Stewart & Colbert neglected to advise the bused in crowd to leave their hate signs at home.
If there were hate signs there, I didn't see them. The crowd was huge, though, so there was probably a lot there I didn't see. Most of the sign-reading I did was while waiting for the metro on the way there and waiting in line at Starbucks after the rally (both for much needed caffiene and to use their bathroom) because at the rally the crowd was just too big for us to do much moving around.
Most of the signs I saw were purposefully moderate. A lot of "I hate taxes" followed in smaller letter by "but I like the things they pay for, so I guess I'm okay with it." or "I am not a witch, not that there's anything wrong with being one".
The crowd was just overwhelming. We showed up around 9:00 am and already the place was packed. We ended up sort of in the center, not able to see the stage at all but could watch everything on the second set of large screens they had.
I saw one guy in a tin-foil hat. He had red hair, red beard, was wearing glasses and what looked like a white tee-shirt, but there was no way I could get to him to find out if he was one of the JREF people or not.
They were giving away these paddles, blue ones that said "team reason" and red ones that said "team fear". We got a couple red ones because they were all out of blue ones. I figured at some point there would be a competition of some sort where people would hold up their paddles, but that never happened. They were also giving away souvenier hand-towels, which made me wonder if some marketing guy somewhere was a Douglass Adams fan.
I would estimate most of the crowd was moderate to moderately liberal, but not radically so. I didn't see anyone from Code Pink or organizations like that. On the way to the rally I saw a vendor hawking tee-shirts with an anti-Bush message, a picture of Bush saying somethign like "I screwed everything up but thanks for blaming it on the black guy", which drew a few chuckles but I didn't see him actually selling any of them. Leaving the rally there was a woman passing out leaflets promoting the radio show "Democracy Now", who seemed a little miffed when I described her as radical leftist. The vast majority of the crowd was very receptive to Stewart's message that although we all come from different viewpoints, different religions and different points of view, that in day to day life we all make the little compromises needed to get along and to get things done, and that we need some of that flexibility in our politicians too.
