Les Blumenthal of the McClatchy News Service wrote up another story on 11-year-old Marcelas Owens advocating for the liberal cause of nationalizing health care. But this time, it was an attack on conservative talk show hosts.

The headline at the Tacoma News-Tribune: "Conservatives attack Seattle boy's 'sob story' of mom's death without insurance." The subhead merely repeated: "Health: conservatives lambaste account of death of mom without insurance." (The photo is also McClatchy's.)

Blumenthal went straight to the boy for more sympathy against Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Malkin, with no rebuttal from the conservatives. The reporter robotically went right down a Media Matters for America report, quote by quote, Rush, Glenn, and Michelle.

Apparently, March 15 was “get Beck” day at the Washington Post. Columnist Howard Kurtz criticized Fox News’ Glenn Beck for “dividing” Fox. He pointed out that companies have boycotted the show, and noted all the controversial things that Beck has said. Yes, Beck is wildly successful, “But that growth has come at a price, at least for those at Fox who believe that Beck is beginning to define their brand.”

That same day, Post religion writer and leftist hack Anthony Stevens-Arroyo attacked Glenn Beck on March 15 in a “Catholic in America” entry to the Post’s On Faith blog.

“Glenn Beck’s anti-Catholic Rants,” sprang from Beck’s position on the social justice movement in the Catholic Church. Stevens-Arroyo first attempted to discredit Beck and wrote, “Few people are better at making accusations with code words than Glenn Beck, the Fox News celebrity. With his chalkboard logic, Beck creates conspiracies that almost always make him a savior against anything named ‘Democrat’ or ‘Obama.’”

"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 publisher Arianna Huffington on Tuesday expressed sympathy for Fox News host Glenn Beck.

Appearing on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" to talk about Beck's bizarre interview with Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) earlier in the day, Huffington said, "And, to his credit, Glenn Beck...apologized to his audience for wasting an hour of their time."

She surprisingly continued, "I never thought anything would make me feel sympathetic towards Glenn Beck, but having to interview Eric Massa for an entire hour make -- made me really feel for him" (video embedded below the fold with transcript and commentary):

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):

"When we see crazy, senseless deaths like this, we can only ask why, why, why couldn't it have been Glenn Beck?"

So joked Bill Maher Friday evening on HBO's "Real Time."

During his opening monologue, Maher addressed John Bedell, the man that was shot and killed Thursday when he attacked the Pentagon.

For some reason, the comedian used the incident as a vehicle to go after the Fox News host (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Ed Morrissey, file photo):  

An article on ABCNews.com aggressively touted fears by the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that prominent conservative are spreading hate. The headline for the March 3 piece by Anna Schecter screamed, "Dobbs, Beck, Palin, Bachmann Share Blame For Rise in Right-Wing Extremism, Says Activist Group."

Schecter interviewed SPLC director Mark Potok and repeated, "Potok said he blames some public personalities and conservative politicians for inciting fear." The ABC News author also fretted about tea party extremism: "Potok said one of the main fears is that these radical groups are infiltrating mainstream groups like the Tea Party movement because of cross pollination of individuals who attend radical group meetings and more mainstream gatherings."

On Friday night, ranting leftist radio host Mike Malloy attacked conservative and libertarian "tea bagger freaks" for opposing Big Government, which he equated with "You want to eat poison! You want to breathe poison!"

Conservative talk-show hosts persuade the limited-government types to "kill your children, make your spouses sick, send Granny and Grandpa into intensive care." He also ranted against Bush: "you people continue to vote for these morons? These people who are just eating you alive?"

This rant started in an odd place: a blog post by Susie Madrak on the leftist Crooks & Liars blog complaining about high mold counts in tomato paste and puree sold to Kraft Foods, and how Team Bush gutted the Food and Drug Administration. Susie Madrak wrote with alarm that "every time we put something into our mouths that wasn't grown and bought locally, we're taking a chance."

New York Times columnist Frank Rich isn't just convinced suicide pilot Joe Stack shared many views with the Tea Partiers.

He also believes some of the movement's members are basically domestic terrorists whose leaders include Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

"What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it."

Yes, Rich's "The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged" was the kind of column we see too often from his ilk these days basically blaming all that's wrong in the nation -- even a disgruntled man flying his plane into an IRS building -- on regular Americans concerned about the direction of the country:

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]:

CNN's Rick Sanchez Tuesday grilled Texas gubernatorial candidate and Tea Party activist Debra Medina about her positions concerning America's role in the 9/11 attacks as well as whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States.

"Just so for the record, if you want to stomp this out right here now on national television, do you believe the government, the U.S. government, played any role in all in 9/11?" Sanchez asked.

After Medina answered, Sanchez continued to press: "Debra, either you do or you don't believe that 9/11 was in any way caused or helped by the U.S. government. Do you or don't you?"

