Glenn Beck

An organization once headed by former Obama administration official Van Jones tried it. Other so-called grassroots organizations have given it a shot. Now Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., with the power of Congress in tow, has taken his best shot to shut Glenn Beck down. But so far it isn’t really working.

On Sept. 23, Weiner called a representative from Santa Monica, Calif.-based Goldline to testify before the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee about what he deemed to be the firm's unfair business practices. However, it just so happens that Goldline sponsors Beck and other conservative media personalities.

With congressional hearings, you'd expect the media to be all over this, right? Not exactly, at least thus far. The most attention Weiner’s charade could muster was a segment at the end of MSNBC’s bomb-thrower show, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.” Olbermann asked Weiner on his Sept. 23 broadcast if Goldline was in cahoots with “willing partners like Glenn Beck,” since anyone who suggests gold be a part of someone’s portfolio is up to no good.

Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham Thursday said Jon Stewart on the previous evening's "O'Reilly Factor" looked sad, demoralized, and deflated about how Barack Obama is performing in his role as President.

"I was a bit saddened because Jon Stewart looked like the sad clown last night," Ingraham told O'Reilly after he asked her opinion about the comedian's appearance on his program.

"He just seems kind of demoralized and deflated," Ingraham continued.

"He knows that Barack Obama is in an auditorium now and the oxygen has been totally sucked out of it."

Ingraham also ridiculed Stewart's upcoming rally in Washington as "derivative to Glenn Beck" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A new study by the Pew Research Center found that Barack Obama gets his highest approval ratings from people that watch MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, as well as from readers of the New York Times.

The numbers are rather staggering, as 84 percent of regular viewers of MSNBC's "Countdown" give the President high marks for his job performance.

This compares to 80 percent for regular viewers of "The Rachel Maddow Show" and 79 percent for regular readers of the Times.

But that's just one of the interesting findings in the Pew survey released Sunday:

KEY UPDATES below the fold, including Beck's response to Schultz. 

There's not really much you can say about this claim, beyond "suuuuure."

Ed Schultz, who attracts just over a quarter of Glenn Beck's viewership (700,000 vs. 2.6 million viewers), claimed he could out-rally the Fox News host, whose "Restoring Honor" event attracted an estimated 300,000 people to the National Mall on Saturday.

"I guarantee you, I could do more than 300,000!" claimed the man who just last week found out he didn't make the cut for an MSNBC promo. "It ain't a big deal!" Schultz also claimed that the crowd size at Beck's rally has absolutely no bearing on Democrats' prospects in November.

Wishful thinking on both counts, it seems.

Audio and transcript via Brian Maloney at the Radio Equalizer:

On Saturday, NewsBusters sister site Eyeblast.tv sent contributing editor Joe Schoffstall to see what exactly Al Sharpton’s protest rally was all about. While there, he was able to get an interview with NAACP President Ben Jealous regarding his thoughts on Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally.

Jealous claimed that those at Restoring Honor wouldn’t applaud Dr. King's historic 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.

Beck aired that Eyeblast video and promptly destroyed Jealous's argument by playing clips of the crowd enthusiastically cheering mentions of the late civil rights leader.

You can watch the relevant excerpt from the August 31 "Glenn Beck" show by clicking the play button on the embed above.

Howard Kurtz on Sunday smacked down liberal talk radio host Bill Press for saying the Park Service allowing Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" event at the Lincoln Memorial was like "granting al Qaeda permission to hold a rally on September 11th at Ground Zero."

Towards the end of the opening segment of CNN's "Reliable Sources," Kurtz surprisingly brought up last Friday's disgraceful editing job by ABC's "Good Morning America" that Beck himself said was like something Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would have done.

When finished with this admonishment, Kurtz went right after Press who was seated directly in front of him (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

UPDATE (7:05 PM): Color of Change's executive director responds. See his response, and my response to his response, below the fold.

Reading through material from the "Turn Off Fox" campaign, one gets the very clear impression that the folks at the Fox News Channel are bald-faced liars. They have "no regard for the truth," and use "half-truths" to push a "stream of misinformation" and "distortions of the truth."

Turn Off Fox is a project started by Color of Change, the far-left political organization founded by neo-Marxist and black liberation theologist Van Jones.

Despite Turn Off Fox's righteous indignation, the same document making the above accusations pushes blatant misinformation about both Fox and the Tea Party movement. Got that? The Turn Off Fox campaign wants FNC to tell the truth, and uses demonstrable falsehoods to bolster its case.

