tea party

the philadelphia tea party was just a block or two from my office, so how could i resist?

i met up with john, ray, brendan and a bunch of other people who don't even have blogs at the rally. the crowd was medium-small, i'm guessing between 150 and 200 people. but people were coming and going so it's hard to say how many total people attended. it was raining the whole hour i was out there, which probably also cut down on attendance. on top of that, there were a fair number of liberal infiltrators like me. and that's just the people i recognized. who knows how many more were there that i didn't? the loyalties of the the people holding signs or wearing right wing regalia was pretty clear. but most of the people were just standing around with umbrellas looking soggy.

meanwhile, brendan ran around, making tea bag jokes with B. and recording youtube videos on his camera. ray wandered through the protesters taking pictures of signs. i didn't end up talking to the true believers like i wanted to. at one point i watched one of the organizers get interviewed, but he left when i tried to ask him a question. i didn't try again after that.

there were a bunch of ron paul people there. they would boo whenever any speaker said the word "federal reserve" and yelled "ron paul!" when the speaker asked who would be the next winner of american idol. the speeches i heard had a definite libertarian bent. they recounted the glorious gold-standard pre-new deal past, talked about abolishing the federal reserve, equated tax with theft, ranted about socialism, used that ubiquitous frogs in boiling water metaphor, et cetera. i didn't hear any proposals of how to deal with the current financial crisis other than to stop doing what obama is doing.

neither i nor my friends were making any effort to stand apart from anyone else (where's the fun in that)? no doubt we were counted as supporters of the tea party by the teabag promoters. that probably would have bothered me if the message of the protest didn't come across as so fringe. if republicans are counting on this "movement" to revive its fortunes at the polls, i think we're looking at a comfortable democratic majority for a while.

i'll link to my compadre's accounts, videos and photos when i find them.

UPDATE: hey, it looks like my uneducated guess about the crowd size is about as good as the inky's. meanwhile, ray has started putting up has posted his tea photos. click at your own risk. it looks like i'm in two of them.

UPDATE2: brendan's post is up. i assume his videos will come later.