Ted Cruz: The first talk radio presidential candidate

Ted Cruz is the first talk radio presidential candidate, so it's no wonder Glenn Beck has endorsed him. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others also gush over him.

I say that because Cruz, like a talk radio host, owes his popularity to staking out the "purest" (read: most extreme) views within his party, without any hope of ever getting what he wants. 

Cruz has never compromised in the Senate, he only grandstands, meaning he gets nothing done. He's a shameless self-promoter who has zero endorsements from his Republican colleagues in the Senate, who can't stand him. 

It's amazing that Cruz looks like a strong candidate for the GOP nomination, having just won Iowa. (But not without some dirty tricks.)

It just goes to show that talk radio runs the GOP. Too bad talk radio takes zero responsibility for governing, just like Ted Cruz.

Now if you want a good look at the real Ted Cruz, in his young and striving young-adult years, read this:

http://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-and-track-down-a-ted-cr-1752337625 

Common Core conspiracy!

The tinfoil hat crew -- Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, et al -- are coming out against Common Core. And since the Tea Parties take their lead from the craziest of the crazy conservative talking heads, Common Core has now become the Obama conspiracy du jour for the teabaggers.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan correctly dismissed wacko conservatives' fear mongering as "a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy."

Since conservatives give more credence to the messenger than the message, here is an op-ed on the conservative NRO site in favor of Common Core. Enjoy.  

Personally, I haven't taken the time yet to see whether the CC program is well designed or not, but in principle I'm all in favor of establishing a national curriculum for our K-12 students. Our kids in Detroit and Des Moines are not so different that they need completely different standards, set by our elected (read: politicized) local school boards, who often have no training or experience in education. 

Local control over education is so 19th century and has long past outlived its usefulness. Let the  bureaucrats (experts) decide!

The Truth about Common Core 

By Kathleen Porter-Magee & Sol Stern

April 3, 2013 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344519/truth-about-common-core-kathleen-porter-magee

Romney agrees with Obama; GOP can stay home

Remember, remember the 22nd of October!

That's when Romney said he wouldn't cut welfare.

This was after Romney agreed with Obama's foreign policy, his planned  withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2014, and Obama's auto bailouts.

This was after Romney said in a previous debate how he wants to keep all the popular provisions of Obamacare.

As Glenn Beck tweeted to his GOP minions after hearing how much Romney agreed with Obama : "I am glad to know that mitt agrees with Obama so much. No, really. Why vote?"

Indeed, why?  Republicans should stay home November 8.  Romney says Obama's got it covered.

Mitt Romney Wants To Get People Off Food Stamps ‘Not By Cutting The Program'
By Arthur Delaney
October 23, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/WF49cs

Glenn Beck's Goldline forced to refund $4.5 M... What about Beck?

The company Goldline scammed its customers into buying overvalued collectible gold coins instead of real gold bullion. Essentially, they were convincing their clients to pay a risk premium for coins, where the supposed risk was government confiscation of personal gold.

ABC broke this story, and they mention that Goldline used Glenn Beck ("The people I trust are the people at Goldline".... "You see, back in 1933, FDR said, 'OK, we're gonna take all your gold...'"), and other conservative pundits and politicians (Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson) to sell its overvalued gold coin business.

Goldline has agreed to refund $4.5 million to its customers and set up a fund of $800 K for further claims; in exchange a Santa Monica court dropped 19 criminal charges.

This is actually the second time a gold company advertised by Beck has run afoul of California law. I wonder if Glenn Beck, et al, will donate the revenues they received from Goldline?....

But this is about more than money. Goldline's pitch was based on a paranoid view that even buying gold wasn't safe, because the federal government could come and take it away. (Which is bogus, incidentally.) Without conservative talk radio and FOX, such paranoid beliefs would not be so widespread.

The real crime here is irresponsible talking heads leading millions of Americans to believe their government is fundamentally corrupt and out to get them. Too bad Goldline's celebrity accomplices like Glenn Beck don't have to pay any share of this settlement.

Goldline Agrees to Refund Millions to Customers

By Matthew Mosk

February 22, 2012 | ABC News

URL: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/goldline-agrees-refund-millions-customers/story?id=15768897

Israel passes law to restrict free speech

While Glenn Beck was over there last week fluffing Israel's Knesset (Parliament) with all manner of praise, they went and passed a law to restrict Israelis' free speech.

Which is hypocritical, because conservatives like Beck say money = speech.

Israel Boycott Ban Passes House

By Mark Lavie

July 11, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/israel-boycott-ban-passes_n_895104.html

Beck's site suspects O'Keefe's NPR tapes were doctored

Thank goodness for crazy right-wing conspiracy mongers posing as news sites which can police the integrity of crazy righ-twing black operators posing as investigative journalists.

