glenn beck

Always fun, having the spokesman from the John Birch Society on as a "serious commentator". Bring on the Amero!

Owie.

too bad the doctors didn't have a handgun handy

I just watched the video...and I truly liked the rawness of Glenn. We just do not see that in anyone of the public stage. Thanks Glenn for taking a risk and sharing personal struggles. God knows that many, many folks in this country are dealing with the same things. I am wishing you a speedy recovery Glenn!

The interview he did with Michael Buble was really weird:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxepjAEhUdc

i've changed my mind on this guy.

Another abject lesson in tolerance and compassion from the liberal wing of today's world. This is the kind of thing that makes me expect liberals to eventually attempt to force their views on anyone who doesn't go along to get along. Re-education camps are a real possiblity. So are all of the other tactics of those heroes of the left, the Communists. Nothing like a vacation in Siberia to change your outlook.

Of course it's sometimes quicker just to put an end to the problem on the spot. Stalin had lists he would sift through picking names at random for execution. The ideals of the left are a shining example of how humans can go down the toilet deliberately with gusto. After all who else can claim 100 million dead in their wake. Hitler can't. Only the Commies can do that. And we have a nation of people who want to head down that same path.

I wonder if they even know they won't be able to pull it off in a land that has known freedom. They might succeed in soaking every inch of ground in blood but they won't conquer the human spirit here. Heck it didn't even work in Russia eventually. What more proof do you need?

So go ahead and preach your venom and hate. Freedom lovers will be waiting for you when the time comes.

Stalin, paragon of the left

So go ahead and preach your venom and hate. Freedom lovers will be waiting for you when the time comes.

Awesome, going on for paragraphs about how them damn libruls gonna send you off to gulags and kill you, and ending with a threat of violence.

botched clitorectomy

asshole reduction surgery (didn't take)

lol dmr actually OTM.

You aren't kidding! Weird.

his comeback show tonight was bonkers

"every time I closed my eyes I saw dogs eating children's faces off, like my own personal version of SAW"

I used to have to listen to his show at work--and grew to love it. It's like a combination of 12 Stepper inspiration, shock jock inanity, unhinged political commentary and self-psychotherapy--the monologues about his mother's suicide--it's close to performance art.

can't believe that joke came true, you heard it here first

http://blatherwatch.blogs.com/talk_radio/2008/11/racist-bigot-glennn-beck-gets-jumped-at-wendys.html

Glennn Beck, (KTTH m-f, 6-9a) in a Wendy's for a Frosty™ last Saturday night, was accosted as he stood in line by a truck driver with "food in his hair" who called him a "racist bigot."

"I said, Yeah, I am. I mean, it's a truck stop. How much trouble am I going to get in in a truck stop?"

If you didn't doubt Beck's judgement before reading this...

A+++++ truck stop would wear my food in it again

Glenn Beck presents the Obama National Anthem

There was some trailer for something he's doing about a Christmas sweater that ran yesterday before Quantum of Solace. Truman Capote it won't be.

was Gore Vidal available?

http://www.mercuras.com/1108/19499_Christmas_Sweater_Online.gif

He didn't realize that Colbert's show was a parody.

Watch a video about The Christmas Sweater!

Glenn Beck doesn't believe a word he's saying.

ever.

As big a jackass as Glen Beck is, he's only the No. 2 jackass sitting on that couch.

No. 1? Not even close: Steve Doocy. (Wonkette identifies Doocy as "quite possibly the biggest (yet most harmless) douche on Fox News.")

Indeed. I think I once described Doocy as always looking like he just ate some bad sausage.

oops u did it again

all his "red scare" stuff he's on is so ridic. caught the interview w/ the us communist party head yesterday while in the gym & lol'd at cuts to pics of lenin/stalin & also when commie dude drank out of glenn's water mug

http://media.glennbeck.com/images/common/header_photocomp.jpg

oops should have posted this one

http://www.glennbeck.com/upload/iblock/329/030509-lead.jpg

yeah his whole WE SURROUND THEM seven-point loyalty oath b.s. is pretty stupid

I love Bill O'Reilly's open disdain for Glenn Beck. Beck totally crumbles into a giggly and shy schoolboy when he is around him.

BECK: So, the shooting in Alabama.
O’REILLY: Yeah.

BECK: Did you hear how they described this guy? I mean, it was a typical, you know, “he was a loner. He was quiet. I didn’t know.” I mean, it was really…But what they really described, when they really got down into it, what they said was: “here’s a guy who felt that he had been wronged. He didn’t feel comfortable talking to anybody. He was disgruntled and everything else.” And then he went out and shot a bunch of people. As they were describing him — and they said, you’ve got to go, now more than ever, you’ve got to start talking to people. You have to start connecting with people because we’re going into hard times yada yada yada. As I’m listening to the description. First of all, this guy’s a psycho. Clearly, he’s a psycho.

O’REILLY: Right.

BECK: But as I’m listening to him. I’m thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now. That feel like nobody’s hearing their voice. The government isn’t hearing their voice. Even if you call, they don’t listen to you on both sides. If you’re a conservative, you’re called a racist. You want to starve children.

O’REILLY: Sure.

BECK: Yada yada yada. And every time they do speak out, they’re shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?

CHUCK NORRIS: Well, yes. The whole thing is that's the Second Amendment — the Second Amendment. The final line in the Second Amendment says, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

That means not by the president, not by Congress. They are not allowed to take our rights away with this because of the Second Amendment, Glenn. And the thing is, I have a 700-acre ranch in Texas. And I have a lot of guns on my ranch.

I don't use them for hunting. I'm not a hunter. But the thing is, it's for protection. And the Second Amendment was designed for tyranny against the government. If the government decides to become a tyrannical government, our guns are to protect us against that. And that's really what the Second Amendment is all about, Glenn.

BECK: So you know, here is the thing, Chuck. You know, the government doesn't want us to have weapons and yet, they have weapons. I think the biggest weapon they have is the IRS. Nobody even understands. I just — I read a letter from ...

NORRIS: You're hitting a real sore point with me right there.

BECK: They can use taxes as a weapon, and the IRS code that that you can't even figure out — am I wrong on that?

first exchange = Beck's cry for help? somebody better be watching that dude.

media matters is all over glen beck friday

http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200903130024?show=1
http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200903130023?show=1
http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200903130021?show=1

we are here to celebrate, worship and adore!

3/13/09 never forget

glenn beck's nine principles and 12 values:

The Nine Principles

1. America is good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

12 Values
Honesty
Reverence
Hope
Thrift
Humility
Charity
Sincerity
Moderation
Hard Work
Courage
Personal Responsibility
Gratitude

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

These are direct contradictions of one another!

Or, rather, they're direct contradictions until such time as Glenn Beck and his spouse personally decree new laws and go around trying to enforce them

That's their plan for next Tuesday! Right after Biggest Loser, they're gonna write some new goddamn laws.

i'm pretty sure there's a name for whatever glen beck has.

A goiter?

asshollism?

is there a latin word for being a retard?

[Middle English retarden, from Old French retarder, from Latin retardre : re-, re- + tardre, to delay (from tardus, slow).]

loooool at Shep Smith in the clips at mediamatters!

also, sometimes i think i hate chris wallace more than any of them.

chris wallace seems like he really believes this shit while beck is just out there trippin balls saying whatever

yeah, i think with beck & o'reilly you get the sense that they are well-aware of and frankly contented with their place as (shitty) rabble-rousing populists. but with wallace it's like he's totally endeavoring to I R SRS JOURNALIST.

he was so entirely awful on inauguration day with the flubbing of the oath. if he was joking, it sure didn't translate. wotta prick.

oh, about the oath thing, i seem to recall ppl on fox asking if he was really president, the "some say.." it might not count, etc. heh.

beck's show is the most batshit insane thing i've seen in a while. it veers from creepy paranoid fearmongering and red baiting like "they're out to get us/we're on the road to socialism" to awkward emo "and i know how you FEEL about it"

shep just had a little segment on his show about bubble-blowing dolphins at sea world or something. then ended it with, "bubble blowing humans, as my friend glenn beck would say, YOU ARE NOT ALONE"

http://i404.photobucket.com/albums/pp127/deanofsomething/sheeeeeeeeeep.jpg

<3 shep

I love Shepard Smith.

One show he did a couple weeks ago emitted similar stuff to what one used to get out of the "The Turner Diaries" and various survivalist far right publications. The last time this flavor of things crept into the mainstream was when Clinton was in office. It was extreme with Beck going on to his guests and the audience about not being nuts. Picked up the transcript from the show and took some of the more pathological material out of it here.

lol shep

so hilarious. it was only after watching a couple times that i realized the fake crying was directly (DI-REC-LY!) mocking beck who cries on the air all the damn time.

glenn beck on fox actually gets v high ratings. i had no idea. i also don't know how many people are watching his show taking it serious, and how many (like me) try to tune in because.. it is the best train wreck on the air right now

i <3 shep smith

Sometimes I wish Shep would jump to a better network, but then I realize he's exactly where he needs to be. That guy is a national treasure.

yeah he was mvp during the election coverage.

there was a remarkable segment on Fox coverage of election night but it was after the cable network's live coverage had ended.. so only played on local Fox affiliates that were still live on the air. A roundtable discussion w/Shep and some other reporters.. google turned up someone quoting it @ crooks and liars, this seems like a pretty accurate account to me because I watched it at the time:

These political operatives and campaigners from the McCain camp were saying that he's a communist, pals around with terrorists etc., in an attempt to make people afraid of Obama the candidate. Now I know those politicos don't really believe that and it was just a tactic. Now that the campaign is over they just go on with their lives. But there are people out there in middle america who are truly afraid of Barak Obama and that doesn't just go away. I get letters from these people that you wouldn't believe.

Other panelist points out that the fear tactic is not a bell you can just unring after the election. Shep goes on about how it's a different kind of fear, like a visceral fear out there.

and of course, glenn beck is on the air, day in day out, just amping up the fear w/his audience as much as he can. it's completely irresponsible IMHO

Why are these folks sending you letters?

should've put italics, that was a paraphrase quote of what shep said on the air

These political operatives and campaigners from the McCain camp were saying that he's a communist, pals around with terrorists etc., in an attempt to make people afraid of Obama the candidate. Now I know those politicos don't really believe that and it was just a tactic. Now that the campaign is over they just go on with their lives. But there are people out there in middle america who are truly afraid of Barak Obama and that doesn't just go away. I get letters from these people that you wouldn't believe.

not that i haven't read plenty of that kind of crazy hate mail. people really believe this stuff

I was looking for that yesterday.

The opening sentence to his book "The Christmas Sweater" makes me want to hurl:

"We weren't wealthy, we weren't poor -- we just were. We never wanted for anything, except maybe more time together...."

haha looking at the amazon reviews for that book was worth it for this:

The Christmas Sweater, February 21, 2009
By Dorothy A. Schultz - See all my reviews

It was an interesting book. It was a real surprise to find out it was a
dream. I am sharing the audio book with a friend.

spoiler alert

HOME TAPING IS KILLING GLENN BECK

we should all home tape more

i have watched that clip of shep making fun of glenn beck about a dozen times. truly a work of art. have the impression that insulting someone like that is a particularly southern thing, and shep is especially talented at it but i can never hope to learn. i mean, reading emails from viewers like "shep, i am tired of your snotty attitude and you are clearly jealous" - stroke of genius.

unless they are buds and it was entirely friendly & i just don't watch these guys enough to understand it on that level.. but i don't think so.

I don't watch FOX on the regular, but I've seen enough to know that it's kind of "Shep v. Everyone Else" around there. Roger Ailes would probably fire him if he weren't so darn likeable.

holy crap is this guy for real

how can we feel like 9/12 again *_*

amzing segment btw - luv the chucks - lol fox news it dept

lolz love the aged newsreel effects wtf

im totally into the emo side of beck - its a brave new face for wingnut inanity

I don't want to go overboard here, but doesn't this have some similarities to Nazi propaganda? Open displays of emotion (WEEPING ON TV), vague but aggressive populism (they make us feel small but we actually have them surrounded), mythologizing foundational patriotic events (the 9/12 thing).

In a different social situation (like, a depression) I can see where this is going...it's scary.

where its going is to the margins. there are lots of things to be scared of, I wouldn't say Glenn Beck is one of them.

"Are you ready to be the person you were the day after 9/11"?

Terrified, paralyzed, my usual low tinnitus-like head noise of neuroses ramped up to a deafening roar? Uh... no.

o this is some dark shit def - luckily i dont think its appeal reaches beyond the loony 30% - and in fact as weve seen w/obamas strategic promotion of limbaugh it serves to alienate the not completely insane

"I'm sorry, I just love my country and I fear for it."

