There is still a bit of a question lingering in some minds as to whether or not this is real, but to my mind, it absolutely has the ring of truth. If that’s not Gov. Scott Walker, it’s an acting genius portraying him. Sadly, this seems too real. The implications of this are staggering if it’s true!
And if it is true, then where do you go after something like this? I can think of a couple of solutions. A statewide recall election, where Walker is crushed and left on the scrapheap of history, becoming in the process, the dictionary definition of “traitor to humanity” or “cunt” for a generation; or perhaps Scott Walker’s head on a fucking pole? (Would Fox News broadcast that or pretend it didn’t happen?) How can this man feel good about what he’s doing? Listen in, you’ll want to puke by the end of this.
Looks like Wisconsin’s increasingly unpopular governor Scott Walker is developing a bit of a “Google problem”!!
He’s no Rick Santorum (yet) in that department, but if just a few of you reading this click over to Google and search for something like, say, “Is Scott Walker a pedophile?” we might be able to help to at least keep Walker competitive!
Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born 77 years ago today in the tiny town of Tryon, North Carolina. As Nina Simone, she’d go on to become the most powerful singer/songwriter of the Civil Rights era, blending the rawest aspects of jazz, blues, soul, and gospel into a unique style that buoyed her message of liberation.
Randy Cohen, the “The Ethicist” columnist for The New York Times Magazine, weighs in on the news that some members of the Park Slope Food Co-op allegedly send their nannies to work their shifts. Sophia Durning, a long-time Park Slope resident, joins the conversation to speak to the ethical dilemma concerning nannies substituting for co-op members.
Chris Hayes and Naomi Klein on MSNBC. This is totally worth watching. In the second half, she says some important things.
I was raised in a union family in West Virgina. My father worked at the telephone company (one of the Bells) and was a member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America). There is no doubt in my mind, NONE, that my family benefited massively—our lives were made a lot better—because of my father’s union and collective bargaining. I was actually able to have a special allergy medicine that was no longer manufactured made up for me a batch at a time and our insurance paid for it. I had to have special lenses made for my glasses. My sister was able to have braces, etc. How many American jobs have benefits like that anymore? Today, you’d practically have to pull a fucking John Q if your kid got really sick, even if you have health insurance!
When my father retired (he was bought out at age 62) he was extremely bitter about the wages the telephone company was paying the younger hires. He saw the writing on the wall and it wasn’t pretty. Outside of the medical profession I doubt that there are any decent paying jobs with benefits in my hometown anymore.
Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans are the lowest of the low. Traitors to the American middle class. The Wisconsin GOP are ready to knife these people to prove a point! Scum. I spit on them. If it’s not already obvious(!) we here at Dangerous Minds stand firmly with the pro-labor demonstrators in Madison. They’re heroes, these people. Good citizens. May they prevail. For their sakes and for all of our sakes.
Kathie Free, a retired Milwaukee public school social worker told Huffington Post:
“He owes it to us. Obama was not put into office just by the big money. He was put into office by millions of poor and middle-class people who walk the neighborhoods, talking to neighbors, getting the votes, and that’s how Obama got in, and he has to start remember how he got in. He’d better start working for the middle class and poor people.”
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong and it’s always best to face up to the facts and just admit it. Here goes: I was wrong, very wrong… I was OH SO WRONG about Glenn Beck in my post yesterday. I said that Beck was getting boring. Running out of steam. That his rants were getting repetitive.
In a word: HAH!
Oh, man, I really blew it, didn’t I? Turns out that there was merely a brief lull in the monkeyshines. Beck was just tuning up the orchestra before unleashing the grandest, most fucked-up (not to mention “supernatural”) conspiracy theory that he’s yet come up with in that fetid, rancid, over-heated little brain of his.
Last night’s broadcast, well, Glenn Beck made a fool of me.
Watch in disbelief as Beck uses information gleaned from a new crackpot Christian prophecy book called The Islamic Antichrist. Embraced by the batshit crazy WorldNet Daily crowd (natch), The Islamic Antichrist posits the theory that the Mahdi, the end-times Islamic redeemer/Messiah who Muslims believe will come to Earth to rid it of evildoers, the tyranny of kings and despots and, of course, the infidels, is in fact, the same fellow Christians call the Antichrist. (Their good guy = our bad guy. Makes sense so far, right? Except that the Koran says the Mahdi works WITH Jesus, keep that in mind and there is already a direct Muslim equivalent to the Antichrist known as Masih ad-Dajjal, “the deceiving Messiah,” although this character doesn’t actually appear in the Koran itself).
Within Islam, the Mahdi is often conflated or considered to be synonymous, with the 12th Imam (see Twelvers), who is prophesied to set up a worldwide Caliphate. The Islamic Antichrist, written by a guy calling himself “Joel Richardson” (apparently a pseudonym to protect him from seeing a fatwa put on his head—DO watch this video for more on this ass-clown) does appear to have some valid points (the Christian eschaton and the Islamic end-times stuff do have many parallels), but Beck being Beck, he takes what are in fact, “facts” about supernatural holy books from over a thousand years ago (interpreted by a fanatical modern day believer, of course) and then turns around and PARADES THESE “FACTS” ABOUT SUPERNATURAL PROPHECIES AS “CURRENT EVENTS ANALYSIS” ON WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE A “NEWS” NETWORK and not the fucking 700 Club. It would really be stretching it to call a book like The Islamic Antichrist, “non-fiction,” if you take my point, so what value would a “fact” about fiction (or a religious holy book, both are the same to me) have? It’s an empty calorie for most people. For Glenn Beck, it’s a motif whistled by his good old prophetic buddy Joel that he can turn into a conspiracy theory symphony of small-minded (albeit brilliant) religious bigotry that is positively Wagnerian—by way of Jack Van Impe—in its scope.
Fuck me… he’s good! It was a new, fresh low for Fox News, but a triumph, a tour de force, for Glenn Beck, personally.
Incorporating Biblical (and now Koranic!) “prophecy” into a wild-eyed, bughouse crazy conspiracy theory is EXACTLY the trick Beck needed to really draw the faithful back into his drama and shore up his ratings in the middle of a big dip. My hat is off to him: Glenn Beck, you are a MAESTRO of weaving together paranoia, bigotry, misrepresentation of history and wacko religious beliefs, and although the sight of you turns my stomach, I will say this: You are a genius showman. A genius. Your schtick is fucked up, corrosive to American civic life (or what’s left of it because of people like you) and I hope you’ll be raptured soon (on camera, if you can swing it). Still, as a person raised in a family of West Virginia born-agains who all vote Republican (and don’t even know why), I now have a grudging respect for your immense talents.
You’re an artist. No, an artiste! But you are no political scientist, Glenn. On that count you’re not much better than a tinfoil hat-wearing Ham radio conspiracy theorist living alone in a trailer somewhere in the Nevada desert with a cache of automatic weapons, saving his pee-pee in mason jars, but boy oh boy are you a master at coming up with plot-lines that Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsay and Jack T. Chick would envy and turning it all into a personal fortune on prime time America tee-vee! When it comes to taking crazy, fucked-up religulous bullshit and making it sound plausible for an audience of low IQ dolts who should be asked to take a test in critical thinking skills before they vote (or are issued a driver’s license), you are DA MAN!
The thing the kept going through my mind, though, as I watched this (other than wondering what Kirk Cameron thought of it all) is that Beck really seems to be setting himself up to become the next Salman Rushdie by explicitly welding Islamaphobia with Christian Eschatology in an insecure time. Who knows, maybe that would be appealing to his pathologies and his oft-admitted martyr complex?
And so it begins… The new Radiohead album has been leaked released a day early along with a video for the song Lotus Flower. I’m no hater, I love ‘em. Let’s all watch and listen together shall we?
