Fox News Hammers Glenn Beck: “He Was Trying To Save His Ass”

Posted by on April 29, 2013 at 11:47 am. 6 Comments :

Here we go kiddies. Strap yourselves in because this ride is gonna get bumpy.

Glenn Beck

Last week Glenn Beck told Forbes Magazine that it was entirely his decision to leave Fox News and that it had nothing to do with the fact that he was bleeding viewers and advertisers like a drunken hemophiliac:

Beck: If you stay in it too long, you become Norma Desmond. I remember feeling, ‘If you do not leave now, you won’t leave with your soul intact.’

Beck apparently stayed too long because his soul is in tatters, and he is committed to likewise shredding the souls of his disciples. Setting that aside, the folks at Fox News are not taking Beck’s whining sitting down. They gave Politico a response that doesn’t pull any punches:

Fox Spokesman: Glenn Beck wasn’t trying to save his soul, he was trying to save his ass. Advertisers fled his show and even Glenn knows what that means in our industry. Yet, we still tried to give him a soft landing. Guess no good deed goes unpunished.

That response is interesting for a couple of reasons beyond the obvious slap in the face to Beck. First, it ought to make things a little uncomfortable for Bill O’Reilly, who is the only Fox host who still invites Beck back to the network. Is Beck still welcome? Will Bill mention that his bosses regard Beck as an ungrateful loser?

Secondly, this unidentified Fox spokesman has confirmed something that Fox has denied for years: that Beck’s racist and rancid antics cost the network advertisers and revenue. The company line at Fox was that “there has been no revenue lost.” But clearly that was not the case, as they now admit.

Beck also told Forbes that “I knew what this big, huge Fox empire brought to the table, and I had to leave before I became too enamored of that.” This reluctance to fall victim to the siren call of television has apparently subsided. Beck is now spending millions of dollars to elbow his way back into the television world he says is dying. His “Get The Blaze” campaign was launched to recruit his disciples into badgering cable systems to carry his web cast. It’s an initiative that reeks of the toxic socialism that Beck pretends to despise, because he wants all cable subscribers to fatten his wallet even if they don’t watch his show.

The campaign appears to be floundering. Beck posted a recent update that sobs “We think that the tens of thousands of emails you’ve been sending are piling up unread.” Gee, the cable TV market is uninterested in assuming the burden of a washed up Tea-vangelist who spews conspiracy theories and hate speech. It must be a plot by Obama’s czars to silence his perversion of the truth.

Stay tuned, because it’s a fairly good bet that Beck will escalate this feud with Fox by saying something typically idiotic and designed to get him press. And that’s his only real mission in life anyway.

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Reefer Madness 2: Bombed In Boston – How Marijuana Marred The Marathon

Posted by on April 28, 2013 at 2:08 pm. 3 Comments :

It didn’t take long for addled-brain conspiracy theories to bubble up from the primordial Tea-publican ooze following the Boston marathon bombing. There were the instantaneous accusations of Al Qaeda influences before the smoke cleared. Then came the allusions to Obama’s secret Islamic cabal to destroy America. That was followed by NRA freaks who were convinced that the whole thing was staged to trick Americans into abandoning their 2nd Amendment rights. And of course Glenn Beck muscled his way into the lunatic choir with hallucinatory ramblings of a third suspect who is being protected by the President.

Now all of these contenders for the Conspiracy Hall of Lame have to step back and pay tribute to the new frontrunner in the race for the deranged. Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media has concocted a scheme that thrusts him to front of the pack. His hypothesis? It was marijuana what dood it, dude.

Reefer Madness

Kincaid unravels a blueprint for destruction that knits together his notion that the Tsarnaev boys were capable of constructing complicated explosive devices, even though they were hobbled by the evil weed’s rotting of their young brain cells. He noted that “The dope aspect of the plot helps explain why they seemed to have no getaway plan.” Nevertheless, Kincaid insists that the doobie brothers were unimpaired when it came to plotting mass murder.

