Yesterday’s Tax Day Tea Parties were a smashing success. There were no reports of any arrests that I could find. No stores were looted. No police officers were harassed or threatened. In fact, the one instance where authories had to take action — in Washington, DC where an unknown participant threw a box of tea bags onto the White House lawn — the protestors cheered the Secret Service for their officers’ professional and prompt action.
I’m still confident of the attendance estimate I made yesterday. It would not surprised me if the numbers reached my upper end of 800,000.
Now, some reporting from around the country.
Pundit and Pundette – Washington, DC
Paco Enterprises – Washington, DC
Moe Lane – Washington, DC
Tabitha Hale – Washington, DC. Tabitha, a member of Smart Girl Politics, also emceed the event in Lafayette Park.
Point of a Gun – Richmond, VA
Donald Douglas – Orange County, CA
Midnight Blue – Harrisburg, PA
Marc Moore – Houston, TX
Andrew Riley – Phoenix, AZ
Duane Lester – Kansas City, MO
Stacy McCain – Hoover, AL; Tuscaloosa, AL; and Birmingham, AL. Stacy was also interviewed by the Crimson White in Tuscaloosa.
Darleen Click – Rancho Cucamonga, CA
Donald Douglas has an even bigger roundup of the days events along with a few notes about the insane reporting from CNN yesterday. On the same note, Ed Driscoll says that yesterday is the day the MSM committed seppuku. Michelle Malkin has more on the execrable Susan Roesgen who, given her performance yesterday, isn’t even fit to report on the fashion beat. Moe Lane isn’t holding his breath to see John Stewart lampoon Roesgen this time.
Lastly, Karl Rove has a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the protests but misses half the story. Yes, people were there to protest the taxes which are surely going up under the Obama administration, but that’s not all they were protesting. they were there to oppose the government spending and the intrusive and unwelcome hand of Washington that over the past few years has dug farther and farther into their lives. I can understand why rove wouldn’t want to highlight that part because he was as responsible for the government’s incredible growth as anyone. He was one of the chief proponents of the “compassionate conservatism” that the protesters yesterday soundly rejected. It wasn’t just taxes that drew hundreds of thousands of everyday Americans into the streets yesterday. It was also runaway government spending and intrusive bureaucracy and, above all, the arrogance of our elected officials in Washington who believe that they know better than we do how to live our lives. The Republican Party doesn’t have a lot of room to throw stones at the President on any of those issues. Not after the last eight years.
But they do have time to get right. Yesterday was their wake-up call. Let’s see if they are listening.
Tags: Big Government, Conservatism, Karl Rove, Republicans, Taxes
As I’ve been saying on other blogs–we protesters are just as mad at the GOP as we are the Dems. We hold GWB just as responsible (maybe even more) than we do BHO. There is going to be a rude awakening in 2010 and 2012 for the smug little thieves in congress that passed these bills (that they didn’t read) that put our future as a country in the hands of people who hate the USA and bankrupted our children’s futures.
A decent reporter could have found that out pretty easily. But that would have involved going to a tea party without a preconceived narrative to advance.
THE LEFT IS LYING ABOUT THE ECONOMY
Tea Parties are a pushback against manipulation
http://greensrealworld.blogspo.....ation.html
What’s so strange is that you guys are beating your chests about getting 300,000 people to turn out in a protest. Compare that to the 750,000 that protested Bush’s war. Don’t remember that? No surprise, the media ignored it. And in Boston, the tea protest in 1773 was ten times the size of this protest in Boston. And Boston now has more than a hundred times the population that it did back then. But I’ll give credit where it’s due, this is the largest conservative protest in history. But conservatives don’t really know how to protest. Martin Luther King could fill the entire mall in DC, and people had to be turned away. And some of the anti-Vietnam War gatherings were much larger and one even featured a man actually burning himself to death. You guys will never come close to our level of protest. I was hoping to watch a real protest, but I was really disappointed. You guys need some old hippies to show you how it’s done. Or maybe the Red Shirts from Thailand. Or the Yellow Shirts. Take your pick. Everyone in Thailand can protest better than you guys. And we stoned hippies can do it better than anyone in Thailand. You didn’t even beat the anti-Prop 8 protests. And gays represent only 2% of our society.
The odd thing is that I really had a real tea issue. I just ran out of my good tea from Darjeeling. Now I’m drinking Twinings. But I’ll get paid soon, and I can order some tea online from the same retailers I visited in Darjeeling. In a month, I’ll be back to drinking the fine Muscatel Valley tea that I’m used to. Wooohoooo! For the record, the Muscatel Valley teas are worth their weight in gold for the first two flushes. The third flush is worth less than gold for some of the plantations. And we don’t talk about the fourth flush. It’s a dirty secret in Darjeeling. That’s the Monsoon Flush, but there is another name for it: Lipton.
So we should have someone commit grisly suicide to prove a point?
GENIUS! We’ll sign up some lefties.
T-Shirt
Yes.
(Edited to change the link to something a bit shorter – J)
Actually, the protest in 1773 was much, much smaller. Not even Nancy Pelosi, as dumb as she is, would claim otherwise. You should be ashamed.
However, you do forget that the anti-War protests (and the Prop 8 protests) did have central, top-down organization. the anti-war protests, for example, were spearheaded by groups like MoveOn and the various anti-American front groups such as International ANSWER. To pull nearly half a million people into protests, as I’ve said before, without a main charismatic figure around which to rally and no activist group setting the whole thing up is quite the accomplishment.
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