| Smitty: | Are you sure this is where the Restoring Honor event was supposed to be? |
| Skippy: | Well, it’s what I read in a comment on a post somewhere on the DailyKos. . . |
Guess it’s time to get moving if we’re to make the Mall.
Category: Glenn Beck
Event To Build Character Scheduled On Ann. Of Famous Speech On Character Denounced By Those Lacking Character
by Smitty
This blog is looking forward to having a fine, American, a-political time at Glen Beck’s 8/28 event.
From the 8/28 page:
What can I bring?
You can bring small umbrellas, bottled water (plastic bottles only please), bag lunches, snacks (e.g. Stacy’s vanilla pudding), lawn chairs, cameras, blankets, small coolers, backpacks, and flags. Also, we advise that you bring hats (say, a fedora) and sunscreen.
What can I NOT bring?
As a security precaution, the following items will be prohibited from the event sites:
- NO signs (political or otherwise) as they may deter from the peaceful message we are bringing to Washington.
- Firearms (either real or simulated)
- Ammunition
- Explosives of any kind (including fireworks, to the chagrin of Stacy McCain)
- Knives, blades, or sharp objects (of any length)
- Mace and/or pepper spray
- Helium balloons
- Sticks or poles
- Pocket or hand tools, such as “leatherman”
- Packages
- Large bags (anything larger than a backpack)
- Duffle bags
- Suitcases
- Weapons of any kind
- Aerosols
- Laser pointers
- Animals other than service/guide dogs
- Structures (i.e tents)
- Alcoholic beverages
- Other items that may pose a threat to the security of the event
Who are the speakers?
The speakers include representatives from SOWF, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Dr. Alveda King and Marcus Luttrell. Jo Dee Messina will be performing as well.
Character vs. ‘characters’
Beck was quoted in the comPost as saying:
. . .whites don’t own the Founding Fathers. Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln. Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King. Humans, humans embrace their ideas or reject their ideas. Too many are rejecting the Founders’ ideas. Too many have forgotten Abraham Lincoln’s ideas and far too many have either gotten just lazy or they have purposely distorted Martin Luther King’s ideas of judge a man by the content of his character. Lately, in the last 20 years, we’ve been told that character doesn’t matter. Well, if character doesn’t matter, then what was Martin Luther King asking people to judge people by?
The WaPo goes on to say:
Beck’s choice of day and place for the rally “is insulting, is what it is,” Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said in an interview Monday. “August 28 is something special. It is a day that means something in American history because it was the demonstration in the United States in support of civil rights.”
Beck’s plans are “an effort to embarrass and poke a finger in the eye of the civil rights community because Glenn Beck and his public utterances don’t necessarily demonstrate a consistency with the vision of King.”
Sharpton, who has planned a march that day to commemorate King’s legacy, says Beck’s rally contradicts King’s legacy. Sharpton said he began planning in April for his “Reclaim the Dream Rally,” which is scheduled to begin at Dunbar High School in Northwest Washington and end at the planned site of the King memorial on the Mall. The event, supported by the NAACP, the Urban League and Martin Luther King III, “is not a countermarch to Beck,” nor will the rally be about confrontation. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will be among the participants, according to a news release from Sharpton’s National Action Network.
As you say, Rev. Sharpton. You and the NAACP just stay classy.
In Closing
Why Stacy McCain wasn’t invited to speak at the 8/28 event is not exactly clear. There may not be enough time for him to get back from speaking at the Gay Vanilla Pudding Manufacturers of Bulungi Convention in Yabba-Dabba. Perhaps he can catch an earlier flight out of Primo-Ganja Airport, but it’s probably too late to book him. Blame Erik Telford, and remember the Gooey Shoe Leather fund.
We cannot over-emphasize the falsehood of the Leftist attempts to tear down America and Americans, but we should certainly attend events like this and give it a solid American try, honor of those who’ve gone before us, and do everything positive and possible to return our country to its founding ideals.
28 August, Lincoln Memorial? Yeah, We’re Blogging That
by Smitty (via Bluegrass Pundit)
| Restoring Honor | |
| Location: | At the steps of the Lincoln Memorial |
| Date: | August 28, 2010 |
| Time: | 10a-1p ET |
Two months is enough time to get our ducks in a row as far as covering the event goes.
