Tag: Washington D.C.

Rally for Sanity from Jon Stewart was long in ideas but maybe short in practice

Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

I was in Washington D.C. on Saturday when the Rally for Sanity, put on by the crew at the satirical Daily Show, which is already been billed as the Woodstock for my generation.

I didn’t really see or hear much,  as there were some big audio problems and, well, maybe as many as 215,000 people were there. But I suppose that won’t much matter.

I was there, or near there, specifically, and, of course, there in the broader sense of being 24 at a time when people my age were trying to do something.

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Flat Stanley in Washington D.C. for the Obama inauguration with Christopher Wink

And I thought children hated me.

Debbie Reinhardt’s second-grade class at the Kiel School in Kinnelon, N.J. sent me Flat Stanley, the title character of a children’s book from 1964. The flattened boy from the book gets sent around the world in an envelope.

I’ve been charged with showing our pal Stanley around Philadelphia, but before I get to that, I took him on the road to our nation’s capital earlier this week, where I was for the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. Check some dispatches below.

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How are those portable toilets going to hold out at the inauguration?

Portable toilets near the FDR Memorial in Washington D.C. on Jan. 19, 2009
Portable toilets near the FDR Memorial in Washington D.C. on Jan. 19, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C. — I’ve heard fears about the available public toilets at the grounds of the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Oh, portable toilets, our most unloved friend. I’m off to the National Mall now, far behind millions who may have gotten there when security opened this morning at four a.m. What’s going to happen when all of those folks have to go?

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Strange encampment near FDR Memorial in Washington D.C.

The entrance of the Roosevelt Memorial, tonight adjacent to a strange cluster of unidentified tents.
The entrance of the Roosevelt Memorial, tonight adjacent to a strange cluster of unidentified tents.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial is in left field of a well-worn baseball field, wedged between the icy Potamac River and the city’s Tidal Basin.

Tonight, so is a strange encampment of brown tents, bright lights and vehicles with federal government license plates.

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