Some famous people have people tweet for them, but not Sarah Palin. I’m pretty sure she’s blasting out her tweets all on her own – straight from her Blackberry to your eyes.

Yesterday she tweeted: Silly media reports“maybe thousands”@Beck’s “irrelevant” event;insinuating MSM sheeple mustn’t believe their own eyes&ears re: event’s truth.

I think she meant to say @GlennBeck and not @Beck. The former is Glenn Beck. He’s that blond guy who sells gold coins on Fox News. The later is musician Beck. He’s the guy who made all that eclectic pop music that was all the rage 10 years ago. You know, “I got two turntables and a microphone.”

Now as for the content of her tweet, aside from being inaccurate and irrelevant, it comes across as really whiny. She likes to do that whole, “look at how oppressed we rightwingers are.” But aside from the people, er sheeple, that follow Palin around like lost puppies, who’s buying it? It’s boring.

Beck’s rally on Saturday drew a crowd of about 80,000 people, it was carried live via CSPAN and heavily reported by all of the mainstream media.

To put this into context, gays and lesbians marched on the nation’s capitol in October of last year and drew about 150,000 people according to the Los Angeles Times. That particular march on Washington was barely covered in the mainstream media and Fox News largely ignored it. And in 2003, hundreds of thousands of people rallied in cities all across the country and around the world to protest the pending invasion of Iraq.

So was Beck’s rally irrelevant? Yes, it was. Beck’s “Restoring Honor” party was just as irrelevant as the pro-peace and the gay rights rallies were. None of these events had any impact on public policy or public opinion, but they made the attendees feel better – like they did something they believed in. I know I felt better when I marched through Seattle in 2003 for peace, but it didn’t stop the war. It was irrelevant. I was, and am, irrelevant. But that’s OK, I still can get out of bed in the morning, drink my coffee and meander through another day of irrelevance.

Glenn Beck held his “restoring honor” rally in Washington, DC yesterday. It was funny and scary all wrapped in an extravaganza of demagoguery.

Sarah Palin whined that “they” are trying to take away her motherhood.

“Say what you want to say about me,” Palin said, “but I raised a combat vet. You can’t take that away from me.”

Beck proclaimed that we must turn America “back” to the once great nation it had been before “they” took over.

Who “they” is wasn’t explained to the crowd of about 80,000 because it didn’t need to be. Everyone knows who “they” are. They are President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. If Beck had delivered this same speech in 1965, the “they” would consist of President Lyndon Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives John William McCormack and Martin Luther King.

Beck sees himself as a Dr. King type of figure, which is why he held his “restoring honor” rally on the anniversary of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech. Beck sees himself as someone who’s going to radically alter America’s course for generations to come. But unlike Dr. King who looked forward, Beck wants to go back to the good old days before the Civil Rights movement of 1960s, before Roosevelt’s New Deal and the creation of Social Security and unemployment insurance, and long before Medicare and Medicaid.

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Beck told his followers as their heads nodded with affirmation. “America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness.”

Beck’s utopia is one in which labor unions are outlawed, banks, corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy are allowed to do whatever they want and everyone else just has to deal with it. You know, back when the Ford’s, Dupont’s and Rockefeller’s ruled the country as they saw fit. There was no Environmental Protection Agency or Occupational Safety and Health Administration telling businesses what to do.

In Beck’s Garden of Eden, African Americans couldn’t vote in much of the country, particularly in the Jim Crow South, and before Women’s Suffrage. That was a time of “honor” for Beck and his followers. It was a time before “they” took over.

–

Related stories:
Martin Luther King ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech (Video and Transcript)
Radio Host Joe Madison Confronts Glenn Beck On Claim Obama Is Racist
Beck: God Will Wash This Nation With Blood
Glenn Beck Mocks 6-year-old With Asthma

On his radio show today, Beck said, “God will wash this nation with blood if he has to, but he doesn’t have to.”

“There is one exit left, and it is God.”

If we don’t turn to God for the answers, Beck said, “The country will be washed with blood.”

Glenn Beck and his sidekicks mocked a 6-year-old boy with asthma on his radio show on Friday. I guess the point was to show how stupid health care reform is, or how stupid kids are with asthma, or how stupid their parents are.

This isn’t a new low for Beck, but it’s pretty pathetic.

Rightbloggers, Fox News and conservative politicians are purposely conflating Al Qaeda with Islam. While it’s true that Al Qaeda members claim to be living the lives of righteous Muslims – the fact is that they are terrorists. Members of the Ku Klux Klan make similar claims about Protestant Christianity, but they are terrorists too.

