:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 11.01.2010 ::

:: Stewart Rally -- Why It Was Vastly Bigger Than The Beck Event ::

Huffington Post

If there's one thing that's certain about the Jon Stewart rally it's that the attendance has been grossly under-counted.

This is not just sour grapes or an effort to re-write history. All anyone has to do is to look at a map.

Let's start with the 1963 March on Washington, the most iconic public demonstration of modern times. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the crowd extended along the Reflecting Pool and beyond. The usual estimate is that 200,000 to 300,000 people attended the King rally.

This summer Glenn Beck held his rally, also speaking from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. By one estimate 87,000 people attended the Beck rally, but photos plainly show that his supporters -- like King's-- largely filled the banks of the Reflecting Pool, meaning that his rally was of similar size.

The rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert was plainly larger than the Beck event. Vastly larger.

A L S O

CBS News: estimated 215,000 attend Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

CBS News estimated 215,000 attended the rally organized by Comedy Central late night stars Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert last Saturday in Washington. The news organization based its estimate on a report from AirPhotosLive.com, which uses aerial pictures taken over the rally and which, the company says, has a margin of error of plus or minus 10 percent. During the rally, Stewart joked that there were 10 million Mall attendees.

CBS News had commissioned the same company to come up with a crowd estimate for Glenn Beck's August rally on the Mall and reported the company estimated that crowd at 87,000.

Here is the CBS News report.

Sanity, Iraq, and Jon Stewart's "View From Nowhere"
Huffington Post

For me -- and I think for a lot of people -- the moment that "sanity" left the building in American discourse came in late 2002 and early 2003, when it became clear that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Paul Halfwits, and their minions were dead set on invading Iraq. This was a country that had nothing to do with supposed issue at hand --the 9/11 attacks or any ongoing terror threat from al-Qaeda -- and, weakened by years of sanctions, an allied no-fly zones, etc., posed no credible security threat to the United States. And so the idea of a U.S.-initiated war with Iraq struck me as so -- and I cannot think of a better word -- "insane" that for months I waited for the forces of reason, such as influential journalists, foreign policy experts, and rational members of Congress, to rise up and swat down such a bad and dangerous idea. In fact, it struck me, foolishly, at the time that an Iraq war debate -- such as it was in that winter of American-flag lapel pins -- would validate the very reason that I and so many others in my generation went into journalism in the late 1970s and the early 1980s -- in aftermath of Vietnam, civil rights but especially Watergate, when it was dogged reporting and the uncovering of facts that proved that an American government had gone way off that tracks. Surely that would happen again in 2002-03.

When that didn't happen -- and when so many of the nation's best-known journalists not only failed to expose the lies surrounding the invasion of Iraq but enabled them -- it radicalized me, and radicalized my ideas about journalists and our responsibilities in a free but fragile society.

Slide Show: Reader Photos from the Rally to Restore Sanity
The Nation

Stewart-Colbert Rally Mixes Fun With Sober Message
ABC News

A N D

The Sanity Song

posted by me

:: 2:59:00 PM [+] ::
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