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John King allows Dick Armey to pretend like the Republicans have not already co-opted the Tea Party movement and says they are "grassroots" because they don't have anyone in charge. Of course as Karoli pointed out the other day, we already know that's not true.

The Tea Party Express is not -- I repeat -- NOT a grass roots movement. It's a professionally coordinated corporate PR effort funded and founded by professional PR hacks, principally from the firm of Russo Marsh & Rogers (also known as King Media Group) in Sacramento, CA.

New FEC disclosures have just been filed, so let's have a look at the money trail.

The TeaParty Express is primarily a Howard Kaloogian project. Howard Kaloogian was featured in an earlier Crooks and Liars report on paid agitator Deborah Johns and in this report about bus tour co-sponsor, the BusBank, who was found negligent and responsible for the deaths of 23 passengers.

Or maybe you recall Kaloogian as one of the architects of the Gray Davis recall/Arnold Schwarzenegger coup of 2003.

According to the most recent Tea Party Express FEC disclosures (PDF), employees of the Tea Party Express include Mormon mom Tiffiny Reugner, Amy Kremer, former Tea Party Patriot, Marine Mom Deborah Johns, and Joe Weirzbicki. These are the paid hacks comprising the face of the "Tea Party Express" campaign. Read on...

And of course let's not forget Rachel Maddow's reporting on the topic. Rachel Maddow Recaps Her Coverage of the Astroturf Movement to Kill the Health Care Bill. These groups are not grassroots and John King knows it. Unfortunately CNN is getting about as bad as Fox with promoting them as Karoli noted in her post.

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You gotta' love that the Republicans aren't ashamed to trot good old Diaper-boy Vitter out there to remind everyone about those Republican family values. At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, David Vitter basically tells us what we know already; that the Republicans are using the Tea Party movement to get their base fired up and win elections in the fall. This whole astroturf movement has been nothing but some major turd polishing to try to get the Bush-stink away from the Republican brand.

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The panel of David Gergen, Candy Crowley and John Avlon pretend like the astroturf teabaggers are not tied to the hip with the Republican/conservative movement and that they're some sort of true grassroots uprising. As all of us know, that's not the truth since we've been following the movement since they first started with Fox News promoting them and corporate lobbyist groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity organizing many of these rallies.

Not to mention that their dear leaders like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are working for ClusterFox. Can anyone imagine Al Gore doing what Palin has done after he lost (or had it stolen from him rather) the presidential election, and the media calling his rallies "grassroots"? We already know they wouldn't. For that matter they'd never allow the Democratic establishment to get away with a scam like this.

Funny none of them could be bothered with mentioning how the Tea Party movement got started and who is sponsoring all of these buses we've seen running across the country. Buses CNN has been happy to embed themselves with and hype as well. Instead they're pretending as Candy Crowley said they're a group the Republicans "are going to have to deal with". Sorry Candy, but they're already "dealing with them".

As Dave already pointed out this is what the Tea Party is really all about.

[T]he Tea Party is fundamentally a way for conservatives to reclaim the reins of power while the brand-damaged Republican Party undergoes a right-wing makeover.

This is just one more example of CNN proving themselves to be Fox-lite and doing their best to help the GOP out as well.

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After Chris Wallace points out that Marco Rubio if elected may be considered the first "Tea Party senator" and that he has Grover Norquist's stamp of approval for his stance on taxes, but reads an email from a Tea Party activist that says Rubio has refused to "be vetter" by their group.

Rubio responds by saying that the Tea Party movement "has been mischaracterized in the press as some sort of an organization" and says it's just a "broad based group of every day Americans from all walks of life" and that most of the people attending have never been involved in politics.

While that may be true of many of the people attending, it's the same cannot be said of the people organizing the group. I wonder if Rubio thinks Dick Armey and Tim Phillips have never been involved in politics before? These industry funded astroturf groups that are paying to drive these people around the country in buses are anything but grass roots or detached from the interests of the Republican Party. Since they're also supported by Fox News and their leader Glenn Beck, we're never going to see Chris Wallace point that out though.

Well I've got to give Michele Bachmann credit for being honest for once since we all know ClusterFox helped organize and promote these astroturf protests along with their buddies Dick Armey and Tim Phillips among others. It's just a bit unusual to hear one of them say it out loud.

Given the way these protests are shaping up I've got to wonder how much worse it's going to get before these members of Congress attending these rallies are censured.

Thanks to our good friends at Media Matters who are watching these clowns in much larger doses than I've got the stomach for.

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Mike Huckabee pretends like the tea baggers are not an astroturf movement already and that any semblance of them being a grass roots movement has not been dismissed a long time ago. This had to be one of the strangest panels I've ever seen on Fox with Geraldo bringing in Jesse Ventura, Mike Huckabee and Rod Blagojevich to weigh in on the latest event with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin doing their best to scare the crap out of the American electorate in Tulsa.

