Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/23/the-womens-march-on-washing.html
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That’s impossible! I have it on good authority that all the people came to the inauguration, so there aren’t two or three times as many, unless you’re counting, i dunno, pets or something. Unfair liberal media! Counting pets! Sad!
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Exactly! With the official estimates (from the Trump folks) at about 5.6 billion, I don’t see how that’s possible.
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I’m more proud of our country now than I was in November, that’s for sure.
All these people, all screaming out, “this is not normal” is a good and important thing.
Now if we could only get some of them to go to places that aren’t major metropolitan centers to have an effect on the local politics that gave us the right wing loony bin that serve as Trump’s ennablers, we might be able to stop them from getting more than two years of this bullshit.
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The other photo that Spicer was complaining about, showing Obama’s 2009 inauguration, was NOT taken from the same place, it was taken from a farther distance away to faithfully capture just how many people were there. Unless there were hundreds of thousands of people behind the photographer on Friday (who for some reason didnt want to be up front?), then his argument about the white tarps has no bearing whatsoever.
One thing I haven’t seen brought up (maybe I missed it) is that the inauguration doesn’t happen in a neutral zone, it happens in Washington DC, a typically liberal city with a huge African-American population. Of course the city’s residents came out in massive numbers for the First Black President of the United States, and of course they stayed home for a man many consider a racist. Duh.
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Iirc, they were both taken from the Washington Monument, but the Trump photo had to be zoomed to crop out all the acres and acres of empty space.
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You have to count all the people in Russia!
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Different lenses! Different exposure! Different aperture! Different framing! Different camera mount! Different humidity! Different wind speed!
Hold on…
These images were captured on different dates!
hashtag unfaircomparison
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Well, for the women’s march Greyhound had to add 18 buses to their line that day, so if people wanted to show up for their guy, I think some out of towners could have topped the scales.
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I was in DC on Saturday, it was an amazing day. What the pictures on the CNN gif don’t capture is that the street behind the buildings to the right was jammed for three blocks as thickly as the thickest part of the crowd in the picture. That’s where the stage was located, and it was like being sardines when you tried to get down in there. We joke that, of the 12 miles we put on our boots that day, that we walked 9 miles and shuffled the other 3. There were also substantial crowds up beyond the museums on the left, though not as thick. Without satellite footage or helicopter cameras, there was simply no way of capturing the full scope of the rally, and 500,000 should be considered a very conservative estimate.
I went to some early 1990’s pro-choice rallies at the mall on the other side of the Washington Monument around the reflecting pool. The biggest of those was estimated at 200,000. Saturday made that look like one of those woeful birthday parties when you’re six years old and you invite your whole school class and only your parents, your mean older brother, and aunt Mildred and uncle Bob who smell like Ben Gay and give you socks and underwear show up.
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Even if you assume every single resident of DC attended Obama’s first inauguration and none of them attended Trump’s (and that’s far from a sure bet), there were still an additional 1.2 MILLION people who came. Far, far more than Trump by a factor of 4, assuming the 300,000 estimate for his is correct.
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One of the reasons Trump’s crowd seemed smaller than it really was is that so many of his attendee’s attire blended in with the white sheeting covering the ground.
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this has been making the rounds, too, and it seems a worthy tactic. cheaper than moving!
https://swingleft.org/
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i of course didn’t watch, but my fear leading up to it was that there was going to be footage of the crowd, and some would be waving confederate flags. i haven’t heard any mention of it happening, but i can’t see how it wouldn’t have happened somewhere.
This is really great. There’s a swing district bordering my own and just a couple of miles away, so I signed up to help out with moving progressive candidates forward. Thanks for sharing it.
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Interesting idea, but when i entered my Ohio zip code the nearest swing district it found was in Michigan.
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The pixels!
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Yeah, half-a-million is a wild under-count. It’s more likely that the Women’s March saw at least a million attendees - they just weren’t all on the mall, nor an hour before the event. If we’re generous, a quarter-million were at Trump’s inauguration. So we’re really looking at four times the size.
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Mine is IN-09 in Indiana, still one state over, and I don’t have much hope for that district. It’s technically a swing district only because it has Bloomington, which is a nice blue oasis in the middle of scary deep red.
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