Many religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, attract a lot of crazy fundamentalists – people who claim to be the “real” Christians or the “purist” practitioners of Islam. But these groups are nothing but ignorant terrorists whose hearts are filled with hate.

While this has been going on for a long time, what’s disturbing is that this equating of a terrorist organization to the entire religion of Islam has reached mainstream American politics. The current uproar is over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which isn’t a mosque and it’s not located at ground zero.

Interestingly, when George W. Bush was president, there seemed to be a concerted effort to keep this type of hate-filled rhetoric on the sidelines, but not anymore.

Politicians, rightbloggers and Fox News have latched onto to this ground zero mosque issue to spread hatred of all Muslims. They’re equating Muslims, such as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to Osama bin Laden. He’s a radical. He’s a fundamentalist. They’re doing this to spread fear. They’re doing this to divide the nation – to pit us against them. They want Muslims to be seen as the “other,” someone Americans should hate.

Why are they doing? In the short-term, it’s for political gain. They’re trying to get Democrats, and liberals, to appear to be supporting terrorists by standing up for the 1st Amendment so that they can take back Congress this year. In the long-term, they’re banking on this being a great wedge issue, similar to gay marriage, abortion and immigration – something that makes one American hate another American.

Conservatives have always sought policies to divide and conquer. The GOP has never encouraged Americans to work together. The whole notion of the GOP being a “big tent” party was a running joke. They will always embrace divisiveness because it’s easier to manipulate a population that is fighting among themselves, rather than working together to solve actual problems.

If Americans are fighting about abortion, immigration, Muslims, etc, they aren’t organizing for higher wages, health care or better pensions.

Let’s call these haters what they are, they’re cheap labor conservatives.

Cheap labor conservatives want you distracted from the real issues while you fight their phony ones. If you’re doing that, you won’t complain so much, if and when you realize that real wages for Americans have plummeted since the 1950s when one income could support an entire family. It’s worth noting that during the ’50s and ’60s was also when organized labor was the strongest. So while you’re hating Muslims and liberals, you probably won’t notice that income inequality has now reached pre-Great Depression levels, and that those tax cuts, they aren’t for you.

The real enemy isn’t Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, it’s conservatives such as Glenn Beck, rightbloggers like Pamela Geller, and presidential wannabes Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.

The real problems facing America are jobs, higher wages, health care, tax cuts for the wealthy, affordable education and putting the brakes on a runaway military industrial complex.

Conservatives like things the way they are. They like their money and big tax cuts. They like desperate workers willing to accept low wages, no health care and no pension. They like their kids’ private education. They’re fine with the defense budget funneling trillions of dollars from the Treasury into the coffers of defense contractors. That works well for them, but is it working for us?

Sooner or later, a lot of the people spreading lies and smearing the reputation of Feisal Abdul Rauf will regret their bellicose rhetoric and feel shame. Not all of them will be capable of humility. Firebrand screamers such as Glenn Beck don’t blink an eye at slamming someone he’s decided is the enemy, but some of them will regret their decision to fan the flames of fear and to try to destroy a good man.

My greatest fear though, is  that someone will get hurt or killed because of this unbelievable irresponsible hate-speech that’s coming from the right, so far, we’ve been relatively lucky, but fear is a powerful weapon when directed at the gullible masses.

The current target of the right’s unsubstantiated charges is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The right claims that he’s a radical cleric because he’s trying to build a community center a few blocks from “Ground Zero.” It was called the Cordoba House, and it will be open to everyone, but some are trying to make political hay out of its Islamic prayer room. Buckling under the enormous weight of the phony outrage by the right, the Cordoba House has been renamed to Park 51. Some on the right claimed that naming it Cordoba House was an insult to Christianity? Yeah, I don’t get it either.

The real injustice of all of this spurious rage, is that a peaceful and good man, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is being dragged through the mud. He’s being called a radical, an extremist, a terrorist sympathizer.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Rauf worked with the Bush administration, the FBI, Madelyn Albright, Bush’s friend Karen Hughes, and countless others in spreading peace and cooperation between Christians, Muslims and Jews. But to the Glenn Beck’s and the radical right, he’s a terrorist. But who really is terrorizing whom here?

It’s disgusting how Fox News and other rightwing media outlets have no desire to seek the truth. What they seek are short-term political wins with a complete and utter disregard for the truth.

It saddens me, and it should sadden you too. To learn more about Feisal Abdul Rauf, please read Sam Stein’s story about him on the Huffington Post. Stay informed. Spread the truth. Battle the lies any way you can. You must remain diligent.

