Apparently Limbaugh slept through the entire 2007 Republican primary campaign. Reacting to a self-identified tea party caller that suggested Rep. Ron Paul, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and former Senator Rick Santorum were the only true conservatives left in the race, Limbaugh reacted in shock at the idea that Rep. Paul would be associated with the Tea [...]

“We need a leader not a reader,” responded Herman Cain to questions recently about whether he had the intellectual horsepower to be President. The general attitude against academia was the topic on the table for today’s Up with Chris Hayes, where some panelists went as far as to call the American right “anti-education” rather than simply anti-elitist, with Ezra Klein left to defend the conservative attitude towards education.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has no faith in the Tea Party’s ability to produce a president. This he noted today in a discussion with Christiane Amanpour on This Week, where he lamented the “very tense” tone currently in Washington and attributed some of that to the obstinacy of the Tea Party.

Occupy Wall Street movement is the exploitation of reports of sexual violence by opponents of the movement, particularly conservatives stung by the negative press that the Tea Party received. At Occupy DC Monday, I spoke with several of the protesters to see if they were aware of the issue, what they thought of the coverage, and most importantly, what was being done to keep people safe.

On today’s edition of Red Eye, Andy Levy called out Alan Colmes for not acknowledging that there are members of the Occupy Wall Street protests who have engaged in less-than-civil means to spread their message. Levy brought up the continued acts of aggression and general chaotic nature of some Occupy Wall Street protestors, and asked Colmes why he thinks it is unfair of media outlets to show the more undesirable elements of the movement, when he had no such objections to tea party coverage.

On America Live Friday afternoon, host Megyn Kelly played referee in a shouting match between Fox News liberal embed Alan Colmes and conservative radio host Mike Gallagher over supposed outrage at Democratic support for Occupy Wall Street. Colmes chided Gallagher, and the media, for focusing on the actions of a small number of protesters, but what really set Gallagher off was Colmes’ comparison of OWS to the Tea Party.

The media’s embrace of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been cause for bitter frustration on the right, where the feeling is that the Occupiers are getting a fairer shake than the Tea Party did. Today, the conservative blogosphere is abuzz about a video of an Occupy San Diego protester asking for a moment of silence for the White House…and the guy who put a bullet into a White House window. It’s a strange moment, for sure, but hardly worth the comparisons some are making.

Sarah Palin offered some advice to Mitt Romney, encouraging him to more openly embrace the fiscal and social conservative side of the Republican party, and to develop a more robust relationship with the Tea Party movement. This morning on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, host Martha MacCallum asked Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson and liberal “embed” Alan Colmes to discuss Romney’s strategy in engaging the powerful Tea Party contingent, which Carlson put in remarkably stark terms.

Every now and then, Mediaite likes to take a deeper look at what topics are getting coverage and who’s being ignored by the broadcast and cable news. Fortunately, we have the tools that make this all possible, in the form of TVEyes, a site that chronicles nearly every word uttered on TV. Today’s look inside the television landscape reveals Gloria Allred pushing her client out of the spotlight, a conservative movement possibly popping up on QVC, and the sad dismissal of Gary Johnson by the mainstream media.

Massachusetts candidate for US Senate Elizabeth Warren continues to pioneer the art of grassroots publicity, as another one of her volunteer meetings has spawned a viral sensation. This time, it wasn’t the size of the crowd, but rather, the candidate’s calm handling of a profane heckler that’s making the viral internet rounds. As Warren tries to engage the man, he calls her a “socialist whore,” before attempting a comically flubbed storm-out.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to refuse to budge from lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, tonight on the O’Reilly Factor resident media critic Bernie Goldberg took a look at how the media has treated the movement. Ultimately, he gives guest host Monica Crowley a grim prognosis for the media’s chances at being fair towards the movement in the same way they were (or were not) to the Tea Party: arguing that “the storyline is set in stone,” he concludes “there is no hope for them.”

“Tea Party Candidate” Rep. Michele Bachmann is having a bit of a problem convincing the people she claims to represent that she should be their leader, at least if the leadership of American Majority is any indication. The president of that organization, Ned Ryun, released a statement today imploring Rep. Bachmann to drop out of the race, calling her a “back bencher” and warning she could hurt the movement. In response, the Bachmann campaign suggested Ryun was in the tank for Rick Perry, and played down his influence in the Tea Party.

Bill O’Reilly was in rare form last night. After a “Talking Points Memo” segment going after the Occupy Wall Street protests for “demonizing capitalism” and “show[ing] the world the cops are fascists,” O’Reilly welcomed his panel, and refused to let guest Leslie Marshall speak much after she compared the role of George Soros on the left to that of the Koch brothers on the right.

On Anderson Cooper‘s show tonight, documentarian Michael Moore declared that “the wind and the snow is not going to stop the collective anger” of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, and they would continue to speak out against the financial industry into the winter season. If anything, the cold weather will only strengthen their resolve, he claimed.

In April, the Richmond Tea Party held a Tax Day rally in Richmond’s Kanawha Plaza. Along with two more of their rallies, the group was charged about $10,000, and had to comply with a list of rules and regulations. Now they want their money back, saying that Occupy Wall Street protesters have been camping out and using the plaza for free since October 15. Colleen Owens, a Tea Party spokesperson, says that her group had to go through a litany of procedures — getting permits, paying for police, paying for port-o-potties, and paying for emergency personnel, among other things — while the Occupiers are getting use of the Plaza for free.

