Glenn Beck Begs Listeners Not to Throw Bombs
On his talk radio program today, Glenn Beck begged his listeners not to use guns or bombs to respond to the passage of health care reform in Congress. In a long diatribe in which he claimed that today's Democratic leaders were violent radical Marxists in the '60s, Beck said, "They need you to pick up a gun or a bomb. They need you to break the law. They need you to become them in the 1960s."
Beck claimed that the United States is "entering a very dangerous phase" by design of the Obama administration, which he said is intentionally provoking the public by passing health care and moving next to immigration reform.
"If you were in the 1960s and you were a radical and you believed in a Marxist revolution, you were crushed," he said. "And who crushed you? Well, the good God-fearing grandparents that we all had that were going to church. They stood up. ... Who crushed you? LBJ and Nixon. The Man."
Although President Obama, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and most other Cabinet members were too young to have been part of '60s counterculture or had absolutely no ties to the radical movement, Beck maintained that today's Democratic Party is led by '60s radicals who pursued the violent overthrow of the United States.
"If I were a radical in the '60s and I was sitting back and saying OK how did we lose? We lost because we weren't in power," he said. "You must have power. It's not enough to be out on the streets. You must be Richard Nixon. You must have radicals at the top. If I again am sitting there and I'm listening to that and I think, you know what really killed us here is that Americans don't like bomb throwers. They don't like hippies. ...
"If you're going to take over, if you're going to end it, if you want to have the true fundamental transformation of America, what you do is you have to reverse the roles. You have to put yourself in the role of LBJ the Man. And you need to put the Man, you need to put the good Christian people, in your role from the 1960s. The ones with the signs and the banners in the streets because you can manipulate them like crazy -- because you know what the Man did to you that pissed you off. You know what the Man was doing to you that made you say I gotta get a bomb. And you also know that doesn't work."
Comparing the American people to a child being disciplined by its parent, Beck said, "Why do you think they are needling and poking and prodding all the time? Why do you think they slap you down on health care and just when you're getting up they punch you in the face with immigration? Why do you think they're being so divisive? ... They gave us a spanking on health care and then they punched us in the face. They want you to say daddy doesn't love me. They need you to be estranged from them."
Beck's advice: "Do not play in to their game. They hold all of the cards. Do not do anything but get on your knees. As we turn to Him He will turn to us. This is His land. Let it play out His way. Do not pick up anything except your soul. They need you to become radical."
In a Gallup poll released yesterday after the House approved health reform, more Americans supported the health reform bill than opposed it by a margin of 49 percent to 40 percent.
Beck, however, fears that the passage of Democratic legislation by a Democratic president and Democratic Congress will lead to revolution. "I'm thinking ... if there's a revolution now, it ends the way the French Revolution did, which is Napoleon, a dictator, bloodshed -- awful, awful things."
Andrew Breitbart Lied to Pimp ACORN Story
Clark Hoyt, the ombudsman of the New York Times, has finally figured out that Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe lied to the media about the way O'Keefe was dressed during the ACORN sting videos last fall:
... O'Keefe almost certainly did not go into the Acorn offices in the outlandish costume -- fur coat, goggle-like sunglasses, walking stick and broad-brimmed hat -- in which he appeared at the beginning and end of most of his videos. It is easy to see why The Times and other news organizations got a different impression. ... The Times was wrong on this point, and I have been wrong in defending the paper's phrasing. Editors say they are considering a correction.
The Times reported several times that O'Keefe was wearing a ridiculous pimp costume during the visits to ACORN offices, an impression furthered by O'Keefe when he wore it during an appearance on Fox News.
As the story was first getting national attention, Breitbart wrote in his column for the Washington Times that O'Keefe was dressed that way:
When filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN -- the nation's foremost "community organizers" -- dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for - and getting -- help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice.
As Breitbart had to know at the time, since he had viewed all of the videos and was publishing them on his Big Government web site, O'Keefe was dressed conservatively in a button-down shirt while talking to ACORN workers. He only wore the pimp costume in footage shown of him getting out of a car, which was filmed separately and edited into the videos to mislead viewers.
Telling people O'Keefe wore that pimp getup helped give the story wider media attention and made ACORN workers look stunningly stupid for not seeing through the ruse.
Dig into any story pimped by Breitbart and you'll catch him spreading half-truths or brazenly false information. Though he employs the trappings of journalism, he engages in practices that no professional journalist could get away with at a reputable organization.
In May 2001, the Drudge Report ran a story that quoted Breitbart and chided the New York Times for not covering Sidney Blumenthal dropping his libel suit against Drudge:
"What the NEW YORK TIMES is doing with its sin of omission concerning the Drudge case is no doubt a form of libel of its own, corporate news slander of the highest degree," said Professor Emeritus Andrew Breitbart of the Cashmere Institute of Media Studies.
The Cashmere Institute of Media Studies does not exist. It's a phony organization named by Breitbart as an in-joke that would be spotted by his personal friends. Breitbart was editing the Drudge Report at the time, and he either quoted himself or Drudge quoted him.
When I was a newspaper reporter, I would have been fired if I pulled a stunt like that to inject my opinion into a story. But Drudge and Breitbart have the good fortune to work in online agenda-driven journalism, where no one is ever held accountable for being wrong. Breitbart lied back then, lied about the ACORN sting and will probably lie in furtherance of the next scoop he peddles to the mainstream media.
He can't be trusted.
I wonder how long it will take the Times and the rest of the major media to figure that out.
