It's Easier For Dogs To Get Into The US Than For People - Thoughts and Pics From Anchorage Immigration Protest

There were lots of folks at the demonstration on the park strip this morning.  Counting is hard on the ground, but my calculations put the number near or over 1000*.


*I didn't think there were that many folks, until I got into the crowd which was really deep.  I counted a thin wedge of folks and estimated how many wedges there were which got me to about 1000.  In NYE that would come to about 25,000.   NYE - New York Equivalents - is a device I invented at women against Sarah Palin march back in 2008 to give people outside of Alaska a sense of what a given number of Alaskan's would mean in a bigger city.  It gives the crowd  size if the same proportion of New Yorkers were out.  I updated things for more current population figures.  And remember, I could have under or over estimated the size of the crowd.

I got there after the Mayor spoke, but I was told his words were powerful.  Someone else told me the best speaker was the first lady.

I'm going to break this into two posts because I've go so many pictures, mostly of signs - original hand made signs seem to me to be an indicator of people's passion on a topic.

Here's the follow up post.

The big sign with God on it was part of a small anti-abortion contingency that tried to interrupt the speakers by speaking with a bullhorn.  It didn't work.



And these folks seemed to anticipate their presence here

And some bible quoting on behalf of
immigrants.

After walking around and seeing all the dogs in the crowd, I suddenly realized:  Dogs can enter the US more easily than people can.    Imagine:  Some American citizens can bring a dog back from Mexico, but not their own children!  Here are the rules - basically they're about health.

There were lots of dogs.  Here, with  the help of photoshop, you can see both sides of the same dog in one picture:












Even the Statue of Liberty was here to protest.




Twice!

Jesus Christ with sunglasses?

Speaker Robin Bronen from the Alaska Institute for Justice.

Voting showed up in signs here and you may have noticed the Voter Registration table in the 4th picture from the top.

And speaking of voting, former US Senator and current candidate for Governor was talking to folks in the crowd.  Many people have been wondering why he would jump into the governor's race and split the progressive vote.  Including me.  But my answer, to myself and to others has been:  his brother Tom knows the numbers as good as anyone and Mark wouldn't make this decision without talking to Tom.  Well, Tom (who is a Senator in the Alaska Senate) was also there and I posed that question to hm and he gave me a very convincing response.  I've got it on video (I hope, I haven't downloaded it yet)  and I'll put it up Monday or Tuesday. [It's up now here.]  Stay tuned.

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The women holding these signs said if I do anything with the picture to give credit to the artist, so here: Julio Salgado's online stencils.








More pictures coming soon.