Over the jump and scroll down for UPDATE
At the intersection of Foothill Blvd. and Day Creek, slated for the 5-7pm window, organizer Laura Boatwright had only expected a couple hundred to turn out when she first started sending out the word in March.
Count provided by the Rancho Cucamonga PD just past 6:30 pm was 1,600.
And I would say that was an undercount.
People started arriving at 4 pm, gathering in the parking lot infront of the closed Circuit City. For alledgedly bitter, clingy, angry, scared rightwing extremists the mood was wonderfully relaxed and upbeat. People pointed to each others’ handpainted signs, applauding the especially clever ones. Large flags abounded, American and “Don’t Tread On Me.” A little after 5 pm the crowd has grown considerably, and groups started circulating between the corners of the intersection. Five or six deep at the corners, the crowd then spread out in each direction almost a full block, one to two deep, down each side.
I spotted some media, but they seemed more interested in trying to get footage of “colorful” characters. Rancho PD undercounted the crowd, it will be interesting to see what numbers the media runs with …
Because of the ASTROTURF!1!!!
For some really big pictures of the crowd see here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Ben Boychuk of Infinite Monkeys also attended the Rancho gathering. We had a chance to chat a bit, especially about the abject derision and hysteria the left is spewing in reaction to American citizens exercising their Constitution rights of assembly
I have to believe Obama’s partisans are more than a little concerned. Smug bloggers and pompous pundits spent the days leading up to April 15 mocking the tea party protests, dismissing them as “astroturf” — fake grass roots — created by Fox News and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. (If support from a national organization disqualifies a local rally from being called “grassroots,” then the word should never appear in the same sentence with “MoveOn.org” or “Kos” ever again.)One of the worst pieces of anti-tea party dross I encountered Wednesday came courtesy of Democratic party hack and CNN commentator Paul Begala. The man who made a small fortune concocting elaborate fictions for the Clintons attempts to defame the tens of thousands of good people who turned out across the country as “goofballs,†“phonies,†“whiners†and — get this — “plutocrats.â€
Plutocrats! I saw small business owners, teachers, Teamsters, stay-at-home moms, retirees, college kids, and even a few government workers angry and worried that the political establishment has saddled the next two or three generations of Americans with a ruinous debt fueled by government spending gone mad. I didn’t see a fat cat in the bunch. But, as I say, it was a big crowd. Who knows? Maybe one slipped in.
Ben has additional pictures of the event.
Comment by Americaneocon on 4/15 @ 11:43 pm #
God, what a day. I could spend another day just surfing Tea Party posts!
Keep ‘em coming!
Comment by Topsecretk9 on 4/15 @ 11:51 pm #
I was at the capitol and a police officer was telling someone at 12:30ish pm there were at least 5,000 people at that time. It’s was pretty packed.
Comment by heh on 4/16 @ 1:57 am #
“The pirates are in Congress.”
Heh. Same thing should happen to ‘em too!
Comment by Rudy Carrera on 4/16 @ 2:28 am #
It was thoroughly heartening to see the hometown crowd having a blast!
Comment by psycho... on 4/16 @ 3:15 am #
I’m down on all this, of course, but I don’t want to be shitty, so here’s some protest fashion advice:
A right-wing extremist in the market for a NASA shirt should go for a vintage one with the old 2001-looking logo, the one they disowned circa Clinton to signify the end of a dark, right-wing era in the agency’s history, the “space race.” The new, no-more-farmboy-daredevils, no-more-penis-shaped-logos NASA (represented by Palin! guy’s moobal region) is just another bureaucratic hive.
E.g., its solar physics program is called…something about Anaxagorus, right? Astronomers love that old-timey shit! No. It’s “Living With A Star.” They gave a Cat Stevens hippie cult disease pamphlet name to shooting rockets at the fucking Sun.
Don’t advertise for that.
DICKS IN SPACE
Comment by meya on 4/16 @ 5:43 am #
“God, what a day. I could spend another day just surfing Tea Party posts!”
It is intoxicating. Thanks for all your work!
Comment by Carin on 4/16 @ 5:54 am #
Detroit Free Press has the Lansing count at 3-4 thousand. I haven’t seen any good pictures of the crowd … there wasn’t really anyway to get any height in order to capture it.
Comment by Carin on 4/16 @ 5:57 am #
Go here for some good crowd-size pictures. There IS one of Lansing. Looks like it was taken from the top of the Capitol ;)
Comment by happyfeet on 4/16 @ 6:02 am #
I can’t believe we all fell for it.
