What if they held a political rally and a rock concert broke out?Posted on 10/31/2010 3:35:19 AM PDT by Kaslin
Big name acts, extensive crowd control, rules against video or audio taping even with your cell phone, boring political speeches ... this wasn't a rally, this was a U2 concert! But how many people attended?
What if they held a political rally and a rock concert broke out?
The “Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear” in Washington, D.C., on Saturday looked like it was probably generally a lot of fun. The crowd looked cheerful, and I generally like Jon Stewart and sometimes like Stephen Colbert. The music was okay — I’m a big fan of Cat Stevens, and the guy with the beard (Yusuf something?) who sang “Peace Train” did a pretty credible cover version.
But Roger didn’t ask for a review; he wanted the now-traditional Pajamas Media crowd size estimate.
As always, this would be much easier if I could get a photo of the crowd from directly overhead, and as usual, I can’t find one. Apparently, for some reason, they no longer let aircraft fly over the Capitol and White House, so we have to settle for the usual photos from locations from the Washington Monument or the like.
The AP provides us several in a slideshow. Here’s a good one:
Of course, right away we notice something: large parts of the National Mall are blocked off to the crowds. If we’re going to make an estimate, we need to know how much. AP provides us with another shot with a little bit wider angle:
…and one more from behind the stage and toward the Washington Monument, so we can see that the crowd really does stop somewhere in the middle of the Mall. In these pictures, north is to the left, so we have the crowd coming a little west of the main entrance to the National Gallery of Art on the north:
On the other side of the Mall, the crowd seems to be roughly up to the end of the National Air and Space Museum:
… while on the east end, it appears the stage is set up somewhere a little west of 4th St NW.
So I constructed a generous rectangle as the perimeter of the crowd that includes a good bit of the buildings on the sides, but then doesn’t attempt to add in the lines of people along the dirt lanes across the Mall.
Here’s the polygon I constructed:
And once again using this excellent tool, I computed the are of the whole polygon as about 150,000 square meters. Before I screw myself up with unit changes, we’ll convert that and call it 1,620,000 square feet.
Which means we can, at last, estimate the size of the damned crowd. We’ll use exactly the same figures for crowd density we used for the One Nation rally and the Beck “Restore Honor” rally:
| Estimate | 10 square feet per person | 5 square feet per person | 2.5 square feet per person | |
| Maximum: | 162,000 |
|
324,000 | 648,000 |
| 90 percent | 145,800 | 291,600 | 583,200 | |
| 75 percent |
|
121,500 | 243,000 | 486,000 |
| 50 percent | 81,000 | 162,000 | 324,000 | |
| Based on CBS news estimate | 58,725 | 58,725 | 58,725 | |
| 40 percent | 64,800 | 129,600 |
|
259,200 |
The row labeled “based on CBS News estimate,” by the way, is using the CBS figure of 87,000 for the Beck 8/28 rally to derive a number for square feet per person, and applying that to the Stewart/Colbert rally.
It’s worth looking back at our table from the 8/28 rally for comparison.
| Estimate |
|
10 square feet per person | 5 square feet per person | 2.5 square feet per person |
| Maximum: | 215,000 people | 430,000 | 860,000 | |
| 90 percent | 200,000 | 400,000 | 800,000 | |
| 75 percent | 163,000 | 326,000 |
|
652,000 |
| 50 percent | 108,000 | 216,000 | 432,000 | |
| CBS News Estimate | 87,000 |
|
87,000 | 87,000 |
| 40 percent | 86,000 | 172,000 | 344,000 |
Of course, we could have shortened this considerably: the Beck rally covered about 2.4 million square feet, while the Stewart/Colbert rally only about 1.6 million square feet. In other words, we know from that alone that the Stewart/Colbert rally was about six-tenths as big as the Beck rally.