“Left unsaid is the fact that dope’s effect on the brain is what may have led [Dzhokhar] into his brother’s terror activities. He was probably so wasted mentally on drugs that he became easily manipulated by his brother and cannon fodder for the Islamist revolution on American soil.

“What happened in Boston is starting to look like what Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn tried to accomplish with the 1960s generation. Disillusioned young people, brainwashed with illegal mind-altering drugs and armed with weapons, were being taught to hate the American government and the police.”

Wait a minute. I thought hating the American government and fretting about the police state was copyrighted by the Tea Party. Well, anyway…

Perhaps Kincaid did not go far enough into this line of thinking. Who’s to say that the bombing might not have been the result of a weekend of debauchery by a couple of stoners who took one trip too many? They may never have planned an attack at all, but were surprised when the pressure cooker they were using to prepare more munchies suddenly exploded on the way to the 7-11 where they hoped to acquire additional Doritos and salsa. They didn’t plant the devices on the crowded street, they simply forgot where they had left them.

In conclusion, Kincaid spells out how dangerous the happy herb is and how the media conspires to suppress the truth. He specifically cites its power to radicalize weakened blazers both politically and spiritually.

“Marijuana is not the harmless drug the media frequently claim it to be. It is a mind-altering substance that can play a role in creating communist or Islamic terrorists.”

So now marijuana is a tool of both the red menace and the global Caliphate. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Kincaid is nursing a righteous buzz.


Sarah Palin Is Pissed That She Couldn’t Get A Date For The Nerd Prom

Posted by on April 28, 2013 at 12:21 am. 5 Comments :

It’s hard to even know where to begin to respond to this:

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin calling anybody else pathetic is a textbook example of Acute Delusional Projection. But for her to direct that criticism at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner that she herself has been affiliated with in the past reflects her envy and bitterness that she is now such a washed up old Tea Hag that no one will pay her any attention unless she belches out idiotic tripe like this Tweet. (And I’m happy to oblige).

Palin hilariously includes herself among those Americans who are “working our asses off.” But she’s best known for having quit her job as governor half way through her term so that she could take a cushy million dollar job at Fox News spewing poorly reasoned diatribes once or twice a week in something that sounded a little like third-grade English. To add to her ass-load of work she had a book ghost-written for her and she hosted a reality cable TV show. Well, her show was canceled after tanking in the ratings and Fox declined to renew her contract. Today she has no visible means of support other than her Super PAC that scams donations from misguided Teabaggers.

All in all, her criticism is preposterous. She thinks that it’s inappropriate, in these challenging times, to have any fun and that hard-working Americans are all off somewhere stewing in their misery. Sarah Palin must not know any hard-working people. She clearly doesn’t have the foggiest notion herself of what it means to work hard. However, she does know something about being pathetic.

Here are a couple of choice moments from the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Obama dings Fox News:

Obama-Satan

Conan Dings Justice Scalia (sitting with Bill O’Reilly).

Conan-Scalia


Fox News’ Racist Editing Turns All ‘Non-Citizens’ Into ‘Illegal Immigrants’

Posted by on April 26, 2013 at 9:25 am. 2 Comments :

The persistent bigotry of Fox News has once again burst into the open with their publication of an Associated Press article that they altered in a manner that totally changes the meaning in a most offensive way.

The article written by the AP’s Judy Lin was distributed with a headline that read “California Bill Would Let Non-Citizens Serve On Juries.” Lin wrote that…

“The California Assembly passed a bill on Thursday that would make the state the first in the nation to allow non-citizens who are in the country legally to serve on jury duty.

Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, said his bill, AB1401, would help California widen the pool of prospective jurors and help integrate immigrants into the community.

It does not change other criteria for being eligible to serve on a jury, such as being at least 18, living in the county that is making the summons, and being proficient in English.”

