Moderately impressive. I wasn’t able to find a webcam covering the front of the Capitol, but the DC traffic cameras from TrafficLand were impressive enough.

It fails to matter. What matters is what will be seen on the TeeVee later tonight, and as commenter “Snowcone” over at Protein Wisdom remarks, what that’s going to be will be

Haha, I take it you missed Obama’s inauguration?And every NFL game ever played?

… in other words, trivial.

What Teh Medja will do is dig through the crowd until they find enough shouting loons to be “representative” of the bunch. They will then go back to the office and begin scanning through the recordings, looking for the sparsest possible assemblages of my relatives and associates, that is, the worst-dressed, least kempt, and most toothless people in the group, with flags for the editors put on anyone prepared to shout something that can be sound-bitten to sound “racist”. From that they will assemble a “report” that conforms to The TRVTH as they know it, and that’s what will appear on the seven o’clock “news”.

The TEA partiers will go home to discover, through the Magic of Television™, that the “protest” consisted of a few dozen, perhaps a couple of hundred, partisan Republican malcontents whose only intent was to see to it that brown people die from lack of medical care, and whom the Dear Leader may ignore or (preferably) send to the gulags. The “reporters”, editors, and newsreaders will retire to the nearest bar, where they will lament their declining viewership and/or readership and wonder how such a thing could possibly happen.

Commenter Bob Reed suggests

…with such a large crowd in attendance there will be a sizeable number of people to call bullshit on anyone that tries to diminish the event…

They have already conclusively demonstrated that they don’t give a [something valueless] about that.

Every single one of those people is going to go home and turn on ABCBSNNBC, and there they will learn that they were part of a minuscule “demonstration” consisting entirely of prole-class Republican partisans whose agenda is killing off brown people as quickly as possible and opposition to the Dear Leader whose beneficence is showered upon the Weak and Oppressed™, just as Snowcone outlines.

And every single one of them will conclude that the alphabeciles are either lying through their teeth or too ignorant to pound sand; in either case, that they can’t be trusted to let people know what’s going on. So they’ll turn off the TeeVee, or switch to the Seinfeld reruns and/or Design Star, and the readership and viewership for the MSM “news” will go down another notch.

And the next time the MSM have the opportunity, they’ll do exactly the same thing again. They know The TRVTH, you see, and sacrificing their credibility is a small price to pay for propagating The TRVTH. The total value, as stock price multiplied by shares outstanding, of the NYT is now less than the value of the real estate they occupy — and Pinch doesn’t care. It’s too important that The TRVTH be got “out there”.

I would like to suggest that, instead of checking the teevee to see how it really went, TEA partiers might have a look at Blow Out Congress, a (no doubt futile, but reach must exceed grasp and all that) attempt set up AFAIK by a minor Dallas talk-radio host with the goal of booting out all the incumbents regardless of race, creed, color, country of national origin, Party allegiance, sex, gender, personal habits and/or hygiene, or preference in T-shirts. A job worth doing, if at all possible.