Does Glenn Beck Really Matter?

I will admit, there was something alluring about Glenn Beck when he burst onto the national scene. Part of it was the fact that he shredded the mainstream media like and F-5 tornado in a trailer park. Part of it was his unapologetic religious nature. Part of it was his ability to see connections that would otherwise escape notice. But then, he got stale. Not stale like bread left out overnight, but rather the kind of stale that comes with a steady diet of the same thing over and over again. The kind of stale that says "toss some meat into the mac 'n cheese tonight ma ... come on, live a little!" Glenn became two things that will doom anyone in media. He became formulaic, and apocalyptic.

He became formulaic in that no matter what the issue was, there would be three things in his radio/TV programs. First there would be analysis of it. Then there would be some joking around by his radio sidekicks. Then on TV, Glenn would do his teacher routine on the chalkboard. He constantly used the radio and TV programs to push exclusive content on his website. Occasionally he would drop a topic and move on so abruptly that I started to wonder if he was straying into territory where there might have been exclusive online content that he didn't want to divulge for free.

Worst of all, he became apocalyptic. Everything was the end of the world, that God just HAD to judge America for this that or the other thing. The moral depravity of the nation had eliminated out most favored nation status with the almighty and now we were going to have to pay for it. We were hanging on by a thread over the pits of hell and someone was greasing the rope between our fingers. Other talk show hosts, even invented a term for when they were in a fit of pessimism, they were feeling "beckish," they would say.

His radio show was shedding listeners faster than Facebook is shedding subscribers, and his TV show was losing sponsors even faster. It is pretty sad when the ad space on a cable TV network starts to become dominated by internal ad buys instead of actual bill-paying sponsors. What does this mean for poor, beleaguered Glenn Beck? It means that this is the perfect time to see if people will PAY to see him do the exact same bit that people used to watch for free.

Beck's show was consistently one of the top-rated shows on the Fox News Channel, but if he truly believes that all of those viewers will follow him to GBTV, his subscriber-based web enterprise, I fear the Beck will have another mystery to sketch out on his chalkboard.

I tuned in the first time when Beck first came to Fox News Channel. I watched sporadically for a while. I turned him off for the last time during the whole 'I'm going blind' drama. I don't knock the fact that he genuinely has health issues. I know many people who do. What got me was seeing him talking about his vision issues, and then blowing it off an segueing into a discussion of Democratic Party political dirty tricks saying something along the lines of 'I don't know why I am going blind, but there is one thing I do know, the democrats will do anything to win an election.' Grab the remote, point and click. Buhbye Glenn Beck. Hope all of your other business ventures can feed your family, because GBTV will never provide you with the comfortable life that you have become accustomed to with the nice fat Fox paychecks.

Living Conservative in a Liberal World (part 9): Thank You for Not Smoking

So I have a little hang up about something and I have decided to say something about it. I have a problem with people smoking.

One of the first principles of conservatism is basic human freedom. People should be free to smoke, or not smoke, as their personal desire happens to be. As a conservative, I am politically opposed to smoking bans that are enacted by state and local governments.

What bothers me though, is the severe lack of politeness and etiquette of many smokers. I have friends who smoke. I will hang out with them while they are standing outside smoking, and most of my friends are understanding that I don't smoke and would prefer to not inhale their used carcinogens. They always stand downwind, and exhale their smoke to the side so that it is blowing away from me. Kudos to you my friends!

The ones who bother me are the ones who don't even try to be polite about it. They stand upwind, they exhale their smoke directly at me (not in a malicious way, they just don't respect my right to remain as smoke free as possible).

I make it a point to not frequent locales which are smoky. My state recently enacted a statewide smoking ban, and while I am enjoying the fact that I am breathing clearer air than I did before the ban, I am against it. I simply cannot support a law passed by the state simply under the auspices of "we will protect you from yourselves, and everyone around you a, by prohibiting X." I am actually appreciating that I can attend more after-work functions with my colleagues because the most common locations of these gatherings is now forced, by a state mandate, to be smoke free. However, I honestly don't believe that they should be forced to do this. If the facility is smoke-filled to the point that it bothers me, I can simply vote with my feet and leave. I am as free to not smoke as people should be to smoke.

That being said, I do not believe that the taxpayers should pay to treat smoking-related illnesses. Medicare and Medicaid dollars should be used only to alleviate the pain of these diseases, and not attempt to cure them. Every person who exercises their right to smoke does so in the full awareness of the health risks involved, and thereby assumes the liability and responsibility for the negative consequences.