On Wed., Glenn Beck made fun of gays, Islam and 9/11 all in one skit.

On his Fox News show, Beck had on a guy named Greg Gutfield. I think he’s supposed to be a comedian, but he needs to work on his material. I’ve heard people do three minutes on open mic night who didn’t bomb this bad.

The crux of Gutfield’s bantering comedic skit with Beck was that he’s going to setup a gay bar for Muslims at Ground Zero. You know, because Muslims are building a community center called Cordoba House two blocks from the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.

The first rule of comedy is that your jokes need to be believable. If your audience thinks you’re just lying to them, or you’re saying things that are so far-fetched to not possibly be true, you aren’t going to get many laughs.

Well, Gutfield’s, “I’m going to open up a gay bar for Muslims at Ground Zero” fell flat, but Beck played along – he can’t pass up a chance to mock gay people, Muslims and the victims of 9/11.

Some of the “hilarious” names for Gutfield’s Muslim gay bar are: Ji-Hot, Ji-Hunk, Infidelicious and Turban Cowboy. Ha ha ha, “Turban Cowboy” that’s so funny because some Muslims wear turbans and the film “Urban Cowboy” had gay sex in it. Oh it works on so many levels. Hack.

Beck chimed in with Mecca-Me-Hot. Zing.

Gutfield said, there will be no alcohol, because Muslims don’t drink, but there will be 72 virgin drinks.

“But I have a lot of people that are interested in backing me for this,” Gutfield yucked. “And I’m telling you, this is the greatest thing ever, because right now, I contacted the Cordoba House. I wrote them. I e-mailed them. They didn’t respond. But I tweeted them and they tweeted me back.”

The Cordoba House folks said, “You are free to open whatever you like. If you won’t consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you are not going to build dialogue.”

“Yes. And you know I love to build dialogue,” Gutfield said.

“Sure,” Beck said. “Especially — you do that at Grind Zeros.”

Really? “Grind Zeros.” Really Beck, you’re really going to end with a joke about 9/11 victims – calling them “zeros”?

Nice job Beck and Gutfield, go back to the chalkboard and figure out some better jokes, you ignorant overpaid hacks.

–
A transcript for this skit can be found here.

Glenn Beck and his followers are convinced that the former shock-jock morning DJ is no racist, he’s just really mad.

On his Aug. 4 Fox News show Beck was flabbergasted by a speech President Obama gave railing against corporate special interests, and thanking the AFL-CIO members for their help. Beck was shocked. He just couldn’t believe his ears – a Democrat was in cahoots with the unions?

“What planet have I landed on?,” he flailed his arms and screamed. “Did I slip through a worm hole in the middle of the night and this looks like America? It’s like the damn Planet of the Apes. Nothing makes sense!”

Read the entire story on Examiner.com.

It just keeps happening over and over again. Another advertiser has pulled their ads from Glenn Beck’s show. This time it’s the dating and social networking site – Zoosk.

More than 100 advertisers have dumped Beck’s show, largely because of the Twitter-based effort of @StopBeck.

Read this entire story on Examiner.com.

Raindrops on roses and white power message forums, these are a few of Glenn Beck’s favorite things.

On June 28, 2010 at 2:21 pm @GlennBeck, the officially verified Glenn Beck Twitter account, selected the following tweet as a “favorite.”

From MalevoFreedom: “White Nationalist message board: http://malevolentfreedom.org/forum Embrace White Culture @GlennBeck WHITE-PRIDE #Beck WPWW.”

Read this entire story on Examiner.com.

On his show today Glenn Beck said that today, Wednesday July 21, 2010 would go down in history along side of October 29, 1929 (The Great Depression), December 7, 1941 (World War II) and September 11, 2001.

Yes, that’s right folks, today is the day that President Obama signed into law financial regulatory reform. It just also happens to be the final day of existence for the United States of America we have known and loved for so many years.

Beck made it perfectly clear – it’s over.

It’s OK though, don’t fret, we’ll just have to build a new and better United States. Oh who am I kidding? We’ll never have a United States as great as the one we had on Tuesday.

Damn you Obama. You and your stupid regulatory reform. You ruin everything with this policy of change that you campaigned on in 2008.

First it’s health care reform. Now you’ve done financial regulatory reform too. What’s next? Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Probably.

According to rightbloggers, such as Jonah Goldberg and Paul Berman, they’re not allowed to talk about links between Islam and Nazism.

