User:RoyGoldsmith/Tea Party movement History

New Proposed Version

Background
The theme of the Boston Tea Party, an iconic event of American history, has long been used by anti-tax protesters with libertarian and conservative viewpoints. It was part of Tax Day protests held throughout the 1990s and earlier.

The libertarian theme of the "tea party" protest was previously used by Republican Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters as a fundraising event during the primaries of the 2008 presidential campaign to emphasize Paul's fiscal conservatism, which they later claimed laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement.

On January 19th, one day before Obama took office, someone on FedUpUSA posted an invitation "to a Commemorative Tea Party" protest in Boston on February 1st. On February 11th, talk radio host and Fox Business Network personality Dave Ramsey appeared on Fox and Friends, waving tea bags and saying "It's time for a Tea Party."

But the dominant theme seen at some of the earliest anti-stimulus protests was "pork" rather than tea. The term "porkulus" was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on his January 27, 2009, broadcast in reference to both the 2009 "stimulus" bill, which was just introduced to the House of Representatives the day before, as well as to pork barrel spending and earmarks. This proved very popular with conservative politicians and commentators, who began to unify in opposition against stimulus spending after the 2008 General Election.

First protest events
According to FreedomWorks campaign director Brendan Steinhauser, activist Mary Rakovich was the organizer of a February 10, 2009 protest in Fort Myers, Florida, calling it the "first protest of President Obama's administration that we know of. It was the first protest of what became the tea party movement."

New York Times journalist Kate Zernike reported that some leaders within the Tea Party movement credit Seattle blogger and conservative activist Keli Carender with organizing the first Tea Party protest on February 16, 2009, although the term "Tea Party" was not used and this was not the first protest of the Obama administration or of the stimulus. Other articles, written by Chris Good of The Atlantic and NPR’s Martin Kaste, credit Carender as "one of the first" Tea Party organizers and that she “organized some of the earliest Tea Party-style protests”.

Carendar first organized what she called a "Porkulus Protest" in Seattle on Presidents Day, February 16, the day before President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law. Carender said, "Without any support from a national movement, without any support from any official in my city, I just got fed up and planned it." She said 120 people participated.

Carender had contacted conservative author and Fox News contributor, Michelle Malkin in order to gain her support and publicize her event. Malkin promoted the protest in several posts on her blog, saying that "There should be one of these in every town in America," and that she would be supplying the crowd with a meal of pulled pork. Malkin encouraged her readers to stage similar events in Denver on February 17 where President Obama planned to sign the stimulus bill into law.

Carender then held a second protest on February 27, 2009. "We more than doubled our attendance at this one." . By Tax Day six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tea Party protest.

First events identified as "Tea Party" protests
On February 19, 2009, in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC Business News editor Rick Santelli loudly criticized the government plan to refinance mortgages, which had just been announced the day before. He said that those plans were "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages". He then raised the possibility of putting together a "Chicago Tea Party in July". A number of the derivative traders around him cheered on his proposal, to the apparent amusement of the hosts in the studio.

In response to Santelli, websites such as ChicagoTeaParty.com (registered in August 2008 by Chicago radio producer Zack Christenson) were live within twelve hours. About 10 hours after Santelli's remarks, reTeaParty.com was bought to coordinate Tea Parties scheduled for July 4 and, as of March 4, was reported to be receiving 11,000 visitors a day. Santelli's outburst was called "a rant heard 'round the world". It quickly went viral after it received a "red siren" headline on the popular news aggregation website, the Drudge Report.

According to The New Yorker writer Ben McGrath and New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, this is where the movement was first inspired to coalesce under the collective banner of "Tea Party." By the next day, guests on Fox News had already begun to mention this new "Tea Party."

As reported by The Huffington Post, a Facebook page was developed on February 20 calling for Tea Party protests across the country. Soon, the "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across over 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, thus establishing the first national modern Tea Party protest.

- Old, Updated Version -

Background
The theme of the Boston Tea Party, an iconic event of American history, has long been used by anti-tax protesters with libertarian and conservative viewpoints. It was part of Tax Day protests held throughout the 1990s and earlier. The libertarian theme of the "tea party" protest was previously used by Republican Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters as a fundraising event during the primaries of the 2008 presidential campaign to emphasize Paul's fiscal conservatism, which they later claimed laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement.

[MOVE/DELETE?] As home mortgage foreclosures increased, and details of the 2009 stimulus bill became known, including the provision for the AIG executive bonuses, organized protests began to emerge.

