I would desperately like to stop writing about Glenn Greenwald. Like Glenn Beck, he’s someone I understood a long time ago and mostly wish to ignore. Thus I make seldom mention of Beck since his dismissal, and hope to do the same when Greenwald burns his last bridge. And he might be doing just that, having made a rape joke on Twitter.

He’s getting disapproval by mainstream voices now. Some of them already know about Greenwald, but do not speak of him. They are journalists and activists who used to subscribe to any the email lists he has destroyed with his divisive tantrums over the years. As I say, I have understood Greenwald for a long, long time.

Greenwald is fond of saying that his critics “blindly worship” the president; he calls us “cultists.” In fact, Greenwald behaves like a cult leader, and his sycophants (see the link above) immediately rationalize his rape jokes. The fixation on President Obama is theirs, not mine or anyone else’s. The NDAA fallout that started this episode is a perfect illustration of that.

Remember, the legislative sections at issue are the will of Congress, not the president. If there is a civil liberties issue, it is with the eighty seven Senators who voted for NDAA. In my world, the Constitution provides for three branches of government, and one of those branches (Congress) is putting language about indefinite detention into a routine defense spending bill that has been passed forty-eight years in a row. In Greenwald’s world, the President hates freedom and Congress doesn’t write law.

Like Glenn Beck, Glenn Greenwald (Greenbeck?) fails on basic civics. His polemics are performance art. His facts are out of context and his narrative arc never changes. It is little wonder he keeps doubling-down on the Ron Paul love: the most conservative congressman since 1937 is also the highest-profile figure in paranoid politics. Like talk radio cretin Alex Jones, who co-sponsors the Paul candidacy with him, Greenwald could title his fictions The Obama Deception.

[Beck] was serious when he said, “Here is the truth (about the) Israeli -Palestinian conflict — at the ruling class, (the conflict) is about the destruction of Israel and about the end of the Western way of life, period.”

[...]

Sounding at times like an evangelist, Beck proclaimed, “The times that we live in — I am wildly clear … that God’s hand is at work.” Evil must be confronted, he urged, and “God will do the rest.”

This is actually worse and scarier than his 5 o’clock show. Beck wants his apocalypse so bad he will try to start it by himself — no more hiding in the doom bunker! When he holds a rally that seems “more religious than political,” remember that in the minds of his culture warrior audience there is no difference between the religious and the political, and that to them the end of the world is not only near but dear.

But wait…like Ginsu knives, there’s more!

I had to go look, so that you didn’t have to. Look at all the exciting benefits of subscribing to Glenn Beck’s career! Look, now he’s going to be doing the worst television show ever on the internet, and for twice as long each day!

I’m with Angelo Carusone (@StopBeck). The top one here is what worries me most, as it has the most capacity for actual harm:

Last but not least, I’m making a prediction that Beck will appear on his new program dressed as Mister Rogers and reenact his historical revisionism with puppets. Tell me I’m wrong.

All this can be mine for $4.95 a month. Whee!

During the March 18 airing of his television program, for example, Beck ran a portion of video created by a Chicago-based blogger who calls himself Rebel Pundit. The blogger, who does not publicly reveal his name, says he was initially pleased to see Beck running his video, which featured left-wing protesters demanding amnesty for illegal immigrants. He was soon shocked, however, to see that Beck’s staff had obscured the watermark logo of his website, RebelPundit.com, from the tape.

“I put my website name on there for a reason – to bring people from the movement to my website so they can see the other stuff that I’ve done,” the man behind Rebel Pundit told TheDC. “You’ve got pretty much the biggest guy in the movement take your stuff and actually have his editors spend the time to scrub my name off of it.”

Remember that time Beck tried to make a Kansas City Junior High School step-dance troupe into an Obama goon army? Yeah, that YouTube’r didn’t get credited, either — which is no surprise, since Beck’s staff apparently failed to look at the notes on the post that gave the school’s location: “what is this?” Beck intoned with mysterious malice. “We’ve been trying to figure this out for weeks, but they’ve sealed it up as tight as a drum.”

Andrew Brietbart, whose name should be the watchword for nasty fabrications, is also quoted in the Daily Caller piece. Given the way he launched himself to fame by lying his ass off about ACORN on Beck’s show, the irony may rip a small hole in the space-time continuum. While I’m amused as hell to see Beck take fire for this behavior, it’s sort of like having photoshop artists gripe about Weekly World News stealing their pictures of Batboy.

