There are only two men in America who can fill Yankee Stadium on three weeks’ notice,” a friend instructed me years ago. “Billy Graham and Louis Farrakhan.”

Indeed, a decade ago, Black Muslim Minister Farrakhan’s “Million Man March” brought a throng of hundreds of thousands to the Capitol.

But, last Saturday, Glenn Beck packed the Mall with a crowd that could have filled Yankee Stadium to overflowing five times over. As it stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, the estimates of its size ran to half a million.

This was twice the size of the crowd that heard Martin Luther King Jr. 47 years ago and matched the antiwar demonstrations of 1969.

Wisely, Beck dropped partisanship to convert his gathering into a God, country and Constitution rally, with speakers honoring the courage and sacrifice of America’s military. Said Sarah Palin, a rally star, “Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet, and you can’t take that away from me.”

Al Sharpton, who organized a counter-rally that turned out a few hundred folks at Dunbar High, was his usual gracious self. Speaking of the half a million Americans on the Mall, the Rev. Al volunteered, “They want to disgrace this day.”

President Obama, seeing that crowd on the Mall as large as the one that came to celebrate his inaugural, must understand what it portends. His moment may have passed.

For that enthusiastic and energetic assembly is the spear point of an army of millions headed for the polls to throw out the party he leads.

Nevertheless, as Obama raised hopes only to be perceived as having fallen short, so, too, Beck’s believers and the tea party folks are raising hopes and expectations.

But can they succeed?

“We must not fundamentally transform America, as some would want,” said Palin, in one of the direct challenges to Obama. “We must restore America.”

But can we restore America, or is the old America gone forever?

Consider the issue that unites all on the Mall on Saturday — the need for the U.S. government to cut spending, to balance its budget and not to shove an immense burden of debt on our children.

Like last year, we are running a deficit of $1.4 trillion, almost 10 percent of the entire economy. With housing starts and housing sales plunging, jobless claims rising, the stock market sinking and economic growth slowing to a crawl, we will face a new deficit equally large in the fiscal year beginning in October. Where are the victorious tea party Republicans going to cut?

According to USA Today, 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, and perhaps an equal number on Medicare and Social Security. Which of these three will tea party Republicans cut, when Republicans are already denying Democratic charges that they plan to raise the retirement age for Social Security?

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has a 600-page plan to reform Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the tax code, the work of a conscientious conservative. But only one in 16 House Republicans has signed on as co-sponsor.

Are Republicans going to go after other entitlements — veterans benefits, earned income tax credits, food stamps — which now go to 41 million Americans, or unemployment benefits that run for 99 weeks?

With the racial achievement gap on test scores returning, will the GOP abolish No Child Left Behind or slash federal aid to education?

The big remaining items in the budget are interest on the debt, which must be paid, and war and defense. But Republicans are more likely to be supportive of Obama’s rebuilding a military ravaged by war, and staying the course in Iraq and Afghanistan, than are Democrats.

Obama’s budget commission will surely come in with tax increases on personal incomes, perhaps also for Social Security and Medicare. But the GOP cannot sign on to these and go home again.

Indeed, how can Republicans cooperate with a president who has spent the campaign blaming them for the Great Recession and telling voters the GOP intends to drag us back to the dark past of Bush II?

And why would a “Party of No” that picks up 40 or 50 House seats by its Alamo defiance become a Kumbaya, “Yes-we-can!” party and work in happy harness with Barack Obama?

Can we really “restore America” as she once was?

According to The New York Times, Orange County, Calif. — birthplace of Richard Nixon, Goldwater Country, bastion of the John Birch Society, land of the “little old ladies in tennis shoes” — is today a place where less than half the population is Anglo and almost half speak a language other than English in the home.

Where Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter three to one in Orange County, Obama ran a near dead heat with McCain. And as Orange County goes, so goes California and so goes America.

Republicans and tea partiers are going to have a glorious fall.

But is this one of the last hurrahs?

[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61 / 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word [Koranic citation, here] … [A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not.

… anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews…[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation [i.e., Jews in the Koran and the Traditions, cited above].

Suppose that the series has some criticism or shows some of the Jews’ traits, this doesn’t necessitate an uproar … The accusation of antisemitism was invented by the Jews as a means to pressure Arabs and Muslims to implement their schemes in the Arab and Muslim countries, so don’t pay attention to them.

It is axiomatic that our elites will declare this whole discussion “Islamophobic” — despite the contents being based almost entirely on Islam’s sacred texts and Tantawi’s own expressed words and actions. Fortunately, tens of millions of Americans are not playing our elites’ endless, self-destructive game of Wonderland croquet, and they understand the stark difference between Islamophobia and Islamo-reality — some 16,000 jihad terror attacks after 9/11.

Governments seem to have forgotten the commitment made only three short years ago to create an organization able to protect victims and confront human rights abuses wherever they occur.

An essential precondition was better membership. The council’s precursor, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, was folded in 2006 mainly because it had, for too long, allowed gross violators of human rights like Sudan and Zimbabwe to block action on their own abuses.

The council was supposed to be different. For the first time, countries agreed to take human rights records into account when voting for the council’s members, and those member-states that failed to, in the words of the founding resolution, ‘uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights’ would find themselves up for review and their seats endangered. For victims of human rights abuses and advocates for human rights worldwide, the reforms offered the hope of a credible and effective body.

Now, it seems, principle has given way to expediency. Governments have resumed trading votes for membership in various other United Nations bodies, putting political considerations ahead of human rights. The absence of competition suggests that states that care about human rights simply don’t care enough. Latin America, a region of flourishing democracies, has allowed Cuba to bid to renew its membership. Asian countries have unconditionally endorsed the five candidates running for their region’s five seats – among them, China and Saudi Arabia.

[u]nder section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, DHS may delegate authority to state and local officers to enforce federal immigration law. DHS has made improvements to the 287(g) program, including implementing a new, standardized Memorandum of Agreement with state and local partners that strengthens program oversight and provides uniform guidelines for DHS supervision of state and local agency officer operations; information reporting and tracking; complaint procedures; and implementation measures. DHS continues to evaluate the program, incorporating additional safeguards as necessary to aid in the prevention of racial profiling and civil rights violations and improve accountability for protecting human rights.

95. A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.

96. President Obama remains firmly committed to fixing our broken immigration system, because he recognizes that our ability to innovate, our ties to the world, and our economic prosperity depend on our capacity to welcome and assimilate immigrants. The Administration will continue its efforts to work with the U.S. Congress and affected communities toward this end.