These are from Saturday, August 22nd 2009 in Pleasanton, CA. For those of you who don't know Pleasanton's a suburb of San Francisco in the east bay area. If you're just starting this report I'd go back to page one.
Where were we? Oh, yes, angry astroturf mobs of well dressed Nazis.
Most of these signs are really good, easy to read, and to the point. However, one of these things is not like the other one... I got curious and looked at the original file and the hard to read sign says No Administrative or Judicial Review of a Payment Rate or Methodology Could Be Your Death Sentence !!! (HR 3200 Section 2 Page 224). Is this How Your Administration Values US ??? "GO DIE QUIETLY"
What a weird idea. Read a bill before voting on it?
It's OK, man, you can say piss off. You can be a little angry. Update: He's picking on some dumbass thing Obama said. Michelle Malkin has the explanation.
I love "Obama Lies! Gradma dies!" as a twist on "Bush Lied People Died!"
I sure would. I mean, hundreds of jack booted thugs waiting in front of my office? And check out that t-shirt in the background.
Ouch.
The problem is people kept arriving and I was out of time. So I just kind of swung around the back...
Saw they'd made at least some attempt to have some tables to let people make signs and hopefully they were getting contact info and such.
The back of a protest. That's a cheesecake factory over there.
Mall security kept driving by and keeping an eye on them. I don't know exactly how the ownership works - but they probably were never on mall property as such.
And back around to the front. Which had moved - the protest had taken over about another hundred feet along the road. That sign on the right says something like "Call the SEALs on the pirates in Washington, DC". Gotta love it but there ya go - he's advocating the military overthrow of the government. Or that's how the media would spin it... if they were there, which they weren't. I've seen protests with a half dozen lefty protesters that had news vans there. Here? Not one. (Update: Apparently somebody from NBC did drop by sometime after I left. I don't know what, if anything, made it to the evening news.)
She's flipped her sign around.
These folks were there before but this is a much more clear shot of their signs.
He makes me so afraid. What with the flaming torch and pitchfork. And there she is with the Nazi symbols and those scary concepts like "Freedom" and "Liberty" used non-ironically. No wonder Jerry McNerney stayed away. Who can blame him?
Note the little unhappy faces in the Os.
Still can't get the whole thing in the frame and it's getting harder and harder. (I should maybe also mention that I waited for breaks in the cars to take these - there's a light controlling the intersection nearby - there were tons of cars going by as you'll see in the video at the end.)
Frankly if I were Jerry McNerney I'd be concerned by all of this. Even with the massive Democrat wins in 2008 he only got 55% of the vote. It probably wouldn't take that much of a backlash to unseat him and return the seat to a Republican and suddenly you have this group of people who have probably never been politically active, who have never been to a protest before, and they feel personally snubbed that this guy couldn't be bothered to show up (which was frankly a mistake). At the very least they're going to go home and write large checks to the opposition, and it's quite possible they'll really work to bring McNerney down. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Here's a bit of video. My apologies for the bad audio but it gives some idea of the level of traffic and honking.
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