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At Politico, Paul Jossey writes of the death of the so-called “Tea Party” movement. The movement didn’t go away on its own, writes Jossey. It was “murdered—and it was an inside job.”

Today, the Tea Party movement is dead, and Trump has co-opted the remnants. What was left of the Tea Party split for a while between Trump and, while he was still in the race, Ted Cruz, who was backed by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In 2014, the Tea Party Patriots group spent just 10 percent of the $14.4 million it collected actually supporting candidates, with the rest going to consultants and vendors and Martin’s hefty salary of $15,000 per month; in all, she makes an estimated $450,000 a year from her Tea Party-related ventures. Today, of course, it’s all about Trump, but Trump rallies are only Trump rallies, not Tea Party rallies that he assumed control of. There are no more Tea Party rallies. [...]

Any postmortem should start with the fact that there were always two Tea Parties. First were people who believe in constitutional conservatism. These folks sense the country they will leave their children and grandchildren is a shell of what they inherited. And they have little confidence the Republican Party can muster the courage or will to fix it. 

Second were lawyers and consultants who read 2009’s political winds and saw a chance to get rich.

Every thinking American knows that Donald Trump has ripped the scab off a very infected wound. We all know that America still suffers from the infection that is racism. But most people figured as long as we didn’t talk about it, we could avoid dealing with it. There were many who remained willfully ignorant.

Then Trump came along, and dissed political correctness. He gave many the freedom to say what they genuinely felt. And guess what shocked the willfully ignorant? The increasingly clear fact that a large percentage of the American population is still racist.

Before anyone in our progressive sphere starts feeling smug, rest assured that when it comes to race relations, liberals are not that different. They are just better at controlling their worse angels. Go to the websites of most NGOs. Attend a Netroots Nation conference. Attend any liberal organization’s conference (I have attended many). How much do they look like America? They almost never do. How inviting are these organizations?

A quick story: When Black Lives Matter interrupted Netroots Nation 2015 in its attempt to have the conference and the candidates address an existential problem, half of the ballroom was irate. Reporters from Blue Nation Review stood outside with cameras, interviewing people exiting the ballroom. When I noticed only black people were getting interviewed, I proceeded to ask the BNR reporter why they were only interviewing black people. She said no white person wanted to go on camera.

In January 1986, I had been in Germany all of one month when the opportunity to go skiing in Berchetsgaden was presented to me. How could I possibly turn down a weekend in the Alps? That was the weekend where I was properly introduced to Germany. We would ski all day in Berchetsgaden, and then would go to a disco in Salzburg at night. As it was summer during this recent return visit, there was no skiing—and there certainly was no dancing. There was, however, sightseeing in the Alps.

I remember standing on the ski slope as a young man, looking up to the Eagle’s Nest on a neighboring mountain. It was the vacation home of the madman that once ruled Germany. It had been turned into a restaurant and tourist spot, but was closed in the winter time due to the treacherous climb up the mountain. I always thought I would come back. I just didn’t think it would take me 30 years.

In dozens of sci-fi stories, heroes and villains alike have ventured to the Centauri system. There’s a good reason: it’s the nearest star to the sun. To be accurate, its the nearest stars to the sun, and of the three stars making up that system, the nearest one is Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.24 light-years away instead of 4.37 light-years for the larger, more sun-like binary stars called Centauri A and B.

Proxima is part of that three-star system, but it’s isolated enough that it could probably host a full system of planets similar to our own without much chance of constant perturbations and collisions with debris from the planetary disks or solar systems of the other two stars. So this news is big, exciting stuff for sci-fi readers and astronomers alike:

The ante for hyping a new exoplanet discovery is a little higher these days, but if rumors are true, this one makes the grade: astrophysicists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) plan to announce they’ve spotted an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in its habitable zone. This, according to an anonymous source quoted in a report that appeared Friday in Der Spiegel.

If you read that link and others like it you’ll soon know as much about this possible planet as anyone else, because there’s not much info out there—yet. But if you want to follow below, we can sure speculate and use our imaginations on what such a world might be like and how we might someday learn a lot more about it, if it does turn out to exist. We can even suggest names for it!

Last week I introduced you all to a friend of mine whose son has been struggling with heroin addiction for 12 years. It began with a car crash that caused traumatic brain injury. He began using heroin after taking opioid pain relievers as directed by his physicians. His story is not atypical as 79 percent of heroin users first abused opioid pain relievers.