Comment by Carin on 4/16 @ 6:08 am #
Reading that article, Happy, I just am SHOCKED to discover that politicians would stoop to politicizing the event. Have they no shame?
Yesterday, Mitch Albom (spit) was lecturing us how “we lost” so it is up to us to find a way to cross the isle and work with Baracky. You see, that’s what happens when you lose. Obama is president, and (apparently) dissenting from his policy is … I dunno, undemocratic or something.
Comment by urthshu on 4/16 @ 6:15 am #
I was at the one in Rochester NY, 600-700 people. Didn’t think I’d have the time, but I’d been working around Lake Ave and took my lunch for it.
Weird day for me, since my dad wound up septic and in the hospital after around midnight.
And there was this moonbat lady shrieking about Bush when we were marching up to City Hall, you know?
So in essence, I was living in a Cure song, since I’d passed the Howling Woman and stood outside their door & whatnot….
Comment by Carin on 4/16 @ 6:18 am #
Urthshu - I hope your dad is ok. That’s how my dad lost his leg. Of course, he is on immune suppressants so sepses is especially bad for him.
Comment by urthshu on 4/16 @ 6:27 am #
Thanks, Carin. I think its a gall bladder thinger. He’s been having stones. We’ll see.
Comment by Pablo on 4/16 @ 6:28 am #
Providence turned out 2000+. Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy.
Comment by Joe on 4/16 @ 6:30 am #
Anderson Cooper notes, it is hard to talk when you are teabagging. And Anderson would know!
Comment by happyfeet on 4/16 @ 7:28 am #
JD had a gall bladder thinger. It all went very well I think. As I quit smoking I will gain weight and then one day I’ll be like this is very alarming and I will lose the weight very quickly and when you do that you’re at greater risk of gall bladder problems.
Comment by Spies, Brigands, and Pirates on 4/16 @ 7:30 am #
I can’t believe we all fell for it.
Yes. It only counts as non-partisan if it’s organized by ACORN and International ANSWER, as we all know.
Comment by nawoods on 4/16 @ 7:42 am #
Since it looks like dipshit thor may have killed the other thread, I’ll this here:
Any Atlanta readers here that were present last night? My better half and I got on MARTA in Buckhead, and the trains were already pretty full bringing folks in from the ‘burbs. We arrived at 630pm, half an hour before the advertised start time and it was already crowded. By the time we left around 830pm, it was assholes to elbows. Atlanta PD estimated the crowd at 15,000, and that could very easily be true. It was too crowded to really move around and get a full view of the proceedings.
Comment by Comrade Carin on 4/16 @ 7:48 am #
Happy, I don’t want you go get the gall bladder thingy. Suppose you keep rice cakes and what not handy?
Apples and water. Pretzels, those are good. Low fat.
I did the wind sprints at the gym yesterday. Yes, you won’t want to smoke after doing those.
Comment by Comrade Carin on 4/16 @ 7:53 am #
Plutocrats! I saw small business owners, teachers, Teamsters, stay-at-home moms, retirees, college kids, and even a few government workers angry and worried that the political establishment has saddled the next two or three generations of Americans with a ruinous debt fueled by government spending gone mad. I didn’t see a fat cat in the bunch. But, as I say, it was a big crowd. Who knows? Maybe one slipped in.
I think this is something that should really worry the left. As I noted over at my joint, the crowd was made-up of regular folk. Business men and blue collar types. Moms and grandmas. Bikers and young adults. No one smelled, and only a few couple appeared to be extremists. Yes, there were a couple. How couldn’t there have been?
Even the policemen appeared to be more interested in the speakers than in watching the crowd.
Comment by TheGeezer on 4/16 @ 8:00 am #
Happy, my wife had her endoscopic gall bladder removal and was home in a few hours. Risk is greatly reduced compared to years ago.
Quitting smoking is the best thing to do to increase chances of longevity. Of course, after quitting smoking is when one becomes suddenly attractive to speeding busses and beer delivery trucks, which means one must acquire a different risky behavior. I suggest heavy drinking after work.
Comment by happyfeet on 4/16 @ 8:08 am #
I will do better when I get back on Monday. It will be ok. You are right that this tea party thing is worrying the dirty socialists. This is all the dirty socialist morning cunt at NPR had to say about it today.
Comment by happyfeet on 4/16 @ 8:20 am #
This is a heartening click for today after yesterday. Will droopy diseased Arlen show up for a debate you think? Bet not. Throwing his sad ass to the curb would be pretty neat and also it would scare the shit out of the dirty socialist Maine hoochies. I wish Meghan’s coward daddy would get a primary challenge soon.
Comment by McGehee on 4/16 @ 8:27 am #
My wife was rolling with laughter over the White House going into lockdown because of a box of tea bags thrown over the fence. We voiced some not-suitable-for-all-ages humor about all those free-range teabags suddenly showing up in Obama’s backyard, though I suspect the ones containing tea are probably too large to be mistaken for any indigenous items.
It’s a great time to be a threat to national security.
Pingback by Dirty Socialist Vermont Public Radio [Dan Collins] on 4/16 @ 9:08 am #
[...] “reports” on the Tea Party in Montpelier yesterday, being a companion piece to happyfeet’s comment, here. [...]
Trackback by Blue Star Chronicles on 4/16 @ 9:21 am #
Susan Roesgen: Angry CNN Reporter Calls Tea Party Protesters Anti-Government and Anti-CNN…
Susan Roesgen is a CNN reporter who was sent to cover the Tax Day Tea Party in Chicago yesterday. She appeared quite angry about the whole thing. The previously little known reporter certainly made a name for herself by her confrontational and barely (…
Comment by LTC John on 4/16 @ 9:37 am #
“It’s a great time to be a threat to national security.”
Sure is - I am so proud to be considered a threat by DHS!
Comment by Matt on 4/16 @ 10:41 am #
My one real irritation about yesterday’s tea party is I never received my check from whichever rich corporate people organized all of these things. According to the drivebys, we were being funded by shadowy “pro corporation” interests.
So Soros good, unnamed “pro corporation” rich people bad. Thank god I have CNN to clear this stuff up for me.
Comment by Matt on 4/16 @ 10:55 am #
I heard the thing with Roesgen. I have no doubt the crowd, when learning she was a CNN reporter, turned “hostile.”
Now if I walked into a crowd of war protesting hippies wearing my Bush04 Tshirt, I would completely expect them to be passive and nice and conversational. Because the left is about peace and love, whereas the right is about racism and guns.
CNN does not yet understand it is the enemy.
Pingback by Tax Day Tea Party Roundup (With Links, and Rove!) : The Sundries Shack on 4/16 @ 11:39 am #
[...] Tuscaloosa, AL; and Birmingham, AL. Stacy was also interviewed by the Crimson White in Tuscaloosa. Darleen Click - Rancho Cucamonga, [...]
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[...] Neo-neocon, NewsBusters.org, Gateway Pundit, Michelle Malkin, Founding Bloggers, Wizbang, Protein Wisdom, Big [...]
Comment by The Monster on 4/16 @ 2:48 pm #
“Anderson Cooper notes, it is hard to talk when you are teabagging. And Anderson would know!”
Isn’t it easier to talk when teabagging than when being teabagged? Or is that the other way around?
Comment by Christopher Taylor on 4/16 @ 8:44 pm #
Wait… Rancho Cucamonga is a real place?
Comment by meya on 4/16 @ 9:16 pm #
“Isn’t it easier to talk when teabagging than when being teabagged? Or is that the other way around?”
I still haven’t been able to figure this one out.
Comment by Ben Boychuk on 4/16 @ 11:22 pm #
“Wait… Rancho Cucamonga is a real place?”
Cucamonga used to be a figment of Frank Zappa’s imagination. Then some clever developer dreamed up “Rancho Cucamonga” — which sounds so much classier — and now they’ve got stores and houses and everything! Or so I’ve read.
I live in Rialto, which is all too real.
The tea party was a blast. Can’t wait for the next one.
Comment by Jen on 4/17 @ 10:50 am #
Thanks for the post! I was there and it was a lot of fun! Can’t wait to do it again! :)
Comment by Donald Lamb on 7/25 @ 5:22 pm #
I’m searching around the net trying to find when the next tea party is. Dose anyone know? I really do believe that having them so spread out between dates dates on the calendar is a strategic mistake. So much can be done between tea parties to discredit them and so much can be done to get people to forgotten the tea parties that have been held. Any ideas? I do have a social site for tea parties @ http://taxteaparty.ning.com/
Pingback by Obama and DNC smear machine to hoi poloi [Darleen Click] on 8/5 @ 8:12 am #
[...] if these mendoucheous, leftist gasbags want to accuse every dissenting person who showed up at a Tea Party as being paid by “K Street lobbiests” then come prove I received any [...]
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[...] if these mendoucheous, leftist gasbags want to accuse every dissenting person who showed up at a Tea Party as being paid by “K Street lobbiests” then come prove I received any [...]