See, it all balances out and we still don't need the lib'rul media... including NPR.

Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionalbe Editing & Tactics?

By Scott Baker

March 10, 2011 | The Blaze

URL: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/does-raw-video-of-npr-expose-reveal-questionable-editing-tactics/

Egypt's problem isn't 'socialism'

Contrary to what Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other wingnuts are saying about Egypt's unrest, the cause is definitely not "socialism:"

"The Arab world has largely transitioned in recent decades from socialist economies to ones that recognize the so-called Washington Consensus that free market policies work best.

"'There was a slow trend in Arab countries in doing away with subsidies across the board and trying to create better-crafted safety nets,' says Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Ottaway says that Arab states are not going to return to socialism or nationalization of industries but may once again promise that they can provide basic goods and help control their prices."


Job Security For Arab Leaders: A 3-Step Process
By Alan Greenblatt
February 2, 2011 | NPR

URL: http://www.npr.org/133410263

'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Egypt'

So how do American pundits who don't know or care anything about Egypt analyze events there? Through the prism of their own parochial, ideological idiotism, of course.

Enjoy all these way-out explanations and warnings of what's happening there!

Just more proof that in America, "getting informed" = getting dumber.

UPDATE (02.06.2011): A friend criticized me for caricaturing Americans as ignorant, parochial knuckle-draggers with this post. To clarify, I was criticizing the media which gives them half-assed analysis and ideological color instead of real information about world events. I'm sorry that the richest country in the world can't do a better job informing its public; in fact, it does a pretty good job of disinforming them. That was my point. We can debate another day whether and why Americans are ignorant, parochial knuckle-draggers....


The Right-Wing Nut's Guide to Egypt
By Max Read
February 2, 2011 Gawker

URL: http://gawker.com/5749601/the-right+wing-nuts-guide-to-egypt

Shot Congresswoman threatened before, targeted by Palin (literally)

I thought it was going to be Obama first, but I guess a defenseless woman at a supermarket was an easier target.

Shame on Palin and all those who incited this violence. Don't believe me? Check out the link below.

You thought it was all fun and games and Glenn Beck's crocodile tears, but now you have blood on your hands. Enjoy.

http://i.imgur.com/Uw4RS.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs75zKxJxVY&feature=player_embedded

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/08/arizona.shooting/index.html?hpt=T1

Hitchens: Beck's paranoia worse than Birchers'

Tea'd Off

Forfeiting a both-houses Republican victory, rational conservatives ignored or excused the most hateful kind of populist claptrap (e.g., the fetid weirdness of Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project). The poison they've helped disseminate will still be in the American bloodstream when the country needs it least.

By Christopher Hitchens
January 2011 issue | Vanity Fair

It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political "surge" which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits away.

Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. His soothing message:

"These parallels are real. But there's a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never had a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits."

The more one looks at this, the more wrong it becomes (as does that giveaway phrase "responsible-seeming"). The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a "dedicated, conscious agent" of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.

Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It's from Skousen's demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen's posthumously published book on the "end times" and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as "pickaninnies." And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this "Communist" assault.

So, Beck's "9/12 Project" is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of "spending and deficits"? It's enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

I remember encountering this same mentality a few years ago, when it was more laughable than dangerous. I didn't like Bill Clinton: thought he had sold access to the Lincoln Bedroom and lied under oath about sexual harassment and possibly even bombed Sudan on a "wag the dog" basis. But when I sometimes agreed to go on the radio stations of the paranoid right, it was only to be told that this was all irrelevant. Didn't I understand that Clinton and his wife had murdered Vince Foster and were, even as I spoke, preparing to take advantage of the Y2K millennium crisis—remember that?—in order to seize power for life and become the Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu of our day? These people were not interested in the president's actual transgressions. They were looking to populate their fantasy world with new and more lurid characters.

There is an old Republican saying that "a government strong enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have." This statement contains an essential truth that liberals have no right to overlook. But it is negated, not amplified, if it comes festooned with racism and superstition. In the recent past, government-sponsored policies of social engineering have led to surprising success in reducing the welfare rolls and the crime figures.

This came partly from the adoption by many Democrats of policies that had once been called Republican. But not a word about that from Beck and his followers, because it isn't exciting and doesn't present any opportunity for rabble-rousing. Far sexier to say that health care—actually another product of bipartisanship—is a step toward Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ten percent unemployment, on the other hand, is rather a disgrace to a midterm Democratic administration. But does anybody believe that unemployment would have gone down if the hated bailout had not occurred and GM had been permitted to go bankrupt? Why not avoid the question altogether and mutter about a secret plan to proclaim a socialist (or Nazi, or Jew-controlled: take your pick) dictatorship?

