WaPo’s Milbank Confirms He’s a Lefty
By Don Irvine | September 2, 2010
Columnist Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has come out of the closet and admitted that he sides with the left.
From the Washington Post via Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post has a new op-ed columnist.
Dana Milbank, who has been writing the “Washington Sketch” feature for nearly six years, is moving to the editorial page, where he will be free to opine at will. But Milbank says his writing will still be rooted in reporting and observation.
“Anybody reading my column would make an informed judgment that I’m left-of-center, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that,” he says. “But strongly ideological people on the left do not recognize me as one of their own.”
A former New Republic and Wall Street Journal staffer who once covered the White House for The Post, Milbank ran up against the limits of the scene-setting sketch format: “If something exciting is happening, I’m golden. If nothing is happening, I’ve got to make a column out of nothing. And anything out of the capital was off limits.”
Milbank isn’t putting his funny side — which got him in trouble during the ill-fated “Mouthpiece Theater” videos — in a blind trust. He says he will still write some sketches online and contribute to a Post humor blog.
It’s not that conservatives didn’t suspect or know that Milbank was a liberal it’s just that he never admitted as much before. But I guess we can take some solace that as he moves to the editorial page he isn’t as hard to the left as some would believe or at least he hasn’t passed the far left’s litmus test yet.
If my father were still alive he would take great joy in this admission since he quizzed the late Katherine Graham and her son Donny for years about the ideological makeup of the Post writers and they brushed him off each and every time.
MSNBC’s Schultz Thinks He Can Match Beck Rally Numbers
By Don Irvine | September 1, 2010
In yet another sign that Saturday’s Glenn Beck “Restoring Honor” rally has struck a nerve with liberals, MSNBC host Ed Schultz said on his radio program that he bet he could easily match the turnout if he had the same amount of resources and time as Beck had.
From the Politico
MSNBC host Ed Schultz says he wasn’t impressed by the crowd Fox’s Glenn Beck was able to draw to Washington over the weekend, saying he could “easily” match Beck.
“I could get every union head in this country, I could organize every progressive group in this country, the main bloggers,” Schultz said on his radio show Tuesday. “This could be The Ed March.”
Schultz used NBC News’ projection of 300,000 attendees to Beck’s rally as the baseline he could reach – though CBS and others have placed the number of Beck supporters at less than 100,000.
“Folks, 300,000 people on the heels of six months’ promotion, that ain’t no big shakes,” Schultz said, alluding to Beck’s frequent plugs for the event on his own television and radio shows as well as his website.
“I bet I could do that,” Schultz said of the 300,000 number. “I bet I could do that with this radio show and my TV show and six months’ production, six months’ promotion, if I had the budget I could equal that march. I know I could.”
“I guarantee you, I could do more than 300,000,” he added. “It ain’t a big deal.”
Well that would be a step up from the 500 or so people who showed up to hear Shultz and others speak at the Al Sharpton rally on Saturday where he told the crowd that in high school he got on the bus with the “brothers” rather than the bus designated for whites.
If Schultz is so confident he should try and hold a rally and see what he gets. Trying to pull all the elements of the left together is a difficult task- just ask Obama and trying to get a 1,000 people much less 300,000 is tougher than he thinks.
CNN Gets A Lift From Beck Rally
By Don Irvine | September 1, 2010
Even though CNN still trailed Fox News in the ratings Saturday they received the biggest increase in audience size from the previous week for cable news channels.
From TVNewser
Though none of the cable news networks — save C-SPAN — provided full coverage of Glenn Beck‘s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington on Saturday, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC did provide some coverage to varying degrees. Here’s a look at the data we have:
During the 10am-1pmET block, Fox, which was in business programming from 10am-12pm, had the largest viewership. CNN, which perhaps had the most coverage of the rally, saw the largest increase of the three networks compared to the same time-slot last Saturday. (Since C-SPAN, which carried the rally live in full, is not a commercial television network, it is not rated by Nielsen. So despite the fact that Beck said last night that he “can’t wait to see the numbers” for C-SPAN, we, unfortunately, won’t be getting any.)
