The Glenn Beck Report

UPDATE: 2/27/10

Glenn Beck’s slash-and-burn schtick fired up the CPAC loony bin by repeating lie after distortion after smear, the most comforting material that he could present to America’s dead political party. It’s hard to imagine how so much crap could come out of a human being in a short period of time.

Beck (with Palin and the rest of the GOP) is attempting  to drag the TeaBaggers into the fold,  kicking and screaming, but they are so thick that most of them have yet to realize it.  Some of them are getting suspicious. (Hmmm… both of them are paid contributors to Faux News, the official propaganda organ of the GOP. Palin was the Vice Presidential candidate for the GOP in the last election. Glenn Beck has never said one nice thing about any Democrat.  Sarah Palin has repeatedly stated that she has no use for the “liberal elitists” and would rather be chasing down animals in a helicopter and shooting them with weapons designed for war than serving as Governor in a corrupt system.   Hmmm. D’ya think…?)

Tonight we hear that Beck and Palin are going on a 2-stop tour to TeaBagger-land, the first stop in Oklahoma, the intellectual center of gravity in America and also home to lots of fancy dancing by men in cowboy hats with shit-kickers that never saw any shit. Watching these two on the same stage reminds me of the dance scene with Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein, doing the soft shoe to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” for a thrilled crowd until an explosion casts a flash of light on them.

At that moment the monster goes wild and runs amok. Surely whatever they say or do cannot stand the light of scrutiny by a critical press. Why else would Sarah Palin try to shut them out of their events? My other question… would Gene Wilder consider impersonating Glenn Beck for a parody remake of the scene?

The Beck CPAC speech lies and abuses have been well-documented by Ryan Witt in the Des Moines Register at the following link:

http://www.examiner.com/x-5738-Political-Buzz-Examiner~y2010m2d21-Video-Commentary-and-fact-check-of-Glenn-Becks-CPAC-speech?#comments

I am looking for an “official” transcript of the speech and will try to get one up on a separate page. Ryan has done a great job of detailing the lying sack-o’-doody, but in case he’s missed any I’ll be doing my own fact check as well.

BTW, you should be careful when you search for Beck transcripts. I put this into Google and it spit up a link that tried to infect my computer. If this happens to you, please press Alt-F4 (the Alt key and the F4 key simultaneously) until all the windows related to your browser close. In this process, you may reboot your computer if you press the combination after all windows are closed; this is still better than having to disinfect your browser.

I am not sure who would want to discourage you from reading a transcript of Glenn Beck’s CPAC speech, which is why I will post a clean copy here when I get one.

I just learned today via The Progress Report that Glenn Beck has lost every single sponsor for his UK version of the show. The digest email that I get refers back to an article at Think Progress by Amanda Terkel, who quotes two of my cultural heroes. Those would be Color of Change and StopBeck.com. Please give them a click; they have been instrumental in the effort to boycott sponsors of Glenn Beck’s show and force him off the air. I consider myself a mere dabbler in comparison to these true warriors for justice.

IN OTHER NEWS….

Glenn went totally ape-shit over an Obama speech about job creation and the stimulus bill. The clip is amazing; insanity, personified.

A nice gent who goes by the name of Kevinge3 on YouTube posted this clip:

UPDATE!! This video can’t be embedded by the request of the poster, but the link below still works to take you to the YouTube video. I respect Kevinge3’s right to disable embedding, so when you go over to YouTube, please do 2 things: First, show Kevinge3 some love for editing this 30 seconds or so out and making a nice video, and second, don’t forget to come back!

Alpo, anyone? Everyone send Glenn Beck a can of Alpo, please.

I’m still working on the next installment in my 4 part series on how Glenn Beck’s Mormon faith will be instrumental in splitting the teabaggers along a religious fault line. In the meantime, enjoy…

“Teabagger” makes runner-up for Oxford Dictionary New Word of the Year for 2009

This is a story that Glenn should be proud about, since he barks instructions to the teabaggers for hours at a time. Some of those instructions, by the way, are becoming rather vicious. Glenn better watch how he runs his mouth or perhaps someone over at Faux will actually have to be the adult. For example,

Glenn Beck compares health insurance reform to rape

The unbelievable dry druggie (perhaps) never ceases to amaze. This time he went over the top, even topping his bit where he “poured gasoline” all over a person sitting on his set. This time he said

The American public doesn’t want government-run health care and, for the first time in history, we don’t think it’s the government’s place to give it to us. We’re the young girl saying “no” and government is Roman Polanski: In the end, we are all going to be cowering in France.

Seriously, Glenn, even some of the faithful must be wondering WTF you are doing comparing any public policy to the rape of a 13 year old girl. This ought to spur another round of phone calls and nastygrams to your few remaining sponsors. You can keep up to date on this effort at http://foxnewsboycott.com/. Last count was 85 sponsors lost, you can get information about how to vote with your pocketbook at this fine site. Please do take time to call, it makes a difference.

Glenn Beck’s Candidate Concedes, and then…

I have written at length in an earlier post about the unfortunate schlub Doug Hoffman, the teabagger candidate who claimed that Glenn Beck is his “mentor”. Holy smokes, to think that a grown man would admit that in PUBLIC. Well, on election night, November 3, as the teabagger dream crumbled before his eyes and his mentor lay sick in the hospital with acute appendicitis, Doug Hoffman conceded the race to Democrat Bill Owens. Owens was sworn into office last Saturday, November 7.

So today, just to prove what a weird creepy dick he really is, Doug Hoffman got into a phone conversation with “the mentor” on his radio show and got egged on into the following conversation:

BECK: Alright, so let me ask you two questions. Are you currently bowing to me at the waist? (LAUGHTER) Have you bowed, or will you bow, to anyone, at the waist? No? Okay, good. Second question for you, are you officially un-conceding at this moment?

HOFFMAN: Yes, if I knew this information at the election night, I would not have conceded.

BECK: So are you un-conceding?

HOFFMAN: If that’s possible, yes.

BECK: If the President can bow to an emperor and nobody says anything, yeah, I think you can unconcede.

Update 11/20:
The actual event that spurred this conversation was the news that around 10,000 absentee ballots had not yet been counted. There are various rumors circulating about what actually happened on election night, but thanks to excellent reporting by Submitted to a Candid World, we don’t have to speculate. Hoffman had all the correct information when he conceded. The NY Board of Elections has NOT issued final certification of the election results, it’s conditional. However, Hoffman’s chances of winning with the uncounted absentee ballots are next to none because they were cast before Dede Scozzafava dropped out of the race. Do the math: she was polling at about 20% when she dropped out. That leaves 8,000 votes. Owens had roughly a 3,100 vote victory, which means that in order to make up the difference and win Hoffman would have to take 5,550 or about about 70% of the remaining 8,000 votes. Now think about this for a moment. After what you’ve seen of the teabaggers in video, still photos, on TV, and elsewhere, what do you suppose are the chances that these people would send in an absentee ballot? 70% of the toothless goofballs couldn’t find their ass with both hands let alone obtain, fill out, and mail in an absentee ballot.

I predict that Dede Scozzafava will do much better in absentee ballots than Hoffman. This is just a hunch, but it makes sense if you think about the organization of the GOP versus the angry rabble that voted for Hoffman based on the recommendations of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

The election will not be officially certified until December. If you go to Hoffman’s website, there are stories on the index page that claim there was a virus in the voting machines (how’s that paper ballot thing the GOP fought for the last decade working out for ya?) and another article that tantalizingly asks the question “Owens in Office Illegally?”. Nope, he’s not. The New York Board of Elections gave Congress a conditionally certified result. If the teabagger boy gets the 70% of the absentee ballots as explained above, then Glenn Beck’s head will explode with glee. If not, it’s going to be Vapo-Rub City for the Prince of Pricks. Maybe everybody should send him a crying towel. Stay tuned…
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Well, Glenn, you had so much success on your first try at throwing the GOP out of office, we here at GlennBeckReport and StopDubya wish you the best of luck and continuing success for many years to come.

OnStarGate 7

Paranoid schizophrenics have a special knack for detecting conspiracies that normal people like you and me would never see. I have known two of them up close and personal. One was a brilliant gent who had been at the top of his class at the US Coast Guard Academy and had a nervous breakdown from the pressure. He was OK if he stayed on his meds, which he didn’t like to do because they “made his brain feel like it was frozen”. He worked on and off, and he was convinced that while he was out “they” were coming into his apartment and “doing things”. I tried to pin John down as to exactly what “they” were doing during a desperate phone conversation we had one night; he called because he feared he was going to get violent. Two of the things he mentioned were that “they” had gone into his closet and removed a button from one of his shirts, and “they” also had moved or somehow screwed up his ship-in-a-bottle project. “They” had also rigged his TV, radio, and phone so that “they” could secretly watch him and listen to him. These nights ended badly for John, usually with 5 cops on top of him trying to get him into handcuffs. By the time he called me it was always too late. He had stopped taking his meds, hadn’t slept for 3 or 4 days, and the only thing I could do was call his sister, who lived 300 miles away, so she could come and mop up the mess. Sad.

The other person was a guy named Don who was in his mid-20s. Don was a typical central Wisconsin teenage kid who liked to drink and drive every weekend with a car full of friends. Don woke up early one December morning in the middle of a snow-covered field next to Wisconsin Highway 29. In the field with Don were two wrecked cars, including the one he was DWI, and eight bodies. Three of them were passengers in his car, five had been passengers in the car Don hit when he ran the stop sign and drove onto 29 from the dirt drinkin’ road. Nobody showed up on the scene for quite a while so Don had plenty of time to be alone with the dead.

When I met him several years after the crash, Don was hearing voices that told him what to draw on his apartment wall. The drawing was bizarre, with lots of vines and insects. The voices spoke to him while I was visiting once, and he told me what they were saying. It was incomprehensible, but he was threatened by “them” and felt compelled to comply or something terrible would happen. The last time I saw Don, I drove him to the hospital and helped him check himself into the Psych Ward for another 30 day evaluation.

I forced myself to listen to the Glenn Beck radio program segment about OnStar and Obama because I wanted to see if I could find any connection between Glenn, John, and Don.

Yes, I did. The language and dialect of paranoia sounds the same when coming from a schizophrenic or coming from someone who is trying to stoke the boiler sitting under a giant stewpot of fear. Glenn uses the same phraseology of my friends John and Don. “How can you trust the government? The government is listening to my conversations. The government is tracking me. The government has ruined our future and they plan to make it worse. The government can stop your car and let the air out of your tires!”

It’s not as if Glenn Beck woke up on Thursday and discovered that OnStar exists. It’s not even that Glenn woke up to the fact that the government has been illegally spying on telephone conversations, email, and other communications of Americans (he says he’s OK with that). But letting the air out of your tires… that’s the last straw for Glenn. The government can let the air out of my tires. Whoa.

Glenn’s sudden, irrational fear of the US Government taking control of his car is based on the false premise that the bailout of GM was a government takeover of GM. I am going to assume that anyone who reads this will know on some level that the government does not control GM’s business activities, its management, its workers, its purchasing, or any part of GM that still survives. GM faced a situation where they would have failed and hundreds of thousands of people would have lost their jobs, creating a shock wave through the entire economy. So they took government assistance to avoid an outright failure. Does Glenn Beck really believe that GM is now acting as a spy agency for the Obama Administration?

To back this claim up, Glenn told us that he had visited the OnStar central office and seen all the operators and the maps, looking like a hi-tech war room. The person who was touring Glenn told him that OnStar has the capability of turning off a car remotely, which they didn’t do at the time but are now advertising on TV as an anti-theft measure.

And all of this would have been OK if only the Maoists hadn’t taken control of the government. Glenn does something dishonest, again, by taking a quote out of context. This time his misquoted person is Ron Bloom, the Administration’s Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy (or as Glenn would say, the Manufacturing Czar, ooooh, scary!) Bloom’s actual words follow, I have highlighted the excerpt that Glenn Beck used on his show:

BLOOM: The second thing about us is we’ve decided to get on the field. Some unions and our union, in fact, some years ago, largely played defense in these situations. We had what we had and we tried to protect it. What we realized through long and often painful experience is that management matters, business strategy matters, capital structure matters, ownership matters. We spent a long time trying to clean up the messes that others had left us. And so now we try to create our own messes. This is more dangerous politically, it’s more difficult. It has higher risk. We think it has higher reward. But in any event, in these cases where we can be on the field, you should expect to find us on the field.

Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market, or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money because they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only, no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.

What Bloom is talking about is how labor has realized that the “free market system” is rigged against labor, and the statistics bear this out. Since Reagan began his union-busting with the air traffic controllers strike in the early 80s, the percentage of union jobs in America has decreased from about 55% to about 7%. The system is rigged, it is anti-labor, and it is about raw political power. He doesn’t state that he wants to murder 10s of millions of people, he simply states the political truth. If you want the political truth, about the last place you ought to be checking for it is Glenn Beck’s shows.

So, Glenn, you little paranoid weasel, here’s the scoop. OnStar isn’t listening to your conversations any more than I am. They are not tracking you, they are a private business that operates a service which people pay for. Most people think it’s a good idea to have OnStar anti-theft protection. The US Government doesn’t care where you go and if they did they could just look at your cell phone information. Ron Bloom is not a Maoist any more than you are. In fact, he may be less of a Maoist than you are because he cares about what happens to people in the workforce and you don’t, you care about the people in the ivory towers.

One last thing. I hate to be the one to let the air out of your gasbag paranoid frenzy, but if the government wants to let the air out of your tires they will probably use spike strips.

Pfffffffffffffft. Glenn Beck the punching clown deflates again.

Monday the White House press team did something that has been a long time coming. They called a spade a spade. They repeated the obvious, a fact known by most reasonable people in the world, the fact that Fox proves and re-proves on a 24/7 continual basis, the fact that Fox is not a reliable news source because it is functionally a part of the GOP.

Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, was interviewed by Howie Kurtz of CNN’s Reliable Sources program. Here’s what she said, in part:

The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological… what I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party.

Let’s be realistic, here, Howie, they are widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.

… What is true, though is that you do not have to be a passive bystander when your opponents are seeking not to have a debate on the issues but simply to tear down the President and his presidency. And that’s what we’re not going to do: we will push back.

Here is the full interview conducted by Howie Kurtz of CNN’s Reliable Sources:

Oddly, Fox News doesn’t even appear to dispute the claim at all. The segment above includes this statement from Michael Clemente, Senior VP of Fox News:

An increasing number of viewers are relying on FOX News for both news and opinion. And the average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents. So, with all due respect to anyone who might still be confused about the difference between news reporting and vibrant opinion, my suggestion would be to talk about the stories and the facts, rather than attack the messenger…which over time, has never worked.

Clemente doesn’t dispute the right wing bias of Fox; he simply claims that they are both a news and opinion network. In reality, news is reported with a right wing filter, and what they present as news is a carefully selected group of stories interlaced with blatant, prejudiced opinion.

The mistake that the lefties make regarding Fox is trying to debate the facts. Facts are facts, and they are not debatable, they just “are”. It is well-documented that Fox is biased and inaccurate. Just Google “Fox News Bias” and you’ll get 2.5 million hits. So if Michael Clemente isn’t going to argue the point, how does Glenn Beck, part of what Clemente would call the “opinion” part of Fox, react to Anita Dunn’s comments?

Glenn Beck goes ABSOLUTELY WILD, and in the video below you’ll see him attempt to mock Anita Dunn. He pulls out a map of New York and purports to show where the “enemy is”. Glenn thinks that the White House believes that Fox News equals all the real national security issues facing the nation. Watch:

I especially appreciated the agitated music he has playing under the first part of the narrative before he tries to go sarcastic. His attempt at humor is based on a false equivalence, namely that a fair statement about Fox News right wing bias is a declaration of war by the White House, which puts Fox in the same category as the Taliban, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. Don’t puff yourself up, Glenn, you’re just a pimple on the bum of the entertainment/news world enjoying his 15 minutes. Nobody is trying to curtail your right to free speech, even though you wail like a child in a grocery store checkout line that they are.

Glenn promises to run a whole series on this topic, and I will follow it. He has already conflated a straight-talk slapdown of his phony “news” network into an “issue” of Constitutional, epic magnitude. What a moron.

The whole world is laughing at the news-clown. See the clown laugh. See him cry. See him jump and see him fly. I’m sorry you didn’t win the Nobel, Glenn, maybe you can win an Emmy for best supporting actor in a tragicomedy. Don’t forget the Vapo-Rub.

It’s Not Really About America or Socialists After All

In a somewhat less-than-shocking expose of Man-Baby Glenn Beck’s phony crying bit, it turns out that it’s less about loving America and more about Vicks Vapo-Rub.

At the beginning of this photo shoot, which was inexplicably done to capture portraits of Glenn Beck weeping (WTF?) photographer Jill Greenberg walks into the picture and applies Vapo-Rub under both of Glenn Beck’s eyes to make them water.

Glenn then apes for the camera, striking poses to depict a wide palette of waterworks-producing emotions from sorrow through anger and tears of joy to cursing God (how’s that Mormon thing working for ya, Glenn?) The God-smacking Beck pose can be seen at 2:22 in the video.

I realize that since I started this website a couple of weeks ago, the garbage is piling up. I think I may have been mistaken; he’s not anything that needs to be debunked, he’s a mindless buffoon who does nothing but fool a few other buffoons and occasionally provoke an indignant response from anyone who can think.

