Just yards from the ancient Temple Mount, site of the Islamic Dome of the Rock, Glenn Beck told a sparse crowd: “We are leaving the age of manmade miracles of spacecraft, and we are entering the age of the miracles of God.”

God, apparently is getting tired of Beck’s shtick, himself, because he offered the former Fox News personality absolutely no help whatsoever in getting asses into seats yesterday: According to eye-witness, Israeli writer Ami Kaufman, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Courage” religious rally in Jerusalem yesterday was a total bomb, with around just 1000 people attending. With such a small number, you’d have to wonder how many of these folks were “ironic” attendees? Surely a number of Israeli hipsters, eager to point and laugh at a pudgy, paranoiac, self-important, delusional American Moron Mormon with a messiah/martyr complex sporting a yarmulke, would turn out for this, right?

If this happened in Los Angeles, hey, I’d have gone to see the Glenn Beck show myself, so if you factor the ironic attendees out, does the indifference seen towards him in the Holy Land foretell curtains for Beck’s cultural cachet even with American idiots? I mean, getting 10,000 Christian evangelicals to show up to a Glenn Beck rally in Jerusalem a year ago would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Box office boffo. Still, Beck should do well in Texas next week. But we’ll see, won’t we?

Via Politics USA

If you are looking for one word to sum up how Glenn Beck went from drawing 3 million viewers nightly on Fox News to seeing his audience plummet and Fox severing ties with him, that word would be dull. By believing his own hype while taking himself too seriously, Glenn Beck bored his fans into leaving him. After his Restoring Honor rally bombed last year, it was the height of self-delusion for him to think that thousands would follow him to Israel.

Glenn Beck was fine when he was the conservative rodeo clown providing a nightly dose of entertainment to the blue hairs that make up the Fox News audience, but his program became too dark, too paranoid, too religious, and too stuck on one paranoid conspiracy theory note to maintain its appeal.

Yossi Sarid seemed to speak for many Israelis who weren’t thrilled with having Beck’s circus in their country either, “Beck, Hagee and their swarm are anti-Semites, who are not even aware of their anti-Semitism and the extent of its ugliness. Or maybe they are. In recent years this anti-Semitism has not been directed mainly against Jews, for they have found the Arab substitute for it. Now they are using the Arabs to scare Israel and the Muslims to scare the world. And the white, Aryan lion will devour them and their undercover envoys such as Barack Hussein. The visit ended yesterday, the circus is folding its tent and moving elsewhere. Let’s pray it will not return soon. Mr. Beck, don’t come back. We’re not short of dangerous wackos here.”

The turnout for Restoring Courage proved one thing. Glenn Beck needed the platform of Fox News more than Fox News ever needed Beck. The media platform to push his dark wares is gone now, and for most of America it is out of sight out of mind as it relates to Glenn Beck.

Below, Beck talks about what a terrific guy (and leader) he is and mentions, all casual-like, the death threats that have been made against him. The pathology on display here is impressive even by Beck’s high standards.
 

 
Over at Talking Points Memo they’ve got the summary of a very interesting new academic study done recently at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Cultures of the Tea Party,” as the study is titled, uses polling data, and interviews with Tea party supporters at a gathering held in the state to provide a snapshot of the overall cultural attitudes of the movement.

The findings, represented on Monday at the American Sociological Association, purport that the defining attitudes of the Tea party sympathizers are “Authoritarianism, ontological insecurity (fear of change), libertarianism and nativism.” From TPM:

The study used polling of North Carolina and Tennessee, conducted by Public Policy Polling (D) in the Summer of 2010, and determined the cultural dispositions by measuring the responses of tea partiers to set questions. After PPP surveyed over 2,000 voters who were sympathetic to the Tea Party, researchers then reinterviewed almost 600 in the fall of 2010. Those interviews included everything from personality based queries like “Would you say it is more important that a child obeys his parents, or that he is responsible for his own actions?” to more political ones, like “Do you think immigrants who came into this country illegally but pay taxes and have not been arrested should be given the opportunity to become permanent legal residents?” The study also incudes interviews and short responses with ten participants at a Tea Party rally in Washington, NC.

“American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration,” a statement accompanying the report reads, as the findings themselves point out a few disconnects between the what self-described members of the Tea Party say and their actual policy stances.

