While women are filling in on the top of the party ticket, the documentary explores the flip side of the equation — looking at the Tea Party’s grassroots activists, like Jenny Beth Martin, and starring the more familiar female stars of the conservative movement, including Rep. Michele Bachmann, Ann Coulter and Phyllis Schlafly.
– Time to face facts, ladies: The Tea Party express appears to be fueled by estrogen. A new film on the ferociously reactionary "Mama Grizzlies" examines candidates like Sharron Angle and Nikki Haley (and now Christine O'Donnell) rattling political races—as well as grassroots organizers of the "reborn" conservative movement stretching back to Phyllis Schafly (who wouldn't, of course, want to be associated with anything as unladylike as a hairy bear). The momentum, ironically, makes the Republican Party the current champion for number of women running for the Senate, due in large part to Sarah Palin's "king-making" endorsements, notes the Washington Post. “I don’t know if it's that mama grizzly instinct being awakened, if women are feeling threatened, or if it’s because women are feeling neglected—or empowered—but you can’t deny that there’s something happening today," conservative commentator SE Cupp says on the film Fire From the Heartland: The Reawakening of the Conservative Woman by the right-wing Citizens United. A GOP pollster says no one says "political outsider" like a Republican woman because "so few of them" have made it to the inner sanctums of Washington. (For more on the newest grizzly, click here.)