News Roundup for 9/27/10

Taking over DC -- or not

-Headline of the Day-
"Washington DC Hotels Reports Colbert and Stewart DC Rallies Outpacing Beck."

And it's doing it bigtime. According to Gerri Smyth, Washington DC Hotel's Director of Reservations, the rate of bookings in advance of the Stewart/Colbert event is outpacing Glenn Beck's little church picnic by 25%. Still, Smyth says you can't tell much of anything from the numbers.

"We can't say that this higher demand for hotel rooms means Colbert's and Stewart's rallies mean these events will be better attended than Mr. Beck's Restoring Honor Rally," she said. "There are other factors at play, including the lead time from the initial announcement to the event, which can either compress or extend out booking patterns. Also, within about 2 weeks of Mr. Beck's event, there were effectively no hotel vacancies in Washington DC. So, we can't extrapolate and say we are going to see a bigger event. Perhaps the data shows liberals and moderates tend to be more conservative and book more in advance or maybe it means that conservative activists tend to be more self-reliant and liberal with risk taking. Or, most likely, it doesn't mean much of anything. As Mark Twain would be apt to say, perhaps 'figures lie and liars figure', so we'll just let somebody else do the figuring."

Liberals may be more conservative and conservatives may be more liberal? The mind reels. Of course, if the Stewart/Colbert rally doesn't eclipse Beck's (organizers say they're expecting just 25,000), the big labor rally set for this weekend should do the trick -- they're expecting over 100,000.

Watch the press completely ignore it. (PRBuzz)


-Not really getting the whole "funny" part-
Saturday Night Live ran a bit about Park51 offering gay weddings and abortions on site. And then it credited the parody ad to the RNC:

Of course, this was the worst thing ever. Here conservatives are, having a perfectly decent unfounded panic, and along comes SNL to make fun of it! No fair!

Well, Jill Stanek of the wingnut site Newsbusters wasn't going to take this lying down. She had a better idea for how the sketch should go. "An honest ad would have shown homosexuals being imprisoned or stoned, as these are punishments meted in Muslim societies for those committing the practice," she wrote.

I don't think I approve of what Stanek thinks is knee-slapping comedy gold... (Raw Story)


-Bonus HotD-
"Quayle Says Americans 'Must Understand' Size Of Federal Budget, But Doesn't Understand It Himself."

Dan Quayle scion Ben is running for congress to get a handle on out of control spending in Washington. So he put out an ad saying that "Government in America is today spending well over 14.5 trillion dollars a year."

Yeah, that's not so correct. We're spending $3.5 trillion a year. "Numbers can be boring," he says, "but every American can and must understand the numbers I'm about to describe." That'd be a lot easier if they weren't from the Republican Ministry of Made-Up Numbers, Ben.

I keep saying it, but I think it runs in the family. Idiocy is the Quayle family curse. (Think Progress, with video)