The report quotes one Tea Party activist as saying, “We don’t want the big government that’s taking over everything we worked so hard for…the government’s becoming too powerful… we want to take back what our Constitution said. You read the Constitution. Those values - that’s what we stand for,” but that sentiment is not reflected in the polling data from the surveys. From the report:

In our follow-up poll, 84% of those positive towards the TPM [Tea Party members] said the Constitution should be interpreted “as the Founders intended,” compared to only 34% of other respondents. Other respondents were also three times more likely not to have an opinion on the issue, highlighting the salience of the question for TPM supporters. Support for Constitutional principles is not absolute. TPM supporters were twice as likely than others to favor a constitutional amendment banning flag burning; many also support efforts to overturn citizenship as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment. That TPM supporters simultaneously want to honor the founders’ Constitution and alter that same document highlights the political flexibility of the cultural symbols they draw on.

The TPM supporters’ inconsistent views of the Constitution suggests that their nostalgic embrace of the document is animated more by a network of cultural associations than a thorough commitment to the original text. In fact, such inconsistencies around policy, whether on the right or left, highlight what many sociologists see as the growing importance of culture in political life. The Constitution - and Tea Party more generally - take on heightened symbolic value and come to represent a ‘way of life’ or a “world view” rather than a specific set of laws or policy positions.

This reminds me a lot of Canadian psychology professor Bob Altemeyer’s long-term study of cultural attitudes of conservatives, The Authoritarians, which is online in pdf format. Altemeyer’s studies reveal rightwing double standards, inconsistent beliefs, willful ignorance, misrepresentation of historical and scientific facts and bizarre justifications. It, too, is absolutely worth reading.

Quoting Altemeyer:

The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence. Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives, and conservatives have stereotypes about liberals. Moderates have stereotypes about both. Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound. But arguing never seems to get anywhere. Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion. And if you keep finding the same thing experiment after experiment, and other people do too, then that’s a body of facts that demands attention.3 Some people, we have seen to our dismay, don’t care a hoot what scientific investigation reveals; but most people do. If the data were fairly gathered and we let them do the talking, we should be on a higher plane than the current, “Sez you!”

The comments thread at TPM is worth reading. I suspect that our thread here will be lively also!

 
Meet Kanon Tipton, pint-sized preacher. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this short video clip from last night’s National Geographic special is worth a million.

Still only a pre-schooler, Kanon Tipton takes the pulpit at his family’s church and like a seasoned evangelist fervently preaches the gospel, mopping his forehead, shouting, waving his arms, the congregation hanging on his every word. But he’s just 4-years-old. NGC’s Pint-Sized Preachers goes inside the controversial world of child evangelists to follow two rising-stars and one established child minister as they spread God’s word and bring congregations to their feet.

Obviously this kid is just parroting religious gibberish—he’s not really saying anything particular here. It’s just Southern-fried pulpit word-salad. I have no idea why these people seem to think they’re getting something out of it.

Then again, it’s the same shit adult Pentecostals preach. Pretty much EXACTLY the same thing.
 

Thank you, Kevin Smith!

 
And here everyone thought “Birtherism” had died out. Not so fast, there’s a new kid on the block(head): meet soon to be discharged Air Force staff sergeant Daryn Moran (yes, that’s his real name, this is not some anti-teabagger jibe).

Moran read on the Internet that Obama’s longform birth certificate is a forgery, so he’s decided to a) make a ridiculous YouTube video about it and b) chat with the “Uncle Ruckus” of the conservative wingnut blogsphere, “Dr.” James David Manning and c) go AWOL to protest Obama’s treachery. (Except apparently he lied about that last part.)

Via the AirForce Times:

Moran appeared to believe he was AWOL and thought arrest would be imminent.

“His birth certificate is a proven forgery. I will also not support any other military person who turns a blind eye to this fact,” he wrote on The Blaze, a conservative website founded by former Fox News personality Glenn Beck. “It’s simple. Arrest B. Obama or arrest me.”

In an audio report posted on BirtherReport.com, Moran said he previously served in the Marine Corps, left on good terms and joined the Air Force in the months following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a follow-up email posted Tuesday on BirtherReport.com and attributed to Moran, the NCO wrote a discharge is imminent and “basically paperwork.”

He wrote in a letter posted Aug. 15 on The Post & Email website that he was a “high priority” for being discharged after meeting with mental-health evaluators. Moran wrote on The Blaze that he would soon receive an “administrative and honorable discharge for a ‘personality disorder’” because he told his leadership that homosexuality is a sin.

He wrote a letter to BirtherReport.com the following day that his discharge was “basically paperwork.”

