Just got off the phone with Barbara Espinosa, who sent in tons of great pics from DC earlier today. Hopefully, we’ll have some video later, too. As a volunteer, she had “full access” to all parts of the protest. Here are some of the things she saw today, by the numbers.
•70 outdoor port-a-potties.
•90 minute wait to use one.
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•The People Meter on Penn Ave had read 450,000 by noon, and 1.5 million two hours later. (That last number still looks awfully high to me.)
•1 DC police officer, who told her, “I’ve been here 20 years and this is the largest crowd I’ve ever seen.”
So, who provides the official, final tally for an event like this? The DC police?
The real question is how much damage and how much cost.
I remember from the Tea Party I went to in Boston in April I asked the police about the crowd and trouble and they said they wasn’t a bit of it. The easiest crowd they ever had to deal with.
I suspect that will be repeated today, after all these are the tax payers, their taxes would be paying for anything broken
I don’t know, 2 million looks high. I was at an Earth day in the early 90s that looked much bigger. But there were a lot of people. It was a strange crowd. Lots of different, conservative types and a bunch of, I assume, mobies running around in Mr. Moneybags outfits, smoking huge, fake cigars chanting something about “Billionaires against medicare” or something. I saw them marching and then they were by the Foxnews truck, did they make it on the air?
I’ll tell you what I noticed besides the cleanliness of the grass, I didn’t see many cops and none of them had riot gear on.
The few I saw were just hanging out, drinking coffee or something and BSing with people. It was like a day off except they made time and half to hang out on the Mall on a nice day.
Quite a bit different from the littery mess and riot police you see at the nice, tolerant, Earth-loving, peace-loving leftist demonstrations.
Hi, Steve, Bob from Monument here. Just got back from the protest in DC – it was AWESOME. I don’t know about 1 or 2 million; there were a lot of people there but that seems high. The energy was tremendously positive and the crowd was having a great time. There was a serious feeling of “oh thank God I’m not the only one”.
No pics – they’re on the camera and we didn’t bring the $!@# cable. (We came to DC on other business and only found out about the protest last night. One rearranged itinerary later, we were seeing democracy in action.)
I think there are a lot of conservative and moderate Dems quivering in their boots today. The only way they’re passing a health care reform bill is to write “we like puppies” on a sheet of paper and call it the “Health Care Reform Act of 2009″.
Drop me a note if you want more firsthand impressions.
Veeshir, I saw those counterprotestors. They were a pathetic little band of maybe 20 people. I marched along with them, chanting “I Want A Free House! Free Money Now!” for a minute or two, but they didn’t seem to appreciate the impromptu joining of forces.
The puppies comment is funny, because at one point I was next to a woman whose sign read, “Every time Nancy Pelosi lies, God kills a kitten.” And she kept saying things like, “Everyone likes kittens; vote Pelosi out.” It was very, very funny. There were also a lot of (pre-printed, in this case) “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy” signs, which seem to have offended many on the Left as well as Charles Johnson, who seems to have fallen into the Andrew Sullivan “I’m crazy for the attention – or maybe just crazy” camp lately. Anyway, I took it as a pretty humorous sideswipe at the Left’s attempted “pass healthcare reform for Teddy” schtick. It was a lot of fun. We were only there for about an hour, and it sounds like most of the crowd showed up after we left to get the kids lunch. (We couldn’t hear the speakers any way, but we wanted to show up and be counted.)
What ‘people meter’ on penn ave..I have read about this thing on a dozen blogs and no one seems to know what it is, who operated it, and where the numbers attributed to it came from???
Freedomworks ran the peoplemeter, lots of people apparently saw them, Barbara Espinosa verified that they actually counted 1.5 million on the meter, why do all the conservative pundits have such a hard time believing it?
Daily Mail estimated 2 million, CNN estimated 2 million, the peoplemeter counted 1.5 million, accept that it was over a million.
Reading the comments from the attendees is great. I hope this happens again next year. I’ll go!
I was at the DC march today.
It was awesome.
Everyone was friendly.
Here are some of my photos, including some good signage.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42420304@N05/sets/72157622227562487/show/
MBS, my problem with the idea is that no one knows what it is…’peoplemeter’…OK< what is a peoplemeter? Where was it and is it accurate, how does it nt measure the same folk over and over? Does it even really exist….a LOT of the crowd estimates attributed to different groups and media were simply not true (as in not made by those groups. The DC Police never produced an estimate yet I have read 1.2 million attributed to them a score of times..I think there was a minimum of a half million and a max of well over a million but that is simply a wild guess looking at the coverage and pictures.
My guess is 250,000 to 500,000 – with 1,000,000 as an outlier. I didn’t go to the march, just the rally, so it’s possible there were people who marched who didn’t rally.
I live in No. Va, and I went to the rally. We read that the march started at freedom plaza at 11:30, so I gave us twice the time it normally would take. I never drive in to DC, parking, traffic, etc. it is useless. So we went to the Vienna orange line, which is the end of the line, if you will, and got there about 9:30.
The line for the metro fare ticket was the longest I have ever seen, and it took over an hour to get the fare card. The line was longer when I got my card then when I first got in line.
This is the first stop inbound, and the car was filled standing room only already. I should note that the vast majority of people in line had signs and american flags.
Then, on the way in town, we realized that Metro was doing track maintenance. Our train was delayed two minutes each at a number of stops, and we went very slowly through a few mile area where there was maintenance crews working, and the train usually goes full speed.
The result was that we did not arrive in freedom plaza until nearly 12:30. By that time everyone had moved to the capitol, so we walked on down.
In other words, we, and none of those people in line behind us, were counted in the initial march. Whatever the number there at 11:30, it was far lower then the real total.
Here’s a map from the WaPo for estimating crowd size on the DC Mall:
http://tinyurl.com/7n5lu2
and here’s a time-lapse photo posted at Hot Air:
http://tinyurl.com/o4rfc5
It would seem that the crowd yesterday was easily over a million.
And Charles Johnson, please call your therapist.
Who ever counted the people doesn’t matter much except I’d love to know a good count BUT whoever, it was a great showing and everyone who participated should be very proud of themselves.
I think people have a hard time believing the huge numbers because its almost unbelievable that such a huge crowd showed up…Wonderful though.
We can’t stop, the battle is only begun.
I get the online Boston GLobe e-paper daily (need to know what the opposition is up to). What I found absolutely fascinating is that the March on DC was not even mentioned at all. Nothing in the paper about it at all, like it never happened. NYT said there were thousands. SacBee did not mention it nor did the San Jose Mercury. No bias in the media at all, is there.
The biggest ralley ever in Sacramento was the anti-MTBE rally about 10 years ago. The CHP was amazed at the crowd (and how clean they were) The SacBee only covered the 20 or so “pro-MTBE?” crowd. I’m not surprised.
My brother was in Washington on 9/12, and he attends large sporting events on a regular basis, he knows what 80,000 people crowds look like, I’m told it was 10-20X as big
I’ve lived in the DC area for over 30 years, and this rally was small on the scale of DC events. DC fireworks, Pro-Choice, Million Man, Promise Keepers – all larger. The 9/12 crowd fit mostly on the west lawn of the Capitol. Big crowd, certainly, but far far under a million. And yes, I was there.
a far better photo
http://iowntheworld.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/capitol-view-lo-res.jpg