Tea Partiers Turn on GOP

Obama 'swinging wildly' at them, needs to co-opt energy

(NEWSER) - The Tea Party is mad as hell and ... that's about it, writes Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. Beyond anger, the Tea Party "has no leader. It has no address, no phone, and no Washington headquarters. It is everywhere and nowhere." When a Post posse tried to track down 2,300 local tea-drinking groups, it could verify only 647. Cohen writes that "the Tea Party exists in the vapors," bound only by anger and the Internet. The latter eliminates the middleman—"in this case an actual political party, which was once called the organization because it actually organized." More»

Most can't exactly explain

(NEWSER) - Why does the tea party hate Barack Obama? For a vast number of reasons—most of which apparently aren't rooted deeply in reality. New Left Media asked protesters at the National Tax Day demonstration to explain their motivations, and perhaps predictably gathered some less-than-well-thought-out answers in this video, picked up by the Huffington Post . “Did you know president Obama is considering banning fishing in America? Fishing!” says one wide-eyed woman. More»

Talking head, Fox News provide the movement's 'water cooler'

(NEWSER) - Of all the data points from the recent mega-poll of tea party members , one stands supreme to Nate Silver: They really like Glenn Beck. "Do the math, and you'll find that 59% of those who do think highly of Beck consider themselves a part of the tea party. This is, in fact, the single biggest differentiator of any of the items that the NYT asked about: not ideology, not any particular political belief, but whom they watch on television." More»

Haven't tea partiers ever heard of sharing?

(NEWSER) - Steve Almond used to hate taxes. But now he hates the Tea Party movement (or, more accurately, the Tea Party's “series of highly publicized tantrums”) even more…and he’s ready to confess something “almost heretical”: He actually loves Tax Day. Here’s why:

• It made him organized: Not only does this newfound organization protect him from an IRS audit or, you know, prison…it also helps him to analyze his spending, which makes it “much harder to fall prey to the junk mail come-ons of credit card companies," he writes on Salon .

Movement is "growin' and steamin,'" says Palin

(NEWSER) - A political dream team—for the tea party set, anyway—of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann wowed the faithful today during a joint appearance in Minneapolis. "The tea party is growin' and steamin,'" declared Palin, who showed up to give Bachmann a boost in her campaign for re-election to Congress. She spent much of her speech lauding Bachmann for standing up to the trio of "Obama, Pelosi, and Reid." More»