This post ran September 3rd, 2009 and was my only experience with being on the front page.

Remember Glenn Beck’s mysteeerious video of Obama’s Secret Negro Army?™ It’s pretty much the foundation of his entire conspiracy theory on the impending takeover of the country by armed Obama thugs, and serves today as the linchpin of the “Obama indoctrination” nontroversy. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about 1:10 into this clip:

“Stop, stop, stop!” Glenn Beck cries — as the Secret Negro Army™ declares its intentions to become doctors and lawyers. (Shudder!)

Beck acts like it’s a mystery who these “dangerous” black children are. “They’ve sealed this as tight as a drum,” he says with his characteristic nervous urgency. The subtext is clear: be afraid! Be very afraid of this mysterious video!

Well, mystery solved. Thanks to one of my commenters at Osborne Ink, Obama’s Secret Negro Army™ has been positively identified…as high school step dancers. You know, like these guys:

Dated October 9th, 2008, here’s a YouTube description from Christiv3:

A typical step show on college campuses throughout the country. The young kids from the “Obama Junior Fraternity” are emulating a historically black fraternity that is found on college campuses throughout the nation. Their teacher was probably a member.

Young men in this fraternity DO go on to become teachers, doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers. Not a bad way to achieve these goals..

These kids want to go to college so they can be like the men in this video who are in college and are pursueing their dreams.

Other members of this fraternity include Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson, Langston Hughes, Count Basie and Michael Jordan.

Cosby, Basie, and Jordan? Commies, all of ‘em.

The kids in Beck’s video are students at the Urban Community Leadership Academy in Kansas City, Missouri. How did I learn this? Why, from going to the original “Negro army” YouTube video post, which bears this ominous note from “Homonoid” including the school address, which I’ve partially redacted:

Imagine what these kids and other militant zealots like them will do if Obama isn’t elected?

This is where it was shot:

URBAN COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP ACADEMY

XXXX XXXXX XXXX

XXXX X XXXX District, Kansas City, MO

This Black Panther racist style of indoctrination really reflects the psychology of most of his supporters on a larger scale.

Get that? If you’re an Obama supporter, it’s only ’cause you’ve been hypnotized by racist step dancing. It has nothing to do with the fact you agree with him on, say, the public option. And woe for everyone if Obama hadn’t been elected, because we’d all be under attack by angry step-dancing children with shattered dreams of middle-class employment.

Over at an anti-Obama website, “Meg” claims to have interviewed Joyce McGautha, Director of the Urban Community Leadership Academy. (We can only imagine what that was like for poor Ms. McGautha.) Noting the teacher who made the video was suspended for releasing it to the public, Meg proclaims:

This teacher needs to be fired, the school needs to be investigated to ensure that no other videos were produced as well as ensuring that no other teachers or administrators were involved or condoned this video. A further concern is if grades were given for this “assignment”, those need to be corrected. Additionally there needs to be oversight into the operations and curriculum being taught at this school to ensure this type of abuse of the students does no happen again. (sic)

Mind you, the election was still in progress when this video first showed up on Beck’s program. The argument Beck and Meg made then was that teachers shouldn’t use the impending election of the nation’s first black president to, y’know, encourage black children to succeed in school. They’re making the same argument now that Obama is president.

This really disturbs me. As a child, I was raised to have respect for presidents. As a parent, I enforced respect for the office on my own child even in the worst years of the Bush administration.

But now that a black man holds the office, tinfoil-hat lunatics say children should not learn to respect presidents, nor should presidents encourage them to succeed. It’s an incredible hypocrisy.

About the military garb: it’s not at all unusual in step dance. Christiv3 adds this note:

They typically wear camo pants, purple shirts and gold boots to do their step routines. The camo pants are practical for the athletic movements, are inexpensive and can be found anywhere in army surplus stores. (Emphasis mine)

Christiv3 isn’t lying. Camouflage pants are, in fact, incredibly common in step dance:

Actually, a Google Video search turned up approximately 168,000 step dance videos. Right away, I found three with camo pants:

My, they look so very militant, these Nazi Negroes!

But wait! Beck’s video was made during a rehearsal. Maybe there’s still some mystery here? Anyone still not convinced had better enjoy step dance practice videos, because there are at least 567 of them on YouTube alone.