Again, there is a real debate about the pace and rhythm of global warming, and about the degree to which it has been caused (or can be slowed) by human activity. But at the first Tea Party rally I attended, at the Washington Monument earlier this year, the crowd—bristling with placards about the Second Amendment's being the correction—was treated to an arm-waving speech by a caricature English peer named Lord Monckton, who led them in the edifying call-and-response: "All together. Global warming is?" "Bullshit." "Obama cannot hear you. Global warming is?" "bullshit." "That's bettah." I don't remember ever seeing grown-ups behave less seriously, at least in an election season.

Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a "racial" matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that "Hispanic" immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It's more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there's nothing racial in their attitude …

As I started by saying, the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it's divine! It may be true that the Tea Party's role in November's vote was less than some people feared, and it's certainly true that several of the movement's elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass "literature" has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that's been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.

$ign of the (end?)times: Gold bug paranoia

I guess gold is like Glenn Beck's "Food Insurance," only in this case it would be "Money Insurance." The only thing is, if there is a total collapse of civilization like Beck predicts, then what are people going to need gold for? They can't eat it, can't build with it, it won't keep them warm, etc. That doesn't stop Beck from trying to fleece his herd with Goldline coin adverts though.

What Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and other right-wing pundits are really asking their followers to do is to speculate in gold and pump up an existing bubble. As a commodity, gold doesn't produce anything so its value depends purely on trading. The more people who buy gold, the bigger the bubble gets, and the more they'll lose when the gold bubble invetiably bursts. (After all, Republicans will eventually take control of Washington, save America, and restore the dollar, right?) Of course, those in the know who got in early on this paranoia and will sell out before the bubble bursts could make a bundle. But are you that cunning, and did you buy gold early enough? If the answer to either is "no," then stay away from gold unless you're an eccentric millionaire.

Remember, gold is not a very good hedge against inflation, it's a hedge against calamity and instability.

Fool's gold seduces the masses

Analysis: Here's why the world's love affair with gold is dangerous.
By David Case
November 10, 2010 | GlobalPost

URL: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/101110/gold-investment-robert-zoellick

Jon Stewart's rally bad for America, liberal activism

Just in case some of you think I take my marching orders from Jon Stewart, here are two very strong criticisms of his silly Rally to Restore Sanity yesterday.

First, mean-spirited, angry liberal journalist Mark Ames, who attended the rally for a short while before he had to bail, argued that the rally is emblematic of his generation's prime directives to 1) never risk looking stupid, no matter what is at stake, and 2) always preserve one's ironic detachment from events, even from oneself. That kind of cool pose is great and everything at parties, but not when the general welfare of the nation is at stake. Concluded Ames:

You see, this is why so many cool Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers were so jazzed up about going to the Stewart rally – by definition, they were guaranteed not to look stupid by going to it, because it's not really a rally. They're not putting anything on the line. They're just going to chant the equivalent of that annoying Saturday Night Live Update skit 'Really?' No generation ever looked so cool so late in their lives as my generation. We did it! We achieved our dream! We don't look as stupid as the hippies did when they were in their 40s! Woo-hoo! We still mock ourselves and we're still self-aware, but best of all, we don't look stupid by devoting ourselves to ideas or movements that other people might one day laugh at. We won! We won the least-stupid-looking-generation competition! Let's gather together in an ironic, self-aware way, and celebrate how we're not really rallying or laying anything on the line–not even now, not even when the whole fucking country is collapsing. What's our prize, Don?
Meanwhile, behind Door Number 1, the country is in two losing wars and the worst economic crisis in 80 years, behind Door Number 2, over 40 million Americans are on fucking food stamps, behind Door Number 3, millions are being land-transfered out of their property like landless peasants in a banana republic–yeah, it's bad, whatever dude, it's always been bad, nothing ever changes much, don't have a cow, deal with it….

Second, founder of the anti-war group CODEPINK, Medea Benjamin, made a similar although more focused criticism prior to the event, saying Stewart's "slacktivism" celebrates those people who are too "sane" to rally against insane wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other unjust government policies. She also noted how Stewart's Daily Show spent two hours taping her, along with an anarchist and a teabagger, lumping them all together as protesting nutjobs. As if any loud and angry protest by definition is crazy. She concluded:

So let's celebrate the people who walk the talk. Slacktivism did not end slavery, activism did. Slacktivism did not get women our rights. Activism did. Slacktivism won't end war or global warming. But activism just might.

I've said it before: my generation's children and grandchildren are not going to be proud of us because we were so cool and avoided saying stupid things; they're going to blame us for sitting on the sidelines in ironical detachment while our country went to shit. If we don't stand up and stand for something -- and that something should be liberal-progressive ideals which have saved us in the past and can do so again -- then we are irrelevant.