Sarah Palin spoke in the 10amET hour and was carried live on CNN. Check out our liveblog of the coverage and the rally, which ended at 1:18pmET. More on Saturday’s numbers here.
| Fox News | CNN | MSNBC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10am-1pm | 1.08M/279k | 729k/212k | 283k/83k |
| 10am | 1.06M/290k | 632k/216k | 295k/74k |
| 11am | 1.06M/278k | 737k/230k | 300k/72k |
| 12pm | 1.13M/270k | 818k/189k | 255k/103k |
| 1pm | 985k/167k | 595k/148k | 250k/124k |
CNN’s brass may not be fond of Beck who jumped ship from the company’s HLN channel to join Fox but they do know he is ratings gold and any increase in ratings for the network is good news especially in light of their primetime ratings which just hit a ten-year low.
While I’m on the subject of ratings I should mention that the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric tied an all time low for the second week in a row. Not exactly a goo sign as she approaches her four year anniversary Sunday.
Beck Sex Tape Offer No Laughing Matter at HuffPo
By Don Irvine | September 1, 2010
Huffington Post blogger Beau Friedlander crossed the line for the editors at the liberal website when he posted a reward of $100,000 to anyone who could provide him with a Glenn Beck sex tape.
From the New York Observer
Huffington Post contributor Beau Friedlander published a post to that site this morning offering $100,000 to anyone who could produce a sex tape of Glenn Beck, but it didn’t stay online for long. A few hours after it went up the tags were changed from “Politics” to “Comedy,” and soon the entire article was gone. An editor’s note where the post used to be explains that the article “didn’t meet our editorial standards,” though the number of comments, Twitter mentions, and Facebook “likes” continues to grow.
The post presented itself as a challenge to those on the left to dig up dirt in using the same relentless tactics employed by the right.
It is time to pop the tea baggers’ favorite balloon (so what if it will be replaced by another?), and with that in mind I hereby offer to negotiate a $100,000 payday to the person who will come forward with a sex tape or phone records or anything else that succeeds in removing Glenn Beck from the public eye forever. I am not offering the cash myself, but I will broker the deal and/or raise the money for what you bring to the table. (And it better be good.)
(The Observer received a copy of the post in its entirety from Friedlander, and it can be found here.)
Friedlander told The Observer that he wrote the post yesterday in hopes of using the somewhat jokey conceit of a “Glenn Beck sex tape” to address what he sees as a serious threat posed by the Tea Party, as evidenced by the massive Beck-inspired “Restoring Honor” rally held this past weekend. “You knew the wingers would come out against this,” he said. “It was fun to swat them down, with humor of course.”
Friedlander, the former editor-in-chief of Air America and a contributor to the Huffington Post since 2009, said he “understands” why the site pulled the story, but admitted that he’s “bummed” they decided to remove it. “They took it down because they had several editors look at it and they weren’t completely comfortable with what it said,” Friedlander explained. “As a blogger for the Huffington Post, it feel like a scarlet letter on my shirt.”
He added that as of this morning he had the ability to post directly to the site, but after editors removed the post he discovered that this priviledge had been revoked. “Now I have to be reviewed, which kind of blows,” Friedlander said.
UPDATE: The Huffington Post’s Mario Ruiz wrote in with a response: “Beau Friedlander was a passworded blogger, which allowed him to post directly to the site. After reviewing his post on Beck, we decided to remove it, adding the editor’s note. Going forward, his posts will be reviewed by an editor before being published.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Friedlander posted has a reaction to The Huffington Post, titled “An Apology to Glenn Beck.” He writes: ”I was actually trying to mimic what I saw as the way right wingers go about these matters, and by misapprehending the way they do things, I went too far.”