The document accusing Fox of pushing misinformation claims that Bill O'Reilly got former USDA official Shirley Sherrod fired, and claims that Tea Party protesters shouted racial slurs and spit on black congressmen outside the Capitol. Both claims have been thoroughly debunked.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez revisited his vendetta against Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh on Thursday's Rick's List. Sanchez brought on outgoing Representative Bob Inglis, who lost a primary challenge to a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate, and when he harped about "flamethrowers" on TV and radio, the anchor pressed him on whether he meant the two radio hosts and his network's competitor [audio clips available here].

Sanchez interviewed Rep. Inglis just before the top of the 4 pm Eastern hour. He introduced the politician by emphasizing the South Carolina Republican's overall conservative record and his recent defeat in the primary: "My next guest is a conservative firebrand. He is a veteran conservative congressman. In fact, he's maintained a 93 percent conservative voting record....Pro-choice liberals have called him a 'zero.'...He was a Ronald Reagan Republican, if there ever one was, and suddenly, he wakes up one day, and he simply is not conservative enough, not for South Carolina Republicans. He lost the recent primary. No- he got killed in the recent primary, 29-71 [percent]."

However, what the CNN anchor left out is how Inglis was one of the few House Republicans who voted for a 2007 Democratic-sponsored resolution opposing the troop surge in Iraq, and has criticized skeptics of man-made global warming, as well as opposed offshore drilling. Most prominently, he voted for the 2008 bailout of the financial system. The Republican's primary opponent used these votes and stances to defeat him.

Lefty blogs have been having a field day with a tweet that showed up on Glenn Beck's "favorites" list - a list of tweets bookmarked, in a sense, by the user - directing followers to a white supremacist message board.
Keith Olbermann picked up on the line of attack last night, crediting a website called "Stop Beck," which he says noticed the tweet. Stop Beck came as close to stating that Beck was endorsing white supremacy as it possibly could, without actually saying it ("Why is Glenn Beck associating himself with white nationalists and white supremacists?").
Since Olbermann is endorsing the notion that a Twitter "favorite" denotes a positive association, we at NewsBusters must thank him for extending that courtesy to our publisher, MRC President Brent Bozell.
This tweet, from @themick1962, showed up at the top of @KeithOlbermann's favorites (click the preview at top right for a larger image): "Brent Bozell's Open Letter to WaPo Ed. Re: JournoList http://bit.ly/cnWvL0 Mandatory reading for ALL media types @KeithOlbermann #p2 #tcot" (h/t Tommy Christopher).

The Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik on Sunday made fools out of CBS White House Correspondent Chip Reid and former CNNer Frank Sesno.

Ironically, this happened during a "Reliable Sources" segment on CNN dealing with today's "Poisonous Press."

With host Howard Kurtz leading a discussion about how news outlets today are spending a great deal of time bashing each other, the conversation predictably led to Fox News.

Both Reid and Sesno tried to make the case that FNC is irrelevant because nobody watches the network.

Zurawik marvelously clued them both in (videos and transcripts follow with commentary):

Gold has been a highly valued commodity going at least as far back as the ancient Egyptian culture in 2600 BC. But now, with economic instability and uncertainty over the health of major global currencies, the demand for gold has risen as a store of value and a hedge against inflation.

Over the past 12 months, the price of gold has gone up dramatically - up 25 percent from July 2009 (from $929 per ounce to $1,163 per ounce, after reaching a high of $1,250 per ounce). That has outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) on a percentage basis.

This success has not stopped some detractors from questioning conservative commentators and investing commentators that argue gold should be a part of a person's financial portfolio. However, a recent report by liberal member of Congress Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., argues that one gold dealer, Goldline "grossly" overcharges for the gold coins and employs deceptive sales techniques to capitalize on fears about President Barack Obama's economic policies. Not so coincidentally, Goldline advertises on shows including Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham and Fred Thompson - all of them politically opposed to the agenda of Obama and Weiner himself.

On Tuesday’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as host Maddow complained that a video clip of former USDA official Shirley Sherrod had been edited to make it appear that she currently has a tendency to discriminate against white farmers at USDA – a clip that led to her firing by the Obama administration – the MSNBC host not only incorrectly claimed that FNC coverage of the clip had helped incite her firing, but she also suggested that FNC would never show her side of the story even though, by that time Tuesday night, several FNC shows had already informed viewers of some of the details in Sherrod’s favor. And, in fact, Sherrod had already been forced to resign before the O’Reilly Factor became the first FNC show to report the story of her comments on Monday night, although host Bill O’Reilly at the time did not realize she had already been fired.