How could Beck be unaware of all this? He’s got a multi-million dollar contract and a horde of investigative journalists at the Fox News Channel, and he can’t get this basic information in two weeks? Please. It took me five minutes and cost nothing, and I’ve never watched step dance before in my life.

Obama’s Secret Negro Army™ is a fabrication, and so is the outrage. Putting Farrakhan in between two Black Panthers at a polling station and a student step dance video is pure, unadulterated racist fearmongering. Glenn Beck is a racist, and a disgustingly obvious one. That’s no mystery at all: to date, 57 sponsors have already figured it out.

UPDATE: Over at Osborne Ink, one of my commenters suggests the step-dance troupe in Beck’s video is The Marching Cobras:

The COBRAS have won over 280 first place awards and trophies in competition and their List of special performances reads like that of a professional group. They’ve starred in several television commercials and other media advertising campaigns, have been invited to perform Twice for the President of the United States, and have done a TV pilot show in Hollywood with all expenses paid for their efforts. But like most success stories, it hasn’t happened overnight. They started practicing in all kinds of weather in Willie Smith’s front yard and walked five miles to their first “public” performance. Adult volunteers attracted to the glamour of the popular group have come and gone, sometimes causing (as adults are so much more prone to do than children) more trouble than they were worth. Willie Smith has remained the heart and soul of the COBRAS throughout its 34 year history, building the organization with “blood, sweat, and tears” and every penny he could spare from the meager salary of a teacher. While the last few years have been kinder, only a man of true dedication whose chief concern was “his kids” could have stuck it out through so many lean years. He freely admits that he loves performing; being what he calls “out front”. And, he certainly enjoys the success of the COBRAS. He’s a “public figure” whose accomplishments are seen by many as an outstanding example of commitment to youth. Although personally the recipient of numerous public service awards, Willie gives the credit for all it to God.

Is this what we’re supposed to be afraid of?

Follow my blog at Osborne Ink

Follow me on Twitter

ADDING: Today is the 44th day of the 112th Congress. There are 689 days remaining. The score so far: zero jobs created, 800,000 jobs threatened, and 12 abortion bills pending.

They couldn’t get enough communists to come in so they liquidated the communists. Now that’s the history.

No, Glenn Beck. It’s not “the” history, it’s YOUR history.

The actual, real, not-imaginary Hitler on the invasion of the Soviet Union: “A Communist is no comrade before or after this battle. This is a war of annihilation.” Mein Kampf, published in 1925:

In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in various circles, some of which are now members of the National Socialist Movement, that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.

The three laws of paranoia: (1) THEY are out to enslave us (2) THEY have all the power (3) THEY are all in it together. It all comes together in this classic clip, which ties Islam and ACORN and the usual suspects together in one big ball of Teh Crazy™.

I get it now. Rush Limbaugh’s shtick is torturing language; yours is torturing history. It’s time for another short story.

They view the Constitution as a living, breathing document that evolves.

Well, okay… sounds like an interesting idea, but is that what our founding fathers had in mind?

Dunno, Glenn. They included an amendment process, and in fact the description of that process takes some paragraphs. Plus they framed a Congress to make laws and an executive to enforce regulations. The Constitution is a complex document that even argues with itself, and sets up that arguement in its three branches. It is a national conversation. We change it all the time. You know. So that there can be progress. What the Hades is wrong with progress, Glenn?

The 16th and 17th Amendments were reckoned progress, chiefly by ensuring oligarchy did not turn the American experiment into a nightmare. The income tax was not even all that progressive at first, but it eventually made the society of America’s “greatest generation” possible. During the Second World War, it was actually patriotic to pay your taxes. I realize this does not register with Beck’s dissonant “history,” but taxes are how American society orders itself; it’s called civilization. Civilizations decline without progress. It’s right there in the phrase “general welfare.”

Ever since the liberal state’s last great Republican (Eisenhower), the right has steadily built rebuilt oligarchy within American government and media. It has become more highly-organized than ever. Beck misspells the word not to attack it but to defend it. In this case, the pipe-dream of oligarchy is to seize control of the upper chamber in Congress again and take “We The People” back out of the upper chamber. See what I meant by undoing the progress of the past?

Progressives are why government does lots of things, like check my hamburger meat for e coli, or ensure my voting rights, or just let me sue the bastards who put poison in my water, or just make sure that health care plans remain affordable. Government is the only agency that can do a lot of these things, which is why oligarchy expends extraordinary sums of money on stopping progress. It is why the American Taliban would re-invent the wheel in some form that might have existed in the past, or might exist in the future, and in the meantime there need be no progress on fixing what went wrong ten minutes or two years ago. There is always a great ungoverning in his philosophy.

It is a great regression. In fact, I hereby coin the phrase “Great Regression” to describe these latter years of conservative governance and their consequences. It is characterized by a pious selfishness. Despite his supposedly-religious-but-not-political Overton Window dressing, Beck has an innate dissonance representative of the new civic religion he’s built: public piety doesn’t jibe with libertardian extremism. That is, Beck’s right-to-life ends at birth, and in fact involves a deliberate starving and neglect of his fellow American on the presumption that they are somehow less American or less deserving of being American.

I call that un-American.

Jesus doesn’t get free health care in Glenn Beck’s manger. One imagines Glenn Beck hovering over the creche, telling the midwife: you owe them nothing. Sniffing of “private charity,” he continues: after all, government poverty programs are abused, and an entitlement culture is making you weak. Unless they co-pay in specie, never mind them.

Good thing a black man brought Mary and Joseph some gold. Have a happy holiday.

Mississippi has nowhere to go but up. And if we pull Barbour’s finger, he can maybe show us how much he cares about civil rights for Mississippians.

A #1stAL hashtag follower tweeted me this Matt Yglesias find at TIME about Ross Barnett, segregationist elected governor of Mississippi in 1959. The words have a sinister echo:

“Remember Hungary. Remember Little Rock. Remember the occupation of Poplarville by J. P. Coleman and the FBI . . . If Gartin is elected, the next occupation forces may be the N.A.A.C.P. and specially trained goon squads from the Justice Department.”

One of Barnett’s first acts as Governor will be a conference with his particular hero, Arkansas’ Governor Orval Faubus and like-minded Southern segregationists. “I am going to put forth every effort,” he promised, “to organize Southern Governors to create and crystallize public opinion throughout the nation with reference to our traditions and Southern way of life.” Crowed State Democratic Chairman Bidwell Adam after the election: “I want to say I’m thankful to God that Ross Barnett has saved Mississippi.”

Glenn Beck’s Mormon apologetics fused to tinfoil-hat doom-bunkery helped bring the return of Skousen’s paranoid politics. Enraged that Eisenhower had enforced federal laws to protect African Americans and their rights, the apologists of the lost cause have never forgiven the general. Joining with the producerists and precious fluiders, the fringe elements of conservative politics that Buckley threw into the outer darkness back in the sixties have come back with the tea tide.

Ideas like torture also made a comeback. In the age of conservatism ascendant and eternal war, this was probably inevitable; the movement is devoted to a great marching-backwards in social rights. The right to life ends at birth.

In the 1950s, the enemy was a commie with fluoride; today, the enemy wears a turban. So much more does that era echo in the Obama years: he is as close to Eisenhower as any Democrat could be. Indeed, his election platform was very much like the general’s. It should be no surprise that all of that nastiness has returned with this president, as he’s a perfect storm for the reactionary and paranoid right.

Beck, for instance, has never explained his remark about “white culture.” We might take a clue from the White Citizens Council, the Council of Conservative Citizens (get it? CCC=KKK), the prevalence of Bircher cells in the south, triumphal tea party support in David Duke videos, and  the pages of Southern Partisan. When you attend a tea party and see copies of 5000-Year Leap available alongside Sarah Palin buttons, it is time to admit the truth: race colors this tea; it is not the only flavor, but the tea leaves all add up to culture war.

What the bloviators of the right offer is excuse for bigotry. In a black/white, Manichean universe it is us against them. They (the other) are beneath rights, beneath contempt. It is certainly not a Christian idea, but it demands to be recognized as a great American fight for freedom: Mark Williams (since thrown under the Tea Party Express bus for racist asshatery) insisted strenuously that there was no racism in the tea party, and furthermore that the tea party itself was a human rights movement.

