It's amazing how much press coverage protests can get. If you protest against Bush, you only need like 5 people to get on the news, and they'll just gloss over the numbers for you. If you want to protest a proposed immigration bill, it's easy to get 500,000 immigrants, many of them illegal, and you'll get all over the news. I read one blogger who was there and he said, "I thought it was more like a million, whereas the police said 500,000, but ewven the organizers said a million, so that must be right." I've never been in a crowd near that size, but I have a hard time estimating how many people are around when it couldn't be more than a few hundred, so an estimate of that magnitude from someone who was inside cannot possibly be very accurate.

At any rate, the key to this issue is who didn't show up, and that's the many millions more Californians who are against illegal immigration, but don't care about it enough to miss March Madness. There's probably a rule of thumb out there that for every person at a protest, there are 8 people who disagree. Think about it this way, if the majority wants something, they usually get it, no need to protest. It's only when a minority (and I mean minority in opinion, not race at all) wants something that they protest.