Congress spared the 100-watt incandescent light bulb from a government-enforced phaseout in a win for Tea Party activists over manufacturers who said they are already switching to more energy-efficient products.

Lawmakers cleared legislation today to fund the government through Sept. 30, with a provision barring the Energy Department from carrying out the elimination of the pear-shaped bulb. Groups backing small government urged Republican allies to block the requirement, calling it an example of regulatory overreach in keeping with the health-care overhaul and the Wall Street bailout.

The bulb provision is in a spending bill for fiscal 2012. The measure is H.R. 2055. Read more at www.sfgate.com

The tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements sit about as far apart on the political spectrum as they can get. Certainly, their members and the American public would be surprised, if not shocked, to consider that the two grassroots movements might derive from the same source.

Yet, that is the conclusion reached by one of the country’s foremost financial writers. In an interview last week with the Gazette, New York Times financial columnist Joe Nocera said he sees the country’s economic situation - the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots - “at the root of both the tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements.”

He believes that for the Occupy Movement to be successful, it must frame clear demands that outline a plan for creating jobs and refashioning Wall Street to benefit the entire country and not just a select few wealthy investors.

Without a solid plan for moving forward, he said, the Occupy protestors will be continued to be viewed by Wall Street supporters as little more than “a gnat that needs to be flicked from its shoulder blades.” Read more at www.gazettenet.com

Many in the media and some well-known politicians have characterized those demonstrating against Wall Street and big business as a spontaneous grass-roots movement similar in purpose to the tea party. Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s start with the important differences.

The tea party movement is universally consistent in its emphasis on the return to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and eager for the restoration of constitutional governance. The tea party protests are intended to bring attention to the unrestrained compulsion of our elected representatives toward boundless growth of the government and display a total disregard for any kind of fiscal responsibility. They also criticize those businesses that reject free-market capitalism in favor of persuading government officials to enact laws and regulations that favor their industry and reduce their competition. (These businesses are inappropriately referred to as “crony capitalists” when there is nothing about free-market capitalism they embrace.)

Tea party rallies are characterized by spontaneous personal initiative, disciplined gatherings, patriotic pronouncements and lawful behavior. The OWS protesters are organized by paid instigators, funded and fed by union and liberal political organizations, unkempt, undisciplined and unlawful hooligans taunting police and disrespectful of local businesses and private property. Read more at www.mcall.com

As the Occupy Wall Street movement attempts to establish a firm foothold in American society, veterans of left-wing organizing, including former Obama administration czar Van Jones, are urging this fledgling movement to run candidates for office, following the Tea Party model of transforming a grassroots movement into a powerful electoral force.  After all, what good is storming local bank branches and blocking Americans from going to work if you don’t send representatives to Congress who share your core values and goals?  But the prospect of OWS emerging as a viable political force is a pipe dream, akin to similar aspirations held by OWS’s ideological predecessors, the 1960s counterculture.

There are fundamental differences between the Tea Party and OWS that made the former a formidable political force and will render the latter an inconsequential soon-to-be historical footnote.  Of course, there are also some basic similarities.  In the abstract, both are grassroots movements dissatisfied with the status quo and bank bailouts fighting for transformative change.  But beyond the abstract, the movements diverge into mutually exclusive entities.

From the beginning, the Tea Party was primarily made up of middle-class, fiscally conservative Americans who opposed government expansion under President Obama and the Democratic Congress.  They organized and rallied peacefully, picked up after themselves, and didn’t cost taxpayers a dime.  The Tea Party called for less debt, less spending, and less government intervention in the economy.  They didn’t always offer detailed policy proposals, but they did espouse coherent philosophical and economic principles.  And while they understandably made some rookie political mistakes, the Tea Party succeeded in transforming the electoral landscape in 2009 and 2010.  Their success was all the more impressive, given how novel and politically inexperienced this movement was. Read more at www.americanthinker.com

Many tea party followers are put off by Romney’s close ties to the world of Wall Street and support for the George W. Bush administration’s bailout of the financial sector.

Mark Meckler, a national co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, said that some in the movement are talking about supporting a third-party candidate if Romney becomes the GOP nominee. “One thing you can say for certain is it would cause a drop-off of enthusiasm” in the general election, he said. “How far people would take that drop-off is impossible to predict.”

At the same time, Romney would like to sew up enough of the tea party vote to clinch the nomination quickly. His biggest challenge in that fight may be preventing Ron Paul from becoming the ultimate favorite of non-Romney voters. The Texas congressman is considered one of the fathers of the tea party movement and may be the only GOP candidate with the resources to go the distance in the primaries — and perhaps beyond. Read more at www.latimes.com

The tea party is a very simple expression of a desire for smaller government. Occupy Wall Street is more of an emotional outburst and reaction.