I’m sure that the editors at HuffPo would love to find a way to bring Beck down but Friedlander’s post went even too far for the lefty’s overseeing the site.
Fridlander said he was trying to mimic the right’s tactics when it comes to matters like this but I don’t recall anyone on the right making an offer if someone would bring forth a sex tape of a politician or personality that they didn’t agree with. And they know if they tried such a tactic they would be skewered by the liberal media which Friedander by virtue of being a liberal will avoid.
Teachers Union Fumes After L.A. Times Releases Evaluations
By Don Irvine | August 31, 2010
Two weeks ago the Los Angeles Teachers Union called for its members to boycott the Los Angeles Times over the impending publication of a study that rated the effectiveness of some 6,000 elementary school teachers.
Now that the paper has published the database the union has gone on the offensive to defend the teachers and blast both the study and the paper for having the audacity to release it.
From the Los Angeles Times
National and local teachers unions sharply criticized The Times on Sunday when the newspaper published a database of about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade city school teachers ranked by their effectiveness in raising student test scores.
“It is the height of journalistic irresponsibility to make public these deeply flawed judgments about a teacher’s effectiveness,” said a statement issued by United Teachers Los Angeles.
The database is part of a Times series that rated teachers by using a “value-added” analysis based on seven years of standardized test scores obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District. The value-added method looks at previous student test performance and estimates how much a teacher added to or subtracted from a student’s progress.
By late Sunday afternoon, the database had generated more than 230,000 page views, an indication of the interest in the issue because Web traffic tends to be higher during the week.
Since The Times began publishing the series, L.A. Unified has moved swiftly to conduct its own value-added analysis and will give teachers their confidential score by October. The district has said the scores could be used to guide training for struggling teachers.
In addition, the district and the teachers union have agreed to begin negotiations on a new evaluation system. Top district officials have said they want at least 30% of a teacher’s review to be based on value-added. But they have said the majority of the evaluations should depend on observations.
Some school districts across the country are doing just that, finding that the approach provides a measure of objectivity for teachers’ performance reviews, which are overwhelmingly based on short, prearranged classroom visits by administrators and other subjective measures. Even the staunchest supporters of the value-added approach believe it should be only one part of a teacher’s evaluation.
Los Angeles teachers union President A.J. Duffy has long said that teacher evaluations need to be overhauled, but he has been opposed to value-added because it’s based on what he considers flawed standardized testing.
A group of education experts writing for the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute released a study Sunday that was highly critical of the approach but also found that it could be one of multiple measures of a teacher.
“Used with caution, value-added modeling can add useful information to comprehensive analyses of student progress and can help support stronger inferences about the influences of teachers,” the group wrote.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had asked The Times not to publish the database. In an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” she criticized the paper for using value-added scores in “isolation.”
In a later statement, she said the union is “disturbed that teachers will now be unfairly judged by incomplete data masked as comprehensive evaluations.”
Weingarten recently told The Times that she helped negotiate 54 contracts in school districts where value-added counts for up to 30% of a teacher’s review. But although she said parents should have the right to know whether their child’s teacher received a satisfactory evaluation, she said the public should not have wide access to the scores.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, also interviewed on “This Week,” has said he is in favor of giving the public access to teachers’ value-added scores and providing more feedback to instructors, who are often left in the dark by administrators. He has decried the fact that many districts have not done more with student test scores.
“The tragedy in L.A. has been [that] teachers … desperately want this data and they’ve been denied it,” Duncan told host Christiane Amanpour. “It shouldn’t take a newspaper to give them that data.”
Several teachers said in e-mail comments they were pleased that The Times had published the database, saying it could spur public debate and give valuable feedback.
“I think that if you are doing the best that you can at your profession, then you should have nothing to hide and your work should be public,” wrote Mary Ann Debellefeuille, a fourth-grade teacher last year at Amestoy Elementary.
Many other teachers included in the database lashed out at the newspaper’s analysis and its decision to make the information public. Teachers were given an opportunity to review their scores before they were released.
