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Glenn Beck leads religious nationalist rally

By Dan Brooks in glenn beck August 30, 2010 4 Comments

God, I wish I had Photoshop.

It’s possible you’ve heard about this, but Glenn Beck held his “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, drawing anywhere from 87,000 to 1,000,000 middle-class, white conservatives to reclaim the civil rights movement. That’s not fair; it was really to honor American troops and raise money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Except it was actually more of a religious revival. Exactly what Glenn Beck did on Saturday and how many people came to watch him and what the fudge the whole thing might mean is frankly unclear. Fortunately, we had a whole list of questions worked out beforehand.

Friday links! Sugaring the pill edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links August 27, 2010 0 Comment

As the chick who does it with Dracula in Dracula once said,* sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Today is Friday, and that’s good. The American economy collapsed like two years ago and now the only people with jobs are professional assholes arguing about whom to blame for said economy and each other, plus terrorism, and that’s bad. It’s a continuum, see, and we’re all just swept up in it, bobbing up and down like boats, albeit not both up and down simultaneously as would better fit my point. Maybe let’s go back to the pill metaphor. For this week’s link roundup, we have some important stuff that’s so horribly depressing I can barely stand to think about it. We also have Kanye and a fail video, by way of sugar. Won’t you have a swallow with me?

Can we please trade Kim Lehmans?

By Dan Brooks in lying August 26, 2010 4 Comments

Which of these ladies is more likely to tell you a made-up story?

I’m not saying that the Kim Lehman we’ve got—Republican National Committee member Kim Lehman, who recently tweeted “@politico you’re funny. They must pay you a lot to protect Obama. BTW he personally told the muslims that he IS a muslim. Read his lips”—is bad. We diaspora Iowans love to hear any mention of our mythical homeland not in the context of a 30 Rock punchline, as evidenced by our continued enjoyment of Steve King. It’s just that, in the course of trying to figure out who our Kim Lehman is, we found out about this other Kim Lehman—Kim Lehman the Beelady—who seems much nicer.

Narrative watch: “Uncertainty”

By Dan Brooks in Narrative Watch August 25, 2010 4 Comments

John Boehner, rapidly approaching skin-hair chromosyncretism.

Speaking to the City Club of Cleveland yesterday, Representative John Boehner (R–OH, net worth $4.1 million) said that President Obama had failed to revive the economy, that his entire economic team should resign, and that voters should elect Republicans in November. That much was unremarkable. The audacity of the second claim was kind of cool, but since it seems unlikely that Boehner’s policy recommendation will be implemented, I suspect he said it just to get a rise out of Joe Biden.* What was notable about Boehner’s speech was his repeated deployment of the phrase “uncertainty” to explain our continued recession. “Uncertainty,” in his formulation, is the hesitation of business owners to hire new employees or expand their operations because they’re worried about how health care, financial reform and other government regulations will be implemented. “America’s employers are afraid to invest in an economy stalled by stimulus spending and hamstrung by uncertainty,” Boehner said in one of nine uses of the word counted by Slate. “The prospect of higher taxes, stricter rules, and more regulations has employers sitting on their hands.”

Ground Zero Mosque dominates last week’s media coverage

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse August 24, 2010 2 Comments

You might be in the Tea Party if: you regard the entirety of lower Manhattan as a war memorial.

In a move of such metacritical complexity that it may threaten the space-time continuum, the New York Times reports that a Pew Research Center survey found that stories about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque constituted 45% of straight news on cable and radio. I personally look forward to the day when the Times is composed entirely of news reports on statistical surveys of the contents of the news, and Combat! blog can comment on them. Overall, the GZM story accounted for 15% of total newspaper, television and radio coverage, an entity that Pew amusingly refers to as the “newshole.”