More Inauguration Bullsh**!

Two items of note on the inauguration today...

First, it looks like organizers (well, everyone but Mayor Adrian Fenty) are now backing away from yesterday's rediculous report that as many as four million people could be on the Mall for the inauguration, and now the top figure seems to be 3 million. As mentioned yesterday, I believe four million is logistically impossible, and I don't think they'll get to three million, either.

Charlie Gibson mentioned on ABC's World News last night that 3 million would exceed:

• Reagan's First Inauguration
• LBJ's record-setting 1.2 million inauguration
• Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and
• The Million Man March

COMBINED. He also mentioned that the region's 90,000 hotel rooms could accomodate three million people - as long as folks didn't mind sharing 33 people to a room!

It's heartening to see other media call B.S. on this Inauguration crowd story, but there's not a whiff of crowd size revision in this morning's Washington Post.

The Post does redeem itself somewhat by reporting in Marc Fisher's blog that Montgomery County School chief Jerry Weast has called B.S. on an online petition from students and teachers asking for an extra day off to observe the inauguration. Weast says he doubts very many students would actually try to go down to the Mall, and he says, in any case, they'd learn more by watching the ceremony in school where it could be discussed in class - a point I made in this space last week!