A couple weeks ago, right after Sarah Palin delivered a speech at Anchorage’s convention center, a group of community organizers led a grassroots effort to convey their disapproval of Palin. The “Alaska Women Reject Palin” rally was held outside the Loussac Library, the subject being that Sarah Palin is a poor representative of Alaskan women and men. A group of friends originally concocted the idea, spreading news of their proposed gathering via flyers and notices in the newspaper. To their great surprise, hundreds of people showed up in support, sporting homemade signs. An organizer walked the crowd with a counter and claimed up to 1400 or 1500 people (and a little less than a hundred counter-protestors) came to protest Palin.

The news was poorly covered in states other than Alaska.

Edward Burke, a local radio talk show host with extremely conservative views (really, except for Air America Radio, aren’t they all?) announced the rally on his show and read the names and phone numbers of the organizers so that his listeners could threaten and harass “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots.” Which they did. Perhaps he forgot that intimidation tactics against the opposition do not represent the principles of democracy. Nevertheless the rally was a huge success; one participant said that “if you can get 25 people to show up at an event [in Anchorage], it’s a success.”

The following are photographs of the event taken by a participant. Photographs courtesy of Rachel Wolfe and Marilyn Detloff:

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under Politics, Politics & Business, Ripe!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.