Altadena Tea Party Leads 2010 Grassroots Movement

Don't know if it's the first of the year, but there's a tea party today up in Altadena. The event's sponsored by my friends at the Pasadena Tea Party. I'm not sure if I'll make it up there (school starts Monday and I've still got some planning to do, but we'll see). Robert Stacy McCain's still in L.A., however, and he's expecting to cover it.

There's a lot of news on the tea party front, that's for sure. Fox News had this report yesterday, "Tea Party Movement Poised for Strong Start in 2010." And see also Newsbusters on Kate Snow's report on the tea parties at ABC News.

Dana Loesch, the St. Louis blogger and tea party activist, has her "Fake Interview with RNC Chair Michael Steele." It's a great live-streaming webcast:

And of course, Sarah Palin's at the center of a lot of the buzz. From Politico, "Palin's Tea Party Raises Eyebrows":

Sarah Palin’s plan to deliver the keynote address — for a fee — at next month’s first-ever National Tea Party Convention is getting renewed attention in light of her rejection Thursday of an invitation to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

The decision to blow off CPAC — traditionally seen as the year’s must-attend event for the conservative establishment — in favor of a little-known convention is prompting some soul-searching among CPAC supporters, and is being interpreted as a calculated play by the former Alaska governor to cast herself as the potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate of the high-energy, anti-establishment tea party movement.

But it’s also renewed questions about her political judgment and brought scrutiny on the Tea Party Convention, which kicks off two weeks before CPAC’s Feb. 18 start date and has cast itself to some degree as a more homegrown, grass-roots alternative to the traditional conservative conference.

“It’s a missed opportunity for her, for sure,” said GOP operative Brad Blakeman. “CPAC is an established mainstay of conservatism that those seeking to be active in 2010, 2012 and beyond should take advantage of to be seen and heard, while the tea parties are a manifestation of frustration that is loosely organized and hasn’t proven itself at the polls.”

Palin has committed to speaking at April’s Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, considered a must-attend for prospective candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination.

Still, the CPAC snub, combined with the tea party commitment, were clearly intended to send a message, asserted Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState.com, which is owned by a publishing firm that is co-sponsoring CPAC. “I get why she did it,” he said. “It is a purposeful decision on her part to try to claim a segment of the conservative movement as her own.”

Though he said it has caused some conservatives to question whether CPAC is losing relevance as new conservative activists affiliate more with the tea party movement than with establishment conservative and Republican groups, Erickson predicted that CPAC is “going to draw a lot more people and a wider range of both conservative voices and conservative age groups” than the Tea Party convention.

More at the link (via Memeorandum).

Plus, Doctor Zero, at Hot Air's Green Room, dicusses the coordinated effort on the left to destroy the tea party movement, "Targeting the Tea Party":

The Tea Party movement has grown with astonishing speed. Swaddled in discussion-board posts and nursed with e-mail over the past year, the movement is now a month away from speaking with a unified voice for the first time, at its first national convention in Nashville. The transition from demonstrations to conventions marks an evolution from expressing need to taking action… from describing what is wrong to declaring what would be right.

A concerted attempt to discredit and marginalize the Tea Party movement has developed with equally amazing speed. The dimmer bulbs in this pinball machine of contempt, such as Chris Matthews, have worked hard to make the derogatory, sexually tainted slang term “teabaggers” popular. The term spread to supposedly mainstream, “impartial” journalists with viral efficiency. It’s hard to imagine a comparable grassroots movement, with a racial or collectivist agenda more agreeable to the Left, suffering this kind of crude insult. Mocking nicknames would never be slapped on a group of illegal aliens agitating for greater welfare benefits. That level of elite contempt is reserved for middle-class folks who object to paying for those benefits. The media covers Tea Parties with the same condescension they show to any unseemly spectacle of tax serfs refusing to “pay their fair share.” To those who believe all virtue resides in the compassionate power of the State, resistance always equals greed.

The Tea Parties became impossible to dismiss after the massive demonstration in Washington, following the 9/11 commemoration. It therefore became necessary to slander them. The original strategy was to portray them as violent lunatics, a bit of intellectual crabgrass planted as far back as the infamous Defense Intelligence Estimate released by the politicized Department of Homeland Security last April. Even as Major Nidal Hasan was praising jihad in seminars and peppering al-Qaeda with Facebook friend requests, and the Underwear Bomber was singing the praises of the World Trade Center murderers, Janet Napolitano squeezed her eyes closed and finger-painted “right-wing extremists” as the hot new terrorist threat. The report came out a week before the big Tea Party protests on Tax Day.

The domestic terrorist smear didn’t stick, so the race card was hauled from the bottom of the deck. Once again, MSNBC muppet Chris Matthews served up the fast-food version of this poison, with his deranged insistence that “every single teabagger in America is white.” Remember: Matthews didn’t write this script, he’s just doing a clumsy job of reading it. Someone slipped him instructions to carefully insinuate the Tea Party movement is tinged with racism, and he responded by turning pink and screaming “They’re all white!”

Ignoring this drivel based on the pathetic audience of MSNBC hosts would be a mistake. These cellar dwellers do the ground work for the media slander machine, sending toxic clouds of smoke upstairs for the more “respectable” journalists to notice after a discreet interval. After a few months of Chris Matthews confusing Tea Party footage with “Birth of a Nation,” the NBC anchors who don’t have to suffer wearing the MS Of Shame can start talking about the clouds of controversy swirling around the allegations that Tea Parties are suspected of reportedly harboring racist thoughts. Laughing at Matthews isn’t enough. It’s essential to laugh at anyone who even thinks about taking him seriously.

Not all of the Tea Party’s enemies are on the Left. Some of them are nominally conservative elitists like David Brooks, who haven’t thought elitism all the way through, and realized it leads inevitably to collectivism – because if the “educated class” is so magnificent, it makes sense for them to run the world, and resistance to their brilliant designs is stupid by definition. You can see the first glimmers of this truth in Brooks’ dismissal of the Tea Parties as “a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against.” Being against things is reactionary and blockheaded, you know. Intelligence demands progress!

The Tea Party convention made a bold choice in selecting Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker for their convention. It was also very considerate of them – since the same people hate Palin and the Tea Parties, for the same reasons, their enemies can reduce their carbon footprint by carpooling to Nashville.

It has been suggested that Palin might not have been the most strategic choice for a keynote speaker, since she’s not running for any office in 2010.

More at the link.

And be sure to check Doctor Zero's bio-page. The dude's a killer analyst!