I'm sorry, I just love my dad, and the fact that he's become a disciple of this guy makes me fear for him. Last time I was home, he had a big conspiracy theory ready to go for any conversation about the economy, and it was all about how the government is going to send ua all to concentration camps. He got it all straight from you-know-who. It rattled me, not because of the content, but the fact that he seemed really convinced of it.

"Are you ready to be the person you were the day after 9/11"?

Terrified, paralyzed, my usual low tinnitus-like head noise of neuroses ramped up to a deafening roar? Uh... no.

― kenan, Monday, March 16, 2009 6:07 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haa i was thinking: drunk, bewildered?

take em to church glenn you old moonraker

beck is pretty much playing this stuff for ratings and would drop it and pick something else the minute it didnt work - he really doesnt give a fuck that hes helping to shape people who actually care abt things other than their own egomanias world views - total dik, darkly hilarious

I mean, let's say even 5% of the U.S. is convinced that the government is going to destroy AMERICA and send us all to concentration camps. There's a lot that can happen when 5% of the population, is convinced their backs are to the wall and the survival of civilization (and MASS GENOCIDE) is imminent.

And they're armed to the teeth. Legally.

Is he crying?!?

Haha; he is crying.

lol turn turn turn

haha waht you really think 5% of the population - even a super-well-armed one - would be a threat to the stability to a country as big and militarized as the US? Consider for a moment, among other things, the paramilitary tactics that major cities' police departments are trained in, to say nothing of the national guard, the army, etc.

x-post

ohmigod his hammy crying is like some Nicolas Cage level acting chops

I think as I talked to my dad about the economy (over xmas), I was most alarmed by what he didn't understand. He posed a question to me that was supposed to be a show-stopper, which was something like, "What do you think was said in those Congressional hearings that turned them around and made them support the bailout?" (Remember, Bush was still Prez then, this was the first $700 billion proposal.) He didn't expect real answers. I explained how on September 17, a couple of huge money market funds "broke the buck," and what that means for the commercial paper market, and why a freeze in that market is... well... what we're going through right now. Which is bad. He had no idea what any of this meant before I explained it. All he knew was "OMG oncentrations camps!"

To his credit, he listened patiently. He's not a ranter, just a fan of ranters.

well for one thing, the 5% would include people in the armed forces, police, etc.

But no, I'm not actually concerned that there is going to be a coup or something. Just that in a depression, crazy shit can happen, and it's worth paying attention to demagogues who could be taken seriously. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people look at this ridiculously melodramatic crying man and take him dead seriously, so there must be something there.

xp

i refuse to ever worry about glenn beck strictly on principle, and i don't see concentration camp level wrongness ever gaining enough traction to be anything to worry about either. i don't even see what this shtick could inspire anyone to do beyond like hate-hug someone. what is he calling for, exactly, beyond patriotic indignation + let's be sad together?

im not familiar with his agenda

btw -- the basis of this particular hysteria:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84

Even Neil Cavuto thinks Glenn Beck is 'scaring people'

david shuster: I didn't know, until I watched Glenn Beck, the Obama administration wants "totalitarianism" and concentration camps.

beck is getting huge ratings at fox, nearly as high as o'reilly (highest-rated on cable news). there is so much unhinged right-wing media which is so ridiculous to me, i tend to forget that people actually believe what they're saying. i don't think there's a threat to the stability of the country itself coming from wacko rightwing survivalist militia types, no, but.. when the margin of the discourse is this crazy, it makes people like lou dobbs and bill o'reilly look reasonable by comparison (which they aren't).

people believing obamas a communist and the governments building concentration camps while not taking us any closer to armed revolution does serious impede our ability to be constructive and get along w/each other as a country

idk daria i think the fact that it is this crazy bodes well for the rest of us. when even people at FOX are saying "btw this guy is insane" i think we can just put our feet up and enjoy the show

from the912project.com:

This is a non-political movement. The 9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.

That same feeling – that commitment to country is what we are hoping to foster with this idea. We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.

Ask yourself these questions:

* Do you watch the direction that America is being taken in and feel powerless to stop it?
* Do you believe that your voice isn’t loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore?
* Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach…as if you’re completely alone?

If you’ve answered YES, then you’ve fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides—the reality is very different. Once you pull back the curtain, you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all.

We surround them.

Jeffrey Feldman @ HuffPo suggests Beck might've gotten this idea from.. the X-Files

personally I put a lot of blame on Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, well, first off on the McCain/GOP operatives who pushed this stuff without regard for what they were stirring up. shep comments on election night about the crazy letters etc and the fear people have - OTM

I just want to see him cry again.

hey i hav an idea how to bring us back to that 9/12 mindset

beck is such a goddamn fascist. i'm surprised he hasn't advocated as a solution to the employment problems, that women go back to being homemakers and basically stay barefoot and pregnant. (he prob did this already and i missed it right?)

Do you believe that your voice isn’t loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore?

as opposed to before, when all bent an ear to your specific rantings, random glenn beck fan

i do feel bad for people who live in his imagined universe, though it would be kind of exciting too what with being under siege and whatnot

It's enough that O'Reilly glares at him contemptuously.

shep is on the air right now. i was sort of afraid someone one of beck's emo-nazis took him out

i always lol at these guys ranting against the media

This is a non-political movement. The 9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.

^^ so let me guess: this goes for everyone except the 63 million people who pulled the lever for Obama?

http://i404.photobucket.com/albums/pp127/deanofsomething/becky.jpg

Time to go see if I can find any recent BSRW toons about the guy

mayb here is where i should list the text msgs i send to my good friend who is glenn's manager...most recent "y is gb cryin so much, rn't ratings good??"

ya rly - let's be careful not to conflate ratings with 100%-support-from-true-believers. cuz some people (ie, us) are watching for the lolz

Anyone else think he shows at least a touch of the hypomania or bipolar disorder?

either he's doing some crazy long game kaufman-esque performance art, or this is all going to end v. badly, like with him killing and eating his family to 'protect' them.

somethin's wrong with the dude for sure

his comeback show tonight was bonkers

"every time I closed my eyes I saw dogs eating children's faces off, like my own personal version of SAW"

― dmr, Monday, January 7, 2008 10:17 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Glenn Beck Friday was lol and all but this shit ^^^^^ was one of the weirdest things ever

I can think of a few very sincere and heartrendingly insane homeless guys that hang around in this neighborhood who could take his place in a heartbeat. (If they were white.)

Also, beck said in that clip pretty plainly that college education is what keeps people away from common sense. Let's take a moment to think of the implications of that.

Glenn Beck considers himself a "self-educated" man, and he did not graduate from college. He claims that he "spent more time in the parking lot than in class." As he began to recover from alcoholism, he decided he would throw everything he knew out and start from scratch. He began reading by having a book in every room.

ah geez glenn sorry but books /= scented candles, and being near books /= reading, technically.

even dennis miller and bill o'reilly were making fun of this dude yesterday. i think everyone at fox is pretty embarrassed which is saying something for the network that runs crackpot hannity 'investigative' specials on the weekends full of badly sourced rightwing smears

if only i had known the horror that lay in store when my dad pulled out the glenn beck book and said "here's a conservative that's pretty common sense, i think you might be able to agree with some of what he says"

jeez, you guys' dadz! my dad has oldschool dem union roots and is becoming something of a grumpy independent, has absorbed a few rightwing talking points from his republican cronies at the country club. (note this is a small town country club, only posh by comparison to a pretty poor area of the country.) but he is a bigger fan of obama than I am, hates o'reilly, thinks sean hannity is a nazi & i'm absolutely certain has no use for glenn beck. in some ways i understand his irritation at dem party dominance in government because.. in the state of MD the political base of most ppl in power is downstate so the rural areas are always hurting for resources, never recovered from industry leaving in the 80's. i've seen myself the really gross disparity in public education between the DC suburbs & elsewhere.

He began reading by having a book in every room.

Well. Looks like we got ourselves a reader.

Let's guess what book Glen Beck had in what room.

Which book is in the Doom Room?

Mein Kampf

http://rightvalues.org/myweb13/Deliver%20us%20from%20Evil.jpg

is that my man hannity?

man what an incredible collection of bozos all in one studio.

i imagine beck's summer reading list has a lot of charles murray

salon war room IDs our man as a john birch society admirer, makes sense.

David Frum weighs in: What the hell is going on at Fox News?

is anyone else weirded out by Hannity's hair helmet?

comments on frum page are 0_0

If Dems can tie him to the public's perception of the GOP then the Dems will be in power forever.

Do they even have to do the tying anymore?

Beck: The second thing is, is that -- you know, I was called -- who was it that called me today, "a populist"? I'm not a populist! I've been saying this stuff when it was unpopular! I've got news for you: It's still pretty unpopular!

lol shhhh

unpopulist

more crying plz

one thing's for sure: it's even easier to mock fox news without folks ('round hyeah) getting all huffy now with crazypants blubbering every week.

looooooool

He has a face like a pound puppy.

he has the same face as a lot of these d-bags...well fed, liver-lipped, pale, heavy lidded...totally john gibson's douchey younger brother, hannity's cousin kinda thing.

His eyes are so dewy, though...it is kind of disturbing to me.

re: gibson, that guy is the worst

http://aftermathnews.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/gibson_john_fox.jpg

Results 1 - 10 of about 127,000 for glenn beck crying

whoah gibson's got the joker grin

beck just explained the state of US economy, using a jenga game with "Taxpayers" "Problem" "Solution" written on it

now talking about.. umm.. why the government "criminalizes the good guy" and something about militias and tax rallies (these people are the good guys?), with a split-screen of the jenga game

this is pretty low on the scale of crazy for him actually.

Dave Neiwert's been on a tear lately, diving into all the BSRW crap beck has been broadcasting lately

lolz Glann Beck and Penn Gillette, together at last

Oh that Missouri militia thing is what he was just talking about, then he interviewed Ron Paul himself

the whole militia thing is so bizarre to me, I mean, ppl are pretty well armed where I grew up & also hate the government, but in no way are they organized about it.

yeah what's gillete's deal is he like a weirdo libertarian dude ?

um yes

Penn Gillette's finest hour:

I'd rather watch different politics on tv, even if it is a John Bircher or militia member.

http://gawker.com/5184452/somethings-rotten-on-glenn-beck

seriously, this guy

every day he's got another prop

And another conspiracy theory that makes no fucking sense.

Unless I hear him wrong, the entire AIG scandal was cooked up deliberately to hide the SHOCKING TRUTH that... the Fed has been printing money. That's right, America, you heard it here first. We have been monetizing debt, which is of course technically inflationary, but is also in keeping with the concept of elastic currency, meaning that in times when money is short, in order to prevent, say, a run on banks, the Fed increases the money supply, because inflation is much, much, MUCH better than all-out shit-fit-throwing panic and blood in the gutters. Judiciously finding this balance is, in fact, the very thing the Fed was set up for. The Fed prints money. It's what they fucking DO.

But no. The President and AIG are in cahoots, and carefully planned two weeks of Obama media appearances to coincide with two weeks of white-hot popular rage so that there's no way anyone would have the leftover energy to notice that the Fed is printing money. Because THAT'S WHAT THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW.

Seriously, where is the gong? Somebody right the gong. Get this idiot off of television. He is too stupid to be on Fox News.

"tits akimbo"?

"VADGES DONT GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO WALTZ OFF WITH A BABY"?

hahahah

the bachmann-beck global currency stuff is hiLARious!!

except it isn't, really. the larouche type shit has taken all of, what, 64 days into obama's presidency to come out of 'legitemate' parts of the gop/right wing media.

beck just explained his plan for dealing with US enemies which is to go to afghanistan and just kick some ass, part of what he'd call the great global kick your ass plan. i am not making this up

gosh why didn't anybody else think of that

http://www.tvgasm.com/newsgasm/baby_hulk-hogan.jpg

Sorry, I'm still flabbergasted by this "monetizing the debt" business. I looked up that Jenga clip. He says in there that "last week they monetized the debt for the very first time." Then he says it again with emphasis, "for the very first time." First of all, that's ludicrous. I don't know what he's talking about, I really don't. Secondly, all they have done is bought a bunch of T-bills and turned them into cash. Last I checked, the target rate for 3-month T-bills is... zero. The yield is zero. The Fed won't even owe the Treasury any interest. They can roll them over when they mature (or "mature" in this case) or not. It doesn't matter. All it does is change T-bills into slightly more liquid cash, as one more hope of getting things moving a little more freely. It may not work at all, but it makes no actual economic difference. This hysteria over "OMG inflation!" is ridiculous. Add Glenn Beck to the mix, who apparently thinks that... they're trying to force the dollar to fail? Who does he imagine would benefit from that?

