Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear (but mainly Truthiness) - Diary of events 10/30/10 (Part II)

What can I say? In my humble opinion I believe it may have been the greatest thing I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. Those of you who missed out on watching it...well, you missed out, lol. People were insanely respectful of one another, and were just as equally polite. While the US Park Police were there in force, they too were polite and friendly, and as far as I know their day, as far as arrests go, was probably fairly dull.

Being the impatient bastard I can be, it was left up to me to kill the time until the actual rally started. I had returned back to the rally site at around the time they were playing music over the speakers, so I started to mill around again and take more photos.

At around 11, that's when the fun began. They began airing the saga of how the rally came to be, in between interspersed public safety announcements and taped musical performances that had originally aired on the Colbert Report and Daily Show. My one complaint has to be this: they didn't go back far enough, as it has been thought on other sites that the REAL beginnings of the rally are from 2004, with the "Crossfire" series of videos. These two are the main videos that must be seen to be believed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE (his actual appearance on Crossfire)
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-october-18-2004/your-show-blows (his first show back from appearing)

Anyways, back to it. The rally took off with about a 30-45 minute set with the Roots and John Legend, then the Mythbusters arrived to get the rally goers to do the wave! It was pretty sweet, lol. Soon after, Jon and Stephen took the stage, Jon coming out first and Stephen showing up in a skit oddly reminiscent of the Chilean Miner Rescue, wearing clothes which I can only describe as "Evel Kneivel"-ish.

The rally passed by far more quickly than I thought it would, so I'm just going to bring up some highlights here, with most of my rally photos to follow in a slideshow:

• Cat Stephens and Ozzy Osbourne in a "Peace Train/ Crazy Train" song battle with evolved into the O'Jays singing "Love Train"
• Jon Oliver wearing a Peter Pan costume (IMO they should have made him fly around the stage, lol)
• Giant Colbert paper-mache materpiece
• The greatest speech Jon Stewart has probably ever given in his life (a close second to the one he made during TDS first night back after 9/11, anyways)

Jon's speech at the end was amazing, that's all there is to it, and to be honest the only thing that would have made the day better would have been if he threw everything out the window and had announced that he was going to run for President in 2012. (He won't, but...a girl can dream.)

In either case, you need to watch this rally if you missed seeing it, and you need to re-watch it if you caught it live, it's that damned good. There is a reason why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are amazing, and you need only to watch the rally to find out why.