9/12

Was the official tally of protesters over the weekend in Washington, DC, in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands?

Major media outlets are reporting that "thousands" of TEA Party (Taxed Enough Already) protestors lined Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday. The protestors came from all over the United States to show their disgust with what they see as out-of-control spending and an unprecedented expansion of federal government.

Now a controversy has arisen over the real number of protesters in the nation's capital, and whether the media is trying to push the protest under the rug. Mike Maynard is a TEA party protestor who was at the event...

Washington (CNSNews.com) – Sarah Bond’s outrage over massive deficit spending and debt is not a partisan matter for her. And it was enough to motivate her to travel from San Diego to Washington to let politicians know what she thinks.

“I’m here out of sheer frustration of spending from both parties, and this started with TARP,” Bond said, referring to the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, pushed by President George W. Bush and supported mostly by congressional Democrats.

Bond was part of a large crowd marching on Washington on Saturday. Adam Brandon, spokesman for Freedom Works Foundation, one of the main sponsors of the event, estimated the crowd at 150,000. But on Sunday, the group’s Web site estimated that hundreds of thousands of people turned out...

The "Taxpayer March on Washington" proved that conservatives can turn out in impressive numbers to protest the direction of the Democratic-led federal government, but it also presented Republicans with a tricky task in figuring out how to marshal the energy on display on the Mall Saturday.

The ability to channel the wide-ranging frustrations expressed by speaker after speaker may determine whether beleaguered conservatives will be able to create a movement rivaling that which liberals used to help power Democrats back into the majority in the 2006 congressional elections and Barack Obama into the White House last year.  read more »