He’s calling it the Million Moderate March. Arch-liberal news satirist Jon Stewart is planning a “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington next month to draw voters to an anti-extremism demonstration sold on witty irony.
His tongue may be in his cheek, but it doesn’t muffle the star TV host’s rallying cry to an exasperated mainstream just days before the mid-term elections in November.
Sent up as “a few hours of fun,” but in reality a serious riposte to the right-wing Tea Party movement now stealing the spotlight, Stewart promised to supply signs declaring “I Disagree With You, But I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler” and other deadpan slogans.
PHOTO: AFP
The day after he announced the rally on his political satire program, The Daily Show, mainstream news channels were calling the Washington police to check it wasn’t a hoax.
They were told Stewart had, indeed, applied for permits for a public gathering on Oct. 30.
It will take place on the National Mall below the Lincoln Memorial, site of so many historic demonstrations over the decades. Not least of which was the recent “Restoring Honor” rally organized by Stewart’s antithesis, the right-wing conservative Christian TV host Glenn Beck. The “Million Moderate” reference is also a poke at Beck’s predominantly white rally, which talked of “reclaiming” civil rights on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, and in the place also where African Americans held their Million Man March for stronger rights in 1995.
Stewart’s event is designed to counter what he called a minority of 15 percent or 20 percent of the country that has dominated the national political discussion with extreme rhetoric.
News of Stewart’s rally came at the end of an extraordinary week. It began with a narrowly avoided Koran-burning on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and ended with former Alaska governor and right-wing darling Sarah Palin stoking suspicions that she will run for the White House in 2012.
In the middle came the giant Tea Party upset, where inexperienced but blowhard conservatives — opposed by their own official Republican party — won primary elections and will now fight for Congressional seats in the mid-terms.
They will not succeed if Stewart has his way. He is even appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, the Fox News show of another of his bellowing right-wing rivals, Bill O’Reilly, on Wednesday.
The last time Stewart went on Fox, he managed to broadcast more criticism of the channel on the actual channel than anyone could remember, accusing it of being a “cyclonic perpetual emotion machine” that has “taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy, and turned it into a full-fledged panic about the next coming of Chairman Mao.”
Stewart is a master of comedy, but he is also seriously influential. When he blasted CNN’s dog-pit-style political pundit-fight Crossfire program back in 2004, saying it was “hurting America” with its mindless, partisan bickering, the show was eventually canceled, with Stewart’s criticism cited as one of the reasons.
The largest segment of Stewart’s audience is under 30 and has liberal views — and gets as much of its news from The Daily Show as from the evening news programs and cable news channels.
Stewart’s rally will be counter-balanced by a spoof “extremist conservative” rally called the “March to Keep Fear Alive” by his fellow Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert.
It may not be enough to help US President Barack Obama retain control over the House of Representatives in Congress, however. The Republicans are firm favorites to wrest the majority from the Democrats.
However, Republican hopes to win control of the upper house, the Senate, too, took a significant step back after the success of fringe right-wing candidates in the primary elections last week.
The victory of evangelical right-winger Christine O’Donnell in the Delaware primary spurred analysts to predict that the Democratic candidate would now beat the original odds and win that Senate seat comfortably in November. O’Donnell is now 11 points behind in the polls in that state, whereas Mike Castle, the moderate Republican she beat on Tuesday last week, had been strongly ahead.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
‘DOWNSIZE’: The Trump administration has initiated sweeping cuts to US government-funded media outlets in a move critics said could undermine the US’ global influence US President Donald Trump’s administration on Saturday began making deep cuts to Voice of America (VOA) and other government-run, pro-democracy programming, with the organization’s director saying all VOA employees have been put on leave. On Friday night, shortly after the US Congress passed its latest funding bill, Trump directed his administration to reduce the functions of several agencies to the minimum required by law. That included the US Agency for Global Media, which houses Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Asia and Radio Marti, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. On Saturday morning, Kari Lake, a former Arizona gubernatorial and US
RSS