Elizabeth Ellen Snyder, who taught at Fries Avenue Elementary during the 2002-03 through 2008-09 period and was rated “less effective” overall, said in an e-mail: “Guilty as charged. I am proud to be ‘less effective’ than some of my peers because I chose to teach to the emotional and academic needs of my students. In the future it seems I am being asked to put my public image first…. How sad for all our children.”
Others said they would use their scores as motivation.
“It is very sobering to see that you have been ranked one of the least effective teachers,” said Monica L. Petit, a third-grade teacher last year at Woodcrest Elementary. “I guess it means that I have more room for improvement.”
United Teachers Los Angeles officials warned that making the data public would create mistrust among schools and parents.
“The database will cause chaos at school sites, as parents scramble to get their children into classes taught by teachers labeled as ‘effective’ by a newspaper,” according to the UTLA statement. “It could also have long-lasting impact on the careers of teachers.”
The union has planned a protest in front of the Times building on Sept. 14. “We want to make a public statement about our concern for our members who are being singled out,” Duffy said in an interview.
Journalistic irresponsibility? Wouldn’t it been more irresponsible for the paper to have kept the data private?
But for the teachers union any evaluation method that wasn’t created by them is automatically flawed.
Yet as the article states Education Secretary Arne Duncan who will never be confused with being a conservative endorses the idea of the effectiveness ratings and allowing the public access to the data.
Many businesses give their employees performance evaluations and use that information in pay and promotion decisions so what is wrong with doing the same for the L.A. teachers and making that information public since they are being paid with tax dollars?
This is just another example of the teachers unions protecting their members at the cost of a good education for students. They may preach that they are interested in giving students the best possible education but their actions betray them. Just look at Washington, D.C. where schools chancellor Michelle Rhee fired several hundred poor performing teachers and was immediately bashed by the teachers union. This in a city that ranked dead last in a recent report by Education Week on education quality. California is 19th but still didn’t score very high in most areas.
The union is probably even more upset that 230,000 have accessed the database on a weekend no less than the fact that the information is available to the public. In this case the Times has provided a little transparency to the public of how effective their tax dollars are in teaching children and that is bound to be bad news for the union.
I have to give the Times credit for standing up to the teachers union in publishing the teacher database and maybe this will lead to improved teaching in L.A. which will be good for everyone.
S.F. Newspaper War Costly for Both Sides
By Don Irvine | August 31, 2010
The leftist Bay Guardian newspaper in San Francisco may have won the court battle against Village Voice Media but may wind up losing the war.
From the New York Times
The office of The Bay Guardian at the bottom of Potrero Hill in San Francisco — the site of one of the last great newspaper wars — was eerily quiet last Thursday morning, with the sounds of a bell at the front desk echoing up into the high ceiling.
Bruce B. Brugmann, the longtime editor-publisher-owner of that reliably leftist weekly, came down and invited me upstairs to his office, a museum to the glories of the printed artifact. Books, many of them about the persistent inadequacies of the capitalist system, formed ad hoc towers, and various kinds of newsprint were arrayed about in a system known only to him.
“I love print. We are doing a lot with the Web, but I’m a print guy,” he said. Just in case I forgot, he later handed me a pressman’s hat that had been made out of, naturally, a page of The Bay Guardian.
Somewhere in this office, there was a copy of a decision from a California state appeals court unanimously upholding a $22 million judgment in a case brought against SF Weekly, a competing alternative weekly owned by Village Voice Media. After a six-week trial in 2008, a jury decided that SF Weekly and its owners had sold ads below cost in an effort to use anticompetitive pricing to put The Bay Guardian out of business.
The case has now gone on for six years, in part because Village Voice Media thinks it did nothing more than put out a competitive newspaper. The case has been fought in the press, in courts and in this room.
