Based on an unconfirmed report on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment site that former President Bill Clinton and James Carville are supposedly planning a dirty-tricks campaign against seven or eight top leaders of the Tea Party movement, the Tea Party Patriots network has responded with an amusing and effective expression of solidarity.

There’s a very interesting confluence of conversations taking place at the moment on the topic of how technology is changing politics. One is on the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. Let me see if I can combine the threads. (And sorry, this is a bit of a long post, thanks to all the traveling in DC I did last week.)

Whatever you make of the origins of today's planed "tea party" protests, it's clear that the national Republican Party is eager to capture some of the wind in its flagging sails. But a correspondent writes to point out that the GOP's online campaign capitalizing on the events violates what might be the first commandment of online organizing: thou shall collect email addresses. Over at teaparty.GOP.com, you can send an e-post card and digital tea bag of your choice to President Obama, VP Biden, Speaker Pelosi, or Majority Leader Reid, making the statement "I do not believe that it is patriotic to pay more taxes." What the site doesn't do, though, is at any time ask for your email address.

UPDATE: A reader points out that if you pick the option of sending yourself a copy of the email, you are, of course, asked for your address.

Perhaps even more mysterious than the question of who, exactly, was responsible for organizing last week's protests in Moldova is the question of who is behind tomorrow's planned "Tea Party" protests against, in the main, President Obama's economic policies and approach to shoring up the American economy. Many on the left have spent the last several days trying to peek behind the curtain to see who's lurking there. The Center for America Progress's Think Progress, for example, sees the national Republican Party and "a smorgasbord of far-right causes" as the puppetmasters. The just-launched SaveTheRich.com (itself of unclear origins) is calling them the "Fox News Tea Parties." Paul Krugman calls them "AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects." Who's that, exactly? In a post titled "Who's in Charge?," The Atlantic's Chris Good has it as three groups in particular: Dick Armey's Freedom Works, the advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, and Don't Go. The last is particularly interesting here, as it was a grassroots effort, largely fueled by Twitter, that grew out of this summer's Republican House floor sit-in over energy legislation.

Over on the Next Right, Jon Henke is calling on Krugman to issue a correction. Astroturfing, he writes, is when you pay people to do what they wouldn't do otherwise; it's not when political organizing groups help to organize political protests. Indeed, some of the charges against the groups involved -- they're capitalizing on a political moment to, gasp, grow their email lists -- seem to be exactly what political advocacy groups do. And for a pretty network-savvy crowd, searching for the one true man behind the curtain like a curious approach. In the end, if tomorrow's protests actually demonstrate decent turnout, it might not matter. As one commenter on Good's post puts it, "Now that's odd because I have never heard of any of those organizations and I am attending a tea party."

If you're interested, keep an eye on the #teaparty hashtag on Twitter tomorrow.