The teabaggers seem to go by many different names. It's not a single organization and new tea parties pop up here and there all the time...
I googled "tea party" and found teaparty.org, teapartyexpress.org, teapartynation.com, teapartypatriots.org on the first page. I'm sure there are more.
Wikipedia lists some of the supporters of the Tea Party Movement:
The movement has been supported nationally by prominent individuals and organizations, including:
501(c)(4) Non-Profit Organizations:
- Tea Party Patriots, an organization with more than 1,000 affiliated groups across the nation that proclaims itself to be the "Official Home of the Tea Party Movement.
- Americans for Prosperity, an organization founded by David H. Koch in 2003, and led by Tim Phillips. The group has over 1 million members in 500 local affiliates, and led protests against health care reform in 2009.
- FreedomWorks, an organization led Dick Armey. Like Americans for Prosperity, the group has over 1 million members in 500 local affiliates. It makes local and national candidate endorsements.
- Tea Party Express, a national bus tour run by Our Country Deserves Better PAC, itself a conservative political action committee created by Sacramento-based Republican consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates.
For-Profit Businesses:
Tea Party Nation, which sponsored the National Tea Party Convention that was criticized for its $549 ticket price.[103][104][105][106] and because Sarah Palin was apparently paid $100,000 USD for her appearance (which she put towards SarahPAC.)
Informal Organizations and Coalitions:
- The National Tea Party Federation, formed on April 8, 2010, by several leaders in the Tea Party movement to help spread its message and to respond to critics with a quick, unified response.
- The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, a loose national coalition of several dozen local tea party groups.
Michele Bachmann will be addressing a rally in Des Moines tomorrow, an event organized by the long established Tea Party Express.
Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell will appear at another event on September 3, organized by the newly formed Tea Party of America. One of the co-founders left Herman Cain's campaign to form this new group. Both Palin and O'Donnell took part in earlier Tea Party Express rallies.
I find this teabagging thing very confusing. It looks like a bandwagon, with people jumping on it for reasons that don't appear to be very clear.
The formation of his latest arm of the so called Tea Party, by being associated with two grifters like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell, may have been motivated by opportunism and greed.
Some people have been talking about Sarah Palin running for a third party, but I can't see all these different groups coming together to form a single party. The organizers of each group would have to get off their individual gravy trains and defer to a single central entity. Also, if they form a party for Sarah Palin's benefit, what would they do with Michele Bachmann?
There must be a deadline for registering a new party in time for the 2012 elections, but I couldn't find much about it.
The Tea Party rhetoric is disruptive and poisonous to the political discourse, but as a party they simply don't exist.
When I started researching this post, I hoped to write something enlightening, but ended up more confused about the whole thing than before...
I suspect that's exactly the goal of the Tea Party Movement: To spread confusion.
