Will Shetterley sez, "This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed from dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald's life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.
From Arizona to Ground Zero via birthers, the Republicans are riding a wave of white resentment. It's reckless and frightening---Update: Glenn Beck criticised this commentary on his Fox News programme on Wednesday evening. I have posted the relevant excerpt and a brief response here. The August madness into which America has descended is about several things. It's about the still-sputtering economy, of course, and the fear it engenders. It's about xenophobia, never far below the surface. And it's about a rightwing media-political complex that plays on the public's ignorance.But there's a unifying theme that few wish to acknowledge. What we are witnessing at the moment is the full, ugly furore of white backlash, aimed directly and indirectly at our first black president. MORE...
In their speeches on the Mall yesterday, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin followed a script familiar to students of American history's most storied demagogues: They played on their followers' murky fear that a sinister and Godless other is trying to transform our country into something no longer recognizable as America. MORE...Howie P.S.: I am resisting the impulse to ignore these mean-spirited morons:
‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’
TPM, with video (00:49):During Sarah Palin's interview with Glenn Beck today, something extraordinary happened -- Beck challenged Palin on a stock, noncommittal answer to a question. Beck asked: "Who's your favorite Founder?"Howie P.S.: But wait, there's more! More from TPM: "Glenn Beck And Sarah Palin Offer To Co-Host Saturday Night Live (with video).""You know, well, all of them, because they came collectively together with so much--" Palin began, in a manner much like her non-answers to Katie Couric's questions about which newspapers she's read ("All of them.") and which Supreme Court decisions she's disagreed with (which brought a similarly broad answer about how there are a lot of decisions).
"Bullcrap," Beck interrupted. "Who's your favorite."
"--so much diverse and so much diversity in terms of belief, but collectively they came together -- and they were led by, of course George Washington, so he's got to rise to the top." Palin then gave a short speech on Washington's virtues.
Washington Outsiders (with video):
(photo: he almost cried)
We sat eating a soggy turkey sandwich and sweating like pigs at a table near home plate on Safeco Field waiting for Glenn Beck.
It took a while.It didn't make much sense, but it didn't matter, the crowd cheered with the rise his voice, and the timing of his punch-lines.
We were graciously invited to lunch at the Beck event by the famous former conservative blogger, Piper Scott, who's leveraged his bloggerdom into a paying job with the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, the venerable right-wing cabal for whom the event was a fundraiser. (They invited Beck in February when his presence was expected to draw but 1800 souls. Beck's success in making himself the most controversial man in America, worked well for them, with over 7000 reportedly in attendence. "There is a God," Piper Scott told us with spiritual intensity).
Behind us in the stands were the hoi polloi, the t-shirted tea-baggers, the blue-jeaned conservative nihilists, the razor-cut kids, and the aged "I'd-rather be-pissed" boomers of the populist right to whom the needy, screedy homespun Glenn Beck is hope and change. They and they paid $25-35 each for the wearing silly shirts for for freedom. Dino Rossi was there.
(The Gadsden flag is the Stars & Stripes, "Right-wing Protesters' Model." Hawked at every conservative event these days, ($5) and featured on one of Beck's book covers, the yellow "Don't tread on me" flags with the rattlesnake are far more versatile for tea parties, town halls and demonstrations. One protester told us: "I can shove this flag up your liberal ass, whereas, I couldn't be that disrespectful with Old Glory."
After a some spirited "ask$,"by EFF suits; which included for boo inspiration. a clip of Governor Gregoire on the Jumbotron snarling like Margaret Hamilton. Also the inevitable, requisite, pro forma tributes to veterans and Dave Boze (KTTH m-f, 3-6p) in a white shirt and tie ingratiating himself to the elderly crowd with his respectful introduction, Beck finally bounded out. (Boze's shirt and tie choice has rightie-world buzzing that he, in deference to his Bonneville/LDS bosses, and admiration of Glenn Beck is converting to Mormonism. Stay tuned).
