OFA’s anti-Tea Party rally a short, strange trip, with ‘Thanks Tea-Tards’ sign and other oddities

Organizing for Action’s (OFA) “Budget shutdown Day of Action event” began with one man near the Capitol Reflection Pool at noon —

— and grew no larger than upwards of two dozen protesters congregated at the bottom of the Capitol’s western steps after sorting out some logistical confusion. The lightly-attended rally, whose participants comprised a mix of OFA volunteers and furloughed federal employees, left some underwhelmed.

“I am a little disappointed,” Ana Chaletzky, 38, said. “I was expecting more people. I mean, we’re federal employees, and we want to go back to work,” the accountant for the Library of Congress continued, her latter words almost precisely coinciding with the start of a chant of the same refrain.

“If I would’ve known this would be the case, I wouldn’t have come,” another attendee muttered.

Still, many of those who gathered Tuesday looked past the turnout and put an upbeat — and at times eyebrow-raising — spin on the event. One protester mocked the Speaker of the House in trying to start a chant of “Boner, Boner let them vote!” and another wielded a sign that played off of the word ‘retard’:

This goes without mentioning an individual who held a poster with an uplifting message of survivalism that read, “JUST DEFAULT! I have military experience, guns at home, and a meat grinder. I’ll be fine.”

The group eventually migrated to the Capitol’s west lawn, where they faced the Speaker’s balcony — and at a 45-degree angle, an eccentric, pants-less visitor from California, ‘Spanky Baldwin’, who strummed a tune about imagining life as an ostrich. His lyrics began:

I wish I was an ostrich and I’d have no care

I’d just sit around in my underwear

Sort of like Spanky on a sidewalk outside the Capitol.

(H/t to the Washington Examiner’s Charlie Spiering for the following video.)