RECAP: Rally For Sanity

Today's Rally For Sanity in DC was an astounding success by most measures, except, ahem, for those of us who only arrived two hours early and still couldn't get within miles of the stage or Jumbotrons. In fact, most of the time we were too far away to even hear the public address system. On top of that, the Metro was insanely overloaded, prompting DC police to close the entrance to some stations for safety reasons. Hello, walking for miles. I'll recap the day further in a later post, meanwhile below is a slideshow, a brief clip from Stephen Colbert's entrance, and Jon Stewart's main speech. Full-screen versions of the below photos can be found here.





[Top Photo: New York Times]

Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert Plan "Dueling" Rallies For Washington DC

Vanity Fair has the deets:

On last night’s Daily Show and Colbert Report hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, respectively, announced that they would be holding concurrent rallies on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on October 30. Stewart’s event, the Rally to Restore Sanity, will urge citizens to “take it down a notch for America.” This means, according to the host, attendees are assembling to encourage others to ”stop shouting, throwing and drawing Hitler mustaches on people other than Hitler.” Colbert’s convention, “Keep Fear Alive,” aspires to achieve precisely the opposite. According to PopEater, in a press release about the event, Comedy Central gave its word that the rivaling rallies would “bigger than Nixon/Kennedy, Ali/Foreman, Aniston/Jolie, 50/Nas, Joe/the Volcano, Alien/Predator, Bunny/Fudd and Ecks/Sever combined.” Another question, though, is whether the pow-wow will garner the same turn-out and press coverage as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s Restoring Honor, a summertime Tea Party variety show, which drew crowd of anywhere from 100,00 to a million, depending on who‘s lying to you.

Who's down? I'm thinking about attending and have already gotten emails from friends in Chicago and San Francisco who are flying in.

(Image via Towleroad)

Christian Groups Launch Preemptive Strike Against Comedy Central's Jesus Show

Comedy Central is considering green-lighting a proposed animated show about Jesus Christ. And Christian groups are already gearing up for a boycott of advertisers. Via the American Family Association:

Christian groups are rising up as a team to oppose a new Comedy Central program that denigrates Jesus. The main character of the animated project is Jesus, who lives in New York and is intent on breaking ties with his "powerful but apathetic father." "You can imagine the mockery and blasphemy and sacrilege that will go on with that, and so American Family Association [AFA] has decided to join other groups to speak out strongly against this," explains AFA president Tim Wildmon. "In fact, we would consider a boycott of the sponsors of this program." He is quick to point out that a few weeks ago, Comedy Central edited out a segment from South Park that was disrespectful of Mohammed after a Moslem activist group complained. Wildmon, along with those in the Coalition Against Religious Bigotry, feel that creates a double standard.

The proposed show is titled JC.

Comedy Central Censors South Park

After an American Islamic extremist group issued a YouTube death threat to the creators of South Park, last night Comedy Central censored a portion of a rerun of the controversial episode.

This week Muhammad was set to appear again, but was replaced by Santa Claus in a bear suit and the word "CENSORED" was plastered over parts of the episode. Every mention of Muhammad was bleeped out. It's not immediately clear whether this was intended to protect the show's creators or if it was executed by them to mock the hoopla, but what is clear is this is not the first time. During the Muhammad cartoon uproar last year, the men tried to insert a picture of the Islamic holy figure into their show, but Comedy Central said no.

When Comedy Central last censored South Park over a different depiction of Muhammad, co-creator Matt Parker complained that the network had "totally fucking pussed out."