This is not be a random sample obviously but here’s all the ages of everyone interviewed in the Post article on Beckapalooza:
- Brian Burnell, 45
- Dave Rue, 67
- Shaun Bryant, 40
- Phil Chancey, 66
- Debbie Wilson, 51
- Anna Hayes, 58
- Joan Wright, 78
- Jeff Mapps, 29
- Dee Meredith, 62
But Sully does have one nice picture of a kid.
Thirty thousand is a pretty pathetic turn-out given that there’s a whole network devoted to promoting this thing.
General Winfield Stuck
Charming.
Polish the Guillotines
Hey, DougJ: Some of us don’t drink tea. How about a booze thread?
Josh
So, wait–
All of those reports about there being 2,000,000 people at the protest (read: hate-fest) was…inaccurate?
GASP!
Cat Lady
Based on the quality of the signs and the age of the sign holders, most of these people learned about this on the AM radio. There will probably be a few thousand who show up tomorrow by mistake – the radio gets staticy out beyond the highrises.
General Winfield Stuck
Obama’s new fried chicken proposal, I reckon.
Elia
The Sullivan post you link to – and the one preceding it, too – is one of the most gutless, asinine things I’ve ever read. How desperately will he wrack his mind and keyboard to avoid calling this like any sane person would see it? The people are an assortment of, as Timothy Noah at Slate recently coined it, “white-separatists.” His final, almost fragmentary, notice that the fact that Obama is “non-white” and “non-Southern” is likely a contributing factor towards their animosity is such an anodyne and bloodless way to skim over the real rancid heart of these protests.
D. Aristophanes
Thirty thousand is a pretty pathetic turn-out
Surely you mean two gazillion patriots woken up from the sleeping giant etc etc
SpotWeld
They had an attendance roughly twice that of a large-ish anime convention despite the fact they had pretty much the entire Fox Network pimping them…
That is pretty much fail right there.
you know your political movement is trouble when you can be easily outnumbered by Naruto fangirls.
geg6
As I mentioned earlier today, I was at an anti-war march in the run up to the war where the crowd estimates were about that and we didn’t rate a photo in the newspaper and got less than a minute on the local news. And then I went two more times over the next couple years with larger crowds, but no more press than the first time. But we managed those crowds consistently over years and no publicity, let alone an entire media empire pushing it. And I gotta say, Doug, those people in DC were young whippersnappers compared to the Teabaggers I saw here today. I’d estimate the average age here at about 75. And ugly. Boy, that was more ugly than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life. Ugly visages and ugly attitudes. They were pissed at me before I even started pointing and laughing. Of course, that might have been the Obama t-shirt I was wearing and the O bumper sticker on my car. ;-)
Polish the Guillotines
@Josh: Actually, all the reports of the inaccurate head count are inaccurate because the liebrul media lies.
Something tells me that by tomorrow, six zillion patriots will have scared the dirty commies in Whoreshington, D(irty).C(ommies). into re-writing all speeches to schoolkids and saving granny from the Death Panels(R).
daryljfontaine
@General Winfield Stuck: Then there’s this little brand of asshattery.
Re: the kid in Sully’s link, I thought there were laws on the books against grooming kids to willingly go along with child abuse.
D
Mike in NC
Poor frickin’ teabaggers. They drove all the way to DC and didn’t even get to collect an autographed pair of panties from Orly Taitz. I hope the many t-shirt vendors on Constitution Avenue did a brisk business in sodas and hot dogs.
daryljfontaine
@SpotWeld: Considering their fondness for cosplay, I thought we were looking at some kind of Redneck Furry convention…
D
Citizen_X
So ~30,000 was the count? I was at an event today where one apparent dittohead came back from lunch break–after, I guess, listening to Limbaugh–going on excitedly about “a million people showed up in Washington!”
A kinda doubted it at the time.
calipygian
I ran into the kid’s mom there. Kinda MILF-y if you can get over the sputtering rage as she screams “Communist!” and “Retard!” and “SAY NO TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER!” over and over again.
Polish the Guillotines
@Mike in NC:
Joshua Norton
Thirty thousand is a pretty pathetic turn-out
This day will be forever known as the Thousand Moran Klan Rally.
Fits.
General Winfield Stuck
@Polish the Guillotines:
Double eww!
calipygian
BTW – John has pics from the Tea Bagger’s Ball if he would only check his e-mail.
SpotWeld
@daryljfontaine:
@SpotWeld: Considering their fondness for cosplay, I thought we were looking at some kind of Redneck Furry convention…
Given the choice I think I actually would prefer the attend the Rocket City Furmeet.
Alan
30K?! The RW blogs are saying 2 million. The wouldn’t exaggerate would they?
geg6
Mike in NC: Arrrrgh! Now I have to wash my brain with bleach to wipe that thought from my memory bank forever. Blech!
Ash Can
Turnout would have been a lot higher if more Fox viewers had any idea in hell where Washington DC was.
Josh
You know what’s funny, is that about a year ago I actually talked to Orly before she became a “media darling”.
She really is batshit insane. The whole birth certificate thing has been pretty hilarious, and downright absurd at times.
I remember when it started, someone out there in the intertubes forged a fake COLB from British Colombia that “proved” Obama was born in Canada–
The birthers accepted this as proof and made a big stink about it.
Here’s the punchline: it was signed by Dudley Doright.
Polish the Guillotines
@Ash Can:
Heh. They couldn’t afford the airfare to Seattle.
rh
I know there are usually wide discrepancies in crowd-size estimates between their organizers and “official” counts, but this is just ridiculous.
The DC fire department is claiming there were 60-70,000 people there, while Malkin is claiming around 2 million people.
But what really bugs me is that I distinctly remember watching TV on the date of one of the biggest anti-war protests in NYC on TV (one of the 2 or 3 that actually had 500k-1million people) and CNN’s coverage of it consisted of nothing more than a perfunctory 10-second-or-so mention every hour. Whenever it was, it was the same protest that Fox News only cut to ONCE, when some sort of embarrassing scuffle occurred in the crowd. From what I can tell, today’s comparatively tiny event got wall-to-wall coverage for much of the day. Some liberal media.
rh
Well, looks like earlier comments pretty much said everything I did already. Ah well.
