from the Louisville Courier Journal
Tea party protests coming to Kentucky
""They've become the hottest things among conservative and libertarian activists around the country who are upset about the government bailouts and ballooning federal budget deficit. And there's one coming to Louisville on Wednesday.
So-called "tea parties" -- some of them large-scale, grass-roots protests -- have been springing up across the country ever since a national television personality suggested them as a way for people to show their anger.
Wendy Caswell, a 24-year-old restaurant worker who is organizing the tea party downtown at Jefferson Square, said it could attract 1,500 people. "That's a rough estimate," she said. "It could be 5,000, it could be less (than 1,500). But I don't think it's going to be less."
The events take their name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists opposed to the Tea Act and its British-imposed tax on tea staged an uprising and threw hundreds of chests of tea into Boston Harbor.
The idea was originally popularized by financial reporter Rick Santelli during a rant on CNBC. Since then, there have been tea parties from California to New York.
Many of them will be held throughout the country on April 15 -- the deadline for filing income tax returns.
Kentucky parties are scheduled that day in Bowling Green, Elizabethtown, Frankfort and Paducah.
Caswell said that the Republican and Libertarian parties in Jefferson County are helping organize Wednesday's event and that she has been overwhelmed by the response so far after publicizing it on a couple of tea party-related Web sites.
"I've talked to more than 1,000 people myself," she said. "When I got started, it wasn't going to be this huge. I thought, if I could get 50 people to walk around and make a big scene, it would be great."
Caswell, a registered Democrat who said she's a social liberal and fiscal conservative, said she decided to organize the tea party in response to a fairly recent interest in politics..... Read Entire Article in the Louisville Courier Journal
