printThe One and Only Glenn Beck, still a scrupulously good fellow despite fame and fortune, would contend that only G-d is great, and that’s what makes Mr. Beck so good.
His humility and love of grace aside, Glenn is one of the most important popular forces for liberty today.
Yes, he often gets it wrong. Yes, he often confuses genuine forces for liberty (Ron & Rand Paul, Peter Schiff) with snake-oil merchants (the neoconservatives Andrew Breitbart and Stephen Moore). Yes, he overestimates the wisdom of the American People, and never touches the topic which accounts for the future dissolution of the people and the election of another. (Embellish, if you will.)
BUT.
No one in mainstream media has done what Glenn has to drive home the reasons and consequences of an irrevocably insolvent America: the twin evils of monetary policy and mind-boggling state profligacy.
And no one, myself excluded, has come out swinging as Glenn has against the Meghan McCain phenomenon and what IT represents. Meghaaan’s delusions of grandeur are those of America’s miseducated, exceedingly arrogant, deeply dopey, utterly outsourceable youth, worshiped, nay deified, by parents and pedagogues (and slowly being displaced by Asia’s pleasant, wickedly hardworking, bright, respectful kids). Glenn hasn’t quite gotten there, but he’s almost there.
Today Glenn galvanized his comedic gifts to roast this fattened goose. Not one Republican has done so satisfactorily. Laura Ingraham practically apologized for lampooning Meghan McCains’s unmistakable moronity; Michelle Malkin also backed down from a less-than adequate evisceration. Coulter opted out as usual, and said nothing much important (as she does on immigration).
Very nice segment by Glenn, He makes one glaring mistake, however, is that neither my generation nor the previous generation (that of the New Deal) understood very much about the Constitution since we helped in the perversion of that document and the entire concept of limited government. Sadly, I think that the percent of Americans who believe that Jose Padilla has a right of habeas corpus, that Social Security is unconstitutional, that Article 1 Section 8 does not entitle putting astronauts into space exploration (one of the RARE Obama budget cuts that Krauthammer rose to vilify), no student loans or government bailouts ….. – the percentage of the population of OLD or MIDDLE AGED folk who believe in sticking to the 10th Amendment concept of LIMITED Government – is probably under 25% (if even that high).
Myron, I concur with your sad estimation. Based upon typical election results and jury verdicts, my guess is the number falls somewhere less than 5%.
Myron is right in that we the citizens have never known or understood the US Constitution. We’ve been fed bits and pieces to justify a position.
Glenn Beck is right that Megan is an airhead, but he is totally off on the Obama is teaching the kids to teach the parents. Obama hasn’t come up with anything new that I know of. What were the Viet Nam protests, but “Educated kids, trying to educate their parents” with the saying “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
Since somewhere around 1960, the schools have been encouraging children to educate their parents on smoking and not to pollute the environment, to snitch on their parents for any possible illegal activities like drug use, child abuse, etc. [And parents have capitulates.]
I can’t remember how many posters that I’ve seen that say- “Listen to your children” and a quote like “We are filling our oceans with garbage and we must stop.” Misty Blank age 11. This isn’t new. In 1955, this was called the way the Russian State was run, by 1965 it was the American Educational Policy.
For all his faults, Glenn deserves credit for hammering home truths that I never thought I’d see on television.
I wish he’d watch the films of the WTC7 collapse a few times before saying ‘Truther’ again. Being an engineer that works with hot steel automatically makes me a wild-eyed crazy conspiracy nut, I guess. If you could heat steel to a temperature high enough to weaken it by burning stuff, my field wouldn’t exist.
That’s far from satisfactory on gutting the Moron Meghan. Decorum might prevent further “lampooning” but that was outright tame.
I thought Malkin was way harsher than this mild offering.
[Yes, but nobody finished McCain off as this writer did in “A Cow Is Born.”]
Glenn Beck is a blast of fresh air. He provides imperfect but welcome relief to anyone blown back by blasphemous belching from Big State worshippers Hannity and O’Reilly. You cannot help but like the guy.
Psychologists explain dysfunctional human relationships as a sort of subconscious dance, in which partners accept as truth that which they know on some level to be false. There is a similar dance between authoritarian governments and their loyal subjects. Official lies “work” because docile subjects “go along”.
Meghan McCain: “Revolutions start with young people.”
Mao’s Red Guard in a nutshell. I’m so reassured.
For the record, regarding the WTC, the problem here is not strictly one of temperature, but how much heat was being pumped into the steel (heat capacity), versus how quickly the steel could conduct that heat to other areas to cool itself down (conductivity). As long as the steel conducts heat away from the fire faster than it takes it in, the steel remains rigid. Once it cannot conduct the heat away faster than is added to it, the temperature of the steel becomes higher than that of the fire and eventually reaches the plastic deformation temperature, at which point the steel girders go plastic and deform, no longer being weight-bearing, with gravity taking over and taking down the structure.
Think of water into a tub – as long as more water drains out than comes in – no problem. If more goes in than out, eventually it overflows, no matter how little water comes in. Similarly, in boiling a pot of water, which absorbs heat for a while – some internally and the rest it radiates out (which is why it boils faster when you cover the pot), but eventually by adding heat, the water cannot do it any more and eventually boils to get rid of heat faster.
And I like Beck too. I like his appreciation of history and details and facts. He doesn’t talk in trite phrases. And he is angry but respectful. He is doing a great service for the country. Much as is Ilana.
And regarding the space program, I also disagree with changing the focus of NASA. They did not cut the budget. (They should have doubled it!) There is ample historical record from the days of Apollo that shows that not only were young people drawn by the droves into engineering and science in direct correlation to the size of the NASA budget, but that the return to the economy was a factor of 7 to the 20s. What I mean is that for every dollar that NASA spent, the multiplier in the economy was between 7 and 20+ dollars. Rarely has there been a better investment in the nation’s economy than for manned space exploration. Private enterprise cannot do this job at this stage of development. We all benefited in hundreds of ways. [This is unconstitutional and based on dubious economics. It’s instructive that the Republicans are opposing privatization of an industry. Space will be better in private hands.–IM]
There are numerous examples of effective federal government investment in pioneering enterprises that, when done, open the doors to private enterprise.
There are countless of other reasons for supporting manned space, but you’ll need to find those on your own.
I grew up on Bobby Heinlein and Asimov and I would like to live to see a Mars landing. I’m just about as nuts about it that I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not; however, it ain’t going to happen in my lifetime. Once we had a small streamlined NASA with one objective, land on the moon and they did it. Over the last forty years, NASA has grown and grown and it is doubtful they could copy the moon landing with four times the budget today. Their latest claim to fame is that they hit the moon with a missile. They lost the vision years ago and became bogged down just like education, welfare and the military have. Ilana’s statement that space is better off in private hands is true, unfortunately, I don’t see a Columbus around either.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution;
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
There have been discord and debate about the meaning of the words herein since the first days of the republic. It continues to this day. There is no one right interpretation, just a body of laws, decisions and a continued debate. I believe that the Framers left the Constitution vague in order to give it the ability to grow and evolve as the nation grew and evolved, so that the unforeseen could be still understood within the framework of the Constitution.
[Spoken like a true progressive proponent of the living Constitution. Wrong on all counts. Start by reading Mercer, at least.]
I am very far from a constitutional scholar. I read the words, and I interpret them, and I follow Hamiltonian view interpretation rather than the Madisonian view. And there were and are many who come down on either side. The vagueness was intentional so that we could weave a rational path for the times in which we live.
[Preposterous: James Madison was the father of the Constitution. Your views comport with those of the “Hillary, Hussein, and McCain Axis of Evil.”]