September 14, 2009

NICK GILLESPIE: Argue about Saturday’s numbers all you want, but “the crowd was truly huge.” “First, the crowd was truly huge. Second, the crowd was from all over the place (both geographically and ideologically). And third, the crowd, well-behaved and stunningly normal in the main, was genuinely pissed off at out of control spending and government policies. “Stop spending,” was the basic answer to any questions about what Congress and the president should do come tomorrow. Throw the bums of either party out come next fall was the second most-common answer.”

As I’ve said all along, the 2 million number seems awfully high to me — even if we did first hear it from an internal Democratic memo. But Stephen Green reported an actual body count of 450,000 by noon. So I’d say upwards of half a million is a reasonable figure. PJTV has been trying to see if there’s a satellite photo, but I think the cloud cover was probably dense enough to rule that out.

But these pictures show an awful lot of people.

Plus, a rather intensive crowd analysis by Henry Vanderbilt, over at Rand Simberg’s.