TAKING IT TO THE STREETS. I wish my conservative brethren well with the street action thing. 150 people on a Federal holiday to protest the Generational Theft Act is a good start. Granted, back in 2003, at the dawn of what many leftists also considered, as today's Seattle protesters consider the stimulus, a tyrannical government intervention, a similar protest drew 50,000 people in Seattle. But the discrepancy may be explained in a number of ways:

For the past 8 years, you never saw a liberal organize a protest against spending by the Bush administration. They protested just about everything and anything, but never specifically government spending - unless it was directed at cutting military spending - the ‘slow bleed‘ campaign. Quite telling about the character of today’s liberal.

So you could say today's gathering was smaller, or that it was more discriminating.

I would attribute the modest turnout to other factors -- most charitably, that for Republicans activism usually means yelling on the internet or, at its most obstreperous, stopping a recount. It will take time, even if they're serious, to get the hey-hey, ho-ho thing going. Maybe Newt Gingrich can teach them about Twitter and revive flash mobs. Maybe they'll do better when the comrades have been centralized and made used to exposure to the elements in government work camps.

Or maybe they'll just do these things from time to time, compliment each other on their signs, and bitch about how the media didn't cover them. That would be too bad; I was looking forward to the riots, especially in the shopping districts.