What We Saw at the Glenn Beck Rally in DC

On August 28, 2010, Fox News host Glenn Beck held his “Restoring Honor” rally at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The aim of the event, explained the lachrymose TV personality, was to “come celebrate America by honoring our heroes, our heritage and our future.”

As the Washington Post reports,

“For too long, this country has wandered in darkness, and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning,” Beck said, at times pacing at the memorial. “We have had moments of brilliance and moments of darkness. But this country has spent far too long worried about scars and thinking about the scars and concentrating on the scars.

“Today,” he continued, “we are going to concentrate on the good things in America, the things that we have accomplished – and the things that we can do tomorrow. The story of America is the story of humankind.”

Despite the presence of former Gov. Sarah Palin and many Tea Party trappings, the event was not political, or at least not in any conventional sense. Rather, the speakers called for bringing religion into the public square and using it as the guiding force in all aspects of American life.

Reason.tv was on hand to take in the day and talk with some of the thousands of people who showed up (crowd estimates were unavailable at the time of this writing, though the crowd felt thinner than the one at last year’s Tea Party rally). Most of the people we talked to were openly skeptical of politicians of both major parties and agreed strongly with the religious bent of the rally, often arguing that some sort of religious orientation was necessary for what that saw as a return to national greatness.

“What We Saw at the Glenn Beck Rally in DC” was shot by Jim Epstein with help from Josh Swain. Edited by Epstein and Meredith Bragg. Hosted by Nick Gillespie.

There you go again, LSM


While filming the Alaska documentary in Homer, I had a brief discussion with a local lady who, in typical Alaska style, decided to give me her two cents worth about my political leanings, American politics in general, and much else besides. It’s what makes our politics so uniquely democratic: two people discussing the things they care about, even though they respectfully disagree about just about everything (you can watch a brief video of the encounter here).

The LSM has now decided to use this brief encounter for another one of their spin operations. They claim I – wait for it – “appear to roll my eyes” when the lady tells me she’s a teacher. Yes, it’s come to this: the media is now trying to turn my eyebrow movements into story lines. (Maybe that’s why Botox is all the rage – if you can’t move your eyebrows, your “eye rolling” can’t be misinterpreted!) If they had checked their facts first, they would have known that I come from a family of teachers; my grandparents were teachers, my father was a teacher, my brother is a teacher, my sister works in Special Needs classrooms, my aunt is a school nurse, my mom worked as a school secretary for much of her professional life, we all volunteer in classrooms, etc., etc., etc. Given that family history, how likely is it that I would “roll my eyes” at someone telling me that they too work in that honorable profession? Stay classy, LSM.

One good thing to come out of this little episode, though, is that it helps to remind people once again that Alaska is a great state full of independent-minded people. I look forward to introducing you to some of them in the forthcoming documentary series on life in Alaska! The show will remind you to get outdoors, breathe in God’s creation, and taste the freedom!

– Sarah Palin

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Pants on Fire, Still

Sarah Palin is establishing the national debate and winning it all while catching fish. She is the real deal… like David slaying Goliath.


A $3.8 trillion tax increase is coming down the pike, folks. America’s tax cuts which can incentivize small businesses to expand and hire more people (thus fulfilling the mission to grow more private sector jobs), or even just to keep our doors open, will expire in four months. That expiration equates to an increase on your tax bill, starting at midnight, December 31.

I’ll keep calling out President Obama and the Democrats until they tell the American people what the plan is to save the incentives – to not allow the mom and pops’ tax cuts to expire. Granted, liberals (including stubborn “fact-checkers” who claim I’m lying about the soon-to-be tax cut expiration) are trying to clobber me for holding them accountable and prodding them toward revealing their intentions (because they’ve had 18 months to publicly propose a plan to stave off the $3.8 trillion tax increase that will soon slam us, but have revealed no plan). If they have a bill to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, let’s see it. Time for them to put up or shut up.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take the word of the “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact, who, before moving the goal posts in their second dissembling “fact-check” on the Democrats’ tax hikes, wrote in their original “fact-check”

There are no formal congressional proposals yet to keep the Bush tax cuts in place, so we don’t have precise estimates from official sources like the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Still, there’s a good bit of consensus on what the tax increases would look like, both if lower rates expired only for high earners and also for all incomes.

As Ed Morrissey noted:

And there’s a big problem with this argument, which is that “consensus” means nothing without passing a bill, and especially not without proposing one first. Thanks to Democrats in 2001 and 2003, those bills cutting the tax rates have hard-and-fast sunset provisions that create an expiration date absent of any other action. We are now less than four months away from that expiration date after seven years of seeing it coming, after more than 3 years of Democratic control of Congress, and after eighteen months of the Obama administration. Democrats don’t even have a proposal on the table yet, and the legislative calendar is rapidly shrinking to take action before the expiration date hits. Without action, we will see a $3.8 trillion tax hike across the entire spectrum of earners.

So much for “consensus” without action. PolitiFact is curiously stating that in his 2011 budget, the President mentioned some “plan” to do something about not raising taxes on all Americans. Um, don’t know about you, but I don’t find this general, vague promise of some “plan” all that reassuring. The Left also “plans” to do something about our out of control deficits and high unemployment, and the President “planned” for his nearly trillion dollar stimulus to keep unemployment under 8%. We’ve seen how successful that “plan” worked out. The President’s budget “plan” hasn’t worked out so well either. As the economist Bruce Bartlett explained at the time, the President’s budget – including the tax promise – was never much more than a vague statement of intent. Practically speaking, it was dead on arrival. Even Bartlett couldn’t have known how dead, though, because in the end Congress didn’t even succeed in passing a budget, let alone in taking a decision on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Bottom line: until we see a formal proposal – an actual bill before Congress – then get ready for that $3.8 trillion hit.

(By the way, the Left sure gets wee-wee’d up when they’re called on something like this, eh? And here I am, thousands of miles away from DC out on a commercial fishing boat, working my butt off for my own business, merely asking the Democrat politicos and their liberal friends in the media: “What’s the plan, man?”, and they seem to feel threatened by my question. So, I’ll go back to setting my hooks and watching the halibut take the bait, and when I come back into the boat’s cabin in a few hours, I’ll log back on here to read their reply. I’ll have succeeded if they’re forced to finally reveal to Americans how they plan to increase taxes, and what they intend to do with our money. In the meantime, I’m catching fish.)

– Sarah Palin, in Homer, Alaska

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