But in the meantime, the world outside has changed. Newspapers in general have obviously suffered, but weeklies, with their franchises in listings, classifieds, racy advertising and editorial content, have been clobbered by the Web. So far, the only thing that The Bay Guardian has to show for the litigation is a lot of legal bills and two old delivery vans from the SF Weekly that it managed to repossess.
But Mr. Brugmann, ever the lefty firebrand, suggests that the court decision, which upheld a long-running California statute prohibiting predatory pricing, is a victory for the little guy.
Village Voice Media is a chain of weeklies formed by the union of the Village Voice and New Times weeklies in 2005, and it owns 13 weeklies in Denver, New York, Dallas, Minneapolis and other American cities. In 1995, New Times bought SF Weekly, and one of the New Times founders came to town and told the staff that they were going to “bury The Guardian,” grabbing a copy of the competing weekly off a desk and stomping on it for emphasis.
As a young man in Iowa, Mr. Brugmann watched a chain drugstore wipe out his father’s independent operation, and from his perspective, it is not a long walk to the present day and this newspaper, where his wife, Jean Dibble, serves as associate publisher and his one son is vice president for operations.
“We have been fighting against monopolies all these years, and we had this chain of weeklies that tried to use deep pockets to put us out of business,” he said. “I was a member of the 60th Infantry, and I was not about to let The Guardian go down because we had a competitor that was trying to put us out of business using illegal tactics.”
Once New Times arrived, a ferocious newspaper war ensued, with charges and countercharges. SF Weekly produced deeply reported articles with no particular political point of view, while The Bay Guardian stuck to its progressive knitting, hacking at the power companies and the daily newspapers.
“They came riding into town out of Tombstone,” Mr. Brugmann said, alluding to the fact that the chain is headquartered in Arizona, “and they started shooting up the place, and now they are going to have to pay the consequences.”
The public undoubtedly benefited from the competition, but each weekly suffered millions in loses.
In a riveting take, The Stranger, a weekly in Seattle, suggested that “the winner is bound to profoundly wound the loser, possibly mortally.”
Andrew O’Hehir, now of Salon and the editor of SF Weekly when New Times took over, stared in wonder at the battle and told Eli Sanders of The Stranger that the case was becoming “like some kind of Greek myth where the two protagonists are still fighting over a city that died 85 years ago or something.”
Mr. Brugmann says he does not keep a running tally of the legal costs associated with the case: “I don’t think we have ever totaled it up because it made us feel bad when we looked.” But he says that at some point, Village Voice Media will be forced to settle the case, and The Bay Guardian will get back to “raising hell and printing the news,” as its slogan says.
He makes it clear that he doesn’t expect to see the $16 million in damages, plus $6 million in interest (so far, as it accrues every day).
Village Voice Media is led by Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, two notoriously pugnacious individuals who are not in the habit of giving up easily and have made it clear they will fight on.
“Bruce Brugmann believes he owns San Francisco and should dictate who is allowed to do business there,” said Mr. Lacey in an e-mail. “He announced upon our arrival that coming to his city would be our Vietnam. We don’t believe Brugmann or lower courts can tell us how much to invest in journalism, and we believe the California Supreme Court will agree.”
He added: “We never attempted to put Brugmann out of business. We merely tried to survive the collapse of tourism in San Francisco, the dot-com bust and the 9/11 economic crash. And we managed that quite well at the same time that we put out award-winning journalism.”
The feuding is taking place in one of the most wired cities in the world, where the information grid is like air and people walk right by the newspaper boxes of the crippled dailies — The Chronicle and The Examiner — and the attenuating weeklies as well.
“It was a horrible time to be in this kind of fight, and it is a horrible time to try to collect. But we will be back, maybe not flourishing, but on much more solid ground and doing what we have always done,” Mr. Brugmann said.
At The Guardian, that means that the office, so quiet right now, will fill later in the day with various candidates for political office who will show up looking for the endorsement of a newspaper that once upon a time helped Harvey Milk start a political career.
