(Newser)
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Jon Stewart's spoofy political Rally to Restore Sanity is headed toward world domination. Some 800 Sanity demonstrations in 67 nations are being planned around the globe to coincide with the Daily Show host's DC demonstration this Saturday. Sanity marchers will gather from Paris to Mt. Everest's base camp in Nepal. "Everyone was getting excited" about the Washington rally, "so I thought, 'Gosh, why couldn't we do something local?'" said a marketing consultant in Paris. She's organizing the event for the Champs de Mars at the Eiffel Tower through Facebook. "We’ll be doing it sanely and calmly and with a sense of humor—which is a change from what's been happening," she adds.
The popularity of the rally reveals a deep-seated desire to pull politics back into rationality, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government tells the Christian Science Monitor. "It’s weird to see people so worked up for the sake of a more rational political process," he adds. Stewart has been pitching his rally to those who think "shouting is counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard." There’s just one problem: "How does one restore sanity to a part of the world where it never existed?" asks a writer in the Jerusalem Post, who proposes an Israeli rally to "introduce" sanity. (Click here for one opinion about why the rally is a really bad idea.)
