We rejoined the Peace Parade at Stockton and Market Streets.
The plan was to find a musical group to march with, and though the group above was wonderful...
...the best band of the day honors went to this ensemble in white...
...playing klezmer-influenced pieces that were a delight.
As usual, the best signage...
...was heartfelt and homemade.
There was also a larger-than-usual Asian presence at the March...
...including East Indians and Pakistanis...
...along with a huge, colorful Filipino contingent.
The parade was also a good place to run into old acquaintances...
...such as Michael Faklis, above, who used to work tirelessly for San Francisco's public access station before he was recently fired by one of the worst thugs in the nonprofit world, Zane Blaney.
After crossing Market Street on Fourth...
...the march doubled back towards Civic Center along Mission Street.
We passed by the San Francisco Chronicle building on 5th and Mission, which had some interesting signage of its own, not to mention the return of the Israeli flag wavers.
On Friday, there was a very stupid article in the Chronicle predicting that nobody was interested in going to anti-war marches anymore.
Then, when at least 20,000 people did show up, they put up a decent article about the event on their SFGate website, but they undercut their own writers with a blatantly false headline.
Above is a screenshot where the head proclaims "Nearly 10,000 anti-war protestors..." and the first sentence of the nicely written article states: "More than 10,000 enthusiastic anti-war marchers..."
The newspaper can't even get its propaganda straight, and they wonder why their circulation is declining on a daily basis.
The march eased up McAllister Street, where the A.N.S.W.E.R. organizers were running a gauntlet looking for donations...
...but we were saving our money for well-deserved sausages and garlic fries.
The noisy, obnoxious media helicopters started hovering over the Civic Center neighborhood around noon...
...on Saturday, March 18th, when a march protesting the third anniversary of the Iraq Invasion was set to take place.
The starting and ending point for the march was at Civic Center Plaza in front of City Hall, which was being fortified against intruders by a small army of police and sheriffs deputies.
Also in front of City Hall was a small contingent protesting the protestors.
They were waving Israeli flags...
...and U.S. flags while singing an out-of-tune rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."
Anyone supporting the murderous regimes currently in charge of Israel and the United States is probably delusional at this moment in history...
...so the large antiwar crowd simply ignored the lunatics, which seemed the most civilized thing to do.
Though the marching crowd couldn't have been sweeter...
...or more playfully charming...
...the police response was grotesque, with hundreds of them lined along the march route, scowling...
...along with dozens of paddy wagons and buses parked near the Civic Center to haul away citizens protesting their government's criminal behavior.
The parade route was interesting, starting up Larkin Street...
...and then turning down Eddy Street...
...through the heart of the Tenderloin downtown.
There was even a Green candidate for Senator with a whole host of Greenies marching behind his little pickup truck.
One of the best moments along the route was in front of the Hilton Hotel where striking hotel workers....
...were cheering and being cheered by the peace marchers walking by.
As the march neared the Powell Street shopping district, the police presence grew even more pronounced.
Property must be protected at all costs, including bankrupting the taxpayers with massive amounts of overtime.
Since we had walked the length of the march from the back to the front by this time, it seemed like a good time to pop into the Mac Store at Stockton and Market to play with the latest machines while waiting for the crowd to catch up.
On the weekend before St. Patrick's Day in San Francisco...
...there is an annual parade that winds up Market Street from the Financial District to Civic Center...
...and the day is invariably wet, windy and cold.
On the few days over the years that it has been sunny and warm, the sunburns on all that beautiful, pale white skin have not been a pretty sight, so the bad weather is probably for the best.
Usually, these parades are way overpoliced but early this afternoon that didn't seem to be the case...
...and the reason turned out to be that a huge contingent of San Francisco's police force...
...was marching in the parade itself...
...many with their children literally in tow.
The Asian guy above, by the way, is actually San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong.
Another formidable contingent consisted of San Francisco firefighters...
...who were throwing strings of green beads to the crowd...
...in a parade gesture straight out of New Orleans' Mardi Gras.
One firefighter broke ranks and made sure this little girl got some beads of her very own.
If you were no good at catching beads, you could always buy some...
...at one of the many vendor's tents set up in the Civic Center Plaza.
This vendor from "The Irish Castle" on Geary Boulevard was already drinking beer "just to keep myself warm."
Irish-American stereotypes about drinking didn't seem to offend anyone, as you can see by this Big Yellow Taxi with signage reading "A Drinking Fellow Calls a Yellow."
It's actually a very inclusive parade.
This marching band from San Mateo, for instance...
...didn't seem to have very many Irish-Americans involved...
...but everyone was cheering for them nonetheless.
I didn't stay for long, because the cold and wet turned into a virtual monsoon...
...and just looking at some of the outfits on the marchers was enough to give me pneumonia.
