The Tea Party Express made its second stop in Albany, NY, yesterday, attracting a couple three hundred Obama-haters to West Capitol Park.
This media/organizing event, extensively promoted on cable TV, talk radio and the teabaggers' Internet networks, is bankrolled by the California conservative Republican group Our Country Deserves Better PAC, and features unemployed radio talk show host Mark Williams and a handful of D-list entertainers like Victoria Jackson.
Details, below.
Back in September, the first Tea Party Express stopped in Albany, and attracted at least twice as many malcontents as yesterday's event.
It's clearly an unscientific sample, but it suggests that the teabagger movement is shrinking, not growing.
Here's a link to the YNN coverage of the pathetic crowd -- a brainwashed kid, an Oath Keeper county sheriff, and the morbidly obese Amy Kremer, who was tossed from the national Tea Party Patriots group when she took a job with the Tea Party Express. (The embed didn't work, but it's well worth clicking and viewing.)
The teabaggers were evidently on their best behavior, but the WNYT-TV reporter found a Hitler sign and a white guy to "explain" why Obama was like the Nazi mass murderer:
"If you watch the trial at Nuremberg you're going to see a lot of what Obama's doing is exactly what Hitler did. All somebody has got to do is watch that movie," said Tom Andreaseen.
I didn't attend the TPE event yesterday, but I did hear Williams promoting it on local talk radio yesterday morning.
Among the usual Obama-hating there was a typical teabagger lie -- Williams said this tour's kick-off event attracted 35,000 to Harry Reid's hometown in Nevada.
Yeah, right, just like 2 million "patriots" answered Glenn Beck's call on 9/12 in Washington.
Media reports estimated the Nevada crowd at about 8,000, and the Washington crowd at about 100,000.
Lying about crowds is the essence of the teabagger movement, designed to convince the credulous (in the media and elsewhere) that teabaggers represent an overwhelming majority of "We the People."
When all they are, and always have been, is mostly the ultra-conservative Paul/Beck/Bircher micro-minority.
And even Republicans are starting to get it -- after Williams dissed GOP gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, Paladino's flack responded:
Who gives a hoot who this tiny band of bought-and-paid-for out-of-staters wants as Governor of New York?