Today is the day for Fox News commentator Glenn Beck to share his dream on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
King delivered his “I Have A Dream” exactly 47 years ago and will now be the scene of Beck and his followers offering their own “dream.” The article below describes supporters wearing telltale teeshirts with Palin’s name that the legend “Babies, Guns, Jesus.”
Here is another tee-shirt from the rally:
Some accounts are almost biblical of Beck’s role in reshaping America. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey explained “[w]e see Glenn Beck as a guy who is bringing revelations of understanding to the American people.”
Revelations by St. Beck will commence this afternoon.
Source: Bloomberg
Geeba Geeba
You may disagree, you may feel that you are way smarter than the rest of us and know what is better for us. Don’t think that way. Don’t be so condescending.
“…… and by honest I don’t think he means someone who is morally honest for that kind of an individual would not want to lead these folk, but rather a charismatic figure who doesn’t lie. If such a person appears on the scene then we have a real problem which we would not be able to simply dismiss.”
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Blouise, Why and how so? What kind of world do we live in where truth is such the fearfull fulcrum?
Ms. Elaine lets just deal with the facts.
With 88% of the contributions going democratic I would say we have a left leaning media.
I think this is fitting to the discussion and find it rather interesting.
“Well, in a way, left-handed people are smarter, and I’ll tell you why,” Dr. Oz says. “Left-handed people can deal with more incoming information that doesn’t come in an organized way.” Dr. Oz says this is because of the way the brain develops when a baby is in its mother’s womb. “The left brain normally controls your right side, which is really powerful,” he says. “[In left-handed people], it allows the other side, the right brain, to become an equal partner.”
Because left-handed people can use both sides of their brain more readily, Dr. Oz says, they can process information coming into their brain in different ways more easily. “That’s why athletes do so well when they’re left-handed. And there are a lot of presidents who have been left-handed, and there are a lot of folks who, because they can deal with a lot of complicated issues at once, work pretty effectively,” he says.
http://www.oprah.com/health/Dr-Oz-Answers-Burning-Medical-Questions/15
Bdaman,
Of course, the Washington Examiner is in no way a partisan/conservative paper…right???
The Beck Rally Is Harmless
by John Batchelor Info
John Batchelor is radio host of the John Batchelor Show in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles
X Close The Fox personality and Sarah Palin took the stage for a controversial rally on the Washington Mall today, but John Batchelor says that he is just a harmless entertainer—and his success is our failure to address real problems.
The celebrity Glenn Beck has organized a festive and apparently harmless public event for the Washington Mall that he calls “Restoring Honor.” This theme is so deeply bland that it invites us partisans to look for inner meaning, such as the fact that August 28 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s revolutionary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or such as Beck’s Fox News Channel seeking a low-budget reality show to sell for the dog days of summer programming.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-27/glenn-beck-restoring-honor-rally-is-harmless/?om_rid=MMAuZ5&om_mid=_BMeQrpB8UOiAQz
Blouise another excellent analysis. You have hit the nail on the head twice.
For every action there is reaction and we are seeing the reaction now to the action of the media.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Obama-Democrats-got-88-percent-of-TV-network-employee-campaign-contributions-101668063.html
I get more than a little nauseated when I hear righties trying to claim they love and/or are protecting the Constitution. They want to stand on it and claim it as their own as they’ve attempted with the US flag and yet they have so little regard for it and its protections against the tyranny of the majority.
They surely didn’t have much love and respect for the Constitution when they were perfectly willing to disgard its protections against much of the Gestapo tactics of the Bush administration (wire tapping w/o warrents, suspending habeas corpus, Gitmo, etc.). They display similar disregard for the rights and freedoms it guarantees to brown-skinned American citizens and to Muslim Americans and now their target is American-born children.
Conservative hate America for its freedoms and thus deserve nothing more than our disgust and disdain.
What intrigues me is why so many Americans hang on the words of a guy like Beck who has traveled a thousand miles past batshit crazy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNIQG7WXpSM&fs=1&hl=en_US]
“What a number of you are missing is that Beck represents what most legal US Citizens feel (maybe not anchor babies).”
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I guess I’m missing that fact because some words were left out of Geeba Geeba’s statement. It should have read:
What a number of you are missing is that Beck represents what most gullible, uninformed legal US Citizens who love to watch FOX and listen to its personalities rant against Democrats and liberals and progressives–as well as listen to others like Limbaugh and Coulter and Savage who love to stir up right wingnuts–feel (maybe not anchor babies).
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Geeba Geeba,
A brief article about “anchor babies” for you:
From the Chicago Tribune (8/23/2010)
Terror babies, anchor babies and Beanie Babies. Oh my!
By Rex W. Huppke
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-23/news/ct-talk-terror-babies-0824-20100823_1_babies-pregnant-foreign-women-terror
Two groups of politicians have at last gathered the intestinal fortitude needed to thwart one of America’s greatest threats — babies.
The crusade began several weeks ago with the sudden rise in concern over “anchor babies,” the infant children of illegal immigrants who, by virtue of being born on U.S. soil, are automatically deemed citizens. An increasing number of politicians claim that preplanned, prenatal trickery is afoot. They believe these illegal immigrants — known as “parents” if you voted for Barack Obama or “criminals” if you didn’t — are using American-born offspring as stepping stones on the path toward U.S. citizenship.
Granted, the path is long. Children can’t sponsor their parents for citizenship until they turn 21. But what are a couple of decades to the people behind what Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham dubbed the “drop and leave” conspiracy? (“Drop and leave” is a play on the more-common “drop and stay” term embraced by all U.S. citizens who have gone through the swift and painless experience of childbirth.)
