Spotlight on the Tea Parties: Tell us about your experiences

Chris Regal, the Community Manager of Townhall.com, is looking to find out about your experiences with the tea parties taking place tomorrow all over the country. If you are going to a tea party and want to share your experiences or photos from the event, please e-mail Chris at

chris.regal@townhall.com.For more details about what we are looking for, check out the TownhallTalk blog here and make sure to post all of the details about your tea party experiences on your own Townhall blogs.

These scheduled tea parties are quickly becoming a major signal of discontent with the status quo and they may show the beginnings of a conservative resurgence. Jim Pinkerton, writer and contributor to Fox News,wrote an interesting piece about the growing conservative grassroots movement happening during the Obama administration. Pinkerton noted that “[T]he grassroots on the right side–conservatives, libertarians, pro-lifers, home-schoolers, Flat Taxers, Fair Taxers, and a host of other causers and crusaders–are starting to burn with white-hot political energy.” The tea parties may quickly become the first major symbol of that energy. Many conservative activists are expected to attend these events along with some Republican members of Congress such as Jason Chaffetz and Rob Bishop from Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

The tea parties are likely to be seen as a direct denunciation of some of the spending policies that President Obama has supported so far in his young administration. Townhall.com’s own Hugh Hewitt recently wrote that “Three months into the Obama Administration there is no denying that the president has swung the country hard left from the center-right course that George W. Bush had piloted for eight years.” Many on the left and the right will surely be watching to see how many people show up for these events and how passionate they are about the issue of excessive government spending in this administration. These events may serve as a startling reminder to political officials that the money they are spending on bailouts and budgets is coming from the American people, who want to have a say in how their finances and their children's future tax dollars are being spent.

The media coverage of tomorrow’s tea parties will surely be interesting to watch from a political perspective. While liberal critics are likely to write off these rallies (as they already have been doing), others will see them as a major symbol of a public disenchanted with excessive government spending. Regardless of what these events bode for future political campaigns, these rallies will be seen as a major political event so make sure to send your own experiences with these tea parties to Townhall.com so we can report on them and share some of your stories.