Glenn Beck (TV Show)

According to contemporary reports, as here and here, Egyptian protesters who pelted the motorcade of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with tomatoes during her visit to Egypt last July were chanting "Monica! Monica!"  

So who did Al Sharpton, on his MSNBC show this evening, blame for the tomato pelting? Why, Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann, of course!  According to the Reverend Al, it was the raising by Beck and Bachmann of the possible connection of Hillary's top aide, Huma Abedin, to the Muslim Brotherhood that outraged the Egyptian horde. Sharpton says "there is absolutely nothing" to back the claims of Abedin family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. That is simply false, as this National Review item documents. View the video after the jump.

The liberal media have spent 12 years feeling sorry for Al Gore.The Man Who Should Have Won in 2000 has had megatons of positive publicity dumped on him, hailing him as the “Goracle.” They cheered as leftists honored him with the Nobel Peace Prize and gave an Oscar to his filmed eco-sermon “An Inconvenient Truth.”

So when Gore sold his left-wing cable channel Current TV to al-Jazeera for $500 million, where were they? Despite the fact that conservatives thought the deal sounded like a ridiculous April Fools joke, the networks had nearly nothing to say. ABC skipped it entirely. CBS and NBC offered a perfunctory sentence on a couple of newscasts.

"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."

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:

In his latest opinion piece, Roger Ebert proved that he is very skilled at one thing and one thing only - movie reviews. 

Ebert penned a piece in his Journal for the Chicago Sun-Times today; a scathing critique which detests the overt melodrama, the wretched dialogue, and the lack of a plot line.  What was he reviewing?  The Republican base.

Ebert hammers the party's base with such sensationalistic rhetoric that it is difficult to believe he withheld laughter while typing away on the keyboard.  And the work is wrought with such falsehoods, inaccuracies, and sweeping generalizations, that it is difficult to fathom that this work could have passed by the desk of anyone having the word ‘Editor' following their name.  Yet somehow, it did.

The list of vitriol and insults follows...

Perhaps this is going to be a common theme of CNN Headline News "The Joy Behar Show." For the second night in a row, two out of two shows - Behar went after the former CNN Headline News host, now Fox News host Glenn Beck as a head of the conservative movement.

On her Sept. 30 show, Behar guests included HBO "Real Time" host Bill Maher and conservative author and columnist Ann Coulter. One had a favorable view of Beck, and the other - not so much.

On Behar's first show, Bette Midler contended Beck would lead to a Rwanda-style civil war in the United States. Behar posed a similar question to Maher on her second show.

Ann Coulter Defends (Video Below Fold)

So what if his network is drawing a larger audience than its combined competition? So what if one of his newest shows has drawn unprecedented numbers for a start-up that airs at 5 p.m.? According to Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Fox News President Roger Ailes is tarnishing his own personal reputation.

It could just be sour grapes for Fineman, who is affiliated with rival network MSNBC and was appearing on that network's "Countdown" with fill-in host David Shuster, but he attacked Fox host Glenn Beck and the 9/12 protestors he helped inspire.

"Well, he can - he can pretend to cry all he wants on the stage and call himself a televangelist," Fineman said of Beck on MSNBC's Sept. 14 "Countdown." "He is not into uniting the country, from everything I've seen. He is making a boatload of money dividing the country. When you say with no real evidence whatsoever that the president of the United States hates white people, you aren't behaving in the spirit of 9/12, you're behaving in a spirit that we thought we've gotten rid of at the end of the civil war and the end of the second civil rights movement. So, you know, he can cry the crocodile tears all he wants. That doesn't seem to be what he's actually doing."

Usually it is easy ignore the commentary from that great bastion of cultural insight, known as the gossip Web site Gawker. But every now and then, even Gawker steps over the line.

In a Sept. 11 post by Alex Pareene that was allegedly meant to reflect on the passing of eighth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Pareene launched into a hate-and-expletive-filled anti-President George W. Bush, anti-conservative and anti-Glenn Beck attack in his post. His first assault was on the prior administration.

