Mormon Prophecy Behind Glenn Beck's Message

Dana Milbank

Political reporter, Washington Post; Author, 'Tears of a Clown'

In one of his first appearances on Fox News, Glenn Beck sent a coded message to the nation's six million Mormons -- or at least those Mormons who believe in what the Latter-day Saints call "the White Horse Prophecy."

"We are at the place where the Constitution hangs in the balance," Beck told Bill O'Reilly on November 14, 2008, just after President Obama's election. "I feel the Constitution is hanging in the balance right now, hanging by a thread unless the good Americans wake up."

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Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work -- Firefighters Let Family's House Burn Down Because Owner Didn't Pay $75 Fee

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on October 4, 2010, Printed on October 5, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148407/

Thanks to 30 years of right-wing demagoguery about the evils of “collectivism” and the perfidy of “big government” -- and a bruising recession that’s devastated state and local budgets -- we’re getting a peek at a dystopian nightmare that may be in our not-too-distant future. It’s a picture of a society in which “rugged individualism” run amok means every man for himself.

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How the Future Will Judge Our Moral Failings

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

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Congress Has Plans for an Internet Blacklist in the Works -- Let's Stop This Now

By David Segal and Aaron Swarz, AlterNet
Posted on October 1, 2010, Printed on October 3, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148377/

When it really matters to them, Congressmembers can come together -- with a panache and wry wit you didn't know they had. As banned books week gets underway, and President Obama admonishes oppressive regimes for their censorship of the Internet, a group of powerful Senators -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- have signed onto a bill that would vastly expand the government's power to censor the Internet.

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Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High

Perceptions of liberal bias still far outnumber perceptions of conservative bias

by Lymari Morales

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.

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HuffPo's New Hire Howard Fineman --Ultimate Insider Journalist, Pushes Dems to the Right

By , FAIR
Posted on September 23, 2010, Printed on September 23, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148263/

One potential benefit of so-called "new media" is the chance that news outlets on the Web might offer a break from the tired old conventional wisdom of the corporate "old media." But when Arianna Huffington (Media Decoder, 9/19/10) announced the Huffington Post's hiring of Newsweek's Howard Fineman, she described the move as a sign that her website was now "able to bring in the best of the old." While Fineman may not exactly represent the best of old media, a case can be made that he's one of the most old media of all political journalists.

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For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again

By MOTOKO RICH

VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.

But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.

College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.

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In U.S. Transition Towns, the Big Challenge is Bringing People Together

When it comes to local resilience, it takes all kinds: Building bridges for a post-oil America

by Lynsi Burton  

 YES MAGAZINE  

posted Sep 17, 2010

Michael Brownlee, co-founder of Transition Colorado, says U.S. Transition Towns are based on the original British model and attract the same kind of people. What’s different about the United States—what Brownlee calls “ground zero for climate change”—is that there’s more work to do here than anywhere else to achieve food independence, freedom from fossil fuels, and the network of relationships necessary in a Transition Town.

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This Country Just Can't Deal with Reality Any More

By Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on September 16, 2010, Printed on September 17, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148206/

As Election Day 2010 approaches – as the United States wallows in the swamps of war, recession and environmental degradation – the consequences of the nation’s three-decade-old decoupling from reality are becoming painfully obvious.

Yet, despite the danger, the nation can’t seem to move in a positive direction, as if the suctioning effect of endless spin, half-truths and lies holds the populace in place, a force that grows ever more powerful like quicksand sucking the country deeper into the muck – to waist deep, then neck deep.

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Net Neutrality Absolutely Vital to Assuring Progressive Free Speech

by Mark Weisbrot

The mass media remains one of the most powerful forces blocking social and economic progress in the 21st century.

It is because of the mass media that tens of millions of Americans are convinced that budget deficits are more important than the lives ruined by unemployment, or that Social Security won't be there for them when they retire. Or that their government's occupation of Afghanistan and its hundreds of military bases around the world, are protecting the "national security" of U.S. citizens.

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Commentary: Rise of the 'content farms'

Edward Wasserman | The Miami Herald

last updated: September 14, 2010 11:51:16 AM

It's an Internet Age challenge, but it has spawned a business model right out of the early Industrial Era, when cash-starved, cottage-based artisans were recruited to turn out product at cut rates for hungry consumer markets.

Meet the so-called content farms. They're the media's newest and most prodigious over-achievers, the Sam's Clubs of the online world — huge, cheap, tacky and popular. You've probably never heard of them, but if you spend time online you read their stuff all the time. A lot of it comes under the heading of "how to" or "10 hottest" or "tips for" or "best and worst," the kind of superficially informative cud that neither you nor I nor anybody else can altogether resist chewing on.