I’m not a regular Beck viewer, so Bluegrass Pundit’s post was news to me. BGP was reacting to Bill Press’s ludicrous assertion concerning the rally that:
If you ask me, that’s like granting al Qaeda permission to hold a rally on September 11 – at Ground Zero.
Well, Bill, if your purpose for making scurrilous remarks like that is to motivate Americans to oppose false mainstream media filth, then you’re about to be visited with sweet success. If the country was not beset with problems orders of magnitude greater than Bill Press, his remark might even be worth specific sign mockery at that rally. But all he really merits is passing mention in a blog post.
More Press love at NewsBusters.Beck’s site mentions other attendees here, including Sarah Palin.
The big names are all fine, but the real point is to gather We The People and underscore for this Congress and Administration that the 2008 election was not a Leftist takeover, and the two year election frequency was envisioned by the Founders for exactly the current circumstance. And the Left would have got away with it, too, if not for those meddling white dudes in wigs.
Newsweek Intern Attempts to Describe Hayek’s Road to Serfdom: Massive FAIL
Thanks to Kathy Shaidle for calling attention to this sophomoric effort by Princeton senior Isia Jasiewicz:
On June 8, Beck devoted an entire episode of his talk show on Fox News to The Road to Serfdom, a work of political theory written in the immediate aftermath of World War II by Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian émigré to the U.K. and the 1974 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics . . .
The Road to Serfdom is a treatise on libertarianism, well-known only in academic circles or among political theory wonks stalwart enough to wade through the 60-page introduction and chapters on “Planning and the Rule of Law” and “The Prospects of International Order.”
Ha. Ha. Haha. BWAAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Just a few points:
- The term “libertarian” in its present meaning was not commonly used until the 1970s.
- Far from being known only to “wonks,” The Road to Serfdom was a best-seller in 1944 and ’45, going through multiple printings, and was originally popularized through a condensed version published by Reader’s Digest.
- It was not “a work of political theory,” but an attempt to explain the rise of Nazism and fascism — 1944? hint, hint — as one consequence of the prevalence of socialist ideas. It was a very practical book, warning leaders in England and America that the tendency toward the “planned economy” could produce similar results even in Western democracies.
- The book obviously wasn’t written in the “aftermath of World War II,” but during the war.
- As to being “stalwart enough to wade through the 60-page introduction,” my own copy (50th anniversary edition, 1994) includes an 11-page introduction by Milton Friedman and a couple of prefaces to previous editions. The most interesting chapters, to my mind, are Chapter 8 (“Who, Whom?”), Chapter 10 (“Why the Worst Get on Top”) and especially Chapter 12 (“The Socialist Roots of Nazism”), which has never ceased to provoke howls from the Left, who refuse to admit that National Socialism was socialism at all.
Next assignment for Isia Jasiewicz? “The Bible, a theological treatise well-known only in religious circles or among clergy stalwart enough to wade through several pages of ‘begats’ and the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy.”
ADDENDUM: Whatever happened to young journalists learning their craft as reporters before trying their hand at punditry or criticism? I suppose it would be slumming for a Princeton grad to take a job as a staff writer for a newspaper, covering school-board meetings and such. But am I the only reader who resents being lectured to by 22-year-olds? I don’t care what your SAT score was, sweetheart. You’re not that precocious.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Remember that Professor Reynolds is a Yale Law grad, so the humiliation of Princetonians and Harvardians (e.g., Andrew Sullivan) warms the cockles of his heart.
UPDATE II: As I remarked last week, it is unfortunate that most people who read The Road to Serfdom stop there and don’t pursue Austrian economics or Hayekian philosophy further. One of the finest treatises Hayek ever wrote was The Mirage of Social Justice — which goes in-depth on a key theme briefly explored in Road — and yet it gets short shrift. Hayek famously described the errors of socialism in The Fatal Conceit.
If you want to read some excellent Hayek for free, I recommend “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” And, oh, yeah, Glenn Beck is right: Buy gold.
UPDATE III: Linked by Greg Ransom at the Hayek Center. Wouldn’t it be nice if the center were Hayekian?
Little Miss Attila has some great Hayekian video.
UPDATE IV: E-mail from a reader:
I’m a former editor at the [Reader’s] Digest. Actually, RD didn’t just do a condensed version of Road to Serfdom, they published the condensed version in the magazine, which at the time was one of, if not the most, widely read magazines in the country. One of the reasons it is so well known by a certain generation, is that it was read by millions of people who other wise might not have been aware of it.