"Shortly after (or maybe during) that day, our president at the time, a little [expletive] no one liked, handed over the reins to the most psychotic elements of his administration," Pareene said. "In the vast national wave of jingoism, paranoia, dread, and fear that followed, he and his friends led us into an unrelated war they'd been planning beforehand, allowed the CIA to wiretap and torture anyone they liked (and encouraged the CIA to wiretap and torture even more than they were comfortable with!), and regularly insisted that our memory of that day should not be sullied with critical thinking or expressions of anything other than still-palpable fear."

Only on MSNBC, the network that prides itself as the "place for politics" could you see this type of anti-religion, anti-conservative vitriol.

On MSNBC's Sept. 1 "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," host Keith Olbermann entertained the musings of Dan Savage, a syndicated sex columnist, author and gay-rights advocate about religious conservatives and their participation in public policy debate.

"When you have a party that claims to speak for God or claims that God is on its side, the rhetoric heats up and the anger heats up because it's not just a battle about ideas and positions and what's good for the country or bad for the country," Savage said. "It's a battle about what God wants and what God doesn't want. It's easier to demagogue about your enemies and to despise them and to dehumanize them in this really personal and vicious way."

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been out of office over a month and there are still those working at major media outlets that just can't get over their obsessions with dissecting everything the former GOP vice-presidential nominee does.

Case and point - Mark Silva, a blogger for the Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp," in an Aug. 26 post took it upon himself to try to rationalize why Palin would possibly suggest to her friends and followers on social media networks to tune in to Glenn Beck's Aug. 26 program, as NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard alluded to earlier.

"Palin, who campaigned as the Republican Party's candidate for vice president last year with the warning that Democrat Barack Obama was ‘palin' around with terrorists,'' is steering fans of her Facebook site to the TV commentary of FOX News Channel's Glenn Beck, who has been warning viewers this week that Obama is getting his advice from a Communist and other radicals in the White House who have no oversight from Congress," Silva wrote.

They warned back in 2008 what might happen if Barack Obama was elected president, and according to conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck, a lot of bad stuff is unfolding right before our eyes.

Limbaugh appeared on Beck's Aug. 26 program to discuss the threat of the federal government attempting to regulate the media. He explained the president's policy maneuvers were evidence that this can happen - with very limited opposition in the media.

"The stimulus plan - Glenn, look at what they're doing to the U.S. economy," Limbaugh said. "Anybody with a sense of economic literacy would know that this is not how you create jobs. You do not rebuild the private sector. This is being done on purpose. All of these disasters are exactly what Obama wants - the more crises, the better, the more opportunity for government to say let us in and fix the problem. And, with his number one opposition is on radio and Fox News. His number one opposition is on radio. They can't go Fairness Doctrine because it's too obvious. So, they're trying to do this backdoor route with diversity and ownership, a 100-percent tax on operating in order to pay public radio because they're supposedly fair."

"...democracy must be more than what the majority insists upon."
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

Let me take this opportunity to look into something the media won't touch. All moonbat hands are unloading every cannon on the deck at Glenn Beck right now. According to the media, Glenn walks down the sidewalk with half a baby hanging out of his mouth pushing old ladies into traffic. Well, as my dear old dad used to say; "If everyone is aiming at you, you know you're on to something."

And what is Glenn on to? If you haven't watched Glenn this week, go back and start at Monday because he has unlocked an unreported movement in this country that he believes may change all of our lives. Glenn's genius is that as he falls on the sword he passes forward a series of questions we should all ask, like "Can we survive this debt? If yes, how?" or why do we have a (self-proclaimed) communist Czar running anything? These are questions that remain long after the media has chewed him up and spit him out. Voters may not remember what the media did to Glenn next year, but his questions are sure to persist as they cast their next vote.

Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and the brain trust at ThinkProgress probably won't like this, but CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer thinks the Glenn Beck boycott won't have an impact on NewsCorp's (NASDAQ:NWSA), the parent company of Fox News, bottom line.

During the "Stop Trading" segment on "Street Signs" Aug. 24, Cramer explained that Unilever (NYSE:UN) was going all out with its advertising, by not avoiding shows that might offend someone's political sensibilities. Cramer said that strategy was paying off for Unilever, whose stock is up 10 percent since July.

