Friday, April 16, 2010

Thousands Turn Out for Irvine and Oceanside Tea Parties!

The weather on Thursday was perfect for tea partying.

I attended two events:
The Non-Partisan Tax Day Rally at the Irvine Auto Center, just a few minutes from my home. And The Tax Day Tea Party at the Oceanside Pier Amphitheater.

According to the Orange County Register, citing event organizers, just "400" turned out for the Irvine tea party. But last year the Register claimed the just "
hundreds" came out the April 15th tea party in Santa Ana (thousands turned out), and at the peak of Thursday's rally we easily had 800 people on hand in Irvine, quite possibly a thousand:

Photobucket

Photobucket

I took close to 150 pictures. I'll post more over the next few days. Meanwhile, some greats shots from the afternoon. Here's "Lady Liberty" starting off the rally with an invocation:

Photobucket

An excited patriot displays his poster, an awesome take-off on Ronald Reagan:

Photobucket

Yours truly (tea party professor) at the event:

Photobucket

Local opposition to ObamaCare:

Photobucket

One of my favorite signs of the whole day:

Photobucket

Another enthusiastic patriot:

Photobucket

The Secretary of State was able to make it, with her former president hubby:

Photobucket

Also President and First Lady Obama:

Photobucket

Lots of media teams on hand. Here's the KABC Los Angeles truck and a dude with the Gadsden flag:

Photobucket

Another great sign, from a genuine goddess:

Photobucket

Folks had a lot of professional signs with non-cluttered messages:

Photobucket

This is Kira Davis, who was interviewed at the Orange County Register, "I've had enough with the government taking our hard earned dollars and spending them in wasteful ways," she said. "I've met the nicest most open people today":

Photobucket

This patriot's got a Chuck DeVore sticker:

Photobucket

And he didn't go home disappointed. GOP Senate candidate Chuck DeVore running virtually neck-and-neck in a general election matchup with Barbara Boxer:

Photobucket

Steve Poizner spoke after DeVore, but more on him later. I took off a few minutes thereafter to have some lunch before heading down to Oceanside. AND HERE IT IS, OCEANSIDE, BELOW. And boy, was that a great crowd in North San Diego County, easily well-over a couple of thousand people. I said hello to the gentlemen from Irvine with the Reagan "recession" sign (partially obscured). We both laughed when I joked about two rallies in one day:

Photobucket

I kept moving up the stairs and then stood by a railing looking back down. Tea partiers are still arriving. It's about 4:30pm, the event's start time:

Photobucket

I walked around the amphitheater to get more crowd shots. Immigration's quite an issue around these parts:

Photobucket

Back up at The Strand, I came across this gentlemen hanging out with a friend, with another straightforward message for November. Notice the stage below, with the ocean backdrop. Great spot for a tea party:

Photobucket

This is Lloyd Prosser, who's a candidate for Oceanside City Council. A Marine Vietnam veteran, he noted during his speech that a year ago he was out in the stands as a fellow tea partier. This year he's a candidate for the Council. I heard a similar story at the Irvine rally, from one of the candidates for the GOP Central Committee. Amazing what's been taking place at the grassroots since the Obama-Dems took power:

Photobucket

The crowd's filling out now, but folks were still coming. I walked down the pier a bit for this shot. Sweet:

Photobucket

More media:

Photobucket

Walking back down now, you can get a feel for density of the crowd

Photobucket

I met up with Tim from Left Coast Rebel. He was on the lookout for tea party crashers, and he found some, "SEIU/ACORN/Fake Tea Party Plant at the Oceanside Tax Day Tea Party Doesn't Get Very Far":

Photobucket

GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner made it down to Oceanside as well. He doesn't seem so much like a tea partier, actually (and as I write this a Poizner ad comes on the television):

Photobucket

While hanging out, I surveyed the crowd for signs, and ran up the steps to this woman. She was flattered:

Photobucket

Chuck DeVore made it to Oceanside as well, and he immediately connected with the huge veterans' contingent (Camp Pendleton's nearby). DeVore rattled off variations in the "hooah!" greeting between the Army and Marines. He's a former reservist, and combined with his authentic conservative credentials, he was a crowd pleaser:

Photobucket

I'll have more tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

18 comments:

  1. GREAT job, sir- and heartening to see there's so many sane people still around in Cali, lol

    Featured and linked at RR today...

