The Tax Day Tea Party brought several thousand people to Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza today. It was impossible to get a count of the attendees, as we saw a steady stream of people both arriving and leaving for the two hours that we were at the event. I’m thinking there were ten thousand there easily.

A very large group of people crammed into an area in front of the Capitol Building where politicians, concerned citizens and radio and TV hosts were speaking. It was so crowded in that area that we were never able to actually see who was speaking, so we chose to mill around the crowd and take some photos for your viewing pleasure.

We’ll be writing more about the event itself within the next few days, but I wanted to leave you with the best quotes of the day:

A woman holding a sign in one hand and a cell phone to her ear:

I’m standing in front of the capitol with fifty thousand other people and they all hate Obama.

This one is our favorite:

If I would have known that protesting would be this much fun, I would have done it in the ’60’s instead of starting to protest in my sixties.

Some general crowd shots:

Just some of the many clever and creative signs (we’ll post more later):

We would like to dedicate this one to the exurbanleague.com guys:

I’ll post some more tomorrow, but I’ll leave you with this one. I haven’t decided what is more humorous – seeing “hippies” at the Tea Party, or the camera crew grabbing them out of the crowd and making a fuss over them. I might normally say that they got lost on their way to a Phish concert, but they did have Tea Party signs :

P.S. – If you didn’t already know it, Arizona is a beautiful place: