[Natural Born 54]

Shortly before Santelli’s rant, there were 3 people Wiki credits as being precursors of the Tea Party movement. The first was Rush Limbaugh 3 weeks before ranting about porkulus. Then a couple weeks later, FreedomWorks activist Mary Rakovich protested outside of an Obama town hall meeting in Florida. When reporters interviewed her she ranted about “government wasting way too much money helping people receive high definition TV signals” and got some face time on TV after that. Last was a blogger named Liberty Belle organized a porkulus protest in Seattle. Within days, there were 2 more protests in other locations (Denver & Mesa) followed by Santelli’s dubbing the movement the new Tea Party. That was Feb. 19, 2009.

[gov_bean_ counter]

As a wise leader once said...

"There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.

[ansel12]

It didn’t start a movement but Roger Hedgecock led a tea party in San Diego in the 1990s.

He also fought for the right of our “Normal” group (with T-shirts) to march in the “Gay” Pride parade in those years (we lost).