The Hollywood Liberal

The Dilemma of a Fox News Blonde

Cooler Than Thou: Will Hipsters Ruin Christianity?
Where’s the proper balance between hip and devout? Between the "natural" and the "marketed?"

Where's the proper balance between hip and devout? Between the "natural" and the "marketed?"

Inside Top Secret America
A major investigation reveals the extent of America’s vast and heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment.

A major investigation reveals the extent of America's vast and heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment.

Hightower: Wall Street Bankers Pull Off Another Regulatory Heist
The financial giants hired away nearly 150 regulators, luring them with fat salaries to switch sides and become industry lobbyists.

The financial giants hired away nearly 150 regulators, luring them with fat salaries to switch sides and become industry lobbyists.

The Bloated Pentagon
Here are four slides that are part of a much larger presentation prepared by the Defense Business Board, an advisory council to the Secretary of Defense that was created in 2001. It is not classified and was sent to me…


United States Secretary of Defense - United States - Military - Government - Defense Department

Become a Deficit Hawk: You Can Be Offensive, Sexist, and Ignorant
Most people try to be respectful of those around them. They also try to be informed and intelligent about the world. This requires some effort, but most of us consider the rewards to be worth the effort. Of course some…



Social Security - United States - Alan Simpson - Politics - Ashley Carson

NJ Education Commissioner Asked To Be Fired So He Could Receive Unemployment Benefits

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) today fired the state’s Education Commissioner Bret Schundler, after the state lost a $400 million Race To The Top grant due to an error made in the application process. Now, the New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that Schundler specifically asked to be fired, instead of voluntarily resigning, so that he would be able to receive unemployment benefits:

Ousted state Education Commissioner Bret Schundler today said he asked Gov. Chris Christie to be fired from the work he considered his “life’s dream,” rather than resign, so he could receive unemployment benefits to pay his bills. “I asked if they would mind writing a termination letter, instead of a resignation letter, because I do have a mortgage to pay, and I do have a daughter who’s just started college,” he said in an interview this morning. “And I, frankly, will need the unemployment insurance benefits until I find another job. … And they said fine. They said sure.” […]

Schundler’s financial disclosure form, released Thursday by the State Ethics Commission, show he and his wife had less than $5,000 in the bank.

Schundler’s case is particularly important because the Republican Party and conservative movement he belongs to have recently made the unemployed a frequent political punching bag. For months the party has fought every vote to extend unemployment benefits, despite double-digit unemployment rates across the country.

And to add insult to injury, major Republicans have derided the character of the recipients of unemployment benefits. NY GOP gubernatorial primary candidate Carl Paladino has suggested sending people receiving unemployment benefits to prison dorms, Nixon administration official and conservative pundit Ben Stein has complained that the unemployed are “unpleasant people…who do not know how to do a day’s work,” Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN) suggested the jobless are “sitting back and waiting” instead of looking for work, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has claimed “welfare” is making the persistently unemployed lazy.

REPORT: Glenn Beck?s Philosophy Is Opposed To Everything Martin Luther King, Jr. Stood For

Tomorrow, Fox News host and self-professed “rodeo clown” Glenn Beck will hold his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, D.C. Beck initially insisted that the rally has no political significance — despite it being located at the Lincoln Memorial and taking place on the 47th anniversary of the “I Have A Dream” speech. He has increasingly claimed to be taking up the mantle of the civil rights movement. Earlier in the week, Beck boasted that the rally will “reclaim the civil rights movement” and called the current civil rights community an “abomination.”

While Beck is practically fashioning himself after revered civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and trying to take up the mantle of the civil rights movement, he is ultimately unfit to command such a legacy. The Fox News host’s views and actions are diametrically opposed to everything the late social justice leader fought for:

KING believed that it was America’s collective responsibility to provide economic justice for all. In 1961, the civil rights leader addressed the AFL-CIO on his vision of the American Dream. King said that his vision of America’s promise was a country where “equality of opportunity, of privilege and property [are] widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.” King helped launch a Poor People’s Campaign based around demanding that “President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, health care and decent homes.” The civil rights legend explained that poverty was a problem that couldn’t be solved without a “the nation spending billions of dollars — and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.” He spent the last days of his life campaigning on behalf of a living wage for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

BECK, on the other hand, has repeatedly insulted any government attempt to help the poor. The host has offensively claimed that “Big government never lifts anybody out of poverty. It creates slaves, people who are dependent on the scraps from the government, the handouts.” The pundit has declared that President Obama “really is a Marxist” because he “believes in the redistribution of wealth.” He argued in his book An Inconvenient Book that the reason the poor are poor and can’t be helped by the government is simply because they are “lazy.” Discussing the topic of rebuilding Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, Beck said we “shouldn’t spend a single dime” and that the residents should just “move out.” Discussing the topic of jobless Americans unable to find work receiving unemployment benefits, Beck said he would be “ashamed” to call some of them Americans.