General Winfield Stuck
@Josh:
No doubt the work of well known libtard Snidely Whiplash, that fiend!
Alan
Okay, the 30K signed up for the protest on Freedom Works website. The picture of the crowd looks much larger than 30K. But 2 million is obviously an exaggeration.
smiley
We’ll never know, of course, but from the pictures I’ve seen, 30-40 thousand seems about right. Malkin is saying 2 mil, natch. It’s a popular movement, damn it, I popular movement I say. We surround them!
Ash Can
@Josh:
Win to the winth power.
Polish the Guillotines
@Alan:
You LIE!
uila
Fact of the day:
2 out of 3 teabaggers oppose the “public” option because they think it is pronounced “pube lick”.
Ironic!
Joshua Norton
if more Fox viewers had any idea in hell where Washington DC was.
A lot of them probably ended up in Seattle.
Kris
The funniest thing about this protest was that it occurred across the mall from the NATIONAL BLACK FAMILY REUNION.
Oh to have seen the reaction on some of those racists’ faces to have to be surrounded by blacks.
smiley
@Polish the Guillotines: Um, as a former resident of Seattle, it’s pretty liberal. Maybe you mean eastern Washington?
Sloth
DC Fire says 60-70K, which is a pretty OK turnout. For, say, a baseball game.
Sucks balls for something that a major network was pimping so hard.
And they really have to cool it on the nazi stuff. It may be lots of fun for them, but it’s just not making their case.
Calming Influence
@Polish the Guillotines:
Yeah! Let’s get liquored up and march on Washington!
“dems where warned that a large group of Balloon Juice Booze Baggers would be protesting in the capital on Saturday…”
Citizen_X
OK, this t-shirt is the scariest thing I’ve seen from there.
PaulW
30,000 is a great turnout for a Washington Nationals baseball game… for a political rally meant to stir the masses to rise up against socialist fascist libruls, not so much.
My question is, when was the last librul turnout in DC and how big a crowd was it? No, the inauguration doesn’t count.
chopper
actually, 2 brazilian people showed up but unfortunately malkin doesn’t know math.
chopper
uh…what?
Polish the Guillotines
@smiley: D’oh. I lived there for a couple of years. I should’ve said Spokane. Which only makes perfect sense, considering the former mayor was a family-values-closeted-gay-man-forced-to-resign-for-soliciting-teh-ghey-secks-from-smooth-young-boys, or FVCGMFTRFSTGSFSYB.
Jules
So far the two pictures I have seen are not actually from today. One is the Promise Keepers rally in the 90’s and the other has a American Flag at half mast on a gov’t building.
Anyone got a link to a real picture of the crowd?
and Michelle Malkin, oh she would never lie about anything….
That kid…ugh…
donnah
CBS News (why do I bother?) showed the Mall and the crowds were big. They wildly guessed that there were tens, probably HUNDREDS of thousands of people there.
I can’t stand it. The signs were hilarious, though. And in my own neighborhood today, I saw two of the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Ugh.
Cat Lady
No one could have predicted every picture would be of a white person.
Zach
30,000? Pffft. Mark Hemingway, an unimpeachable source, says, “I’d be shocked if it wasn’t well into six figures. I’ve heard crowd-size estimates ranging from 350,000 to 1.5 million — the latter seems overly optimistic, but even the former figure would still be incredibly impressive.”
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDU3ZDA0OWY5YjU1NDg5OWMxOGQ1MTgyNWE0OTkyOTU=
I was in DC for the preinauguration concert with a few hundred thousand people. I saw an overhead view of PA Avenue on the news tonight and there’s no way that was anywhere near a hundred grand. Comparing it to similar sized marathons I’ve seen, 30,000 seems close enough.
smiley
@Joshua Norton:
Oh. That’s what you meant. I miss the place. Lived just north of the U-district and worked at the university. Good times (and the UW football team was good then).
Polish the Guillotines
@Calming Influence:
We’ll call it the 100-Proof March!
Joshua Norton
Yeah! Let’s get liquored up and march on Washington!
Wasn’t that a “South Park” episode?
JK
Teabagger Sign from Today’s Tea Party Event
THANK YOU FOX NEWS FOR KEEPING US INFROMED
h/t http://unrepentantoldhippie.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/great-moments-in-brain-damage
General Winfield Stuck
While I have little doubt that most folks at the tea party events genuinely believe the nonsense they hear from Beck et all, and are there to protest whatever lie they choose to believe, Think Progress has a pretty good post up on who is behind organizing and perpetuating these events.
geg6
JK: What the hell is it with these people? Is there not one of them who can spell? Just one?
me
Isn’t that the point of teabagging?
Polish the Guillotines
@JK:
Woah. So much fail at so many levels.
Cat Lady
@JK:
If you can’t execute a simple message on a piece of cardboard with a Sharpie and a few weeks running start, you can’t have anything to do with running anything. That’s a New Rule. Can’t wait until Colbert gets back.
Andy K
@Alan:
Well, if you count everyone who thought about going, but stayed home and watched football….or went to the auto parts store, or the home improvement store and bitched about sales tax…or typed angrily in ALL CAPS anywhere on those confusing interwebs…Well, ya know, they were there in spirit.
bayville
Attendance breakdowns.
Cops say about 30K.
Shuster thinks about 50K or less:
http://twitter.com/DavidShuster/status/3942120853
FOX & AP say “tens of thousands”.
Hemingway at NRO: “well into six figures”, estimates 350K.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDU3ZDA0OWY5YjU1NDg5OWMxOGQ1MTgyNWE0OTkyOTU=
Malkin, Prof & the crazy, crazies say: “up to $2 million”.
