Liberal Groups Planning to Rally on National Mall (NYT)

[jefferson_dem]

Liberal Groups Planning to Rally on National Mall
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Hoping to overshadow last month’s rally led by Glenn Beck that drew thousands of Tea Party advocates and other conservatives, a coalition of liberal groups plan to descend on Washington on Saturday to make the case that they, and not the ascendant right, speak for America’s embattled middle class.

Predicting a crowd of hundreds of thousands, some 300 liberal groups — including the N.A.A.C.P., the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the National Council of La Raza and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force — are sponsoring a march on Saturday in the hope of transforming the national conversation so it focuses less on the Tea Party. The groups sponsoring the rally, which is called “One Nation Working Together,” say they hope to supplant what they say is the Tea Party’s divisiveness with a message of unity to promote jobs, justice and education.

“The Tea Party has been getting much more media attention than it deserves, and it’s been saying it represents the voice of middle-class America,” said George Gresham, president of 1199 S.E.I.U., a New York health care union local, who says his union has chartered 500 buses to carry 25,000 union members to the rally. “A lot of us feel we have to get a different voice out there speaking for working people, one respecting the diversity of this country, which the Tea Party does not.”

With so many civil rights, labor, religious, student, gay and peace groups sponsoring the march, organizers acknowledge that it was not easy to forge a common platform and message. And sometimes their message has gotten garbled.

Many sponsors say that the rally is not seeking to back President Obama or the Democrats, but rather to hold all of Washington, Democrats and Republicans, accountable for not doing more to fix the nation’s problems. But some sponsors sound unmistakably partisan as they denounce “obstructionism” in the Senate that has blocked larger job-creation programs and other measures. While these sponsors steer clear of mentioning Republicans, their target seems obvious.

The march’s supporters say that they, and not Mr. Beck, are the true descendants of the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. The Saturday march, like the 1963 march — and the Aug. 28 gathering that Mr. Beck and others organized — will be held on the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

<SNIP>

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/politics/27rally.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimespolitics&pagewanted=print

[thunder rising]

1. I'm going, just to let Mr Beck he'd be wrong.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

2. I'm going, too, but I don't like the way the M$M is framing this event. This isn't an anti-Beck

outing. It's a JOBS rally. Part of it is Ed Schultz's fault because it started out that way, but it's not.

It's not about Beck.

[thunder rising]

3. For me it's the Blue Dogs.

Neuter The Blue Dogs.
Just cut off their
... noses?

[bigdarryl]

4. Didn't Big Ed say there Will be disinfected Conservatives invited

so the article is misleading it's not just liberal groups that will be there

[Mister Ed]

5. Disinfected or disaffected?

I have to admit I like "disinfected" better! A Freudian slip on your part?

:evilgrin: