Beck wore bulletproof vest at request of his wife and pissed at CBS Crowd Estimate

[RamboLiberal]

Beck spent much of his show complaining about media coverage of the event and said "nobody's telling the accurate story." He also noted that he wore a bulletproof vest at the request of his wife and showed a pair of photographs, including one he called "most beautiful photo of Sarah Palin I have ever seen."

Glenn Beck said today that his "Restoring Honor" rally attracted "a minimum of 500,000 people" and complained that news outlets, including CBS News, badly underestimated the number of people who showed up for the event.

"We'll never know the exact number, but anyone with eyes can see this number was in the hundreds of thousands," Beck said on his Fox News show.

Jim McGlinchy, CBS News' Washington, D.C. Deputy Bureau Chief, said in an interview that CBS News thought it was important to get an independent estimate of the rally's size. He said he turned to AirPhotosLive.com because the company had experience making crowd estimates on the Mall.

Asked if he was surprised by the controversy over the estimate, McGlinchy said, "not really."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20015115-503544.html

[underpants]

1. Wow playing victim

who'da thunk it?

:sarcasm:

[cascadiance]

15. He's played victim before when he "wore a bullet proof vest" in Times Square...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp2lWjpWva0

This was about the same time that we had the other "Republicans threatened" scares from the likes of Cantor, etc. too.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. A-hole in the dictionary has a picture of Beck.

[hlthe2b]

3. I don't begrudge him wearing the bullet-proof vest...

but I really think he should wear the accompanying bullet-proof hood... :evilgrin:




Comes in a "fashionable" white version as well...;)

[gratuitous]

4. He wore a bulletproof vest?

And here I thought his magic underwear was just bunching up.

[Bozita]

5. Aerial photo: Big House in Ann Arbor - 106,201

This crowd appears larger to me than the DC crowd shown on the CBS webpage.





Here's the CBS shot:


The area around the Lincoln Memorial in Washington during a rally organized by conservative commentator Glenn Beck is seen in this aerial picture taken Aug. 28, 2010. (Credit: AirPhotosLIVE.com)

[cascadiance]

13. And how many of those in that shot were protesting Beck's speech too?

Hard to tell from just looking at it.

As many youtube reports we have of people carrying banners like the "MLK->Dream, Beck->Nightmare" sign, and talking to these TP'ers I would bet that the number of those people aren't insignificant.

[notadmblnd]

22. FYI, those blue and red spots are empty chairs

Wonder ho many of them was counted as people?

[maxsolomon]

6. to me, the bulletproof vest is proof that he believes his own bullshit

"the left" in 'Murka have no desire to kill their opponents. unlike the right. and don't give me that "Pol Pot/Stalin proves that the left murders" crap.

does he even know that MLK was assasinated?

[ixion]

8. It also exposes him as a narcissist , and a coward

which we all knew, but which his actions confirm.

[SoCalDem]

7. Dear Mrs Beck

YOUR side is the one that "handles issues" with people with gunshots

YOUR side is the one with the rigid ideology.."wit-us-or-agin-us"..

YOUR side is where most "gun-nuts" exist

YOUR side is the sanctuary of "angry white men"

but then YOUR side doesn't think Mormons are Christians, so being a non-Christian in an Army of ginned up Christian Warriors, armed to the teeth may be akin to Dr. Frankenstein's Monster.

Has the Glennster's monster gotten so out of hand, that Dr Glenn now fears them?:rofl:

[DeschutesRiver]

19. Probably scared more about his followers, who were disappointed at all the $$ they paid and

the lack of red meat thrown out to them during the "rally".

I'd read awhile back that his neighbors in his tony area in CT were pissed at him for building a fence way too tall around his new mansion. According to Beck, it was necessary due to the risks to him from some of his crazy pissed off devotees.

He seems very aware of who is targeting him, and knows it ain't the Left at all.

[RamboLiberal]

9. One of the Estimators CBS Hired on how he did calculation

Naturally, I expected more of the same about my Beck rally estimate. To calculate it, I used Airphotoslive.com’s very striking images (MUCH larger than the thumbnail posted here) to make density estimates across different zones of the crowd; a variety of ground-level images from news photographers and attendees who posted their photos on Flickr; and Google Earth to measure the square footage of the different zones. Yes, I included the crowd areas under the trees; the full-size Airphotolive images were detailed enough to discern the edges of the crowd even there.

My estimate is that about 80,000 people were at the rally. Ryan Shuler, an Airphotoslive image analyst, used the same images and a different grid-density method to produce an estimate of 87,000. Considering the error margins around our separately-calculated estimates, they are statistically identical. CBS went with the 87,000 figure, which I certainly can accept.

Now the fun begins in the blogosphere. NBC News, the New York Times, and other large media outlets that didn’t attempt a scientific estimate uncritically accepted Beck’s claim of “300,000 to 500,000″. (At least Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s laughable claim of 1 million isn’t being treated seriously.)

-----

I expect that kind of behavior from partisans on both sides. I am disappointed, though, by the many responsible news organizations that failed to produce their own independent estimates and instead reported only ungrounded hype. Their readers and viewers deserve better journalism than that.

http://stevedoig.com/archives/250

[bushisanidiot]

24. I think the 87k by CBS was far too generous. 20K seems closer to it

.. if that much. A thousand people isn't just a dot. It's a massive amount of people.

If Dr. King's appearance only attracted 250K, there's no way BecKKK's white-a-palooza even touched 50k. The difference in the pictures are just too striking to ignore.

[Dappleganger]

10. Fucking Diva.

I've said it numerous times, but I really believe that Beck wants to be shot for the attention.

[RamboLiberal]

11. IMHO he does

Jon Stewart played a clip of him last week going on about how he might not make it to the promised land and if he didn't to his viewers "you know who will have done it."

Stewart said something like "OMG his blackboard did it!"

[KingFlorez]

18. I believe that

Folks like him are so unstable that they wouldn't mind getting hurt to get attention.

[bullwinkle428]

12. Why doesn't Beck use that same "university" that estimated 1.7 million

for his 9/12 rally last year!!!

:rofl:

[tavalon]

14. Who would waste bullets on him?

And why would anyone marry him?

[Rex]

16. Beck is so full of himself. The smell must be horrible.

He just can't handle the fact that a football size crowd showed up to hear him. Get over it stooge, only crazy people remotely like you - the rest of us are embaressed that you are a human being.

[MH1]

17. someone married that a-hole?

[Ineeda]

20. $$$$$ n/t

[Bonhomme Richard]

21. Another one that doesn't take any responsibility.

My wife made me wear it. Chickenshit.

[Beaverhausen]

23. Remember, to fox, big numbers/ratings means you are right

O'Reilly always touts their high ratings as proof that Fox is somehow better than the other news networks, and now Beck wants to say his rally was great just because he suckered a whole bunch of people to attend.

The point should be, no one is talking about what he said at the rally. No one.

Does anyone remember one line of it?

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

25. Honey, does this vest make me look like a big ass?