I heard that baton picked up during Beck’s rally on the Mall — which was “more religious than political” only if you think there’s a difference in the mind of his audience. Engage the tea party for five minutes; offer them $10 if they can talk that length of time without mentioning birth certificates or immigrants. They can’t do it. In reality, what they are dying to do is follow Dr. Laura’s example and just use the n-word, because sooner or later during that conversation you will find out that poor, criminal minorities caused the 2008 financial crash. Guaranteed.

When Beck and Williams chain themselves to a tree in blinding snow, then I will believe they are serious about their ‘human right’ to be jackasses. Until then, they are just useful clowns for the strange marriage of Christian-dominionist and Darwinian-producerist politics. Nor is Tea Party Express off the hook with Lloyd Marcus, a Steele wind-up toy, providing that strange Showboat-on-a-bus with a blackface performance.

I first heard about the Tea Party Express from the lips of Judson Phillips, who announced it at the Nashville convention as Sarah Palin left the stage. Palin, mind you, reads John Birch Society tracts. She is tied to the separatist militia movement that nearly put Joe Miller in the Senate. Phillips had just finished interviewing her in televangelist format when he spoke of Searchlight, Nevada, where Andrew Breitbart — the professional faker behind the ACORN smear, the Shirley Sherrod libel, etc — helped launch the Tea Party Express later that summer.

Phillips, who formed the convention as a for-profit corporation and has failed to hold a second event, echoed Beck’s statements about “social justice” yesterday:

They want amnesty, they want “economic justice”, they opposed “global climate change” (earth to the Methodists, man isn’t doing it), fighting global poverty (here is another hint, most poverty is caused by a lack of freedom and lack of a free enterprise system). Not shockingly, the Methodists side with the Islamists against Israel, and of course oppose America in Iraq.

Methodists are actually Muslims. See how that works? This argument for eternal war from a movement ostensibly inspired by a prince of peace who — get this — had the very un-tea party idea that you should love your enemies. Methodism began as a reaction to socialism, and not an encouraging one.

Methodism was followed by the Salvation Army, which saw social justice as its primary role. When I stayed at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in DC last week, it was because that church sees  peace as a social justice issue. All of them — Methodist, Salvation Army, and St. Stephen’s — see their work as the work of Christ. Their behavior resembles the work of the Christian savior far better than Phillips’ flummery.

We have satellite pictures of the polar caps shrinking. Poverty, we learn from this new righteousness, is not a policy at all but an accident of the free market; pull its invisible finger and it will maybe fart you some prosperity. It in fact resonates with prosperity gospel, doesn’t it? And explains how a third of working Americans are in poverty. But hey, as long as we’re not “socialist.”

Look out, Christians, the right wing media has inserted Atlas Shrugged into the Bible. A science fiction novel by an atheist abortion advocate is your new revelation. That rabbi-Indian chief tableau at Beck’s WhiteStock? Totally LDS symbolism. Once forced to be born, a child must be starved and denied health care until it learns to trust Jesus and the invisible hand.

Of course, Yglesias was responding to Haley Barbour, the current governor of Mississippi, who defended the White Citizens Councils:

Mr. Barbour, a teenager and young adult during the 1960s, said that in his town, they were a positive force, praising them as “an organization of town leaders” who refused to tolerate the racist attitudes of the Ku Klux Klan.

“In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan” would be “run out of town,” Mr. Barbour said. “If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

The Klan suffered from its own excesses, to be sure, but look at the fruits of those councils.  The Klan was expunged the way corporations change names. From the ADL, a brief on the CCC:

Founded: 1985
Headquarters: St. Louis
Leader: Gordon Lee Baum
Publication: The Citizens Informer (circulation of 20,000)
Background: Established by former activists in the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils
Ideology: White supremacy, white separatism
Outreach: Mass mailings, prison newsletter
Approach: Advances its ideology by inflaming fears and resentments, among Southern whites particularly, with regard to black-on-white crime, non-white immigration, attacks on the public display of the Confederate flag, and other issues related to “traditional” Southern culture.
Connections: Several mainstream figures have spoken at or attended CCC meetings, including Senator Trent Lott; Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour; Mississippi state senators Gary Jackson and Dean Kirby; and several Mississippi state representatives. Former governors Guy Hunt of Alabama and Kirk Fordice of Mississippi also spoke at CCC meetings.
Extremist associations: David Duke, Mark Cotterill, Chris Temple, Jared Taylor, Paul Fromm

[...]