The AP article addresses the subject in a fair and balanced way. It notes the objections of Republican opponents who assert that there is no shortage of available jurors. It also reports the claims by Democratic supporters that jury selection is hampered by the reluctance of many to serve. In addition, Lin notes that current law does not require citizenship for either lawyers or judges.

Fox News, however, was not satisfied with the neutral tone of the article and re-wrote the headline to assert something that is utterly false: “California bill would let illegal immigrants serve on juries.” Not only is it untrue that anyone in the country illegally would be permitted by this legislation to sit on a jury, the first paragraph of the story as published by Fox refutes the lie in their headline.

Fox News

In their feverish rush to demonize even legal immigrants, Fox failed to notice the obvious discrepancy between their headline and the content of the article. They were so preoccupied with advancing their prejudices that they inserted the offensive phrase “illegal immigrant” (a phrase that the AP itself has officially abandoned) despite the fact that it misrepresents the legislation as drafted.

This perversion of journalistic ethics was so severe that even the lie-riddled Fox Nation did not resort to it. And on Fox News Latino (where the phrase “illegal immigrant” has also been nixed) the very same AP article was published in Spanish with the accurate headline from the original AP story.

It was only Fox News that re-wrote the headline to assert something that was both offensive and false. And they did so while attributing the story to the AP without disclosing the alterations they made. It’s bad enough that Fox routinely pursues a conservative GOP agenda, but for them to go this far out of their way to promote a racist lie violates every professional standard of journalism and exposes their hateful and rancid bias.


American Justice And The GOP’s Comic Book Villainization Of The Boston Bomber

Posted by on April 25, 2013 at 4:26 am. 16 Comments :

“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets.”
~ The Joker in Batman, The Dark Knight

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

The prospect of advancing the bigoted notion that all Muslims are terrorists, or at least that all terrorists are Muslim, is bringing untold glee to members of the conservative media and the righteous-wing of the Republican Party. This is vividly expressed by their persistent promotion of a comic book villain-esque portrait of the Boston bomber as a devoted jihadist. However, the facts don’t back them up. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not an enemy combatant subject to a military tribunal. He is a severely disturbed and impressionable young sociopath. He has committed heinous crimes for which he must be held responsible in a court of law.

That’s how we deal with criminals in America. We do not, on whims of outrage and prejudice, decide to treat certain citizens differently when they violate our laws, even if the violations are especially grotesque. We do not breach the Constitution to satisfy a lust for revenge. We honor the principles that shaped our nation because to do otherwise would stain the character of it.

If the Tea-publican extremists who advocate consigning this defendant to Gitmo have such little faith in the American justice system that they fear entrusting it with adjudicating this sort of crime, then they are admitting their belief that the American experiment has failed. Ironically, these are the people who so furiously wave the flag despite their disdain for what it stands for.

Fortunately, there are more stalwart patriots who still believe that our nation is strong enough to bear the burden of our values without flinching. These are the people who serve as judges, lawyers, law enforcement officers, and the ordinary folks who sit on juries. Yes, it’s a radical concept, but one that is uniquely American and well worth preserving.


NewsBusters Nutcase Ties George Soros To “Gun Control” Groups

Posted by on April 24, 2013 at 11:11 am. 1 Comments :

Monitoring right-wing media is a full time job that offers innumerable opportunities to expose blatantly dishonest bias and manipulation. But sometimes you encounter something so monumentally stupid that it defies adjectives sufficient to express the depths of depravity to which these cretins will sink. And when that happens it is usually something produced by NewsBusters (and disseminated by Fox News).

Fox - NewsBusters

The conservative obsession with portraying billionaire philanthropist George Soros as an omnipotent overlord of every liberal activity would be comical were it not for the fact that it reveals an acute psychosis on the part of those afflicted. NewsBuster Liz Thatcher is one of the sufferers as indicated in her posting titled “Soros Spends Nearly $7 Million to Push Gun Control.”

The article lists five groups to which Thatcher alleges Soros has made donations. Of course, it could simply be that some organization that received funds from Soros subsequently donated to the groups without his knowledge (which occurs often), but right-wingers consider that the same as if Soros donated to them personally.

However, the real disconnect from reality here is the definition that NewsBusters applies to a “gun control” group. These are the five entities cited in Thatcher’s article:

  • The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
  • The American Bar Association
  • The Children’s Defense Fund
  • The League of Women Voters
  • Physicians for Social Responsibility

Any mentally coherent person would quickly recognize that there is only one group in that list that is affiliated with gun safety and regulation. The others may have expressed an opinion on the issue, but it is obviously not their core mission and most of their activities and expenditures are spent on other matters.

What’s more, of the $7 million that NewsBusters is so disturbed by, only $50,000 went to the Brady Center. The largest chunk ($4 million) was donated to the American Bar Association, which certainly has a busy agenda concentrated on other totally unrelated issues. Apparently NewsBusters realized that a measly 50k was not enough for a good Soros bashing, so they scoured his extraordinarily generous records of philanthropy for eleven years in order to artificially inflate the dollar amount that they could falsely connect to gun safety issues.

This indicates how desperately fixated NewsBusters is on disparaging Soros and gun safety advocates. But, sadly, it also reveals how pitifully idiotic the right can be when their phobias and fetishes outflank their ability to twist the facts to fit their preconceived positions.

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Fox Nation vs. Reality: Fox Gives ‘Illegal Immigrants’ Full Voting Rights

Posted by on April 23, 2013 at 3:46 pm. NO Comments :

Continuing to cling obsessively to their anti-Latino bigotry, Fox News latched unto a story in Politico that speculated about an electoral windfall for Democrats if the immigration bill winding through congress becomes law. The Politico story was not particularly well-reasoned (and an article in The Guardian masterfully rebuts it), but, true to form, the lie-factory at Fox Nation took a weak argument and made it even less palatable with their trademark brand of hyperbole and inbred prejudice.

Fox Nation

The title, “Immigration Bill Gives Illegal Immigrants Full Voting Rights,” is patently false. No one other than an actual citizen is permitted to vote in this country and the pending immigration bill doesn’t change that. In fact, it contains a provision that explicitly punishes anyone who is not a citizen, if they unlawfully cast a ballot, by precluding them from obtaining citizenship.

So Fox’s assertion that “illegal Immigrants” will get full voting rights is dead wrong. And so is their unrelenting use of the derogatory phrase “illegal Immigrants.” Many news outlets have ceased to use the term that is considered offensive by those to whom it refers. Even the Fox News Latino web site has formally abandoned it.

The gist of the Politico article is that Democrats stand to gain electorally if the estimated 11 million undocumented residents were to become citizens. However, the legislation currently being debated contains a pathway to citizenship that would take thirteen years to complete. A lot can happen in politics in thirteen years. What’s more, there is no indication that all of the 11 million would ever become full citizens (either by choice or due to the stringent requirements in the law), or that those who did would ever register and turn out to vote.

So even if the Fox Nationalists had not overplayed their rhetorical bias in the headline, the facts would still not support their panicky fear of a browner, more Democratic electorate. That prospect is already manifest and is due primarily to the fact that Democrats welcome a more diverse society, while Republicans insult and demean minorities and aspiring citizens.

If the folks at Fox, and their allies in the GOP, are worried about losing future elections due to an expanding voter pool (and they should be), they might try not deliberately alienating the fastest growing demographic group in the nation, rather than trying to obstruct legal citizens from voting with measures that disenfranchise minorities, seniors, students, and the poor. But that would put them at odds with their Tea Party contingent and the confederate dead-enders that are the core of their southern strategy. It’s kind of a rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma for the them. Except the rock is equality and the hard place is their compulsive hatred for anyone not like them.


Fox News Mystery: Conspiratorial Article On Boston Bombing ‘Suspect’ Disappears [Update]

Posted by on April 22, 2013 at 7:48 pm. 4 Comments :

In a peculiar and suspicious chain of events, Fox News ran an article by commentator Todd Starnes with the provocative headline “Saudi National Questioned in Boston was on Terror Watch List.” But the article was not there for long, and has since been deleted from other conservative news sites as well.

There was no evidence in the article affirming the title’s allegation other than Starnes’ assertion that “sources have told me.” Starnes went on to say that his sources alleged that “Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi had been deemed inadmissible” for entry into the United States because he was engaged, or likely to become engaged, in terrorist activity. “Two additional sources,” Starnes said, “have confirmed to me that Ali Alharbi is set to be deported as early as this week.”

The article also notes that national security officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, have denied the reports and stated explicitly that Alharbi is not being deported, nor was anyone else with any connection to the Boston marathon bombings. All of the chatter in the right-wing media about this was definitively debunked days ago.

Despite the dismissals by Napolitano and others of these rumors, Starnes weaves a speculative tale of innuendo that he fails to back up with any substance. The missing article echoes the conspiracy theories emerging from the fringe outposts of Alex Jones’ InfoWars and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze. Beck’s recent foray into these wilds of reckless slander has been titillating his fans for several days with promises of jaw-dropping revelations that he literally described as the most important story in the history of the country. His pledge to unveil the sordid details Monday went conspicuously unfulfilled.

Glenn Beck

But here’s where the plot thickens. The delusional ravings of Jones and Beck might have been supported in some small measure by the article posted by Starnes. Mind you, Starnes did not have any better proof than they did that some untoward activity was taking place, but at least his column could have been cited as a rather useless and circular corroboration – and, in fact, Beck did just that. Which makes it all the more curious that Fox News made the column disappear. The link currently returns a “No Results Found” page. Making matters worse, Starnes also posted the article on the conservative Townhall web site, where it was also scrubbed. [Note: The Townhall article remains in Google’s cache]

What can explain this odd self-censorship by two separate, unaffiliated web sites? The articles simply vanished with no comment or correction. Was there a discovery that they were so far off base that they put the publishers in jeopardy of being sued for libel? If so, simply removing them would not be an effective defense without an apology for any harm done. It would more likely serve to prove that they had an awareness of the potential for harm and sought to cover up their actions.

Fox News

Another theory might be that Fox and Townhall are actually covert liberal agents who are in cahoots with Obama and the jihad movement and decided it would be better if they didn’t publicize these allegations. Plus they could sabotage Beck’s effort to reveal these harrowing truths and crush his credibility (if there were any left for crushing).

Alright, I know I shouldn’t be giving Beck any help in concocting his paranoid delusions. First of all, he’s better at it than I am. And secondly, it’s like giving a drug addict a fix. But what else might explain the behavior of Fox News, who ordinarily would leap at the opportunity to implicate Obama in some nefarious intrigue?

These missing articles create a mystery all their own, and it’s one that will likely never be solved because Fox is not forthcoming on matters related to their pseudo-journalistic endeavors. They rarely acknowledge errors in the best of circumstances, so we ought not to expect them to do so after having secretly excised a piece of dubious reporting. For all we are likely to ever know, these articles were just sucked into the black hole of Fox’s nightmare factory.

[Update 4/25/13] The articles referenced above are still missing and there have been no explanations or corrections offered. However, the “false flag” schemes they promote have been adopted by a GOP congresswoman from New Hampshire, Stella Tremblay, who said that “The Boston Marathon was a Black Ops ‘terrorist’ attack…by our own Government.”

Also, on Wednesday Beck interviewed a retired INS Special Agent on his webcast who disputed Beck’s account of the affair saying that “it doesn’t make sense.” Not surprisingly, Beck glossed over that portion of the discussion as if it hadn’t happened.