Silly kenan - once the dollar falls, they can move us all to the FEMA camps!

it's like hitler!
(also a feature on today's show w/a guy who wrote a book on hitler/lenin/stalin)

it's just... i can sit here and laugh at this hateful little cabbage patch kid scaremonger. But then there are people like my grandparents - in every other way rational human beings - who think they are really getting the straight dope with this guy. It really is grossly irresponsible.

i figure, even the smartest people find their own ways to be completely and utterly stupid. you just never know where it'll show up.

watching fox report right now & shep just gave a bullet-point list of the basics of geithner's plan, asked cameron what the critics were saying, next asking their biz correspondent what wall st was saying. it's pretty straightforward though of course i've got to check quite a few more sources just to feel like i get what's going on. i'm really not knowledgeable about this stuff. anyway beck has got to piss off the people at fox who do real news, and even the people who do opinion shows, because beck doesn't even try to learn much about what he's talking about or even do a professional quality show - he likely can't even handle interviewing anyone who disagrees with him.

http://www.cato.org/people/penn-jillette

Penn Jillette
H.L. Mencken Research Fellow

Penn Jillette, H.L. Mencken research fellow, is the louder, bigger half of the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller. He and Teller co-host a new series on Showtime that looks to debunk junk science, scares and scams with reason and logic. Jillette writes the "Final Word" column for Regulation magazine.

----

http://www.cato.org/people/-teller

Teller
H.L. Mencken Research Fellow

Teller, Mencken research fellow, is the smaller, quieter half of Penn and Teller. He and Penn Jillette appear regularly in Las Vegas and co-host a series on Showtime that looks to debunk junk science, scares and scams with reason and logic. He writes occasionally about freedom of speech.

Glenn Beck sez it's anti-American to try to keep newspapers afloat. Whether he's right or wrong on the merits of the topic, the writing is just so batshit crazy here that it's worth multiple reads, just to catch the crazy you missed the first time.

(Isn’t one PSB already too many?)

lolz

^^^get a fucking COPY EDITOR glenn beck

Pet Shop Boys?

(OK, fine, yes, I Goggled it)

"And I hate to “bury the headline” here, but maybe the newspaper business wouldn’t be bathing in red ink if they hadn’t alienated their readership and strayed so far the sensibility of the American people. I’m just sayin’. . "

King of the Morans

Sounds like he's had more PBRs than PSBs or PBSs lol amirite?

he's just a regular guy. he don't cotton to no book learnin.

major roffles that this tool is citing Jeffrey Archer as an authority on anything other than being a crazy fantasist and appalling novelist.

"...but I just as eagerly embrace the future, and I have no problem using every advance to its fullest and prioritizing what I want my elected officials spending their time and my money on"

except for like scinece 'n stuff.

Until just now I thought that this thread was about dude from the Eagles.

hasn't Beck called enough stuff anti-American.. also does he (as usual) completely not understand what he's talking about? i haven't read up on the bill but allowing an organization to function as a nonprofit =/ the government funding that organization. unless i work for the government and don't know it, but i highly doubt it. i could see how the nonprofit thing might be problematic but he should.. try to find a valid point? oh wait, that requires work, also intellectual honesty instead of going with his gut

intellectual honesty is un-American

sounds like something they make you learn at Obama's re-education camps

today, beck explains to you how the dems are sucking the blood from American business

http://i404.photobucket.com/albums/pp127/deanofsomething/vamp.jpg

for serious

jesus. nice barney / rahm slash fic

the morning joe crew just made fun of glenn beck for a solid 10 minutes
scarbs called him a parody of colbert's parody of a right wing talk show host.. after practically falling off his chair laughing several times

Scarbs' uncontrollable laughter was a treat.

great guy hes a great guy def

Is Brit chick on Morning Joe a Mike Myers character?

That's Tina Brown...who, yes, I guess is kind of like a Mike Myers character.

http://www.rozanehmagazine.com/JulyAugust07/tina-brown-book-pic.jpg http://www.thecinemasource.com/moviesdb/images/news/News%20-%20Mike_Myers%20-%20Walter_Mitty.jpg

Geez:

http://gawker.com/5206155/glenn-becks-scariest-meltdown-yet

re: that morning joe clip, it's great to see the dude get ripped into but i still think scarborough is like top 5 biggest douchebags on cable news

fuckin hate that guy

i've only watched his show a handful of times but he (Scarborough) seems astonishingly dumb even for cable news

wow awesome - totally unhinged

BECK: By the way, I just want -- I just want to show you, kids, water, not gasoline. I was -- I was actually told by our legal department, "Glenn, you can't just do that, you've got to" -- I said, yeah, this is why our country is so screwed up if I got to actually say, that wasn't really gasoline, kids. Don't do that at home, that would be really, really bad.

i wanna get dvr just to record Beck. dude is killin it!

My hope is that all the press he's getting lately will force him out of the dark corner of talk radio he's been swelling and festering in and into the cold light of day, where we will all mock him in rhyming unison, and then give him a swirly.

My worry is that he will actually be institutionalized, because genuinely insane people are very sad, and the last thing I want is for people to pity him. (Although that would still be better than taking his word at anything.) I think he's pretty eaten up with the same narcissistic personality illness that are the corkscrews in Blagojevich's brain, and also maybe a hint of schizophrenia, and possibly a splash of dissociative personality disorder. I would hate to have his brain, I really would.

Why is the world structured to reward extreme narcissism and dissociation? One for the ages, I suppose.

wow.

or, you know, he's acting. making it all up. entertaining.

But that's not better or worse than just being insane. It may not even be that much different.

i'm not making a judgement call on that. I'm just saying, it's no secret that these guys are in it for the ratings a lot of times, it's a business, etc. i remember olbermann saying on bill maher that he knew of a few Fox News guys who have told him before that if one day the money was all of a sudden flowing in for pundits pandering to liberals they would switch.

I mean, the guy's putting on a show, that's all.

so can we speculate now on whom specifically olbermann was refering to?

xxpost Clearly, but who is really buying the Glenn Beck crying routine? It's really unconvincing. As theater, it's incompetent, so either he thinks he's a clever clever actor, or he's just nuts. Either way, going on TV with this shtick is a bad idea.

Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg are both on my tv screen at the same time. Alert the cops!

xp Who out there loves to watch grown men cry? Much less about FASCISM?

it's like if they put Stephen Colbert on a "real" news channel and took away the live audience so no one would know whether he was kidding

yeah what is this beck show about today? what might repeat?

oh my god this is the axis of crazy

ok, part of what i'm getting from beck is that what was so bad wasn't hitler-stalin-lenin, it was the fact that after the war we had FDR AND THE NEW DEAL.. THE HORROR

After the war we had uh President Truman...

Yeah the Hitler shit is just a massively ramped-up argument for why you should be afraid of the government. Just as all Hitler shit is a massively ramped-up argument for... whatever. The Godwin is strong with him.

man the pro wrestling comparison is getting better and better, that gas can thing was straight WWE

gaah, brain fried. of course. but honestly, i'm listening to this guy & he goes on for a bit with footage of nazis and the like (oh, here it goes again) and then switches right over to FDR 'we have nothing to fear but fear itself' and then to obama re: choosing hope instead of fear. just runs it all together

Can someone break down for me what the Republican anti-new deal argument that I'm hearing everywhere lately is all about? Half-serious question here. What does it even mean to say things like "the government doesn't create jobs"? How does it make sense to argue that FDR's government-based programs didn't end the depression, instead it was the WAR, when the reason that the WAR was so good for the economy was because it spurred the government to spend ludicrous amounts of money on WAR stuff?

it is not a cogent position because it is basically a smokescreen for the right's real beef with FDR, which was that he broke the backs of oligarchs and "redistributed the wealth". But they can't say that because it makes them look like a bunch of greedy, selfish bastards (who, by the way, couldn't care less about job creation). So instead they prop up this weird, half-formed argument about the gov't being inefficient and ineffectual in directing the economy.

I believe their argument also somehow deeply draws on the idea that WAR is a great thing. But... does anyone even believe that?

um.. where were you for the last 8 years

kenan, dude, the ~military industrial complex~

I know people act on the belief that war is good, but more fundamentally, who's in favor of more missing limbs for everyone? I don't like to think that the opposing point of view is simply venal and vicious and basically anti-human, because that's too reductive. But it's hard to make much else out of this particular argument.

there are people so deeply self-absorbed that the venality, viciousness, and anti-humanity of their actions that is so readily apparent to others somehow escapes them

the neocons seemed to have theorized away every doubt about going to war in iraq & convinced everyone it'd be quick.. i recall watching an interview with kristol a couple years ago & he was so smug and blase about the real-world consequences of policies (issue in question - why bush can't send more troops until after the 2006 elections). maybe? easy to advocate for war when it doesn't actually directly affect you or your family or your city, and when being a successful advocate helps your career.

like I said, self absorption is a thing of wonder

(if I ever meet william kristol I am going to kick him in the balls, btw)

xposts I guess I'm saying the same thing I was trying to say about glenn beck. In the Venn diagram, the choices are "crazy" and "stupid," and "crazy" is represented with a blue circle and "stupid" is represented with a yellow circle, and the final diagram is a single green circle.

i think that americans' indifference to waging war (having never had one visited upon them) is a pretty well-worn idea by now, no?

like dudes we have literally not had battles on our soil for like 150 years! i can't think of anywhere else off the top of my head that can say the same

Well, yeah, that's the OTHER thing that ended the Depression: after WWII, we were the only country that still had any means of production. Everyone else had to lick their wounds for 20 years or so.

I was taught in school (in the uk) that the Depression only ended because of WWII and the need for massive industrial production of armaments etc.

One man's hellscape is another man's ticket to economic domination, I guess. It seems so obvious. I am rattling on a bit, I guess.

One of the things that really pissed me off about that Bill Maher movie "Religulous" was the way he slammed Muslims for being especially violent. In many cases they are, but seriously, a movie about religion is the wrong place to discuss it. Gravely wrong. The uneven distribution of resources causes violent conflict, just as surely as the uneven distribution of air pressure causes wind. Religion? Grow up.

Of course back in the 30s/40s the conservatives were saying the same stuff against the New Deal--but this time around they have a guy on who TV who cries and pours fake gasoline people so they might prevail.

on people

Plus even the hellscape idea - I read something a few months ago about war-videogames and their relationship to how we understand war: in a game, even at the beginning, the POV soldier's capable of blowing away a disproportionate number of enemies without dying himself. Which isn't all that unrealistic in situations where 'our' military have far superior technology to 'theirs': but it still serves to dull the "hellscape" image. plus the romanticisation of wartime injury as "veterans' battlescars", etc.

One of the things that really pissed me off about that Bill Maher movie "Religulous" was the way he slammed Muslims for being especially violent.

Maher has always struck me as irritatingly facile so I didn't bother with this movie so I assume that this is related to the oft-repeated atheist canard that "religion is responsible for [insert dubious percentage] of the world's wars" (a contention which is so dubiously constructed and easily disproved I'm shocked at how prevalent it is)... I would think that the more pertinent characteristic about Islam that has enabled it to entangle religion and politics and violence so tightly is the weird way in which the Koran does not differentiate between religious and civil life. There's no "render unto Caesar" moment for Mohammed. There's no separation of church and state. Mohammed was a political leader as much as a religious one, and a warrior at that. Of course, expecting Bill Maher to actually develop a nuanced understanding of anything is asking a bit much I guess...

Maher wanted to be Johnny Carson (and does a killer Carson impression sometimes without even really meaning to), and he's often funny on that level. But he habitually gets in over his head.

Which is not, btw, any kind of virtue.

Can someone break down for me what the Republican anti-new deal argument that I'm hearing everywhere lately is all about? Half-serious question here. What does it even mean to say things like "the government doesn't create jobs"? How does it make sense to argue that FDR's government-based programs didn't end the depression, instead it was the WAR, when the reason that the WAR was so good for the economy was because it spurred the government to spend ludicrous amounts of money on WAR stuff

The book around which a lot of this recividist anti-Rooseveltism has cohered is Amith Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, which I actually read a few months ago. I'm sympathetic to contrarianism by nature, and know from history that many New Deal programs like the AAA and NRA were batshit crazy in the we-gotta-try-anything spirit in which FDR was elected (and re-elected), so I figured what the hell. Holy shit. Apart from being written in a slovenly manner, with passages that may or may not be free indirect style or just examples of poor attribution, she offers the not terribly original argument that, yeah, WWII got us of the Depression. To accept that argument, however (which has a grain of truth), means you have to accept massive government spending and the subsequent deficits. Keynesianism!

This is a fantastic review.

