Kombiz tweeted
Couple next to me convinced themselves this is bigger than inauguration. Good to be reality based.
David Waldman had a few pointed rebuttals to the inauguration comparison.
Clearly many of the ridiculously inflated crowd estimates were from professionals trying to make the event seem historic and intimidating. But some of them, as from the couple Kombiz heard, may well have been people who've never been to a protest and just don't know the first thing about estimating crowd size. And maybe also aren't real familiar with cities. A woman behind me on the Metro said in awe "look at how many people are in the station." Clearly she thought these were massive crowds from the protest. In fact, it was about what you'd expect at, say, 3:00 on a Wednesday afternoon. I turned around and said, in a friendly way, "you should see it when there's a baseball game!" She stared stonily past me. Guess she wasn't interested in hearing it.
(Also on the "not real familiar with cities" front, as far as I could tell, every public transit-using teabagger stood on the left side of the escalator.)
Based on the crowd, future of GOP is a 50+ white couple. Oh wait that's the present of the GOP
DougJ backs that up with a breakdown of who was interviewed in one article.
If Joe Wilson had had a seizure for a reporter on Fox News about Obama's "lies" after the speech was over, he might have been the new Dan Burton; by designating himself as the one to prove that Washington isn't ready yet for the innovation of having spitting lunatics yell at the President during a speech, he instead gets to be the new Orly Taitz.
Yet few Lehman veterans, or their counterparts at other banks, blame themselves for the havoc their activities wrought. Instead, they point to the failures of regulators. "From a policy perspective, the regulators have to step in," says Richard McKinney, who oversaw mortgage trading at Lehman and in the firm’s last year, the bundling of mortgages and other loans. "It would be an awful lot to ask the Street to not look for revenue opportunities where their competitors are finding revenue."
Yet few Lehman veterans, or their counterparts at other banks, blame themselves for the havoc their activities wrought. Instead, they point to the failures of regulators.
"From a policy perspective, the regulators have to step in," says Richard McKinney, who oversaw mortgage trading at Lehman and in the firm’s last year, the bundling of mortgages and other loans. "It would be an awful lot to ask the Street to not look for revenue opportunities where their competitors are finding revenue."
Somehow I doubt they thought regulation was so great back when it would've applied to them...