Google’s “Politics and Elections Blog” released data on Thursday revealing some interesting statistics about the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Searches for Occupy Wall Street, according to Google’s Jake Parrillo, currently outpace Tea Party queries, but that’s expected, as it’s a buzzy topic. What Google uncovered, though, was that when both were gathering steam, OWS still outpaced Tea Party in search traffic during their respective early phases. And the blog pinpoints the exact moment when OWS took over the “most-searched” title from the Tea Party: September 24. Since then, OWS searches have far outpaced those for the Tea Party.

Last Friday, I made my way down to Zuccotti Park to meet up with Current TV’s latest host, Cenk Uygur (who was taping a week’s worth of shows there), for a quick discussion about a variety of topics: the Occupy Wall Street movement, the role of corporate media in its coverage of the protest, and when and what we can expect to see his new Young Turks show on Current. A series of unfortunate events conspired to delay the interview, which lessened the total time to just a few minutes. However, Uygur packed a lot of observations about the OWS protests, the Tea Party, and the media into our short visit.

There’s been a growing argument that — hippies and agitators aside — the bulk of the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party protesters comprise a very similar group: angry at the government and large corporations for overtaxing and under-representing the everyday American. Today, Buzzfeed’s Matt Stopera presented an exercise in showing just how close the two groups are. Stopera posted 20 photos of protesters holding up signs and asked readers to guess if the photo was taken at a Tea Party or Occupy protest. Trained eyes may pick up some tell-tale elements in the background of pictures, but it’s still a fun, and somewhat surprising exercise, in discovering how similar the two movements actually are.

In a discussion Sunday on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, The Nation‘s Richard Kim disputed there was an overlap between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the tea party. Kim argued that one of the major differences between the two groups was that that the tea party didn’t want to help African-Americans. “One of the key polling points around that is that when you poll tea party people they think government does too much for black people, and that’s one of the markers of whether you are in the tea party or not in how you respond to that question.”

After a soft launch last week, Jon Bon Jovi’s new restaurant, Soul Kitchen, opened in New Jersey with the promise of giving meals away in exchange for volunteer efforts in the kitchen, food banks, or other local charities — a scenario made famous by Pee-Wee Herman’s 1985 movie, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, in which Pee-Wee washed dishes until he paid off his meal. The premise is really that simple: diners can earn a voucher for a free meal through volunteering if they can’t afford to pay. Those who can afford are asked to leave suggested donations in an envelope at the table. If you can leave more, it’s encouraged. The menu has no prices. And the rocker is even taking a hands-on approach to the project. “Last Friday, I was at the White House, serving on the Council for Community Solutions, got on a train, changed in the bathroom and got here in time to wash dishes Friday night,” he told the AP. “I’m the dishwasher, for real. I can’t cook a lick.”

President Obama sat down for an interview with Nightline‘s Jake Tapper, and hit on a wide range of issues, from his frustration with filibusters to his willingness to pay more in taxes. But the sentiment that might stick out for most people was his assertion that Tea Partiers and Occupy Wall Streeters are more similar than they may even realize:

Between the years of protest on the far right and the increasingly vocal demands of the far left, no matter what the government is doing– whether it be foreign policy initiatives or monetary policy– there appears to be a consensus in American politics that it’s doing it wrong. So perhaps there is no timelier occasion for Fox Business host Judge Andrew Napolitano to release his new book, It’s Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong, than this week– an expository volume on how America got so off-track from where the Founders placed us and how to navigate the way back. Mediaite caught up with Napolitano earlier this week via phone, where he gave us some insight into why the two-party system is an illusion, the government’s insistence on giving and taking rights is unnatural, and why electing a Congress full of Rep. Ron Pauls could be the solution to our problems.

It has been several years of Tea Party protests demanding Americans take back their country. With the Occupy Wall Street protests in full swing, Jon Stewart took a segment today to figure out who exactly the country had to be taken back from, and how Rep. Eric Cantor and other vocal Tea Party supporters were reacting to Occupy Wall Street. Unsurprisingly, he found a bit of a disconnect between action and rhetoric.

As the Occupy Wall Street protests went global (and violent) over the weekend, the increasing number of people turning out piqued Bill O’Reilly‘s curiosity this weekend, as, to him, the people attending appeared no more diverse than those protesting for the Tea Party Movement, which faced a number of accusations of racism. Tonight, O’Reilly asked Prof. Marc Lamont Hill why the minority turnout was so low and how, if at all, the Tea Party exhibited any more racism than Occupy Wall Street. As always with the pair, the debate ended in fireworks.

Democrats are not the reason the Tea Party exists. But by ignoring the Tea Party — or in many cases, mocking it — until it was far too late, Democrats were ill-prepared to deal with the fallout that led to an unmerciful electoral defeat in the 2010 midterm elections. For instance, at one point Democrats were doing Republicans’ work for them. They figured tying the Tea Party to Republicans would yield a negative reaction from voters. Nope, not really. Instead, the Tea Party energized the Republican base and created the wave that rode the GOP to victory.