Glenn Beck: Lying Obama Wants To Reduce Funding To Child Healthcare!

Glenn Beck just keeps on giving.  See if you can follow the “logic:”

Remember when presidential candidate Senator Obama said ‘if you make under $250,000 a year you will not see a tax increase of any kind’ and his running mate, Joe Biden, said the same? That’s the latest campaign promise to go up in smoke, as the unprecedented tax hike on cigarettes went into effect yesterday. The hike is six times bigger than any other cigarette tax hike in history—and since people making less than $250,000 a year are more likely to smoke it’s a disproportionate tax on the poor. Not only that, the tax will likely discourage low income people from smoking—thus hurting the original reason given for the tax—funding S-CHIP, the health care program for kids.

Wow. Just wow.

Source*, via Slog.

(*The text of the above quote actually comes from glennbeck.com and appears as the above story’s mouse-over preview. FYI.)

Is Glenn Beck The Next Bill O’Reilly?

If you don’t know, Glenn Beck is a former morning radio disc jockey and still performs comedy in shows across the country. This year, he left Headline News to host his own news program on Fox News and has been met with incredible ratings:

Barely two months into his job at Fox, his program is a phenomenon: it typically draws about 2.3 million viewers, more than any other cable news host except Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, despite being on at 5 p.m., a slow shift for cable news.

That’s right, he’s in third place across all of cable (take that, Olbermann!) and he has a 5:00 PM time slot.

Beck offers a performance that in emotionality is probably close or equal to O’Reilly’s, but while O’Reilly is often more angry, Beck comes off more as a fellow victim to those to whom he’s speaking. For example, Beck often cries.

Yes, cries.

Some historians believe that Beck’s popularity is similar to those who were popular in the Great Depression and that drew on people’s fear and frustrations:

[Beck] says that America is “on the road to socialism” and that “God and religion are under attack in the U.S.” He recently wondered aloud whether FEMA was setting up concentration camps, calling it a rumor that he was unable to debunk.

While the topics are serious, Beck still identifies as a nothing more than an entertainer: “I’m a rodeo clown.”

Recently, Stephen Colbert took Beck on and ripped him about 17 new assholes:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I would love to see Beck appear on Colbert’s show only because I think they would be much better matched than Stewart and Cramer.

More: Fox News’s Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful Rising Star (NYT)

Update: It’s not socialism that Obama is bringing, it’s non-violent fascism:

Mark my words: this guy is going to have one huge future.

Fox News Edits Biden Comment To Reverse Meaning

Is anyone even surprised?

Think Progress did some reporting and discovered the clip that Fox News ran, which was presented as current, shows Biden saying, “The fundamentals of the economy are strong…”

…is actually a quote from September (i.e., the campaign) in which he is quoting (and disagreeing with) John McCain‘s assessment of the economy:

What a joke.

FoxNews: National Counterterrorism Center Calendar

The NCTC has released their 2009 calendar, “a 164-page daily planner” (um, yeah, I don’t get it either), featuring pictures of terrorism’s most wanted, including this cleaned-up and Westernized version of bin Laden (“Hey papi!”)

“The calendar, which is free to the public and distributed widely to national security staff, provides pictures of terrorist leaders and important dates in the history of terrorist movements. It even offers advice on how far away to run from bombs of different sizes.  […]

In addition to identifying Muslim, Christian and Jewish holidays, the calendar also notes anniversaries of deadly strikes, which are often used by terrorists for so-called “commemoration attacks” years afterward.”

You can view the calendar here but the site is running really slowly.  (It’s a government site, so the server’s probably operating on dial-up or some shit.  How do you expect to fight terrorism if you can’t even host a website?!?!)

I’m not sure whom I’d rather stare at day after day: Osama bin Sexy or the classy dames from the 2009 Women In Waders calendar.

(And two little gripes: first, this article repeatedly spelled bin Laden’s name “Usama.”  Is that a new thing?  Second, the FoxNews homepage is a hot mess.  I know the websites of television stations/networks are usually kinda booty but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a banner ad for bargain-bin porn one of these days.)