Now things are beginning to make sense. According to Freeper math, McCain/Palin actually got 127 million votes & thus proving arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias.
nepat
30,000? That’s means the other 970,000 are stranded in an airport in Washington state.
smiley
@Polish the Guillotines: I went to a NY Academy of Sciences meeting in Spokane back in< I think, 1993, and was almost killed by a graduate student from Washington State in a rafting incident on the salmon river in Idaho. Long Story. Never mind.
geg6
The aerial pictures didn’t look like anything over 50,000 to me. I was in a crowd of 500,000 in Pittsburgh twice within the last 8 months and I have the photos my students took at the inauguration in January. No way was the crowd today in any way comparable to those.
Calming Influence
@Citizen_X:
Looks like an “I’m with Stupid” t-shirt. (Yeah that’s my comment on flickr.)
Comrade Jake
Oh the stupid, how it burns and burns and burns.
Zach
@Jules: If you’re talking about the pic on Malkin’s site, that’s looking down PA Av from the Hotel Washington and the flag’s on the Intercontinental. The Freedom Plaza where the march started is right there and the Intercontinental might very well be flying it’s flag at half mast for Teddy. That’s nowhere near the same order of magnitude as 1.2M or whatever crazy’s gotten into Malkin.
ruemara
They want to claim it was a 2 million person turn out. For comparison, here’s the gigapan of the inauguration, with a near 2 million person turn out.
http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374
teabag phail.
General Winfield Stuck
@Alan:
They were apparently punked by liberal agents.
JK
Lying Dumbass Glenn Reynolds Is Drooling All Over the Teabaggers
“Maybe I was wrong to be so skeptical. But cut it in half and it’s still a huge number. And this is priceless: ‘Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event – an ethic they believe should be applied to the government.’ Why is the British press more honest in its reporting on this stuff than the American press?
Meanwhile, a reader emails: ‘I’ll tell you what I find impressive. I’m watching the Fox news video about 15 minutes after the end of the event. The crowd has thinned out enough that you can see the ground and there is not a speck of trash on the grass. Absolutely clean. To contrast, google ‘pictures of litter on the mall after the inauguration.’”
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/85085
geg6
GWS: They were punked? Seriously? That is fuckin’ awesome. Who did it? Whoever it was wins the day.
smiley
@smiley: P.S. I meant to include that Spokcane was kinda cool for a place to have a meeting.
Ash Can
@Polish the Guillotines:
And it would ultimately be broken up by the cops tear-gassing a group of drunken male Juicers who insisted upon gathering at the White House fence and serenading the First Lady with several verses of “I Love You Truly.” I can just imagine the quotes from the First Family…
Malia: “They frightened Bo, and we can’t put up with that.”
Michelle: “It was a nice gesture, but to be honest, the el train rounding the bend at Wabash and Van Buren sounds better than that.”
Barack: “Thanks, guys. After your performance, I don’t think Michelle’s ever going to make fun of my singing again.”
Comrade Jake
Yglesias is having a lot of fun with these bozos:
Alan
@General Winfield Stuck:
Heh, clever.
b-psycho
@Mike in NC: Because she doesn’t wear any, having found them a Communist restraint on the natural juices of the females of the white race…
Polish the Guillotines
@Ash Can:
Slight correction: It would be an interminably long medley of top 80s hits.
General Winfield Stuck
The outrage queen is catching on and in citizen journalist mode to find out wtf.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I know what this area is like when we’ve got visitors. They didn’t hit the million mark. They didn’t hit the 100K mark.
But hey, if they want to insist that 2 million Republican voters are sheet-draped yahoos, that’s fine with me. In fact, let’s make Stalkin’ Malkin really happy:
50 Million Republican Bigots Descend on Washington, D.C.
@Kris: That’s D.C. on any given day. I suspect a lot of those ass hats took one look at our wonderfully diverse population and locked themselves in their hotel rooms.
@chopper: Win.
Zach
Here’s a timelapse video w/ the same frame that Jules disputed above… it appears that the crowd never stretched to the capitol from the freedom plaza. We can estimate the crowd size pretty easily.
Using this google maps planimeter thing – http://acme.com/planimeter/ – I estimate about 60,000 square meters on Penn Av between Freedom Plaza and the Capitol. Watching a video of the march in progress – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VMXz6xGeqc – the density is less than one person per square meter, and I think it’s safe to assume that the person editing that video wanted to make the crowd look as large as possible.
Comrade Jake
Say what you will about the teabaggers, but they know how to treat the flag with respect!
JenJen
@Zach: Right! I was at both the pre-Inaug concert and the Inauguration. We had to plan out special transportation strategies for the concert because of huge crowds (we had MARC tix for the Inaug).
There was a Marathon in DC today, as well as The Black Family Reunion taking up half the Mall. And from talking to various old work buddies in DC today, there were just no Metro issues in the slightest. That’s why the 2 million number struck me as just DUMB. Not possible to have that big of a crowd in DC without the hotels and the police and Metro knowing about it, and broadcasting about it for weeks prior. Why go with such a silly stretch?
Michelle Malkin has updated her original post. She did a tack-on edit, but actually changed the content of her original post without noting that… in order to throw a Twitterer under the bus for supplying her with the 2 Mil number. Malkin is such a full-of-shit coward, but it’s fun to watch her when she’s stone busted.
Joe Max
Burning Man pulled 50,000 this year. And they drew that to the middle of an alkaline desert with no amenities.
geg6
Polish the Guillotines: Bwahahahahahahahaha! Oh, to see John and Fuckhead singing “Three Times a Lady” to Michelle.
General Winfield Stuck
@JenJen:
Yes, she is a coward. Took the info from a twitterer and ran headlong into stoopid. Would be cool if that twitterer was really another supersecret undercover libtard/
rh
@Polish the Guillotines:
If you look really close, they also misspelled the word “America.” No joke.
wasabi gasp
Liver spots, two million liver spots.
