San Diego Tea Party tax protest - April 11 edition

We rolled out to the San Diego Tea Party tax protest with B-Daddy this morning down at Spanish Landing. Overall, it was a good time. Great signs and generally good speakers, though, the one speaker who has a radio show here in town and is paid to speak for a living was absolutely atrocious. Dude could not get through two sentences without stumbling over a word or phrase or mispronouncing something.

Anyway, a few observations and thoughts:


Roger Hedgecock was there though he did not speak and kept a low profile – just an attendee like the rest of us. So was local tax-crusader, Richard “Dick” Ryder. We shook his hand and thanked him for all his hard work here in San Diego over the years.

There was some young guy in a San Diego County Republican Party t-shirt talking to a couple of older ladies next to us. He was passing out flyers for more tax protests on April 15th. We couldn’t make out much of the conversation but we did catch this somewhat exasperated reply from one of the ladies: “… but you never contact us back”. Classic. We appreciate the GOP establishment’s desire to glom on to this but we’re afraid they may not have the juice, credibility or organizational savvy to be much assistance. Thanks for asking, though, fellas.

An Arnie and Barney Frank piñata. We didn’t stick around for the beat down. Ah, yes – bipartisanship. We were encouraged by the consistency of the message both from the speakers and by the signs we saw around us. In the near hour-long slate of speakers, we can’t recall the President’s name being mentioned even a handful of times (the Governor, however, was not treated as respectfully). This is a protest against a culture in both D.C. and Sacramento that is the antithesis of everything reasonable, pragmatic Americans were taught to believe while growing up and a protest against how it is we conduct our lives on a daily basis. A protest against the “Heads, I win – Tales, you lose” culture that exists in these two locations. Being asked to fork over more of our money and freedom to this miserable lot makes absolutely no sense and the “message” of this protest stayed on that point.


Gender ratio was split right down the middle. Racial make-up was an entirely different matter altogether, though. We did not see one African-America and but a handful of other minorities in this crowd of 1,000-1,500 people.

Local media coverage was spotty. Fox News reportedly was there though we had no visual confirmation and we did see a CW Channel 5 news truck in the parking lot.






Oh, man. We have got to get one of these t-shirts.