Chicago Tea Party Organized with Right Wing Think Tank

On MSNBC’s Hardball, host Mike Barnacle had Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) and Chicago tea party organizer John O’Hara on to discuss the tea party protests. Throughout their discussion, both Pence and O’Hara repeatedly claimed that today’s protests were nothing more than a “grassroots” movement that had finally reached a boiling point.

It wasn’t until Barnacle pressed O’Hara on how he got involved with the protests that O’Hara explained that he worked for the right-wing think tank, the Heartland Institute. Still, O’Hara claimed he only worked on the tea party project in his “spare time — on weekends and nights.”