    CALIFORNIA... Knows How to Party!

    http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/2010/04/california-knows-how-to-party.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is an impressive array of photos. Thanks for posting them.

    Yesterday, I perused some blog and news stories re: the Tea Party protests. Most stories had derogatory inference regarding the Tea Party. However, the posts from readers were over the top. The blatant, and false, ad hominem attacks comprised most of the comments. And any commenter that disagreed with the positive posts was attacked by the typical mindless minions of the left. It provided a great example of group think.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Excellent photos and reports! Well done!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great pics! Looks like a nice turnout an a beautiful day!

    Rick, it's not enough that they're calling is racists - now we're terrorists who sympathize with Timothy McVeigh. It's just feeble and sick. In Philly we were subjected to some verbal abuse and I also overheard comments from people passing by. It's strange that so many seemingly educated and intelligent people could practice such flawed thinking. They're NOT thinking obviously!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great job reporting....unbiasedly!

    Thanks for your time and I loved the creative signs.

    ReplyDelete
  6. just curious, why are the majority of the people at these events well off white people? im not suggesting anything, just asking out of curiosity.

    ReplyDelete
  7. St. Blogustine has tracked back to this post.

    Very nice job, Don!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Why are the majority of people at baseball games white? Must be a racist gathering. Fatuous Leftists!
    Always interesting to see the astro-turfing left out in full force when they sense they are losing. Like little wind up dolls following orders.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Dennis, you must not live in Los Angeles, so I forgive your ignorance. Baseball games here, from a certain level up, are almost exclusively latino. Tea parties, exclusively white. What about NBA games? They are a mix, unlike tea parties. The other fail in your argument, is that they are not political events. Tea parties are almost exclusively white, middle to lower middle class, middle aged. (And there is nothing to dispel the racial angle folks. This movement didn't start when Bush was bailing out banks, it started when Obama got elected.) The people here have not been unfairly taxed by Obama.

    What a sad display.

    Donald, shame on your for your horrendous poster. You really aim low. And succeed. You must be really proud of yourself. You remain a hypocrite. But at least you own it, so I can't complain too much.

    ReplyDelete
  10. This post is almost as good as being there, which unfortunately I wasn't able to pull off.

    Thank you for your tireless efforts, and for the great job covering the event, Donald.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "Baseball games here, from a certain level up, are almost exclusively latino." According to leftist reasoning, this must constitute racism. Where are the blacks and whites? You cannot argue both sides merely to suit your prejudice.

    Petition the Congress to make these fraudulent allegations of racism a hate crime.

    Hate Crime: A hate crime is usually defined by state law as one that involves threats, harassment, or physical harm and is motivated by prejudice against someone's race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation or physical or mental disability.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Check this link - these are the kind of people that use the term "teabagger":
    http://www.zombietime.com/zombl p=612og/?

    ReplyDelete
  13. These are great pictures and reflect the truth of the nature of the people in the movement. I invite you to compare these pictures with ones at the following site and please circulate the link. You know what they say about a picture...

    http://www.zombietime.com/zombl p=612og/?

    ReplyDelete
  14. Sorry about the double post. Memory issue. Still, I'm sincere about it.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Don't mean to be a pest but I realized there is an error in the link. It pasted into my documents wrong. NEW:
    http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=612

    ReplyDelete
  16. lagibby - OM Gosh! I looked at those pictures on Zomblog and guess what??!! All of those protesters were white!!

    I think that they must be racist.

    It's not something that I would have even noticed if it hadn't been for starfox commenting about race all the time.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Trackback: http://republicanheretic.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/tax-day-tea-parties/

    ReplyDelete
  18. You are so active in degrading obama. Where were you when our last president ran our nation into the ground? In the next five years as we see our recovery, you will feel like a total idiot for being on the wrong side. Do you have political amnesia? Do you know what the Republicans have done to our economy? How can you sit there and hold your ignorant anti-obama sign knowing our actual history. Not the history that exists in the fantasy in your dreams, but the history that actually just happened in 8 years of national rape. Do you honestly choose this as your life battle? To deny the nation a new try at something people just like you have been F***** up for the past three decades????????????? You think our biggest problems are mexicans and affordable health care? SERIOUS??? What about the billions wasted on useless wars? What about the right wing ideas of a free-market that enabled the banking industry and wall street to bend us over and economically rape us for 8 years strait? How can you not recognize you're on the wrong side???? Are you just plain stupid???

    ReplyDelete