Zach
By comparison, you can look at a satellite photo of the inauguration – http://specials.washingtonpost.com/inauguration/satellite/ – the area covered around the Washington Monument alone is equivalent to the entire stretch of Penn Av from the Plaza to the Capitol and the crowd density was probably five times as high at least.
Comrade Jake
But what does John McCain think about all of this, my friends?
JGabriel
Teabagger Sign via JK:
Sadly, the same sign says in it’s upper left corner, in smaller red letters:
.
JGabriel
Is there a gene, possibly, that links conservativism and dyslexia?
.
kommrade reproductive vigor
It would be really weird if DC P&R gave an estimate about an event that that took place on the Mall. In fact, it would be a first. The Mall is controlled by NPS, something a D.C. area resident with 2.3 brain cells should know.
JK
OT
Interview with Joe Wilson
http://rightwingnews.com/2009/09/an-interview-with-congressman-joe-wilson
General Winfield Stuck
@Comrade Jake:
I expect he’s applying for the Tree of Liberty,, once these idiots get to watering it with their wingnut tears.
Zach
For my last amateur crowd size estimate, I calculated that the crowd size in the Purple Tunnel of Doom was roughly the same as the teabagger crows today. The area with those poor souls on the satellite pic is 1/6 the area of this march, the density is way higher, and I’m not even including the crowd inside the 395 tunnel itself.
Cat Lady
@rh:
Holy fucking shit, you’re right. It fucking says Amercia. TEABAGGER FAIL ELEVENTY1ONE1!
Comrade Jake
I’m thinking there’s a pretty healthy intersection between these folks and people who’ve been home-schooled by their cousin Eddie.
JenJen
@General Winfield Stuck: You and I have been having a bit of fun with this today, haven’t we? :-)
Did you notice that she changed her original post to reflect that she got the 2 Million report from a tweet by this Tabitha Hale person? Screencap of the original post shows Malkin just saying “ABC News reporting crowd at 2 Million” and of course she tweeted the news breathlessly without attribution.
And she mischaracterizes the tweet by the ABC News correspondent. ABC News correspondent calls Malkin’s report “myth.”
Jennifer
HA! From the WSJ:
A spokesman for D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services estimated the crowd at “in excess of 75,000” people. Local and federal law enforcement authorities don’t provide crowd estimates.
So, A) Tabitha Hale is a liar, B) MM is too stupid to recognize that Tabitha Hale is a liar, and C) the only estimate available from any “official” source, not someone just pulling numbers out of their ass, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 75,000.
75,000 is not the embarassment that 30,000 would be, but still…if in a nation of 300 million the majority really felt that their government was conspiring to kill/imprison/sell into socialist slavery them and theirs, you’d have more than 75,000. The Iraq War protests, which garned about 20 seconds of coverage on CNN, were the largest world mass protest in human history and drew something like what, 2 million in this country alone in protests in hundreds of cities? That would be a drop in the bucket to what you would see if these nutsacks in any way represented a “majority”.
I’m on to thinking that we need to counter-protest in greater numbers, only in ridicule of the teabaggers. We could march with banners held upside down announcing “Idiots of America UNTIE!!!” ala the Far Side; carry signs demanding that illegal aliens be left to die in the streets like the dogs they are, or demanding protection of our right to go bankrupt over medical issues. Would be great theater.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
If your event is too small, Photoshop it!
General Winfield Stuck
@JenJen:
Aren’t we awful?:–)
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Comrade Jake: Amercia is a Inglish only nashun!
calipygian
@Comrade Jake:
Heh. If John would ever check his e-mail he’d find a pic that treats the American flag with even MORE respect.
SIA aka ScreamingInAtlanta
Just went to Huff Post and saw the creepy, creepy photos. Just below got to watch Obama’s rally today in MN. Hmmm…now which world do I want to live in?
JK
OT
Praise and protest greeted former VP Dick Cheney as he visited his alma mater Thursday for the dedication of a new international center bearing his name.
About 100 protesters heckled Cheney throughout the dedication ceremony for the University of Wyoming’s Cheney International Center. Cheney and his wife Lynne donated $3.2 million for the new center for foreign students and for scholarships for Wyoming students to study abroad.
Protesters made up about a fifth of the crowd of about 500 and hoisted critical signs: “Shame on UW” and “We don’t want your blood money.”…
Dick Cheney said his time as a student at the University of Wyoming laid the foundation for an “extraordinary career.”
“We hope that this center will provide the kind of support for Wyoming students to travel overseas, to travel internationally, to learn a lot of the lessons that we’ve learned over the years,” he said.
h/t http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iLXuaie1tgSMRaCvHQq7jfIkQ-4QD9AKNOE00
Alan
@Cat Lady:
Maybe they purposely spelled “Americia” to highlight the Mexican Re-conquistadors who have illegally infiltrated the country.
jl
Oops.. The teabagger troops are dupes:
“On Thursday, Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks partnered with an anti-health reform group pushing to privatize Medicare to host a Republican rally outside the Capitol. Alongside speakers such as Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)…”
note the phrase “pushing to privatize Medicare”
From link provided by @49 General Winfield Stuck:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/09/12/armey-teapartypatriots/
Allan
I’m thinking there’s a pretty healthy intersection between these folks and people who’ve been
home-schooledmolested by their cousin Eddie.Fixed.
mai naem
Just saw a blurb on CNN about prostate cancer being related to sexually transmitted diseases. I know you aren’t supposed to make fun of cancer, but really, Rudy Giul91an1 anyone?
Polish the Guillotines
@rh: OMG! I totally missed that. Homeschooling FAIL.
General Winfield Stuck
@JK:
Remember Col. Wilkerson, Powell’s ex CoS.
Pretty much says it all/
Comrade Jake
Just checked out the pics over at HuffPo. There’s enough material there to last Colbert a couple of months, easily.
Cat Lady
@rh:
Anything is possible, but I’m going to stick with the stupid.
JK
@jl:
Dick Armey has the perfect name.
After all, what are the teabaggers other than an Army of Dicks?
