BOB KRUMM: Teabagging The Establishment.

If you’re attending a Tea Party, please send me pics and reports. I’m going to be busy with coverage for PJTV, but I’ll post what I can.

FROM ROB NEPPELL: A Tea Party aggregator page.

IN THE MAIL: From Brad O’Leary, Shut Up, America!: The End of Free Speech.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why Bankruptcy Matters.

MORE BAD LOCAL PRESS: Dodd’s Costly Errors:

Two years ago, presidential candidate Chris Dodd announced that he wouldn’t be running for the Senate in 2010 but he didn’t mean it.

He only said it to get the Federal Election Commission to let him use leftover millions from his 2004 Senate race to run for president. (The FEC requires a presidential candidate to say he’s not going to run for the office for which the funds were contributed but doesn’t hold him to it. It’s a very thoughtful rule.)

As things turned out, using up his Senate campaign money was a mistake, Dodd’s second, if you consider the first was his decision to run for president. There was a lot of money involved, $4.7 million, and it went toward the $16 million Dodd raised to attract 1 percent of the Democratic Iowa Caucus before quitting the race and moving his family out of their Iowa home and back to Connecticut. . . . And now, with his donor base shrinking, Dodd has to face the first tough Senate race of his career with the mortgage scandal, the AIG bonus scandal, the pardon for a felonious friend scandal, the Irish cottage scandal and, as an extra, added distraction, the charge he was AWOL as chairman of the banking committee while the economy was collapsing. It’s not hard to see why Dodd is redesigning himself as an outraged fixer of the financial mess that evolved while he was running for president.

Good luck with that.

CHARLES RANGEL WINS THE “MIGHTY WINDBAG AWARD.” “Rep. Charles Rangel was given the ‘Mighty Windbag Award’ yesterday by a taxpayer group for his effort to secure almost $50,000 to put a windmill on a Harlem building. The embattled Rangel was singled out for the dubious honor while also winning his second ‘Oinker’ award in two years for pigging out on what the group deemed pork-barrel waste.” A man of achievement.

HAPPY TAX DAY: Here’s a collection of 1040 forms from 1913 to now.

FREE SPEECH in the Obama Age. I’ll bet there’s no comparable violence at the Tea Parties today. But if there were, it would get a lot more attention than this is getting.

Related thoughts here: “When fascism comes to America, it will not be wrapped in the flag or carrying a cross. It will look like it always has looked: Ugly and intolerant.”

VISCLOSKY UPDATE: “Indiana Rep. Pete Visclosky has turned over to the U.S. Treasury about $18,000 in campaign contributions that his campaign said came under suspicion after media reports of a federal investigation of a Washington lobbying shop with ties to the Merrillville Democrat.”

HOT TEA and a good paper. Related thoughts here.

IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THERE WOULD BE no math.

XENI JARDIN REVIEWS Theo Gray’s Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home – But Probably Shouldn’t. Her conclusion: “This is an awesome book.”

PAT TOOMEY WILL run against Arlen Specter.

HOW ARE YOU SPENDING YOUR TAX DAY? C-Span is soliciting videos.

IN TODAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL, I talk about “Tea Party” protests as an Army of Davids phenomenon.

UPDATE: New York Post: Time To Make Some Noise. ” Complaining about taxes is as American as apple pie. But the spending has never been so crazed. Nothing wrong with a few folks reminding the people they put in office that it’s time to get things under control.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Worth noting:

• If you’re a 50-year old-with a college degree, you will pay approximately $81,000 over your working life just to pay the interest on the debt in the Obama budget.
• If you’re a 40-year-old, you’ll pay $132,000.
• And if you’re a 20-year-old, just starting out after college, you will pay a whopping $114,000 just to service the interest on the debt created by the Obama budget.

Plus, IRS workers see double standard on tax errors:

The Treasury secretary, who oversees the IRS, didn’t pay all his taxes. Neither did five other top nominees for the Obama administration, or their spouses.

Now, as Wednesday’s tax deadline looms, some Americans are wondering why they should comply with the arcane requirements of the Internal Revenue Service when top administration officials failed to do the same. Even some IRS employees are upset at what they see as a double standard.

The most criticized example has been Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who admitted not paying $34,000 in payroll and Social Security taxes, saying his failure to pay was an oversight. Five other nominees disclosed similar tax issues, including one as recently as two weeks ago when Kathleen Sebelius, President Barack Obama’s pick for secretary of health and human services, admitted she didn’t pay $7,040.

“Our members are upset and angry,” said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, referring to concern bubbling up within the IRS over unusually strict rules that can cost agents their jobs if they make a mistake. In some cases, IRS employees have lost jobs for simply filing a late return or failing to report a few hundred dollars of interest income.

