As if the right-wing fringe politics of the nationally-organized tea parties are not embarrassing enough, almost nobody showed up for them. 

Staten Island's Republican fringe show up for a party that almost nobody else cared about. Image: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty

“Tens of thousands of people” across the United States showed up at the tea parties to denounce taxes, Barack Obama, evolution and whatever else they could throw on the plate. 

To give you perspective on the turn-out of ”tens of thousands” across a country of over 300,000,000 people, at Denver, Colorado’s Gay Pride Parade in 2008 there were 250,000 participants in attendance.

An estimated 800,000 people protested the Republican National Convention in 2004. 

Tens of thousands nationwide, even with right-wing media stars hyping these events?  Perhaps nobody showed up because most Americans think that they are paying a fair amount of their taxes.  Robert Schlesinger  at U.S. News & World Report:

According to Gallup, for only the second time in more than half a century, a plurality of Americans (48-46 percent) think that they’re paying the proper amount of taxes. The only other time that that has been true since 1956 was in 2003 when 50 percent of Americans felt they were paying the right amount in taxes. Drilling down a bit deeper, the slim plurality comes entirely from Democrats, who 55-40 think we’re paying the right amount of taxes (up sharply from 2008 when they thought so 47-45). Independents narrowly disagree, with 48 percent saying taxes are too high and 46 percent saying they’re just right–though that figure too has narrowed sharply, as it was 54-40 in 2008. And Republicans are not surprisingly opposite Democrats, with 53 percent saying taxes are too high and 43 percent saying they’re about right. (Really? Forty-three percent of Republicans think taxes are correct? I thought it was an article of GOP faith that taxes are by their nature too high.)

A separate Gallup poll released today showed that for the first time in 15 years a plurality of Americans think lower-income people are being taxed fairly (usually, they are seen as overtaxed), while by a margin of 50-43, they believe that middle-income taxpayers are taxed at the proper rate (this has fluctuated fairly rhythmically over the decade). Nobody likes the wealthy, of course: 60 percent of Americans think them under-taxed, 23 percent think they pay their fair share, and 13 percent feel that they are overburdened. (The “fair share” and “too much” numbers both declined this year, while the “overburdened” number went up.)