The truth can now be told. I wasted a beautiful Friday afternoon spending an afternoon in Hudson with the Tea Party Express. I have nobody to blame but myself. I went in somewhat the same way that you can't keep yourself from looking at a car wreck on the side of the road. You know you don't want to see something bad, but as long as it's right there you want to see how bad it is. It was really more odd than threatening in the grand scheme of things.
Headliner Joe the Plumber unfortuantely could not make it. But since he's neither a Joe nor a plumber, I guess I'm just as [img_assist|nid=63199|title=Harsdorf special interests|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=300|height=180]well of fixing that kitchen sprayer myself as trying to hire him. I'm certainly not taking economonic advice from him. But there were plenty of other Tea Party stars on the bus. At least once they started coming out. Two things were obvious right out of the gate - there weren't a lot of people on the bus, and they weren't in any hurry to confront the sizeable group of protesters that were waiting when the bus showed up. The other thing that was obvious is that someone cannot spell, as the bus proudly procaimed that the next Tea Party Express tour was taking place in August and Setpember. At least they were on message, as it was mis-spelled on both sides of the bus. Cries of "Spell Check" arose from the crowd. Which again shows that if you're[img_assist|nid=63198|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=300|height=180] going to piss of schoolteachers you need to be careful with spelling and grammar.
Approximately 300 people were at the rally at the time we tried to count, and it appeared that the number of Tea Party supporters and the protesters were fairly even (we counted a few more people we thought were protesters, but it was hard to distinguish who supported what in a a lot of cases).
The first few speakers were pretty well accepted by the protesters, who mostly stayed at the back of the crowd at the beginning. But when Tea Party Nation founder Judson Philips referred to the protesters as "birth control gone wrong" the gloves more or less came off and the protesters became more raucous.
Phillips proceeded to haul out various other pieces of raw meat for the crowd, calling out the audience as confused victims of the public education system, and launching into a very odd recitation of the American Revolution, calling the British forces of evil, like liberals. He also said that the protesters were probably from a trailer park because they didn't have jobs. I'm not quite sure how he figured the supporters were there on a work day. The continual litany that the protesters were outside interests while they're local was confusing since the people on the bus were almost all from out of state, and almost everyone in the crowd was apparently from the area.
The day was broken up by musical performances by Ron and Kay Rivoli. Other speakers included Representative John Murtha, Annette Olson (local Tea Party organizer) , Tabitha Hale (from Freedomworks) and Andrea Shay King, who has a BlogTalkRadio Tea Party show.