His first sergeant “passed on the advice to refrain from more internet activity,” Moran wrote. “She knows I cannot do that, because I want to end this crisis. For my family, and for the Constitution and my country, and for B. Obama”

He said he tried to resign several times from the Air Force, but his first sergeant wouldn’t allow it. Moran also said he was removed from his position after a coworker complained that he asked a doctor in his unit about her Muslim faith.

“My conscience is violated,” he said. “I feel like I’m supporting the flag of whatever those Islamic countries are and the rainbow flag and not the red, white and blue. That’s not the kind of people I want to be associated with.”

Here’s the aforementioned YouTube video and it’s every bit as tragic as you might suspect. This idiot is… just an idiot. That’s all you can say about him. He’s an inconsequential twit practically guaranteeing that he’ll never hold a job again. It’s one thing to post pictures of yourself with a lampshade on your head on Facebook, quite another to do this. Who would do a Google search on Mr. Moran and think “This is the bloke I’m gonna hire”?

Good luck in life, Daryn, you’re going to fucking need it as dumb as you are, pal. His wife probably wants to strangle this fool.

If you enjoy listening to crazy people who aren’t very intelligent talking nonsense, this is a classic of sorts…
 

 
But it just gets worse, here’s the Uncle Ruckus “Dr.” James David Manning interview that Moran did. Oh my! Towards the end, he advocates that all the birthers and Christians move to Texas and live under the constitution and not, of course, under Obama’s Islamic tyranny and shariah law and stuff.
 

 
Mother Jones found a video Michele Bachmann made during her time as a Christian education activist. In Guinea Pig Kids II, she warns of a Holocaust that will be brought on, she claims, by the U.S. public education system.

Bachmann’s co-star, Michael Chapman, get even more descriptive and paranoic , claiming in the video that “globalists’ were plotting to destroy Christian America by indoctrinating children with a morality that would lead to a second Auschwitz.

A conservative Christian group called the Maple River Education Coalition made and distributed Guinea Pig Kids II, the obscure conspiracy theory video starring Bachmann and Chapman, in 2002.
 

 
Via Mother Jones

 
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips is such a fucking idiot that I have, on more than one occasion, wondered if he was some sort of long-fuse “Yes Men” prank designed to embarrass and disgust current or would-be Teabaggers from having anything to do with the dying-off political movement. Just Google his name, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of completely unintelligent, ill-informed, ignorant and just plain stupid things he’s said. Judson is a small-town jackass who puffs his chest out and says dumb shit like only land owners should be allowed to vote. What does he add to the conversation besides a hefty dollop of DUMB?

Here’s just the most recent example of what a complete buffoon this man is. Via Raw Story:

At a Wisconsin rally on Saturday, Judson Phillips, CEO of “Tea Party Nation”, one of the many tea party splinter groups, claimed that “the left” has “killed a billion people in the last century”.

According to Politico, Phillips and other speakers heated up the rhetoric around Tuesday’s historic recall elections, with one speaker referring to Democrats as terrorists who struck at a Republican “Ground Zero”. Vince Shmuki, leader of another tea party group, the Ozaukee Patriots said, “This is ground zero. You remember what the term ground zero means? We have been attacked.”

Earlier this week, Judson Phillips compared protesters who opposed Governor Scott Walker to Nazi storm troopers. On Saturday, he said, “I detest and despise everything the Left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me.”

See what I mean? If Judson did not exist, it would be in the interests of the Democrats to “invent” him. If they weren’t so lame, the Democrats, I’d have added “and maybe they have” but this is Democrats we’re talking about.

Phillips made this statement at a sparsely-attended rally to support Republican State Senator Alberta Darling, who is in the fight of her political life trying to hold onto her seat against Democratic Representative Sandy Pasch. When they were making the speakers list for the rally, you have to wonder what the selection process criteria was that they decided to INVITE (and probably pay the travel and hotel costs) for a complete idiot like Judson Phillips. How is inviting a fool to say crazy shit that is then ridiculed all over the media and blogsphere in any way helpful to their cause?

Unless it IS helpful to their cause, of course, which is just too frightening to contemplate.
 

 
Below, Phillips makes a complete and utter fool of himself on Hardball with Chris Matthews when he decided to flap his lips about the Gabrielle Giffords murder attempt just after the shooting in Tucson. How dumb would you have to be to follow this goofball?
 

 
Texas governor Rick Perry seems to really go out of his way to associate himself with complete fruitcakes. There’s a curious item at Right Wing Watch today about zany churchlady Alice Patterson, one of Perry’s “church mobilizers” for his “The Response” prayer rally. Patterson works on getting African-Americans interested in the Republican party (good luck!) and is the author of a book about her career titled Bridging the Racial and Political Divide: How Godly Politics Can Transform a Nation.