KING championed using his faith to achieve social justice. King called himself an “advocator of the social gospel,” and saw Jesus’s teachings as commanding him to take part in progressive activism to achieve “social justice.” In a 1963 speech Western Michigan University, he said that he saw an “age of social justice” as the goal of his movement. When he spoke out against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967, he quoted the first epistle of Saint John to demand an end to the fighting: “Let us love one another, for love is God.”

BECK has derided social justice and attacked Christians who want to use their faith to achieve it. The Fox News host told his audience that when they hear the words “social justice” they should “run, and don’t listen to anyone who is telling you differently.” He also accused progressives of trying to “hijack churches” with a message of social justice. He even ignorantly claimed that civil rights demonstrators “weren’t crying out for social justice.”

KING believed in loving those who disagreed with him and engaging in thoughtful dialogue. One of the hallmarks of King’s philosophy and what separated him from many other African American leaders was his advocacy for maintaining thoughtful and respectful dialogue with those who disagreed with his goals. In 1957, the civil rights leader gave a sermon titled, “Loving Your Enemies.” King said that a man must “discover the element of good in his enemy, and everytime you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points.” He practiced nonviolence and even asked civil rights demonstrators to not fight back when attacked by white racists. He demanded of his fellow demonstrators a “refusal to hate.”

BECK, on the other hand, has repeatedly attacked his political opponents with vicious and hateful language. He has compared president Obama to the Antichrist and said that it was “approaching treason” to elect a more progressive Congress. He has said he hates the 9/11 victims’ families and derided supporters of cap-and-trade as “greedy,” “wicked,” and “treasonous.” When interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the nation’s first elected Muslim congressman, Beck told him, “[W]hat I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies’.” He also speculated that Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) wife must have been under the influence of a “date rape drug” to marry him.

It’s difficult to find two people whose philosophies are so distinctly different than Glenn Beck and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While King fought for all people to be able to live a decent life, championed a compassionate version of Christianity that sought to create a better world, and established dialogue with those who disagreed with him, Beck shows little compassion for those worse off, has derided the social gospel, and has viciously smeared and attacked his political opponents. As Media Matters writes, “Martin Luther King would have been on Glenn Beck’s chalkboard.”

(Big HT: Media Matters)

How to have a rally on the Mall
The permit issued for Glenn Beck’s rally Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial is one of about 3,000 issued annually by the National Park Service for rallies, cultural events, weddings and photo shoots on the Mall and other Washington area national parks and historic sites.



Martin Luther King - Sports - Rallying - Motorsports - Auto Racing

The journalist who revealed Ken Mehlman’s secret
Marc Ambinder, the political junkie who writes for the Atlantic, says he suspected, like lots of insiders, that Ken Mehlman was gay.


Ken Mehlman - Republican National Committee - George W. Bush - Same-sex marriage - Media

Same-sex marriage gains GOP support
A growing number of Republicans are breaking with the party’s traditional stance to publicly state their support for same-sex marriage, a shift strategists say stems as much from demographics as from the renewed focus on economics and the “tea party” movement.


Same-sex marriage - United States - Marriage - Politics - Gay Lesbian and Bisexual

44: Murkowski third-party bid compared to prostitution
Alaska mayor Joe Miller and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) are still locked in a tight primary fight. (Results on Wednesday showed Joe Miller holding a slim lead of about 1,900 votes, but a winner won’t be declared until election officials count as many as 10,000 absentee ballots.) In the meantim…



Lisa Murkowski - Politics - Joe Miller - United States - Libertarian

The New Wiki Warfare
Ralph Peters, New York Post
The recent WikiLeaks debacle, which will result in American, allied and Afghan deaths, drives home how inadequate our antique laws on war are in the new millennium.We live in a lawless age, when it comes to our security. A hypernarcissist such as WikiLeaks' Julian Assange puts thousands of lives at risk by e-publishing classified documents, and we have no legal answer.Every day, foreign powers and rogue players attack our nation's computer networks, attempting to steal secrets, plant sleeper programs or just create havoc. We have no practical legal framework for counterattacks….

The Parent Model
David Brooks, New York Times
During the first half of this year, German and American political leaders engaged in an epic debate. American leaders argued that the economic crisis was so bad, governments should borrow billions to stimulate growth. German leaders argued that a little short-term stimulus was sensible, but anything more was near-sighted. What was needed was not more debt, but measures to balance budgets and restore confidence.The debate got pointed. American economists accused German policy makers of risking a long depression. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, countered,…

Progressives Against Progress
Fred Siegel, City Journal
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives,…

Not Ready for Conversation on Race
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chicago Tribune
Virginia Sen. Jim Webb recently wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” that really brought home the foolishness of pining for a “conversation on race.” The headline itself was a device meant to drive conservatives to cheering, liberals to howling, and the whole of them to page-clicking and reading. Webb's piece was about affirmative action, and his argument was much more nuanced than the headline — sympathetic to the argument for historical redress for African-Americans, unsympathetic to hazy appeals to…

But They’re Not Racists, Really!
The conservative Republican proponents of the corporate-bigot alliance known as “the Southern Strategy” are mounting one last frenzied Battle-of-the-Bulge effort to push the Bigot Buttons one more time in order to gain what they think will be unbreakable electoral dominance. Here’s what happened in Minnesota when a local elite screwed up at button-pushing.

