Conservatives fighting against Obamacare should be optomistic about our chances. Check out left-wing nut job Keith Olbermann’s rant the other day. He slams the Dems and President Obama for taking out the government option and Medicare buy-in provision from the healthcare bill.

Olbermann, along with Howard Dean, DailyKos and the other unhinged leftist bloggers and personalities are now saying that the Senate should kill the bill in the Senate. It’s not liberal enough for them, I guess. President Obama is losing his left-wing base, which is going to be a disaster for his overall approval ratings, and his already low support for the healthcare bill.

Conservatives should continue to press the swing Senators in Arkansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Virginia and elsewhere. We should also send a barrage of letters to the editor to newspapers in these states, continue to hold sit-ins and candlelight vigils, and lead local senate office visits to deliver our message loud and clear. If we do this, we could put the final nail in the coffin of this very bad piece of legislation.

I’m quoted in today’s Washington Times about the energy of the limited government movement, and the battle against Obamacare.

Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for FreedomWorks, one of the groups that helped organize the rallies this summer and fall, rejected the idea that the anger has subsided.

“There is a lot of energy still,” he said. “Yeah, people are a little fatigued in some ways and in a way tired of battling this battle, but they are not slowing down. I think the polls are showing our effect on public opinion is significant.”

The Gallup Poll released a survey at the end of November that found opposition to congressional Democrats’ health care plans at 49 percent and support at 45 percent. A Public Policy Polling survey released Wednesday found that 39 percent of voters said they approved of Mr. Obama’s health care plans.

Mr. Steinhauser said some Democrats appear to be ignoring the opposition and will face the consequences in the next election.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, offered the same warning to his Democratic colleagues on the chamber floor.

“What I hear the American people saying to us, ‘Vote for this bill and you’ll be history,’ ” Mr. McConnell said. “This is not in the gray area. The American people are asking us to stop this bill and start over.”

I think the reporter I spoke with gets the fact that the Democrats are in real trouble if they push this $2.5 trillion monstrosity through Congress. We will be making it very clear to Senator Blanche Lincoln when we travel to Arkansas next week.

The DC premiere of “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” has received some pretty good press this week. Liberal bloggers are attacking it, and conservative bloggers are being more kind. Notable hits include The Examiner, Alternet, American Spectator, Washington Independent, and WorldNetDaily.

Here is an excerpt from AlterNet, a liberal blog:

The Birth of a Movement — and a Movie

The way the Tea Partiers tell it, the movement was born in February, with just a handful of tax-revolt “tea parties” convened in protest of President Obama’s stimulus package. By March, FreedomWorks was applying for permits for the September 12th march, said Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks’ grassroots non-organizer, who is credited with the idea. (I can’t call him an organizer if, as Chairman Armey says, they don’t organize.)

“What I saw was hundreds of people like the five who were chronicled tonight,” Steinhauser said, “and I saw them in D.C. and Atlanta and I saw them in various cities, and I saw the sentiment was there, they were all on the same page. They didn’t know each other, but they were all moving in the same direction, and I think what we did is gave focus. We said, once we organize these first round of tea parties, I know everyone’s gonna want to come to Washington.”

Steinhauser is young and enthusiastic. “Everyone remembers the 1963 march on Washington — Martin Luther King’s famous march, where they had a quarter of a million people,” he said. “And they went through the same stuff that we went through, in terms of the different organizations trying to figure out how to do this and that. And they’d all done their thing in their local communities, and they were ready to come to D.C. and make a very public statement.” The press kit for “Tea Party: The Documentary” asserts that 1.5 million people showed up for the September 12th march; mainstream media put the number at 70,000 — which is still quite impressive — based on an estimate from the Washington D.C. Fire Department.

He says that the first “protest of the Obama administration,” as he termed it, was a Tea Party in Ft. Meyers, Florida, on February 9th, which drew about a dozen people. Yet by March he was applying for permits for a massive march on Washington. Either he was extremely prescient about a groundswell of opposition to the newly elected president, or already had an organizing network in place — or both.

It wasn’t much more than a month after Steinhauser applied for his permits that filmmakers Littleton and Cotten began shooting footage. Littleton, the production company owner, knew Jenny Beth Martin, who organized the Tax Day protest in Atlanta that drew some 20,000 people to Atlanta’s Golden Dome on April 15th — the one that drew William Temple. Cotten and Littleton volunteered to shoot the event and run the Jumbotrons, Cotten told me, and from that moment on, they were already scouting talent for what would become “Tea Party: The Documentary.” Between the April 15th event, and a rally against health care reform sponsored by Americans For Prosperity in Atlanta on August 15th, Cotten and Littleton found their talent. The forlorn Nate, the movement’s emmissary to black people, was found in the crowd at the August event. Dr. Fred Shessel was one of the speakers at the August rally (as were Dick Armey and Ralph Reed).

David Weigel over at The Washington Independent has an outstanding piece about the premiere.

For the activists, makers, and stars of the movie, it was all a bit overwhelming. The movie hadn’t been finished, said director Pritchett Cotten, until three days before the premiere. He and a small group of volunteers spent a month of 17-hour days editing the film with Apple’s Final Cut Pro software, stopping only for Thanksgiving. The finished product elicited many moments of spontaneous applause from the audience, as well as some tears, and a final standing ovation.

“Tea Party: The Documentary Film” is part tribute, part “official” history, and part human interest story. Cotten, who cut his teeth on commercials and corporate training films, has the most success with the human drama.

“I didn’t want to make a policy movie,” said Cotten.

Focusing on six people who participated in the 9/12 march at various levels, the film presents them — and, by extension, all Tea Partiers — as average Americans less concerned with partisanship or economics than with a government that, according to all six of the subjects, “doesn’t listen.”

In the film’s telling, the movement began with anger at President George W. Bush. His voice, announcing the September 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 with warnings of what will happen “if the free market is allowed to work,” is the first sound viewers hear at the start of the movie. Price, the member of Congress featured most often in the film, later argues that Tea Party anger goes back to the March 2008 collapse of BearStearns, and the government’s corresponding rescue package.

From there, the Tea Party movement is portrayed as a natural next step in America’s history of peaceful rebellion against the government. William, a minister and Revolutionary War re-enactor, explains how the movement is in step with the original Boston Tea Party. (The film’s footage depicting colonial America was filmed at Colonial Williamsburg, Va., according to one note in the credits.) Painstakingly, Cotten and his stars make the case against charges of “racism” in the movement, relying on William’s membership in a mostly African-American church and through the testimony of Nate, an African-American activist who is deeply apologetic about his 2008 vote for the Obama-Biden ticket.

“You have to understand how that played with the psyche of a black man or a black woman,” Nate says, “to see the highest seat of power, and it’s held by a black man.” The film shows Nate making the case to black men in Detroit that “black people we never really had a political voice.” He also admits that he stands out in the mostly-white Tea Party crowds of which he’s been a part. There is a “voice in my head,” he says, that tells him one day he’ll be less alone.