My Photos & Video from The Rally For Sanity

Below are a bunch of selected photos that I took today during The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear which took place on the National Mall from 12:00 - 3:00. At the bottom is a slideshow of all the images I took.

You may also want to check out a few photos my wife took from a different vantage point during the rally.

Before I get to the photos though, here are two short videos I shot during the event:

During the pre-show portion of The Rally For Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall in Washington DC on October 30, 2010. The Mythbusters appeared on stage and conducted several experiments using the crowd to help. I recorded the first and third experiment, The Wave and The Jump.

Update: Comedy Central now has the entire video of the Mythbusters posted if you care to see it from the vantage point of the stage:

This movie is comprised of three short clips. The first is a 360 degree pan of the crowd before the rally got started, just to show the size of the crowd. The second is a bit of Jon Stewart at the beginning of the show (didn't think to start filming until after he came out - sorry about that) and the 3rd clip is just after Stephen Colbert started coming out of the stage in his faux Chilean miner rescue capsule.

Update: Comedy Central now has video posted of the hilarious duet Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert sang, entitled "I'm More American Than You":

And finally, Jon Stewarts moving speach at the end of the rally:

John Hodgman on The Truth About Jonathan Coulton

Rachel Maddow exposes ignorance of Joe Miller Supporters

Faux News indeed.

A Web Of GOP Influence

NPR has a wonderful interactive flow chart up of the source of GOP money in campaign ads this year and how they're connected to the Republicans

These groups style themselves as independent, grass-roots organizations, though they are tightly interconnected. The network is behind a slew of campaign ads this fall.

The Daily Show covers the Juan Williams NPR Controversy (Hilarious)

Donald Duck Discovers Glenn Beck in “Right Wing Radio Duck”

Donald Duck discovers Glenn Beck, a animated political cartoon parody. As John Gruber says, you'd better watch it while you can before it gets yanked from Youtube.

Via John Gruber, Roger Ebert, and Boing Boing.

Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury

Vanity Fair - "Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury:

On the road, Palin gives “prayer warriors” regular shout-outs. She did it in Wichita and again in June during “An Evening with Sarah Palin” at Chicago’s Rosemont Theatre. Standing in front of a 50-foot-long American flag, wearing a black leather jacket, Palin thanked prayer warriors in the audience, just as at other events she has thanked them for keeping her “covered” and “providing [a] prayer shield.”

The term “prayer warrior” describes a person who offers a specific kind of supplication: asking God to direct an unseen battle between forces of light and darkness—literal angels and demons—that some Christians believe is occurring all around us. A leading member of Wasilla’s Church on the Rock, the non-denominational evangelical congregation where Palin sometimes attends worship, confirmed this understanding of the term. When Palin thanks prayer warriors for keeping her covered, she is thanking them for calling on angels to shield her from demonic attacks. On the night of the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, Palin received an e-mail marked “URGENT … Urgent for Sarah to read … ” The e-mail came from pastor Lou Engle, a prominent right-wing activist who identifies himself as a prayer warrior and is a central figure in dominionist theology. (Dominionists believe that, until Jesus Christ returns to earth, society should be governed exclusively by God’s law as revealed through a literal reading of Scripture.) In the e-mail, Engle compared Palin to the biblical Queen Esther. “This is an Esther moment in your life,” he wrote. “Esther hid her identity until Mordecai challenged her to risk everything for such a time as this. Your identity is ‘Sarah Barracuda.’ Esther removed corruption from the Persian government and Haman fell. She didn’t have experience, she had grace and favor. Sarah, don’t hide your identity tonight.”

A later quote from the same piece

Even Palin’s strongest supporters say they feel confused by what their former governor has become. “She quit us,” says one Wasilla woman. “We elected her, and she left us,” says another. (“Sarah was my babysitter,” she later adds, as an indication of goodwill.) Yet they are too nice to turn me away, and they are too honest to completely suppress what they themselves feel unable to tell. After one local Republican delivers 90 minutes of uninterrupted praise for Palin, I ask whom else I should talk to, and the answer comes so fast it’s like a cry for help—which is how, the next day, I end up in the living room of Colleen Cottle, who is the matriarch of one of Wasilla’s oldest families, and who served on the city council when Palin was mayor. She says she and her husband, Rodney, will pay a price for speaking candidly about Palin. Their son is one of Todd Palin’s best friends. “But it is time for people to start telling the truth,” Colleen says. She describes the frustrations of trying to do city business with a mayor who “had no attention span—with Sarah it was always ‘What’s the flavor of the day?’ ”; who was unable to take part meaningfully in conversations about budgets because she “does not understand math or accounting—she only knows buzzwords, like ‘balanced budget’ ”; and who clocked out after four hours on most days, delegating her duties to an aide—“but he’ll never talk to you, because he has a state job and doesn’t want to lose it.” This type of conversation is repeated so often that Wasilla starts to feel like something from The Twilight Zone or a Shirley Jackson short story—a place populated entirely by abuse survivors.

This woman is fucking crazy.

Put Up or Shut Up

From Roger Eberts, "Put Up or Shut Up":

These opinions have an agenda. They seek to demonize the Obama Presidency and mainstream liberal politics in general. The conservatism they prefer is not the traditional conservatism of such figures as Taft, Nixon, Reagan, Buckley or Goldwater. It is a frightening new radical fringe movement, financed by such as the newly notorious billionaire Koch brothers, whose hatred of government extends even to opposition to tax funding for public schools.

The money behind the movement has been shaken in its boots by the recent exposure of criminal activities in the money markets. Our economy has collapsed and it seemed clear to many Americans that the unregulated greed of Wall Street trading, especially in derivatives, was responsible. These were not investments in industry, the economy or the future. They were investments in a bold Ponzi scheme which defrauded home owners into fronting for a pyramid of worthless loans. Citizens lost their homes, investment houses went bankrupt, but the criminals responsible continued to pay themselves multi-million-dollar bonuses.