Instead of loosening the rules for IRS employees, though, shouldn’t we tighten them for the folks at the top? And — just maybe — simplify the tax system to reduce the chance — or the excuse — of honest errors?

Plus, a history: How the Tea Party movement got started.

MORE: I was on C-Span talking about this earlier. Here’s the video. (Sorry — had to remove embedded video as it seems to have killed them.)

[LATER: Here it is via YouTube:]

Plus, from most Big Media, “confusion and ambivalence.” “A good story is to be had, but it’s not exactly a story they want to tell. So what to do?”

Some related thoughts here:

A few years ago, Glenn Reynolds, Rob Neppell, Ed Morrissey and other prominent bloggers tried putting the spotlight on the Bush administration’s runaway spending with an organization called Porkbusters. The outrage they expressed was genuine but it did’t light a fire with enough people.

Little did they know that the Bush administration’s spending would look modest compared with the next administration’s out-of-control spending spree. Little did these fiscal conservatives know that a Democratic administration would overreach as badly as this administration has overspent on one bailout after another.

The Obama administration’s proposed spending trillions of dollars on bailouts lit the fuse that the triumvirate of Reynolds, Neppell and Morrissey tried lighting.

So Obama, Pelosi and Reid succeeded where Reynolds, Neppell, and Morrissey failed! But at least we managed to annoy Trent Lott.

And we might as well run this graphic again. It’s pretty illustrative.

Plus: Rick Santelli: “I’m Pretty Proud of This.” He should be. He didn’t actually start it, but he gave it a huge boost, and a name.

THE HILL: Murtha Draws Donations from PMA Clients:

It’s business as usual for Rep. John Murtha.

The FBI raiding a high-profile defense lobbying shop hasn’t stopped the powerful Pennsylvania Democrat from dealing with its former clients. He’s seeking earmarks for them and accepting campaign contributions from them.

“Business,” indeed.

PIRATE-PROSECUTION NIMBYism.

ABC NEWS ON THE TEA PARTY PROTESTS: “The movement is leaderless and only aligns indirectly with party politics. While many participants will be Republicans, the anti-spending message is more closely aligned with libertarian themes of small government, with many people angry at both Democrats and Republicans.” Indeed.

UPDATE: A warning to Republicans about the Tea Parties. “Practice what you preach when it matters. Not after the fact.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Gary Robinson writes: “That’s the big problem for the movement, and why the administration isn’t terribly worried about it right now. Very soon, there will need to be some form of leadership to give the tea parties direction and focus – to actually turn the multiple independent protests into an effective movement. It will need a few simple, uniform slogans, for example. It’s also badly in need of a media spokesman to give the movement a voice in the major media.” Is he right, or is that old-style thinking that’s obsolete in a new age of dispersed media? I’m guessing he’s right.

MORE: Reader Dusty Raftery writes:

That the tea party protests are leaderless is only partly true. True in that there is no national leader or group of them that either began or carried the movement to where it is right now.

But it is not true that the movement is leaderless. What we will see today is the work of thousands of leaders and at the gathering, thousands more. And as the movement gathers more steam, many of these leaders will become prominent ones, if and as they wish, in their communities, which, I think, is the the great issue undercurrent of these demonstrations — devolving national government power back to the states and localities. In other words, returning power to the people.

Where all politics becomes local, the need for national leaders is less important and issues of great importance do not become a personification of them.

I might add that the success of the movement in returning power to local communities and states might save more than few local newspapers.

Good point.

PJTV: Six Space Policy Musts.

ANDY MCCARTHY ON the Obama Administration and free expression. Hey, they’re in the pocket of the RIAA, so why would they support free expression?

MOTHER JONES: At the White House, Joking about a Torture Investigation?

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: The Dash To Dumb – Special DHS Edition. Among other things, “presenting as ‘open source’ analysis stories that were debunked years ago. One wonders what else these DHS analysts believe that is simply not so. . . . The militia story from April 2007 represents a ridiculous failure by the ‘open source’ analysts at DHS, who are presenting a discredited story. . . . My goodness, a phone call to the BATF could have spared them this embarrassment. Our tax dollars at work.”

HERE’S THE TAX DAY TEA PARTY GOOGLE MAP.

REWARDING HIS SUPPORTERS: Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept. “Monday’s naming of Ian Gershengorn, to become the department’s deputy assistant attorney of the Civil Division, comes more than a week after nearly two-dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library coalitions urged the new president to quit filling his administration with lawyers plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America.”

TEA PARTY DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: It’s here!