That said, Jon Stewart is funny. That's his job. It's not his job to organize and lead us. We are not like those atomized zombies of the Right looking for a TV preacher like Glenn Beck to tell us where to gather and what to say and do.

U.S. lokul ejukashun meetz reseshun

Listen up, all you conservative cavemen (and cavegals) who want to go back to the Laura Ingalls Wilder days of the Little Red Schoolhouse (minus that little b**tch Nellie, I presume): Your beloved model of locally funded and run primary schools has sunken into a fiscal crisis so deep even Michael Landon's angel can't pull it out. That dern economic cycle that you stake your life on means that kids unfortunate enough to be kids today get a worse education.

Aint the free market grand?

Come on, we're smarter than this. Public education should be centrally controlled and financed. Kids -- the future of our nation's economic productivity, and the guarantors of your beloved Social Security and Medicare, you Boomers -- should not be at the mercy of the business cycle.

Meanwhile, the Marxist, failed, redistributive stimulus bill that has brought affluent white seniors to the point of, well, actually leaving their homes, has been responsible for saving more than 342,000 school jobs, about 5.5 percent of all the positions in the nation's 15,000 school systems. "That's just socialism!" I can hear Glenn Beck sobbing from his mansion. I hope he and Nellie will share a desk in hell.


Districts Warn of Deeper Teacher Cuts
By Tamar Lewin and Sam Dillon
April 20, 2010 | New York Times

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/education/21teachers.html

Sarah won't rule out a Palin-Beck ticket, you betcha!

Palin won't rule out running with a dancing chimp either.

Seriously though, this just confirms everything I've been saying about the long, downward slide of the GOP. Its leadership is coming from un-elected, unaffiliated "rogues" and rightwing bloviators on FOX and talk radio. It's sad to see a once proud party reduced to this.

Palin-Beck Ticket? Sarah Doesn't Rule it Out
By David A. Patten
November 17, 2009 | Newsmax.com

It's no secret that former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Fox News host Glenn Beck share great respect and admiration — so their fans can be forgiven for wondering: Is a "dream ticket" of Palin-Beck ticket completely out of the question?

Perhaps not.

Palin initially chuckled when Newsmax broached the idea. But then she had some serious words of praise for the popular Fox personality.

"I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I'm not there yet," Palin tells Newsmax. "But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he's so bold — I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he's very, very, very effective."

[Yeah, he's very effective at self-promotion, a quality which Palin surely admires. - J]

GOP 'media candidates' stoking party civil war

Gee, great minds think alike. I just posted on this topic and here I see somebody saying the same thing: the GOP is in soooo much trouble right now.

Trying to don my moderate, apolitical hat for a moment, I'd argue that this is not a good thing for America. We've only got 2 parties, which even on a good day is inadequate; but with 1 party on a metaphorical acid trip lost in the woods, that leaves the other party to run things pretty much as they see fit. That's great if you have total faith in that party and see no good that could come from a loyal, reasonable opposition. But it's not so great if you have big misgivings about the effects of absolute power -- and absolute access to lobbyists' campaign donations -- on America's money-driven political process.

Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh Stoking GOP Civil War

By Eric Boehlert

November 11, 2009 | AlterNet

It's not easy to flip a congressional district that's been Republican since the late 1800s, but after being willingly hijacked by the right-wing media -- after getting steamrolled by Fox News' embrace of third-party candidate Doug Hoffman -- Republicans managed to hand Upstate New York's 23rd District to Democrats last week. And they did it just in time for the newly elected Democrat to help (barely) push health care reform through the House of Representatives during Saturday night's historic vote.

Doug Hoffman was, first and foremost, a media candidate (a media creation), which means we are entering a very new and different realm in American politics. We're entering a sort of Fox News Era where media outlets -- where alleged news organizations -- essentially co-sponsor political campaigns. We've moved well beyond the time when Fox News, for instance, leaned right and gave conservative candidates more air-time and tossed them lots of softball questions. We're now watching unfold a political reality where Fox News literally selects candidates and then markets them through Election Day.

There's a reason Hoffman described Glenn Beck as his "mentor" and pledged his "sacred honor" to uphold the "9 Principles and 12 Values" of Beck's 9/12 Project. There's a reason Sean Hannity wanted to "declare" Hoffman the election winner, and why Fox News' on-screen graphic read "Conservative Revolution?" when Hoffman was being interviewed (i.e. prematurely crowned) by Hannity on the eve of Election Day.

Hoffman's outsider bid, originally opposed by the Republican Party, was a media production, plain and simple, which means his loss was a media loss, as well.

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich had it right when he told The Washington Times that Hoffman's rise as a third party candidate was the "result of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News." Gingrich, who originally opposed Hoffman's candidacy, added: "This was not an isolated amateur; this is an entire movement."