"When I look at it, it's very interesting because there's an article in the same magazine, Ad Age magazine, about how like Unilever is spending like mad, and that they're going to be, Unilever had a spectacular quarter," Cramer said. "My take is that whoever is just trying to parcel and figure out where to be in the Fox News or where to be in the MSNBC, ought to take their cue from Unilever, which had the best quarter of all packaged goods because they flooded all media and it showed that those who pulled back, whether it be from Glenn Beck, or whether it be from Olbermann, didn't do as well as Unilever, which was all in during this period where the rates went down."

UPDATE: Sargento says Colors of Change did not influence company's decision (at bottom)

What constitutes "hateful speech?" It depends on the views of the individual, or in this case the advocacy group propagating the claim.

Earlier this week, Plymouth, Wisc.-based Sargento Food, Inc., along with several other companies, pulled their advertising from the Fox News Channel's "Glenn Beck" program, some at the behest of a campaign by Color of Change, an advocacy group.

Barbara Gannon, vice president of Corporate Communications & Government Relations for Sargento Foods Inc., told the Business & Media Institute why her company decided to stop advertising during the Fox News Channel program.

His show has usually been Fox News third-highest show, behind Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. And since Fox News host Glenn Beck has come on the scene, he has been a thorn in the side of the left-wing machine.

But his July 28 "Fox & Friends" criticism of President Barack Obama's comments on the racially-charged Cambridge, Mass. incident in which a local policeman arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has sent the liberal nutroots over the edge. After left-wing storefronts drew attention to Beck's analysis, groups want to viewers to boycott his sponsors.

Say what you want about the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck and his antics, but to give credit where credit is due, he exposed some disturbing language from the Obama administration's "Cash for Clunker" program Web site Cars.gov.

Beck on his July 31 program hosted a segment about the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) Web site, also known as "Cash for Clunkers" and demonstrated what a Web browser would encounter when logging on to the system.

"Here is Cars.gov. Let's say you go in, if I understand this right - I go in and I say, ‘I want to turn in my clunker.' The dealer goes to Cars.gov, and then they hit submit transaction. Here it says, ‘Privacy Act & Security Statement,' and you're just like, ‘Oh, it's the Privacy Act of 1974. Whatever, I agree. Now, this is how bad this system is."

While President Barack Obama's health care plan is garnering plenty of media attention including two prominent spots on ABC, Fox News host Glenn Beck says the plan won't even help the poor get insurance.

Beck appeared on FNC's June 17 "Your World with Neil Cavuto" to promote his new book, "Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine" and called into question the claim that Obama's health care proposals will actually assist the poor.

"Look, it doesn't even make sense," Beck said. "When you start to look at it, they're talking about savings, but their savings come from moving people from Medicaid over to universal health. We're also leaving, I think it's 33 or 39 million people off the roles. They - we're not even talking about people who are making less than $33,000."

Many have claimed the federal government was playing fast and loose with the rules surrounding its takeover of General Motors and the circumstances surrounding the selection of which dealerships would remain open and those that wouldn't. Fox News' Gretchen Carlson came forward with evidence of this through a personal account of dealership closings.

Carlson, a co-host on the Fox News Channel's morning show "Fox & Friends," appeared on Glenn Beck's June 9 program and questioned the logic behind the decision reached by the government and General Motors (GM) to close down a dealership that has been in her family for 90 years.

"I'd like to get a hold of the car czar too," Carlson said. "Never did I think personally that I would need to get a hold of him, but now I do because my parents have owned a General Motors dealership in Anoka, Minn., for 90 years and they were terminated last week and they would like to know why. They would like to know why from the car czar."

Given the paper's unfair treatment of his Fox News show, it comes as no surprise the New York Times didn't much approve of talk show host and provocateur Glenn Beck's recent simulcast comedy show, which aired from Kansas City and over 400 theatres around the country. 

The criticism came in an Arts Beat blog post (hat tip Hot Air) by Times critic Mike Hale, "Glenn Beck, Simulcasting Discontent." Hale is clearly far more at home when praising left-wing Frontline documentaries for PBS, where he showed his eagerness for Euro-style socialized medicine to supplant the American system's "high-costs" and "failure."

Before starting his performance Thursday night at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, Mo., which was simulcast to more than 440 movie houses around the country, Glenn Beck walked over to the camera, waved, and acknowledged the critic for The New York Times. The poor guy was in a theater somewhere in New York, Mr. Beck said, "all by himself."

Actually, at that moment I was one of eight people watching at the Clearview Chelsea Cinema, a number that would grow to 14 and hold there until almost the end of the show. (More on that later.) Not for the last time that night, Mr. Beck -- the comedian, Fox News host and suddenly hot spokesman for American populist discontent -- was hazy on the specifics but shrewdly aware of where his listeners were.

The small group that braved West 23rd Street was audibly pro-Beck, laughing at the same times as the capacity audience in Kansas City and occasionally saying something in menacing tones about the Federal Reserve or the progressive income tax. Being the critic, I didn't cheer or heckle, but I did yell at the screen once, something I don't think I'd ever done in a movie theater. It was 50 minutes in, when Mr. Beck announced that he was taking a 15-minute break and coming back for the second half of the show. "You've got to be kidding me!" was out of my mouth before I knew what was happening.

The media have lamented use of the word fascism when it has been used to describe moves by the Bush and Obama administrations and the private sector economy. 

But when examined from a purely political and economic point-of-view, that is what's going on now according to Thomas Sowell, Stanford University's Hoover Institute Senior Fellow and author of "The Housing Boom and Bust." Sowell appeared on Glenn Beck's May 27 program and was asked if the United States was still a capitalist country.

"Oh, heavens, partially," Sowell replied. "We're not a socialist country, because the socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. But, the fascists believe that the government should have private ownership and the politicians should tell people how to run the businesses. So that's the route we seem to be going."

Call it an ominous warning, but Fox News Channel afternoon host and ratings sensation Glenn Beck on Wednesday cautioned viewers that government is strengthening its grip of power and is not going to stop at the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Beck declared on his May 6 broadcast the government is out of control, noting that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were a weekly occurrence, including efforts to make the TARP bailout more transparent earlier this year from the Treasury Department.

"We've got a government out of control and I'm telling you, it is up to you to control it," Beck said. "These stories of corruption and abuse of power, I'm going to continue to bring them to you as long as I possibly can, and everybody else on this network is dedicated. But it seems like every week this network is filing another Freedom of Information Act request. Even with all the resources of Fox, the truth still can't be fully exposed without you. I ask you, please - help us. Meet us here every day. Tell all of your friends what you learn here. Spread it. E-mail me. Tell me what I'm missing. We will do the best we can to provide you with the information, but it is a little overwhelming."

As readers here know from Noel Sheppard's report last night, at yesterday's annual GE shareholder meeting, CEO Jeffrey Immelt was challenged on the subject of media bias at GE-owned NBC, CNBC and MSNBC.

The story is far from over.

I encourage those interested in it to watch the O'Reilly Factor tonight for additional in-depth reporting, including the airing at least part of an audio recording of the Q&A session inside the stockholders' meeting made by Tom Borelli and shared with Fox News. (As of this writing, Fox has also made a tiny portion of the tape, the part featuring Fox reporter Jesse Watters asking about about Keith Olbermann's handling of the recent infamous Janeane Garofalo interview, and the shareholders booing when GE cut off Jesse Watters' mike, available on its website now here, and it has been linked to by Drudge.)

It was either an effort to avoid blaming individuals for ill-advised borrowing or an effort to vilify the banking system, but a segment on the April 20 "CBS Evening News" took a very one-sided view of credit-card lending. 

On a day bank stocks struggled and dragged the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) down nearly 300 points, "Evening News" scrutinized the current state of the banking system's credit-card lending. According to anchor Katie Couric, that sell-off of bank stocks occurred as a result of the realization the institutions would be forced to cover bad loans.

"Wall Street had been on a six-week winning streak, but today it suffered its worst drop in two months as investors rushed to sell bank stocks," Couric said. "[T]he sell-off came after Bank of America reported earnings of more than $2.8 billion last quarter, but that good news was offset by the word that the bank has set aside more than $13 billion to cover its losses from bad loans made in the past."

