Well, according to the Seattle Times, there were between 1000 and 1200 people in attendance at yesterday evening's Tax Day Tea Party. Attendance at the noon-time Tea Party in Olympia was pegged by the State Patrol at over 5000, making it the largest protest in Oly in several years.
In Texas, the governor led the party. In Olympia, the State Auditor, Brian Sonntag, was a key speaker, pointing out that the state congresscritters had voted themselves raises and then cut his budget, so that he can't audit them...
Keli Carender, AKA Liberty Belle, organized the Seattle Tea Party, She also organized the February 16th Porkulous Protest, which makes her the organizer of the very first tax protest in the country, before we were even calling them Tea Parties.
Saying that she felt like she had fallen down a rabbit hole lately, she dressed for the Tea Party like Alice in Wonderland--a fact which was lost on the Seattle Times, which called her "Little Bo Peep."
(Not a great photo, for which I apologize to
(I failed to secure a photo of myself wearing my TANSTAAFL! cap from I Am Simon Jester. Bad Drang. No beer.)
Here's a quick drive-by shot at 5:30 PM as I circled Westlake Center looking for a place to park.
Speaking of crummy photos, the entire Seattle PD Mounted Unit, plus some of the Bicycle Unit, was waiting patiently across the street from Westlake Park for... something. WTO II, maybe.
The rest of the Bicycle Patrol was hanging out at the back of the plaza, but I didn't get a picture of them.
Don't know how well this panorama shot will work on the site:
Had no luck making signs, wish I'd thought to buy a pitchfork. And maybe a torch...
Liberty Belle calls Representative "Baghdad" Jim McDermott, D-isgrace. No answer, not even a machine.
By the way, I had no idea that His Imperial Majesty had named his dog for himself...
More crowd/sign pics. One of the guys in this first pic was an advocate of "Open Carry"; normally, I frown on it as unnecessarily provocative, as well as ceding a tactical advantage, but not even the cops in the area seemed to notice.
This lady--Rose Strong, I think her name is; I should have been taking notes!--was probably the most impressive speaker of the evening, to me. Not just that she opened up by saying "Do you know how hard it is to be a Black Republican?" But everything she said was well-thought out, articulate, and backed up by facts.
Other speakers included perennial Washington ballot initiative-writer Tim Eyman, and (name again!) Sean Salzar, who is opposing Patty Murray, D-Sneakers, for her Senate seat next year. He was a hit with his "three bills I will introduce as soon as I am sworn in", but it seems to me that a person running for political office should be more careful how he says "I don't owe anyone anything!" as the explanation for why he will press for these reforms: You do owe your constituents...
At the end of the evening, Liberty Bell was presented with a teacup of her own...
Another poor picture. Light was fading, and the autofocus on the digital camera was having a hard time keeping up with the sign- and flag- waving, the point of aim kept shifting...
All in all, a great time. Earlier in the day I had stopped by a 12:00 Tea Party in North East Seattle, and saw maybe two dozen people there. When I first went by looking for parking I thought I saw... something. On my second go-round the block, I didn't see it again, so I went ahead and parked and walked over... And discovered that this particular Tea Party was a Lyndon LaRouche fest. I left.
Saw many of them at the Seattle Party. There were people there who were even fringier: One young, um, lady who had about a 12-inch mohawk, and a sign reading "Bring Back Crystal Pepsi"; her friend, whose sign made a reference to intimate portions of his anatomy; and another young man who wore a bandanna over his face, and had a pair of goggles on his head, who was waving a sign which read "No New World Order" on the front, and had some reference to pyramids, and, for all I know, the Illuminatti, the Tri-Lateral Commission, and the Gnomes of Zurich, fnord, fnord.
Still, even though some of the signs carried by the "regular" crowd pushed a few boundaries, this was almost certainly the most well-behaved Seattle demonstration in a long time. No way to tell for sure that it was really "mostly middle class", of course. While it did seem to be "mostly" white, it was certainly not "white bread"/WASP, I saw quite a few folks who "seemed" to be Hispanic, and a few Pacific Islanders. Not many Blacks, alas.
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