Sacramento Tea Party is a big success!

UPDATE 9/13/10 9:00pm: Pictures have been added. Scroll down to view them.

I have not been able to download the photos from my camera yet, but I did attend (along with my parents) the 9/12 Tea Party rally held at McClellan Air Park in Sacramento yesterday.

This was the second large Tea Party rally I have attended, and once again, it was a well-organized affair brimming with pleasant, polite, regular folks who came out on a beautiful late-summer day to voice their concerns about the overreaching level of federal government involvement in our lives. I guessed that about 5,000 people were in attendance, and lo and behold, that is the very number that the Sacramento Bee used in their article about the proceedings.

My parents were happy listening to the speeches from the friendly shade of a tree, so I took off on my own with my camera and took stock of the situation.

I don't know how it happened, but black people were actually let in to the Tea Party (I say this with sarcasm dripping from my tongue). I also saw Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, South Asians, and all manner of a cross-section of the local populace. In the end, the only colors of the people that mattered to me were red, white, and blue. These lies from the NAACP and other race-baiting groups about who and who does not attend these rallies are nothing but that: lies.

As I walked the area, I also saw not one scrap of trash on the ground; not one, and I looked hard. Compare that to a left-wing protest where the aftermath looks like a New York ticker-tape parade. These left-wing bigots who call us "Teabaggers" and are convinced that we are a bunch of raging racists have no idea what good people were attending this rally, and other rallies being held all over the country, including two large rallies in Washington D.C. and St. Louis.

I hope to post my pictures tonight, and I will include an update flag when the pictures are posted.

The festivities began with a parachutist descending upon us with an American flag hanging from his feet. Like a deer in the headlights, I was so fixated on watching the guy float down, that I only remembered at the last second to take a picture of him before he landed. Doh!

It is a sad sign of the times when the organizers found it necessary to have signs like this at the ready, just in case some jerk like this tried to pass himself off as a Tea Partier in an attempt to misrepresent and hurt the movement.

I could totally overwhelm this post with picture after picture of all the clever signs that were present at this rally. However, in some form or another, you have pretty much seen all the signs before. I included the one above not only for its originality, but for the fact that it addresses the unique situation we face in the late, great state of California. Our state legislature needs a Fall cleaning perhaps even worse than the federal one.

As the rally got into its first hour or so, the crowd really began to swell. The picture above shows just one sliver that I was able to capture. My camera has a panorama feature. Perhaps I should learn how to use it? As I wandered the crowds, I also felt it was my duty to take some pictures that I felt very self-conscious taking, and that was of some of the black attendees. I wish it wasn't necessary, but with the left-wing meme about the so-called "racist" Tea Party movement, taking photographic evidence that shows the contrary becomes a requirement:

The speaker on the screen is Lisa Fritsch. She is a radio host and blogger from Texas. She gave a rousing speech, and the crowd loved it! Click here for a snippet of her speech that she posted on her Facebook page.

I tried one more time to try to capture as many of the 5,000+ attendees as possible. Even this long shot shows only about less than one-third of the total area. I know, I know - panorama mode; look into it.

And what is a pictorial essay without proof that Yours Truly was in attendance? Especially working in the left-leaning profession of teaching, it is quite refreshing to go someplace where I can be reminded that there are indeed countless people who think about life and politics as I do. I hope to find out just how much this November 2nd!

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson