As tens of thousands of anti-Obama protesters marched in Washington, D.C., Saturday, about 150 gathered in Anchorage and expressed their anger at the direction of the nation.

They talked about the Constitution, gun rights, and what they called the "socialist" President Obama.

Organizers had hoped for a bigger crowd but people said they were pleased so many did come out to the soggy Delaney Park Strip. "This is a large crowd for the amount of rain we have here today," said Joe Miller, a Fairbanks attorney and former Interior regional chair of the state Republican Party.

Reflecting irate rhetoric of right-wing dissidents nationally, Miller told the crowd Obama wants to turn the U.S. into a "bastion of socialism." Katherine Hicks of Anchorage agreed. She was watching from the crowd, wearing a placard that featured a posterior and the words, "bend over, socialism is coming."

"It should have been fascism, but I was being nice," she said.

Hicks said what she's talking about when she refers to socialism is "out of control spending and taking control of our industries." While socialism was founded in the 19th Century as a movement advocating collective or governmental ownership of production and distribution of goods, the founders would not have included out of control spending in their characterization.

Hicks said she's been a part of both the 9/12 project, which describes itself as being for liberty and small government, and the Anchorage second amendment task force. Groups like those helped get the word out about the event, attendees said, and it at least partially sprung from the "tea party" movement that began last spring.

Miller said the second amendment exists to protect the right of people to be a threat to their government. One man carried a gun on a holster. Another had a rifle. Signs decried "Obamacare" and warned of creeping communism.

A unifying principle clearly was antipathy toward the president.

"(Obama) is a fake, he is an illegal alien, he is a fraud. Barack Obama, where is the birth certificate!" event speaker Bob Bird, last year's Alaskan Independence Party candidate for U.S. Senate, said to scattered cheers from those gathered.

Richard Sloderbeck of Anchorage, standing watching the speakers, said he believes Obama was elected through voter fraud, and, "I know he is Islamic in my heart." He said Obama is trying to take people's guns away and destroy the Constitution.

Sloderbeck and others said they heard about Saturday's event on the Eddie Burke talk radio show.

Burke, who was one of the speakers, led shouts of "You lie!," a re-creation of South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's speech to Congress on health care. Wilson later apologized to Obama for his House chambers catcall.

Erik Lambertsen and his wife, Veronica, said they were recording Fox News coverage of the national protest while they attended the Anchorage event. They said they were particularly alarmed at people associated with Obama, such as Van Jones, the environmental adviser who resigned earlier this month in the midst of a brewing backlash over his past controversial remarks and his signature on a petition calling for hearings into whether the U.S. government had any role in planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

Find Sean Cockerham online at adn.com/contact/scockerham or call him at 257-4344.

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