I went to the Richardson Tea Party yesterday and it was pretty interesting. The crowd looked like it was around 700 or so which is pretty good for a lunch day protest rally. We weren’t centered in one place like in other tea parties around the country. Most everyone was walking around the park waving at cars. There was lots of supportive honking and only one idiot woman who flipped us off. There were all different types of people there as you can see from the pictures below.
I feel like there is definitely something brewing with this movement. Here’s hoping anyway. Instapundit has lots more coverage and pictures including one from Dallas.
Nice. It’s good to finally see people taking a stand.
it is good to see this. i just wish they didn’t end up looking ignorant in the process. seriously, tea party? those of us who paid attention in american history class remember that the boston tea party had nothing to do with high taxes — in fact, the protested tea act had lowered the effective tax on tea. taxation without representation was the name of the game, something none of these folks can claim without becoming hypocrites for telling me i should move back to canada if i didn’t like bush’s policies. love it or leave it, remember? support your president no matter what in times of crisis?
the unfortunate fact of the matter is that in looking at these pictures i see a remarkable dearth of anyone who didn’t vote republican (though if by ‘all different types of people’ you mean middle-aged and older middle-class white folks i can see your point), which suggests that this has less to do with a groundswell of support for a third party and more to do with just being unhappy with democrats. while i can sympathize with that, it gives me no hope for change. the moment mr. obama is replaced it will be with another neocon who lowers taxes but spends like a meth addict with his mom’s credit card who feels he deserves the very best stereos to disassemble on the white house lawn while he figures out another way to end around my constitutional rights to privacy, freedom of religion, and whatever other bits and pieces he can come up with to advance his distorted social agenda.
but that’s just me — i’m a bit of a pessimist. i thought the bailouts were a bad idea back when they were something bush cooked up.
for the record, i’m aware that you thought they were a bad idea from the start as well, my man. i’m presently nearing the end of maybe my worst night’s sleep of all time. that makes me cranky.
First of all, calling a bunch of people you don’t know ignorant based on their attendance at an event, especially on someone’s blog who was in that same attendance doesn’t exactly make you look like a reasoned individual who just happens to disagree. It looks a lot like an ad hominem to me and isn’t particularly useful for the discussion at hand. Second, saying the Boston Tea Party was only about taxation without representation is like saying World War I was only about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Taxation without representation was a key factor but there were many more factors that led to the Boston Tea Party. And even if it was only about taxation without representation, if you truly think that you are well represented by our ruling class, you have a different view on them than I’ll ever have.
Finally, your keen ability to ascertain how people voted just by looking at some pictures is extraordinary. ACORN probably has a high paying consultant job they’d love to give you. What I meant by all different types was cowboys, bikers, old people, young people, second amendment people, abolish the fed people, federalist people, fair tax people and more. I didn’t say anything about diversity and given the fact that the protest happened in whitebread Richardson, that shouldn’t exactly surprise you.
Whether this is the beginning of a third party will only be decided with time. Maybe it’s not. However, back in 1994, the American electorate threw out a whole bunch of politicians because they were angry for being lied to. Our politicians have been lying to us for a long time now and I think this very well could be the tip of the iceberg. Saying hundreds of thousands of people across the US protesting our government’s profligate spending and rampant corruption is just more of the same seems worse than pessimistic. It sounds cynical.
ok, first off 4am is never the best time for me to write — i didn’t mean to imply that anyone involved in this IS ignorant, only that it comes across as such. and i certainly did not to imply my own ignorance relative to the boston tea party’s causes, only that with regard to taxes lack of representation was the name of the game, not height of said. lastly, i never suggested we are well-represented by our ruling class, only that we are, in fact, represented by them. quality of representation was not even an argument to be had in boston. i suppose that’s hair-splitting, but there you are.
now to the rebuttals that weren’t based in my own miscommunication. to begin with, relatively speaking richardson is anything but whitebread. just drop by the high school that’s a few hundred yards from that picketing site and check the demographic relative to that protest and tell me there’s any alignment there at all. as for how these people voted, the woman’s ‘read my lipstick’ shirt is a pretty obvious nod to mrs. palin’s pig defense, and there hasn’t been a leftie who wore that much ‘merican flag regalia since abby hoffman. perhaps i’m guilty of sterotyping, but these were not exactly without educated precedent. and no, you didn’t say anything about diversity, just ‘all different types of people’, so if i’m going to stoop to the insult level of your ACORN reference can i infer that minorities do not qualify as people? you’re better than that. besides, your pictures don’t show anyone under the age of 50 who wasn’t brought by someone that age (one notable woman aside, admittedly), i see no one who in my experience would qualify as a biker (and my dad owned a harley dealership when i was young), and without substantial discussion i’d wager it’s be tough to determine if anyone in any of your pictures is a member of any of those groups you cite. you challenged us to judge the diversity of the turnout based on your pictures — that’s all i did. i’m just saying it don’t look all that ‘all types’ to me, brother.
