CBS "Late Show" host David Letterman, of all people, featured an interview with Pam Stout, the president of the Sandpoint, Idaho, group called the Tea Party Patriots. (By sheer coincidence, Sandpoint is also the birthplace of Tea Party icon Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska.) Stout’s 15 minutes of late-night fame proved quite compelling TV viewing. Where other encounters between the More.. media and Tea Partiers have erred strongly on the side of confrontation, the dominant tone of the Letterman exchange was actually kind of sweet. Letterman played up his image as a comparatively naïve follower of the political scene, announcing at the outset that "I know nothin' about the Tea Party." Stout responded patiently to Letterman's queries, projecting an image of a wholesome, quiet-spoken Middle American activist. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Ken Tucker called it "a quietly remarkable piece of television." No less remarkable, though, was the way the interview came to pass. On February 15th, David Barstow penned a story on the Tea Party movement for the New York Times. And he made Stout's odyssey into grassroots activism a centerpiece of the article, writing: Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college. ... She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. "I was like, 'Did I really just do that?' " she recalled.  In a phone interview this morning, Pam Stout told Yahoo! News that she was "absolutely floored" when the article came out, noting that "it was really kind ...