Houston Downtown Tea Party

Photo Montage

The Houston Tea Party was held outside downtown with a stage in one area and a booth area about a 100 yards away. Thankfully, it was a beautiful windy day.

I''ll make a very un-SWAG and say 2000 people, but this isn't really my specialty. The crowd was polite and I saw no evidence of left wing agitator moles. All negativity focuses on Obama or the media, rather than Congress, Pelosi, Reid, et al. In my opinion, that's a mistake.

The John Birch Society had one of the most professional-looking booths, but they've had 50 years of practice.

Sorry to bust the multicultural narrative, but the crowd was solidly 99% white with very few blacks, asians or hispanics. Our South Texas racial mix doesn't allow much distinction between white and hispanic, but this crowd was white. Even the blues band "Westborn" was white. Not bad though.

Local radio talker Natalie Arceneaux appeared to be the main MC and did fine, although her voice, like Palin's and Hillary's takes some getting used to. A local Baptist minister made it all the way to the last sentence of his invocation before mentioning "my" savior Jesus Christ. I would have been happier with the standard "Father in Heaven" but at least he went with "my" rather than "our". He said he prays for "states rights" and "low taxes", so I'll take it.

This is my first Tea Party, and it looked like a typical outdoor Austin or Houston art festival, except no art, no food or drink vendors, and no damn Port-a-Potties. The biggest cheer was a from a swipe at the media in general and a mention of gratitude for Fox News.

If 2000 people seems a little thin, there were also large Tea Parties in North and South Houston that I did not attend. Only about 10% of the Houston population works downtown, in fact, we have several downtowns, so we may be a little more dispersed. Also, Texans have lived the dream of relatively small, if occasionally activist, government for a long time. We can afford to be smaller and less professional because we've all been three-fourths Tea Party in spirit for a long time.