Could the “Tea Party” take over Congress?

This gathering of libertarians, conservatives, and others just plain fed up with business as usual in Washington has some prominent figureheads – Fox News broadcasters and political pot-stirrers Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck –and, is clearly having a major impact on the midterm elections — putting a significant number of more conventional Republicans as well as Democrats into a cold sweat as they look over their shoulders at tea-party backed candidates with a real possibility of winning.  Some of these candidates should scare the hell out of most voters — these are not your average run-of-the-mill politicians, in fact, they’re worse.

Which tea-party-backed candidates do you think will be elected this fall, and why? Which ones are most off center, maybe even off the far edge of ‘right?’

Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally

Glenn Beck plans a rally for the anniversary of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech.  He calls it “Restoring Honor.”   Now he’s saying it’s totally apolitical – and the proof is Sarah Palin will be the headlining speaker.  Oh, and it’s partially sponsored by the National Rifle Association.

What other “totally apolitical” speakers do you think Beck will bring with him to the Lincoln Memorial steps?

fnord

Hypocrisy of the right-leaning media

David Frum makes a smart observation: When Dan Rather fell for a hoax about Bush’s war record in 2004, CBS kicked him to the curb. Now that Andrew Breitbart has published doctored videos that make a Department of Agriculture employee appear racist—and cost her her job—will he have to do the same? “Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather,” Frum writes, “but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.” Indeed, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservatives are actually blaming President Obama and the NAACP for the whole brouhaha while neglecting to mention that Breitbart is the one who disseminated the video in the first place. Frum draws a connection to the right’s fury over leaked emails from Journolist, an email list-serve for several liberal journalists, that showed a few journalists expressing a wish to quash stories about Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election. “Only, of course, the Wright story was not quashed—unlike the story of Breitbart’s role in Sherrod’s firing, which has been, at least among conservatives.”

Read more here.

The Man Who Changed Glenn Beck’s Life (via The Glenn Beck Review)

I’m just checking out WordPress’ new “reblogging” feature.
I’ve always maintained that I’m not “anti” anything, but rather “pro” other things.
Sooo….this is my disclaimer. I’m not anti-Glenn Beck, I’m PRO-REALITY and TRUTH!

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him. W. Cleon Skousen By Alexander Zaitchik (reprinted here with permission of the author) On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America’s new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutremen … Read More

via The Glenn Beck Review

Is GOP becoming all-or-nothing absolutists?

In today’s radicalized Republican circles, it seems anyone to the left of the John Birch Society is a “liberal.”

Here’s how crazy our politics have become: Legendary Republican President Theodore Roosevelt is being called a socialist by conservatives like Glenn Beck. The man on Mount Rushmore, the Rough Rider president.  Beck bases his opinion on the fact the Roosevelt was a Trust-Busting, Department of Commerce, Panama Canal, FDA, meat inspections, champion for women’s rights, first president to invite an African-American to dinner at the White House.  Beck’s departure point for his now-frequent attacks on our 26th president was a post-2008 election snide swipe at John McCain, who he characterized as “this weird progressive like Teddy Roosevelt.” In his subsequent book, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Beck devoted a chapter to “The Cancer of Progressivism” and lays the blame at TR’s feet.

If conservatives want to kick TR out, Obama seems ready to welcome him in. As if on cue, the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, announced yesterday that the president is now reading the classic The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, a book that inspired Reagan’s senior staff to tap Morris as their in-house historian during the 1980s.

As TR said, “constructive change offers the best method of avoiding destructive change, reform is the antidote to revolution… social reform is not the precursor but the preventive of socialism.”

Bye Bye…..

Interesting little bit of news I just read on Huffington Post.   I wonder if this the start of a trend?  Could we be so lucky?

Lilac

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/18/glenn-beck-producer-leave_n_426905.html

Glenn Beck: Media Matters’ 2009 Misinformer of the Year

Media Matters has a well-reported account of Glenn’s misdeeds.

Palin-Beck 2012?

The end of the world as we know it? In an interview with Newsmax, Palin says that she’d consider Glenn Beck as a running mate if she ran for president in 2012. “I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I’m not there yet,” Palin says. “But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He’s a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he’s so bold—I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he’s very, very, very effective.”

She has no brains!  She sets back the goal of women being respected as equal.  She embarrasses women with critical thinking skills.

fnord

Glenn Beck and left-right confusion

A fascinating article by Glenn Greenwald, at Salon.com, not only attempts to categorize (not an easy endeavor) Glenn Beck. Along the way, Greenwald has much to say about the political climate in the states today. To say the bulk of the protesters (teabaggers, etc.) don’t have a clue about what exactly they’re protesting is oversimplification.
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Last night during his CBS interview with Katie Couric, Glenn Beck said he may have voted for Hillary Clinton and that “John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama.”  This comment predictably spawned confusion among some liberals and anger among some conservatives.  But even prior to that, there had been a palpable increase in the right-wing attacks on Beck — some motivated by professional competition for the incredibly lucrative industry of right-wing opinion-making, some due to understandable discomfort with his crazed and irresponsible rhetoric, but much of it the result of Beck’s growing deviation from GOP (and neoconservative) dogma.  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.

Some of this confusion is attributable to the fact that Beck himself doesn’t really appear to have any actual, identifiable political beliefs; he just mutates into whatever is likely to draw the most attention for himself and whatever satisfies his emotional cravings of the moment.  Although he now parades around under a rhetorical banner of small-government liberty, anti-imperialism, and opposition to the merger of corporations and government (as exemplified by the Bush-sponsored Wall Street bailout), it wasn’t all that long ago that he was advocating exactly the opposite:  paying homage to the Patriot Act, defending the Wall Street bailout and arguing it should have been larger, and spouting standard neoconservative cartoon propaganda about The Global Islamo-Nazi Jihadists and all that it justifies.  Even the quasi-demented desire for a return to 9/12 — as though the country should be stuck permanently in a state of terrorism-induced trauma and righteous, nationalistic fury over an allegedly existential Enemy — is the precise antithesis of the war-opposing, neocon-hating views held by many libertarian and paleoconservative factions with which Beck has now associated himself.  Still other aspects of his ranting are obviously grounded in highly familiar, right-wing paranoia

Continued here:

jammer5