In the comments below a post down below, 30,000 angry, suggestible victims, Swede links us to a photograph and an inspirational quote by Sam Adams very similar to one by Margaret Mead.
I suggested to Swede that he had linked to a faked photo of the 9/12-13 Teabagger protest in Washington. Right wing media all over the country misreported the attendance, and circulated a photograph at least ten years old claiming it was of the event. Their objective in saying there were two million there (when it was more like 20-30,000) was apparently to beat the attendance at the Obama inauguration.
That they can get away with shit like that in the age of Twitter and security cameras everywhere is a demonstration of the power of the right wing media.
Anyway, Rusty Shackleford asked if I could offer evidence that the photo was a fake. He could do it himself, I suppose. I wondered how he could miss something so widely covered on the Internet, but then realized that right wingers really, honestly, stay queued in their little domains.
Anyway, Rusty, the photo was exposed by a web site called Politifact. It’s pretty much foolproof – a building that was constructed in the last ten years, the National Museum of the American Indian, is absent in the photo given us by Swede. According to Politifact, the purported Teabagger photo is actually one of a 1997 gathering of the Promisekeepers.
That too is troubling.
Anyway, this is well-covered and all over the place. I’m just putting this up for Rusty’s benefit.
Piece of Mindful 
I just spent the last half hour reviewing all the stories in the LA Times, huffpo, and several traditional and nontraditional news outlets.
And they’re right, it’s the Promise Keepers rally.
The ironic thing is the exposure given, printing ink used, blogs with hundreds of comments generated mountains of interest in this event, via the faked picture.
If the real picture had been used this protest would have passed peacefully in the dark of night, unseen by many. But instead takes on new life.
Regardless, the damage has been done, 15K to 70K normal people protested this adm’s motives and direction and wounded it’s momentum.
And we have now to Thanksgiving to see if they can drag this turkey over the finish line.
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Thank you. You done good.
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The picture in the Politifact link — an aerial view of the mall, from almost 17th Street to the Capitol, is certainly the Promise Keeper’s rally. The photograph currently linked with the Sam Adams quote, taken from the Capitol looking west, is not from 1997. The Indian Museum is clearly visible, and so is the Annex to the federal courthouse, which was built from 2002-2006. And if you look at the picture, you see the crown trailing off on Pennsylvania Avenue before the Canadian Embassy on the right, and well before the Indian Museum on the left. This is, it seems to me, entirely consistent with the estimates of 30-50k people.
Comparison of this with the Obama Inauguration — which I attended, fighting my way through the crowd right in front of the Indian Museum — is beyond laughable. Indeed, comparing it to the 200k who attended a rainy July 4th in the 90s is also ridiculous, much less the usual 4th crowd of around 400k. No one who knows anything about how people fit in DC thinks this was close to 100k, I’m quite sure.
I drove past the Wingnut Woodstock twice on 9/12. Even with the Black Family Reunion, it wasn’t very crowded at all. By DC standards.
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30-50k sounds like a lot of people, and I guess it is. But 80k attended the opening ceremony for the Indian Museum in 2004: which was spectacular.
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And the Black Family Reunion drew 20k in 2008.
I’ll stop now.
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