JK
@Comrade Jake:
Comedy Central should have the same arrangement with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that NBC, CBS, ABC have with Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Charlies Gibson.
In the event of breaking news such as Joe Wilson’s heckling, Stewart and Colbert should be required to return to the air immediately with new shows.
jwb
@JK: The problem is that, with the current level of wingnut fail, they’d never be able to take vacation.
And, quite frankly, I’m growing rather bored with making fun of wingnut fail. I recognize that it’s one of the few effective weapons available against the crazy, but really the jokes write themselves and I’m just finding it all less and less funny.
Montysano
Meh…. fuck these knuckledraggers. I’m tiring of seeing/talking about/thinking about them. You want to know how this ends? Here’s a spoiler: they lose. They always do eventually.
War’s “The World is a Ghetto” on the turntable, through a tube headphone amp. Damn, those guys could play.
Cat Lady
The pictures are all weirdly pathetic and sad. They remind me of Diane Arbusphotos. I hope the Republican leadership and Dick “dick” Armey are proud of themselves for catering to the stupid and the paranoid.
JenJen
@General Winfield Stuck: We’re a hoot. ;-)
Check it… ABC News has issued their own story about the phony ABC News story!
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/protest-crowd-size-estimate-falsely-attributed-abc-news/story?id=8558055
This is better than Fitzmas!
General Winfield Stuck
More republican domestic tragedy in my homestate of KY. The son of Louie Nunn, an iconic KY pol family goes bonkers and kills fiancee (likely_) and slits own wrist in cemetery over parents grave.
Not with the tea bagging spirit.
General Winfield Stuck
@JenJen:
oo oo, bet I know. And jenjen/
Gus
@Montysano:
Yeah, but how do they lose? That’s the interesting part.
JK
@JenJen: @General Winfield Stuck:
Nothing says clueless like Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds pulling out all the stops to exaggerate and overstate the importance of these knuckledragging neanderthal teabaggers.
Polish the Guillotines
@Montysano:
The problem is, they tend to cause serious damage along the way.
geg6
They only showed one 9/12 rally at Bushy Run Battlefield (rather unfortunate choice of venue IMHO) on the ,Burgh news. Looked to be a few hundred. Next story was that Obama is coming to Pittsburgh on Tuesday. Pretty epic fail. But definitely epic comedy on a slow Saturday. Also.
Josh
A cursory glance of quite of few of the “Twittards” who attended the hate-fest are going with erroneous and highly inflated 2 million estimate.
I know that the demonstration in D.C. only hurts their cause, but it does a lot of damage. When you see morans holding signs that mischaracterize the opinions and ideals of such men as Ben Franklin, you can actually feel your soul weep.
Yes, we can see their true colors when they open their mouths and say stuff like, “We fear Muslims are moving in and taking over.”
And the fact that Republicans in government are going along with these people only cements my belief that we’re going to go through a violent phase before we get to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Don’t such displays of incomprehensible stupidity depress you?
kay
Ugh. Real nasty slideshow photos at the new York Times site.
They put up a huge photograph of Obama at a podium with the words “Parasite in Chief” where the Presidential seal goes. The idiots are grouped around it, jeering or something.
It’s first on the slideshow. It’s an actual photograph of him, as Prez, and what looks like the actual seal, with the words replaced.
I think this is too hateful to be effective. “Parasite” is an ugly word.
TheFountainHead
Besides the “Obama = Hitler” did anyone decipher any kind of meaning out of today’s little event?
TheFountainHead
Besides the “Obama = Hitler” did anyone decipher any kind of meaning out of today’s little event?
kay
I shouldn’t be surprised. They were spiteful and arrogant winners in 2000 and 2004, and they’re bitter and angry losers this time around.
They can’t do either thing properly. Win or lose, they’re nasty.
kay
@TheFountainHead:
Yeah. When they lose an election they think it’s a constitutional violation.
It’s the “right to win” clause.
Maus
“How desperately will he wrack his mind and keyboard to avoid calling this like any sane person would see it?”
When has Sully ever done differently?
Davis X. Machina
Oppressed, unless oppressing.
Montysano
@TheFountainHead:
Barack was the name of the horse that the prophet Mohammed rode to heaven, but it can also be an albino infant Uncle Same being ridden by a mutant kangaroo with a tail made of hand tools, and this kangaroo will ride the baby, or…. something.
Bootlegger
@JK: That crowd was 500,000 for Cheney! The liberal media lies!!!
kay
@Davis X. Machina:
They kept saying on the radio that they had “never” been politically active before.
That must be why they think they get an actual vote in Congress. As individuals. Without being elected.
Where do they think this Congress came from? Obama brought them out from Chicago?
One old man interviewed was on the ball. He said he hoped Republicans won in 2010. I was thinking, ‘That’s refreshing. He gets the general idea”.
He was the only person interviewed who gave even a passing nod to elections as a means to block legislation.
Citizen_X
@Davis X. Machina:
See also “Civil War, U.S.”
debaser
Check out Sully’s comments. He thinks all this is swell, except for the nasty signs and sentiments. And of course we get the standard Joe Klein reference to ANSWER and anti-war proterstors.
This IS conservatism, Sullivan. Maybe not “properly understood”, but that is just something that exists in your mind anyway.
kay
@Citizen_X:
See, also, “elections have consequences”.
Sound familiar? It should. These people said it to us, 4 years ago. Now they’re being denied their inherent and god-given right to…win?
ChrisB
@JGabriel: “Facsist”
That’s from the sign held by the kid in the Andrew Sullivan link.
Is it dyslexia or just plain stupidity?
I just think they’re morans.
gnomedad
Politians Are Like Dipers!
ChrisB
@ChrisB: Sorry, here’s the link:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/more-reason-from-the-right.html
GregB
You are the facsist morans!
There was over 300 million white patriots at the tea-party!
Wolverines!
