The account you guys gave about the Tampa Tea Party is interesting. I live in Palm Beach County and down here we met at the West Palm county courthouse. There were about 300 of us. If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have known it occurred! Our local liberal rag, The Palm Beach Post (famous for libeling Rush Limbaugh during his rehabilitation), virtually ignored it - a couple sentences at bottom of C section. This, however, isn’t discouraging to me. There were probably thousands of such unreported, spontaneous gatherings in addition to the much larger ones. And our congressman is the ultra-liberal Robert Wexler. You know, he’s the guy who was discovered to not even reside in his district (covered by Fox)! I think the fact that this was a grass roots authentic expression of the people has overcome the efforts of the liberal politicians and MSM to downplay it. Among themselves, they KNOW something important happened and that it wil continue to grow.
I was at the evening session in Tampa and I had it pegged at 2,000+. Apparently the police put it closer to 3,000 - 3,500. I am hoping that there is something in the area on July 4. I believe we could get enough people together for that to force the media to report it. We had 2 local TV reporters at our gathering, but I didn’t see the reporting on it and didn’t look in the newspapers afterward. Both area newspapers are liberal, with the St. Pete Times bordering on communist, so I don’t really get the newspaper.
There were some huge gatherings and I personally think it would be more powerful with fewer, larger gatherings. Instead of 20 different smaller gatherings in the Tampa Bay area, have 1 or 2 that would have 10,000 or so each would really get attention.