THOUGHTS ON Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

We left the house at 7 am to catch the Springfield Metro into DC for the rally -- we arrived at the Foggy Bottom Metro station about 11:30 am, 3-1/2 hours later. Here’s what it looked like at the Springfield Metro station about 8 am. The parking garage is just out of the picture to the left.


Here’s what it looked like once we got into the parking garage. Then over the pedestrial bridge and into the Metro station itself.


Then there was the 6-block or so walk from Foggy Bottom to the Lincoln Memorial. In this picture you can see the top of the Lincoln Memorial just above the treeline in the distance. By the time this picture was taken, the rally was a bit more than half over, and a few people were already leaving.


This was taken from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, above and behind the speaker’s podium, looking toward the Washington Monument. For comparison, the AP photo taken from the Washington Monument is here.


We tried to move further away from the Lincoln Memorial in order to see - and hear - better: this is what we faced along each side of the reflecting pool. The crowd density didn’t change until one was several hundred yards away from the reflecting pool.


As to thoughts and observations about the rally, I’ll leave that to Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine. My observations mirror his.

As to crowd size, I’ve heard numbers ranging from 300,000 on the low side to 500,000 on the high side. The latter number came from Glenn Beck on his show a few days later, and I suspect it’s the more accurate number despite the source. I checked Metro statistics for ridership on 8/28, and Metro rail alone carried 510,020 passengers compared to a average August Saturday of just a bit more than 320,000. The numbers don’t include bus ridership.

And a final note: when leaving, some “liberal” in a car driving by shouted “Where are the blacks?” Somehow I doubt he drove past the Sharpton rally and shouted “Where are the whites?”