Indeed, it's a media movement that's doing it's best to obliterate the line between journalism and politics.

As I've been noting for some time, Fox News has transformed itself into the Opposition Party of the Obama White House. So it makes sense that, as a purely partisan player, Fox News would immerse itself in backroom horse-trading. It makes sense that rather than covering the campaigns and the candidates, Fox News would insert itself as a political player within Republican contests and throw its support behind a specific candidate, the way it did in NY-23.

The looming problem for the GOP, though, is that the right-wing media can't pick winners and stands poised to rip the Republican Party apart. (Did you notice how Limbaugh last week claimed "Newt" had "screwed the whole [NY-23] thing up"?)

It's yet more evidence that during President Bush's pro-war tenure, far-right radio and TV talkers, along with fringe bloggers, convinced themselves they represented the mainstream -- the majority -- of the GOP. But they don't. They represent the radical CPAC wing of the GOP, and it shows on Election Day. We saw that in 2008, when bloggers and talkers opposed Sen. John McCain in the GOP primaries yet were completely unable to sway Republican voters in the process. In the immortal words of Republican strategist Mike Murphy, "These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination."

What's different now, though, is that the right-wing media have become even more powerful within conservative circles, while the Republican National Committee and traditional Republican leaders have receded even further into the background. (Does anyone really see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the leader of anything?) That power vacuum means it's Fox News that sets the conservative agenda in America. It's at Fox News where partisan strategies are hatched, rallies are marketed, and smear campaigns are launched. And it's Republican politicians and traditional Beltway professionals who are forced to play catch-up to the conservative media.

In other words, in just the last 12 months, the balance of power within the conservative movement has completely swung in the direction of the right-wing press, which is stoking the flames of the GOP civil war. It's a partisan press corps that no longer documents internal Republican squabbling; it initiates the infighting.

National political parties go through all kinds of evolutions; all kinds of natural expansions and contractions over time. (Barry Goldwater, for instance, oversaw perhaps the GOP's most radical contraction in modern times.) It's quite rare, though, for the catalyst of that change to be external media forces. Sure, permanent Beltway insiders such as Bill Kristol have routinely hopped back and forth between "the role of Republican flack and alleged journalist without changing even a comma in his prose 'style'," as columnist Eric Alterman noted last week.

But what we're seeing unfold in 2009 is something entirely different. This isn't a few conservative pundits dipping their toes into Republican political waters during election cycles and trying to generate an electoral wave. And this isn't like 1994 when AM talk radio morphed into an RNC echo chamber and helped spread the Republicans' anti-Clinton message.

This is a case where huge swaths of the conservative media, including television, radio, and online, have shed any façade of being journalists and embraced their king-making role. Or, if savaging a GOP candidate is what's needed, as was the case in NY-23 and Dede Scozzafava, then they'll do that as well.

Looking forward, it's inevitable that during the 2012 GOP Republican primary season, there will be, for the lack of a better term, a Fox News candidate in the field. There will be a far-right darling of the Tea Party movement (cough, cough, Sarah Palin) who has both the official (Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin) and unofficial (Fox News) endorsement of the right-wing media.

But will that do any good in the real world? Ask Doug Hoffman.

Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Malkin, among others, all put their reputations on the line in NY-23, touting the contest as a referendum on the anti-Obama, Tea Party movement in America. And they lost, big time. Not unlike the way the same right-wing media leaders put their reputations on the line in early 2008 and went all-in against McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary. (FYI, McCain wasn't sufficiently conservative.) Result? McCain won the SC contest in a walk.

See a pattern here? Me, too. The Republican Party is now attached to a political movement -- a media-led movement -- that cannot win elections. It's a movement that cannot even win elections in traditionally red districts (NY-23) or in very red states (SC). By refusing to separate itself from media players who claim the president of the United States is a racist and a Nazi, the GOP may be assigning itself a permanent minority status.

And I'm sorry, but belated and feeble attempts by Republican leaders such as Rep. Eric Cantor to create the slightest glimmer of daylight between the GOP and the right-wing media aren't going to do the trick. (For the record, comparing health care reform to the Holocaust was the line Limbaugh and company recently crossed, according to Cantor. Good to know.) Republican politicians in 2009 have made it blindingly obvious that they lack both the courage to consistently stand up to the far-right media's hate merchants and the resources. Meaning, without the energy of the fringe activists who insist Obama is destroying America on purpose, the Republican Party would be virtually kaput today.

Disillusioned "Right Wing" blogger Rick Moran, recently bemoaning what he sees as the rise of an "anti-reason" movement on the far right, may have put it best when he asked, "What is it that possesses certain conservatives to fool themselves so spectacularly into believing that they can create a majority out of a minority?"

