la raza and sand castle fest

we attended the obama rally outside the convention center sunday, where he was speaking to the la raza convention. turnout was pretty good, probably 150 people, along with a caravan of obama supporters that kept driving by. their horns helped to drown out the incessant hate speech coming over the loudspeaker across the street from the minutemen group. i can understand their motivations, but the way they present their message, including signs showing calvin from calvin and hobbes peeing on the words "la raza", and "la raza and obama hate america", make them come off as completely nuts. my favorite line was when they yelled at us, "where's your american flags?!" patriotism is clearly the last refuge of these scoundrels.


after an hour or so and no sign of obama coming out to meet us (understandable given the security concerns) we walked over to sultan s. shawarma on 4th for a great lunch of falafel and chicken shawarma. the place is owned by a former iraqi translator, so i'm guessing drunken gaslamp revelers are no match for what he had to put up with in iraq.



later sunday we went to the sand castle competition in imperial beach to do voter registration with the obama campaign. it was my first time in IB, which was completely packed both on the beach and the main drag next to it. most of the sand castles were pretty weak, but the one showing gas hoses strangling car owners (see photo below) was timely. the registration was based out of state senator denise ducheny's house just off the main street; booths on the main drag were going for $900/day. that didn't stop the mccain folks from buying a booth, and they were nice enough to yell "higher taxes" at us as we walked by. there's nothing more important to a republican than contributing as little as possible to pay for the services they expect, so i made sure to tell them they were typical selfish conservatives. nevertheless, we managed to register a few voters during a fun, warm day at the beach.