One sign read "God hates this sign," a dig at the Westboro church in Kansas that demonstrates outside military funerals with signs that read "God hates fags." Another said: "Every time Sarah Palin tweets, God kills a kitten."

Many saw the rally as a liberal response to the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement, which has held events across America to oppose what it views as growing government intrusion into their lives.

The right-wing movement has helped mobilise opposition to the policies of president Barack Obama, whose Democratic Party is expected to suffer severe losses to Republicans in Tuesday's legislative and gubernatorial elections.

Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck appalled liberals in August when he hosted a rally "to restore honour" on the anniversary and at the site, on the Mall, of civil rights leader Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

At least 80,000 people - hundreds of thousands according to organisers - turned out at Beck's rally to show their opposition to Mr Obama and what they call his administration's big government or "socialist" policies.

Two weeks later, Stewart and Colbert, considered two of the funniest men in America thanks to their prime time political satire shows on Comedy Central, announced twin rallies on the Mall which were later combined into one.

The name The Rally to Restore Sanity was an unabashed dig by Stewart at Beck's event. Colbert branded his event the March to Keep Fear Alive in keeping with his role as mock conservative foil to the liberal Stewart.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/31/3052937.htm

There were an estimated 215,000 different interpretations of what just happened. As the throngs who attended Saturday's enormous "Rally to Restore Sanity" dispersed, there was no agreement on whether it had been a powerful answer to the Tea Party rallies that upturned politics last year, a popular uprising against the media, or just a hilarious free show by two of the hottest comedians in America.

There was one thing everyone wanted it to be, though, and that was bigger than Glenn Beck's Restoring Honour rally. And, yes, it trounced it. Mr Beck, the mewling Fox News host who had brought Tea Partiers to Washington two months earlier, had claimed between 300,000 and a million attendees; Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert claimed "somewhere between 10 million and one billion". The official arbiter, a CBS News-commissioned analysis, put Saturday's event on the National Mall at 215,000, compared with Mr Beck's 87,000. Certainly, it was many more than the comedians had dared to hope.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bigger-than-becks-stewarts-rally-eclipses-fox-news-pundits-effort-2121848.html

I would not mention this ghastly halloween US "tradition" but after having seen "Newtown alive with dead people" on the 30th and 31 of October, I picked up this article:

A man faces charges of wearing a mask or hood in public after police arrested him on Halloween night and charged him under a rarely used old law designed to combat the Ku Klux Klan.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reports that 20-year-old Lawrence Marqueal Rogers was cited for wearing a red bandana that police said concealed everything but his eyes.

He was then arrested when he donned the garment again. The man was being held in jail on a 7,500 US dollar bond.

The University of North Carolina School of Law said the 1953 ban on people 16 or older wearing masks or hoods was adopted to curtail the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, the secretive white supremacist group whose members wore distinctive pointed hoods to conceal their identities.

At least 17 other states have similar laws.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-man-charged-for-wearing-halloween-mask-2122809.html

The American people have spoken, but it's impossible to decode their incoherent message. Drunk with their capture of the House of Representatives, the Republicans thunder that the verdict of ballot boxes from Maine to Hawaii is clarion-clear: the ultimate evil in America is government, specifically government as led by President Barack Obama.

But when exit pollsters questioned voters on their way to those same ballot boxes, as to who should take the blame for the country's economic problems, 35 per cent said Wall Street, 30 per cent said Bush and 23 per cent Obama.

The American people want a government that mustn't govern, and a budget that must simultaneously balance and create jobs, cut spending across the board and leave the defence budget intact. Collectively, the election makes clear, they haven't a clue which way to march.

Midterm elections: Clueless Americans send confused message to politicians

Sound familiar?