I’m making decisions that are not necessarily good for the nightly news and not good for the next election, but for the next generations.

— President Obama, in an interview on NBC News.

More prosaic reporting on interactions between mad animals and sometimes demented humans from ProMED Digest, the newsletter of the International Society of Infectious Diseases.

A woman attacked by a rabid raccoon in Prospect took matters into her own hands, literally. The raccoon jumped out from a backyard on Woodcrest Drive and bit the woman [...]

I don’t have to say I’m going to caucus with the Democrats or the Republicans.

— Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (I), in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, dodging the question of which of the two major political parties he would caucus with if elected to the U.S. Senate.

Zero

- Number of minutes GOP-Fox News devoted to coverage of the announcement by former Republican National Committee Chairman and Bush-Cheney Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman that he is gay. On that same day, the story was covered for 19 minutes on CNN and 12 minutes on MSNBC.

Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for ground zero. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.

- Bryan Fischer, a blogger for the right-wing hate group, American Family Association, which has raised millions of dollars over the years by stoking hatred of gays among its Christian-extremist donor pool — but with acceptance of gay rights rising in the polls and the multi-million dollar budgets of AFA’s anti-gay competitor groups shrinking to the point that employees are being laid off, Fischer’s attack on Muslims may signal that AFA will add Islamic hatred to its fundraising appeals.

78,000 — 96,000

– CBS News estimates of crowd size at Mormon Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in Washington on Aug. 28, based on work commissioned by CBS from AirPhotosLive. The company uses photos taken from tethered balloons shot at the peak of the crowd, which are then broken into 2-D and 3-D grids, and the individuals counted.

Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands

– Figure quoted by NBC Nightly News

More than 100,000

– ABCNews.com

Crowd Attending Beck Rally Estimated at Over 500,000

– FOX News headline

As low as 300,000 and as big as 650,000

– Glenn Beck on FOX News Sunday

“We’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today – because we were witnesses.”

– Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)

This is obviously scaring white people. What they have done is essentially try to put off-limits any parts of the city where these main tea partiers believe you might be able to encounter, dare I say, black people.

-- Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson on MSNBC, describing a post by tea bagger Bruce Majors, which Majors said was intended as informational to participants in Glenn Beck’s “Million Moron” rally. The post listed subway lines and neighborhoods to avoid (diverse ones), and warned that most cab drivers are Arab or African. It also included a map showing the “safe” areas, which were mainly around the Washington Mall. City leaders countered that millions of tourists visit happily every year, and that Majors is out of touch with the times, since many of the areas he said to avoid are the hippest and trendiest.

In the Jim Crow era, it was white supremacist pseudo-Christians like today’s GOP-tea partiers and racist Mormons like Glenn Beck who stood in the school house doors and unleashed attack dogs against those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who fought for civil rights and racial equality.
What these neo-Confederates are doing today, by convening on the [...]

You’ve got the right place, wrong speech.

Civil rights figure Rev. Al Sharpton, directing comments to FOX News personality Glenn Beck.

It was not my intention to select 8-28 because of the Martin Luther King tie. It is the day he made that speech. I had no idea until I announced it.

– Talk radio and FOX News personality Glenn Beck, stating the obvious. No one doubts that the date of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was outside Beck’s frame of reference when he planned his “Restoring Honor” tea bagger rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, site of King’s world-changing speech.