-G
Jason Bylinowski
@Josh: I believe you are on to something with that theory. I’m not afraid of a 2nd civil war exactly, but just anecdotally I can tell you that it is NOT SAFE to be a democrat right now, depending on where you live. I got in a political argument the other day with a customer of mine (I am an IT consultant), and suddenly the whole scene zipped from being intellectual and healthy to “you fucking dirty sockyalist, say that again and I’m going to lay you the fuck out.” I mean we nearly came to blows over an argument concerning the philosophy of governance. Isn’t that just lame? Just think about how silly that is. One has every reason to be passionate about politics, and I certainly fall into that crowd, but you gotta keep your distance a little bit, at least enough distance to stay sane in the presense of rivals. Finally, here’s the craziest part: I kind of wish he would have done something. I am ashamed to say it, not because I’m a pacifist who just fell off the wagon, but because if I looked back on that fight, regardless of the outcome, I know I would feel like an ass over it, and I probably would have lost that customer as well. Instead, I stuck out my hand, smiled and gave my usual Southern Democrat speech, high flying stuff about how politics in America exists as a continuum, that the D’s are just the yang to the R’s yin, and that having one without the other would never work in a healthy democracy (all of which I do believe to be correct, by the way, but it’s still bullshit), and that at the end of the day what we should both agree on is that we need more than just two National-level parties. So we are still frienemies or whatever, and I’m sure I’ll hear from him again (mainly because he is cheap and I don’t charge much).
Anyway, I am not the only person this has happened to around here either. In fact, it’s become more or less unremarkable info around here that if you still have an Obama sticker on your car, you are risking your car’s paint job. I’m not going to lie: I’ll tell anyone to their face that I’m a Democrat and not worry about it, but I did take off my Obama sticker. People around here will look at you & smile with their mouths while plotting to kill you with their eyes, and I have a feeling that my car’s paint job is bad enough as it is.
Montysano
@Jason Bylinowski:
Yeah, me too. Mine sent me an endless stream of email forwards; some really vile, sick stuff. I replied one time, saying “___ isn’t factual”. The guy went ape shit, as did everyone else on his list, and a brutal “Reply All” war ensued. I won’t do that again.
Josh
@Jason Bylinowski:
I live in Ann Arbor. This place is essentially Obamaland, USA–and incidentally, we all feel awesome about beating Notre Dame today.
I have an Obama sticker on my car, as do about 1 out of every 10. In point of fact, it is an extreme rarity to see anything to do with conservatism and Republicans around here–except of course for the University of Michigan chapter of Young Americans for Freedom and the Collegiate Republicans.
I can’t say that I have experienced anything near to what you have, but I have seen it. Actually, the closest thing to that I’ve ever experienced was a person in one of my lectures complaining about a Professor bashing conservatism (as an ideology) and Bush (as a person)–and that ended in abject embarrassment for the person because they couldn’t really debate what they were objecting to.
Last year, YAF pulled a stunt called “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day.” The local chapter of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN–don’t like them–too extreme) made a big stink about it and proved YAF’s point (which I can’t comprehend–but that’s what YAF claimed). Anyway, I remember it as a time where rich white kids went around accosting people with dark skin thinking that the “illegal immigrant” that they had to catch was some dark-skinned student–so that they could win a prize.
Oy. This is not something that is unique to idiots. I’ve witness educated people act just as stupid.
r€nato
30,000 teabaggers protesting today.
nearly 2 million people attended Obama’s inauguration on January 20.
you do the math.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@r€nato:
Hell, Obama had larger rallies during the general election. Wasn’t it Portland that had over 75,000 people (too lazy to look up) at one rally? Cain ought to remember, he was there…lol
Every time I run into a rabid teabagger I am going to tell them that if they want to hang out with an organization (Beck’s 9/12) who embraces the white militias who want to secede or overthrow the legitimate US government while their astroturf sponsor, FreedomWorks, gets paid to push for privatization of Medicare, then they are free to do so.
But they better not dare to call themselves patriots in my presence because I will point out that they nothing more rebels without a clue.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Fix’t!
SIA aka ScreamingInAtlanta
@Josh: Yes
Martin
Philly – 50,000.
Portland – 75,000.
St Louis – 100,000.
Berlin – 200,000.
There were a bunch in the 30K range.
Will
We broke 1,000,000 for the March For Women’s Lives back in 2004. Not a peep of media covered it. These 30,000 can suck…on…this.
Mike G
And I don’t like the elitists telling us what we should do or eat.”
WTF?
Down with Obama’s Arugulist-Dijonist tyranny! Give me iceberg lettuce and mayo or give me death!
Kyle
We hope that this center will provide the kind of support for Wyoming students to travel overseas, to travel internationally
Points for suicidal recklessness for any University of Wyoming student who travels overseas and admits to the locals that their trip was funded by Cheney.
Bender
DougJ pwns himself — film of the beclowning at eleven?
From your own article, moron:
Jeez, even MS-DNC reported from the Mall that there were “hundreds of thousands.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/32813988#32813988
I had no idea that a mere rally by your political rivals would drive you Obots all off the tracks into self-delusion like this. Just don’t watch the traffic-cam videos showing the full Mall — your heads will explode! Trust Doug’s unlinked, unsupported numbers, contradicted by his own sources! PROTECT THE HIVEMIND AT ALL COSTS!
JenJen
@General Winfield Stuck: Late to get back to the party, but oooh, ooooh, I bet I know too!
It’s because Brendan Steinhauser, spokesman for FreedomWorks, is a big fat lying liar! What do I win, Stuck?
This wingnut stuff isn’t rocket science. Especially when Dick Armey and Michelle Malkin are involved.
Wile E. Quixote
Jesus H. God, I’ll be 44 in October. I hope I don’t turn into a drooling nutbag and total fucktard as I get older.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
The crowd was so large that ABC had to issue a statement correcting a phony statement issued at the rally by a FreedumbWerks spokesheadpiece where he claimed that ABC said that there were 1-1.5 million at the rally.
ABC reported that the DC fire department said that there were about 60 to 70 thousand there. Another report has the DC police saying that there were about 30,000. The attendance was so bad that the supporters (poorly) photoshopped a PromiseKeepers event from the 90’s into the picture to make the crowd look larger.
Fail, epic proportions. At least the Secret Service and FBI were probably busy taking notes, so at least something productive came of it. :)
bob h
A goodly percentage of them evidently not so committed to their principles that they reject accepting government paid for healthcare in the form of Medicare.
ppcli
@Kyle:
“We hope that this [Cheney] center will provide the kind of support for Wyoming students to travel overseas, to travel internationally”
Yes, they call it their “extraordinary rendition” program.
bob h
The Baggers evince great concern for the effects of the deficits on their “grandchildren”. Where are the grandchildren?
The Medicare Teabaggers should be carrying signs “I’ve Got Mine”
kay
I can’t imagine having a Medicare card in my pocket and then traveling halfway across the country to protest government involvement in health care delivery.
I would just have trouble with those two things being true at the same time.
kay
@bob h:
It’s like the massive protests we saw when conservatives instituted the massive new Medicare entitlement, the prescription drug plan.
Remember those? No?
Person of Choler
Thirty thousand, you say?
Well, as another dickless character put it, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1213056/Up-million-march-US-Capitol-protest-Obamas-spending-tea-party-demonstration.html
Svensker
@Mike G:
Give me iceberg lettuce and
mayoMiracle Whip or give me death!Fixed.
The Grand Panjandrum
@TheFountainHead:
Yes. Size matters.
The Grand Panjandrum
@kay: Yes. And it is an UNFUNDED mandate that would dwarf the cost of any of the bills now being discussed in Congress. I believe current projections have it adding $10 trillion dollars to the deficit over the next 15-20 years. (I don’t remember the exact number of years in the report I read.)
kay
@The Grand Panjandrum:
I know some fiscal conservatives, well, I know TWO, one of whom is presently a registered Democrat, and they were quite upset.
I generally like and (mostly) respect old people, but I’m growing a little weary of their taking with one hand and shaking their finger at me with the other.
I resent being called a “parasite” when I’m picking up their prescription drug costs. I didn’t vote for the GOP Congress or President that instituted that give-away plan they currently enjoy, and I’m paying for it, without hurling insults at the beneficiaries.
I worked yesterday. The Tea Partyers spent a fun day in DC calling me a parasite. What’s wrong with this picture?
Ash Can
@Person of Choler: Are you saying you got punked too, or just the Daily Mail?
Person of Choler
kay 166 Here’s what’s wrong with the picture: the retired folks spent their working lives paying social security taxes (and their employers essentially matched the payments, the cost of which was part of employee overhead). They paid into Medicare since 1965 or so. And now they have good reason to suspect that the benefits they thought they were paying for are going to be significantly cut to save money for you.
You complain that you worked while other people had a day off? Well, that happens to most of us once in a while.
kay
@Person of Choler:
The park service number is 60 to 70k. That’s a good size crowd.
Of course, you had to blow that success by by inflating it by a factor of 10, and then claiming your source was ABC, and then that being debunked…
Nothing is simple and straight-forward with conservatism, especially numbers. It’s like the Movement exists to muddy the water.
I keep going back to Karl Rove and “the math”. That must be a basic tenet of conservatism, that numbers are up for discussion and debate.
kay
@Person of Choler:
The House bill cuts 200 billion over 10 years. 20 billion a year. It does that by reducing the payments to the conservative-led 2003 Medicare Advantage program that pays private insurers 14% more than the public Medicare rates.
Again: I didn’t elect the Congress or President that put a policy in place (Medicare Advantage) that pays private insurers more than the public plan. I didn’t do that. I WANT that cut, because it’s a waste of money and a direct subsidy to private insurers. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s bleeding Medicare. Seniors should want that cut. It’s a failed experiment.
If you want to debate the merits of the Medicare Advantage plan, fine, let’s go. If you want to tell me you oppose government involvement in health care delivery, as an ideological issue, don’t do it with your Medicare, Medicaid or S-CHIP card in your pocket, or you’re a fraud.
kay
@Person of Choler:
I don’t know what Social Security has to do with anything, and I’m weary of this whole “spent their working lives” garbage. It doesn’t work with me, so sell it somewhere else.
Senior citizens are not unique, or extra-special super-duper hard working. Most people work, most people pay taxes, conservatives are only unique in that they whine incessantly, while happily taking any government benefit that comes their way.
This is fairly simple. Don’t march on DC with signs calling me a parasite when I’m paying for programs that you enjoy, and haven’t paid for, because the fact is the payments into Medicare don’t cover the costs. I, and millions like me, cover the costs.
I resent the hell out of that, and I’m not going to apologize to seniors when they lose an election.
Person of Choler
Ash can, Maybe the Daily Mail got punked, maybe not. The Daily Mail is a newspaper, what are you?
Kay, why are you weary of the “spent their working lives” stuff. Unless you are a government employee (which, if true, could explain your annoyance) you, too are spending your working life paying social security taxes (matched by your employer), or the self-employment social security tax, plus medicare taxes.
Chris Johnson
I was at Rocket City Furmeet, and was just down in Tennessee at Mephit Furmeet.
Redneck furries are definitely more fun. :)
Ash Can
@Person of Choler:
Blockquoted because this makes you look so spectacularly dumb.
Now I’ll pause in my pointing and laughing and direct your attention to the rest of the thread above, which discusses all the various crowd estimates and arrives at the conclusion that the estimate of 60,000-75,000 from DC Fire/Emergency is likely the most reliable one.
Butbutbut THE DAILY MAIL SAID IT! So it MUST be right! And you LIKE that number, so that’s the one you’re going to cherry pick and believe, the truth be damned! WOO HOO!
Person of Choler
Ash Can, The Daily Mail added another crowd estimate to discuss, as in the thread above.
kay
@Person of Choler:
Because spending your working life working is the NORM. Conservatives are not a special category of taxpayers. You take, and you pay, like everyone else.
