Athens Tea Party

So, I unexpectedly had the chance to attend yet another tea party in the area, this time in Athens Alabama.

I didn't have my camera with me, so I will put up another post later with pictures off my phone.

For those of you not familiar with the area, Athens is a small town, about 23,000 people.
I wasn't expecting much, perhaps 50-100 people. But it seems that the word is getting out better these days. About 300 people showed up, by my estimation. And if everyone who honked and shouted in support as they passed had parked and joined us, we could easily have matched the Huntsville event.

Will Anderson, an area radio personality, led the proceedings.
Christie, the young lady who organized the Huntsville event, showed up as well, and was given a very well-deserved round of applause.

We also heard from a Marine veteran who had recently seen combat in Iraq, been injured several times, and brought back an elaborate dagger from one of Saddam's palaces.

It was encouraging to see more people show up on shorter notice this time. Perhaps the necessary organization is beginning to be set in place. That by itself would be a positive outcome of the tea party movement. Conservatives aren't used to protesting, but we all may be forced to become rather skilled at it in the coming days.

Pictures and more information to come.

-()4|<.

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"

-()4|<.

Huntsville Alabama Tax Day Tea Party - Part I

Today, all over America, concerned citizens gathered together to protest uncontrolled spending and general encroachment by Washington. I was present at the Huntsville, AL rally, and I can say that it was quite another thing from the small but lively band that gathered in Decatur. Even before I got off the highway, cars were backed up. People parked all along the street for over a mile down the road.

By the time I had walked to the event itself, there was already a crowd of probably three hundred. This grew steadily to a maximum of what I would guess to be around 800-1000 people. (estimated attendance will be forthcoming eventually, as some local media was present, but anything lower than 750 is an attempt to lowball the figure; the crowd was quite large and densely packed)

The speakers did mostly well. Dale Jackson was present, and of course did an excellent job getting everyone fired up. He and other speakers made numerous comments about our being "domestic terrorists", a reference to the DHS report featured in my previous entry below.

Things began to wind down when an interesting but longish discussion on the Fair Tax was plagued with technical difficulties. I am all for the Fair Tax, and for promoting it, but this was perhaps not the best venue to go into more than a brief summary.

However, everything got back on track, and ended with the recitation of the pledge of allegiance, and a rousing USA chant.

All in all, I was pleased to see the turnout, considering the unfortunately low attendance in Decatur previously. Alabama is not densely populated, so massive crowds tend to require attendance drawing from more than one county. Huntsville is something of a regional center for most of northern Alabama, however, and the event drew people from the surrounding areas. I recognized some people from that earlier Decatur rally as well.

It was a good day, and a good event. In the grand scheme of things, however, it must merely be the beginning of something greater to have any lasting effect.

I will post another article with more information soon, also hopefully with a link to some video of the event, and some commentary on the news coverage.

UPDATE: It turns out I am indeed a conservative, including when it comes to estimating crowds. Huntsville Police are estimating the crowd at 2300 people.

UPDATE 2: WHNT has a great picture of the Huntsville crowd from a better vantage point than I could reach. They also have a couple of pictures from the Dekalb county protest. More pictures may be forthcoming later.

-()4|<.

Decatur Alabama Tea Party

On a warm Saturday morning at Rhodes Ferry park by the Tennessee River, a few score citizens gathered to celebrate their freedom and protest Washington's encroachment on both their rights and their pocketbooks.

Things were a little slow at first; it was the first time that some people had attended this kind of meeting. But as it went, things picked up steam, and pretty soon we had a full-fledged political assembly going. The Republican party was heavily represented, of course, but seemed almost apologetic, whereas some of the open-mic speakers commented that both parties were responsible for the current mess.

After the scheduled and open speakers, petitions were brought forth to be signed, and things ended on a more or less hopeful note.

The Verdict:
It's a beginning.

If that meeting constitutes the sum of the region's efforts, then it will not have accomplished much. However, if this is the first step towards gaining a voice in Washington, then combined with all the numerous towns doing the same, it might not have been in vain.

