A leading organiser of the Tea Party, Joe Dugan, could barely conceal his irritation. When asked by a reporter “Where has the Tea Party gone?

Dugan, waving his hands around to show the hundreds attending the South Carolina Tea Party convention earlier this week, retorted: “Does this look like the Tea Party is finished? This is not a wake. This is a celebration.”

In spite of his protestations, the Tea Party has been largely invisible in the 2012 Republican presidential race. One of the largest groups in the movement, the Tea Party Patriots, is co-sponsoring with CNN the final televised presidential debate on Thursday before Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

But the noise and energy associated with the Tea Party since it exploded on to the US political scene three years has been stilled, overshadowed in recent months by the youthful enthusiasm of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The silence of the Tea Party prompted the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, in a television interview on Sunday, to say: “I think the Tea Party is dying out.” He attributed this to the seeming improvement in the economy. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

After a wave election gave Republicans the majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, no one thought that Democrats, a year later, would be in a position to take it back.

But, that’s exactly where Democrats claim to be. At a press briefing Wednesday, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Steve Israel (D-NY) said that Republicans have had such a “catastrophic” year that he now believes Democrats can take back the House. The chairman was cautious not to sound too optimistic, but he had a long list of statistics in Democrats’ favor; an advantage that comes almost entirely from Republicans’ blunders over the past year.

The DCCC rolled out its first wave of Red to Blue Races, a list of 18 races where Democrats are confident they can oust a Republican incumbent. The DCCC also has three races they feel are in the bag and 18 more districts where the Democratic candidate is showing increasing strength. Overall, that’s more than the 25 seats needed to reach a majority. As a sign of their understated optimism, Israel points out this is two months earlier than they normally roll out these races.

A key reason Democrats are feeling good about November is the particular crop of Republicans they are looking to replace: the freshmen tea partiers elected in 2010. “[Democrat] candidates are going to be aggressively holding Republicans accountable for consistently choosing Millionaires over Medicare, oil companies subsides over middle class tax cuts and ideology over solutions,” Israel said. The Dem spin is that much of the work that needs to be done to take back the House, Republicans have done for them over the past year. Read more at 2012.talkingpointsmemo.com

FOR more than two years, conservatives have been riding a wave of Tea Party insurgency that has formed the most dynamic force in American politics, a protest movement that promised to slash taxes, close the federal deficit and remake Washington. And yet to judge from the results of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, some of the most engaged Republican voters are inching closer to nominating Mitt Romney, the candidate they like least, a Harvard-educated technocrat who is in many ways a mirror image of the president the insurgents want to dislodge.

Even in South Carolina, a seat of conservative activism, the opposition to Mr. Romney appears to be fragmented and diffuse, as Matt Bai reports this weekend in The Times Magazine. Others have put the case more bluntly. “Where’s the Tea Party?” a headline on Politico asked last week.

This is all the more puzzling because the Tea Party movement did not lack for useful precedents or operating models. On the contrary, it is “the latest in a cycle of insurgencies on the Republican right,” as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice writes in his new book, “Rule and Ruin,” a chronicle of half a century of internecine Republican warfare. “Even the name of the movement was a throwback to the ‘T Parties’ of the early ’60s, part of the right-wing, anti-tax crusade of that era.” Read more at www.nytimes.com

Georgia Tea Party groups held a rally at the state Capitol Thursday to push for ethics reform. They’ve helped to draft a bill that would limit lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers.

The Tea Party groups want Georgia to become a model for government ethics.

And they want to start with a $100 limit on lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers.

Debbie Dooley is with the Tea Party Patriots. When told that some legislators oppose the move, she said she knew why.

“Legislators who say that want to continue to accept extravagant gifts from lobbyists. And that’s wrong,” she said. Read more at www.gpb.org

Twin Tier Tea Party members spoke out Thursday against claims their political influence has weakened.  In fact, some members say the party is as strong now as it’s ever been.

According to a recent national study supporters of the tea party have dropped from 27% in November of 2010 to 20% this past November.

But at a meeting Thursday in Elmira Heights Twin Tier Tea Party members say their numbers are actually growing.  They say as we get closer to election day their momentum will only build.