The one common denominator between the two is not liking the bank bailout — in actuality, the bank bailout was actually a good thing, but the government failed to penalize the shareholders and bondholders. The taxpayers should have owned the companies and the government should have taken ownership of the companies for a limited period of time. In the real world, if you can’t pay your bills, you go bankrupt.

The reason for this inequity occurring is because of special interests. You had government picking who the winners and the losers were. The tea party’s interest and solution is the best solution for Occupy Wall Street. There are some Occupiers who want entitlements — but I think at the bottom line, people are mad that Wall Street got bailed out, and they are correct. Read more at www.washingtonpost.com

TEA PARTY ISN’T LIKE OCCUPY PROTESTERS Recent national media coverage has been comparing the OWS protesters to the Tea Party Patriots. Yes, “the American people are justifiably frustrated with poor decisions from Washington & Wall Street but the OWS agitators continue to disrupt business and break laws across the country as part of the “occupy” protests. (Todd Cefaratti, The Tea Party.net, Oct 23) “Unlike the Patriotic Tea Party Movement where Old Glory flies proudly and participants sing patriotic songs” and “recite the Pledge of Allegiance with thunderous respect, the exact opposite goes on at OWS.” The OWS protesters “hate America. You won’t see them pledging allegiance to this country.” (You can check out images and videos “this cabal has spawned” on Google and “tell me these protesters love this land”. Doug Giles: “Four Habits of an OWS Occupuss”, Oct. 24) For the national media to continue to compare the peaceful law-abiding Tea Party Patriots, who secure permits for rallies, leave places where they are held cleaner than they found them, and then return to their jobs, is a sure sign of dirty politics. Hilton Head Read more at savannahnow.com

The Tea Party began as a protest against the bailout of Wall Street.

Now the Tea Party is, in effect, coming to the defense of Wall Street.

Now the Tea Party has found another way to slide into irrelevance, with its negative response to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Ordinary Americans sense that we have been screwed by Wall Street every bit as much as by Washington, D.C., but instead of fighting together we have fallen into the perennial Right vs. Left trap of letting the ruling establishment divide us. The conservatives say Washington caused our meltdown, the progressives say Wall Street caused our meltdown. Only the Ron Paul Revolution understands that they are one and the same, with the Federal Reserve representing and empowering both Washington and Wall Street against the people.

When the protests first began, conservatives and Tea Partiers should have descended on New York to seek to influence the movement in the right direction. From what I have read and seen, some members of the Ron Paul Revolution have been trying to do just that. But the Tea Partiers have reacted like, well, conservatives. And now the opportunity has probably been lost. Occupy Wall Street has been taken over by the liberal branch of the establishment – the labor unions – just as the Tea Party has been taken over by the conservative branch of the establishment – Washington insiders. The union bosses and conservative power-brokers saw their opportunity and took it. Read more at my.auburnjournal.com

“The similarity may just be we are frustrated with the behaviors on Wall Street,” added Brendan Steinhauser, director for federal and state campaigns for FreedomWorks, a group linked to the tea party movement. “However, the tea party is much more angry and frustrated with politicians in Washington, D.C., than the Wall Street occupiers are.”

Other tea party leaders view the Wall Street protests with disdain and say any comparison between the two is apples and oranges.

“Those occupying Wall Street and other cities, when they are intelligible, want less of what made America great and more of what is damaging America: a bigger, more powerful government to come in and take care of them so they don’t have to work like the rest of us who pay our bills,” Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler, co-founders of Tea Party Patriots, said in a written statement headlined: “Occupy Wall Street? They’re no Tea Partiers.” Read more at www.miamiherald.com

Anyone who’s spoken at any length to members of both the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements should have no doubts as to the similarities regarding their respective origins.

There are stark differences between the groups, of course, most decidedly in terms of their methods and goals. But it’s the similarities that matter, especially if the movements are to have any lasting impact on U.S. fiscal policy and the overall political process.

At their core, both groups formed in response to populist anger in the wake of the U.S. government’s decision in 2008 to bail out the nation’s largest banks. In an effort to stave off what policy makers at the time felt was the impending collapse of the global economy, Congress approved using hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up banks deemed “too big to fail.”

The Tea Party organized in 2009 and gained momentum through nationwide rallies and widespread media coverage. By the fall of 2010 Tea Party-backed candidates were appearing on Congressional ballot boxes across the country, their platforms unified in their disgust for excessive government spending in general and taxpayer-backed bailouts in particular, not least those targeting big banks. Read more at www.foxbusiness.com