These mobile billboard trucks, in town for today’s West Coast Walk for Life, don’t appear to constitute “commercial advertising” so the people responsible for them don’t appear to be violating San Francisco law.
Click to expand. On the Embarcadero:
And Market Street:
Anyway, this is what’s roaming the streets today…
Let’s see here, that was a big march the anti-abortion people put on today, huh? The Chronicle (or what I’m actually looking at - SFGate, San Francisco’s online newspaper) was on the scene today and reports that “several thousand“ were at the West Coast March for Life on the Embarcadero.
On the other hand, the organizers themselves have the number at “at least 35,000.”*
My count was 22,000+ so 35k sounds, how shall we say, optimistic, unless they’re counting people who didn’t march and were hiding somewhere. PipeLineNews (“the RIGHT news… RIGHT now”) comes in with a guess of “23,000 – 25,000,” which I’m thinking is their good-faith effort to be objective.
But, as always, You Make The Call. If you think this video shows the crowd passing any given point at more than one person per second, then you’ll think an estimate of several thousand is too low. So much for crowd estimates….
UPDATE: The Chronicle’s Joe Garafoli discusses yet another estimate of precisely 22,809 marchers. And the SFPD weighs with more than 10,000 all told. Here’s an IndyBay report that indicated the crowds were smaller this year (they weren’t) and here’s another with five glaring errors in the first three sentences. Oh well. Lastly, here comes the Catholic News Agency with an estimate of 25,000, which sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Today’s vanguard:
Click to expand
Read all about it, after the jump
*And when you tell lies/ An angel dies. Remember that for next year, Dolores.
Let me tell you about how things were back in the day, back in aught-five when the pro-life / “anti-choice” West Coast Walk for Life had smaller numbers and the competing pro-choice / “anti-life” side had more.
Those were the days, complete with heckling and back-and-forth.
Remember?
From 2005, click to expand
Well, things have changed. After giving it some thought, a lot of the organizations and political representatives who oppose the March for Life have decided to ignore the entire affair. Sure, there were some folks in the counter-march that went up the Herb Cain Way sidewalk, but only about 130 or so. Throw in a marching band that was going the other way (marching to its own drummer hither and yon) and I’d say about 200 locals showed to oppose today’s WCMFL. Don’t know for sure though. People were on hand to listen to BACORR’s Gemma Mirkinson earlier in the morning at 10:00 AM anyway.
But what about the other side, the actual marchers themselves? They went up the Embarcadero for a full 51 minutes – it was a river of people.
How many marchers this year? Tens of thousands anyway. I’m thinking 22,000 minimum this year, which is about ten percent more than last year – that jibes with the fact that everybody passed by the intersection of Broadway and Embarcadero in 51 minutes, which is about ten percent more time than last year.
How fast do you think this river of humanity was going on average? If it went 10/second then you mulitply by 3060 seconds to get and crowd estimate of over 30K, which I think is a stretch. It was going anywhere from zero to 20+ people per second:
And here are the local countermarchers:
And here is the joyful reed and brass marching band going the other way:
Noe we’re back to the March. I thought this was advertising for a new kind of eHarmony thing but now I don’t think so. CFC = Couples for Christ, so this is just their unmarried contingent.
Hey kid, what’s an abortion?
These bused-in marchers would show up regardless of the weather, so a cloudburst at the start of the parade didn’t seem to affect them a bit. Anyway, the weather soon cleared and most of the march was under blue skies and fluffy white clouds.
Click to see the cloudburst raindrops – it was like being in the shower with your clothes on for a little bit.
And there’s your March for Life West Coast for 2010.
Fresh from flacking his book on the Daily Show, UC Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo is coming to the 415 to flack his book at the Commonwealth Club on Wednesday, January 27th.
See?
Tickets are still available. But be aware that “attendees are subject to search.”
Anyway:
“Crisis and Command: Presidential Power in the 21st Century” 6 p.m. program
Cost: $12 members, $18 non-members, $7 students (with valid ID)
Also know: Attendees subject to search. In association with the International Relations MLF.