Where Are The Anti-Tyranny Teabaggers When Fox News Proposes Bugging Churches?

Posted by on April 22, 2013 at 5:35 pm. 9 Comments :

The Tea Party, and their Republican handlers, have created a cottage industry of fabricated fear mongering over imaginary plots to thrust the American people into slavery. Their incessant wailing over non-existent attempts by President Obama to designate himself a dictator and force his socialist, Sharia law down the throats of patrio-pathic Christicans has reached eardrum-busting decibel levels.

So it sort of makes you wonder why they aren’t aiming their NRA-approved assault weapons at their TV sets that are perpetually stuck on Fox News. Because this morning, Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends proposed that the government place listening devices in houses of worship.

Fox News

Whatever happened to the right-wing advocacy of small government? Where are the zealots who are convinced that Washington is a cesspool of would-be tyrants? How can those defenders of the Founding Fathers be silent when Fox News promotes such brazen violations of privacy and religious liberty?

The truth is that the righteous wing of the Republican Party was never opposed to big government. They have always favored a brand of oppression that focused on the private lives of the people. When they say that they want government “off their backs” what they mean is off the backs of big business. Regulation is a mortal sin to them. But they reserve the right to dictate how law-abiding individuals practice their faith, not to mention who they marry and what they are permitted to do in the privacy of their bedrooms.

Clearly hypocrisy is not foreign to their way of thinking. And that’s how they can sit back and be silent when their spokesmodels say things that are seemingly contrary to what they pretend to believe. Besides, when you violate the rights of minorities it doesn’t really count, does it?


Glenn Beck’s “Most Important Story In History” Just Another Epic Dud

Posted by on April 22, 2013 at 2:45 pm. 9 Comments :

Last week Glenn Beck was salivating over easily debunked rumors that he was convinced were proof of a scandalous cover up by the Obama administration. He spun a tale of a Saudi man who was near the scene of the Boston marathon bombing and was, according to Beck, connected to the Tsarneav brothers. And with the slimy veneer of the great snake oil salesman he is, Beck promised his glassy-eyed listeners that if they could just hold out for the weekend he would reveal unambiguous evidence that the Saudi was a terrorist and that President Obama was personally covering up for him.

Glenn Beck

And now our patience has been rewarded with Beck’s radio broadcast this morning. Completely oblivious to the fact that the man Beck is slandering as a terrorist was found to be a student with no ties to anything unsavory, Beck is clinging to his delusional conspiracy and reiterating his allegations from last week. And despite having threatened the President with the disclosure of the shocking truth, Beck has no further proof of wrongdoing or suspicious connection than he pretended to have previously.

The entirety of Beck’s expose consisted of unsupported allegations that a Saudi man was scheduled for deportation under “section 212, 3B” (security and related grounds). However, the Department of Homeland Security has already confirmed that the person in question was not a security risk and that he was not being investigated or deported. That, of course, hasn’t stopped Beck from persisting in his ramblings and calling for Obama to be impeached. He still has not speculated as to why Obama, and his entire national security apparatus, would be protecting a terrorist. Unless, of course, they themselves are behind the Global Jihad that Beck and his minions have been warning us about.

Beck failed to offer any substance to confirm his charges, other than unsourced “reports” and conjecture. So the weekend-long cliffhanger turned out to be bust. Now, as we all know, Beck having hallucinatory episodes marked by feverish fear mongering is not particularly newsworthy. What’s really troubling about this is that there are four Republican congressmen who are now demanding answers from DHS based on what they call “media reports,” but are really just Beck’s psychotic discharges.

It is always somewhat sad when Beck displays the severe mental deterioration that has become the hallmark of his broadcast career. But it’s downright nauseating that members of congress rely on such bull excrement and cite it in official communications. The American experiment in democracy sometimes comes frighteningly close to failing when people in government act like escapees from an asylum. And it isn’t just the obvious nutcases like Michelle Bachmann anymore.