Back in the fall, you would have thought from the media coverage of the TARP debate and its eventual passage that some sort of crime had been committed when the House didn't pass it the first time around.

"CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric demanded to know from House Minority Leader John Boehner, "What in the world are you people doing?" on her Sept. 29 broadcast. However, there was a side to this that people never were allowed to realize behind closed doors during the debate, as Fox News host Glenn Beck explained.

The "Glenn Beck Show" host on his April 20 program told viewers he had inside knowledge of how the Bush administration strong-armed the banks into agreeing to the terms of the TARP bailout.

With the Tax Day tea party rallies just three days away, outside of the Fox News Channel, the coverage has been lacking. And, it was something that even Washington Post media columnist and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" Howard Kurtz acknowledged on his April 12 program.

"The folks at Fox News have found something to be for in this age of Obama," Kurtz said. "They are firmly in favor of tea parties. On Wednesday, that would be April 15th - there will be tax protests around the country on the theme of the original Boston Tea Party. TaxDayTeaParty.com says it was inspired by that rant against President Obama's mortgage aid plan by CNBC's Rick Santelli."

However, Kurtz didn't condemn his network and other networks for lack of coverage - but instead explored the notion that Fox News was giving it too much coverage.

Some groups on the left may have it out for anti-tax tea party movement, but according to one of the movement's biggest proponents - it is because they don't understand it from a hierarchical perspective.

Although there are reports that ACORN, The Huffington Post and the Daily Kos wanting to infiltrate the rallies, or crying foul for other reason - Beck, who appeared on Fox News Channel's April 9 "Your World with Neil Cavuto," explained that the left has difficulty understanding it's not a top-down movement, but a bottom-up one.

"It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the left," Beck said. "They don't get it. They think that these tax rallies - because they are so into their ‘.org's and their ACORN movements, where you have to have these coordinators. These are regular people and they are regular people that were hacked off at George W. Bush. They were angry at the spending of the Republicans."

Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck has already shown he's a rating success and is leaving a mark in cable news. However, he may have pulled one of his most successful performances yet.

Beck interviewed Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on his March 30 broadcast. But, the radio and TV host took the opportunity to tell Blumenthal what he thought of his investigation into the bonuses received by American International Group (AIG) executives - whose company received federal bailout money. 

"Look, you know what you have done, know what you have done?" Beck said. "You have - you are an insult to George Washington, sir. George Washington made it very clear that we are a respecter of laws, not of men. For your own political gain, you have decided to go after these people at AIG because it is a popular thing."

As part of a continuation of his "COMЯADE UPDATE" segment he started near the beginning of his show, which became a YouTube sensation, Fox News host Glenn Beck is picking up right where he left off.

Beck, on his March 4 program took on a couple new targets, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and union labor.

"Comrades! Comrades, there is good news from the Western front," Beck said. "Our glorious revolution is starting to take hold on a global scale. Just listen as Comrade Brown pounded our propaganda into the minds of the clueless capitalist pigs today. Listen up."

Beck played a clip from Brown's address of a joint session of Congress, where the prime minister lobbied for the "world" to work together.

While most of the liberal media gush and fawn over President Barack Obama's plans to radically expand government while imposing constraints on the private sector and ridiculing companies for actually wanting to make a profit -- oh the humanity!!! -- Fox News's Glenn Beck Wednesday night asked a question that should be on the minds of all Americans:

When did socialism become a happy thing for us?

Sure, the economy isn't doing well right now, and folks are losing their jobs on a daily basis -- although certainly NOT at the rate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) believes -- but should our current woes lead us to sacrifice what our Founding Fathers and so many other brave Americans have worked and died for?

Beck doesn't think so, and marvelously illustrated on Wednesday what's really at stake at this moment in history -- something the Obama-loving media are clearly negligent in doing (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

It's Saturday night, which means that our good friends at NBC are getting ready to skewer John McCain and Sarah Palin. As such, here's a little balance from our friend Glenn Beck (h/t NBer GregE):