This story on Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally made it all the way to paragraph 6 before laying on the sort of tone you’d expect from The Washington Post:

On the Mall, an overwhelmingly white crowd of tens of thousands stood quietly during an opening prayer, the silence broken only by an occasional “amen.” The dense assembly , which contained few young people, stretched from the Lincoln Memorial, past the reflecting pool, to the World War II Memorial and spilled onto the grounds of the Washington Monument.

The crowd, consisting of many from the Midwest and the South, was not visibly angry. Rather, they said they had come to express their fear that the country was at a perilous moment.

Emphasis mine. The crowd’s not primarily or predominantly white, but overwhelmingly so. And the hillbillies aren’t visibly angry – should we expect them to be? – but they are afraid. This endless focus on the race and fear of Tea Party types represents a naked attempt by the “mainstream” media to paint anyone who agrees with Beck, Palin, et al. as a bigoted yokel. It also helps explain why Beck and other Fox News programming generally pulls more viewers than the three top competitors combined.

I’m a News Corp. shareholder, but I watch almost no TV news because I tire quickly of all the networks’ theatrics. For millions of Americans, however, Fox News provides a distinct option in a sea of leftward slanted reporting. That the other fish use every opportunity to whine about the racism and ignorance of anyone who disagrees with them reflects poorly on somebody… and that “somebody” is not Glenn Beck. Charles Krauthammer sums it up perfectly.

As for concerns about Beck co-opting the time and place of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, these seem completely misplaced. Red or yellow, black or white, it’d be difficult to find worse representatives of King’s dream than the professional victims who get away with acting in his name simply because of the color of their skin. I’ll take a speech about what makes America great over a speech about how much we owe the Al Sharptons of the world any day, even if the audience is “overwhelmingly white.”

It’s been a busy weekend for our most important Middle Eastern partners for peace, the Iranians. Friday, 08/20/2010:

Iran’s defense minister says military forces have successfully test-fired a missile with enhanced guidance systems to hit ground targets.

Saturday, 08/21/2010:

Iran has crossed a new nuclear threshold, but it’s one the Obama administration isn’t worried about.

[...]

“Because the Bush administration did such a good job of neutralizing the Bushehr reactor, we don’t view it as a proliferation threat,” said a White House official, who requested anonymity to discuss the issue freely.

Some experts, however, disagree. They warn that Iran could still use Bushehr to enhance its uranium enrichment program – located some 300 miles away at Natanz – that the U.N. Security Council is demanding be halted amid charges that it is part of a secret nuclear arms development project. Iran denies the allegation.

Sunday, 08/22/2010:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is hailing the country’s first domestically built drone bomber.  The unmanned aircraft, unveiled Sunday, is the latest in a series of Iranian announcements of military advances.

Somehow I doubt President Obama’s assurances are having much impact on Israeli planning. Israel doesn’t have the luxury of being that stupid.

Check it out!

The Black Keys make great music, and The Black Keys are great live. The Dispatch review of last night’s show at the LC Pavilion is… okay. Describing Brothers as the band’s defining album is way off base: it features some very good stuff, but also several utterly skip-worthy tracks. I agree, though, with the tone of the Dispatch review, as I heartily recommend seeing the Keys live if you like bluesy rock even a little.

I’ve got all but the first Keys album – yes, I’m one of those late arrivals who didn’t hear of the Akron duo until Attack & Release – and couldn’t have been much happier with the set list. Although Dan Auerbach’s voice lost the battle against drums and guitar, the rocking-ness of his guitar and Patrick Carney’s drums completely made up for that.  I was hoping to hear 10 A.M Automatic, but when a band has 6 albums to cover it’s hard to be picky!

If you want to see a movie based on a web comic which is itself heavily influenced by video games, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is nearly perfect. It’s more stylized than I expected, which won’t sit well with some viewers, but I was impressed. The trailers had me looking forward to indier-than-thou dry humor in a geeky wrapper, with some goofy action for good measure. That could have been entertaining, if not exactly original… given that Michael Cera himself has been in, what, 19 films matching that description? Pilgrim is, in fact, something unique, and something very, very funny.