Party member Leon Golder said, “I can assure you the Tea Party is as strong as it is today as it was a year ago.  It will grow.  It will grow through 2012 like you have never seen.” Read more at www.wetmtv.com

Freshman Sen. Rand Paul is making good on his promise to cut federal spending. The Kentucky Republican and tea-party favorite said Thursday he’s returning $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury — money from his operating budget that his office never spent.

The half million dollars represents about 16 percent of Paul’s annual budget. He contended no senator had returned as much to taxpayers, though at least two senators disputed that claim. An aide to Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said his office returned $636,036 in unspent money to the Treasury in Fiscal Year 2010 and another $503,161 in 2011.

“I ran to stop the reckless spending. And I ran to end the damaging process of elected officials acting as errand boys, competing to see who could bring back the biggest check and the most amount of pork,” Paul said at a news conference in Louisville, where he presented taxpayers with a massive mock check for $500,000.

“I hope this sets an example for the rest of government — at all levels,” he added. “We can carry out our duties in a fiscally responsible way. Government can be both smart and efficient. We are proving that — and trying to convince the rest of Washington.” Read more at www.politico.com

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., speaking in New Hampshire this morning, reminded her audience of the tragic Tucson shooting last year — and also insinuated that the Tea Party, which she said regards political opponents as “the enemy,” has enhanced divisiveness in Congress and had something to do with the shooting, at least indirectly.

“We need to make sure that we tone things down, particularly in light of the Tucson tragedy from a year ago, where my very good friend, Gabby Giffords — who is doing really well, by the way, — [was shot],” Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair said during a “Politics and Eggs” forum this morning. “The discourse in America, the discourse in Congress in particular . . . has really changed, I’ll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement.”

Having brought up the Giffords attack as a political cudgel, Wasserman Schultz doubled down on that attack. “You had town hall meetings that they tried to take over, and you saw some their conduct at those tea party meetings,” Wasserman Schultz said today. “When they come and disagree with you, you’re not just wrong, you’re the enemy.”

Giffords’ shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was eventually discovered to be a mentally unstable loner with no immediate partisan agenda and a serious alcohol problem. In 2007, he had attended a forum and asked a question of Giffords, which she had not answered to his satisfaction. Read more at campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com

Carl Paladino’s recent insertion into the presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich was uninvited—motivated by the former gubernatorial candidate’s hope to strike back at New York state GOP leaders who prefer Mitt Romney.

Mr. Paladino traveled to New Hampshire just days before Tuesday’s primary at the behest of New York Republican activists who had been in contact with the Gingrich campaign and had mentioned a possible role for the deep-pocketed Buffalo developer.

Mr. Paladino said he made clear that he was not speaking to reporters in an official capacity, though he was invited by the campaign to visit its operations in New Hampshire. Then he proceeded to give interviews in which he made incendiary comments about Mr. Gingrich’s rivals, creating a distraction just as the nation’s first presidential primary gets underway.

“We told the campaign we’d like to be involved,” Mr. Paladino said. “They said that’s wonderful.” Read more at www.crainsnewyork.com

Dozens of tea parties, including the state’s largest, say they will support an E-Verify immigration bill at the 2012 Legislature.

But with some libertarian-leaning conservatives balking at the issue, the path to passage looks more precarious than ever.

“Most in the tea party are concerned about anything that is illegal and does not uphold the rule of law. E-Verify is one way to uphold our legal immigration laws and we support it,” said Billie Tucker, who chairs the First Coast Tea Party in Jacksonville.

Tucker’s comment came in the wake of a Sunshine State News story reporting that The Tea Party Network was merely “watching” the employment-screening legislation. Read more at www.sunshinestatenews.com

Simon Campbell, a member of the Pennsbury School Board in Bucks County, told about 100 attendees of the monthly Lehigh Valley Tea Party meeting that they should hold officials’ “feet to the fire” over teachers union contracts.

Campbell said teacher salaries and benefits need to be comparable to those in the private sector.

“Nobody has these guaranteed pensions in the private sector,” he said. “I have a big problem with all these benefits and packages these people get.”

Speaking at Palmer Township’s Community Center, Jan. 6, Campbell, originally from England, said he never thought he’d be involved with politics, but found himself drawn in shortly after settling in Bucks County with his wife, a New York native. Read more at bethlehem.patch.com