If you haven't seen it already, start at page one.
They'd pulled back a bit and these guys just sailed right through.
Didn't even slow down. UC students don't even blink at this kind of thing.
"Stop Privitization! Down with Capitalism! Students and Workers of the World, Unite! Stop repression of HOSEI students!". That last bit refers to some communist students at Hosei University at Japan, who are apparently being repressed.
Everybody's massing together getting ready to march so they're all crowded together. Makes for a good newspaper shot if they're kind and zoom in.
I'm not sure why the Muslim students chose to make signs saying they were against cuts, but there were at least three or four of them.
The thing that was weird is they crossed the street just enough to block it, making the police redirect traffic at nearby intersections and pissing off Berkeley residents. This poor guy's just trying to get his truck unloaded. And then they just waited for at least 20 minutes.
Where the sun don't shine? Note they're just standing at the head of the march, posing for photos. They still haven't gone anywhere.
Notice how they keep going on about no money this and can't afford that and yet there are so many snazzy custom t-shirts for their event.
I went down to check out the police traffic guys and ran into this fellow on the way. First time I've seen the Revolutinary Communist Party late to anything. Guess they slept in.
Lots of local intersections looked like this. These are Berkeley city police, not UC police. (You can tell by their shoulder patches - the city police have a star and the UC police have a fancy UC logo. Most cops use their city logo but Berkeley police don't because the city logo is remarkably stupid.)
You just can't make this stuff up.
Our university!
Nobody ever did get those signs.
They're all convinced the state's going to privatize the UCs or at least get some of the random functions like the janitorial staff off the state payroll.
I can only assume they did eventually march but I had to get back to work.
Update: Folks at the school paper tweeted updates so I found out they left after sitting in that spot for about 45 minutes. Their estimate was 800 protesters, which is high unless they were joined by more after I left. AP described it as "hundreds". Oakland PD said 500-1000 by the time they hit the Oakland border, where they were met by hundreds of police in full riot gear and made it to their destination with no great drama. It's always difficult to estimate crowds - bottom line is it was a pretty decent turnout but again, there are 35,000 students at Cal and those weren't all students obviously. And if you compare the turnout to recent tea party events just to use another example it was pretty unimpressive.
Update 2: After the Oakland event many of the protesters attempted to go up a freeway offramp and block the freeway during rush hour. 160 were arrested. Quite a few of the protests at other campuses tried to block freeways as well. This is a remarkably stupid move since blocking traffic is the #1 way to turn people against you fast.
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