Yesterday, I went to the Myrtle Beach Tea Party. It was a lunchtime Tea Party that ran from noon to 2 PM. Now, Myrtle Beach is not a particularly large area. The population is only roughly 30,000 people and so the Tea Party was a bit smaller than a lot of the ones in the big cities. I'm not very good at estimating crowd sizes, but I guess a few hundred people were there -- although that may be low, given that someone else who went estimated about 600 people were on the scene.

The Tea Party had a strong anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-big government theme. There was also a significant amount of anti-illegal immigration sentiment, which isn't a big surprise given that the Minutemen were out in force. So were, for that matter, the Fair Tax people. Politicians, on the other hand, were not involved. They bragged from the stage that no politicians were being allowed to speak and they also complained about the media refusing to cover the event. However, Free Republic and the internet in general got some favorable mentions. In fact, judging by a show of hands, most of the people there seemed to have learned about the event from the net.

Additionally, it was different from the Left-Wing protests of the last few years. There were American flags everywhere, the signs were homemade, there weren't any thugs smashing windows or making threats, and there weren't any dirty, smelly hippies around.