Huntsville Alabama Tax Day Tea Party - Part II

First, some number crunching, for anyone who likes numbers.

The final attendance estimates I'm getting for the Huntsville, AL event were about 2300-2500.

For comparison purposes, that's about 1.4% of the city of Huntsville's population, though many participants came from the surrounding area rather than Huntsville proper.

Pajamas TV is estimating total turnout for the nationwide protests at over 578,000 people.
For Alabama, total participation was estimated at about 12,000.

So a slightly better than proportional turnout, since Alabama represents 1.6% of the nation's population, and contributed 2% of the tea party attendance with 18 events.
(New York, by comparison, with 6.5% of the nation's population, contributed just 3.3% of the total event attendance, with 33 events, while Texas, with 8.2% of the the nation's population, contributed 12.4% of the total event attendance, with 78 events. But more on Texas later.)

Note: They estimated Huntsville's attendance numbers at 3000, about 500 more than police estimates, so some optimistic rounding up may have occurred. However, by the same token, many events may have been low-balled by official counts, depending on the politics involved, so it's really hard to say.

In any case, at least half a million Americans showed up on April 15th to make their voices heard, many for the first time in their lives.

High-level reactions to the events were varied, including:
Crude and sophomoric
Clueless
Opportunistic
Hypothetically Seccessionary

CNN and MSNBC showed their true colors as crude, sarcastic, out-of-touch elites who neither have any idea of what they are talking about, nor of what normal Americans think about anything.
FOX, meanwhile, was basically along for the ride, defaulting to be the only network that gave the events positive coverage, and earning massive rating boosts as a result.

Republicans generally tried to co-opt the events as supportive, but received mixed results.
Even in Alabama, where for conservatives the Republican party has for years now been seen as the force of good in Washington battling the evil Democrats, opportunistic Republican attempts to channel the events into support for their own campaigns foundered.

One of the more interesting moments at the Huntsville event was when a Republican candidate had been speaking about kicking the current group of politicians out of power (loud cheers), and then expressed his hope that everyone would support his upcoming reelection campaign. (a few weak cheers, deafening silence)

That gave me hope more than most other things I saw. Once people realize that it's not a question of a good party vs. a bad party, but of an entrenched, damaging bureaucracy in which two largely similar parties share power and unelected officials pull the important strings, we might see some effective action taken.

To all the Americans that took time out of their schedules and showed up on Wednesday, and especially to those for whom it was the first time, we salute you. You have earned the right to protest, by acting on your principles.

In a sense, you are learning what it truly means to be a self-governing American citizen, and it is in you that any hopes of stemming the dark tide of government encroachment remain.

Let us draw together in the days ahead, for in the words of Benjamin Franklin:
"We must all hang together, gentlemen... else, we shall most assuredly hang separately"

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