After showing some footage of Beck and Palin at their Taking Our Country Back tour, Geraldo has Huckabee and Ventura weigh in. Huckabee of course tries to pretend this group is still a grass roots movement and also fails to acknowledge that the two people he's being questioned about are his fellow employees at ClusterFox and the role they've played in promoting the movement.

Ventura dares to point out that the tea baggers are not anything that could be considered a grass roots movement and Rivera makes sure he doesn't get to say much more about it before ending the segment.

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Rachel Maddow spent the better part of her show recapping her coverage of the health care bill debate and how the Democrats allowing the bill to be delayed in Max Baucus' Finance Committee while they tried to get Queen Olympia Snowe to play nice with them opened the door to the likes of Dick Armey and the rest of the astroturf groups to organize well enough to start disrupting the town hall meetings. And then from there for the Republicans to mislead the public with every ounce of mud they could throw against the wall from death panels to cries of socialism.

You can watch the rest of the segments from the Playlist button in the MSNBC embed player once it starts playing.

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The Republican Party is pulling the strings behind the tea parties but protesters still have some things in common with Democrats, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"The Republican Party directs a lot of what the tea party does, but not everybody in the tea party takes direction from the Republican Party. And so there was a lot of, shall we say, astroturf, as opposed to grassroots," Pelosi told ABC's Elizabeth Vargas Sunday.

"We share some of the views of the tea partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C," Pelosi continued.

"So, common ground with Nancy Pelosi and tea party movement?" asked Vargas.

"Well, no, there are some. There are some because they, again, some of it is orchestrated from the Republican headquarters. Some of it is hijacking the good intentions of lots of people who share some of our concerns that we have about the role of special interests and many tea partiers, not that I speak for them, share the view, whether it's -- and Democrats, Republicans and Independents share the view that the recent Supreme Court decision, which greatly empowers the special interests, is something that they oppose," explained Pelosi.

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The Wall Street Journal's Thomas Frank on C-SPAN's Washington Journal talks about the Tea Party movement and how, as he wrote in his article The Tea Parties Are No 'Great Awakening', the leaders of this movement are just the same characters from the Jack Abramoff story:

How glorious is the tea-party movement? Some talk of its purity of heart, its patriotic spontaneity, and its abundance of republican virtue. To hear others tell it, the movement is but a few steps away from sacred.

After attending the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, the prominent blogger Glenn Reynolds wrote last week in the Washington Examiner that the movement amounted to "America's Third Great Awakening," a massive popular rising against "politicians and parties" that have "grown corrupt, venal and out-of-touch."

How strange, then, that this flowering of populist integrity should have been tended and pruned and succored by a group of Beltway operators known primarily for their venality and insider power. Read on...

Frank, whose books include What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America and The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, as usual gave a really wonderful interview on this edition of Washington Journal. You can watch the entire interview on C-SPAN's web site here.

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I don't agree with Mark Halperin about very much, but I agree with him on this one. After a discussion on Sarah Palin going to speak to the Tea Bag Convention and whether or not this is an independent movement or disgruntled Republican voters, Mark Halperin lists the reasons Sarah Palin will never be President.

Brzezinski: Mark Halerin is there a third party wave brewing? Is it real?

Halperin: It’s real and there for someone who has a lot of money that they could spend tens of millions on a campaign and who had real ideas about how to unite left and right because there is commonality such as going after Wall Street. I see no such person. Can I state three other reasons why to date Sarah Palin will never be president?

Brzezinski: Yeah.

Halperin: One is that Republican elites behind her back think she’d be horrible for the party. Two is, she’s not appealing to anybody but a narrow slice of American life and she’s heading more and more in that direction based on her rhetoric.

And finally and I think it’s best for the country. She has no ideas. She stands for nothing specific. To go into an event like that with the opportunity to say “I hear you disaffected Democrats” and here’s where we need to go. Great opportunity—she wasn’t woken up and kidnapped and flown to this event.

It’s been on her schedule for a long time. To come in so ill prepared for both the event and the interview with no ideas I think forfeits any claim on being a credible national leader right now.

Anyone believe Halperin or the rest of them are just figuring this out now? I sure don't. Don't you just love Peggy Noonan making sure everyone knows what John noted here earlier—that Sarah Palin now owns the tea bag movement which has been co-opted by the Republican Party and Fox News. But that’s been obvious since Dick Armey and Tim Phillips and other astroturfers got in there and started planning rallies. She made sure to let the rest of the cast know that these people will be voting for Republicans even though she and Mike Barnicle tried to act like there were a bunch of disaffected Democrats in that crowd. I doubt there were very many of them if any.

Noonan also claims there were a thousand people watching her. I thought they were only trying to sell 600 tickets and they couldn’t get those to sell out? Nothing like over-hyping the crowd size and calling it a movement when we had quite a few more show up for events like Netroots Nation. They weren’t giving that prime time live coverage on all the cable news stations and saying that the Democrats had better listen to the netroots or they were going to be in trouble the next election.