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Why Jon Stewart Is a Huge Long Term Threat to Fox News

PoliticusUSA / By Jason Easley

Stewart educates his young viewers in the ways of Fox news on a nightly basis. Meanwhile, Fox's primary audience is over 60. Who does the future belong to?

The newest Pew Research Center’s survey of where and how people get their news has been released, and while Fox News is still polling the oldest viewership, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are pulling the youngest. As Stewart educates his young viewers in the ways of FNC on a nightly basis, it is clear that he is the biggest long term media threat to Fox News.

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Generation Y Encouraged to Break Tradition

Melanie Breault | September 8, 2010

This post originally appeared at The Ithacan [1].

Why are 20-year-olds taking longer to grow up? This is what Robin Marantz Henig asked readers of The New York Times Magazine, while citing that we 20-somethings are traveling and avoiding commitments instead of starting careers and having families. We are no longer following the traditional “timetable for adulthood” of “completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child,” all by the time we’re 30 years old.

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Glenn Beck May Be a Clown -- But the Shady Right-Wingers Who Pull His Strings Are Dangerous

Daily Kos / By Laurence Lewis

Beck is being used to enforce the very political and economic structures that subjugate the people who worship him.

Glenn Beck is a charlatan. A clown. A buffoon. He belongs on a second tier stage in Vegas, and he very well may end up there, some day. He is not dangerous, but his ability to exploit the legitimately angry dispossessed reveals something that is dangerous. Decades of right wing economic policies have undermined unions, the middle class, the social safety net, and the sense that we are all in this together, moving into a better future. Few believe their children or grandchildren will inherit a better world. People are afraid, and they don't understand why they are afraid.

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Wikipedia’s Anti-Natural Health Slant

Posted By ANH-USA On September 7, 2010 @ 2:19 pm In Attacks on Integrative Medicine, Media Bias, Monopoly Over Nutritional Therapy | No Comments

Wikipedia is the largest and most popular reference site on the Internet. Yet the articles that are pro-health freedom or integrative medicine perspectives are consistently gutted, removed, or vandalized.

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Screening Out the Empathy: The Impact of Screen Culture on Our Brains

by Bridie Smith

The impact of screen culture on the human brain merits the same public debate and funding for research as climate change, says one of the world's most eminent neuroscientists.

As the online world continues to expand, Oxford University's Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield has warned excessive screen culture may be changing the way our brains are wired.

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Glenn Beck and the Yearning for Fascism

by Matthew Rothschild

Glenn Beck’s got me worried again about fascism in America.

His so-called restoring honor rally last weekend assumed that somehow America has been dishonored, and that is a classic trope of fascists.

Nor was I comforted by all talk from Beck about “America today begins to turn back to God.”

Nor was I comforted by the full-throated and repeated chants of “USA, USA.”

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Glenn Beck the Faith-Healer Continues to Scam His Followers

By Bob Cesca

From The Huffington Post.

Throughout his gripping new book, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, Philadelphia Daily News reporter and blogger Will Bunch augments the notion that Glenn Beck is playing a fictional character named "Glenn Beck." A faker. Specifically, Bunch draws together evidence indicating that Beck is nothing more than a morning zoo deejay whose latest money-making stunt is to portray a new kind of televangelist, offering political and religious salvation for profit.

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Life Challenges for the 20-Something Generation: Far More Harsh Realities Than Arrested Development

AlterNet / By Aliza Bartfield

People in their 20s are taking longer to start careers and get married. What's going on?

People in their 20s are taking a perplexingly long time to grow up these days -- at least that's the story we're hearing in the media. According to this narrative, young people are stuck in a phase of arrested development, moving in with their parents more often and committing to jobs and marriages later. Most recently, the notion that young people refuse to grow up is the premise for a widely discussed New York Times magazine cover story, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”

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Less Work, More Life

The Progressive / By John de Graaf

A few years ago, after finding-my way through an incredible jumble of bicycles outside her building, I met with a University of Amsterdam professor who studies work-life balance. She recounted a conversation she'd just had with the manager of the Dutch division of an American company who had come to Holland from the United States two years earlier:

Professor: Do you notice a difference between the approach to work time and free time here compared to the United States?

Manager: Yes, it dawned on me my second week on the job. It was a Friday evening, eight o'clock, and we had an important shipment to get out on Monday. I called my assistant at home, and told her to call some of the workers to get some things done on the weekend in preparation.

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