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Robin Stublen

Tea Partiers Now Forming Circular Firing Squad

Zachary Roth | February 17, 2010, 2:54PM

Tea party in Hartford, Connecticut in 2009

The level of internal tension within the always fractious Tea Party is reaching a boiling point, in the wake of yesterday's meeting with RNC chair Michael Steele and amid early efforts to build a third party out of the grassroots movement.

A major Tea Party group has announced its opposition to the idea of creating a third party -- drawing scorn from at least one activist. And a new anti-Steele website warns of the "'hijacking' of the Tea Party Movement by the GOP." Taken as a whole, the infighting suggests intense and fundamental philosophical differences among Tea Party factions, just as the movement is being hailed as a political force.

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Topics: Everett Wilkinson, Jenny Beth Martin, Michael Steele, Republican National Committee, Robin Stublen, Tea Parties, Tea Party Patriots

Tea Party Express

'The Tea Party Movement Is About To Be Hijacked': Activists Slam Plan For Convention

Zachary Roth | January 11, 2010, 9:00AM

In the latest sign of rancor in Tea Party circles, a convention billed as an effort to bring together conservative activists from across the country is being attacked by some leading Tea Partiers as inauthentic, too tied to the GOP, and -- at $549 per head -- too expensive for the working Americans the movement aspires to represent.

The National Tea Party Convention, scheduled for early February in Nashville, grabbed headlines after announcing that Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann would appear as speakers, Palin as the keynote. According to a message on the convention's website, the event "is aimed at bringing the Tea Party Movement leaders together from around the nation." But organizers are a long way from unifying the notoriously fractious movement.