The gist of Goldberg’s argument today is that there was a connection between Islam and Nazis and no one in the mainstream media is talking about it, and so Goldberg and other rightbloggers are being silenced on the issue.

Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make any sense.

On his blog today he pulls some text from Berman’s recent post in the Wall Street Journal.

“In our present Age of the Zipped Lip,” Berman moans, “you are supposed to avoid making any of the following inconvenient observations about the history and doctrines of the Islamist movement.”

Among the taboo topics is the Islamic-Nazi connection.

Berman assures us that “no one disputes that the Nazis collaborated with several Islamist leaders.”

Yes, I’m sure it’s indisputable.

And he said that “Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.”

Goldberg is shocked that “such an enormously significant historical fact – the Nazi-Islamist connection – could be ignored for so long.”

Well I don’t think it’s been ignored. The issue is that 70 years later, it’s only of academic significance. I can’t imagine a front page New York Times story with the headline “Islamic-Nazi Connection Exposed” popping up in the near future.

It’s not news that Islam has had a serious beef with Jews – they have for a very very long time – even before Hitler.

It’s also not news that many people in the US, Christians even, supported Hitler. In fact, the George W. Bush’s grandfather was a shareholder and director of companies that benefited from Hitler’s rise to power. Historical documents show that Prescott Bush financially backed Hitler – these are actual war crimes.

My question is this, what does Goldberg hope to achieve by connecting the dots between Islam and Hitler? Should we launch another Crusade against Muslims? How about burning down all of the mosques in the US and rounding members of the religion and putting them concentration camps like we did with the Japanese during World War II? What’s the practical application that can be gleaned from this historical observation?

And who’s telling Goldberg he can’t talk about this stuff? His own blog post refers to two recently published books on the matter. That’s right, books on printed paper and sold in book stores. Yeah that’s some serious suppression of ideas there.

My theory is that Goldberg, like many rightbloggers, is trying to ratchet up the hatred towards Muslims because they are today’s enemy du joir. It used to be communists, and to Glenn Beck it’s both commies and Muslims, but for most of the rightwingers out there – we’re at war with Islam.

They’ve got to hate somebody – I guess.

Here’s a video montage of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown on MSNBC. I believe it’s from May 26, 2010, it features the Geto Boys.

Enjoy

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has opened up a full-throated attack on Glenn Beck’s peddling of gold coins from Goldline.

Weiner accused Beck of using his show “to prey on the public’s fears of inflation and socialist takeovers while actively promoting the purchase of gold coins as insurance against this purported government overreach.”

Media Matters for America reported that on Oct. 6, 2009, Beck said this on his Fox News show:

You don’t have any gold, right? This is you. This is you. This is your savings. How much did you lose if you had any money in your 401k? Did you lose, let’s say, I don’t know, 40 percent of it? So, that’s gone. Now, did you know that the dollar has lost nearly 29 percent of its value in the last seven years? Twenty-nine percent. OK, that’s gone. Just gone.

Read the complete story on Examiner.com.

Holiday Inn has joined the long list of advertisers boycotting Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, the boycott effort is being waged by Twitter followers of @StopBeck.

“Last week, Holiday Inn advertisements began running on Glenn Beck’s show,” explained @StopBeck founder Angelo Carusone on his website. “As with other advertisers, participants in the StopBeck effort sprang to action. We informed Holiday Inn that this is not about politics, but about Glenn Beck’s reckless vitriol, sexism and preying on racial anxieties. We kindly requested that they follow the responsible action of well over 100 other former advertisers and remove their ads from Glenn Beck’s show.”

Read the entire story on Examiner.com

The Twitter campaign by @StopBeck, as well as efforts by Color of Change, are having a real impact on Fox News and the Glenn Beck Show. According to StopBeck Founder Angelo Carusone, Beck’s show has been running in the UK since February 9 without any advertisers.

“With the assistance of the StopBeck – UK Effort, participants in the StopBeck Effort reached out and urged advertisers to stop sponsoring Mr. Beck’s vitriol, sexism and preying on racial anxieties,” Carusone wrote on Sunday. “Once aware of the reckless vitriol they were associating their brands with, advertisers were quick to flee – some of them leaving Fox News as a whole.”

Read the entire story on Examiner.com.

The grassroots effort by @StopBeck has resulted in yet another advertiser pulling their ads from Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.

“As usual, StopBeck participants reached out to Nestle for clarification and urged them to cease advertising on Glenn Beck’s show,” wrote StopBeck founder Angelo Carusone. “The efforts paid off! Nestle confirmed that they do not advertise on Glenn Beck’s show; they advised that the ads were run in error and that the mistake has been corrected.”