His definition of "anti-reason" conservatives, who now anchor the right-wing media, seemed dead-on, as well: "[T]hose who reject reality in favor of persecution complexes, wildly exaggerated hyperbole, and a frightening need for vengeance against their imagined 'enemies.' "

Moran actually penned that lament before the votes were counted in the NY-23 congressional race. And incredibly, the "anti-reason" fanatics Moran described were encouraged by the results in Upstate New York, which, in a strange way, actually made sense. Of course anti-reason conservatives would celebrate as a victory the fact that a district that hadn't elected a Democrat to Congress in nearly 150 years did so last week. Of course they'd announce that it was good news that by backing a candidate who did not even live in the district and who, according to a local newspaper editorial board, was woefully ill-informed about local issues, the movement had helped toss a Republican seat to the Democrats.

Anti-reason conservatives watched Hoffman go down in defeat and immediately announced they were going to target more Republican candidates, which means the right-wing media stand poised to unleash even more wingnuttery on the GOP establishment.

Grab the popcorn. This is going to be fun to watch.

Beck, Bachman & Palin's party

Kind of an interesting article, because it shows you the evolving Tea Party-GOP-talk radio dynamic currently in action. Here we have a politician who eschews her party and instead embraces talk radio, FOX jocks, teabaggers, "Birthers," "Deathers," "10thers," and just about every other kook theory or group out there. That kind of popularity is double-edged sword, because it is fleeting, and the paranoid people who give it to her see creeping socialism in every Democratic proposal, and they demand the same low rhetoric and hysterical tone from their favorite politicians. Together, they drag the GOP farther to the Right, away from the mainstream of America -- away from where the GOP needs to be to win elections.

So basically, all of this is good for the Michele Bachmanns and Sarah Palins out to make a name for themselves, but but bad for the Republican Party. Bad, that is, assuming the GOP wants to be relevant.

As a Democrat (or at least a liberal) you kinda just have to sit back and observe this in awe, shaking your head wondering, "What the hell are they thinking?"

Michele Bachmann's 'high stakes' political game grows

By Rebecca Sinderbrand

November 12, 2009 | CNN

The thousands of restive conservative protesters milling outside the west front of the Capitol last week definitely didn't seem in the mood to listen -- but there was at least one voice they wanted to hear.

The chant started from the back of the crowd, and rolled forward like a wave: "We want Michele! We want Michele!"

Michele Bachmann doesn't say she finds GOP leadership irrelevant. But with health care reform gathering momentum as the Democratic bill entered final debate in the House, she took her typical route around, not through them.

The swarms of Tea Partiers who descended on Washington on her week-old call didn't come to see John Boehner and Eric Cantor. The top Republican leaders in Congress were guests at Michele Bachmann's party.

"When we came down to this final hour, as the clock is ticking 11:59 on this health care reform, Speaker Pelosi is posed with her health care bill to take over 18 percent of the American economy," the Minnesota congresswoman said Thursday, drawing an angry roar from the audience set to swarm Democratic congressional offices on her instructions. Bachmann grinned. "Oh come on, don't hold back," she said. "Tell them how you really feel!"

In many ways, Michele Bachmann is the ideal political creature of the Tea Party era. Her path to power doesn't lie in moving up the GOP leadership ladder, but in ignoring it entirely, drawing her power more from cable TV hits than committee assignments.

And that power is growing: A University of Minnesota study released in August found she had already doubled her media appearances from the previous year. In 2008, when she was running for re-election, Bachmann hit the airwaves every 16.6 days, Minnesota researchers said. In 2009, that frequency had nearly doubled, to once every 9.1 days.

Nearly all of those appearances made news, featuring a supremely confident and combative Bachmann.

"If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism," she said in March on CNN contributor Bill Bennett's national radio show. "The Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels -- that's what they're very good at -- they're trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren't able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated."

One summer pledge to battle health care reform generated even more media heat and liberal outrage. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing," she told Colorado conservatives in August. "This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass."

Since Bachmann's arrival in Washington in 2007, she's grabbed attention not so much for what she's accomplished as for what she has said. Her statements are sometimes debatable, occasionally incendiary, always quotable. In October, she told conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation that she refused to "cower in fear," and worry about media chatter. "They're irrelevant," she said of mainstream journalists. "And I don't play by their rules."

Her target audience, and core constituency, is the outraged conservative voter who feels powerless in the Obama era. And they're listening.

"You've gone to the town hall meetings and been at the tea party rallies, only to be ignored by the Left," the congresswoman wrote in a fundraising message this fall. "Well, I've heard you loud and clear and you're saying: 'Enough is enough!' "

Her polarizing voice sounds like money -- to members of both political parties.

