On Mar. 21, at a rally sponsored by a group called Floridians United, between 3,000 and 5,000 people showed up at the Lake Eola amphitheater in Orlando, Florida, to not only rail against "wasteful Washington spending," but also to call for the impeachment of the president.

One local television station reported that Floridians United "staged a Boston Tea Party-style protest, hoping to make it loud and clear to politicians that they were tired of bailouts and what they called a push toward the socialization of America."

"These `tea parties' apparently seek to build on the outburst from CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago mercantile exchange, when he lashed out at the `losers' who had gotten in over their heads on mortgages and rallied the traders into booing President Obama's efforts to reduce the number of foreclosures," Robert Parry, a former AP and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s, told me.

"Santelli's rage, which was highlighted by other NBC news programs...became known as the Chicago Tea Party. Overnight, Santelli became a folk hero on the Right and the `tea party' emerged as a way of denouncing Obama's liberal reforms," Parry added.

Former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich's American Solutions for Winning the Future - an organization that bills itself as non-partisan, while raising millions of dollars from top-shelf longtime Republican Party donors - announced that it was endorsing the Nationwide Tax Day Tea Party.  

The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition was set up a month or so after the Obama inauguration by the Dontgo Movement, Top Conservatives on Twitter, Smart Girl Politics and now includes American Solutions.

"The goal of the Tax Day Tea Party is two-fold," Juliana Johnson of Urquhart Media, who is doing the PR work for the coalition, told me via e-mail. "The first is to show the president and members of Congress how upset we are and that we will not sit idly by while they destroy our country. The second is to rally conservatives together and build strong coalitions in every state."

Despite the signs at the Florida rally, impeachment "is not one of our goals," Johnson said.

Several other groups, including Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, are also sponsoring their own tea-parties.

For the American Family Association, "TEA stands for `Taxed Enough Already,' and is meant to invoke the Boston Tea Party," Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me via e-mail. "It's actually a fairly clever media overture, and in the hands of some of the more sophisticated right wingers, it might get some traction."

"But it fails for two reasons: The overwhelming majority of Americans got a tax cut under Obama, and the project is being run by Wildmon's AFA, a group that people long ago stopped taking seriously."

At the AFA's TEA (Taxed Enough Already) website, Wildmon's AFA offers up a a pretty broad list of grievances, slicing and dicing abortion, immigration, child pornography in with economic issues.

"Are you fed up with a Congress and a president who:

*    vote for a $500 billion tax bill without even reading it?  
*    are spending trillions of borrowed dollars, leaving a debt our great-grandchildren will be paying?
*    consistently give special interest groups billions of dollars in earmarks to help get themselves re-elected?
*    want to take your wealth and redistribute it to others?
*    punish those who practice responsible financial behavior and reward those who do not?
*    admit to using the financial hurt of millions as an opportunity to push their political agenda?
*    run up trillions of dollars of debt and then sell that debt to countries such as China?
*    want government controlled health care?
*    want to take away the right to vote with a secret ballot in union elections?
*    refuse to stop the flow of millions of illegal immigrants into our country?
*    appoint a defender of child pornography to the Number 2 position in the Justice Department?
*    want to force doctors and other medical workers to perform abortions against their will?
*    want to impose a carbon tax on your electricity, gas and home heating fuels?
*    want to reduce your tax deductibility for charitable gifts?
*    take money from your family budget to pay for their federal budget?

"It's hard to say how effective any of this will be," said Robert Parry, who is currently editor of Consortiumnews.com, a 13-year-old investigative news Web site. "Because the Right has a large news media apparatus...it can spread and popularize its outrage quickly."

"But the protests often have an awkward quality to them, like the renamed `freedom fries' before the Iraq War or the crushing of Dixie Chick CDs after their lead singer criticised George W. Bush," he added.

"On the other hand, the crude personal attacks on the Clintons - which also started early in that administration - combined with the relentless verbal abuse from Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Savage and Fox News helped to undermine Clinton's legitimacy in the eyes of many voters."

Rob Boston noted that these events are the perfect vehicle for Newt Gingrich, who "is trying to forge a new alliance between the Religious Right and the far-right `all-taxes-are-evil' crowd. I'm sure he [sees himself as a] lead[er of] this movement and regain his rightful place in American political life and perhaps even run for president."

Gingrich's new group, Renewing American Leadership, "has been working on the TEA rallies with the AFA and other organizations," Boston noted. He also "has a history of exploiting Religious Right groups to advance his political career."

Overall, Boston doesn't see the tea parties as being the vehicle that will transform the rage the U.S. public feels over the various bailouts and bonuses into a coherent movement: "The Religious Right has spent years backing the GOP and the Republican candidates whose economic policies have brought us to this point. For these groups to now pretend that they are suddenly standing up for the little guy who is feeling the squeeze is simply beyond belief."

"These days, Obama has a very high approval and it hasn't changed much over the past month. I don't believe the Religious Right attacks on him and the TEA rallies are having any effect. Most Americans don't even know about them. The people attending these events are the same lunatic fringe that always turns up for events like these. Most of them are probably dividing their time between attending these rallies and filing lawsuits claiming that Obama is not an American citizen."

'Tea Party' Anthem in the making?

If you're going to have a `Tea Party' that will rouse the masses, won't a theme song be helpful? Apparently rested from one of the most ill-conceived and ill-attended tours in the history of presidential politics - Our Country Deserves Better PAC's 40-city pre-election Stop Obama Tour - country singer Lloyd Marcus (http://www.lloydmarcus.net/index.html) hopes to add his voice and his lyrics to the party.

The African American president of an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Conservative People of Color, recently appeared on the Fox News Channel, where hoist Bill Hemmer, publicized the song that Marcus hopes will become a "Tea Party Anthem." (Hear it here: http://www.lloydmarcus.net/)