Once he was done with that issue, Sanchez moved on: "How about the birth certificate thing? You say you're not a truther. Are you a birther?" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t HotAirPundit):

Chris Matthews gave his old Philly talk radio show host friend Michael Smerconish a platform, on Tuesday's Hardball, to boldy proclaim what anybody who's paid attention to Smerconish for the past few years has already known, that he is no longer a Republican. In explaining his decision to register as an independent Smerconish insisted he couldn't "play wind-up talk radio" and "read the GOP talking points" like the much more successful Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Glossing over the fact that the aformentioned hosts have repeatedly criticized the GOP when they betrayed conservative principles, Matthews pondered: "Do you think they honestly believe what they say?" [audio available here]

Comedian Jon Stewart on Monday bashed the just-concluded Conservative Political Action Conference by calling it "this year's Festival of Whites."

The "Daily Show" host devoted two segments to the conservative gathering going after many of the presenters including former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

But the real target of Stewart's disaffection was Fox News's "Glenn Beck and his magical erasable truth board" (videos embedded below the fold with commentary, h/t Story Balloon):

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):

Glenn Beck gave the keynote speech to conclude this weekend's CPAC meeting Saturday, and the Fox News host did not disappoint.

The rising conservative star touched on familiar themes saying that progessivism "is the disease in America."

"It is a cancer," he said. "It must be cut out of the system because it cannot co-exist. And you cannot cure cancer by saying, ‘I'm just going to give you a little bit of cancer. You must eradicate it."

But Beck wasn't striking a strictly partisan tone, as he scolded Republicans, "It's not enough just to not suck as much as the other side" (video embedded below the fold with more transcribed highlights, readers strongly encouraged to watch the spectacular crescendo beginning at 54:00):

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):

My first instinct when one of my tipsters sent me a link containing a discussion between the astonishingly vile Janeane Garofalo and Rosie O'Donnell on the latter's radio program was to delete the e-mail message and pretend I had never received it.

I had just eaten lunch, and really didn't want to upset my stomach so early in the day, especially given how gorgeous the weather is here in Northern California following so many straight weeks of rain.

But curiosity finally got the best of me, and what I discovered was worse than I could possibly imagine.

From O'Donnell calling Rush Limbaugh a junkie to Garofalo claiming that everyone on Fox News is a liar, I really wish I had gone with my first instinct and ignored this travesty (video embedded below the fold with extremely rough partial transcript as a result of the shooting pains caused by the content, h/t Story Balloon):

Conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck has struck back at Rachel Maddow for her gross misrepresentation of his position on global warming by calling her a dishonest purveyor of propaganda.

As NewsBusters previously reported, Maddow last Friday cherry-picked some statements by Beck to make it appear that he believed the recent snowstorms in the nation's capital disprove Nobel Laureate Al Gore's favorite money-making theory.

For what should be obvious reasons, Maddow and her crew decided to omit a key sentence from Beck's radio program that very morning: "How many times have I said both for hurricanes and no hurricane, this doesn't, one storm, one storm does not prove anything?"

Beck made the same case on his radio show Monday accusing Maddow of intentional dishonesty employed to spread anti-conservative propaganda (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Right Scoop):

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Friday cherry-picked statements from Glenn Beck's radio show to accuse him of lying about global warming.

In a brief segment on the MSNBC program bearing her name, Maddow said the Fox News star claimed the snowstorm that hit the East Coast this week disproves Al Gore's favorite myth.

Unfortunately, Maddow conveniently left out the part when Beck said "one storm does not prove anything."

But that didn't stop the MSNBC host from making the accusation (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

After taking time out of his last few broadcasts to try to clarify his Feb. 8 remarks that the "snowpocalypse" was because of global warming, one would hope MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan would have learned his lesson.

Ratigan spent a portion of his Feb. 10 and now a portion of his Feb. 11 shows trying to clarify his statement - that "these ‘snowpocalypses' that have been going through D.C. and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming," as he said - but that he didn't necessarily believe that premise.

"Now, in addition to that being completely wrong on so many levels, it's also a total misrepresentation over the climate change theory that I was attempting to explain," Ratigan said. "Let me be very clear - I do not believe that this storm is proof of climate change. And I do not believe that this storm is not proof of climate change. But I do believe that you, Mr. Beck, did a tremendous disservice to your viewers by bastardizing the most basic science behind the theory, period. That's not very good."

CRITICAL UPDATES AT END OF POST: Limbaugh responds to list; author of list story used to work for the Wall Street Journal.

The Daily Beast Thursday published its list of the Right's most influential media figures, and the winner will likely surprise many on both sides of the aisle.

In the top position according to author Tunku Varadarajan (please see update at end of post!) is Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal.

In third place -- yes THIRD place -- is conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh behind Fox News sensation Glenn Beck.

Varadarajan described the winner thusly:

Keith Olbermann Wednesday claimed that conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin are trying to kill us all by disinforming the public about the dangers of global warming.

Speaking with Newsweek's Howard Fineman about how conservatives are using the recent snowstorms in the Northeast to refute Al Gore's catastrophic climate claims, the "Countdown" host said, "[L]ife on earth is going to be threatened because the people who recognized and warned about climate change did not just go with that phrase, climate change, and instead chose global warming, opening this opportunity up for Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to kill us all."

Earlier the factually-challenged MSNBCer declared, "And, of course, we have Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street water carriers, the corporate clowns, who get rich by tricking listeners into voting against their own interests, laughing about how silly it is to believe in extreme weather change in the middle of extreme weather" (video embedded below the fold with full transcript and commentary, h/t Story Balloon):