Saturday, July 4, 2009

Washington Missouri Tea Party

It was awesome! It's going to take awhile to get all the video uploaded. I'm working on it. I got all the featured speakers and the open mic at the end (including a brief remark I made); however, I missed the guy who spoke before the prayer and national anthem. His personal experience with the brokenness of Washington, DC, really struck a chord with me.

I started this blog with a call to Rush the Hill. In that post I proposed a new kind of term-limit: forbid legislators from serving consecutive terms and an implementation strategy that defers a constitutional amendment by relying on changes at the state level. One advantage/goal of this approach is that lobbyists would be forced out of DC since sitting Congresscritters would no longer have a reason to raise money. Read the whole thing. So sorry, I missed him...

Other thoughts... Twitter and texting were important at this event. I asked Jim Durbin to get some video of the crowd and he tweeted back that he did. I couldn't do that since I was baby sitting a video camera front and center. Here are the two videos he shot:




My wife and daughters were sitting outside the pavilion and towards the back of the crowd. She texted me to let me know that they couldn't hear the speakers. I mentioned it to the guy running the sound board behind me. He tried to raise the levels, but the feedback was a problem. Perhaps if the amps were in a different place... I don't know.

On the drive home, my wife commented that she didn't understand why the speakers kept talking while the trains were passing—several long coal trains passed during the event—she couldn't hear anything. I was surprised at this because we didn't have any trouble hearing with the passing frieght trains. The acoustics of the venue were difficult... perhaps worse than Kiener Plaza. I suspect that Jim Hoft decided to take me up on my suggestion only to make a mockery of it. For the record, my wife said: "Jim was the only one I heard clearly."

Cross Coverage:

More to follow....

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