I wish I had more on yesterday’s rally, but what the major media chooses not to cover is the set up for Q&A jokes about Catholic bears and shitting popes. This is the best crowd shot I could find, but I’m still looking (this, btw, is the only crowd shot from DK that doesn’t look sad).
Crooks & Liars has video and is claiming 175,000 in attendance (as proven by satellite photos I have yet to see).
Dave N., reporting live: Amazing. The crowd size was clearly larger than the one at Beckapalooza, and the energy was outstanding. You can see the video I shot above.
Also amazing: The kind of camera work I saw from C-SPAN. It looked to me as if they were deliberately shooting the few empty seats that were close to the podium. These empty spaces were largely the result of the way the crowd was fenced at the Mall. But as you can see, it was a massive event.
Clearly, they were our kind of people:
√ late starting and somewhat disorganized?
√ handheld camera shots?
√ crowd talking over speakers?
√ more diversity per square rod than in all of Glennbeckistan?
√ negligible major media coverage?
√ deceptive photos in the WaPost?
√ CNN fixed feeds that ignored speakers and focused on empty spaces?
The last point is no joke (actually, none of them are). Here’s a screenshot of the feed that CNN ran most of the rally:
You could hear massive numbers of people off camera, but this shot was so far from the speakers you couldn’t even hear who was talking. They cut to Jesse Jackson just as he was finishing, the first 90% of his speech apparently not being relevant to the CNN’s meme of general apathy and liberal listlessness.
While CNN was busy barely covering the rally, they were promoting a thumbsucker they’re going to air on young conservatives taking on the mainstream media (oddly, James O’Keefe wasn’t one of them).
The WaPost uploaded pix, but they did so on Saturday morning while the crowd was still gathering and then, gosh golly gee, they forgot to update with pix from later in the day.
All the media bothering to report contextualized the rally as a reaction to Glenn Beck’s, yet this one was being planned last April long before Beck announced his revival meeting.
More from Jane Hamsher,
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Frank Rich on the shmendriks running the Republican party:
The once obscure governor of Alaska was also tripped up by lies and gaffes when she emerged on the national stage, starting with her misrepresentation of her supposed opposition to “the bridge to nowhere.” But she quickly wove the attacks into a brilliant cloak of martyrdom that positioned her as a fierce small-town opponent of the coasts’ pointy-head elites. O’Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in “real America.”
The more O’Donnell is vilified, the bigger the star she becomes, and the more she can reinforce the Tea Party’s preferred narrative as “a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement” (in the recent words of the pundit Charles Krauthammer) populated only by everyday folk upset by big government and the deficit. This airbrushed take has had a surprisingly long life even in some of the nonpartisan press….
Last week the same Tea Party Patriots leader who bragged to the National Journal about all those small donations announced a $1 million gift from a man she would identify only as an entrepreneur. The donor’s hidden identity speaks even louder than the size of the check. As long as we don’t know who he is, we won’t know what orders he’s giving either.
Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.
From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal….
They are acing it, these guys. Election Day is now only a month away. The demoralized Democrats are held hostage by the unemployment numbers. And along comes this marvelous gift out of nowhere, Christine O’Donnell, Tea Party everywoman, who just may be the final ingredient needed to camouflage a billionaires’ coup as a populist surge. By the time her fans discover that any post-election cuts in government spending will be billed to them, and not the Tea Party’s shadowy backers, she’ll surely be settling her own debts with fat paychecks from “Fox & Friends.”
Acing it indeed. No, I don’t think we had more people on the mall than they had. Laverne & Shirley conventions will always outdraw Mensa meetings. And hopey changey always sells best when laced with a stick it to the other guys schtick.
Steve Benen has more on the massive welfare check Fox News cuts the teabaggers daily.
Oh, and the latest from McDonnell (Mahr, actually) is that she considered Hare Krishna but couldn’t handle giving up meatballs.
