Tea Party folks are being bankrolled by billionaires.

Both the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch are bankrolling the activities of the Tea Party.  In one sense, it perfectly matches the same type of mentality - a very self-interested greed that permeates the Tea Party - but in another way, it is ironic, because the self interest of Murdoch and the Kochs, is to manipulate people to increase their own profit and at the expense of those very people they're manipulating.

"In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States." *

"The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation."**

 "When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools."***

* - "Covert Operations", Jane Mayer, New Yorker, August 30,2010, paragraph 5.
** - "Covert Operations", Jane Mayer, New Yorker, August 30,2010, paragraph 6.
*** -  "The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party", Frank Rich, New York Times, August 28, 2010, paragraph 10.