I am leery of government power, especially when it is used to limit the freedom and choices of the people. Perhaps a less intrusive government would be smaller, cheaper and more efficient, and all of those people who get paid from tax money will, instead of being tax consumers, become tax PAYERS.

8^) Jim
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Living Conservative in a Liberal World (Part 8): 21st Century Civil Rights

My generation ran it's civil rights race, and with a few exceptions, managed to clear all of the hurdles placed before us. The civil rights issue we had to deal with was racism. When I was young, I remember racism being rampant. Neighbors would congregate and talk about African Americans in unflattering terms. It didn't help that we were living in public housing at the time, and racists in the neighborhood had little fear about antagonizing their neighbors of color. When we left the projects, and we moved into a modest apartment, I remember mom and her friends evaluating wether a neighborhood was "too dark" to move in to.

Was mom a racist? Not really. She didn't HATE African-Americans (which I believe is the requirement to be considered a racist). She was what I would call civil-rights challenged. She didn't have any African-American friends, therefore she did not understand African-Americans, and like many people of narrow horizons and minds, she didn't want to expose herself or her children to things she did not understand or appreciate. In other words, she did not have the needed knowledge to overcome the stereotypes she learned from society.

My generation was the last generation born during the civil rights era, and therefore it was left to us, thrust together by the courts to learn to get along. And guess what? We did! The numbers of interracial marriages and biracial children are on the rise ... a testament to the fact that we figured it out.

So what is the great civil rights issue of the 21st century? Homophobia. I see it every day, and it is an issue that simmers under the surface of every public and private organization in America. It is in our schools, universities, workplaces, professional sports teams churches and the military.

Homophobia, as an issue will also be tougher than racism to deal with. At least with racism, there was no explicit biblical statements for racists to hang their hat on. The Bible directly condemns homosexuality, which then places homophobia in a different class altogether than racism. Sure, there are those who claim that the mark of Cain was black skin, but the Bible doesn't say that. However the Bible does say that for a man to have sex with a man is an "abomination" (Lev 20:13). So now, instead of being just a legal and political issue, Homophobia has a religious and moral dimension which cannot be ignored.

Rather than address the religious and moral issues around homosexuality, however, I will limit myself to the social and political issues, because that is the focus of this blog. I will leave it to the philosophers and theologians to have the other argument. Sure there are those who cling to the second part of that verse in Leviticus and say that homosexuals should be put to death, and there are plenty of examples of personal attacks on homosexuals, enough to fill an entire blog, much less a single post.

So the first task: defining what it is we are against. Sure, we can say that we are against homophobia, but the definition of homophobia would be fear of homosexuals, not hatred of homosexuals. We need to establish that there is nothing wrong with fear. Fear is a natural response to the different. The task is to either better define the word, or replace it with a better term.

Now regardless of wether you believe homosexuality is a sin or not, you have to admit that there has to be some national consensus as to the status of same-sex couples in the United States. Non-married heterosexual couples have some standing before the law. You can sue for palimony, with varying degrees of success at the end of a long-term live-in relationship. And if there are children involved, the legal status of the relationship becomes all the more definite.

So what should we do with same-sex couples in America? Put them in a rocket and fire it at the moon and pretend they never existed? Or better yet, how about we simply acknowledge that these relationships exist. Create a civil union law, and allow people to register their civil unions, and allow for the dissolution of civil unions under the divorce laws. Civil Unions would allow the same hospital, and legal rights as a marriage, so obviously, a dissolution process would be necessary. And, to avoid the stigmatization of same-sex couples, all unions of heterosexual couples not performed by an ordained member of the clergy (read: judge/justice of the peace) would also be classified as a civil union. Reserve the word marriage for a ceremony that takes place in a church, and leave the rest be. John Barrowman, the very talented British actor who just happens to be gay says he doesn't want a "marriage" from a belief system that "hates" him (read the article and interview here, if you like).

Surely this will not destroy the human race, although it does stand to make divorce lawyers richer with the infusion of a whole new marketplace of civil union dissolutions ...

Living Conservative in a Liberal World (Part 7): A Little Civility Please!

There is a local talk radio host who thinks that conservatives are wusses. We hold ourselves to a high ethical standard, and when liberals constantly take advantage of our high ethical standards and reap a political benefit, it is because we weren't willing to get down into the trenches and get dirty fighting back. He said that conservatives will never truly have political power until we are willing to play out of the same relaxed rule book as liberals, employing the same dirty tricks and taking advantage of every chink in their armor the way they do to conservatives.

Consider how the left set out to absolutely destroy Sarah Palin. They attacked her character, the character of her family (especially Bristol, with good reason), her intelligence and her ethics. When none of that worked, they attacked her for her clothes.

Now I am not a huge Sarah fan as readers of this blog may know. I don't have anything against her really, I just don't think she is the end-all be-all that some people believe she is. That being said however, I have a problem with people who can't leave well enough alone.

Recently, comedienne Kathy Griffin declared that her new target for the new year would be Willow Palin (read the article here if you like). She said that after having gone after Sarah, Todd and Bristol it is "Willow's year to go down" and that she wants "to offend a whole new Palin."

Can anyone say overkill? Why go after a 16 year old because you hate the politics of her mother? For that matter, what sane, rational person hates someone so much that they feel the need to attack their family? I mean, seriously, this isn't the mafia here. It is politics! And a couple years ago, when she "dated" Levi Johnston ... what was that all about? How hateful do you have to be in order to want to hurt the daughter of the person you hate by appearing in public with, and then vehemently denying you are dating, the father of that daughter's child?

I am not saying that only liberals have a problem with civility. It was conservatives after all, specifically Jerry Fallwell and his Moral Majority who fired the first shot in this war of incivility when they made politics a battle not of competing ideologies, but a battle between good and evil. I remember how riled up some conservatives got during this time in our political history. Nothing gets the blood of a religious person boiling like the belief that someone is acting against God.

So I make a plea here. Civility. Is it too much to ask for? Is it too much to ask that conservatives and liberals alike say "enough is enough, lets get back to the real issues here and stop this over the top incivility?"

Sadly, it may be.

Living Conservative in a Liberal World (Part 6): A "recovered" liberal ...

NOTE: This is the final pre-written post on this string of posts. As I mentioned before, I will, from time to time revisit this topic thread. Hopefully, 2011 is a year of productive and happy blogging.

I sometimes describe myself as a recovered liberal. I first became politically aware back in the seventh grade. I remember the election of 1980 quite well. I remember going to the library on the bus after school and hearing people talking about the election. I said to one of the gentlemen, a Reagan supporter, something to the effect of 'Ronnie ray-gun will only get us into a war.'. The gentleman, an older gent by my recollection (of course when you are 12 anyone above their teens is "old"), said to me, "we have had four years of the clown, it is time for the cowboy."

I started attending church and going to youth group a few years later, and I remember listening to talk shows on the Christian radio station. As I listened, I heard a show featuring an interview with a guy by the name of Lindsey Williams who was exposing what he called "the energy non-crisis". He talked at length about "one world governments" and "the illuminati". He also referenced the then-current president of the United States, Ronald Reagan as being swayed by these secret groups. I made the assumption that Republicans were bad, and democrats were good. After all, people were starving around the world, and Republicans were in charge, didn't that make the fame in Ethiopia Reagan's fault? Working off of partial information and wild assumptions, I became a liberal. This lasted until my senior year in high school and that is when things began to change.

My senior year in high school, I had an amazing experience. I had the opportunity to go on a trip with a group of students to Washington DC as part of a program put on by the Close Up foundation. While we were there, we saw all of the sites and had educational programs. During our evening group discussion sessions, there were two liberals in the room, myself, and a young lady from Iowa. We argued our convictions with courage and passion, but by the end of the week, I was starting to question my beliefs.

Because I believed I lacked opportunities, I left to join the Navy right after high school ended. No one in my family had ever gone to college, and because we were barely making ends meet and couldn't afford the fees, I never took the SAT or ACT test. We couldn't afford college anyways, so why even try?

While I was in the Navy, I discovered many things. They say that boot camp makes or breaks you, well in my case it made me. I came out of boot camp far more confident than I went in. After boot camp, I went to Naval Air Station Memphis to attend my training school. While I was there, I spent a lot of time in a place called the Armed Forces Center, which was run by missionaries who were reaching out to military personnel on the base. In my time spent there, I came under the tutelage of two older military members who volunteered at the center. They taught me many things about constitutional government, patriotism and the founding of the United States. The more I learned, the more I realized that my previous beliefs were wrong, and by the end of my time in Memphis, I had abandoned them, but I didn't quite embrace conservatism yet.

As I had opportunity to travel the world and learn about the world and our own nation, I grew more and more conservative in my ideas. I came to realize that freedom from oppression and tyranny made all the difference in people's lives and lifestyles. I also learned that freedom from oppression and tyranny is more than being free from outside nations, but it encompasses being free within the borders of your own nation from excessive government intervention and interference in your life.

By the time I left the navy, I was a rock sold conservative. I based my convictions on my Christian beliefs, my observations of the world, and the writings of philosophers who believed in freedom and basic human rights. In the end, isn't that all you need?

