Tea-baggers protest DC Mass Transit

[Thanas]

Thanas: I went six pages in on the Google keywords "teabagger fox" and did not find one Fox news reference. The closest I found was this Fox news radio opinion piece by Alan Colmes, an avowed liberal. Fox's reporting, from what I can see, did not use that term.

Teabag Obama was the slogan from the main site organizing the protest. Or "Teabag the fools in DC" etc. Also, Griff Jenkins used it afaik.

[Kuja]

Lemme guess you're a party-party UA alum/student.

I love this part. Where the fuck did you pull this from, anyway? Because I mentioned 'back in high school' in my paragraph?

Did you even take the time to parse my sentences before jumping to the conclusion that I said the media invented the WORD?

I'd like you to point out where I made this claim. Oops, you can't, because I didn't. Here's what I said:

Jesus you're a fucking idiot. Media-invented? The term has existed for years, I remember it from high school for fuck's sake.

Now, I'll grant you, my context wasn't perfect because it was an off the cuff remark, but I was replying to you saying:

In other words, it was a media-invented distortion to mock the opposing side.

And in your own post, you said:

It went sideways when the "send a tea bag to Congress" e-mail, unattributed and repudiated by http://www.newamericanteaparty.com, started circulating and some people followed its advice:

So guess what? You're still wrong. The teabagging association wasn't started by the media, it was started by the Teabaggers themselves and their stupid choice of words; either they didn't know the word "teabaggers" and it's silly implications would get attached to them, or they didn't care. Either way, they're still dumb as hell. So my point stands, despite your attempts to smarm your way out of it. Saying the misapplication was "media-invented" is idiocy incarnate.

[Count Chocula]

^ I found this MSNBC Rachel Maddow clip, which had one out of five Fox news personalities say "teabag." I concede your point, with an observation: Maddow is the person in the clip who repeatedly states the word "teabagging," with a clear intent to mock the Fox reporters.

[CmdrWilkens]

To the September 12 demonstrators' complaints: in my opinion, they're half right. The Metro system moves on average about 800,000 people per week day, according to Wikipedia. As Aerius noted, subway systems usually operate at reduced capacity on weekends. Metrorail runs 814 cars during rush hour (again from Wiki), and on Inaguration Day operated at rush hour levels from 4 AM to 9 PM (from the http://www.wmata.com Web site). If they had anticipated the crowd, they could have operated on a normal rush hour schedule that Saturday and done a much better job getting folks where they wanted to go. And made a buttload of money in the process! The human traffic jams at the subway stations tell me that (a) the WMATA traffic management folks didn't pay attention to the predicted numbers of incoming people for the protest, and (b) there were an assload more than 70,000 people who showed up for the demonstration, as that capacity could be easily handled with a normal weekend lineup of cars. Taking on "tens of thousands of people" is no big deal. The error points to bad planning, but blame, if any, could equally go to WMATA and to the organizers, if they failed to advise the transit authority of the number of people they expected to show.

I wanted to counter point this mostly because:
a) The point of blame to the protesters is likely more valid. Their expected attendance was only the 30,000 folks who signed up for the rally on the organizing website. 30,000 is a number well within weekend capacity...if you don't expect immediate service.
b) Atrios still had the most correct observation (and you alluded to it in the paragraph I snipped for brevity) that folks were ticked because they viewed the Metro as the city equivalent to Disney's monorail and it didn't work to their satisfaction.

It remains the case as with all weekends that this is when you do your track maintenance, you single track and you reduce service o increase maintenance work on the car fleet that will be needed during the week. Sure 70,000 additional people would have made some extra money for the system but the balance point between maintenance needs to serve 800,000 versus the 70,000+ typical weekend clearly falls on the side of maintenance. As a great example of having no leg to stand on there were few (though certainly higher than average) complaints about Labor Day weekend. During one of the busiest weekend experiences of the year when travel in and out of the city is peaking they shut down access to National Airport and replaced it with shuttle buses due to needed maintenance. That certainly didn't prompt any congressional investigation despite the extended nature of the interruption which almost certainly affected more passengers than the 9/12 protest.

[Bluewolf]

As Wilkens said, the expected amount was far far higher. On top of that, how well can you really plan for a protest? Even if you have given plenty of planning time there are a lot of variables. I mean for example if you plan a protest say a month ahead; you have the chance of having the turnout be different to what was planned, wheather making it higher or lower, the cause they are protesting for peaking in interest or not so etc. This means that planning to service a protest and make money off said protest is not as easy as it seems. Even more so on a more limited day of the week.

Besides, it's the whole hypocrisy thing that is more annoying really.

[Big Orange]

I know mentioning the implications of "teabagging" is a "no-shit" moment, but it still seems far too surreal to be true.

This is an interesting video featuring a Borat/Louise Theroux style interviewer; the best showing of abysmal stupidity is after 04:29 and 05:30...