"Polarizing people are double-edged swords, and I think that on balance ... she's hurting the Republican Party," says veteran Democratic consultant Jennifer Palmieri.

Even Republicans concede Bachmann, 53, is playing a high-stakes game.

"If you're going to play that kind of role as a passionate person who, who goes out there and really says stuff, you better have pretty good instincts," says Tony Blankley, one-time press secretary to former House speaker Newt Gingrich. "Because if you have bad instincts, you're going to pay a price.

"But on the other hand," he adds, "nobody follows somebody who's just muttering."

Bachmann relishes her underdog status -- a fortunate trait, given her timing: She ran for a seat in a GOP-controlled Congress, but took office as part of the smallest Republican freshman class in six decades.

[...]

When she entered Winona State College, Bachmann was a Democrat and along with her future husband, Marcus, even worked for Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign. But she grew disillusioned with the Carter presidency. Reading a tartly written Gore Vidal history book on a train ride back to school one year, something just clicked, she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an interview a few months into her first term.

"He was kind of mocking the Founding Fathers and I just thought, 'What a snot,' " she told the paper. "I just remember reading the book, putting it in my lap, looking out the window and thinking, 'You know what? I don't think I am a Democrat. I must be a Republican.' "

But she says she didn't see politics in her future. She headed off to study law at Oral Roberts University, and later at the College of William & Mary Law School. She married Marcus, worked as a tax attorney, and had five children of her own, along with a succession of 23 foster children.

Her entrance into politics came relatively suddenly -- she jumped into a state Senate race a decade ago over dissatisfaction with school regulations, and quickly became one of the most high-profile culture warriors in the Minnesota legislature, a leader in the fight against same-sex marriage.

That embrace of hot-button issues continued when she made her way to Washington. Name a controversial conservative cause of the Obama era, and she's been an icon to devotees: She's a core member of a group of Republican lawmakers who continue to push for government investigations into alleged Democratic ties to controversial community group ACORN. She's been a hero to "10thers," who believe the 10th Amendment of the Constitution rules out a major government role in health care reform; "Birthers," who question whether President Obama was born in the United States (though Bachmann -- who helped block a resolution affirming Hawaii as the president's birthplace -- recently told CNN's Larry King she has "no reason to doubt" he was born there); and "Deathers," who claim government cost-cutting under President Obama's health care plan would prevent older Americans from receiving necessary medical care.

While other Republican lawmakers have publicly struggled with the role of conservative voices like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck -- offering mild criticism and backing away from their comments, serving up vague praise with conditional disclaimers -- Bachmann has embraced them wholeheartedly.

Brooks: Rise of talk radio corresponds to fall of GOP

I'm interested how many of my esteemed Republican friends will respond to this op-ed, written by conservative pundit David Brooks, with a "Well, duh," and how many of them will leap to defend Rush, Hannity, and Beck's importance?

I can't wait to find out!


The Wizard of Beck

By David Brooks

October 2, 2009 | New York Times

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/opinion/02brooks.html?_r=1&em

Glenn Beck's Party

Glenn Beck's Party

By Paul Waldman

September 22, 2009 Prospect. org

In Great Britain, the opposition party assembles a "shadow cabinet," offering up individuals who are supposed to speak for it on various policy issues. One off th results is that the party is required to at least pretend to care about the substance of government. We have no such tradition here in America, so our opposition, without much to do with its time other than plot strategies to undermine the party in power, is free to be as trivial as it wants.

Granted, when you're out of power, stirring up trouble is a lot more fun than writing policy papers. But the problem for the GOP today is that it is increasingly being defined by its ugliest impulses, its most gullible conspiracy theorists, and its acceptance of a rising tide of nuttiness. Conservatives are having quite a bit of success drumming up manufactured controversies, but each one makes them look less and less like the kind of people you'd trust to run the country.

It is appropriate that the conservative moment's new leader is Glenn Beck, who spends his hours on the air drawing conspiracies on white boards and literally telling his viewers that he's terrified, and they should be too (in Time magazine's cover story on him, fellow Fox News anchor Shepard Smith calls Beck's studio the "fear chamber"). Watch Beck's disquisition on the hidden communist and fascist symbolism he discovered in the sculptures and building facades around Rockefeller Center, and you realize just how thin the line is between achieving media superstardom and standing on a corner with a sandwich board and tinfoil hat.

Having procured the scalp of Van Jones, whose job in the White House was to promote green jobs (a terribly nefarious task, I know), Beck has focused his all-seeing eye on the fact that there are people in the executive branch who have been referred to, at various times and by someone or other, as "czars." Just what is a czar? There's no definition, because the title doesn't actually exist. Aficionados of the czar conspiracy have devised lists with the number of czars ranging from 29 to 44, depending on which right-wing blog's comment thread they're using as a source. And no, that isn't a joke.

