On the outside Liberty Central Inc. may look like another conservative tea partying lobbyist group, non-profit but accepting donations from corporate sponsors. Take a closer look though, and you’ll find the woman behind the organization is Virginia Thomas, the wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Which some critics are understandably worried might be a conflict of interest.

Rachel Maddow went on a field trip to CPAC yesterday and lived to tell about it. Kidding! She actually says everyone was very nice to her. Maddow came away from her trip with a whole lot of eye-opening swag and some interesting conclusions about the state of the Conservative movement.

The New York Times front page story on the Tea Party movement did not escape Glenn Beck’s attention today. The paper wrote a long feature on the movement, which did not sit well with Mr. Beck.

At all.

Enter the pipe.

Let’s just first qualify this by stating that online polls, for any variety of reasons, are not necessarily reliable. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to note this FOXNews.com poll, in which nearly 160,000 people (ostensibly) participated. The poll asks “What Is the Tea Party Movement About?” Here are your options:

Numbers genius Nate Silver crunches…well…numbers and comes up with some extremely wonky but very interesting scenarios, which he explains in detail here. The general conclusion, and there are a lot of variables, is that Palin has a solid chance at getting the GOP nomination as long as no one asks too many detailed questions about anything. Some interesting notes on the factors weighing into it all after the jump.

Wow. Rachel Maddow will not be giving the Tea Partiers any sort of free pass and once you watch this you may understand why. Specifically, Maddow is criticizing (actually, she’s eviscerating…no joke) what she calls the Tea Partiers “embrace of racist history” — in this case, a call for the return of segregation-era literacy tests.

Mike Huckabee spoke on Fox News yesterday about the Tea Party Movement as a crucial new voting block, lending legitimacy to a group that has been met with derision and mockery. “I’m hoping the Tea Party people will be absorbed into a solid and principled Republican party,” said Huckabee, sounding like someone certainly running for office as a populist.

The New Yorker has jumped in to the Tea Party fray with a longish piece by Ben McGrath, which explores “the social movement that…may have derailed the President’s chief domestic initiative, occurred last fall.” Too little, too late? Hint: No mention of SCOTUS.

There were signs that hard core Liberals were getting frustrated with the President Obama late last year when it became apparent he was not going to go to bat for the public option, but that’s nothing compared this scathing blog post titled “He Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For” [!!!] from fellow Nobel Prize winner and Liberal stalwart Paul Krugman. It’s a doozy.

For a third straight night, Countdown host Keith Olbermann pressed his attack against Scott Brown, whom he first called “racist” and “homophobic,” among other things, then apologized for not attacking harder. Last night, he noted that defenders of Brown had accused him of lying, but offered no refutation. He then laid out the proof of his claims in his new “quick comment” segment and dared someone to disprove him. I’ll give it a shot.

A segment from last night’s Countdown is generating a lot of heat in the conservative blogosphere, with the general consensus being that Keith Olbermann cried “Racism!” on the Massachusetts special election, and cited Scott Brown’s pickup truck as an example.

I watched the exchange between Keith and Howard Fineman last night, and I don’t think the right is being fair to Keith. In fact, I think they might owe him an “attaboy” or two.

Here is further proof that the Tea Party movement may be a great brand, which has been lately “elevated by the media into a political force to be reckoned with in 2010″ but is suffering for lack of leadership and organization. Is the Tea Party movement prime for a takeover? Behold yesterday’s sort of protests at the Detroit Auto Show.

The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan quotes “a Wellesley graduate, a widely traveled, thirty-something, multilingual daughter of Indian immigrants who lives in that most redneck of territories…Union Square, in Manhattan” in his defense of the Tea Partiers. Defending and/or warning against the prevalence the Tea Partiers is apparently the latest media parlor game.

Apparently, the Tea Partiers do not read NPR.org. An animated cartoon titled “Learn to Speak Tea Bag” has been running on the site for nearly two months with little fanfare. Until now. Some folks, not surprisingly, are not thrilled by the use of the term “Tea Bag.” Welcome to the new political decade NPR!

Five days into the new decade and David Brooks, in what sounds like an alternate preamble to Beyond the Thunderdome, is predicting that it will be known as the Tea Party Teens. Why? Tea Partiers are the natural successors to hippies and feminists, of course.

On last night’s show Rachel Maddow, looking back, called the attempted reinvention of the Republican party after the last year’s election (and before that Bush) and the “the greatest show in American politics over the past year.” So who will it be? Maddow taps the Tea Partiers as a the strongest sign of what’s to come.

Sometimes, Worst Person status isn’t enough. In last night’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann not only named Chicago Tea Patriots organizer Catherina Wojtowicz his Worst Person, but condemned her and her followers to hell for mocking a pro-health reform husband and wife who had lost their daughter-in-law and unborn grandchild to untreated double pneumonia.