Kyle Mantyla, the author of the post, is reading Patterson’s book and found this astonishing tidbit about how she came to believe that the Democratic Party is “an invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure,”(i.e. controlled by demons) when she was listening to a sermon by Charles D. Pierce. (Pierce author of Prayers That Outwit the Enemy and the recent book, Time to Defeat the Devil).

As Chuck described ‘Saul Structures,’ my thoughts raced to politics. “Oh my God, Chuck is describing the Democratic Party!” This was the first time I’d ever considered that an evil structure could be connected to and empowered by a political party ... One strong fallen angel cannot wreak havoc on an entire nation by himself. He needs a network of wicked forces to restrain the Church and to deceive the masses. Unlike the Holy Spirit, who is everywhere at once and can speak to millions of people simultaneously, the devil can only be in one place at a time. By himself Satan would be totally ineffective, but in cooperation with other powers of darkness he erects structures to deceive and manipulate entire nations ... At the time I was listening to Chuck Pierce in Louisiana, I hadn’t given any thought at all to strongholds in political parties. If I had ever thought about it, of course, it would have made sense, but it was new information. As Chuck’s words began to sink in, I asked the “Lord, Father, what is the demonic structure behind the Democratic Party?”

Incidentally, it doesn’t look like Perry’s day of prayer and “atonement” for America is getting much traction:  According to Wonkette:

“[O]nly 8,000 tragic souls have signed up for Perry’s “The Response” rally on Saturday, which is mathematically many less than the 71,000 or so people that fit in the gigantic football stadium where he’s holding it. Has America suddenly lost its appetite for asking God to solve its problems? Did an entire day of Rick Perry weeping and speaking in tongues while a cabal of hate-mongering evangelical pastors grown in jars under Pat Buchanan’s bed fling spittle full of damnation and hellfire at everyone just sound like a little too much fun?”

 
Idiot redneck “preacher” Damon Thompson is ignorant, bigoted and proud of it. He makes his living spewing mono-syllabic hatred towards a group of people (gays) who he personally, has probably never had any direct experience with (unless, of course, what they say about the most vocal homophobes is true. I hadn’t considered that).

Thompson’s “flock” are the people for whom the Tea Party movement—or the Ku Klux Klan—is a step beyond them intellectually. As one YouTube commenter quipped “This is Christianity for meth-heads!”

Well put. If advanced beings from the future ever arrive on Earth, you can bet Damon Thompson would be the first one to want to burn them at the stake. What this hillbilly ignoramous doesn’t realize is that when “the queers” are re-broadcasting his message to hundreds of thousands of people across the Internet, the people watching are just laughing at him. Pointing and laughing at the dumb hick.

To the average person watching his YouTube clips, Damon Thompson just appears to be a brainless hillbilly moron. No more, no less. He’s as compelling as a drunk racist and possessing half the charisma. There is nothing, not one thing, that is even remotely interesting about him. His “message” is trite and inconsequential. People are just laughing at him. Eventually we’ll never hear his name again and no one will even remember him. He doesn’t even distinguish himself as a decent enough gay-basher to achieve any real prominence in the field. Not with the likes of Bryan Fischer around. Thompson is an inarticulate dud by comparison.

(A note to Damon: You look like a smelly hobo, dude. I could have sworn I saw flies buzzing around your head in the video clip. Have you ever considered going on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? I think they could really help you. I know they could. Your personal grooming and hygiene is deplorable, m’fren…)
 

 
Via Jesus Needs New P.R.

 
In case you missed it, some fantastic reporting from The Rachel Maddow Show (by way of Right Wing Watch) on Rick Perry’s wingnut Woodstock, “The Response.”

What will future people think of this era? (Provided of course, these crazy assholes don’t kill us all first)
 

 
At the National Education Leadership Conference in 2004, Michele Bachmann, then Minnesota State Senator, gave a lecture on the effects of same-sex marriage on education. It’s as stupid you you might imagine.

There is not a whole lot of nuance in her words describing homosexuality and LGBT people, is there?

“I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgendered. We need to have profound compassion for the people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It’s not funny, it’s sad. Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle—we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It’s anything but gay.”

Funny, but her brand of “profound compassion” sounds just like Christianist bigotry to me. Exactly like it, in fact. Is there ANY discernable difference?

Here’s another winner. Bachmann on hate-monger Fred Phelps:

“I almost think that the gay community has hired this guy, or created this guy, to do what he does. He is their best friend.”

Noted and quoted.
 

 
Via Dump Bachmann