This has become Beck's latest anti-Obama crusade, that these czars, with their unchecked, unaccountable, nearly unlimited power, represent a threat to the life and liberty of every American. Though no actual Cossacks have been seen pillaging heartland towns, we should be vigilant.

I can't help but wonder if behind closed doors, Republicans say to themselves, "Man, that Glenn Beck is a real idiot. I wish we could just ignore him." But they can't, of course -- you go to war with the Fox News hosts you have. If Beck starts yammering on about a plague of czars, well, that's what the base is interested in. So you'd better put on your outrage beanie, step up to the microphone, and start yelling.

Doing their part in this piece of performance art, Republican members of Congress have been holding press conferences and posing in front of photo arrays of the alleged czars. House Republicans even have a bill, the Czar Accountability and Reform Act of 2009, which now has 100 co-sponsors. They argue that the czars are unaccountable because they haven't been confirmed by the Senate. Except many of those on the various lists were, in fact, confirmed. We have yet to see a reporter ask one of these officeholders for a definition of "czar" that goes beyond "I heard somebody once call that guy a czar, so he is one." What's the difference between a czar and someone who holds a job in the executive branch? None that we can tell. The Republicans may not be aware of it, but I heard there's a college student intern who makes copies in the office of the deputy undersecretary of agriculture. Egad -- a soybean document duplication czar!

But it's not just on the House side, where silliness is always a featured offering on the daily legislative menu. Senators are getting into the act, too. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas wrote a breathtakingly stupid op-ed for The Washington Post, decrying the unchecked power the czar epidemic represents. "A few of them have formal titles," Hutchison wrote darkly, "but most are simply known as 'czars.'" Actually, every single one of them has a formal title. And the only person who is really "known" widely as a czar would be the drug czar, or head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, an agency created under George H.W. Bush.

While Hutchison hasn't had the most distinguished of Senate careers, she has not appeared to be as much of an ignoramus as her op-ed would suggest. But she is running for governor of Texas against incumbent Republican Rick Perry, whose vigorous pandering to his party's nuttiest elements could teach Mitt Romney a thing or two. Running in a GOP primary against a man who has actually suggested that Texas consider seceding from the United States if Washington continues to pass laws and regulate things, the fairly moderate Hutchison knows she has to start shimmying her way up the crazy tree, and right quick. (A poll taken after Perry's remarks showed Texas Republicans evenly split, 48-48, on whether the state should remain part of the United States or not. Really.)

Do we even have to mention the epic hypocrisy at work here? I suppose we do. These Republicans -- who are now so concerned that by hiring people to work on issues, President Obama is "consolidating power" (Sen. John Thune of South Dakota) in a way that "upsets the checks and balances" (Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee) -- were quite happy about consolidation of power when a Republican was in the White House. They didn't criticize the Bush administration's "unitary executive" theory, which said, among other things, that criminal laws don't apply to the president as long as what he's doing has anything to do with national security. They didn't object when the Bush administration claimed that the president had the power to wiretap citizens without warrants, or arrest and lock up Americans for life, without charge or trial. They didn't disagree when over 1,200 times, Bush used "signing statements" to assert that he would ignore laws or parts of laws he found displeasing. All that was no problem -- not to mention the fact that Bush also had staffers whom people sometimes called "czars." But the presence of an Obama adviser not subject to Senate confirmation? Tyranny!

If you're a politician in either party, you often find yourself pulled to the ideological edge by your most fervent supporters. This sometimes means you have to assure them that your heart is with them, even if you know that political reality means you won't be able to give them what they want. I agree with you that a single-payer health-care system would be better, a Democrat might say, but a weak public option is all we can get -- and maybe not even that. You're right, we really should privatize Social Security, a Republican might assure a supporter, but it's just not politically possible.

But what the GOP faces now is that portions of its base, spurred on by the likes of Beck, have gone completely, utterly mad. And prominent Republicans, many of them otherwise fairly reasonable people, have decided to check into the asylum.

Why? There are many reasons. Some of the members of Congress taking up these charges are not really playing with a full deck (see, for instance, this video of Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio whispering "I agree with you" to a constituent claiming Obama wasn't born in the U.S.). Others may actually be so ignorant of how government works that they believe that an official who is not confirmed by Congress is a dangerously unaccountable czar (and yes, it's possible to be elected to our national legislature and still be a dolt -- there are more than you'd think). But the most relevant reason is that, at least in the short term, it works. Drawing the news media's attention away from policy and toward craziness is as easy as waving a shiny ball in front of a baby. And the more time they spend talking about whatever the conservatives want them to talk about, the less time goes toward a reality-based discussion of actual issues.