*Amity Shales

I think I want a t-shirt that has just this printed on it:

http://image.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/keynes-1(4).jpg

she was on beck's panel today, in fact.

I'm still fuzzy on what, apart from massive government spending, the war was good for economically. Did it just give us all a big American stiffy, and that's what works every time?

One of the things that really pissed me off about that Bill Maher movie "Religulous" was the way he slammed Muslims for being especially violent. In many cases they are, but seriously, a movie about religion is the wrong place to discuss it. Gravely wrong. The uneven distribution of resources causes violent conflict, just as surely as the uneven distribution of air pressure causes wind. Religion? Grow up.

― tits akimbo (kenan), Friday, April 10, 2009 11:19 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The murderers who gutted Theo Van Gogh on the streets in Amsterdam did so because of uneven distribution of resources?

outside of massive govt spending, i imagine it probably did some to boost the post-Depression American psyche and cement this identity among avg joes of US = heroes, etc. so yeah stiffy it is, i guess.

this weird thing with the right that WWII brought us out of the GD rather than the financing of WWII is some real WTF.

xp As surely as they did because of religion, sure, why not?

My point is that our own Christian Bible contains just as much justification for taking up arms as the Koran, if that's what you want to read. Pissed off cat is pissed off.

I believe the counter argument to "the New Deal was a failure" is that after the gubmint started putting money into the economy and it started to grow again, FDR thought good times were happening and pulled back on the spending which lead to a downturn.

*xpost*

I think Mahr made the case that all the "big three" he covered in the movie have, and continue to, inspire violence. To omit this quite obvious fact would have left a gaping hole in the doc, which I thought was great, even if I didn't learn anything new from it.

Personally, I'm done with the notion of having to respect religion. If someone thinks I'm going to hell or am an infidel because I don't share their belief system, they simply can fuck right off.

Still counting the days until Glenn Beck's fall. It will be spectacular when it happens, and it will happen, mark my words. He is simply too unhinged for it not so. I'm thinking a cocaine/hooker scandal is the likely scenario.

I'm scanning the National Enquirer in the grocery store checkout line for news of his inevitable relapse into alcoholism.

I think it'll be back to the bottle for him.
ha, xpost

He points out the recovering alcoholic thing so much it drive me crazy, all part of his "I'm a regular guy" schtick. But the good news is he's getting weirder and weirder since Obama won the election, so it won't be long now...(I hope).

*xpost
I think he's mentioned a coke problem in his past as well, but perhaps I'm mistaken. He definitely seems like a cokehead.

Addict cat has an addictive personality.

Personally, I'm done with the notion of having to respect religion.

christ yes

is someone forcing you to go to church or something?

The pendulum swings wide both ways for addicts...the drunkest drunks turn into the jesusiest jesus-freaks. Beck has traded booze and drugs for the adrenaline highs of attention-whoredom, and that might be enough for him. But if he starts thinking he's indestructible, he might have a celebratory drink one night. I hope he does, and his head pops off.

xp I respect religion just fine, but I'm done ascribing peoples' motives to it when there are so much simpler ways to explain things lying all around.

Individual people can have faith. Societies are a lot more practical than that.

Sorry, I think it's willfully naive to avoid religion as the source of the problem.

Also faith and religion are very different things.

wait which problem?

Also see: the difference between weather and climate, and the difference between mutation and evolution. In the grand scheme of why people wage war on each other, religion is about as important as what TV shows you watch. It helps, I guess. It informs cultural opinions. But it's not the REASON. Assuming so is an express ticket to prejudice.

I'd say the idea that religion can be cleanly separated out from political, economic, and psychological/emotional factors is perhaps more willfully naive

x-post

I'd say the idea that religion can be cleanly separated out from political, economic, and psychological/emotional factors is perhaps more willfully naive

Yeah, this is true. It's just turning into a frustrating thread and my hyperbole got away with me.

I accept full responsibility for the frustrating part. Oops.

I'm okay with getting a rep for having anti-religion prejudice.

stuff like women being treated like animals (or worse) and 7 year olds running around with "God Hates Fags" signs gets old. and yeah, i suppose i hold religion culpable, if for no other reason than the moderates who identify as religious (not to mention many live & let live progressives) seem all to eager to ignore it/ make excuses. i'm probably not being fair or nice, but there you go. keep that shit at home and/or church.

(y'all pardon me, i've had a few..)

It's a kill/die ratio. You will kill for what you will die for. Given any significant numbers, people don't kill or die for God. They may claim to, but the 9/11 hijackers who were about to get all those virgins in the afterlife were still hanging around strip clubs right before that. One last tickle before the big adios. The extremely abstract, more spiritual parts of our brains are never motivations to do base things like kill and die. Societal pressures do that. And societies do not have faith, they either have what the next guy has or they do not.

I suppose it is that old Human Condition, that everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves, and almost all of us settle for "Ok, maybe this is big enough" and miss the point entirely.

God I need to get some sleep.

btw oppressing women isn't unique to Muslims

Come on, man, you already tried that strawman upthread. ("My point is that our own Christian Bible contains just as much justification for taking up arms as the Koran, if that's what you want to read.") Nobody on this thread has tried to argue otherwise, have they?

What? No, of course not. You're saying religion is a cause of violence, and I'm saying that if that's the case, we would all be that violent. Americans go to church A LOT. War with Canada? Not so much. We're cool because we're fed, clothed, large and in charge. (As of a few months ago; the Large/In Charge stats do lag a bit.)

We're violent in a frighteningly institutionalized, chilly way that allows us to think stupid shit like, "Muslims are so violent."

I think what he's saying is that the real problem is that religious moderates are made too complacent by middle-of-the-road interpretations of their scriptures, and they're likewise too often willing to ignore or excuse extremists who gravitate towards radical interpretations.

Nobody's holding the Monolith of Islam culpable for all violence in the world, you seem to be spiriting up that particular bugaboo yourself.

No, Bill Maher was. I was just bitching about him doing that.

My beef is: these people have HUGE amounts of money and HUGE amount of real estate that they don't have to pay taxes on, yet often insist on shaping national policy on everything from what you can show on TV to how you have sex.

They try, but that's why this is a great country, and it's one of the real advantages of capitalism. I mean that sincerely. They can insist all day long, and let 'em. I get to watch as much blood and filth on TV and have as much butt sex as I want. For better or worse, our government is really bad at protecting us from ourselves.

*lights up unfiltered cigarette*

Oh my God I think I might be a libertarian. Time to go hand out toy guns to children, I guess. :/

You 'get to watch as much blood and filth on TV' because Christianity loves violence and hate sex. Look at what they're big symbol is.

http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.html

because Christianity loves violence and hate sex

See, I think that... no. It's not that that's not true, it's just the wrong argument. Nobody *actually* hates sex. It's just that if you tell children that sex is awful and dirty, they grow up to have awful, dirty sex. Sometimes you get a pornographer, sometimes you get a priest. (The implications of that are obvious enough.)

But porn doesn't create pedophiles, and John Woo movies don't create murderers.

Yeah, well the line between love & hate. I'm with ya there.

But it seems to me if there's any question about what's allowed and what's not violence vs sex the violence will win especially if the Xtian influence is there.

Violence and sex are so incredibly different, though. Movie violence is a little window to a place that you'll never go, with all it's shock and horror and weight. It's fiction, it's demonstrative of a situation and story and (hopefully) a moral that is clearly outside of you. Sex, otoh, is a place that few people ever WON'T go, so the line between what's tasteful and what's horrible is incredibly thin. It's not even a line. I don't know how to shoot bad guys in a way that will maximize my cool, and I will continue to simply take their word for it. But porn... well now you're getting really personal. It's not fiction anymore. It breaks the fourth wall by its very nature. Ok not exactly the fourth wall... let's call it the fifth wall. The wall between what you see as your life and what you see as being entertainment. It's pretty near the (ahem) bone, and people get squeamish sitting in a theater watching all this goings on. They should! Sex isn't just something people do kind of abstractly as part of a plot of something else, it's something that, like, holds marriages together. Makes babies. Really heavy shit. It's not about people being prudish, or being embarrassed to get aroused, even though that seems to be the common argument. It's because sex is more IMPORTANT than violence. Sex is real, and violence kind of (for most people) isn't.

Seriously. Do you want more graphic fucking in movies? To what end?

Boy was that ever off topic.

I don't think Bill Mahar singles out Islam any more than he does than the other "big two" in his doc.

"Who hasn't gotten drunk, got into a car, and ran over someone?" Beck asked. "That happens all the time!"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/11/glenn-beck-radio-show-ric_n_185857.html

btw wishing glenn beck relapses into alcoholism is some hateful shit

You're saying religion is a cause of violence, and I'm saying that if that's the case, we would all be that violent. Americans go to church A LOT. War with Canada? Not so much.

Holy crap, this is like the old "it's turtles all the way down," except instead of turtles it's bullshit. Like, saying something is A CAUSE of something else doesn't mean it's the only, the biggest, or the most important cause such that you can jump from A (religion is a cause of violent) to Z (we would all be that violent) and skip B through Y, then conclude that, since Z is untrue, A is untrue.

Next, American church attendance, talking about people or families who go every Sunday (or Friday, as the case may be for Jews), has been pretty steadily declining IIRC, or at best holding constant.

Finally, what's this bullshit "Canada" limitation? The US armed forces have been involved in some kind of hot action of one type or another nearly constantly since WWII. From Korea to Vietnam to Granada to Gulf War I to Gulf War II to Afghanistan to Panama to Libya to Bosnia to Somalia, there has been almost not a single year since V-J Day that our army has not been actively shooting at someone. And we have higher violent crime rates internally than pretty much every other country similar to us.

So, yeah, we ARE that violent. Big time. Among western democracies, I think we could fairly be categorized as practically bloodthirsty. Is "religion" the cause of that? Obviously not. Is it A cause? Yeah, insofar as it gets tied up in certain sociopolitical concepts like Manifest Destiny and our role as the god-given protector of democracy in the world.

To make that a little shorter, you can't both say, "Americans go to church A LOT" and look at the violence we tend to wreak on each other and on the world, and insist that they are unconnected. It would be remarkable if that were the case, not to mention unprecedented.

I might not be Christian but at least I don't pretend to drink blood. Yuch!

wow!

"Now I'm not accusing you of being a terrorist, but please tell me that you are not a terrorist"

You've got to be kidding me.

"i'd like to think most americans aren't colossal douchebags"

Come on Glenn Beck what is he's going to do? Go to congress and use his legislative powers to bilk the American citizens and their grandchildren out of trillions of dollars?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/glenn-beck-spins-the-holo_b_214118.html

watching this now

o_O

JEWS

this one's a keeper. crooks and liars has the .mov file.

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/glenn-beck-and-his-fellow-wingnuts-p

oh man, and the all time greatest hit: http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/projection-much-glenn-beck-warns-fas

Wow, the beginning of that is like some next level Network shit ^.

I like how Glenn is small but the fascist film clips ARE HUEG

also, JEWS

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/11/obama-created-by-jews-museum-killing-suspect-wrote/?eref=politicalflipper

will be interested/sickened to see what pretzel logic beck employs to spin THIS away from right-wingers

Easy; killer was a Neo-Nazi, and Nazis were leftists. See? They even had 'socialist' in their name.

At any rate, as somebody mentioned before, the next few years are going to keep Dave Neiwert busy. He's coming to Portland on his book tour, and I'll probably go catch him.

If Nazis were liberals then that means Prescott Bush was funding the left during WWII!

Okay, here's what I was looking for, a nice little rundown of the guy w/ relevant links and such.

If Nazis were liberals then that means Prescott Bush was funding the left during WWII!

I'm no fan of the Bushes but this has been debunked, btw

I think that the anti-thesis of Nazi politics is highly individualistic and anarchic libertarianism, but that's a kind of libertarianism few mainstream Republican pundits like. Thomas Sowell discussed the tendency to say that Nazism is the extreme extension of your political opponent's ideology and came to the conclusion that Nazism was a hard mixture of traditional and modern ideas about people and political power. A Conflict of Visions is actually a really fair book that a lot of famous leftists praised at the time for its insights into where modern ideologies come from. I recommend that book to people who like discussing politics, it's better than all of the books that come out and say that beliefs you don't like come from Satan, Hitler or biological problems people haven't evolved past. Sowell could actually be incredibly fair and impartial in books like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR3i4UkJ0c0&feature=player_embedded

Watching Beck clips is terrifying to me.

it's lol until u realize how many ppl are like "damn, really makes you think"

i think the first person i meet that parrots that whole Nazis are liberals schtick will be the first person i sucker punch

i really really really want him to be caught in some horrible scandal involving farm animals and meth and eagle scouts. really.

lolz "anti-negro"

i really really really want him to be caught in some horrible scandal involving farm animals and meth and eagle scouts. really.

