Originally Posted By Lisann22 Any LPers go? I'm so sad I could not. I'm stuck at work doing inventory. Watching via the Internet. John Legend and the Roots Band opened which was very cool. Then the Mythbuster guys bored me to death. Now Stewart is on stage. The Mall is packed! LOL! Good to see such a big turn out.
Originally Posted By mele Oh good,I started watching it at the beginning. I was afraid I missed a lot of it. Ah, love Stewart. Glad so many people are there. Won't need any fake footage (unlike Fox News) to prove how many people are there!
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Originally Posted By Dabob2 They had a hard road to hoe, considering a). they had to find a balance between comedy and making a serious point; b). it's hard to fire people up about being reasonable. All in all, they did a good job. Check out various news sites for some of the signs that weren't shown on TV also. Some were very clever. They did a great job drawing people too, considering they announced it fairly recently (Beck hyped his for a full year), and their original park permit was, IIRC, for 25,000 people, later bumped up when they saw the response on Facebook and other places. But a rally of this sort had never quite been done before, so how could they know if they could pull it off? A friend of mine who used to work in the DC police dept. told me that a good rule of thumb was that if they fill most of the space between the Capitol and Washington Monument (as this one did), that's between 100,000 and 200,000 people, depending on how tightly packed, and how much room is left for emergency egress (they allow more these days than they did, say, 20 years ago). If you fill most of the space between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial (where Beck's was), that's slightly smaller, but still probably 100-200,000. Predictably, on comments boards on CNN and other news sites reporting, Beck fans are pooh-poohing these crowds and touting their own (and to a lesser extent, vice versa). There are a lot of "mine's bigger" arguments going on. Which is why I loved Stewart's ironic comments about drawing "10 million." Except for the Mythbusters (who I like, but who could have compressed that into half the time), I thought it was all pretty well done, and sometimes very well done.
Originally Posted By jasmine7 I loved it. To be honest, I hadn't felt as patriotic in a long time as when I watched this rally. And John's speech at the end, when he got serious, was amazing. there were several moments that brought tears to my eyes, and that was one of them.
Originally Posted By ecdc Agreed. I'm the first to admit that I need to hear messages like Stewart's at the end. Overall I think of myself as a pretty bright person, but I am guilty of defining people by their politics. (Which, apart from not being that smart of a thing to do, is really no way to go through life.) "We live in hard times, not end of times." "The media is like our immune system; if you overreact to everything, it just makes you sicker." Great, great stuff. If you peruse news websites (yes, including Huffington Post) that are covering the rally, then you look at other headlines on the sites, the unintentional irony abounds.
Originally Posted By ecdc The only criticism I have is that Stewart seemed so desperate to be fair that he engaged in that fallacy so common to people trying to be reasonable: false equivalency. Fake fairness isn't fairness. As dabob2 accurately said on another thread, if a news organization (rhymes with Pox) repeatedly engages in *false* reporting - not one-sided reporting, not lean-one-way reporting, but *false* reporting, then it's not the same if there's another station that leans a different way. I really get Stewarts desire to bridge the divide and go above the fray. And of course, if he'd only showed clips of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, the story would've been his supposed "bias" instead of his great message. But I think this notion of false equivalency is one of the biggest problems moderates and otherwise reasonable people need to overcome.
Originally Posted By Lisann22 As I put on FB "Go on with your bad self, Jon Stewart!" His speech at the end was excellent. Some many good points. I did not care for the MythBusters it was corny and boring. The rest of the show was overall good with some REALLY good stuff sprinkled in. I wish I could have gone. Loved all the music too!
Originally Posted By Mr X BEST rally sign EVER..."We're all in this together..Let's act like it" Extra credit - the sign was designed to look like old parchment
Originally Posted By ecdc My rally sign would read: Don't be so obsessed with "under God" that you forget about that whole "indivisible" thing.
Originally Posted By plpeters70 I was there yesterday, and it was a pretty amazing day! The crowds were crazy - and we had to squeeze our way onto the mall to get a spot where we could just see a jumbo-tron, but overall, it was amazing! The show itself was a little long - especially since we were all standing around packed in like sardines - but hearing Jon's speech at the end live was a really emotional moment for me. He really said some things that have needed saying for a long time - and it was wonderful to hear them with such a huge crowd of people. And speaking of the crowd - I have never in my life seen such a huge number of people all gathered together behaving so nicely to one another. With the size of the crowds, and the difficulty getting spots to see, things could have gone south very quickly. But everyone was in such a good mood, and so polite, that I didn't see anyone acting rudely. It may sound cheesy, but this crowd was truly made up of some rationale, sane people - and I was so pleased to be a part of it!
Originally Posted By Labuda VERY cool, plpeters! And, I echo those who said they got emotional off and on, especially during Jon's ending speech.
Originally Posted By ecdc CBS News estimated the crowd at 215,000, 2.5 times larger than Glenn Beck's rally. The company they hired to do the crowd count detailed their methodology after Beck and his fans whined that their estimate of his rally was wrong (Beck insisted he had a bare minimum of 500,000 people; in reality it was about 85,000).
Originally Posted By Mr X A right wing friend of mine insisted the Beck crowd was "no less than 1.5 million", based on his first hand account. He kept that up for a few days, until finally "conceding" that the REAL count was 500,000 (because that's what Beck's home page said, I would guess)...
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan Stephen Colbert tweeted that he estimated the crowd size to be 6 billion people. I'm going with that.
Originally Posted By plpeters70 <<Stephen Colbert tweeted that he estimated the crowd size to be 6 billion people.>> LOL - it sure felt like it! You could barely move once you made your way on to the mall!
