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Tea Party redux

Nick Carey was invited on MSNBC last night to talk about his Tea Party special report. Here’s what he had to say:

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Hell hath no fury like a Tea Party scorned

Here’s what Nick Carey had to say today about his special report “Stuck between the Tea Party and a hard place.”

By Nick Carey

Not long after the battle over the 2011 fiscal budget in Washington ended in mid-April, I received a few emails from Tea Party groups expressing frustration with the apparent failure by the Republican Party establishment to follow through on promises that they would cut spending in that budget by $100 billion.

I passed on one of those emails to an editor in Washington and we agreed that it would be a worthwhile exercise to talk to Tea Party groups across the country to see if that frustration was widespread, or if it was merely restricted to a few groups.

My very first call was to a Tea Party member in the South whom I had talked to before for previous special reports on the movement. I told him about the emails I had received and asked if he was frustrated by the budget deal. His answer: “Frustrated? I’m f***ing angry!”

At that point, I knew I was onto something. Dozens more interviews followed with Tea Partiers in 20 states, with all of them to varying degrees expressing anger and disappointment at what they see as an act of betrayal by the Republican Party.

Tea Partiers worked hard for a Republican win last November, driven by rage at President Barack Obama’s health reforms and egged on by Republicans many of whom professed that they, too, were Tea Partiers who would fix the mess in Washington with massive spending cuts. That message was simple and clean cut.

Following the money in O’Donnell’s campaign

Mark Hosenball has been in Delaware and Pennsylvania reporting on the midterm election campaign for our special report “Conservative donors let Christine O’Donnell sink.”

If that’s not enough O’Donnell for you, here’s his report from a bastion of conservative thinking in Delaware:

By Mark Hosenball

Republican Delaware senate candidate Christine O’Donnell may be the darling of both national and local Tea Party groups. But she’s not particularly beloved at one of Delaware’s most august and esteemed conservative organizations.

Among the more venerable institutions of modern American conservatism is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization based in a mansion in suburban Wilmington. The Institute, dedicated to the promotion of conservative principles on American college campuses, has an impeccable pedigree: its first president was the godfather of American conservative thought, William F. Buckley Jr.

But if records filed in Federal court in Wilmington are any guide, it is one of the Delaware conservative organizations least likely to be campaigning aggressively in support of Christine O’Donnell’s Senate bid. This is because both the Institute and O’Donnell are still smarting over an ugly lawsuit O’Donnell filed against the group after she claimed that they had unlawfully fired her as their director of communications and public affairs in 2004.

Highlights from O’Donnell’s grievance against the Institute, originally written up by O’Donnell herself in a rambling 55 page Federal Court complaint, were reported in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine shortly before the Delaware GOP primary and then given added publicity on the Delaware Republican Party’s official website.