TPMDC fleshes out FreedomWorks' involvement with the "grassroots" evolution of the tax day tea parties, w hich seem to curiously overlap with the agenda of the clients at Dick Armey’s lobbying firm:

There are, of course, differences between MoveON and FreedomWorks. But that raises a couple interesting questions, such as: Who first proposed holding tea party events? When did major conservative organizations get involved. And how much support have they gained along the way?

The answer to the first question is "FreedomWorks." The answer to the second question is "right from the start." And the answer to the last question is "less than you'd expect, given the months of hype."

The first tea-partyish events occurred in February in Seattle, WA, Denver, CO, and Mesa, AZ around the time President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law--but they didn't have an explicitly Tea-based theme. If they had a theme of any kind it was "pork" and government waste. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote a post about the Seattle protest called "From the Boston Tea Party to your neighborhood pork protest." And in Denver, protesters shouted, "No more pork!"

That all changed on February 19, when CNBC commentator Rick Santelli erupted in anger on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, and proposed a "Chicago Tea Party" for traders to protest the government's plan to provide mortgage assistance to distressed homeowners.

The idea took hold and on February 27, a handful of cities across the country hosted protests that involved genuine tea (or at least the use of the word "tea"). One of those tea parties, in Tampa, FL, occurred from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. on Friday February 27. According to the website Tampa Bay Online, it was organized by "John Hendricks, a Tampa-based consultant."

John Hendricks turns out to be John Hendrix, who by phone earlier today described the events as completely spontaneous. "These are independent groups, not coordinated," he says, "and most of the people, including myself, have never done anything like this." He even said that two different groups in Tampa emerged simultaneously, both called the "Tampa Tea Party," both unbeknown to the other.

I asked him where the idea came from. "Tom Gaithens," Hendrix said. "He's with FreedomWorks."

"Oh really?"

"He sent an email out with his network of contacts to see who could help."

The event, Hendrix said, drew somewhere in the ballpark of 200 protesters, and there were, by his count, 88 people on hand at peak. That's not very many people. Henke may be right, in a sense, about the distinction between astroturf events and genuine protests--but this appears to be, at best, somewhere in between the two. There was certainly not enough burning furor about the stimulus bill or the bank bailouts in Tampa to drive residents into the streets without the help of Dick Armey's 501 group.

Over time, the Tea Party Protest Movement (or whatever you want to call it) has grown. There were larger tea parties in March, and if you've been watching Fox News, you know that tomorrow (tax day!) Tea Parties are scheduled to occur in cities across the country. That growth has been facilitated in part by such favored grassroots techniques as robocalls, which readers have been tipping us off to for nearly a week, and early estimates suggest that the largest of tomorrow's parties will draw about 5,000 people