OK, I know this sounds REALLY, REALLY screwed up. But that’s what Glenn Beck is. I mean, pathologically insane. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe his mother’s suicide, maybe his Mormon conversion.. I don’t know, but he’s definitely a few Pop-Tarts short of a breakfast.

In this segment, Beck is trying to point out the obvious… that incremental change goes unnoticed and is therefore embraced but sudden change is not. To do this he throws a frog into a pot of boiling water, or at least makes it appear that he’s doing that.

I downloaded the video from YouTube and did a frame-by-frame analysis of it. There are three places that make it unclear whether or not he actually boiled a live animal to make a sick, obvious point. First, it is unclear whether he actually picked up a frog. The camera is over his box of frogs, but it’s possible the frog jumped out… unless he had captured TWO frogs with his meathook and let one go. Second, he makes a brief turn away from the camera during the discussion and that is an old magician’s trick. He may have flipped it back off the stage or done something else with his hand. Third, as he is supposedly throwing the frog into the pot, I can what appears to be an object in his hand in the first frame but it’s unclear what it is, and I don’t see it in midair. There is an audible “plop” sound, though, so something hit the water. Here’s the video, see if you see something more than I could.

Whether this stunt is real or not is irrelevant. It’s an outrage, it’s not funny, it doesn’t illustrate anything other than the already obvious fact that Glenn Beck is a friggin’ moron who will do anything that crosses his sick mind.

Glenn, I think your ought to claim that Americans are lemmings and then illustrate by being a human lemming. Let us know when your swim to Greenland is over.

UPDATE…. Glenn Beck did a segment on this on the next show. Ho ho, boy did you fool the liberals, Glenn. Man alive, it sure is funny to PRETEND that you are throwing a live animal into a pot of boiling water, hee hee. What a clever boy.

Didn’t your MOTHER teach you not to torture animals, Glenn?

Can you help Glenn Beck out?

He is looking for 56 white men to help re-found America.  Glenn Beck says he “believe[s] we only need 56 men today to free our government from the rabid corruption and special interests and to protect and defend the republic and the Constitution of the United States of America. “Re-found America!?”, you ask. “Why should we re-found America?”

Well, according to SOME people, (not naming names) America has gotten too far off from what America was supposed to be when it was founded. That is, Christian fundamentalist white men.

So Glenn’s going to “fix” our “corrupted government” by “re-founding” it. Some of you might consider this to be threatening to overthrow the government, but that’s not it at all. Glenn just sees a problem. The problem is that those people have taken away our country and if they continue to be part of the “problem”, they better watch out.

So Glenn Beck is looking for 56 good men (if you are a white slaveholder, it would be more appropriate) to re-found the country. Together, 56 white men with the right attitude will be able to fix America into the dystopic vision of the dysfunctional mind of the weeping Glenn “I love America so much it hurts” Beck.

Glenn Beck wants to accomplish this democratically, small d, of course.  He will do this by a nomination process.  Think of it! You can participate in re-founding America by nominating one of the 56 men who will fix it!  The suspense!  The angst!  The drama… who will you nominate!?!?

For more information, please click http://www.the912project.com/take-action-get-involved/re-found-america/.

OR, you can just do like I did and nominate yourself.  Send your nomination to: refounders@foxnews.com

Here is a sample form you can use for your self-nomination letter to Fox News.  It happens to be the one I sent in, feel free to use all or any part of it you feel is appropriate.  Cheers!

Nomination for one of 56 re-founders

I would like to nominate myself, William W. Wexler, for the honor of being one of the 56 re-founders.

I would be happy to assist in re-founding America, using the US Constitution as my guide at all times, in the context of having a diverse society of 300 million people of all religions and no religion, black, brown, white, women, men, gays, and whatever, who all are trying to get along after having their money stolen from them by the banks and 30 years of Republicans destroying America.  America belongs to the people, all of us, not to non-persons such as corporations.  It belongs to the laborer on the factory floor, just as much as it belongs to the boss in the plush office.  Yes, egalitarianism, fairness, share the wealth.  I am 200% for that!  Health care for all, fair wage for a fair day’s work, no demagoguery, just plain truth.  We don’t need a sugar coating, we don’t need right-wing noise, we don’t need phony patriotism, we need people like me who love their country and have sacrificed dearly for it.

You may contact me at this email address to notify me of your selection of me.

wexler@glennbeckreport.com

-Wexler