Thousands "Rally to Restore Sanity' in the Seattle Rain

photo by Alan Berner / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Lynn Thompson (Seattle Times):

The Seattle and Washington, D.C., rallies opened with "The Star-Spangled Banner" and ended with "America the Beautiful." Local organizer Jim Baum, a Maple Valley building inspector and farmer, said he was offended by tea-party activists asserting they "wanted their country back."

"Wait a minute," he said, "isn't it our country?"

Baum said he'd never organized anything, but when he heard about Stewart and Colbert's rally, he floated the idea of a Seattle satellite event on his Facebook page one Friday morning in mid-September. By the following Monday, he said, so many people had said they wanted to be involved that he started calling the city for permit.

His co-organizer Marjorie Osterhout, a Madrona mother, said she'd never attended a rally before Saturday. But she said she was disturbed by the attack ads on radio and television, and she wanted her 10-year-old son to know there were alternatives. MORE...

Amy Rolph (seattlepi.com):

The Seattle rally was attended mostly by fans of the comedians' Comedy Central shows. And while fandom went a long way to draw people to the early-morning event on a rainy day Saturday, some said there wasn't anything funny about their real reasons for attending.

"The national discourse has become very fractured, very extreme -- and even a little dangerous," said Seattle resident Robert Reeder.

He worried the country is headed for a "dumb place," and that he wanted to be a part of a movement calling for reason, even if he couldn't make the trip to Washington D.C. MORE...

Howie P.S.: David Goldstein went down and did the Twitter. Here are 26 photos by Joshua Trujillo (seattlepi.com).