I don’t have much to add to Dr. Zero and John Podhoretz. Both share excellent overviews of the primary votes from tuesday. Things are shaping up this year just as I had hoped and believed they would. The song above is the official music video of the tea party movie.

It has been so fun to rise up with fellow activists this past year as the tea party movement hit the ground running. So happy to have been a part of history.

Dr. Zero: The Teaparty Imperative

Our Freedom is not for sale

“No one welcomes the understanding that a system they have lived under their entire lives, built over the course of a century, is fatally flawed and headed for collapse. This knowledge is a heavy burden. The Tea Party is determined, not spiteful. It’s about renewal, not doom… demanding better from the political and media elite, not lashing out with blind fury as the light fades from America’s eyes.

This is the Tea Party imperative: No more politicians voting for legislation they haven’t written, or denouncing state laws they haven’t read. No more billion-dollar environmentalist con jobs. No more programs that can never be repealed. No more fraudulent candidates. No more illusory “moderate Democrats” representing a party that abandoned every plausible claim of “moderation” when it rammed the health-care monstrosity down our throats. No more “moderate Republicans” cutting deals with a system only a few years away from crashing down on all our heads.

Arlen Specter got over 480,000 votes last night. Pennsylvania’s District 12 elected the successor of a crook they made Senator-for-Life. The power of incumbency is not to be underestimated. In November, with the future of this country hanging in the balance, we will discover its limits.”

Podhoretz: No Seat is Safe

“The electoral year that began in January with Republican Scott Brown’s staggering victory in the Senate race for Teddy Kennedy’s seat in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts is nowhere near done with us yet — or with them.

What is happening in the 2010 elections goes far beyond the conventional interpretations. Yes, voters are expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo. Yes, conservatives are displaying anger with runaway liberalism and what they perceive as accommodationism. Yes, populists are using their primary votes or special-election votes to stick it to the elites.

None of that gets at the central fact with which all American politicians will be forced to grapple going forward: The era of political stability for incumbents and veteran political players has truly reached its end.

The point is not that every incumbent is vulnerable — certainly Chuck Schumer isn’t — but that every incumbent might be.

The threat might come, as it did to congressional Republicans in 2006 and 2008, from Democrats taking advantage of voter exhaustion with the GOP in districts and states that should have been safe conservative territory. Or it might come, as it has over the past month, from within the incumbent’s party itself.

If Bob Bennett can be ousted in Utah and Alan Mollohan can be ousted in West Virginia — in their own party’s primaries in seats they not only they held for decades, but that their fathers held in turn before them, in states noted for the relative docility of their party’s internal electorate — then anything can happen.”