We have all heard of Bush Derangment Syndrome (BDS), but I think we may have a new one.  Earlier this year, on February 8th, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) released the results of a study on the Tea Party.

Key bits:

Rather than being a purely grassroots movement that arose spontaneously in 2009, the Tea Party developed in part as a result of tobacco industry efforts to oppose smoking restrictions and tobacco taxes beginning in the 1980s, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.

“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party movement have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda,” said senior author Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) and a UCSF professor of medicine and American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor in Tobacco Control.

You can view the entire press release HERE.  Be sure to read through to the end, where you will be overjoyed to see that this cockamamie study was financed by your Federal tax dollars.