Maddow’s show even chose to only present to her viewers clips from FNC that ran Monday and Tuesday morning which portrayed Sherrod’s comments as racist, without airing any of the clips from shows later Tuesday which showed FNC personalities conveying more of her side of the story. As Maddow filled in her viewers on some of the details in Sherrod’s favor, the MSNBC host used such phrases as "you would never know this if you got all your information from Fox News," and, after explaining that Sherrod, in fact, helped the white farmers in question, she added: "That`s what happened – unless, of course, you watch Fox News." FNC had already reported most of those same details hours earlier, and O’Reilly even informed his viewers Tuesday that Sherrod had declined an invitation to appear as a guest on his show, so liberal FNC analyst Alan Colmes appeared in her place.

Huffington Post blogger, Frank Schaeffer, has been trying to eradicate elements of the right for quite some time.  Katie Bell had a great post on Monday covering his recent call to ‘eradicate' fundamental Christianity. 

It's no secret that Schaeffer is very critical of religious elements in society.  But on a side note, were you aware that he is a former member of the religious right?  Apparently making mention of such information gives him street cred with the non-religious left.  He mentions it nearly every time he opens his mouth.   Take a drink every time Schaeffer mentions his past participation in the religious right, and you're sure to be hammered in no time.

Not content with attacking the religious right, Schaeffer has also made a career of attacking the conservative voice in general.  Last year, he penned a column so bereft of facts that even the Huffington Post should have been embarrassed by the content.  More troublesome is that this particular post included the pronouncement of a new Web site campaign that is wrong on two fronts:  It incorrectly predicts the rise of violence perpetrated by the ‘far right' (anyone who dares to oppose Barack Obama), and it specifically labels conservative talk show hosts Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck as ‘domestic terrorists'.

Schaeffer states in his October 5, 2009 column that, "The extremism and paranoid delusions of the far, far loony right -- in other words The Republican Party today as led and deformed by Beck/Limbaugh/Fox and the fundamentalist "Christians" --- is now on full display."

The media reaction to the Obama administration's handling of the BP Gulf oil spill crisis has been a mixed bag. But it hasn't been good.

Some are arguing President Barack Obama has gone too far and overstepped his legal authority and some are arguing he hasn't gone far enough with the "boot on the throat" mentality. And on his June 17 Fox News Channel program, Glenn Beck played three separate examples of these differences you normally wouldn't associate with one another - CNBC's Matt Nesto, liberal flame-thrower and comedian Rosie O'Donnell and MSNBC's Ed Schultz.

"Even the people at NBC are noticing maybe something is not right," Beck said.

Beck was referring to comments made by Nesto on CNBC's June 16 "Closing Bell," which Nesto emphasized his concerned over the President's action.

On February 19, 2009, Rick Santelli helped create a movement whose political impact has not yet been fully realized. The "Rant Heard 'Round the World," as it has become known, was a profound, if hardly isolated example of the power of conservative pundits to enact political change.

That power has grown as Americans have become more sympathetic to the economic conservative argument--both the moral/spiritual element of it, and the strictly economic one. The American people have by and large come full circle in a short time, and the pundits that retain the most influence in our society have changed accordingly.

Santelli is the perfect example, as he was certainly not the prominent name he is now before he let loose on the floor of the Chicago exchange. Michael Barone explains the essential appeal of the rant. He wrote Wednesday that it "was both an economic and a moral argument."

MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan on Wednesday became the latest host at that channel to lash out at Fox News. He frothed that Glenn Beck is a "scumbag" for touting the company Goldline. Ratigan also promoted an investigation by Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner of the business.

He hyperbolically attacked, "The only problem here is that Glenn Beck and Goldline are largely snake oil salesmen and scumbags, trying to create money for themselves at the expense of everybody in this country." [Audio available here.]

Ratigan's over-the-top language continued as he ranted, "That man there [Beck] is paid by that other company to be a snake oil salesman at your expense. He's no better than the very politicians that he claims to be against."

A far-left Democratic congressman is accusing conservative commentators of improperly -- perhaps illegally -- conspiring with advertisers to shill for their products under the guise of political opinion. The accusers, however, conveniently ignore liberal commentators that do virtually the same thing, only on a far larger scale.

Rep. Anthony Weiner released a report yesterday alleging that Goldline "has formed an unholy alliance with conservative pundits to drive a false narrative and play off public fears in order to sell its products," according to a release. Under "conservative pundits," read the Fox News Channel, and specifically Glenn Beck.

Weiner has this far neglected to criticize Fox's cable news competitor MSNBC and its parent network, which consistently shill for policies that would dramatically enrich their parent company, General Electric. GE's communications arm consistently further's Weiner's own political agenda, so a double standard seems to be afoot in his failure to call NBC out on its colossal conflict on interest.

There's a cynical theme growing in the media that Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square Saturday, was driven to violence by the loss of his job, the loss of his house, and his anger towards former President George W. Bush.

In all of this theorizing -- or what some might call psychobabble -- those making the assertion have yet to ponder if six years of Bush Derangement Syndrome might also be involved.

For over a year, Americans have been warned that so-called "hate speech" directed at Barack Obama and Democrats by conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, as well as others at Fox News, is going to manifest itself in violent acts against elected officials and/or our nation.

With this in mind mightn't years of "hate speech" directed at Bush and Republicans by liberal talk radio hosts and MSNBC in particular have incited Shahzad's anger to such an extent that he decided to become a domestic terrorist?

Consider what the Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday (h/t Jennifer Rubin, photo courtesy AP):

Phil Donahue believes people should learn about Fox News's Glenn Beck by watching a video that was posted at the perilously liberal website Daily Kos.

In a preview of an interview to be aired on the "Joy Behar Show" Friday, the host asked her guest, "What do you think of this upsurge of the Becks and the Limbaughs and Fox News?"

Donahue curiously responded, "You know this kid Daily Kos?...He's got a thing called 'Full Mental Beck.' And it's, it's like seven minutes of, a montage of Beck" 

He amazingly continued, "So, if you've just read about Glenn Beck, and you don't want to watch Glenn Beck, check Daily Kos and watch it, because you better know what's going on here or you're going to be culturally illiterate" (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t Weasel Zippers): 

Glenn Beck struck back at Joe Klein and John Heilemann Monday for practically accusing the Fox News host, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh of being seditious.

As NewsBusters reported Sunday, Time magazine's Klein and New York magazine's Heilemann made some rather inflammatory comments about the trio this weekend on the syndicated "Chris Matthews Show."

When Beck saw our piece at the Drudge Report Sunday evening, he said, "[I]t was like a horse stepped on my chest." 

"I love my country," said an emotional Beck. "I don't even understand how speaking out now can be sedition."

Beck then demonstrated how absurd AND hypocritical Klein and Heilemann's claims were (video follows with partial transcript and commentary): 

"Avatar" director James Cameron had some nasty words for Glenn Beck and global warming "deniers" yesterday.

Cameron said at a news conference that he would like to shoot "those boneheads," referring to skeptics of anthropogenic global warming. "Anybody that is a global warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their a** I'm not sure they could hear me," Cameron added.

As for Beck, "he's a f****** a**hole," the 2010 Oscar nominee so eloquently put it. He backtracked a bit, but still maintained that the FNC host is "dangerous because his ideas are poisonous," echoing a statement by NPR's Cokie Roberts yesterday. "Of course he wound up on Fox News, which is where he belongs, I guess."

Journalists love the marketplace of ideas until people start selling ideas they find objectionable. The liberal media somehow manages to shout about its right to speak freely while demanding others be silenced.

Glenn Beck is probably the most popular target for the left's demands for censorship. Cokie Roberts and her husband Steve picked up that ball and ran with it today in their joint syndicated column. They dubbed Beck "a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend" and claimed he is "corrupting the very essence of democracy." And all this just by speaking.

Unsurprisingly, the immense damage Beck is doing to the American political process can only be demonstrated anecdotally:

"Why Does Glenn Beck Hate Jesus?" asked Time's Amy Sullivan in a Sunday March 14 Swampland blog post:

When Glenn Beck told listeners of his radio show on March 2 that they should "run as fast as you can" from any church that preached "social or economic justice" because those were code words for Communism and Nazism, he probably thought he was tweaking a few crunchy religious liberals who didn't listen to the show anyway. Instead he managed to outrage Christians in most mainline Protestant denominations, African-American congregations, Hispanic churches, and Catholics--who first heard the term "social justice" in papal encyclicals and have a little something in their tradition called "Catholic social teaching. (Not to mention the teaching of a certain fellow from Nazareth who was always blathering on about justice...)

So to whom did Sullivan turn for complaints about Beck's characterization? Some theologically conservative Catholic theologian? A conservative Protestant theologian like Baptist seminary president Al Mohler or Presbyterian theologian R.C. Sproul?

Nope. She highlighted two stalwarts of social gospel-oriented liberal Christianity:

Compliments sometimes come from strange places, but you'll take them where you can get them, no?

It seems that Fox News' March 10 "Glenn Beck" program, in which host Glenn Beck interviewed former Rep. Eric Massa, D-N.Y., captured the attention of both the left and the right. And it may have even put to rest some of the misconceptions about Beck, which are mostly generated by outfits that operate with just out-of-context sound bites.

"Let me tell you something," "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough said on his March 11 program. "[Beck] was not on his heels. He just - he played straight-man and Donny Deutsch, he was - he did it very, very well.

Liberal talk radio host Mike Malloy on Saturday blamed Glenn Beck for Thursday's shootings at the Pentagon.

"So, a shooting at the Pentagon, a Glenn Beck fan who obviously went beserk and decided to kill police officers at the, at the Pentagon and didn't succeed," Malloy disgustingly said on his radio show Saturday.

"The perpetrator apparently is not dead yet either, so maybe they can, when they fix him up, they can waterboard him a bit and find out what it was that Glenn Beck said that made him decide to open fire."

Readers are strongly cautioned before proceeding for this is astonishingly offensive (YouTube audio embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Radio Equalizer):

For those who have neither the time nor the Red Bull required to wade through Al Gore's windy "We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change" in the New York Times, permit me to summarize:

• Record winter storms and revelations of warmist fraud notwithstanding, we "face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."

• Unfortunately, "television" has replaced newspapers as the dominant medium.  And "television" serves as the tool of powerful forces favoring "unrestrained markets" and opposing regulatory "reform."  Though Gore stops short of naming television names, you don't have to read too hard between the lines to see that he's pointing the finger at Fox News in general and Glenn Beck in particular.

Key excerpts [emphasis added]:

We've seen the likes of Time Magazine, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and Newsweek link the Joe Stack airplane attack to the conservative movement.  But in an interesting twist, a political blogger for The Nation has inexplicably linked Stack to several players at the recent CPAC convention - including Tim Pawlenty, Scott Brown, and most notably Glenn Beck. 

Leslie Savan wastes little time delving into despicable comparisons from the onset with the title to her rant: 

Glenn Beck Dodges Incoming Plane at CPAC

From there, the associations to Stack stretch ever further.  Savan somehow manages to draw parallels between Pawlenty's comment about taking a 9-iron to big government, and the attack (emphasis mine throughout):

"Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty strained to hit a Southern-sheriff note of populist threat by suggesting, rather oddly, that conservatives were cuckolded wives who, like Tiger Woods's spouse, should "take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country!"--thereby managing to invoke both the wall of shattered glass windows at the Echelon Building and the marital troubles that may have contributed to Stack's anger."

It would seem the term ‘metaphor' is beyond the writer's grasp. 

Next up is an out of context quote from Scott Brown:

Howard Kurtz asked an interesting question on Sunday's "Reliable Sources": Is it appropriate for Fox News hosts and contributors to be making political speeches at events like this weekend's CPAC?

Given Saturday's extremely successful keynote address by Glenn Beck, as well as the controversial nature of the rising star, such a question seemed inevitable. 

But there was still something peculiar about this segment, for although Kurtz mentioned other FNC contributors that spoke at the event including Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and John Bolton, he failed to notice George Will of ABC News (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

The war between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow continued Tuesday night when the MSNBCer told the Fox Newser to back off.

Maddow was responding to Beck's accusation on his radio show the previous day that she had intentionally omitted a key sentence of his during her attack on him last week.

During a nine minute segment designed to try to redeem herself in front of her tiny audience, Maddow refused to explain why she and her staff cut off an audio of Beck on Friday just as he was about to say something that would make her point totally absurd.

Instead, she filibustered ad nauseum with videos of previous programs without ever owning up to her shameful omission, after which she ridiculously concluded, "I didn't lie. Back off" (partial video and transcript below the fold):

Keith Olbermann Tuesday said the newly-captured top military commander of the Taliban in Afghanistan should be given his own show on Fox News.

In his Worst Person in the World segment on Tuesday's "Countdown," the MSNBCer went after Fox's Glenn Beck for statements he made about Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar on that morning's "Fox & Friends":

If I were in charge, we'd be interrogating him. And we'd interrogate him, and interrogate him, and interrogate him and then we'd shoot him in the head. ... Shoot him in the head before we all of a sudden release him into, what? Primary schools in New York City? What are we going to do with this guy? 

Olbermann's answer? "Well, since it's worked with a lot of other people whose plans would destroy America, give him a show on Fox News" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):