Last May, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about AngryRenter.com, a website which served as a rallying point for disgruntled souls opposed to a prospective Bush administration foreclosure bailout. AngryRenter.com had collected 44,500 signatures for a petition, but Journal reporter Michael Phillips discovered--by clicking on the site's "About Us" link--that it wasn't actually a people-powered uprising. Instead, AngryRenter was the product of FreedomWorks, a group run by Dick Armey and Steve Forbes.

Phillips spent several paragraphs detailing all the deluxe homes owned by Armey, Forbes, and others associated with FreedomWorks, making the point that only wealthy, cynical Republicans would object to helping those unfortunates caught in the maw of foreclosure.

But that was a long time ago. Before Lehman Brothers. Before TARP. Before the Detroit bailout and Obama's trillion dollar stimulus package. Now the new administration has put forward its Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, a $275 billion scheme to save certain people from foreclosure, and a real opposition movement may be building.

With almost $2 trillion in emergency government spending doled out since October, Obama's Home Affordability measure can be considered small beer. And at the end of the day, it's as much about creating a backdoor bailout for the banks who hold the mortgages as it is about "saving" people's homes. But as a political matter, it's something else.

On the morning of February 19, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli ranted about the plan from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. "This is America!" Santelli cried on the air. "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" The traders milling around started booing and then gathered closer as he continued. Before he was done, Santelli had called for a "Chicago tea party" to protest the bailout. During the next few hours, Santelli's rant led the Drudge Report, was replayed on all of the cable networks, and was seen more than a million times on YouTube.

Santelli-inspired websites quickly appeared attempting to organize tea parties. ChicagoTeaParty.com bills itself as the official home of Santelli's tea party. The site belongs to Zack Christenson, a Chicago radio producer. Christenson had bought the domain last August, thinking it might be a good name for a group. Within 12 hours of Santelli's rant, Christenson had retooled the site, and 4,000 people quickly signed up. On Facebook, dozens of Santelli groups formed, ranging from fan clubs to draft-president movements to tea party plans for Chicago, Texas, New York, and Los Angeles.

Anthony Astolfi bought the domain reTeaParty.com about 10 hours after Santelli's rant. Astolfi is a 24-year-old web designer and small-time political consultant who dabbled in the Ron Paul world last cycle. He thought the tea party idea had a chance to catch on and decided to organize them for July 4. Working with his roommate and a cousin, they finished building a website by midnight. Then they turned to promoting the project. They did Google searches for "Santelli" and left comments pointing to their new site on high-ranking result pages. They spent a couple hundred dollars on a small number of Google and YouTube ads and finally went to bed around 5 A.M. They awoke to 40,000 emails, their site having become a minor sensation. Astolfi says they now have 11,000 people a day coming to reTeaParty.com. Ten thousand people have signed up to get information on the tea parties, and 5,000 have "pledged" to attend one of so-far eight tea parties on July 4.