Salt City Sinner

posted on 4/20/2013 by the Salt City Sinner A conspiracy theory without Glenn Beck kicking in his two cents is like a kiss without whiskers as the saying goes (or is it a soup without salt?). Joining the illustrious ranks of such deep thinkers as Alex Jones, Beck is now convinced that the official story on the Boston bombings is so much flim-flam and hocus-pocus. Like a newly hatched baby turtle’s irrepressible urge to seek the sea, or a flower’s instinctual strain for the light of the sun, Beck’s internet vanity press, The Blaze, is inevitably advancing the theory that all this Boston carnage has something to do with Benghazi. “Huh?” you say. Well, that’s not really a word, mister, but I’m willing to forgive it in this case because, seriously, huh? It’s not necessarily surprising that Beck’s first and most authentic reaction to the tragedy in Boston was to   use it  to   sell gold  . Glenndolf Beckler is, after all, a good capitalist, although his theory ...

posted on 8/13/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Well tickle my armadillo! It's been a while since we checked in on Glenn Beck, hasn't it? Thanks be to my horrible pagan gods, I've pretty much gotten over my obsession with Glenndolf. Why, it has been   more than a year   since I devoted a post to Beck - far, far too long, especially given that I have of late fallen back into my nasty habit of spending my mornings with Glenn and the rest of the "political morning zoo" crew he commands. Even now that the FM dial has a feed from   KLO  , and thus I can once again enjoy the comedy fascist tantrums of one   Dr. Michael Weiner   (AKA "Michael Savage"), I still have a soft spot for the latter-day (saint) Orson Welles. I especially like it - and always have - when Glenn badmouths and belittles academic "liberal elites" out of one side of his mouth while thoughtfully impersonating an academic out of the other. Obviously Our Boy Beck has some pretty s...

Harper's magazine's October 2011 cover story, " Pennies From Heaven: How Mormon Economics Shape the G.O.P. " (by Chris Lehmann*) is certainly a bombshell for anyone living in Utah, anyone of the LDS persusasion, and/or anyone who has a passing interesting in either post-1970s Evangelical politics or political Mormonism. It has some excellent research and some decent points, and also, in my opinion, has some significant, crippling flaws that demonstrate a lack of understanding on the author's part of Mormonism's history (aside from its most recent few decades) and modern Evangelical (especially megachurch-Evangelical) self-help theology. That said, it is exhaustively researched enough to include gems like this one regarding chemical magnate Jon Huntsman Sr., which I think presents the best case thus far for the existence of actual, physical evil: Even as he worked in the Nixon White House as personal aide to the president, the elder Huntsman was also sel...

In my bid to transcend reality and become the next Monitor of the DC Multiverse , I monitor (obviously) as many media "signals" as I can. One thing I particularly enjoy is my daily rendezvous with Glenn Beck and his lovable sidekicks Pat and Stu. I used to catch at least 1-2 hours of Beck every day: now that he's no longer re-broadcast from 4 to 7 PM, I can only usually get in about an hour of Beck. This morning, Glenn Beck took me by surprise by indirectly endorsing and lauding non-violent direct action. The set-up for this turn of events is as follows : ten members of Jewish Voice for Peace attended Pastor John Hagee's annual "Yay, Israel!" Rally for the purpose of standing and disrupting services to bring attention to Hagee's unwavering, ultra-hawkish support for Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian population. If you're familiar with Hagee, feel free to skip this paragraph, but if the name vaguely rings a bell or you have no idea who he i...

First off, apologies as I haven't kept up on this blog as I'd like to, but that's going to change right now. So, Glenn Beck, favorite punching bag of callow liberals like myself, is out on his ass at Fox News. Well, to be fair, Mercury Radio Arts (Beck's company, named in honor of Orson Welles) apparently still has a contract to produce content for Fox: According to GlennBeck.com, Beck’s production company, Mercury Radio Arts, will continue to work with Fox News on a new partnership where Beck will assist with development and production of a variety of television show productions for Fox News as well as other digital media holdings. No details were given on what the partnership might look like for Glenn Beck or Fox News. This is not even close to the end of Beck. My passion for horror cinema has given me a pretty apt simile to use here: Beck is like Jason the first time a teenage would-be victim lights him on fire or shoots him or drops him off a bridge. You just know ...