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Meg Whitman, her every line of defense eviscerated by facts on the record, is now blaming Jerry Brown for her having employed an undocumented worker for nine years before shitting on her just in time for eMeg to get the GOoPer gubernatorial nomination. Blaming Jerry, yep, that’s the ticket.
Meanwhile Breitbart goes from Idunnothisguy to thisshouldbelookedinto to thisisoffensive to demandinganapology! all within a few days. Yes, you can do that when you live in a country where the media gives a free pass to liars like Dick Armey.
I’m not on speaking terms with former City Pages managing editor Steve Perry, but I have to credit him for this. Back in ’03 he told me (based, I believe, on conversations with Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch) that Karl Rove was trying to destroy the general public’s faith in the news media. Well, they did.
Like Obama with Senate Republicans, the harder the media kisses these toads, the less noble they become. Why do these idiots feed the maws that bite them? Why isn’t every newspaper running stories about how anti-gay groups are opposing anti-bullying legislation? [earning a WTF? from Gryphen] Why
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More politics:
Rahm’s goodbye gift from Austan Goolsbee? A dead fish wrapped in a newspaper
Linda Greenhouse on the upcoming Supreme Borks cases
Can you rank the Borks by seniority? (I came very close — I can name all nine from memory but do I ever get polled? Noooooo….)
DougJ on Catholic bishops
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Econacy:
Digby on blighted titles
The Exiled on The Economist’s “debunking” of Timothy Noah’s inequality series (yes, they use the pejorative libertard a lot)
Glenn Beck meets Donald Duck (vintage ‘toon w/new voice over that channels the Great Depression in our times) ***** (seriously, this is worth 8 minutes out of your Sunday)
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World:
IDF terrorists convicted of using an 11-year-old Palestianian child to open bags thought to have been booby-trapped (no, that’s not a link to a U.S. newspaper, how on earth did you guess?)
David Cameron distances himself from tea party culture wars (it’s that pesky “real conservative” thing I keep talking about)
The actual report on how we used Guatemalans to test STD vaccines
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Via Steve Benen, Jamelle Bouie explains why atheists beat the crap out of evangelicals on a religion test:
As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa. To use a familiar example, blacks — and especially those with middle-class lives — tend to know a lot about whites, by virtue of the fact that they couldn’t succeed otherwise; the professional world is dominated by middle-class whites, and to move upward, African Americans must understand their mores and norms. By contrast, whites don’t need to know much about African Americans, and so they don’t.
Likewise, religious minorities — while not under much threat of persecution — are well-served by a working knowledge of religion, for similar reasons; the United States is culturally Christian, and for religious minorities, getting along means understanding those reference points. That those religious minorities can also answer questions about other religious traditions is a sign of broader religious education that isn’t necessary when you’re in the majority.
I find that pretty persuasive. What do you think?
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Etc.:
Kristof on unregulated chemicals and their impact on the unborn
MN: the new Seattle?
I have a postcard version of this skull on my bulletin board (oddly enough, by the same artist)
LA Times has a pot section, including an editorial that just says fuck no you stupid colored drugged out pieces of shit! (seriously, if Prop 19 passes, you could buy marijuana as easily as you can buy 100-proof vodka!)
Romantical link o’the day
OK, now I’m thinking Inez Sainz has inverted nipples or something because I’ve never seen a woman wearing clothes this tight who was at all shy about taking them off (scroll as long as you like, this woman does not know the meaning of the word “modest”) (or maybe keeping the clothes on is opening even bigger doors for her in Latin America….)
Free books
Should football plays be patented?
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Only thirty days left until Democrats have the option of throwing away any possible chance of economic recovery by staying at home on election day.
Don’t be that clueless. Flake to the third parties on safe races if you like, but don’t throw away your vote in any Congressional races.
Then, in 2011, we can start grassrootsing some primary surprises of our own for 2012. (Here in MN I’d love to see Klobuchar challenged from the left. She’ll be re-elected, but without any flack from the left, she’ll just keep devolving into a Blue Dog).
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