Caught? If Glenn Beck can make shit up, so can we!

Holy shit, Gleen Beck caught in some horrible scandal involving farm animals and meth and eagle scouts! Really!!!

What a disaster for scouting.

we don't even need him to be caught in a scandal. all we need is for him to be interviewed by one remotely sane person because he absolutely skids off the rails into an evasive, mealy mouthed, transparently clueless fool whenever he's in conversation with people whose microphones he can't cut

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/201/25560/

first part is fun enough, but his incredulous expression when barbara asks him 'what are your real convictions?' a second time after his first generic answer about how he loves the founding fathers. he can't believe he's even being asked the question, and he's trying to laugh off the 'idiocy' of the person asking it, but for a split second you can almost see his panic when he realizes he doesn't know what to say

fish in a barrel, perhaps, but there you go

LOL at that last YouTube video. Someone should tell the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists that they're actually leftists.

lol cracked is actually funny these days??

Fox News can really get away with saying anything, because for their fans, it doesn't really matter, as everyone else is the liar and in on the take. It's ridiculous, but hey, most of the people that watch their shit hour after hour don't really have anything going on in their life to do other than watch these blowhards a couple of hours every night.

Can we agree that Beck's show is the most entertaining on FoxNews? I'm not even sure why I find him so intriguing.

entertaining, like a snuff movie

I usually love your articles but this one is totally off-point and just flat out wrong.

On the internet everyone is an athiest and/or a liberal. Because even if you aren’t you will get flamed all to hell, so I understand why you have to post shit like this. It does not change the fact that you are wrong about your assumptions of Mr. Beck.

is an agnostic merely an athier?

Fox News ILX can really get away with saying anything, because for their fans, it doesn't really matter, as everyone else is the liar and in on the take. It's ridiculous, but hey, most of the people that watch read their shit hour after hour don't really have anything going on in their life to do other than watch these blowhards a couple of hours every night.

http://stylemens.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cc8d453ef0115711b878c970b-300wi

June 09 interview - http://men.style.com/gq/blogs/gqeditors/2009/06/glenn-beck.html?mbid=typepad

I grew up in an alcoholic family, and I was the one who always made the family laugh. So “This is uncomfortable-laugh!” is what I grew up with. You know, my mom committed suicide. That became a really dark comedic shtick for me for a long time. I couldn’t deal with it any other way, so I would make jokes about it. There is no “act” per se. It’s me.

June 09 editorial - Our Government Is Acting Like Alcoholic, Abusive Parents - http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,528642,00.html

So basically Glenn Beck contain multitudes, and you just parcel bits of yourself out into different mediums and platforms?

Exactly. For example, I’m writing a futuristic action novel right now—I just named one of the characters last night around midnight, I wrote it down on a
piece of paper someplace—and it’s going to be a vehicle that makes my usual points, but in a totally different way.

wait, this is right after saying he understood Colbert is parodying people like him

"I’m writing a futuristic action novel right now—I just named one of the characters last night around midnight"

^^^good start

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3QWF1bZc3M

kinda wish he actually dressed up as a rodeo clown

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/auQJVhNH99c&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1";></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/auQJVhNH99c&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

o_O

...pretend that posted properly ;)

we need to be horribly attacked in order to prevent horrible attacks

Love that GQ picture. A sense of humor is def one in the plus column.

tom carson has a great bit about how beck and fox news map onto the characters from "lost": http://tinyurl.com/lzsd4q

That article makes me dizzy.. I think he's in love with his own writing.. doesn't matter if his description of Fox's core audience has any basis in reality - phrasing it the way he does sure sounds cool! seems he doesn't know what those people think and hasn't tried to find out, either. Did he only watch Beck?

and I don't know how you measure whether the channel had more "cultural clout" in GW Bush's first term. It's easy to say but is it accurate? I wish I had a LexisNexis account for transcripts, because I really wonder what Fox actually said on their news shows. my impression at the time, not watching Fox a bit, was that the mainstream media in general fell down on the job for years, as far as aggressively going after the Bush administration. I'm just saying, I don't trust these neat narratives. I read the WashPost and NYT trashing Gore for petty nonsense, the WashPost and NYT promoting the case for the Iraq war, and watched CNN and the major network news cheering the war on.

doesn't matter if his description of (what have you) has any basis in reality - phrasing it the way he does sure sounds cool!

#1 writing pitfall to avoid, excluding bad grammar and punctuation. Painting bullshit purple.

exactly. i wanted to take a red pen and cut 75% of that piece.

it is a sloooooooow news day, yet i am still watching studio b because it is getting a little weird, as it usually does when there's no major breaking news. there's still a half-hour left so maybe something very weird will happen.

OK why would he go on a forgiveness tour? if he illegally used public money for any of his travels, that's to be investigated and he should be held accountable. if it's just about the affair(s), why would he ask the people of south carolina to forgive him, because it doesn't matter a bit if they forgive him or not?

damn. sorry wrong thread. over to the GOP thread.

yall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGeZQrpZbjI

O_O @ 3:30, guys

He sounds like the wicked witch!!!

"get off my phone" def. not as badass as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=238y_E0zZK0#t=0m8s

Was 3:30 a drop? How is it possible for an adult male to make that sound?

this is the closest I've seen someone come to just out and out saying on the air that we shouldn't have to pay for diseased people, and we'd be better off just saving the money and letting them die.

that clip is hilaaaaaaaaaaaarious

dude I feel like I'm covered in Glenn Beck's spittle after listening to that

http://imgur.com/1zwLp.gif

jfc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpeye9hpWvQ

lol

love it.

A+ would get off phone again

MY GOD I LOVE TEH INTERNETS

Nancy Pelosi is proposing to pay for the $1.5 trillion plan by — wait for it — taxing the rich. Anyone making over a $1 million a year will be paying for our government-run health care. Because damn those millionaires, what have they ever done for society besides hoard money?

Like Donald Trump: He'll do anything to get his name on another tower — like hire hundreds and hundreds of construction workers for months at a time. He's so selfish.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,534135,00.html

How Glenn Beck Is On Track For An $18 Million Year
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/29/how-glenn-beck-is-on-trac_n_193168.html

wait for it — taxing the rich

the rich are your betters, you'll be happier when you just accept it

good grief. looks like the big money there is in his talk radio gig isn't it? and then there's all those people paying for whatever is on his interwebs site..

i listened to a lot of his tv program today & when he got done bashing health care reform, he went after the unions on the grounds that.. they're only in it to gain power and are against not only the managers, but the workers themselves.

TONIGHT on the factor

glenn beck is on! will say something to the folks about his radio rant
may bring props of some kind

after that? teen strippers!
may not be in studio with beck ;_;

CAUTION

they played a clip from beck's tv show, where he is watching barbara boxer get yelled at by some dude, and apparently beck enjoys this so much, he has to sit there and eat chocolate pudding with strawberries + whipped cream while it is on. so gross. ??? this should be happening in a john waters movie

i do find this guy fascinating because i think he's genuinely crazy and delusional whereas hannity is just purely trolling

I dunno; I'm with a few others who've mentioned that he seems like he DESPERATELY wants to be taken as mentally unstable so's he can build cred as this modern rightwing Howard Beale type.

The desperation is so palpable that it results in visible flop-sweat; both literally and metaphorically.

Glenn flat out calls Obama a racist

http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0709/beck_attacks_ed5a4e5b-ac5b-4699-b431-d37c16986211.html

who knew
that in the year 2010
we would have a
REVERSE RACE WAR

fingers crossed that glenn talks some shit about Obama's mama next

"he has a deep seated hatred of white people... i'm not saying he doesn't like white people... this guy i believe is a racist..."

huh?

deep seated hatred of his mom

I suppose he should have some expertise in the mannerisms of racists, what with the featuring clips of Nazi marches behind you on your TV show and all.

When I heard about the Obama cop comment the first thing that came to my mind was, wow, this 'stupidly' comment I can relate to through 100% of my experiences with police officers. I immediately thought back to last year when my house was broken into and how the cop that came to file a report not only didn't believe me (asking several times if I was making this up) but he accused me of a number of illegal things for which he had no basis, had a condescending attitude, and left me feeling like I had done something wrong. I think if a cop does something stupid, he should be called out on it, not protected for the sanctity of the position or some such BS.

i mostly have avoided police but one of my friends recently got arrested and held at the station for an entire DAY over an unpaid parking ticket (rolled through a stopsign on a residential street pulling out of starbucks, and the cop was all rude to her when she claimed to actually live in the posh neighborhood she happened to live in, and the ones at the station said they wouldn't let her go until she signed the report saying police acted properly and everything was her fault).

i was in traffic court in jersey once & it is my opinion that the majority of the people there had been pulled over for a) driving while black and/or b) being an out of state driver, frankly

ben stein just told glenn beck that obama was part of some minister farrakhan thing that is against israel
beck agrees that obama is anti-israel

apparently beck enjoys this so much, he has to sit there and eat chocolate pudding with strawberries + whipped cream while it is on. so gross.

only thing worse than glenn beck = glenn beck in the act of feeding

don't feed him after midnight

Nothing's more disgusting than a nasty bald fat man eating 'soft' foods on TV. Next: giving cone to some Dairy Queen.

good lord, beck has gone all-in here
FNC distances itself from Beck calling Obama a racist

Beck proceeds to try and bait Ben Stein into calling Obama a racist & keeps dancing around it with leading questions like 'well he just has racist friends then?' & they go on more about how Obama admin is against Israel

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/glenn-beck-pleads-his-audience-not-r

http://gawker.com/5330803/glenn-beck-man-of-a-thousand-voices

^^^high quality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s96rSjLf_dg&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fuser%2Fjeraboo29&feature=player_profilepage

"For the first time in human history we have available to us the ability to communicate simultaneously with millions of our fellow men. ...

"An obligation rests on us to see that it is devoted to real service and to develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile."

Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, 1924

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/fnc/glenn_beck_off_this_week_vacation_or_something_more_124727.asp

A Fox News spokesperson denied our accounts and simply told us, "Glenn Beck will back on Monday." But several sources inside FNC confirm that this is a forced vacation.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,543822,00.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD1X6u9GW-0&NR=1

So who is the real enemy?

"Common Sense" has been No. 1 for the last 10 weeks. One of the last chapters is "The Enemy Within" — I wrote it months ago. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out — let me give you this quote:

"It's not just the political class who has mastered the art of deception. There are other potentially deadly masters who will seek to exploit your frustration and sense of desperation. Many will warn you of government tyranny; they'll talk of secret societies, vast conspiracies, shadow governments, and the need for violent action. I urge you to stay away from these individuals and those ideas."

& here's that clip daria-g was talking about, and it really is beyond

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj8Oul6183I

(shot of two black guys in jackets outside polls staring at camera)

"there... if that's not intimidation... we're talking about an ARMY being built by our president... ok, play the video of Louis Ferrakhan."

(Ferrakhan: "You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change. And that is why Barack has captured the youth. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear.")

"OK. We've been looking for connections on this story for weeks, they have this story sealed down as tight as a drum..."

(clip of small room of college kids in fatigues, one of them steps out of line and says "because of Obama, I aspire to become the next lawyer")

"OK, Stop, stop, stop, stop. I am not suggesting the President of the United States or anybody in this government has anything to do with the Black Panthers, with Louis Farrakhan, or this group here. But this is a... that was a very militant looking group, the Black Panthers are very militant looking, and they ARE militant. Pat... what is happening here?'

lolz the Black Panthers have been de facto defunct as an organization for over 30 years (as I mentioned on some other thread) so weird to use them as a bogeyman.

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/obamas-army-glenn-beck-sees-scary-bl

!?!?

Watched those last two videos, it all seems very very weak as damning evidence for the evil revolutionary new world order intention of the Democratic Party!

Surely any competent dirtdigger would be able to come up with something better, staged or not, than just showing a row of people SOME OF WHICH ARE OBV NOT IN VERY GOOD SHAPE and insinuating they are among the mighty st0rmfr0nt elite of universal revolution??

in fuller context, throughout the week Beck has been playing an Obama clip over and over: "We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." He then demands to know why that's needed, demanding to know who Obama thinks his enemies are. Then plays clips of lefties fretting about the people bringing guns to the town halls, saying 'He thinks the enemy is US.' Then back to the civilian force, saying the white house won't answer his questions, which leads him to fear that there could only be one possible answer for why Obama wants a Civilian Army...