It also means The Bay Guardian will continue its 40-plus year crusade for publicly owned power, a long running hobby horse that a visitor brings up at his peril. Mr. Brugmann goes over to his window and points to the power plant visible under a stretch of Interstate 280: “We got involved in ’39, I mean ’69, and this is one of the greatest scandals in the history of the United States,” he begins, and he winds into a fight song that goes on from there.
From a business standpoint it doesn’t make a lot of sense for either paper to continue with a print edition but this battle has become so bitter that both sides are willing to continue to lose millions more on principle alone.
At some point The Bay Guardian’s Brugmann will have to realize that his leftist idealism even in lefty friendly San Francisco will not be enough to save his publication in its current form and unlike countries where there is a state controlled media the government isn’t going to step in to provide relief.
Liberal Pundit Bill Press Compares Beck to Al-Qaeda
By Don Irvine | August 30, 2010
Liberal commentator Bill Press questioned by Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources defended his comment that compared the granting of Beck a permit for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial to allowing Al-Qaeda to do the same on 9/11 at Ground Zero.
It’s obvious the left has been reeling from the lead up to and the subsequent success of Beck’s Restoring Honor rally on Saturday in Washington but to compare this to Al-Qaeda is going over the top.
Press and his fellow liberals were bitterly disappointed that Beck didn’t get political as he promised he wouldn’t and that the rally was about America, about Faith, Hope and Charity and about what liberals fear the most- God.
J-School May Get the Axe in Colorado
By Don Irvine | August 30, 2010
The University of Colorado is considering shuttering its School of Journalism and replacing it with a program that is better suited for the digital age.
From the Denver Post
The University of Colorado is working toward replacing its School of Journalism with a program better prepared to shepherd students into a news industry trying to keep pace in a digital age.
CU-Boulder Chancellor Phil DiStefano announced Wednesday the formation of a committee to consider how to organize a new information, communication and technology program.
In the meantime, shuttering the School of Journalism in its current form — a process called “program discontinuance” — will begin, although the committee could potentially recommend that the school remain as it is, DiStefano said. All current students will be allowed to complete their degrees, whatever the changes.
“Discontinuance” is an unfortunate legal term, said journalism-school dean Paul Voakes.
“It implies that we’re shutting down, when the opposite is true. Discontinuance is the necessary legal process that would enable us to create the innovative new programs our students need,” he said.
DiStefano said he doesn’t know what form the school eventually will take. The committee could recommend it remain as is, or pieces of the curriculum could be folded into the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society Institute (ATLAS), which includes programs enabled by information and communication technology.
The CU Board of Regents would decide whether to close the journalism school.
More than 30 schools, including Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, have revamped their journalism schools to keep up with the evolving industry, DiStefano said.
Berkeley started its Berkeley Center for New Media in 2004. In recent years, the Cronkite School at Arizona State University has launched its New Media Innovation Lab for research and development of multimedia products, and it is part of News21, an experimental program that trains students to present news in innovative ways.
“I want to make sure our students coming into the university who want to have careers and major in communications and information technology have the right curriculum and technology,” DiStefano said.
The exploratory committee will make a recommendation by the end of the year, and a final decision on whether to close the J-school could be made next spring, DiStefano said.
Colorado is a little late to the game but still far ahead of most schools in recognizing that thanks to technological advances journalism has changed and that the traditional J-schools are now hopelessly outdated.
For many years J-schools have been operating with blinders on as newspapers, television and radio have cut jobs as demand waned for their products and services , treating this as a temporary blip and preparing students for jobs that no longer existed.
Now that the light bulb has finally gone on in their collective heads the question is can the schools change or adapt their programs to the new world order in journalism.
One potential roadblock to a quick change is tenure which basically guarantees professors a lifetime job. Many of these tenured J-school professors are children of the old media or traditional media world and are not prepared or equipped to teach their students about the rapid rise of new media which is where journalism is headed.
