GREAT MOMENTS IN SELECTIVE IDENTIFICATION OF COMMENTATORS

CNN.com posts a gushing (if dreadfully written) commentary about Beckstock titled "My Take: Beck's Rally Was About Restoring Virtue and God's Place." The author's background was given as follows:

Jim Garlow, Senior Pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego, California, is a radio commentator and author of Heaven and the Afterlife: What Happens When You Die?

Gee, what's being left out there? Oh, just the fact that he's also the chairman of Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership organization. And the fact that he was a leader in the fight to pass Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage referendum, in California (during which time he characterized gay marriage as "worse than radical Islam"). And the fact that, as Right Wing Watch notes, "he's a full-bore advocate of the 7 Mountains Mandate, which is a Dominionist theology that seeks get Christians in control of the levers of power and influence the world over so as to create God's kingdom on Earth and bring about the return of Jesus Christ."

Garlow is a tad secretive about at least one ID in his piece as well. He writes:

So remedial was [the] message [of Beck's gathering] that a Jewish rabbi -- who received multiple ovations from the overwhelmingly evangelical Friday night crowd -- called for a return to "manners."

"A Jewish rabbi"? Any rabbi in particular. Oh yes -- it just so happens to have been Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who was a close friend of Jack Abramoff (and was used by Abramoff in his heyday to conceal client money). Yeah, if I were praising Beck I'd downplay that guy's presence, too.

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UPDATE: More from Joe Conason:

If Glenn Beck's Washington extravaganza seemed strangely empty of political content, filled with vacuous pieties and fetishes rather than protest, then perhaps it should be seen as the opening act in a renewed campaign to assert the power of the religious right. A series of four mass prayer events, featuring many of the most prominent figures in the Republican Party's theocratic wing, will occur between Labor Day and Election Day, starting with an arena rally in Sacramento, Calif., and ending with perfect symmetry on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Behind these events, under the rubric "Pray and A.C.T.," is Newt Gingrich's organization, Renewing American Leadership, although the frontmen for this particular initiative are former Watergate conspirator Charles Colson and evangelist Jim Garlow, who now works for Gingrich....

Clearly, this was a table-setter for those rallies. (Alveda King and David Barton, who were prominent participants in Beckapalooza on Saturday, are endorsers of Pray and A.C.T.) Pity CNN couldn't have mentioned any of this about Garlow and his group.