(Boze in his good boy shirt)
Beck came out in shirt sleeves, and delivered a Beckish speech full of platitudes and exhortations of patriotically correct do-gooding and glad-hands for everyone in sight. He got that catch in his voice a couple of times making us think he was going to cry, but he motored on, (see photo above) and we didn't get the pathetic sob we were all praying for.
He's an effective speaker, and knows his audience. Mysterious was his badmouthing of Theodore Roosevelt, a hero to most Republicans. Beck (and his political inspiration, the long dead Mormon crank, W. Cleon Skousen blame him for the income tax, and hold the national parks against him as a sort of socialist scheme. He was a scary "progressive," he said.
We scooted out fast in order to scoot up the freeway to Mount Vernon where the protest action was heavy.
Skagit County Young Democrats organized the protest. Some folks from Whatcom County went down to add their voices... I recognize several familiar faces in the video's.
KOMO4 - W. Washington greets Glenn Beck with huzzahs, hisses
Mt .Vernon says NO to Mad Hater Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck Recieves The Key To Mt. Vernon, Washington
Mount Vernon City Council Rejects "Glenn Beck Day"
Beck came to Seattle amid a torrent of anger over his proclamation on July 28 that President Obama was a racist and that he believed the president has a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."Howie P.S.: The complete Seattle Times story is here. The Seattle PI has a story and a photo gallery. Darryl has a "Video Tribute for Glenn Beck Day."
On September 26, Bud Norris, the mayor of Mt. Vernon, WA, will award the ceremonial key to the city to Glenn Beck, who grew up there. Norris’ decision to declare “Glenn Beck Day” has led to demonstrations “on the streets and in city council meetings over the conservative commentator’s visit.” Last night, the city council voted unanimously to distance itself from honoring Beck:On Wednesday night, the City Council of this town of 32,000 distanced itself from Mayor Bud Norris, who plans to give the keys to the city to talk-show personality Glenn Beck on Saturday.
The seven-member council unanimously passed a resolution proposed by member Dale Ragan that stated, “Mount Vernon City Council is in no way sponsoring the Mayor’s event on September 26, 2009 and is not connected to the Glenn Beck event in any manner.”
The resolution came after two dozen people who had signed up for the public-comment part of the session spoke in often emotional language to oppose honoring the controversial talk-show host.
RAW STORY:Fox News host Glenn Beck now has something in common with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
They’ve barred media from their public appearances. Representatives for Palin, who spoke in China yesterday, refused to allow press at her event, saying they were trying to ensure the governor’s “comfort.”
A directive from Fox News Channel and Glenn Beck “and his representatives” have instructed a town near Seattle not to let anyone but a single local reporter near an event Saturday for the controversial Fox talker. No press credentials are to be allowed to be issued to anyone else.The town’s mayor — Bud Norris of Mount Vernon, in Washington State — told a local newspaper that the directive came from Fox, Beck and his associates, and that he didn’t ask for a reason. Beck is speaking at a sold-out event Saturday, “Welcome Home Glenn Beck.” Norris organized the fete.How have locals responded? Ragan was quoted as saying, “Of several hundred e-mails I have had, there are maybe three supporting it. All of them talk about the fact that they will shop no longer in Mount Vernon.”
A spokesman for Mercury Radio Arts, Beck’s production company, told the Seattle Times that the decision not to allow press was made by organizers, not at their behest.
“Glenn is very excited about returning home and being a guest at the fundraiser [for Mount Vernon's Lincoln Theatre], but there is a slight misunderstanding as we are guests and are not running the event,” Mercury spokesman Chris Balf was quoted as saying.
Mayor Norris has dubbed Saturday “Glenn Beck Day.”
“It is a city event,” Norris told the paper. “There’s no question about that.”
Then why bar reporters from attending?
“This is a ticketed event not open to general public,” Mount Vernon City Attorney Kevin Rogerson told a reporter. “This is the mayor giving a symbolic key of recognition to a private individual.”
