified. I would compare it to Soft Machine One (with a guitar and no singer) and the earliest Krautrock." - Tom Moody, Deep Grooves of the '60s magazine

Tony Williams Lifetime, Ego LP

"The personnel are: Ron Carter, bass and cello; Khalid Yasin (Larry Young), organ; Ted Dunbar, guitar; Don Alias and Warren Smith, percussion; Tony Williams, drums, singing, all songwriting.

"This is a very strange album I got in a cutout bin for a dollar. I was amazed to see it was a Verve/Polydor 'listener request' reissue. All these years and I thought only I liked it. Tracks 1-5 I call the 'guitar side' and tracks 6-9 the 'organ side,' with incredibly eeriely beautiful Hammond B3 work by Young. Williams' singing is an acquired taste but kind of adds to the weirdness, and the lyrics are great. This is one of my favorite records. 'Clap City' is filler and not representative of the depth of this release. I would start with Lonesome Wells, Mom and Dad, or The Urchins of Shermese.

"There was briefly a YouTube up of this combo live in Canada. Very murky but exciting to see the setup and players. It was pulled fairly quickly. Something tells me ol' Ton watches his copyright crap carefully. [Williams died several years before YouTube -ed.]" - Tom Moody, Deep Grooves of the '70s magazine

From the annual TED conference (Technocrats Embrace the Dharma) comes "The Shirtless Dancing Guy" theory of leadership. In a video shown at the conference, a man dances a goofy dance by himself outdoors, then another man runs up and joins him, then a mob forms, all dancing the goofy dance.

Simplified, the shirtless dancing guy is a "lone nut" until someone follows him--it is the "first follower" that turns solo insanity into a mass movement. This isn't offered as a parable of the Third Reich but rather some kind of wisdom about building people-powered initiatives. MyDD, a center-left site, cites it with favor.

A counterexample might be the scene in Forrest Gump where Tom Hanks runs cross-country. Hanks' "first follower" asks "why are you running?" and joins him without getting a decent answer. More runners join. Three years Hanks suddenly stops, in the middle of Monument Valley, leaving a hundred runners stranded without a clue.

The shirtless guy in the TED video is dancing at a music festival. Presumably everyone came to dance and have fun and then go home, so "leadership" has a pretty low bar.

(edited for clarity, tone)