Planned protests at IRS offices across the country seemed to stall at a few dozen Tea Party people outside the Treasury Department offices in Boston, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Washington today. Maybe there just aren't that many Tea Party people after all, or maybe Obama really did deploy the HAARP tornado machine.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, the protest consisted of exactly one person.

The IRS scandal hasn't gone away completely—if anything, the White House revelations this week are worse than the original story of rogue non-profit enforcers looking at new applications from groups with obviously political names like "Tea Party" and "Patriots." But the story, never one that got people excited outside the Beltway or the fading Tea Party movement, was completely eclipsed by the mile-wide twisters that devastated Oklahoma. UPDATE: Maybe the scandal has legs, after all! Lois Lerner, the boss of the gang who scrutinized tax-exempt organizations for Tea Party affiliation, is taking the fifth before Congress.

If the Tea Party ever had a chance to get back on the national outrage stage, it was last week. That the movement's current demands are no different than they were before the IRS scandal probably hasn't helped their cause—"Impeach Obama" is the ongoing message. Even Fox News had to break away for the real-world news of monster tornadoes that plowed right through the cable channel's geographic stronghold.

Here's a Tea Party protest from February, months before the IRS story broke:

[AP Photo by Mel Evans.]