A city council member who spoke to a reporter said that the event for Beck would involve additional police officers, which the city would pay for.
“If someone wants to bring a speaker to town and sell tickets, they’ve got the right to do it,” Dale Ragan told the paper. “I don’t believe in involving the city. There’s going to have to be additional police officers on duty. There stands a chance of huge numbers of demonstrators on the premises. It just runs up all the costs…This is a very divisive, uproaring issue.”
KC Dems:The King County Democrats will lead a coalition of organizations in a rally against Fox News and Beck's lies and distortionsHowie P.S.: H/t to Roger Fulton.
NO KEYS TO THE CITY AWARDED HERE !!
Saturday September 26, 2009
PROTEST
11:30 am-12:30 pm
West side of street across from Safeco Field in Seattle
(1250 1st Avenue)
Rosemary Blackwell-KCDCC Team Captain
( signs and buttons will be available )
Call 425.255.2679 for more details
If only it were just about the color of his skin.
With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, the racist component of Obama-hatred has been undeniable since the summer of 2008, when Sarah Palin rallied all-white mobs to the defense of the “real America.” Joe Wilson may or may not be in that camp, but, either way, that’s not the news. As we watched and rewatched the South Carolina congressman’s star turn, what grabbed us was the act itself.What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.Beck frequently strikes the pose of an apocalyptic prophet, even insisting that he predicted 9/11. This summer he also started warning of domestic terrorism in the form of a new Timothy McVeigh. On this, one fears he knows whereof he speaks. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He — and our political system — are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.
The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another “national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments we have, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been for Obama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But there is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.
Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.
Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts.
Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.
Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).
Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.
Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.
“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.
Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.
Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.
Nor has Obama succeeded in persuading critics on the left or right that he will do as much for those Americans who are suffering as he has for the corporations his administration and his predecessor’s rushed to rescue. To mark the anniversary of Lehman’s fall, the president gave a speech on Wall Street last Monday again vowing reform. But everyone’s back to business as usual: The Wall Street Journal reported that not a single C.E.O. from a top bank attended. The speech sank with scant notice because there has been so little action to back it up and because its conciliatory stance was tone-deaf to the anger beyond the financial district.
That same day a United States District Court judge in New York, Jed S. Rakoff, scathingly condemned the Obama Securities and Exchange Commission for letting Bank of America skate away with what Rakoff called an immoral and unjust wrist tap to settle charges that it covered up $3.6 billion paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch. How is this S.E.C. a change from the Clinton-Bush S.E.C. that ignored all the red flags on Bernie Madoff?
Artist Shepard Fairey, left, stands with Yosi Sergant at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art in February.The National Endowment for the Arts has reassigned former communications director Yosi Sergant, who had become the latest target of FOX News talk show host Glenn Beck.Howie P.S.: Earlier today I received a video (03:45), "GRITtv: Aimee Allison & Ari Melber: Right-Wing Attacks on Obama Administration Continue" and was pondering whether to post it.Acting NEA communications director Victoria Hutter said Thursday that Sergant had left the communications post. The move came after he had come under attack from Beck, a conservative commentator who accused Sergant of attempting to use taxpayer money to fund art to support the president's initiatives.In recent weeks, Beck also had trained his sights on Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein, a friend of President Obama whose nomination to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs had been stuck since January. But the Senate confirmed Sunstein's appointment Thursday afternoon, after voting to end debate on the nomination the previous evening.
Sergant's reassignment came after the resignation last weekend of environmental adviser Van Jones, who had been criticized for weeks by Beck.
The talk show host accused Sergant of arranging an August conference call with the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve to recruit artists to create works in support of Obama policies. The NEA has denied that the call was inappropriate, and the White House has said that it did not force Sergant's reassignment.Sergant became well known during campaign 2008 for his work with artist Shepard Fairey around the iconic Obama HOPE poster, and first came to Washington as a staffer in the White House.