No need to mention me, just the fact, which reinforces that this guy’s a moron. Cheers.
Thanks!
Gold Price Hits Record High
Gold futures closed at a record high on Thursday, handily surpassing the mark reached just last week as investors grew more concerned about the U.S. economy and its proxy, the stock market.
Gold for August delivery, the most active contract, added $18.20, or 1.5%, to settle at $1,248.70 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. That left the June 8 record close of $1,245.60 in the rearview mirror. . . .
“Equities are in a precarious situation,” said Charles Nedoss, a senior market strategist with Olympus Futures in Chicago. Investors feel stocks may be overbought and turned to the safety of gold, he added.
Obamanomics: Still Not Working
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost another 115 points Monday, after losing 324 points on Friday, for a two-day loss of 439 points (4.3%) — and a cumulative loss of 1,389 points (12.4%) since April 26. In short, if your 401(k) is mainly in stocks, you’ve lost about 1/8th of that money in about six weeks. The net gain of the typical stock portfolio since November? A big, fat zero:
Stocks slumped Monday, with the Dow and S&P 500 ending at 7-month lows, after the euro hit a fresh four-year low, adding to worries about the global economy.
The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 115 points, or 1.2%, closing at the lowest point since Nov. 4.
The S&P 500 index (SPX) lost 14 points, or 1.4%, and closed at its lowest point since Nov. 4. . . .
“Last Friday’s jobs report inspired very little confidence in terms of the economic recovery,” said Erick Maronak, senior portfolio manager at Victory Capital Management. “Add to that the anxiety about Europe and investors are very skittish.” . . .
Worries that the United States could be in danger of falling into a so-called double-dip recession have plagued markets for the last month, sending the major stock indexes down more than 10% each.
Wait, did somebody say the magic words?
Neil McKinnon of VTB Capital said: “Eurozone debt and banking problems remain paramount.”
He said worries about a “double-dip” recession were rising. “Are we moving from a V to the downleg of the W?” he asked.
Let me remind you once more what I wrote on June 1:
“What investors must wonder is whether the past month’s declining trend on Wall Street is merely a short-term correction . . . or the onset of the second wave in a W-shaped (‘double dip’) recession.”
But this was predictable long much earlier, as I reported March 4:
The United States is currently suffering from “a capital-starved economy,” syndicated columnist Donald Lambro told George Washington University students Wednesday. “We’re in for a very long period of very high unemployment.”
Noting several forecasts of “anemic” economic growth in coming years, Lambro called President Obama’s deficit spending agenda “unsustainable.”
“Government stimulus programs have never worked and they’re not going to work now,” Lambro said . . .
And guess what? It’s going to get even worse next year:
On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire on that date . . .
When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe “double dip” recession.
That’s from Art Laffer. Maybe you’ve heard of him. And maybe you’ve also heard of liberal idiots like Matthew Yglesias, who think that more Keynesian “stimulus” deficit spending is the answer. On Oct. 8, 2008, Yglesias was mocking some guy who told people to invest in gold. What if you’d ignored Yglesias and taken that other guy’s advice?
Gold rallied to within inches of its U.S.-dollar record and beat its all-time high in euros Monday as investors increasingly buy the metal as a hedge against financial deterioration in the euro-zone.
Most-actively traded gold, for August delivery, rose $23.10, or 1.9%, to settle at $1,240.80 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. That just missed the $1,243.10 record close for a most-active contract set in mid-May. Nearby futures had their largest one-day dollar and percentage gain since Feb. 16. . . .
“The global tensions are at a pinnacle,” said Mike Daly, gold specialist at PFGBest in Chicago. “People are saying, ‘We don’t have any confidence in these fiat currencies, and we need to move our money into tangible, safer assets.'”
Let’s just compare and contrast, shall we?