Throughout the week & in past weeks, repeated references to some terrible violent event that could change our Republic overnight. Basically what he's pointing at is that the Left is preparing for Obama's assassination, perhaps even anticipating the opportunity to openly assert martial control with his 'Civilian Army', and that we-the-actual-people need to be ready to stand up to that tyranny, should that event come to pass. This whole week's been building to last night's episode

He's at his peak as a performer, dude is just unshakably ON with anger and confidence, but now that his narrative is clear, and it's... that clip? I couldn't believe it falls that flat, that clip is just laughable. Whoever helped him assemble the Lenin=Bernanke 'Road To Fascism' segment was clearly on vacation the day they put that montage together. We'll see just how scary those kids who want to be lawyers are to Beck's audience, I surely hope he just overplayed his hand

"We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded [as the military]."

What was the actual context of this btw? It does sound super-scary if isolated. Celebratory talk for municipal police department or something?

it does sound scary, doesn't it

...And we're going to grow our Foreign Service, open consulates that have been shuttered, and double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 to renew our diplomacy. We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200908270033

& I'll post this again from Daria's cable news thread, 'cause Alex Jones hasn't come up on this thread yet

good lord, the cable news is SO WEIRD lately!! this is my news thread

as Daria notes, Alex Jones' bugaboo is the Bilderbergs, i.e. Capitalist power structures throughout. But Beck is a Capitalist tool, and masterfully substitutes 'The Government' as the principal enemy, while covering for millionaires

a few googles and it seems clear the 'civilian force' thing is straight from Alex Jones as well, but Beck's added all the race-baiting

http://www.infowars.com/wnd-claims-obama-national-security-force-back-on-agenda/

oh yes haven't seen this one yet looks good sure - http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/obdedvd.html

(advertisement) ammunition supplies are low... food is next... click now

it does sound scary, doesn't it

sure!

aha Peace Corps, context asked for & received. Thanks.

(Obv hyperbole though hopefully; more power to Peace Corps and all, but I'd only want a maximum of one force as "powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the US Military.)

(ie ideally none of those, but one is in place already and not easily or even prudently dismantible)

ugh someone graffiti bombed my neighborhood recently with INF0WARS.ORG NO NEW WORORLD (sic) ORDER written alloverthefuckinplace

Whenever I see infowars or Alex Jones bumper stickers, t-shirts and graffiti I get the same feeling I used to get when I'd see Tool bumper stickers. It's the secret thrill to see that support for either exist outside the internet.

I wasn't making fun anatol -- when you watch Glenn Beck's show, he really does find the occasional half-sentence that sounds a little funny when taken out of context, even if you go in armed. Imagine an audience already slightly wary of Obama, and his impact on them

I know what you mean about Alex Jones -- his stuff is really striking, and unlike Beck, he is actually angry at deserving targets, he takes on corporations. Beck's jiu-jitsu is to funnel Jones' most compelling conspiracy theories and spin them explicitly against the government, while defending Capitalism. But either way, this is a breakthrough week for Alex Jones after being so throughly cribbed by Fox's biggest commentator / entertainer.

Headline story on Media Matters: Glenn Beck Mainstreams Fringe Conspiracy Theories

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIWSI2tkDM

I wasn't making fun anatol -- when you watch Glenn Beck's show, he really does find the occasional half-sentence that sounds a little funny when taken out of context, even if you go in armed. Imagine an audience already slightly wary of Obama, and his impact on them

Yeah, fair enough, got that. Was just doing ilx lol throwing-up-hands yoga at the lateness of the hour. But still it seems... weak? I'm probably elitist then hurrah! :P :D

This bit takes that quote,

"We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded...

Adds the erroneous "half a trillion dollars" funding bit and that lets two guests see how can get even more horrified at the prospect than him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgSBumvA11M

He seems to agree with the David Bellavia who suggests that the situation is like when he was in Iraq confronted with a mob, and you've got 'a window of opportunity' to take out the 'two or three' agitators. What could he be suggesting?

Following this with that little sign he does so well..."Well, gosh..."

Oh my typing skilss - how = who, sign = sigh, etc.

I tried listening to Alex Jones's live internet feed and I couldn't take it cos they stopped every 3 minutes to play the same commercials for guns and training/apocalypse seeds/Jones's newest book.

At least he's exposed Obama's oligarhy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0OUXkZO8vE&eurl

I tried listening to Alex Jones's live internet feed and I couldn't take it cos they stopped every 3 minutes to play the same commercials for Guns and Training: Apocalypse Seeds, Jones's newest book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWL-pfCao-U

Take me to art school, Professor Beck!

"IT'S IN REVELATIONS, PEOPLE!!!!"

http://www.mundosimpson.com.ar/imagenes/technical/1f03.jpg

I guess if Beck had his way, he'd probably want to destroy these progressive/communist/fascist pieces of art. As we all know, the first step toward fighting back against an emerging evil fascist state is to...destroy everything with even a hint of an opposing ideological view?

The notification "glenn beck has new answers" always makes me giggle a bit in my mouth.

"Progressives, fascists, communists - now what do they all have in common - to-day? Well that's something you're going to have to figure out."

Fuck, he's so maddening. What is his point? That Rockefeller was a commie/fascist? That these things are either a) hidden or b) in plain sight and that they a) are unnoticed or b) indoctrinate you. At one point he says "Don't let any of these people, ever, tell you anything other than the truth, and that is...early 20th century progressives and the progressives of to-day..." and just leaves you hanging on..WHAT GREAT TRUTH WERE YOU ABOUT TO IMPART BECK, WHAT!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJkxBLgd5Hs

I really can't recommend this Salon story enough:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index.html

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce (Kelly) apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

That's a terrible thing to do! What a jerk.

glenn greenwald on beck and the becketeers:

Increasingly, there is great difficulty in understanding not only Beck's political orientation but, even more so, the movement that has sprung up around him. Within that confusion lies several important observations about our political culture, particularly the inability to process anything that does not fall comfortably into the conventional "left-right" dichotomy through which everything is understood.

... Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties' establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom -- the Ron Paul faction -- objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these "tea party" protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.

that article is excellent!

"Like the establishment leadership of both political parties, he has no core political principles or fixed, identifiable ideology."

Wow. Yeah, there it is, right there.

lolz @ becketeers

Toward the end of Beck's time in Phoenix, KZZP sponsored a free Richard Marx concert at the Tempe El Diablo stadium in downtown Phoenix. Marx was at the time riding high on a triple-platinum album, and the show was a monster publicity coup for Beck's rival. But Beck was in no mood to let KZZP bask in the concert's glow without a fight. He and Hattrick arrived at the stadium early on the night of the show and gave the sound technician $500 to play a prerecorded Y95 promo moments before KZZP's Bruce Kelly was scheduled to announce the show. As an audience of nearly 10,000 waited for the show to begin, the KZZP mics were cut and Beck's voice suddenly boomed out of the stadium's sound system: "The Y95 Zoo team is proud to present … Richard Marx!" As soon as he heard his name, an oblivious Marx walked onto the stage and began to play. As the KZZP crew stood stunned offstage, scattered Y95 agents popped up and began throwing "Y95 Zoo" T-shirts in every direction to a cheering crowd.

"It was brilliant," remembers Kelly, who gave Beck his first lessons in the art of publicity. "Totally brilliant. He nailed us."

great illustration of just where Beck's coming from. if you missed part 1 of the Salon story, Beck and Kelly were hard partying DJs doing coke and partying hard as good friends in the early 80's, then ended up with competing morning shows in Phoenix, at which point Beck starts pulling 'pranks' like this & making fun of his old friend's wife's miscarriages -- he wasn't doing this to just anyone, he was doing this to friends

hard partying / partying hard good grief edit one post

shameless, batshit insane opportunist revealed to be shameless, batshit insane opportunist

Greenwald on fire today.

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

scroll up 5 posts guys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9nVpO1Dvfk

now that's showmanship

FORGET ABOUT THE FROGS BECAUSE MOST OF THEM ARE FAKE

FORGET ABOUT MY JEANS BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT ACTUALLY ARMANI

((( GB )))

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/b/b5/Snakewalker.jpg

couric palins beck
http://www.fark.com/cgi/vidplayer.pl?IDLink=4657977

he's such a dreaful human being

how cute of katie to let him off the hook so easily

people just wanna know -- what is the white culture?

A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce (Kelly) apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

I kind of hope he gets shot in the face now.

how cute of katie to let him off the hook so easily

Just watched it. I didn't feel she let him off easily. He just refused to answer. And I think the way she handled it put him in a very bad light (Beck: "I won't give you a soundbite."; Couric: "Well, this is unedited. You can give us an unfiltered explanation now." Beck: "No.").

I actually like the way Couric does these types of interviews. She doesn't get confrontational. She doesn't get distracted or sidetracked. She doesn't lose her cool. Is she far behind in the TV news ratings? Because I haven't seen her NBC or ABC nightly-news anchor counterparts do such effective interviews (but I admit I haven't watched many lately, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot).

i think this interviewing style works better with someone like palin as there was some question about her intelligence. katie could sit back and let palin hang herself. beck is different though because he makes a living sounding like an idiot and is almost proud to filibuster. this is just more of the same. when i see this, i don't think she got him. it seems like she was afraid to press him on why he wouldn't answer.

i'm just curious
this is adrian from florida
you didn't really address it
just for our purposes
no, for this show
some people might say that sounds kinda racist
people just want to know
adrian wants to know
i'm not.. i'm not trying to trap you
people wanted to know
if you felt like you wanted to explain it, you have all the time in the world

What do you think she could have done differently?

Not trying to grandstand with that question. I'm genuinely curious, because I don't see it (and I don't see it for precisely the reason you mention: Beck is a professional blowhard and doesn't care if he sounds like a loutish idiot with his refusals to answer).

give the situation the weight it deserves? i don't see anything wrong with her using more force and probing deeper into why he is willing to make statements like this that are clearly racist and why he won't explain himself. yes, he is a massive douche and would do his best to wiggle out of answer those as well, but at least she would be asking the questions that put his whole career into context, as opposed to treating it like she got an email that pointed out a minor thing that he may have said once. her demeanor suggests to me that she doesn't think this is very offensive or at least not really that big of a deal and i think it's this attitude that allows guys like beck to prosper.

jeff, it could just as easily be argued that, in the context of the interview itself, being accusatory or shaming about something like that only justifies his refusal to answer, or allows him and his supporters to act like he's being persecuted, set up with "gotcha" questions, etc., such that it's actually a matter of principle not to cooperate with the way some journalist is framing the question.

Couric is 100% aware of this and surely 100% aware of her reputation as a "softer" journalist, and strikes me as having pretty deliberately chosen this interview style where she politely sets thorny issues in people's laps to say whatever they wish, and then just lets it be really telling and informative when someone can't or won't answer a simple polite question from a smiling, friendly Couric.

^^^^ This.

no, you're wrong. she handled that pretty well; any more confrontational and he probably would have gotten angry and hit her or told her to make him a sandwich. the way it is, it comes off as very condescending and makes him look like a child, which is about right

xxxp jeff

yeah, i'm well aware of that. what is the net then? did this really accomplish anything?

I would say no b/c Beck's followers will see this as a brave refusal to fall into the same "traps" Couric set for Palin. Meanwhile, everyone else will see it for what it is. But those people already know Beck is full of shit.

this might sound like a super-obvious statement but I would be wary of expecting journalists conducting interviews to "accomplish" anything besides finding out what the subject has to say; it's not really their job to pointedly expose the subject or discredit their views, after all

yeah i'm not hoping to convince the beckettes of their boy's evil, whatever imo

nabisco... that seems incredible naive. no offense at all btw.

incrediblY... there's too much PR involved to let it be anything but a campaign of interests or spin. i'm sure Couric was handed a list of things that were off-limits for Beck.

Beck's listeners are so bizarro-world, there's no convincing them of anything outside of their sphere anyway. Beck can say whatever bullshit he wants at this point & as along as long as he shoehorns it into some provocative, conspiratorial pretzel-logic, they'll eat it up obediently.

part of what was interesting about the Palin interview was that the whole defensive narrative was predestined before it even began -- no matter what happened, the right was going to rally around Palin as unfairly maligned or set up by a vicious media elite, right? which made it almost comically awkward, this dual performance where Couric had to portray herself as bending-over-backward neutral as Palin made it increasingly tempting to unravel her words and ask pointed questions about what the hell she was saying. (this became a whole weird journalistic-ethics issue, I think, the way people in mainstream media couldn't very objectively state or argue what loads of them surely believed to be objectively true -- that Palin wasn't very well informed or in command of a ton of world or policy knowledge.)

xpost - Shasta there's a lot built into that "this is super-obvious" preface but no, I don't think there's anything so naive about accepting that it's just not the role of journalists to be "right" in interviews

the idealistic expectation that a journalist doing a TV interview must pointedly expose what's correct seems more describable, to me, as "naive"

on network tv, with millions of advertising dollars, producers, agents, scripts, music, make-up, lights...

you really think it's just a couple of folks just chewing the fat?

seriously.

nabisco, what would you say the point of this interview is?

this part btw: "I would be wary of expecting journalists conducting interviews to 'accomplish' anything besides finding out what the subject has to say"

ratings? XP

i agree. it's just a commercial.

