Burn.

Putz:

So the Tea Party Movement is well underway.

Weigel:

That’s sort of an overstatement.

There is, indeed, a viral movement afoot to stage protests against President Obama’s spending plans. They are really very small protests. The largest “tea party” Facebook group has a bit less than 3000, and it’ll probably pass that, but many members belong to other smaller “tea party” groups.

Look, I covered the Ron Paul campaign for more than a year, from his launch in early 2007 to his “vote for some third party candidate” press conference. I waded through crowds at Paul rallies that drew 4000 people, ten times the size of any “tea party” we’ve seen so far.

This isn’t to say that the “tea parties” will never, ever take off. Just that it’s quite easy to get attention for an anti-government cause, especially in the blog era, and easy to forget that it doesn’t really matter politically.

Meanwhile, there's a ridiculous conflict of interest here.

...Pajamas Media has started running online ads (spotted on conservative blog Hot Air today), simultaneously encouraging readers to organize their own tea parties and promoting Pajamas Media's coverage of them. "The Pajamas TV team including Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and Joe Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) - are mobilized to help cover this new and evolving revolution," Pajamas' online promotion page reads. The model appears to be that the promise of coverage (partly) motivates the protest, which motivates the coverage.

You think if The New York Times were pulling this, Putz wouldn't be the first to grab a pitchfork?