ultimately, i hope i’m wrong. i really do. even an old liberal like me has mellowed with age and come to recognize that all the democratic party is is the opposite side of the trade-ff coin from the republicans — with one you lose a bunch of money to maintain rights, with the other you lose a bunch of rights to hold onto your money. and the dems seem to be getting worse. and i don’t think cynical is the wrong word at all (secretly, i think that we liberals are more cynical than conservatives in many ways — how else to explain a group of people who think people can’t care for themselves and won’t care for each other without governmental involvement?). i’ve just seen too much behavior to suggest that anything will change. 1994 was watershed, but what has it given us long-term? dickety-doo. in the end, i think without a saturation of alternative parties it’s not going to work out well, unless a true libertarian party emerges that can stay true to its principles. but even then, will it work? will an american public that is split down the middle between those who want a handout and those who want to tell others how to live their lives really take a government that will provide for neither? maybe so. but since the price of gas has gone down i have a load of rising SUV sales that suggest maybe not.
AND after much discussion, it turns out that i am apparently the only one i know who thinks ‘tea party’ was a goofy name for these — it seems i am alone in my thinking that it undermines the point. everyone else i have asked thinks that it’s plenty effective regardless of factual accuracy as it points the finger at taxes one way or the other (something i must grudgingly admit), so i guess i’ll take that point and suck it for a while!
Well, this discussion has certainly taken on a tone I wasn’t anticipating nor intending. My ACORN comment was over the top and I apologize for that. I thought of it as a joke but realize that in reality, I look like an asshole saying that. So mea culpa.
I have lots of other pictures I didn’t post. None that I can see have any true diversity in them though they do have most of the types I mentioned above. I should have posted them though if I was going to use the pictures as evidence of different types of people.
As far as diversity is concerned, the 2000 Census says Richardson is slightly more diverse than Plano but slightly less diverse than Carrollton and far less diverse than Dallas. The high school population probably isn’t useful in deciding diversity since there are quite a few things that might influence that one way or the other. I think all the flag regalia could be said to be a sign that it is actually non-partisan. And I would be willing to wager a bottle of good scotch that if I asked everyone there “Do you support the second amendment?” and “Did you VOTE Republican in the last election?” I’d get far more people saying yes to number 1 than to number 2 since, again leaning on statistics, 50% of the people there probably didn’t vote at all.
1994 was a watershed event and I actually think it had a great impact because it showed people what can actually happen. Our politicians go long periods of time without any intervention from the mainstream until they step over the lines and a huge backlash occurs. 1994 was a backlash. I believe we may be seeing another one now. And if this isn’t one? I have dark theories about what happens to American civilization. If we can’t get angry about how we are currently being treated by our political class, all hope may in fact be lost.
Concerning the tea parties in general, Rasmussen put out survey results yesterday that 1 in 4 people knew someone who attended one and that 51% of Americans had a favorable view of the tea parties including 54% of Mainstream Democrats. Further sign that there is a HUGE divide between our ruling elites and the mainstream, only 32% of the Political Class was following the news on tea parties compared to 58% of the mainstream.
With that, I’ll go back to blogging on gardening.
mea culpas are due all around. i frequently let my temper get the best of me, and once one adds that to a joke of a night’s ‘sleep’ it was my attitude (along with a substantial lack of clarity in communication) that kicked off the negative tone.
i AM shocked that richardson is less diverse than carrollton, having lived there for several years, but perhaps it’s merely an issue of perspective — i now live in mckinney, which makes plano look like all the new york boroughs combined. i’m not sure i agree on flag regalia, but i’m not sure this is exactly a salient point anyway, and i’m fer dayum sure you’re right on the last point in that paragraph, so screw me again. i’m wrong A LOT.
i’m thoroughly intrigued and frankly pleasantly surprised by the rasmussen results — i think that is extremely encouraging, and thoroughly discredits my initial (totally inadequately expressed) concern that you inadvertently pointed to with your suggestion of ad hominem argument. that is precisely what worried me; the argument didn’t matter because anyone left of center would look at the crowds and, ad hominem, dismiss the argument as nothing more than sour grapes. these data point not only to that not being a major concern, but possibly of no concern whatever.
i am always open to having egg on my face, and in this circumstance i am truly glad to wear it. i’m still not entirely convinced that this has any staying power, but even i have to admit that it looks pretty good. let’s hope all the social agenda differences can be ignored for long enough to get this rolling.