That means that even if schools wanted to shift their programs they can’t unless these professors retire and that could still take several more years before the baby boomers are ready to retire from these cushy jobs.
It’s probably safe to say that most students already possess more knowledge than their professors about social media and digital journalism.
In the meantime aspiring journalists will take matters into their own hands and find what they need elsewhere on the internet or through the multitude of activist organizations that hold social media seminars and classes which will lead to lower enrollment at J-schools as time goes on.
With the old media in a rapid decline and the demise of newspapers predicted by the end of the decade if not sooner what is the value of a Journalism degree anyway?
Based on the number of unemployed journalists these days I would say not much.
NJ Ed Commish Asks to Be Fired to Collect Unemployment Benefits
By Don Irvine | August 29, 2010
New Jersey’s conservative education commissioner Bret Schundler asked to be fired rather than resigning so that he could collect unemployment benefits.
Schundler who rose to fame among conservatives during his tenure as the mayor of Jersey City was earning $141,000 in his job of running New Jersey’s education system which isn’t exactly a paltry salary even in a high cost state like New Jersey.
From the New York Times
That same evening, the governor’s chief of staff, Richard H. Bagger, called Mr. Schundler to ask for his resignation, Mr. Schundler said in an interview.
Mr. Schundler said he told Mr. Bagger that he was willing to resign. “I said I know that I serve at the will of the governor, so if he would like me to leave I would leave,” he said.
But on Friday morning, Mr. Schundler said, he asked Mr. Bagger if he could instead be fired, citing his need for the unemployment benefits.
I would have thought Schundler with his experience, connections and conservative credentials would have desired to spare New Jersey taxpayers any additional burden by leaving his post after the state lost out on a $400 million Department of Education grant. Instead he has chosen to feed off the taxpayers for who knows how long which doesn’t seem to wash with his conservative beliefs. At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised to see him apply for food stamps as well.
If Schundler is this hard up for money then he shouldn’t have been in charge of a multi-million dollar budget to begin with.
Let’s See the Media Spin This
By Don Irvine | August 28, 2010
Radio and television personality Glenn Beck held his Restoring Honor rally from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial today and what an event it was.
Even though I have been a conservative all my life I have normally only participated in protest events that were on the small side 20-30 people on the average. And though today’s rally wasn’t billed as a protest and Beck asked that no signs be brought to the rally there is no doubt that the turnout was due in large part to voter frustration with the Obama administration and the Democrats in congress.
I got a very good glimpse of what this day would be like as I showed up to my local Metro subway stop with a friend about 20 minutes after the station opened this morning only to be greeted by an enormously long line of people waiting to enter the station. After standing in line for about 15 minutes or so we heard a rumor that the line was only for those that needed to purchase a farecard for the subway. Luckily for me I had two cards with me and after some checking my friend and I were able to breeze through the fare gates and get on a train.
The train was packed as it was the peak of rush hour and it was only 8 am on a Saturday. By the way the line for farecard purchases I estimate would last more than an hour from where we were standing earlier. Too many people and too little help.
In any event I still wasn’t prepared for the size of the crowd once we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial around 8:30. There were already tens of thousands of people sitting and standing and we still had 1 1/2 hours to go before the event started.
The crowd only grew larger of course and Beck made a reference to the number of people that could fill the areas around the Memorial starting with 200,000 with at least another 250,oo0 off to the sides and believe me those areas were thick with people.
I don’t know if the Guinness Book of World Records keeps track of this but with everyone reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the rally it must have been a new record for the most people doing so at one time.
Since I didn’t stay for the entire event let me just say that Beck and Sarah Palin were easily the highlights of the morning for the crowd and while I’m no expert at estimating crowd size it was by far the largest event I have ever see in person or taken part of in my life.
We will just have to wait and see how the mainstream press covers the event and what the report about the crowd size but it will be hard to downplay the numbers no matter which camera angles they use.
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