Halvorson: Shutting down the national parks and arresting people and kicking people out of their homes, because they happened to be located within the boundaries of the national parks… Who was kicked out of their homes? Halvorson: There were – well, you’re familiar with all the various stories of private property. I don’t want to get into those details. I’m just citing some open source examples. I hope that’s not where this interview is going…

There’s a poll that came out last week I saw that 60 percent of people said that they wanted to clean house – including their own representative… Where was that poll from? I believe I saw it on Drudge Report.

I don't know where the tea party movement keeps finding these people, but it doesn't appear that well will be running dry anytime soon. Pennsylvania Republican Art Halvorson is looking to boot incumbent Bill Shuster for not being conservative enough, and boy howdy is he a piece of work I don't know what Halvorson means by "open source" in this context, but he appears to think it means "things I heard from crazy people."See above re: crazy people.

The interview is telling on a number of points. Halvorson is a tea party/goldbuggian true believer: He considers John Boehner a sellout, says that Paul Ryan was "perceived" to be "more conservative than he really is", and is convinced that shutting down the government would have worked, eventually, if only John Boehner had crafted a proper exit strategy. Or something. But he's still clever enough to hedge, when it comes to stating outright his preferred plans for hot-button programs like Medicare and the VA.

For those who might have been expecting the Republican Party to moderate themselves in the face of this last fiasco: There is zero evidence of that happening. Not a bit. The Cruz wing of the party and the hard-right are as convinced as ever that the problem was not a failure to judge American popular opinion on their parts, but insufficient radicalism on the part of their fellow Republicans. Halvorson here points to a poll showing horrific disapproval numbers for Congress as support for primaries against Republicans to replace them with farther-right representatives.

The only reason I'm skeptical of talk of a "Republican civil war" is that it implies two sides fighting against each other, and that's not happening. The more pragmatic (I won't say more "moderate", lets just call it "less loud") powers of the party made a big show earlier in the year about rebranding, but it died a quick and quiet death and there simply hasn't been any real pushback against the continued party radicalization. The crackpots are in charge.