Living Conservative in a Liberal World (Part 2): Why I Am Writing This

NOTE: This is a post that was written some time ago. I am gradually posting them in order to build up the blog and perhaps get myself into the habit of the blogging regularly.

I was talking to my class one day when I was struck with a couple of revelations. One revelation is that my urban students are "stuck on liberal," a revelation that is none too shocking. The second revelation, however, was shocking. The revelation was that it is the fault of conservatives that my students are stuck on liberal. As a matter of fact, it may well be the fault of conservatives that urban public education is failing altogether. This got me to thinking about the world we live in. It truly is a liberal world. Young people are inundated with liberal thoughts and ideology for at least twelve years if they are in public education.

Conservatives are an interesting bunch. I ought to know, because I am one. There are many different types of Conservatives, but there are a few distinct characteristics that many conservatives share. Many conservatives believe that the public education system is a bankrupt program which has failed to elevate the masses to full participatory citizenship in the great experiment we call the United States of America. Public education has failed to fulfill Jefferson's belief that only when people are well-informed can they be "trusted with their own government."

I would argue, however, that this failure is due to the ascendancy of liberalism in the public schools and the flight of conservatives out of them. In the 60's, liberals realized that the best place to replicate was in the sector of public education. Liberals started to go into teaching and take over the staff lounges at the nation's public schools. During the 1980's, seeing the path that liberals were taking our public schools, conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, pulled their children out of public schools and placed them in private, often church run schools. Removed from the population of public schools in one decade were not only the students whose family upbringing would make them conservative in nature, but the conservatives who would have otherwise worked in public education to teach them.

We are rapidly approaching a time when those who believe in a greater government role in the lives of citizens will not only outnumber those who believe in limited government, but they will have a large enough voting bloc that old fashioned liberty, liberty envisioned by Jefferson, when he said "A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."

It is sad, as one who loves liberty, to see the people of the United States sliding into the depths of being a culture of dependency. They look to the government for the things that our forbearers did for themselves. During the "great recession" of 2008-2010, a Facebook group was created called I.N.A.F.J. which stands for "I Need a F-ing Job." It was a poignant plea from people who are fed up with being unemployed. They wanted jobs, sure, but by creating a Facebook group, it seemed like what they were really after was validation. Through online T-shirt sales, they actually raised the money to pay for a billboard that greeted the President in Buffalo during a stop there that read "Dear Mr. President, I need a freaking job. Period. Sincerely, inafj.org." Last time I looked, it was not the job of the government, or the President, to help you get a job.

Now, I understand that the costs of regulation and high taxes leads to private sector job losses. I also understand that government action can create a favorable business environment that leads to job growth. That is not the point here. Sure the INAFJ folks talk about taxes and regulation on their website. They favor (supposedly) smaller government that spends less, allows people and businesses to keep more of what they earn and with that kept wealth, stimulate and grow the economy. But anyone who would buy a billboard that reads "Dear Mr. President, I need a freaking job" is a group that Makes me say "Dear Billboard Owner, Retrain, Reapply, Relocate" because, when it comes down to getting a job, I believe in the three R's.

It all started with a bumper sticker …

The Name Game.  Liberal, liberal fee-fi-iberal.  Conservative, conservative moo-oink-ervative.  Lets get real.  Republican?  Democrat?  Liberal? Conservative?  Those terms have become irrelevant.  They have been stripped of all meaning by history and a press that is quick to cast the fog of war on politicians they don’t like.

Many, many years ago, I remember a bumper sticker that said “I’m not anti-abortion, I’m PRO-LIFE”.  This set off a revolution over political naming rights.  Who has the right to determine what a person is called politically?  Pro-Life has such a  … well, positive, sound to it.  Of course, so as not to be considered “anti-life”, abortions rights people decided to describe themselves as “pro-choice”.

Republicans haven’t always been conservatives, and conservatives haven't always been American in their ideals.  A conservative is one who believes that the established order should be maintained and protected, while a liberal wants to change the established order (usually  in the name of reforming it).

By those definitions, the American Patriots fighting for independence were liberals, and the loyalists were conservative.  The Confederates, fighting for states rights and against federal intervention in property laws were conservatives and the abolitionists were liberals.

I think that one of the weaknesses of political discourse today is a lack of absolute terminology.  Mark Levin in his book Liberty and Tyranny prefers the term “statist” to describe the main body of the current Democratic party.  A statist is one who believes in “giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy” (dictionary.com definition of statism).

I am anti-statist.  I believe that the best thing government can do is get off our backs and let the American People be free and prosperous again.  This is something you will unlikely get with Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives in the United States today.