The idea is that this is all leading to a massive crowd converging on Washington on July 4th.
We shall see, but if such an event occurs, there is at least a decent chance that MC will be there to cover it...

I hope to attend the "tea party" in Huntsville in a couple weeks, being the area's largest city it may have a somewhat higher turnout. The more people show up, the less excuse the media have for ignoring it. If you are sick of listening to the depressing news and want to actually do something about it, come on down. Here's the info...


-()4|<.

Nuclear Angst

Alabama honor: Bush visits first new reactor to open for decades

We may be thanking God for Mississippi in most state comparison rankings, but Alabama is currently leading the way in the quest for sane and efficient power generation. President Bush will be visiting the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Athens on Thursday, where the Unit 1 reactor has recently been restarted. While this may not sound significant, it is the first reactor to be started in the US in 20 years.

You may be asking yourself why this is, considering that nuclear power is the most efficient power generation means available to us by far. The only by-products are hot water and small amounts of very radioactive but containable material. (Yes, this material poses an obvious and enduring health hazard until it's safely under Yucca Mtn., but not nearly as much as the lack of power infrastructure will cause in the event of a national emergency, or even just an over-stressed power grid.) Those situations involving mishaps and the threat of radiation leaks, most notably Three Mile Island in the US and Chernobyl in the Ukraine, are irrelevant at this point: Chernobyl is a nightmarish scenario that is not possible with modern US reactors, and the lessons of Three Mile Island have been well-learned and taken into consideration.

I have noted that Browns Ferry Unit 1 is the first reactor to be started in the US in 20 years, making it unit number 103 in the US as a whole. Contrast this to nuclear efforts in China:
(info from http://www.world-nuclear.org)

* Mainland China has nine nuclear power reactors in commercial operation, a further two units grid connected, four more under construction, and at least four more about to start constuction in 2007.
* Additional reactors are planned, including some of the world's most advanced, to give a fivefold increase in nuclear capacity to 40 GWe by 2020 and then a further three to fourfold increase to 120-160 GWe by 2030.
* The country aims to become self-sufficient in reactor design and construction, as well as other aspects of the fuel cycle.

To summarize, China has plans to increase their nuclear power capacity by 15-20x its current level in the next 27 years.
By contrast, in the past 20 years, we have only shut down or paused the construction of plants, not opened any.
Now, lest I be accused of sinophobia, I will call attention to the fact that China only has 11 working reactors at this point, so it will take some time for them to catch up, even at the rate they are building.

However, my point is not to worry lest we be overtaken in numbers by any specific country, but that we have irresponsibly neglected to keep a robust power infrastructure in place. Remember the rolling blackouts in California? They were at least partially responsible for the referendum that kicked Gray Davis out the door and ushered in the era of the Govinator.

And it's not as if we can solve the nation's energy crunch with the ongoing boom in windmill construction either. Though they may alleviate problems in some areas, as a whole you're not going to help lighten the load on the nation without a veritable sea of them covering vast sections of the Midwest, and the energy required to create and construct said sea of windmills would make such an effort counterproductive.

In the end, nuclear power is the only option that makes sense. There are no coal-based clouds of smoke, no swirling windy blades of death, no acres of solar cells with meager power returns. Though these (coal-powered, wind-powered, solar-powered) solutions make sense in certain locations and contexts, the only technology that makes sense to use as the backbone of a heavily loaded power infrastructure in great need of shoring up is nuclear power. Even France has figured this out.

(That, or we can wait for the even cleaner and more efficient process of nuclear fusion to be perfected. But even setting aside the fact that it is the technology of the future and probably always will be, why do I have this sneaking suspicion that the drinkers of Gore-aid would find some reason to scream out against them too?)

If we continue to allow regulatory dead-locks and people who oppose the idea of power plants on principle (often the same people who think the fewer humans living and disturbing nature's tranquility the better) to prevent the responsible and practical process of increasing our grid capacity, the problems will only get more severe. Let those who complain of global warming go without air conditioning for a summer, and then decide if a few more reactors aren't worth it...


-Oak