The liberal argument that you take MORE than you pay is actually a good one, if we want to go to “parasites”, and that’s where conservatives went, yesterday. I don’t call people “parasites”. You do. Okay then. Let’s talk about that.
I live in a rural conservative area. One of the funniest local political events I have ever witnessed was when the feds starting posting the numbers for farm and crop subsidies, I think it was 2004.
The Democrats here had an absolute ball with that. I admit I searched the database. Come to find out half of our loud-mouth local fiscal conservatives have been collecting federal checks for 2 generations, for not planting corn or soybeans on the ground they inherited. They got a lot less noisy after their names were posted on that database.
I would resist using the term “parasite” from here on out, if I were a rural, red-state conservative. That pedestal you’ve constructed for yourselves doesn’t hold up to honest scrutiny.
kay
@Person of Choler:
If conservative senior citizens had any common sense, they’d stop screeching and work for immigration reform.
The last best hope for paying their ginormous medical bills are new immigrants who pay into the system, because their demographics skew younger. So. Let’s stop being silly, let’s stop pretending benefits are “free” and get younger workers with demographics that favor growth into the system, and collect payroll.
We can’t, because conservatives are hysterical (again) and bad with numbers (always).
Calm down, take a deep breathe and maybe we can mitigate some of these huge problems our hard-working seniors blissfully ignored for the last 30 years.
JenJen
@Person of Choler: Buddy, seriously. Drop the Two Million claim. It’s laughable. Even that super-coward Michelle Malkin is too humiliated to back it up. The entire thing is a lie. Drop it.
I’m guessing you’ve never been to DC before if you actually believe two million people descended upon The Mall yesterday at the same time, and nobody knows about it.
kay
@JenJen:
People that live there and went are commenting on the Post site that they estimate it was about 50k. That’s close to the Parks estimate of 60k. But, it’s nowhere near 1 million.
JenJen
@kay: Exactly. I lived in DC for years; from the moment Malkin first tweeted the 2 Million number, a few of us were commenting about how crazy that was, right here at Cole’s Place. I truly spent most of the afternoon wondering how in the living hell they were ever going to get away with that lie. It was so easily laughable and disproveable from the moment it was conceived.
So… why? 50, 60, 70k. For a GOP March, that is a good number. It’s nothing to blow off. So why did they make up such an outrageous lie, and then disseminate it out through the usual channels? They blew the entire even. It’s 100% on them.
And Nate Silver agrees.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/size-matters-so-do-lies.html
kay
@JenJen:
The Silver piece is good, but I guess I disagree with even him. 60,000 people is a tenth of a single congressional district. Antiwar protests were triple that, and it took years to oust the conservative Congress, and turn public sentiment against Iraq.
I think we get caught up in the politics so much that we (I do) forget about the fact that most people aren’t engaged, or on one side or another.
Most of the people I know watched college football yesterday. I’m going to the county fair later. I’ll man the Democratic Party booth, with my husband, and I can make a safe bet that 90% of the people who stop will talk, to him, about Ohio State football, because I don’t know anything about football, and in any event I didn’t watch the game.
I’ll report back if I meet a lot of teabaggers. I doubt it, though.
JenJen
@kay: Well, if people are going to stop to talk OSU Football, it’s going to be a long day for both of you. I’m still not quite over last night. :-(
Have a lovely day!!
kay
@JenJen:
He’s already out there, and he’s considered something of a local expert on college football, and I was teasing him because he was essentially “cramming” on the details of the game, online, before he left.
I worked yesterday, and I have a feeling the football watchers here drank a lot. He doesn’t know what the hell went on in the last half of that game, so had to study up. He had to PREPARE for idle football chatter, because I’m no help at all.
Fulcanelli
@kay: Kay, your posts here today have been great, and informative. Good Stuff!
henqiguai
@Wile E. Quixote (#155):
Our children have promised to drag us out back and beat us with shovels if we go down that path…
Person of Choler
jenjen, as to the two million claim, rag on the Daily Mail about that one.
Kay, As to the farm subsidy stuff, yes I know about that. I grew up on a farm and, yes, I looked in the database also and was amazed at what my former neighbors and their kids were knocking down from the taxpayer. People who couldn’t keep their cattle in their own fence were collecting ~$200K / year. These were good Democrats, by the way. If you offer free stuff to people, they will take it.
As to squawking about being called bad names, sometimes it comes with the paycheck. I work in the energy industry and demonstrators call me a wrecker of the planet, exterminator of polar bears, polluter of the atmosphere and then they get uncomplimentary. But I don’t take it personally and recommend that you don’t either.
sunsin
I work in the energy industry and demonstrators call me a wrecker of the planet, exterminator of polar bears, polluter of the atmosphere and then they get uncomplimentary.
I take it that you admit to the first three charges, then? or consider them compliments?
And anyone familiar with the British media would hesitate to trust the Daily Mail on anything. If that’s your only source (even Malkin having retracted), you are in very bad shape. I hope you’re not as careless in your sourcing in your professional life.
someguy
30,000?
They’re ucky if there was 10,000.
Dr. Morpheus
Person of Choler? I’m beginning to suspect your a paid troll from jolly old England. No American rightard would have even heard of the Daily Mail, let alone quote it.
So, do you have any facts to back up your initial post? You’ve already thrown the Daily Mail under the bus, so I’m guessing you agree 30,000 was the pathetic attendance for your KKK rally.
Bender
What kind of Juicer dementia is on display here? I am just not understanding why you guys would go so far out of your way to delude yourselves that there weren’t more people there, when your own eyes and your own links certainly indicate that there were. I mean, what’s the difference to you if there were hundreds of thousands of people there? It’s just more people for you to hate, which you guys usually like!
Cognitive dissonance is hilarious, but in this case it’s just loony.
hoser
As I’ve said before, if these parades didn’t cost the tax payers so much money I’d say let ’em do one every weekend. Free entertainment, no driving, best views in town (if the pictures are real).
H M Bascom
Hover Round Revolutionaries. Ha!