“[Pentagon officials] misspend a lot of the money. It’s $396 billion with no accountability,” Galusha says.

“The World Trade Center [attack] just demonstrated that you don’t need advanced weapons to bomb us,” he says.

Cohen and Galusha say TrueMajority is neither anti-military nor anti-government.

“There’s nothing wrong with defense,” Cohen says. “We believe in defense and we believe in America, but we’ve got a staff of military admirals and generals who say the amount of money spent on it is absurd.”

“We’re anti-waste,” Galusha says. “We’re not anti-government at all.”

TrueMajority has a board of military advisers that includes retired admirals and generals as well as a board of business advisers, both of which are featured prominently in the organization’s website and informational literature.

“We actually had some focus groups done that indicated that the only two players in our society that would have credibility to the general population on the issue of putting more money into social needs and reducing Pentagon spending would be retired military people and business people,” Cohen says. “So we tried to play to those strengths.”

On the Road

Rolling down Mass. Ave. on a sunny afternoon, pedestrians stop and take notice of these strange cars.

“It’s a nice visual presentation, and that’s just to get the people who aren’t exited about politics involved,” says Galusha, who drives the pig van. “You need something that goes over the top, that wows people.”

“Basically everything came out of the numbers,” says Stefan Sagmeister, the New York artist who designed the TrueMajority parade vehicles.

The parade began with test runs in Cohen’s hometown of Burlington, Vt. and continued through Portland, Maine, and around Massachusetts to Boston, Cambridge, Hyannis and Provincetown.

While in Maine, the group stopped in Kennebunkport to visit the vacation home of the Bush family.

“We wanted give [President] Bush a ride in the pigs, but he couldn’t come out to play,” Galusha says.

This weekend, TrueMajority will take its parade to New York City and then will travel out to the West Coast, stopping in cities along the way.