Another year of public humiliation for Tea Party

Yesterday, Cincinnati area Occupy folks and the Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania held a rally on Fountain Square urging Wall Street and the U.S. government to stop funding Mauritania's apartheid regime. I'm proud to say I went to this rally. Yet The Media provided no prior promotion of this event, and the sky was stormy all day.

Today, the Tea Party appeared on the same square for what was supposed to be their biggest rally of the year. The Media promoted this event like there was no tomorrow, and there was fine weather for it.

Even though the Tea Party's right-wing complain-a-thon got much more promotion and much nicer weather than the spectacular and forceful Occupy/MJEM event, the Tea Party got less turnout.

I made no prior mention of the teaburglars' protest on this blog, because I knew it would be a bust. Then again, they did have ridiculous radio commercials for their demonstration - while Occupy and MJEM had no radio ads at all.

Where did the Tea Party draw its crowd from? Wouldn't ya know it, I happened to see their tour bus beforehand. I was at the ongoing Occupy appearance at Piatt Park, and I noticed passengers on the bus taking pictures of us while the bus circled the park. They were probably the same hapless clods who embarrassed themselves at the Tea Party meltdown in Madison, Wisconsin, yesterday.

And there was the heckling. I walked down to Fountain Square from Piatt Park to monitor the Tea Party, and the speaker who was up on stage was grumbling about the prospect of counterprotesters. He meant Occupy, of course. So I heckled the crowd about why they were demanding a balanced budget amendment now but never raised a peep against Bush's costly wars.

After I got back to Piatt, we were confronted by some weirdo who argued with us about so-called "right-to-work" laws. I don't know whether he had come from the Tea Party harangue, but he claimed he knows all about the economy because he owns 4 corporations. He decried American workers because they expect to be paid more than 12 cents an hour, and he gloated that he preferred hiring overseas.

Stay classy, teagaggers.