Related blog entries:
- Simon Owens interviews Brad Friedman, the liberal blogger who has doggedly pursued a correction from the Times
W3C Serves 130 Million XML DTDs Per Day
A Java application I wrote that reads several dozen RSS feeds started running into trouble with the W3C. Feeds failed with HTTP 503 "Service Unavailable" errors like this one:
Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd
At first I thought this was a temporary error. HTTP 503 errors are defined to indicate that a server is temporarily overloaded or undergoing maintenance.
However, the W3C Systems Team announced in February 2008 that they were dealing with so much traffic for their XML DTD files that they were using 503 errors to deal with bandwidth-hogging XML clients that request the files too often:
... we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. ...
A while ago we put a system in place to monitor our servers for abusive request patterns and send 503 Service Unavailable responses with custom text depending on the nature of the abuse. Our hope was that the authors of misbehaving software and the administrators of sites who deployed it would notice these errors and make the necessary fixes to the software responsible.
But many of these systems continue to re-request the same DTDs from our site thousands of times over, even after we have been serving them nothing but 503 errors for hours or days.
Although the problem went away for reasons I don't yet understand, I'm looking for a way to read local copies of the XML DTDs with the XOM Java XML library. XOM doesn't yet support XML Catalogs, an XML standard for handling this kind of issue.
Huffington Post Censors Jesse Ventura on 9/11
A March 9 commentary submitted to Huffington Post by former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura was removed after publication by the site, which replaced it with a note stating that contributors are banned from engaging in conspiracy theories:
Editor's Note: The Huffington Post's editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories -- including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.
"I can't believe the Huffington Post today will practice censorship. I've got news for them," Ventura responded to the action. "I won't ever write for em again."
I get tired of a lot of the conspiracy stuff posted by users on the Drudge Retort, which gets 2-4 posts a day from Infowars, Prison Planet and similar sites, but I've never banned it. I know it's difficult for Huffington Post to deal with fringe stuff -- the conservative group blog Red State kicked off birthers and truthers last month -- but the Post is doing a public disservice by allowing no discussion at all on a subject. Ventura is a former governor. When prominent people challenge the government, the idea that their views should be censored on the grounds they are a "conspiracy theory" is antithetical to open debate in a free society. Any far-out idea could be dismissed as conspiracist. Would the Post have censored Jim Garrison from writing about the Kennedy assassination? The site is running Jenny McCarthy's dangerous autism vaccine quackery, a view widely discredited by medical experts.
To combat the censorship, I republished Ventura's censored 9/11 commentary yesterday and gave it major news banana treatment on the Retort:
You didn't see anything about it in the mainstream media, but at a recent conference in San Francisco, more than 1,000 architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9-11.
That's right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy -- because they don't buy the government's version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the twin towers and WTC Building 7.
His views aren't faring too well in the Retort discussion. But they deserve to be heard.
Boston Herald: Alabama Shooter Played D&D
A story I missed last month: After University of Alabama-Huntsville professor Amy Bishop was arrested for shooting up her faculty department, Boston Herald reporter Laurel J. Sweet blew the lid off a shocking angle of the crime: Bishop was an avid player of role-playing games.
Accused campus killer Amy Bishop was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons -- just like Michael "Mucko" McDermott, the lone gunman behind the devastating workplace killings at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000.
Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.
"They even acted this crap out," the source said.
I didn't think the press was still capable of anti-D&D hysteria like this. Back in the '80s, Joe McGinness wrote a ridiculous true-crime book on some murderer who blamed D&D for his crime, Tom Hanks starred in the anti-D&D TV movie Mazes and Monsters and grieving mother Patricia Pulling began the scare group Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, blaming the game caused her teen-age son's suicide.
But these days, D&D and role-playing games are about as controversial as Yahtzee. Millions of people played the game as kids and grew up without worshiping the occult or committing murders. The deaths of game creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in recent years were major news covered across the globe, sparking countless remembrances by people who huddled around a table with dice when we could've been experimenting with drugs and alcohol. (I was going to say drugs, sex and alcohol, but who am I kidding?) Today, millions of people play MMORPGS and other videogames that are D&D in everything but name.
Like out and proud D&D geek Stephen Colbert, I was a dungeon master in my youth (and not the cool kind who wears assless leather chaps and ties women up on torture wheels in my basement). I've managed to reach middle age without killing anybody at all, not even a single drifter or truck stop prostitute.
The Heavy: David Letterman Likes Them Now
On Jan. 18, the British band The Heavy impressed David Letterman so much with their song "How You Like Me Now?" that he did something he's never done before in the history of his program -- he asked for an encore.
The YouTube video is the televised broadcast -- which edits out most of the encore -- but you can see it in full in high quality on Letterman's web site. Paul Shaffer and Letterman even perform part of the encore.
There have been some great live performances on Letterman, including TV on the Radio's Wolf Like Me and Phoenix's 1901, but that one tops them all.
Google Flags MSNBC.Com as Malware Site
I was reading news stories this afternoon on MSNBC when one of its pages triggered a malware warning in Google Chrome:
The website at www.msnbc.msn.com contains elements from the site adrotator.mediaplex.feed-mnptr.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.
According to Google's safe browsing alert for that feed-mnptr.com domain, it has contained three trojan programs and five browser security exploits. The domain has been used as an intermediary to infect users of Digg, CNBC and MSN.Com.
I can't check without visiting the MSNBC page, which would be extremely dumb, but based on the domain the malware appears to be coming in from a third-party ad service. There was a report Wednesday that the Drudge Report had hosted malware, probably from an ad network.
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