Read the complete story on Examiner.com.

I don’t know what’s scarier, Victoria Jackson screeching into a microphone, Joe the Plumber bragging about his big truck and guns, Andrew Breitbart claiming liberals “firebombed” a church or that there are people out there that watch Glenn Beck every day.

Here’s a video montage of Tea Party rallies across the country this week.

I hate cable news. At least 99 percent of all cable news is a bag of throwaway garbage that serves no purpose other than to confuse, distract, misinform and stink up the room. The same can be said about talk radio. It’s not that broadcasting can’t be used to inform and educate the populous, sometimes it is, but the trend has been to simply chase ratings and fill airtime with whatever is cheap and easy.

And what’s the cheapest and easiest content to produce? Opinion masquerading as news, or as Glenn Beck likes to say ‘Truth.’

Take this story for example. It’s easy for me to sit here and blast out an opinion story bemoaning the horrors of cable news, but if I actually wanted to do an investigative piece about cable news and why it got this way, well, that would take time and money – none of which I have.

But I’m not Rupert Murdoch. He does have money. He could pay people to investigate stories and produce in-depth analysis segments on things like health care reform, the Iraq war or the nation’s struggling education system. So could GE’s MSNBC and CNN, but they don’t do that.

I know, I’m taking a long time getting to my lead, so let’s get down to it.

Today, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog organization, published a story detailing the conservative nervous breakdown we’re watching unravel across this once great nation. The thesis of Boehlert’s story is that conservatives believed their own hype, and now they’re freaking out that they weren’t able to kill health care reform. Now they’re worried about what else they won’t be able to stop the liberals from doing.

What happened was that Fox News, along with other right-wing media, convinced the Tea Partiers that they were winning. They believed Fox News when they said 2 million people rallied in the nation’s capitol last September, even though there might have been 100,000. They believed Fox News and Rush Limbaugh when they were assured that after the gun-touting town hall screamers had shouted down Democratic politicians that health care reform was dead.

I believed them too. Not more than a month ago, I was convinced that health care would not happen.

But what everyone forgot is that the people get to speak in the voting booth and that’s pretty much it. Anti-war protesters couldn’t stop the Iraq war no matter how many people rallied against it because George W. Bush was elected, well sort of, in 2000, and Congress was controlled by the GOP. In a republic, the people vote for their representatives in November and it’s up to those elected leaders to lead. And leading doesn’t mean changing your mind every time the New York Times or Fox News publishes a public opinion poll. Depending on your point of view, that’s either the upside or the downside of living in a republic.

And so now that health care reform has passed, conservatives are losing their shit.

Boehlert said:

After all, late last week the nation stood on the precipice, just three “days away from the United States of America being over as we’ve all known it,” according to Rush Limbaugh, who warned that reform would drive every private insurance company out of business. Glenn Beck also went full tilt, warning that the bill represented a “turning point,” like the Civil War and Peal Harbor, while colleague Sean Hannity pinpointed the health care vote as the ‘very hour’ that America turned ‘completely towards socialism.’

The Washington Times likened reform to the “Black Plague,” and the online reaction was somehow even more unhinged. It was “RIP USA,” because with the vote, America would become “occupied by a hostile foreign power.” Indeed, a “socialist putsch” had been sprung and “America’s Day of Wreckoning [sic]” was at hand. Why? Because the Democrats’ health care legislation “will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage.”

Basically what Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Partiers want is to run the government regardless of whether or not they win elections. To them, it doesn’t matter who gets elected, what matters is that politicians do what they tell them to do. And because Fox News effectively created the illusion that they were winning the debate, right-wing fringers are now throwing a hissy fit.

When health care reform passed Congress, Boehlert wrote, “It was the sudden and rude realization that, instead, they’d spent the past few months trapped inside an echo chamber, I think, that created the volcanic and unhinged response we’ve seen play out in recent days. It’s the kind of childish and hysterical reaction I didn’t think we’d ever witness from a major political movement.”

So the Tea Partiers and other conservative groups out there need to understand that in order effect change in this country they’re going to have to organize into a political movement. It takes more than a few gun-touting fanatics to pass legislation, and most people would agree, that’s a good thing. So turn off Fox News and actually engage in the process or you’ll be left on the corner shouting to no one.

Read Boelhert’s story.

On his radio show today, Glenn Beck disagreed with a nun who said that Jesus would support the recently passed health care reform bill.

As is often the case with Beck’s radio show – it got racial and ignorant.

Read the entire story on Examiner