The discussion that followed in the comments brought to the surface the other stakeholders that must be included in any discussion of opioid analgesics—the patients to whom the drugs were sold in the first place. Before the widespread use of opioid analgesics, patients with chronic pain were treated with non-opioid medications and various other therapies dependent upon the cause of the pain. Sadly, these treatments did not always provide the relief that patients needed and, frankly, deserved, so the introduction of an opioid analgesic that was marketed  in the early 1990s as safe and less addictive than prior versions was a boon to them. As well as for the doctors who had struggled unsuccessfully to alleviate their pain.

In case you missed this diary, by CathyM, that was in the Community Spotlight earlier this year, you might want to give it a read to get some idea of what hoops our modern medical practice puts patients through when they seek pain relief. And this diary that CathyM wrote for the KosAbility Group is also worth the few moments of your time that it would take to read. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I’ve had many discussions recently with conservatives about Hillary Clinton and, in particular, the numerous investigations of her and Barack Obama. 

One of the questions that came up was, what have congressional investigations been used for in the past and what are their limits? 

In my research, I stumbled on a wonderful, freely available document at the American Law Library titled “Congressional Investigations: A Bibliography” by Matthew Mantel. 

If this interests you, I encourage a full read. But I thought I’d summarize some of the key points here and talk about how today’s investigations differ from the past. 

Donald Trump speaks to the irrational fears of millions of Americans. That these fears are not based on facts is irrelevant to the people who hold them. And they do hold them. They feel them. They cling to them. Many have access to objective information that would debunk their fears, if objective information was relevant to them, but clearly it is not. They will live their fears, and they don't want to be dissuaded from it. They want politicians to address their fears with an unthinking presumption that they are valid. Donald Trump does exactly that. Not because he shares those fears or cares about the people who hold them, but because he can exploit those fears to manipulate the people who hold them to serve his own personal purposes.

Trump wants people to believe that Islamic terrorists are lurking in the shadows, that Democrats are sympathetic and abetting them, that violent criminals are out of control, that people from Mexico are crossing the border to rape women and poison children with drugs, that government regulations are destroying the economy, that Christanity is at risk of being destroyed, and that Hillary Clinton wants to take everyone's guns.

Trump wants people to believe that unless he is elected to Take America Back and Make America Great Again, doom is imminent. He's just a fancier version of that guy with the placard roaming your city center, warning that The End Is Nigh. Except that millions of people actually believe him.

At the moment, Hillary Clinton maintains a strong 8-point lead over Donald Trump in national polls. Meanwhile, Democrats have a good chance of gaining the four seats they would need to regain control of the Senate chamber if Clinton wins, since a Vice President Tim Kaine would be able to break ties. But while election analysts of all stripes have long viewed the battles both for the presidency and Senate as competitive, many have assumed that the fight over the House of Representatives would not be—at least until Trump’s unique toxicity began testing that proposition. So why have prognosticators generally been down on the Democrats’ chances of gaining the 30 seats they’d need to wrest the speaker’s gavel away from Paul Ryan? That’s what we’ll explore.

Congressional district lines are one of the most important reasons. Despite recent court-ordered redistricting in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, 224 congressional districts voted for Mitt Romney and just 211 for Barack Obama, even though Obama won the national popular vote by 3.9 percent in 2012. If we ranked every district from reddest to bluest according to how they voted in the last presidential election, the median seat—the one that would get Democrats a bare majority of 218 if they won every seat bluer than that mid-point seat—you’d land on Arizona’s 2nd District, which Romney carried by a margin of 1.6 percent.

If you could imagine every district in American shifting exactly in step with every change in the national presidential vote (it wouldn’t, but this concept of a “uniform shift” is still helpful in thinking about this problem), Obama would have had to win the popular vote by 5.5 percent just to carry half of the districts in the House. In other words, with a 1.6 percent bump in the popular vote, Obama would have theoretically carried Arizona’s 2nd, just barely turning it blue. And in this polarized era, another 1.6 percent of the vote is a lot to ask for.

Democrats feel optimistic about national and state polls in the presidential race, as they all point to a big win for Hillary Clinton and a major loss for Donald Trump in November. Team Blue hopes those votes seep into down-ballot races, giving control of the Senate back to the Democrats and picking up many House seats.

But anyone who thinks this portends a change in attitude in American politics is wrong. This will be an anti-Trump vote. It will not be a major shift toward the Democratic Party, nor does it mean the implosion of the Republican Party.

Trump’s instability, lack of ground game, insults to everyone short of Vladimir Putin, missteps, lies, hiring of a scorched-earth campaign management team, general craziness—all of the above, and more—mean he’s likely to get clobbered in the Electoral College. His unfavorable ratings are high enough that most voters are unwilling and even scared to put him in office. The latest NBC News/Survey Monkey poll puts his unfavorable ratings at 64 percent. Only 17 percent of Americans think he has the temperament to be an effective president. Many news organizations, FiveThirtyEight, and other poll trackers say the election could be in landslide territory.