Ho-lee SMOKES. I knew that Alexander Zaitchik's new book about Glenn Beck was going to be a doozy, but in this excerpt posted at AlterNet he unloads two whopping barrels loaded with explosive rounds into Beck and how Utah Mormon culture (a certain strain of it) has flavored his shtick - a theme that others, including myself, have been hammering for a while now. Some choice bits: Those who study Mormon rituals and rhetoric say that the fingerprints of bearing testimony can be found all over Beck’s public tearfulness. “Beck’s ability to ‘cry on cue’ appears to be a combination of Mormon culture and the practiced delivery of a media professional,” says Daymon M. Smith, a Mormon doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. “He is using Mormon tactics to spread Mormon ideas, such as the gospel of Cleon Skousen, under the cover of secular political revelations.” “Beck’s emotional performances are very like Mormon testimonies,” agrees David Knowlton, a Mormon cu...

I've made no secret of the fact that I listen to Glenn Beck (so you don't have to!). Over the time that I've listened to Glenn's show, he has rotated through three theme songs: first Glenn opened the show with a pop-punk number that was pretty nondescript. He then dabbled with a lengthier opening theme with a "NEVER AGAIN!" theme that sounded sinister (this coincided with Glenn's continuing slide into scenic clowntown Crazyville). His current theme: ...is a schmaltzy little number called "We Will Be The Key." Apparently this ditty is sung by a man named Stephen Lyons , but with a heavy assist from Beck ( says Beck *: "I am instrumental in the writing of the theme song of the radio show ... and the music behind the documentaries on the Internet"). From the very first time I heard the new theme, I noticed it's similarity to Muse and I'm not the only one . I mean, for god's sake: This doesn't exactly come out of left field:...

Jon Stewart's take on Beck is pretty spot on in my opinion: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Rage Within the Machine - Progressivism www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Vancouverage 2010 One other thing - it's worth noting that one of CPAC's sponsors this year was the John Birch Society , a pre-paleoconservative organization that St. Buckley drove from the island of conservatism in the 1950s (arguably, that's the only reason that conservatives in the U.S. managed to mainstream their platform). David Weigel, in a great interview on Terry Gross' Fresh Air, described a brief exchange with David Frum in which Frum said that "the best you can say about Beck is that he has taken hard-money crankery away from the anti-Semites." Yikes.

What a week (and only Tuesday so far)! Wonkette sums it up best: So, this week the wingtards are furious about a) Scott Brown voting for some tax breaks for companies that hire American workers, b) Glenn Beck being too liberal *, and c) a wingnut blog not calling for a homosexual holocaust. Carry on, freedom fighters! 2010 is going to be a weird one. * - It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Beck has been called out by WND for not being enough of a wingnut. He has been more or less on WND's black list since he refused to jump on board the birther wagon - apparently the one thing that Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck have learned that Joseph Farah hasn't is that all this birth certificate stuff is very damaging to the conservative cause, because it makes you look freaking crazy .

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c The 11/3 Project www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

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Godwin's Law : "Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is a humorous observation coined by Mike Godwin in 1990, and which has become an Internet adage. It states: 'As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.'...There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself) than others invented later. For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically 'lost' whatever debate was in progress. This principle itself is frequently referred to as Godwin's Law. It is considered poor form to raise such a comparison arbitrarily with the motive of ending the thread." Back in my political forum-posting days, anti-Bush sentiment ran pretty hot at times. This issue came up s...

I fully intend to stop using Glenn Beck as a punching bag, but damn it, there are a few things that I just can’t let slip past me without comment. In a previous post, I linked to a video of a weepy Beck flogging his latest project/marketing vehicle, the so-called 9/12 project (the intent is to bring us all back to that kumbaya, trans-partisan state of nationalism that followed the greatest American tragedy in recent history). As I stated in said previous post, I’m a big believer in giving people a fair shake, and so I have been giving the 9/12 Project’s website a thorough going-over. One thing I will admit that I like about the project is that it encourages people to read – and, unlike Michael Savage or Bill O’Reilly or any of the other pontificators of the right, Beck actually wants his followers to read *real* books, stuff like the Federalist Papers and Tom Paine’s “Common Sense.” There are some unfortunate right-wing revisionist biographies of various founding fathers tucked i...

I wanted to use my first post here to flesh out an exchange I had with a friend about Glenn Beck's recent turn for the hysterical, in particular, some problems I have with both his "We Surround Them" and "9/12 Project" storylines. I decided to start things by giving the guy a fair shake, and read his founding principles or however he refers to them. Right off the bat, this jumped out at me: “ America is Good.” What does this even mean ? There’s no extrapolation here, not even some out-of-context quote taken from Washington or Lincoln. “ America is Good.” What are we calling America here? What are we calling good? This almost seems like a deliberate anti-thought instead of a thought: as in, what we are secretly agreeing to here is that we aren’t going to think very deeply or in a mature fashion about this question. America Good. Unamerica Bad. Ungh. “We surround them” vs. “the Spirit of 9/12” Weepily , Glenn Beck asks us to think back to the day...