forgottenliberty.com

The 9/12 tea party in Washington D.C. had an amazing turnout. I’m sure very few people expected the numbers to be as high as they were. Many liberal bloggers said only a few hundred or a couple thousand people would show up. Wow… they were wrong. I have not been able to find official numbers, but estimates are anywhere from 70,000 to 1.5 million. The true number is probably somewhere in the middle, but even if the low estimate of 70,000 is correct, the turnout was still much better than expected. This goes to show just how angry Americans are getting over the unconstitutional and expanded role of the federal government in our lives. I have a feeling that these protest will only continue to grow. Here are some pictures of the crowd.. I mean… angry mob,

UPDATE–

The Washington Examiner has a great piece about the 9/12 protest.  It is by their Chief Political Correspondent  Byron York.  Here are some excerpts from the article,

Dr. David Dunch had never been to a political demonstration before.  Yet on Saturday Dunch, a surgeon who has practiced for 25 years in Youngstown, Ohio, found himself marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, wearing a white medical coat with a small American flag tucked into the breast pocket, explaining what’s wrong with President Obama’s national health care proposals.

“It’s a mistake,” Dunch says.  “It’s going to result in ultimate rationing and limiting care to our elderly.  We need universal access of patients with pre-existing illnesses.  We need to open up the 50 states to all insurance plans.  We need tort reform.  We don’t have to trash the current system.”

Dunch has come here with his wife, who is a nurse, because he believes the president is “telling half-truths” by citing the support of the American Medical Association to suggest that most physicians favor Obamacare — when in fact the AMA represents a relatively small minority of doctors. The situation is enough to turn a private physician into a protester.  “I’ve never been political before,” Dunch says.  “This is atypical for me.”

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Some of the protesters had traveled farther than just the distance between their home town and Washington.  Dr. David Levine, a psychiatrist from Rockford, Illinois, was Ramsey Clark’s volunteer press secretary when the ultra-liberal former U.S. attorney general ran for the Senate from New York in 1976.  Now, Levine, wearing a faded NEWT GINGRICH 2008 t-shirt, was on the streets of Washington in a crowd of conservatives.  What accounted for the change? “It started when liberals just stopped making sense to me,” Levine said.  “I was listening to NPR, and nothing was making sense.  So I started reading more and more conservative things, and here I am.”

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Their attitudes toward Obama himself are complicated.  No one I met expressed hatred for the president.  A few had voted for him, and others, like Christy Smith, said they were deeply moved when he was elected.  Many others opposed him all along.  But now, the predominant mood is deep distrust. They believe Obama will raise their taxes, that he will blow up the health care system, that he will weaken America’s defenses.

And they wonder who he is as a person. “The company you keep tells a lot about who you are,” says Tres Berden, a truck driver from Newark, New Jersey.  “With all of those associations of his, from Rev. Wright to Van Jones — you don’t know those kind of people without being one.”  Berden, one of the few African-Americans in the crowd, is a Democrat who now considers himself a libertarian.  He voted for Obama, but quickly became disillusioned. “He isn’t the person he sold us,” Berden says.

You’ve probably heard descriptions of the marchers as crazies and haters and fanatics.  Perhaps there were some in the crowd. Far more important, though, was the very presence of so many everyday Americans protesting in Washington, just eight months into unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress. What did Barack Obama and his party’s leadership on Capitol Hill do to bring doctors and truck drivers together in common cause on the streets of the nation’s capital?  More than anything, these people are afraid that the new president is running the country off a cliff.  They’re in no mood to remain silent now.