Back when I was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, the common rumor was that Colorado had been left out of Playboy magazine’s rankings of the top party schools because “it was unfair for professionals to be included in competition with amateurs.” (It wasn’t true, and I presume lots of other schools had the same rumor; spare me from everyone’s story of how it was really their school.)
But in much the same way, it seems a bit unfair to compare either the 9/12 rally or Beck’s 8/28 rally with this one. The 9/12 2009 rally was more or less ad hoc; Beck’s rally was more organized, but still basically a rally.
But look at the Comedy Central “Sanity/Fear” rally. As PJTV’s Richard Pollock found out, it was very carefully organized, with limited press access — or at least attempts to limit press access — and with the announcement that video and photography was prohibited except for Comedy Central.
(On the National Mall? Good luck with that, bunky.)
There was a big proscenium stage, with a lovely setup framing the Capitol — as a sometimes theater guy, I really admired it, it was gorgeous — and a large controlled area behind the stage for performers and technical people. Professional sound set ups, with big name acts flying in for a few numbers.
Big name acts, extensive crowd control, rules against video or audio taping even with your cell phone, boring political speeches … this wasn’t a rally, this was a U2 concert!
And that tells us the real story: they held a rock/comedy concert, with pro acts including two of the hottest TV comedians around, and professional production, with free admission and with Arianna Huffington paying for bus rides — and no matter what you think a “dense” crowd is, it was still only about six-tenths of Beck’s open-air church service.
But the bearded guy really wasn’t a bad imitation of Cat Stevens. Not like the real thing, of course. I wonder if he’s thought of going pro?
IMHO; not much. Anyone that would throw away freedom while destroying their own country is insane.
Arianna Huffington strikes me as too selfish to pay for rides. Most likely Soros did the paying.
You said it
Cat Stevens *is* Yusuf Islam. He's a big mover in the stealth jihad, he has been on terrorist watchlists to the point of not being let into the US. He also owns the foundation (the waqf) running the madrassas in Britain, as well as a number of other companies funneling money into the islamist cause.
More like “Rally for their own Vanity”
Well, it looks like they had a crowd that was smaller than the one we had on 9/12 over a year ago in that area. Except our crowd was larger by the amount of space up above which was cordoned off here. How many did the libtard media say we had at that one, 20,000 IIRC? SO this crowd must be smaller than 20,000. Q.E.D. By their own reckoning.
BTW-I think it's a mistake to compare this to the Beck rally. Instead it should be compared to the 9/12 rally because it was in a similar location (the Capitol). One can see the difference with the way the blocks are broken up. Remember the media was saying there were only 60,000 at the 9/12 rally.
What I would like to know is what condition did they leave the grounds around the rally? Bet it wasn’t like it was when they arrived.
I wonder how heavy the smell of pot was during this event
That was sarcasm, I say, sarcasm, son.
“this wasn’t a rally, this was a U2 concert!”
LOL...I wonder if, everytime Jon Stewart clapped his hands, a kid died in Africa?
Your posted photo is not from the 9/12/09 rally. I was there and stood on the west side of the pool near the Capitol for the event. Trust me, the only video screen for the rally was up by the stage. There weren’t any others.
It was a rally for vanity not sanity.
These idiots are neither influential nor funny.
‘I make witty comments to heavily edited news footage, I’m a frickin legend’
I would sooner watch paint dry than that horse sh*t. They have obviously begun to believe their own hype.
Therein lies their weakness.
No escaping the truth: Glenn Beck has a bigger one than Jon Stewart.
The type font in the original was Irony Intended.
FWIW, Yusef Islam openly supported the fatwa against Soloman Rushdie and said he wished he could do the deed himself.
I thought total insanity has reigned in DC for decades.
maybe with some slight to moderate burps otherwise during the reign of some mostly decent guys . . .
All that being said, I too was down in DC for the 9/12 rally as well; standing on the Capitol lawn. I'm sure you would agree the rally did stretch far down the mall and on the side streets; much farther back than this.
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