John Yoo, Law Professor, UC Berkeley; Author, Crisis and Command
Allen Weiner, Co-director, International Law Program, Stanford Law School – Moderator
At the Department of Justice, Yoo played a large and controversial role in shaping the Bush administration’s policy in the war on terrorism, arguing that prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions does not apply to “enemy combatants.” He further asserted executive authority to undertake “enhanced interrogation techniques” regarded as torture by the current Justice Department. Yoo will trace the history of presidential power.
Location: SF Club Office, 595 Market Street
Time: 5:15 p.m. check-in,
Turkey’s socialist, Kurdish-dominated Democratic Society Party just got banned by Turkey’s Constitutional Court, so these people marched around San Francisco’s City Hall yesterday in protest.
Click to expand
Here’s Reuter’s take on the situation, via KALW.
\
This was the scene last week when the Marin Institute went after The Wine Institute trade association and the “Myth of the California Family Winery.”
The protesters are boosters of AB 1019, the Assembly bill in Sacramento that would establish an Alcohol-Related Services Program paid for with a tax on alcohol.
Here’s the takefrom SFGate bidness reporter Andrew “Don’t forget the S“ Ross.
Click to expand:
More details here at ALCOHOL WATCHDOG GROUP ATTACKS WINE INSTITUTE.
A crowd of a hundred-something showed up on the steps of City Hall yesterday to protest against the Stupak Pitts proposal (aka the Stupak–Ellsworth–Pitts–Kaptur–Dahlkemper–Lipinski–Smith Amendment, srsly) regarding health plans covering abortions.
Moms and daughters were there…
…plus San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Supervisor Bevan Dufty
And here’s a shot from the ACLU of Northern California of UCSF med students for choice:
Are we heading for a filibuster?
All the deets here.
Here’s last night’s protest against Barack Obama’s Afghanistan escalation made up of members of Code PINK, ANSWER, World Can’t Wait, and the International Socialist Organization, among others. It was a fairly ho-hum affair, without the expected Black Blockers.
Several hundreds gathered at 6:00PM near the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market. Click to expand:
A few words and then they were off down Market Street:
A “hopeless” escalation? Really?
Only Time Will Tell.
Well the arrestees had already been hauled away by the time I passed by the global warming protest in the Financial District at California and Kearny yesterday. So that left about 50 to contiune the rally until 2:30 PM. By that time, there were more cops in the area than protesters.
The kids don’t like banks funding projects, particpating in carbon exchanges and opposing legislation – thoses are the beefs. Anyway, here’s the big site that explains why they went after BofA on November 30th and here are a few local accounts. The Chevron HQ on Market is the next target so look out on Pearl Harbor Day,
Hi mom:
Click to expand
A “parachute” the protesters played with. At least one ‘chutist was a passerby who joined in with glee.
After the arrests, there were cops everywhere, all around the building:
The mise-en-scene
See you next time.
[UPDATE: Whoops, apparently the Chronicle has two Andrew Rosses covering similar beats? Oh noes! Well, all the better. Speaking of mistakes, what are the odds that I'll see a lit up snowflake on Market Street tonight? About 100%, based on the past two weeks' observation. Oh well. Good thing those snowflakes don't use petroleum-based electricity, huh?]
You see, normally the San Francisco Chronicle’s Andrew S. Ross is lumped together with PhilMatier, thusly:
But sometimes they let him run wild and unchained, all by his lonesome, thusly:
As here, where Andrew Ross gives his take on the order of battle of this morning’s Whole Foods Showdown: Six Flags Over Noe Valley, Don’t Mess With Texas. See what Andrew did there? He fleshed things out, he gave more detail, he added to the story.
Que bueno!
(Now, you give those limited column inches to somebody like C.W. Nevius to check in with 24th Street and what would you get? Well, maybe vitriol and emotion, and maybe that would be it. Oh well.)
Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with M&R together (a quarter mil. we have to pay for horrible, soon-to-be-cancelled Trauma, where the average worker, we’re talking median and mode here, makes rock-bottom minimum wage?), but they should let Andrew out of the bizness ghetto and allow him to run wild over any and all subjects of the day
And that’s the The Bottom Line.
[UPDATE: Whole Foods has started to construct a defensive wall made of pumpkins, but how strong could it be? We'll find out soon enough.]
[UPDATE 2, Electric Boogaloo: War Reporter Andy Wright has extensive coverage from the field of battle]