"Porkulus", tea bags and early mention of tea party
The dominant theme seen at some of the earliest anti-stimulus protests was "pork" rather than tea. The term "porkulus" was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on his January 27, 2009, broadcast in reference to both the 2009 "stimulus" bill, which was just introduced to the House of Representatives the day before, as well as to pork barrel spending and earmarks. This proved very popular with conservative politicians and commentators, who began to unify in opposition against stimulus spending after the 2008 General Election.

Even earlier, on January 19th, one day before Obama took office, someone on FedUpUSA posted an invitation "to a Commemorative Tea Party" protest in Boston on February 1st. On February 11th, talk radio host and Fox Business Network personality Dave Ramsey appeared on Fox and Friends, waving tea bags and saying "It's time for a Tea Party."

[DELETE? Not pertinent to the Tea Party movement.] Ramsey was on the show criticizing newly-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who that morning had outlined his plan to use the $300 billion or so dollars remaining in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. He intended to use $50 billion for foreclosure mitigation and use the rest to help fund private investors to buy toxic assets from banks.

[MOVE TO LEAD OR DELETE?] The letters T-E-A have also been used by some protesters to form the backronym "Taxed Enough Already".

[DELETE? Not pertinent to the Tea Party movement. May be useful in Tea Party protests article.] Mary Rakovich, along with six to ten others, protested outside a townhall meeting featuring President Barack Obama and Florida governor Charlie Crist. Interviewed by a local reporter, Rakovich explained that she "thinks the government is wasting way too much money helping people receive high definition TV signals" and that "Obama promotes socialism, although 'he doesn't call it that'". She was invited to appear in front of a national audience on Neil Cavuto's Fox News Channel program Your World. Regarding the role FreedomWorks played in the demonstration, Rakovich acknowledged they were involved "Right from the start," and said that in her 2 1/2 hour training session, she was taught how to attract more supporters and was specifically advised not to focus on President Obama.

[DELETE? Not pertinent to the Tea Party movement. Malkin's interaction with Carender reported below. May be useful in Tea Party protests article.] A protest at the Denver Capitol Building was already in the works, which Michelle Malkin reports was organized by the conservative advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, and spearheaded by conservative activist group, Independence Institute as well as former Republican Representative and presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo. Another protest, organized by a local conservative talk radio station KFYI was held in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, on February 18, and brought 500 protesters. KFYI organized the protest in reaction to Obama's visit to the local high school to hold his first public talk on elements of the stimulus bill. By February 20, Michelle Malkin was using her nationally-syndicated column to attempt to present these three protests as a movement to her fellow conservatives, and continued to call for more. "There's something in the air," she wrote, "It's the smell of roasted pork."

Precursor protests in Fort Myers and Seattle
[DELETE?] Competing claims have emerged over which protest was actually the first to organize.

According to FreedomWorks state and federal campaigns director Brendan Steinhauser, activist Mary Rakovich was the organizer of a February 10, 2009 protest in Fort Myers, Florida, calling it the "first protest of President Obama's administration that we know of. It was the first protest of what became the tea party movement."

However, although it was not the first protest of the Obama administration or of the stimulus, New York Times journalist Kate Zernike reported that some leaders within the Tea Party credit Seattle blogger and conservative activist Keli Carender with organizing the first Tea Party in February of 2009, although the term "Tea Party" was not used. Other articles, written by Chris Good of The Atlantic and NPR’s Martin Kaste, credit Carender as "one of the first" Tea Party organizers and that she “organized some of the earliest Tea Party-style protests”.

[EDITED the following three paragraphs.] Carendar first organized what she called a "Porkulus Protest" in Seattle on Presidents Day, February 16, the day before President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law. Carender said, "Without any support from a national movement, without any support from any official in my city, I just got fed up and planned it." She said 120 people participated.

Carender had contacted conservative author and Fox News contributor, Michelle Malkin in order to gain her support and publicize her event. Malkin promoted the protest in several posts on her blog, saying that "There should be one of these in every town in America," and that she would be supplying the crowd with a meal of pulled pork. Malkin encouraged her readers to stage similar events in Denver on February 17 where President Obama planned to sign the stimulus bill into law.

Carender then held a second protest on February 27, 2009. "We more than doubled our attendance at this one." . By Tax Day six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tea Party protest.