Who was that guy saying you should buy gold? Glenn Beck. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
Everybody Should Buy Gold, Even If Glenn Beck Gets Paid to Tell You So
Look, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 300 points today, and the DJIA is down more than 1,130 points since closing at 11,205 on April 26. The Greek debt crisis is pulling down the European economy, more than 700 U.S. banks are now on the FDIC “troubled” list, and concern about a “double-dip” recession is becoming mainstream. Now, let’s look at this chart of gold prices over the past five years:
If you were investing in real estate or plowing your 401(k) into stocks five years ago, don’t you wish you’d bought gold instead? Yet according to Democrats, it is somehow wrong for Glenn Beck to tell you about this, because his advertisers happen to share the same opinion:
“On numerous occasions, Glenn Beck has dedicated entire segments of his program to explaining why the U.S. money supply is destined for hyperinflation with Barack Obama as president. He will often promote the purchase of gold as the only safe investment alternative for consumers who want to safeguard their livelihoods. When the show cuts to commercial break, viewers are treated to an advertisement from Goldline . . .”
If you’re a Beck fan, you know that the guy who is trying to make this into a “scandal” is Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Ouchenozzle), and that Beck has responded by launching a new Web site, WeinerFacts.com.
While you’re reading this blog, by the way, be sure to enjoy a cold refreshing Corona ExtraTM beer.
As my blogger friends know, I don’t actually drink beer, but I always make a point of having a delicious Corona beer in my hand when I’m photographed at a party, because I’m trying to get a product-placement deal with the Mexican beer cartel.
So far, I have not been able to persuade the manufacturers of Corona that making me their officially sponsored right-wing blogger would be good for business, and Anheuser-Busch also nixed my pitch, which is why I stopped drinking pretending to drink Budweiser.
Some readers may be asking themselves, “Is it legal for Stacy to pimp himself out to advertisers so shamelessly? Couldn’t he be arrested for that?”
Not to worry, dear readers. I have consulted the nation’s finest legal mind, Professor Glenn Reynolds, who informs me that I am perfectly within my rights.
If you want to attend a fine law school, the University of Tennessee has an excellent faculty. While visiting beautiful East Tennessee, be sure to stop by Granny’s Fireworks at 1948 Bristol Highway in Watauga, where you’ll find the finest products at the lowest prices. And if you want me to shut up with these shameless product pitches, just hit the tip jar.
Silence is golden, IYKWIMAITYD.
UPDATE: Oh, look: “Financial reform” just cleared the cloture hurdle in the Senate! Doesn’t that inspire you to invest more money in Wall Street?
Of course not. Buy more gold immediately. And hit the tip jar, because this kind of excellent (but entirely unofficial) financial advice has got to be worth something.
UPDATE II: Doug Powers:
I have a strange feeling that my 401K is about to sink so low tomorrow that it may well put the final plug on the Gulf oil leak.
Anybody want to suggest an over/under on how many points the DJIA loses Friday? It hasn’t closed under 10,000 since February 8, so the prospect of 100 days of gains being wiped out . . . Hey, how’s that Hope and Change workin’ out for ya?
And thank you, Scott Brown — you’re on your way to becoming the Arlen Specter of Massachusetts.
Hey, Howard Kurtz: Any Anonymous Fox News Employees Dissing Geraldo Rivera?
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post had a column yesterday in which he allowed anonymous Fox News employees to portray Glenn Beck as a liability to the network who “undermines their credibility.” To which I responded at the Hot Air Green Room:
OK, so Beck can be wrong and when he’s wrong, it looks bad for Fox News. On the other hand . . . Geraldo Rivera.
Why am I suspicious that Geraldo is among those “Fox journalists” most worried about Beck’s impact on their “credibility”?
You can read the rest of that. After I posted it, I got an e-mail from a reader:
I just read your article, Success, Envy and Glenn Beck and found the Geraldo digs extremely amusing. . . .
I met Geraldo when I was sixteen (am now 39). He was the featured speaker at our local MADD conference, and I was a SADD delegate from my highschool. Nancy Reagan was supposed to be the featured speaker, but alas, cancer surgery, so we were stuck with Geraldo. He walked into the Cajun Dome (Lafayette, LA) with escorted by State Troopers. Into a MADD conference. Because, y’know…those crazed anti-drunk driving mothers… He then proceeded to talk. And talk. And talk. Mostly about himself. It started to all sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher after a while, but I am fairly certain he talked about his past drug and alcohol use. I know he lectured the attending students about staying clean, which highly ticked us off. I mean, hey, we were the SADD delegates. Idiot. So, I got to meet him in person, and he came across as a total ass. But I got my picture in the paper with him, so not the total loss.
My opinion of him has not changed. When he comes on television, I switch channels. If you ever meet him, please tell him I remember meeting him, and that I watch Glenn Beck.Sincerely,
Susan
Thanks, Susan.