When the N.A.A.C.P. urged African Americans in particular not to vacation in South Carolina until the Confederate flag was removed from the Statehouse, the CCC encouraged its constituents to take advantage of the absence of African American tourists; it posted a flier pronouncing that “now that the African Americans are boycotting South Carolina over the Confederate Flag, Whites can enjoy a civil liberty that has been denied to them for many years at hotels, restaurants and beaches: the freedom to associate with just one’s own people.” (Emphasis second clip mine)

This nastiness has changed its face before. It’s lurking in your tea right now. But as long as they can keep not saying the n-word, they are not racist, and they’re not about race except they’re a human rights movement (!) to preserve the rights of bigots (!). See how that works? Plus, they’re God-inspired, so they have permission to make stuff up — i.e., lie — with impunity.

The modern conservative Christian movement is neither conservative nor Christian, but it keeps on moving by moral inertia. Decrying Obama’s invocation of Ronald Reagan, Krugman says of stimulus:

None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist. But it helped empower bad ideas, in ways that can do quite immediate harm. Right now Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy — but Republicans are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects from the deal. And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.

I have two reactions to that statement: one, invoking Reagan on “restoring American dynamism”  is a way to invoke Reagan when pushing START. My other reaction is that zombie ideas found  support from eighty-three senators last week; they have power over our imagination. Death panels are a zombie idea. Schoolchild indoctrination is a zombie idea. Socialism hiding inside the progressive agenda is not a new charge. The emails telling me to call my senator and stop START  before it leaves America defenseless are not a new thing.

These falsehoods are part of the ancient story: “they” want to spread your wealth, mandate gay married health care and abortions for all, and destroy the God of prayer warriors, prayer shields, and intelligent design. No mere fact or empirical reality can overcome their absolute insistence that rational, scientific empiricism is wrong, that Keynes and the basic facts of economics are wrong, that the physics of carbon dioxide are wrong. Torture is not torture, but hazing. It all runs together in an inside-out Christ.

After all: torture worked out so well with Christianity, did it not?  Pilate gained no actionable intelligence by torturing Christ to death; the lions of the Colosseum did not protect Rome from terror; martyrs became saints. These are the wages of torture. Beck and Limbaugh and Hannity have been torturing the English language for decades to lend their selfish doctrine a veneer of respectability. The tea party offers nothing new but flavor; their snake oil is an old brew.

There’s no need to wonder at the odd dissonance of the irreligious, libertarian, Darwinian tea party born in the Ron Paulite movement. Paul, like his son, is professedly against abortion, but also against feeding or caring for the born on his dime. John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that conservative philosophy was a continuing search for a moral excuse for selfishness; well, that Cthuluesque creation is here, wrapped in Sinclair’s cross-and-flag. The Mighty Wurlitzer removes actual, real, not imaginary doom ahead (anthropogenic global warming, deregulation) to substitute an imaginary doom of its own invention.

The right works hard to bring apocalypse closer, and will install idiocracy to have it. Conservatism is the doom it would describe. It is serious about its culture war; it even warns us in advance. Take them at their word, I say, for they come to ungovern, yea even unto our Constitutional Amendments.

As I watched progressives throw their bodies into the gears of the state in an ever-shrinking zone of freedom this fall — 114 arrested at Appalachia Rising, the jailhouse solidarity of SOA Watch, and the 135 arrested protesting war last week in DC — I am increasingly convinced this is the only way forward. The tea party and the ugly noise machine must be confronted directly. Nonviolence and civil resistance are the keys to meeting the head-stompers and shaming the shameless. This ugly new religion must be challenged, its manipulations laid bare.

Otherwise, we are all in trouble.

SOROS: Look, I think — I think you put your finger on a very important flaw in the current world order, and that is that only Americans have a vote in Congress. And yet, it is the United States that basically determines policy for the world. That is a flaw in the current setup. I don’t think you can correct it by giving the Chinese government a vote in Congress. But it is a flaw, and I think this is where American leadership is needed, to take into account and respect the interests of others as well, in order to retain the dominant position we currently enjoy.

The first part? That’s what Beck used as “evidence” Soros wants to install Teh Global Socialist Gummint. The second part? Left out. He’s done that sort of selective editing before, but now he’s reaching Breitbart-Sherrod levels of dishonesty. FOX will not balance him; there will be no correction. It is up to the rest of media to provide a corrective.