[THIS is what I want to delete from the paragraphs above.] [DELETE? Wrong position in the History section.] before, as she says, "Rick Santelli’s rant!" referring to the CNBC reporter who called for protests after the announcement of the AIG executive bonuses in the face of increasing home mortgage foreclosures. [DELETE? Not pertinent.]

"The bluest of blue cities" needs to stay. This movement crosses all lines and Carender, on just 4 days notice got 120 people to show up in Seattle, of all places. "Which is amazing for the bluest of blue cities I live in, and on only four days notice!! This was due to me spending the entire four days calling and emailing every person, think tank, policy center, university professors (that were sympathetic), etc. in town, and not stopping until the day came." [DELETE? Not pertinent.] and that is very much due to the fact that I had collected email addresses at the first one and was able to tell a couple hundred people at once about the second rally.

What Carender has to say tells the reader what she did and how she did it. This goes to the grassroots/populist. We can't edit out Carender. And Rick Santelli's 'rant' was called 'the rant heard 'round the world,' and certainly deserves to be expanded. He called for dumping derivatives in the Chicago river on July 1st, etc. Also there needs to be mention of the FEDUP protests, because they are the precursors to these 'tea parties.' Malke  2010  12:31, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Birth of the "Tea Party" movement
On February 19, 2009, in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC Business News editor Rick Santelli loudly criticized the government plan to refinance mortgages, which had just been announced the day before. He said that those plans were "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages". He then raised the possibility of putting together a "Chicago Tea Party in July". A number of the derivative traders around him cheered on his proposal, to the apparent amusement of the hosts in the studio.

In response to Santelli, websites such as ChicagoTeaParty.com (registered in August 2008 by Chicago radio producer Zack Christenson) were live within twelve hours. About 10 hours after Santelli's remarks, reTeaParty.com was bought to coordinate Tea Parties scheduled for July 4 and, as of March 4, was reported to be receiving 11,000 visitors a day. Santelli's outburst was called "a rant heard 'round the world". It quickly went viral after it received a "red siren" headline on the popular conservative blog drudgereport.com.

According to The New Yorker writer Ben McGrath and New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, this is where the movement was first inspired to coalesce under the collective banner of "Tea Party." By the next day, guests on Fox News had already begun to mention this new "Tea Party."

[EDITED the following paragraph.] As reported by The Huffington Post, a Facebook page was developed on February 20 calling for Tea Party protests across the country. Soon, the "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across over 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, thus establishing the first national modern Tea Party protest.

[THIS is what I want to delete from the paragraph above.] [DELETE? Not needed; unsourced.] Group administrators included Eric Odom of the conservative activist group FreedomWorks, and the group was created by Phil Kerpen from the conservative advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity -- the same group credited for the Denver "porkulus" protest as well as Mary Rakovich's early February 10 protest.

<-- Ignore this.

Background


The theme of the Boston Tea Party, an iconic event of American history, has long been used by anti-tax protesters with libertarian and conservative viewpoints. It was part of Tax Day protests held throughout the 1990s and earlier. The libertarian theme of the "tea party" protest was previously used by Republican Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters as a fundraising event during the primaries of the 2008 presidential campaign to emphasize Paul's fiscal conservatism, which they later claimed laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement. As home mortgage foreclosures increased, and details of the 2009 stimulus bill became known, including the provision for the AIG executive bonuses, organized protests began to emerge.

Use of tea bags and backronym
On February 11, talk radio host and Fox Business Network personality Dave Ramsey appeared on Fox and Friends, waving tea bags and saying "It's time for a Tea Party." He was on the show criticizing newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who that morning had outlined his plan to use the $300 billion or so dollars remaining in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. He intended to use $50 billion for foreclosure mitigation and use the rest to help fund private investors to buy toxic assets from banks.

The letters T-E-A have also been used by some protesters to form the backronym "Taxed Enough Already".

First Rallies
The dominant theme seen at some of the earliest anti-stimulus protests was "pork" rather than tea. The term "porkulus" was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on his January 27, 2009, broadcast in reference to both the 2009 "stimulus" bill, which was just introduced to the House of Representatives the day before, as well as to pork barrel spending and earmarks. This proved very popular with conservative politicians and commentators, who began to unify in opposition against stimulus spending after the 2008 General Election.

