I'd like to thank the NY Times' Kate Zernike for this story, because it needs to be said.

Enough Tea Party-supported candidates are running strongly in competitive and Republican-leaning Congressional races that the movement stands a good chance of establishing a sizeable caucus to push its agenda in the House and the Senate, according to a New York Times analysis.

With a little more than two weeks till Election Day, 33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats.

While the numbers are relatively small, they could exert outsize influence, putting pressure on Republican leaders to carry out promises to significantly cut spending and taxes, to repeal health care legislation and financial regulations passed this year, and to phase out Social Security and Medicare in favor of personal savings accounts. 
Scared yet, America?  You should be.  The Tea Party will effectively take control of the Republican Party if the Republican Party takes control of Congress.   Obama will actually develop some sort of elbow condition from overuse of his veto pen.  But that's what we're facing here.

The Tea Party isn't anything new, folks.  it's just the same old fringe lunacy on the right repackaged, astroturfed, and mass produced for consumption.  In fact, just about the only thing people are consuming these days in our economy is Tea Party ideas.  It's the same old litany of hate, the same old "I'm the candidate who stands for something, I stand for being against blah blah blah" and if you value any sort of two party sanity in DC or in the American system as a whole, you'll want to see these guys go down in flames roughly the same height and temperature as the sun's corona.

These guys actually make me miss the Republicans of the 80's.  So if you're going Galt with your vote this year as a progressive because you want to teach the Democrats a lesson, then the lesson that they will learn is "The Tea Party runs this country now and progressives are to be ignored" and that the country should lurch even further to the right.

Because right now a small percentage of folks on the right are about to run rampant over the country, because an even smaller percentage of folks on the left are actually planning on giving a rat's ass.  I hate to bring up, of all things, the lyrics of Rush, but here you are:

"If you choose to stand still, you still have made a choice."

There are better choices in November, folks.  Make them.