A new billboard in downtown Mason City, Iowa features our President Obama, flanked by photos of Hitler and Lenin. The billboard headlines “Radical leaders prey on the fearful and naive.” Last fall that billboard said “Obama-Nation, Live Free or Die” with the Communist symbol of a hammer and sickle. It's brought to you by the North Iowa Tea Party. Iowa state Tea Party coordinator John White says, “everything Obama has done is ‘lock-step’ with what Hitler did in his day.” The Tea Party was initially created, funded, and promoted by operators and funders like Dick Army and David Koch. But by appealing to the worst in people, by basing their pitch on "no" and fear and paranoia, Dick Armey and his rich buddies have created a mobster. The Tea Partiers now appear to just be the most extreme right-wingers of the current crop of Republicans, trying to repackage themselves as patriotic instead of the bigots and racists some have shown themselves to be. Conservatives like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater wouldn’t even recognize these creatures from the darkside. In 1996, observing the post-Reagan swing of the Republican party to the hard reich, true conservative Barry Goldwater, just two years before his death, told Bob Dole, "We're the new liberals of the Republican party. Can you imagine that?" With the 1998 death of Barry Goldwater, the fate of the Modern Republican Party was sealed. They've become total and incoherent shills of billionaires and transnational monopolies. And, tragically, they seem to be taking some Democrats and much of this once-great country with them