Competing claims have emerged over which protest was actually the first to organize. According to FreedomWorks state and federal campaigns director Brendan Steinhauser, activist Mary Rakovich was the organizer of a February 10, 2009 protest in Fort Myers, Florida, calling it the "first protest of President Obama's administration that we know of. It was the first protest of what became the tea party movement." Rakovich, along with six to 10 others, protested outside a town hall meeting featuring President Barack Obama and Florida governor Charlie Crist. Interviewed by a local reporter, Rakovich explained that she "thinks the government is wasting way too much money helping people receive high definition TV signals" and that "Obama promotes socialism, although 'he doesn't call it that'". She was invited to appear in front of a national audience on Neil Cavuto's Fox News Channel program Your World. Regarding the role FreedomWorks played in the demonstration, Rakovich acknowledged they were involved "Right from the start," and said that in her 2 1/2 hour training session, she was taught how to attract more supporters and was specifically advised not to focus on President Obama.

However, although it was not the first protest of the Obama administration or of the stimulus, New York Times journalist Kate Zernike reported that some within the Tea Party credit Seattle blogger and conservative activist Keli Carender with organizing the first Tea Party in February 2009. Other articles, written by Chris Good of The Atlantic and NPR’s Martin Kaste, credit Carender as "one of the first" Tea Party organizers and that she “organized some of the earliest Tea Party-style protests”.

Carendar organized what she called A "Porkulus Protest" on President’s Day, before, as she says, "Rick Santelli’s rant!" referring to the CNBC reporter who called for protests after the announcement of the AIG executive bonuses in the face of increasing home mortgage foreclosures. Carender said, "Without any support from a national movement, without any support from any official in my city, I just got fed up and planned it." Carender said 120 people participated. "Which is amazing for the bluest of blue cities I live in, and on only four days notice!! This was due to me spending the entire four days calling and emailing every person, think tank, policy center, university professors (that were sympathetic), etc. in town, and not stopping until the day came." Carender held a second protest on February 27, 2009, that she and other leaders claim was the first Tea Party. "We more than doubled our attendance at this one, and that is very much due to the fact that I had collected email addresses at the first one and was able to tell a couple hundred people at once about the second rally."

Carender contacted conservative author and Fox News contributor, Michelle Malkin in order to gain her support and publicize her event. Malkin promoted the protest in several posts on her blog, saying that "There should be one of these in every town in America," and that she would be supplying the crowd with a meal of pulled pork. The protest was held in Seattle on Presidents Day, February 16, the day before President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law. Malkin encouraged her readers to stage similar events in Denver on February 17 where President Obama planned to sign the stimulus bill into law.

A protest at the Denver Capitol Building was already in the works, which Michelle Malkin reports was organized by the conservative advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, and spearheaded by conservative activist group, Independence Institute as well as former Republican Representative and presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo. Another protest, organized by a local conservative talk radio station KFYI was held in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, on February 18, and brought 500 protesters. KFYI organized the protest in reaction to Obama's visit to the local high school to hold his first public talk on elements of the stimulus bill. By February 20, Michelle Malkin was using her nationally syndicated column to attempt to present these three protests as a movement to her fellow conservatives, and continued to call for more. "There's something in the air," she wrote, "It's the smell of roasted pork."

First national Tea Party protests
On February 19, 2009, in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC Business News Network editor Rick Santelli loudly criticized the government plan to refinance mortgages, which had just been announced the day before, as "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages" and raised the possibility of putting together a "Chicago Tea Party in July". A number of the derivative traders around him cheered on his proposal, to the apparent amusement of the hosts in the studio. It was called "the rant heard round the world" and quickly went viral after it received a big "red siren headline" on the popular conservative blog, drudgereport.com. According to The New Yorker writer Ben McGrath and New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, this is where the movement was first inspired to coalesce under the collective banner of "Tea Party." By the next day, guests on Fox News had already begun to mention this new "Tea Party."

In response to Santelli, websites such as ChicagoTeaParty.com, registered in August 2008 by Chicago radio producer Zack Christenson, were live within twelve hours. About 10 hours after Santelli's remarks, reTeaParty.com was bought to coordinate Tea Parties scheduled for July 4, and as of March 4, was reported to be receiving 11,000 visitors a day.

According to The Huffington Post, a Facebook page was developed on February 20 calling for Tea Party protests across the country. Group administrators included Eric Odom of the conservative activist group FreedomWorks, and the group was created by Phil Kerpen from the conservative advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity -- the same group credited for the Denver "porkulus" protest as well as Mary Rakovich's early February 10 protest. Soon, the "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across over 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, thus establishing the first national modern Tea Party protest.