The conservative Republican proponents of the corporate-bigot alliance known as “the Southern Strategy” are mounting one last frenzied Battle-of-the-Bulge effort to push the Bigot Buttons one more time in order to gain what they think will be unbreakable electoral dominance. Be it whipping up anti-immigrant hatred to freaking out about brown people they claim are Muslims — who they apparently figure are the last group left that it’s OK to hate — they have been working overtime. But when their actions result in things that might hurt their game plan — like when the folks whose prejudices they’ve inflamed go running out to stab cab drivers — suddenly they start singing the “But We’re Not Racists, Really!” song. (Even though, as Gene Lyons points out, they have nothing to fear from the “respectable” journalistic community, which is too cowardly to call them out by name.)

They apparently think it’s a catchy little ditty. George Pataki hummed a few bars on Hardball, and Word Salad Pam essayed a full-throated rendition when the racists at the Ground Zero attacked a guy whose skin was darker than theirs. Kinda reminds you of how Rush Limbaugh and his fellow hate-radio talkers still bristle when they get some of the blame for inciting the right-wing terrorist bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, doesn’t it?

It’s not just wealthy conservatives on the East Coast saying these things. You can find members of the elites saying them in the heartland as well. For example:

Here’s a local guy, “The Admiral”, from the ritzy Minneapolis exurb of Mound, Minnesota, which is on (if not in) the western end of the complex set of lakes known collectively as “Lake Minnetonka” — hence the name of his blog, “Lake Minnetonka Liberty”. His work is favorably featured on the conservative “News Busters” website, despite (or because?), among other things, calling for the assassination of Barack Obama (“Somebody please! Do a Sirhan Sirhan on this pompous ass, willya?”). We’re talking about someone who, if he were a liberal (or anything other than an arch-conservative) calling for the assassination of, say, Chief Justice John Roberts, would likely have been shamed out of public life, if not actually arrested and charged with making terroristic threats or instigating people to acts of terror. (Hell, Shirley Sherrod and Helen Thomas lost their jobs for far less — in fact, Sherrod lost her job even as it was shown that the accusation leveled against her was bogus. But I digress.)

The Admiral’s variation on the “We’re Not Racists!” theme is to play the old game of projection and accuse others, especially lefties whose skins are darker than his, of (ta-dah!) racism. (Just like what Andrew Breitbart and his fellow conservative travelers did to Shirley Sherrod. But again, I digress.) Do a search on “lake minnetonka liberty” and “racist” in most any search engine and you’ll see what I mean; here’s a recent example. (By the way, what is with Minnesota right-wingers and the linguistic atrocity “bold faced liar”? Luke Hellier uses it too.)

The latest excrescence of The Admiral is laughable, in a pathetic sort of way. It comes when he, in the midst of a full-on rant defending the right of huge corporations to buy elections in general (and a governor’s seat for Tom Emmer in particular), decided to unload the following rant against SEIU Local 26 president Javier Morillo-Alicea:

That’s right, and what business is it of yours, Javier, how much money Target makes? It doesn’t concern you. And how they choose to spend it doesn’t concern you either. Javier Morillo-Alicea. Why don’t you put on your sombrero, hop on the burro and ride your ass back to Mexico where you belong? People like you are the problem, not the solution.

He then goes on to rave about Mark Dayton’s admitted battle with alcohol, while ignoring the controversy over Tom Emmer’s two DUIs and Emmer’s efforts in the state legislature to lower the penalties for drunk driving.

Just in case ol’ Addie tries to pull a fast one and do some editing, I’ve got the screen shot of that text saved for posterity:

Now remember, this isn’t some pig-ignorant guy with a fourth-grade education who literally doesn’t know any better. This is someone who is one of the elites, just like Alan Simpson and Max Baucus and Paul Ryan.

Oh, and for future reference, Addie: Mr. Morillo-Alicea is not of Mexican heritage, but Puerto Rican. He was born in Panama, the son of a Vietnam veteran, is a Fulbright Scholar, and got his undergraduate degree from Yale, which I suspect is more than Addie has ever done. But, just to make you happy, I’ve found a burro named Pepe, just for you, and put him at the top of this post, where he can express his opinion of your opinions. Enjoy!

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The Equal Rites Awards—Again
And so we rise to celebrate Aug. 26, the 90th anniversary of the day American women finally won the right to vote. By Ellen Goodman

And so we rise to celebrate Aug. 26, the 90th anniversary of the day American women finally won the right to vote.

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