I don't agree with Nabisco on that point (aggressive, savvy journalists can force a lot from an interviewee). But that's not the only way to proceed, and it may not be the most effective way in some cases. I have trouble seeing how any interviewer would get past a flat refusal to answer. Beck's not trying to be cagey. He's cutting off the entire line of inquiry.

Maybe an aggressive, tough interviewer would have kept asking the same thing from different vantage points? Not sure it would have made any difference, and it probably would have let Beck play his stupid "victimization" card far more effectively. Here, he just seemed like a tool.

(xp)

yeah, he doesn't want to answer but he did say that to answer would be to fall into her trap. to me, that opens up a new line of questioning that speaks to his character.

Guys, what if she had forced Beck to admit that when a talk show host does something illegal, it isn't really illegal? (Like in that Ron Howard movie.)

I was hoping she would punch him. And that he would cry.

there is nothing katie couric, or any other journalist, in a sit down with beck, could have exposed! with several brilliant questions!! for all to see!!! that he's a racist creep

you really think it's just a couple of folks just chewing the fat?

no, I don't, and didn't say so. I said:

I would be wary of expecting journalists conducting interviews to 'accomplish' anything besides finding out what the subject has to say

^^ this isn't a statement about the workings of interviews, it's a statement about what kinds of imperatives or expectations you want to project onto journalists in terms of what they should or should not accomplish when conducting an interview. (e.g., just because the subject is wrong about something doesn't necessarily create a moral duty on the journalist's part to reveal them as wrong, because that's just not, at base, what interviews are for -- both platonically and in, partly because of all the considerations you guys are listing, in mucky reality!)

I am trying to figure out exactly what people are reading into nabisco's words here that would make them naive as opposed to cynical.

(I mean, the intimation behind his statement that I inferred to is exactly what people are accusing him of ignoring, namely that interviews are to some degree staged to have a particular outcome and therefore expecting them to reveal information shocking or damning to either party involved in them is highly, highly unlikely unless one person breaks the code (this is what I assume "Frost/Nixon" is about; I haven't seen it yet so I can't use it as a definitive example) or one person is profoundly retarded (Couric/Palin).)

wow I need an editor

he comes off pretty well in the interview overall. couric does not hold him to the fire, at all, and he dodges every bullet by abstracting to passionate populism every time. and he needles at Couric just enough to wink at his audience about his situation, but he remains perfectly civil.

'listen to REASON. and not special interests. stop. and do the RIGHT thing.' he says. seconds after arguing that allowing health insurance companies to sell their plans across state lines is the solution to the problem. Couric does not call him out on a single point, nope it's a platform for him talking about open Libertarianism, Mormonism and his mom's suicide, which all ties back into personal responsibility.

love the part where he compares his early identification as a 'social liberal' to his alcoholism, 'I was an alcoholic, and I'm a recovering alcoholic, and I think I was more of a liberal not for any thought process, but just wanted to keep all my options on the table and be cool with everything'.

the only real wormish moment is of course the 'white culture' line. he acts as if the question is such a given that it is a trap to even have to answer it, an indignity to be asked it. and of course the question is the exact trap minorities have been asked in job interviews for years, the act of self-definition they've got to bring to the table before they get the job, the thing that results in improvised one-sentence Sotomayor sound bytes. And Beck just refuses to play, as if he's above it! I think this actually may be one of the first times I've seen a white guy called out on it on national television, and of course he mocks the game behind it and then refuses to play. Total privilege card. But I like that moment, because it's clear that he knows that if he did play, he'd lose, and not because of any game

xpost & I don't read nabisco's comments as naive. but I hear shasta in that couric kinda let me down bigtime with this interview, it is depressing to see this guy's power growing by the week

what a disaster for nbc

she's on cbs

what a disaster for you

what a disaster for traps

haha what's weird is that, to be honest, I wasn't even trying to say anything I'd consider that contentious -- I just meant that the basic platonic idea of an interview is to get the subject to talk about him/herself and his/her opinions, so that you as a viewer have a sense of who they are and what they have to say. it can be done in a softball way that just hands the person airtime, or it can be done in an incisive/challenging way that catches them out on their ideas, or anywhere in between. so while it's always disappointing when someone who I consider awful or wrong is being interviewed and the journalist isn't pressing in and exposing all their awfulness/wrongness, it's not like I necessarily consider this the ultimate duty of conducting an interview -- in fact, I think it'd be a bad thing if all journalists took this up as an ultimate duty. (already, half of the reason we can even talk about this is that TV interviews themselves are so mediated that they function as a form of editorial content, in the end, in terms of what's presented and how it's contextualized; I don't think it'd help for that fact to get bigger.) so I guess sometimes I can be wary of expecting an interview to prove or demonstrate something; sometimes it seems fair to me to ask the subject "why did you say X" or "how do you respond to X criticism" and let them say whatever it is they say, and leave it to the viewer to bullshit-detect that. which is partly why I think Couric's style works with certain things, insofar as letting Beck censor himself or Palin look uninformed on her own lives right up to that platonic ideal of an interview, where it's just like ... well, this is who this is.

many xposts: Those Frost/Nixon interviews were hours and hours. It was also a totally unusual situation.

I don't know about platonic ideal. This is one kind of interview that's televised, on a major network, between two major personalities, &c. Differing tacks, degrees of true or manufactured intimacy, degrees of interviewer–interviewee compatibility and levels of research all yield different results.

hi dere, frost/nixon is pretty damn good, totally worth seeing. also maybe a little interesting to consider that, despite how g-beck comes off as a tragic nixon too-clever-by-half bitter dude, he would probably way more identify himself with media-savvy international showhost/playboy david frost than with nixon. each age gets the stars it deserves i guess

leave it to the viewer to bullshit-detect that

If TV viewers generally had working bullshit detectors, we wouldn't have Glenn Beck in the first place.

captain vicks

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Kj4I2f0ZO6g&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1";></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Kj4I2f0ZO6g&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

sorry, that link is fucked up. hopefully this one works -- it's glenn rubbing vicks on his eyes to cry for a photo shoot

"http://www.youtube.com/v/Kj4I2f0ZO6g&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1";

You're close. Just paste the link, no html accoutrements.

one more time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4I2f0ZO6g

Ok but what is this "exposed" shit. It's a photo shoot. Why was someone videotaping a photoshoot, anyway?

And he laughed about the photo shoot at the time. He knew the cover was making fun of his tendency to cry on his show.

A real "exposed" piece would show him doing this for his actual show.

not a real "exposed" piece, just sorta funny cuz the guy's such a shameless crybaby yet people buy his impassioned christian patriot shtick

the party is over
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt_G6Lq9jWQ

I too yearn for the commercials of television's youth.

anybody see Jon Stewart's pitch-perfect parody of Beck on the Daily Show last week? hit every single note...

yeah some talk on the daily show thread

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/06/jon-stewart-does-glenn-be_n_348129.html

glenn beck compared health care reform to roman polanski raping an underage girl, news at 11

"I've done a lot of reading on history in the last few years. And I was amazed to find that what we're experiencing now is really a ticking time bomb that they designed about a hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Progressive Movement.

* * * *

And they thought, if we just do this, and this, ad this and this, over time, if we do it in both the Republican and Democratic parties, we will have our socialist utopia. Well, I say again, two can play at that game"

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/files/2009/10/glenn_beck.jpgp

I meant:

http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Entertainment/images-2/glenn-beck.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvOF4_8EmAM

the christmas sweater is back! very very tempted to see this

i mean there's a gospel singer and a string section and everything

will all new inspirational tales of redemption!

Every pose he strikes in that is like the equivalent of the fetal position, or, in one case, is the actual fetal position.

http://geeksofdoom.com/GoD/img/2009/09/2009-09-01-beavis_and_butthead.png

Fathom Events... so apropos. Could you even imagine what kind of mind would be impacted in a genuine way by this horseshit?

Simpletons abound, thrive, and still have disposable income. So hilarious this Christmas Sweater playing in NYC. Shouldn't he do a two weeker in Branson, Missouri instead?

And miss out on the ironic ticket purchases? I think not!

sounds like an epic heckling opportunity.

http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs107.snc3/15443_670821231937_22606283_37778883_6848910_n.jpg

Full cast and crew for
The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew (1983)
Directed by
Rick Moranis
Dave Thomas

Writing credits
Rick Moranis (written by) &
Dave Thomas (written by) and
Steve De Jarnatt (written by) (as Steven De Jarnatt)

Cast (in credits order) verified as complete

Dave Thomas ... Doug McKenzie
Rick Moranis ... Bob McKenzie

Max von Sydow ... Brewmeister Smith (as Max Von Sydow)
Paul Dooley ... Claude Elsinore

Lynne Griffin ... Pam Elsinore
Angus MacInnes ... Jean LaRose
Tom Harvey ... The Inspector
Douglas Campbell ... Henry Green
Brian McConnachie ... Ted

Len Doncheff ... Jack Hawkland
Jill Frappier ... Gertrude
David Beard ... The Judge
Thick Wilson ... The Prosecutor
Robert Windsor ... Bailiff
Sid Lynas ... Angry Man at Movie
Ron James ... Man in Movie
Dora Dainton ... Lady in Movie
David Clement ... Man in the Alley
Paddy Sampson ... Pensioner
Roger Dunn ... Beer Store Clerk
Diane Douglass ... Receptionist
Eric House ... John Elsinore
J. Winston Carroll ... Fire Chief
James Conroy ... Bald Con

Glenn Beck ... Prison Guard
Desh Bandhu ... Parking Attendant
Ilija Ilijevski ... M.C. at Oktoberfest
Mary Charlotte Wilcox ... Nurse
Maggie Butterfield ... Nurse

David Rigby ... Policeman

Denis Forest ... Policeman
John Kelly ... Policeman
Dick Grant ... Policeman
George Stinton ... Policeman
Thom Bell ... Hospital Orderly
Christopher Benson ... Hospital Orderly
John Stoneham Sr. ... Hospital Orderly (as John Stoneham)
Buddy the Dog ... Hosehead the Dog

Mel Blanc ... Voice of Mr. McKenzie (voice)

different guy

i watched this guy for 10 minutes last night and couldn't do it anymore

different guy

― larry craig memorial gloryhole (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, December 18, 2009 10:43 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really, so you're telling me that fox news commentator glenn beck did not act in a minor role in the movie "strange brew" (and incidentally also did not play abraham lincoln in the "national treasure" movies)?

because i find that difficult to believe

he WAS however in an episode of Cheers

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/victim_in_fatal_car_accident

O_o

I thought Scott Brown was kind of a creeper too, should I worry that I'm even somewhat in agreement with Glenn Beck?

from the comments on Brown/Beck: It’s actually Rush Limbaugh who has the line of the day: “This one’s for you Mary Jo.”

these guys are sick

Woah.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/08/glenn-beck-urges-listeners-to-leave-churches-that-preach-social/

LOL fantastic

a satirist would never have the gumption to invent this guy and his spasms of crocodile tears and patriotic kitsch, his hateful knownothing rhetoric....

i just sort of presume that somewhere down the line this guy is going to go down in the flames of his own hypocrisy--possibly some coke-fueled week of whoring, a domestic abuse case, something. just hope it happens sooner instead of later.

it's like he watched the broadest bits of the colbert report, decided to amplify it to previously unseen levels and add boatloads of false pathos. oh and remove the irony.

he's crackers.

i have some relatives who will likely agree with him on this, tho.

Beck would be funny if he was a joke. What terrifies me is that our (supposedly left-leaning) government (UK) has been bending over backwards for a decade and a half now to accommodate every whim of the media mogul who is only too happy to employ him.

