What can we make of the jam-packed “Restoring Honor” rally held by Fox News spinmeister Glenn Beck last Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial and featuring an appearance by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin? Inquiring minds want to know.

Galling as it may be, Mr. Beck has a constitutional right to rant and rave in public all he wants (unless he’s inciting people to riot). However, it’s pretty suspicious to be doing it on the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the same site, which is guaranteed to rile up more than few people.

And, sure enough, there was a dueling rally held a few miles away on Saturday featuring speeches by the Rev. Al Sharpton and NAACP and Urban League leaders - and with a much larger contingent of African-Americans and other minority groups than were in attendance at the Beck/Palin rally.

I caught some CNN footage of Mr. Beck in shirtsleeves roaming around the stage sporting a wireless headset and obviously enjoying his moment in the sun. He resembled nothing so much as one of those Southern preachers holding forth to a swooning, hand-waving crowd in one of those huge auditoriums.

He told media reps that the venue and date were a coincidence and that it wasn’t designed to be a political event. Right. At the same time, he denied wanting to run for president in 2012 and apologized for calling President Obama a “racist.” (Well, he sort of had to, given the rally’s theme of bringing everyone together.)

The president told the press that he ignored the Beck rally on Saturday, noting that U.S politics has entered the “silly season.” “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,” he reportedly told Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News.

I’m just enough of a conspiracy theorist to imagine Mr. Beck sitting down with Karl Rove and other conservative strategists to scope out how best to chip off some minority voters who might be feeling shoved to the edges of the Democratic Party’s supposed “big tent.”

“Let’s take the civil rights movement away from ‘em,” one might say. “Yeah, why not? Nobody gets to own it, and besides, if they slam us, it just makes ‘em look divisive themselves,” says another. It actually makes strategic sense in a kind of twisted, D.C.-centric way, although Mr. Beck and national GOP officials denied coordinating any joint involvement in the rally.

The big political plum these guys would love to pluck is the U.S. Senate, where 36 seats are on the ballot this year and the Republicans are just 10 seats away from partisan control. But the even bigger, longer-term goal, I suspect, is to use the old divide-and-conquer strategy that keeps people pointlessly fighting against each another and failing to recognize their concerns in common. Otherwise, they might join together to actually solve problems and improve conditions for all.

Judicial race

The race between Helena attorney Beth Baker and District Judge Nels Swandal of Livingston for associate justice of the state Supreme Court is definitely heating up. The two candidates, despite being jointly endorsed by the Montana Chamber of Commerce on Aug. 19, are being colored in partisan political tones whether they like it or not.

In Judge Swandal’s case, the situation is self-created since he publicly calls himself a conservative while denying he approaches any legal matter with preconceived notions or lets personal opinions dictate how he decides a case.

For her part, Ms. Baker indicates that she is unbiased and nonpartisan, despite being endorsed by the Montana Conservation Voters and personally contributing to Democratic campaigns.

According to campaign-finance reports, Ms. Baker has attracted more money so far than Judge Swandal (about $100,000 for her versus about $71,000 for him as of Aug. 18), but he is receiving donations from more known Republicans, while more known Democrats and environmentalists are sending contributions to her.

Bad behavior

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas, who get their kicks protesting at veterans’ funerals, were apparently targeted with pepper spray Saturday by a counter-protestor outside a funeral of a U.S. Marine in Omaha, Neb.

This is the same charming outfit that protested near the funeral at the Sieben Ranch north of Helena of U.S. Sen. Max Baucus’ nephew, Marine Cpl. Phillip E. Baucus, who was killed in action about four years ago in Iraq. Church members assert that the deaths of U.S. soldiers are “divine retribution” for the country’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Japan slam

Ichiro Ozawa, leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, handed this country a seriously back-handed compliment the other day. While noting that he likes Americans and admires the U.S. political system, he also used a Japanese term for us that translates as “monocellular” or “simpleminded.”

“When I talk with Americans, I often wonder why they are so simpleminded,” Mr. Ozawa was quoted as saying during an Aug. 25 speech to lawmakers in Tokyo.

“I don’t think Americans are very smart, but I give extremely high credit for democracy and choices by its people. They chose a black president for the first time in U.S. history,” he continued, adding that he once thought that would never be possible.

Ballot challenges

Legal efforts are under way to keep two different initiatives off the November 2 general-election ballot. Both Initiatives 161, which would eliminate special outfitter licenses, and 164, which would cap the maximum allowable annual interest rate charged by payday and title loan companies at 36 percent, are being challenged by complaints filed recently in Lewis and Clark County District Court.

In the case of I-161, the Montana Outfitter and Guides Association is claiming that initiative supporters used “deceptive practices” to gather required signatures. With I-164, which recently survived a state Supreme Court challenge, the Coalition for Consumer Choice Against I-164 alleges that the initiative language is flawed.

Quote of the week

“You don’t go to northern Montana expecting to hear praise for Washington or East Coast institutions in general, but my perception is that the disgust was stronger than usual this year.”

– New York Times columnist David Brooks on his recent Glacier National Park vacation, Aug, 25.