On February 19th Rick Santelli stood up in CNBC’s squawk box and fired the second shot heard round the world. Within hours of his rally cry a website with a video of his rant and an rsvp form had launched for the “official Chicago tea party.” 
A week later small tea parties drew crowds of several hundred to over a thousand in more than a dozen cities across the Unites States. At the same time, planning had already begun for “Tax Day Tea Parties” on April 15th in over 115 cities with high attendance looking promising.
#Tcot (top conservatives on twitter) #SGP (smart girl politics) and Eric Odom of DontGo are relying heavily on social networking and viral media forums to spread the word and organize the Tax Day Tea Parties, and following the hashes #sgpchat and #teaparty on twitter will launch you into a twitterverse of planning. A contest at TaxDayTeaParty.com encourages users to virally market the teaparty event by offering a drawing for a free t-shirt with entries based upon such fields as tweeting and blogging about the site or purchasing t-shirts. Meanwhile, a call has gone out to all Americans to mail a Tea Bag or fax a picture of one on April 1st in honor of the Boston Tea Party.
Santelli’s rant was amazing, a rally cry, a motivational and sensational moment that said what so many were already thinking but afraid to say and thrust it in the national limelight. These events, their organizers, and those who turn out all share something in common with Rick Santelli: an impassioned refusal to accept the poor fiscal and monetary policy that has been the status quo in Washington for so long. There is just one problem, where is Rick Santelli in all of this?
I don’t want just another round of Tea Parties (the Ron Paul campaign had many), I want THE Tea Party. The Rick Santelli Tea Party that hits home our sentiments and makes us decide to drop work, life, and everything else and travel to Chicago just to be there for this momentous occasion. Right now real America needs a Hero not a sophist, and Santelli is about as close as we’ve come. Rick are you out there? Are you listening? I want to go to your Tea Party, in July.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Share
James Thoburn (twitter: @you_count) is the founder of Backyard Politics. Comment here or @reply you_count on twitter to join the conversation.
A taxpayers declaration of independence has been drafted in conjunction with these events. No word yet on who the bold John Hancocks are, but we’d like to send a delegation to the signing convention.
Read it here:
http://www.taxdoi.org/
Glenn Beck is running a similar movement called ‘We Surround Them.’ This sounds pretty solid, it is based on basic principles of human rights, freedom, and family. I highly suggest signing up and sending in a picture for the unveiling tomorrow. I have reason to suspect Glenn Beck is launching a serious political social networking site with this.
Here is the link:
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/21018/
And so he did! (I think). He put all the pictures into this really cool mosaic:
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/program/we-the-people
And announced the launch of http://www.the912project.com
but despite having the ‘biggest server available’ the site has crashed from the load. If this is a social networking site, its going to be huge!