“Let’s do what’s great for fair free enterprise”–Geeba
Geeba
Liberals do not need, nor will we stand for, lectures from conservatives on America’s economy or it’s politics. Perhaps you’ve been asleep for the last 30 years while every concession possible has been given to promote free enterprise. Unbridled free enterprise has proven itself both not great and not fair. Pro-business, anti-citizen policies promoted, legislated and dictated since the Reagan era are the precise reason America and the world are in the financial mess it’s in. In fact, the world political scene replete with fanatic anti-American haters around the globe is directly tied to the Conservative world view of domination.
What you call “Eurosocial”, is actually the mainstream of the world. Only in America do you find decades of government policies joining with business interests to financially and socially break it’s own society. Thanks for the invitation, but we’ve already seen the self-destruction of continued support of the nobility against the people.
Glenn Beck, Geeba and all other conservatives should thank their stars they live in America. Given the damage they’ve done to America and our Constitution, they’re lucky they’re allowed to vote.
I notice some of the news media used low shots with telephoto lenses. That technique “compresses” the crowd, making the people look as if they are closer together. Also, the low angle hides the fact there were lots of open spaces between people, many of whom had lawn chairs, blankets and picnic gear. Some bloggers have posted photos taken within the crowd and those “inside the crowd” pictures make the gathering look more like a tailgate party at a football game than anything else. Sorry Big Media, Glenbeckiscam did not draw much of a crowd, as gatherings on the Mall go. Use all the hyperbole and photo tricks you want, Big Media, but the truth will find its way out.
“There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.”
From The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party by Frank Rich
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“You may disagree, you may feel that you are way smarter than the rest of us and know what is better for us. Don’t think that way. don’t be so condescending.”
irony \ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\, n.,
1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other’s false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony
oxymoron \ˌäk-sē-ˈmȯr-ˌän\, n.,
: a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (as cruel kindness); broadly : something (as a concept) that is made up of contradictory or incongruous elements
moron \ˈmȯr-ˌän\, n.,
1:usually offensive : a person affected with mild mental retardation
2: a very stupid person
puppet \ˈpə-pət\, n.,
3: one whose acts are controlled by an outside force or influence (a puppet ruler)
What a number of you are missing is that Beck represents what most legal US Citizens feel (maybe not anchor babies). We Americans have valid points of view that don’t agree with yours. Live with it. Let’s try to come to a compromise and move on with free enterprise instead of a eurosocial system that just doesn’t fit in with what has worked well.
You may disagree, you may feel that you are way smarter than the rest of us and know what is better for us. Don’t think that way. don’t be so condescending. Let’s do what’s great for fair free enterprise, keep the federal govt small, make the feds secure the borders and administer immigration law sanely (not just for votes). Let’s have work for our citizens in conventional and “green” energy development by developing our lands smartly to become energy self sufficient. More work, smaller government, less taxes, energy independent. What can be better? Come on. Let’s wise up.
Elaine M.
That video was so great I just had to pass it on. Thanks!
Bdaman,
I might give you the hat correction as long as you don’t insist that one of them is a “thinking” hat or that none of them are hat-“tricks” or that wearing many hats is a political necessity.
Personally, I found the straw hat with teabag fringe to be the most alluring.
But reconsider your correction for just a moment. It is true that many hats make changing easier and luggage lighter but these persons you lead are not particularly known for their quick thinking or agile intellect … it takes them ages to go from one thought to the next … you have lots of time between sentences to do a complete costume change … probably make up and hair also. One could go from Uncle Sam yelling “No, you can’t take our guns!” to soccer mom yelling “The homos want to destroy our marriages!” to rancher Tex yelling “Protect our borders!” to Joe the Plumber yelling “No mosque at Ground Zero!” to stupid old lady yelling “Obama is a Muslim!” to …..
Well, you get the drift … they’d be wowed, over the moon … and you would be the new republican star.
I don’t know … hats just seems so … Willy Lomanish.
P.S. You’ll need an agent
Definitive proof there is no God – there was not a giant meteor or lightning strike the wipe this cesspool of vermin off the face of the earth.
What worries me is that the brown shirts & SA were only a small group of shitheads in a large population. They never won a single election, never had a majority of the government and never offered a real alternative to the German people. But they did enough to put the pieces in place to destroy the country and drag the world into hell.
Excellent analysis Blouise.
P.S. it’s hats. costumes take to long.
Buckeye,
I agree with you completely.
I also agree with Chomsky’s opinion that we do need to beware of an honest charismatic figure taking hold of these people … and by honest I don’t think he means someone who is morally honest for that kind of an individual would not want to lead these folk, but rather a charismatic figure who doesn’t lie. If such a person appears on the scene then we have a real problem which we would not be able to simply dismiss.
Your point: “More sinister are those Machiavellian characters with the money and power to really determine outcomes through propaganda and election fraud. The internet is a powerful tool to expose these characters – as long as it is not abused or bought out as some of the major news sources may have been.” is well made.
These persons fly under the radar and are more of a threat than 100 Glen Becks. In fact, it is my opinion that much of the hype over Beck and his fellow performers is purposeful and aimed at disguising the true nature of what both parties are actually doing. Rather than railing against Beck and Palin, we should be looking behind the curtain for there is the stage upon which the real players are acting.
Elaine,
A minstrel keeps the bardic tradition alive!