They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy.

that "surprisingly" kills me. hopefully he'll start telling people to suspect anyone who uses the term "democracy"!

fucking hell.

isn't this crossing some kind of line?

i'd say it's just coming closer to a straightforward defense of this movement's core beliefs.

dude's trolling skills are legendary

hate him so fucking much

haha, i thought you meant me!

i know better. my trolling skills aren't legendary.

it's kind of amazing just how whining, fearful, and straight up pussy the rightwing can be for such self-professed brave americans.

i hate to use a cliche, but if Fox News birth MSNBC (equal and opposite reactions, you know)...what left-wing figurehead now slouches toward bethlehem?

id like to think the constant crying wolf will dent some credibility in the future, but then credibility isn't really at issue so much as a quarantining himself and his followers from the contamination of "progressivism"--any and all attacks strengthen the walls of denial...and they'll eventually suffocate from lack of oxygen. (how many metaphors can i use here?)

really would not mind if this dude died

i don't what his "surprisingly, democracy" thing is all about, but i'm guessing it has to do with the whole "america is a republic, not a democracy" bullshit line that's become an article of faith on the right. it's really frustrating to argue about that, because you find out pretty quickly that nobody's bothered to read their stupid dictionary, they're just repeating what someone told them.

i don't know what...

Isn't he highlighting how undemocratic Democrats really are - trying to shove all those evil commie proposals down America's throat, etc.

beck's just making money, doesn't believe most of this stuff imho

which might become clear to even much of his audience eventually, one might hope - I recall reading one of those articles in which Serious Journalist interviews People From the Heartland and a guy they're speaking with in like kentucky says he doesn't trust beck because he's really a 'patriot for profit.' and i'm beginning to think that's the most effective thing to say against beck. he's just making money.

i bet eventually he'll cross too many lines you're not supposed to cross. like this politics daily article - come on, you don't mess with somebody's church or tell them to leave their church.

it's kind of amazing just how whining, fearful, and straight up pussy the rightwing can be for such self-professed brave americans.

― ('_') (omar little), Monday, March 8, 2010 8:00 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yes, see KSM trials (and add dems to the list)

Isn't he highlighting how undemocratic Democrats really are - trying to shove all those evil commie proposals down America's throat, etc.

could be that too. who knows. but i've always thought there was something deeper in the right's need to denigrate "democracy." start making people think that's a bad word, then you can really make some headway.

(reminded of a great creepy scene in germany year zero where the creepy pedo ex-nazi schoolteacher sneers to the boy something like, "are they teaching you about democracy?")

Isn't he highlighting how undemocratic Democrats really are - trying to shove all those evil commie proposals down America's throat, etc.

sure. when democrats win an election and try to implement policies on which the democrats ran, and for which the majority of the public voted, it is actually undemocratic and shoving it down the throats of the public. even if the majority of the public voted for it.

what is supposed to happen is, when democrats win an election, they should turn around and implement GOP policies in accordance with the views of the minority who lost the election. because they know what's best for you and they're going to decide for you, even if they lost the election.

the sad thing is, the democrats are quite good at continuing to give in to the GOP, and yet the tea partiers and right wing are still screeching mad. no one could have predicted this.

Said it before, I'll say it again. I really think the divide in this country is too large to be repaired. Might as well split the country in two right now and save the trouble of watching it fall apart on its own.

The problem with that is you create the failed state of bezerkistan.

what we need is an outside threat to unite us all

o wait nm

I'm only half serious... but I know I have no intentions of caving to the Beck-Palin nation and it sure as hell seems the feeling is mutual. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't feel like the divide has ever been this huge and angry before.

Maybe not in our lifetimes, but I'm sure it felt pretty crazy during the Vietnam era

True, true.

I'd say it's been a lot worse.

Media amplifies it. But it's the still the same old red-baiting.

what we need is an outside threat to unite us all

― crossing the aspie rubicon (latebloomer), Monday, March 8, 2010 9:41 PM (6 minutes ago)

o wait nm

― crossing the aspie rubicon (latebloomer)

New Mexico not much of a threat IMO, we don't even have the death penalty.

I can't remember who said it (max planck?) but a quantum physicist remarked that any truly new, revolutionary scientific theory is ever really accepted by the old guard. They just have to die off. Be patient! (and then of course we'll have new right wing crazies, maybe we'll even BE them. C'est la vie)

Never really accepted, that is

I'd like to be optimistic about that, but the people I know producing the most offspring are the crazypants ones that wait in line for Palin & Beck books!

can we rewind for a second to the latest point of interest?

beck is equivocating churches that promote "social justice" as communist and/or nazist?

i was a failed bible scholar but doesn't the bible portray Jesus as promoting social justice all over the place?

well fundies don't really place much emphasis on what jesus said or did as much as that he died painfully and is coming back to destroy all their enemies

the people I know producing the most offspring are the crazypants ones that wait in line for Palin & Beck books!

Yeah but how many of said offspring actually think their parents are completely out of their minds?

Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't feel like the divide has ever been this huge and angry before.

― you gone float up with it (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, March 8, 2010 11:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

heard things were pretty messed up in the 1860s

lol

I think what beck et al represent is a mass media reflection of the paranoid and rage fueled resentful delusions of people who've ALWAYS been around. So it's scary as a look into that mentality--but it's really the same old shit morphing into new mediums. The opium of the masses imo.

heard things were pretty messed up in the 1860s

― I DIED, Monday, March 8, 2010 11:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol

― how is "babby" horribly formed????? (k3vin k.), Monday, March 8, 2010 11:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

LOL x1000

there was some fucked-up shit during the great depression too. father coughlin and all that.

"love" is a code word for "hate"

"peace" is a code word for "terrorism"

i seriously cannot wait much longer for this fuckwad to get caught with his cock in a sea-lion or whatever secret sin fuels his fuckwaddishness

i can't remember if anyone's linked this or not but this is essential reading about right-wing talk show hosts -

http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/currentIssue/full_feature_story.asp?NewMessageID=24046&pf=yes

it's true - he is just making money. in a world dominated by pageviews, audience numbers, etc it is all about who can be the trolliest troll. and beck is the best.

Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don’t attract large audiences.

re: "things have never been this bad"

the other night an older friend of mine (guy's probably in his mid-50s or so) was complaining about how the mainstream media has legitimized kooks like beck and the tea partiers, and how in the 1960s they would have all been treated like fringe lunatics (citing the john birch society as an example). i said that might be true, but noted that into the mid-1960s segregation was treated as a mainstream viewpoint. so, take your pick. i'd rather have glenn beck on the cover of time magazine than orval faubus.

http://www.huntsvillearchamber.com/images/faubus.jpg

<3 this guys trolling knowing i live somewhere else

i just sort of presume that somewhere down the line this guy is going to go down in the flames of his own hypocrisy--possibly some coke-fueled week of whoring, a domestic abuse case, something. just hope it happens sooner instead of later.

I'd actually like to see what it would take for these people to disown someone like Beck. Since Limbaugh is still popular after all his Oxycontin and Viagra (for third world sex tourism) busts and serial racist statements, it's clear right-wingers don't hold their talk show hosts to politician standards (or even Don Imus standards.) Beck has sort of inoculated himself by talking openly of his addictions, so any drug stumble will probably be written off. He'd probably have to rape a child on live TV for his fans to desert him.

FINGERS CROSSED

He has never refuted the claim that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, to be fair.

Yes, any time I get bummed out by the dude I remember the claim about him raping and murdering that young girl in 1990 and hope that it comes back to bite him in the ass.

just like he bit that young girl's ass sometime between raping and murdering her?

Wait, is that a genuine claim?

no it is a dumb joke someone made up to get back at him for something i don't remember

maybe he didn't really kill her ; )

I think what beck et al represent is a mass media reflection of the paranoid and rage fueled resentful delusions of people who've ALWAYS been around.

Doesn't everybody have a relative, specifically an uncle, like Glenn Beck?

Maybe that's what inspires so much fandom and hatred for Beck and Palin: they're easily recognizable archetypes. Palin is like your kooky/folksy aunt, or that Christian woman who not only wants her child reading alternative material, but demands that Harry Potter be removed from the library altogether; Beck is the crazy brother-in-law you can't stand, or the bizarre guy who was warning you about Y2K and a UN takeover back in 1993, at your kids soccer games.

careful, that's the next president and vice-president of the united states of america you are talking about.

Doesn't everybody have a relative, specifically an uncle, like Glenn Beck?

take that back. my uncles are both hard-core leftys, both older than glenn beck, and they could both kick his ass. (not that kicking his ass would be any great feat, obv.)

take that back. my uncles are both hard-core leftys, both older than glenn beck, and they could both kick his ass. (not that kicking his ass would be any great feat, obv.)

Not nec. right-wing dudes, but just uncles that when you were a kid and you were coming home from visiting them your dad would say stuff in the car ride home like "Uncle Barry didn't know what he was talking about. The world is not going to end next week," and you felt relieved because your uncle had subjected you to a lot of radical fear-mongering and radicalism.

i have no relatives even 10% as vile as that pair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELRmgJw8muw

from the clips i've seen this is incredible, seeing beck deflated like that is such an uplifting feeling

i mean fuck both of those guys but

beck is actually kinda tolerable when he's subdued and frustrated! massa is 100x more annoying and retarded

Doesn't everybody have a relative, specifically an uncle, like Glenn Beck?

Maybe that's what inspires so much fandom and hatred for Beck and Palin

no i think its that they're vile and deceitful fucks making money off other folks' ignorance in a manner that's massively destructive to the national discourse

the other night an older friend of mine (guy's probably in his mid-50s or so) was complaining about how the mainstream media has legitimized kooks like beck and the tea partiers, and how in the 1960s they would have all been treated like fringe lunatics (citing the john birch society as an example). i said that might be true, but noted that into the mid-1960s segregation was treated as a mainstream viewpoint. so, take your pick. i'd rather have glenn beck on the cover of time magazine than orval faubus.

yeah or george wallace. i was just a tween in the late 6os but the difference between then & now seems like demagogues are media figures instead of politicians. a right wing crank like joe pyne wasn't taken seriously by the mainstream media and even a "reasonable" wingnut like paul harvey was kept at a distance, syndicated instead of network. i do think the divide in the 60s was just as extreme as the last couple years. oh the memories of my parents & grandparents arguing endlessly about vietnam & civil rights & dirty hippies...

can we rewind for a second to the latest point of interest?

beck is equivocating churches that promote "social justice" as communist and/or nazist?

i was a failed bible scholar but doesn't the bible portray Jesus as promoting social justice all over the place?

― ✌.✰|ʘ‿ʘ|✰.✌ (Steve Shasta), Monday, March 8, 2010 9:06 PM (4 days ago)

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/LIVING/03/12/beck.boycott/t1larg.beck.sign.irpt.jpg

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/03/12/beck.boycott/index.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcYJhqxjVw

But a prominent evangelical leader says he, too, is suspicious of churches that preach economic and social justice.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University

ok i stopped reading and had an actual sensation of horror when i read that name

In the old flying vs. invisibility super power question, guys like Glenn Beck make me rethink my stance on invisibility. If I could spend one week, maybe a day, just following him around, completely invisible, and like, just spit on him every time he says "social justice" or "gold", or knock that chalk out of his hand whenever he gets that chalkboard out, just, damn how satisfying would that be.

“Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! If I am going to Jeremiah Wright’s church,” he said, referring to the incendiary black pastor who led the church attended by the Obama family members when they lived in Chicago. “If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, ‘Excuse me, are you down with this whole social justice thing?’ ”

Religious bloggers, from the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the liberal Jesuit magazine America, to Joe Carter, at the conservative magazine First Things, took Mr. Beck’s decree as possibly an attack on Catholic teaching, and definitely an affront to Christianity.

Father Martin wrote on the Huffington Post: “It is not enough simply to help the poor, one must address the structures that keep them that way. Standing up for the rights of the poor is not being a Nazi, it’s being Christian. And Communist, as Mr. Beck suggests? It’s hard not to think of the retort of the great apostle of social justice, Dom Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife, ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’ ”

From Christians Urged to Boycott Glen Beck
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/christians-urged-to-boycott-glenn-beck/?partner=rss&emc=rss

I have heard the Good news!

Philip Barlow, the Arrington Professor of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, said: “One way to read the Book of Mormon is that it’s a vast tract on social justice. It’s ubiquitous in the Book of Mormon to have the prophetic figures, much like in the Hebrew Bible, calling out those who are insensitive to injustices.
“A lot of Latter-day Saints would think that Beck was asking them to leave their own church.”

Mr. Barlow said that Mr. Beck’s comments were particularly ill-timed because just this year, the church’s highest authority, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, issued a new “Handbook of Instructions” to church leaders in which they revised the church’s “three-fold mission” and added a fourth mission statement: care for the poor.

Glenn Beck is KORIHOR!

Wait, apparently Glenn Beck converted to the Mormon Church in 1999 – no wonder that dude is so butthurt.

I would so love if this became the #1 google hit for "glenn beck is korihor."

father martin otm

Wait, apparently Glenn Beck converted to the Mormon Church in 1999 – no wonder that dude is so butthurt.

― How to Make an American Quit (Abbott), Saturday, March 13, 2010 1:44 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

abbs u r my authority on mormons what do u mean here