Both Republicans and Democrats expect Trump to lose, which is “a powerful predictor of general election outcomes,” as explained in a story on Huffington Post.

Here’s the thing, though. As high as Trump’s negatives are, unfavorable ratings for Clinton are at 59 percent—the same as they were back in May. I write this as a strong Clinton supporter: Clinton’s win in November will be more about voters rejecting Trump than favoring her. What will that ultimately mean for her presidency?

Being Muslim in America—especially if you wear your Muslimness openly—is no doubt a complicated thing. Beyond the travails of practicing a minority faith, looking Muslim makes one especially vulnerable in a time when Donald Trump got where he is to a significant degree by exploiting Islamophobia.

It is no coincidence that hate crimes against Muslims in America are on the rise since Trump began running for president a year ago. Just last week, a New York City Muslim imam named Alauddin Akonjee, along with his assistant, Thara Miahand—both of whom were dressed in religious garb—were assassinated in the street. The assailant was charged with first-degree murder. The prosecutor called the act “coldblooded and premeditated.” 

Ibtihaj Muhammad has come along at just the right time.

People around the globe and here in the U.S. will watch today’s closing ceremonies for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Looking back over the headlines garnered by black athletes and other athletes of color made me think hard about how far we have come—and how far we still have to go on issues of race and racism in sports, and in the societies that they reflect.

Athletic competition, whether amateur or professional, has garnered public interest since sports were invented in the ancient civilizations of Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the modern world where we suffer under a yoke of societal ills, many caused by racial, ethnic, national, and religious divisions, sports competitions have often been the venues to symbolically lessen hostilities and bridge barriers between and among diverse groups of people in the global community.

Sports have often been the means by which individuals from groups who have been historically suppressed and subjugated rise up to fame and acclaim, becoming  champions for the groups they represent. We hear athletes talk of hope and dreams that their individual victories will make a dent in the walls of hate, fear, and mistrust that societies have constructed around groups who are on the bottom rung of hierarchies in race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

We have just had the opportunity to watch American competitors like Simone Biles (gymnastics), Simone Manuel (swimming), and Michelle Carter (shot put) capture gold medals in sports that only recently were devoid of black female gold medal winners. We have also had to observe the excoriation of our gold medal Olympic champion from 2012, Gabby Douglas, for trumped up charges about her lack of displayed “patriotism” (see Chitown Kev’s commentary for Black Kos). 

The road to the Olympics and sports fame has been a rocky one for athletes of color, and we have not completed society’s marathon run against racism—yet.

The nature of APR is such that nearly every Sunday, I launch straight into one of this week’s editorials, generally from either the New York Times or the Washington Post. But this morning, I’ve come across something dire enough that it seemed worth communicating even though it falls outside the editorial page.

Amrith Ramkumar has some unpleasant news about something already very unpleasant.

Zika may pose a danger for far many more of us than pregnant women and babies, a new study suggests.

Mosquitoes have now transmitted the virus in a second area in South Florida, officials announced on Friday, as they advised pregnant women not to travel to the zone in Miami Beach. As the virus spreads in the Americas, with more than 10,000 cases confirmed in the United States, researchers are working to understand its subtleties and develop a vaccine.

In addition to causing the birth defect microcephaly, Zika can wreak havoc in our brains' stem cells, researchers from Rockefeller University and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology found in a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell Thursday.

Zika virus has been around for some time in Africa. Luckily, the version of the virus that originated there has not been noted to bring either the birth defects, or the neurological damage of the strain that has appeared in the Americas.

Unfortunately, it’s the nastier strain which is now spreading locally in the area around Miami Beach. So, especially if you live in the Southeastern United States, start taking precautions now. Check around your home and neighborhood for items that could hold standing water—which includes things as small as disused water bowls for pets and that cup you left setting next to the shed when you were painting the trim, circa 1997. Mosquitoes breed prolifically in very small containers.

When you’re outside, light-colored clothing seems to help, and even if you normally shun harsher insect repellents like DEET, rethink your position. At least for now.

Work on a vaccine for Zika is underway, and if the Republicans will stop treating a deadly, spreading disease like leverage they can use in the umpteenth attempt to sink Obamacare, things could change quickly. Next summer this threat could be over.

But right now, a single bite, from a single mosquito, can ruin your life. Even if you’re not pregnant. Worse still, it can turn you into a vector to carry the disease to many more people. So take some damn precautions. Please.

Right now, I’m feeling ready to get after not just the Culicidae (mosquitoes) but the Vespidae. I’ll tell you about my gripe with them in a minute.

First, let’s do some pundits…