source http://www.activistpost.com/2010/08/senate-blocks-investigation-into-bp.html
Monday, August 30, 2010
Glenn Beck in Washington: Preaching the gospel of Mammon and militarism @glennbeck
source http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/beck-a30.shtml
The Washington rally organized by right-wing Fox News TV personality Glenn Beck on Saturday offered a twisted mix of religion, potted history and the glorification of the military under the banner of "restoring honor" to the USA.
Crowd estimates for the rally varied wildly. Beck and his supporters claimed over half a million. Most media outlets put the figure at "tens of thousands" or approximately 100,000. CBS News provided a more precise figure, relying on a company that performed analysis of aerial photographs to produce a figure of 87,000.
Whatever the real number, this amorphous event received immense promotion and coverage, not only by Beck's own employer, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, but by every section of the media. This treatment stood in stark contrast to the media's virtual blackout of far larger demonstrations held in recent years against the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Beck, who has described himself as a "rodeo clown" and entertainer, while using his television and radio programs to promote right-wing conspiracy theories, reinvented himself for Saturday's appearance at the Lincoln Memorial. He came before the crowd as the nation's preacher-in-chief, promoting a gospel of Mammon, Americanism and militarism that reflects the very direct interests of the powerful financial figures who have turned the former drug addict into a multi-millionaire.
The word "Obama" did not cross Beck's lips. Instead, he advanced the themes of "Faith, Hope and Charity."
Perhaps the most outrageous pretense of the event was that it somehow had "reclaimed the civil rights movement," by presenting the idiotic and reactionary rant of Beck on the same site and 47 years to the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech.
Beck and his fellow right-winger, former Alaska governor and Republican candidate for vice president in 2008, Sarah Palin, repeatedly invoked King's legacy, while giant jumbotrons carried King's image and snippets of the words he spoke in August 1963.
In the months leading up the event, Beck used his radio and television broadcasts to suggest that the American right was somehow the legitimate heir of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, insinuating that it had arisen to counter similar adversities and oppression. One might suspect from such cynical rhetoric that supporters of the "Tea Party" and Beck's viewers were being lynched, beaten, jailed and assassinated in various parts of the country.
The association of King with a rally glorifying militarism was perhaps the greatest obscenity. "What is it that America still believes in?" Beck asked in his opening remarks. "Our military."
A year before his assassination, King denounced the Vietnam war, accusing Washington, in terms that are fully applicable to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, of fighting "on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor."
While Beck hailed King and the civil rights movement Saturday as "people of faith" who merely believed that "everybody deserves a shot," earlier this year he used one of his broadcasts to denounce King as a "radical socialist" and question why a national holiday had been proclaimed in his honor.
The day after the rally, Beck dismissed the demands raised at the 1963 march on Washington for jobs and decent housing as "racial politics" and said that the civil rights movement's economic agenda was "a part of it that I don't agree with."
In crafting his speech, Beck and his handlers appeared to be guided by the famous axiom of P.T. Barnum that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." It was a rambling invocation of God and country that included a full-length recitation of the Gettysburg Address, selective quotations from the Declaration of Independence, the invocation of every hackneyed cliché of Americana and liberal doses of both the New and Old Testaments.
Palin had even less to say, presenting herself as the mother of a "combat vet" and leading the crowd in the chant of "USA, USA, USA."
While right-wing populist movements in America have a long history of wrapping themselves in the flag and the bible, they have also tended to advance definite economic and social policies that at least invoked the interests of the common man. Those influenced by the Christian revivalism of the 1870s and 1880s railed against monopolies and Mammon. Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s denounced capitalism and mixed a poisonous brew of anti-Semitism with calls for inflationary monetary policies, a guaranteed annual wage and limited nationalizations.
The fascist huckster Gerald L. K. Smith would have no doubt appreciated Beck's performance. "Religion and patriotism, keep going on that," he confided in the 1930s. "It's the only way you can get them really 'het up.'" But he put forward demands that included limits on the income of the rich and universal old-age pensions.
In his speech Saturday, Beck offered precisely nothing in terms of proposals. His most concrete advice was to tell people they should pray on their knees and leave their doors open so that their children can see them doing so.
When he first announced his planned Washington rally, Beck had promised he would use it to present "The Plan," which he promised would provide "specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps" to found "a new national movement to restore our great country."
During his speech Saturday, he attributed his decision to do no such thing to what he described as a conversation he had had with God. One could be forgiven for believing that rather than the divine word of God, Beck was responding to instructions from his more temporal lords: Murdoch, the right-wing Scaife family foundation and the other billionaires and corporate entities that bankroll FreedomWorks and the so-called Tea Party movement that played the principal role in organizing the rally.
Instead of policies, principles and action steps, Beck offered reactionary bromides, telling the crowd, "The poorest among us are still some of the richest in the world… and yet we don't recognize it."
"We all must realize how nice we have it here, in spite of our problems," added Beck, who resides in a $4.5 million dollar mansion in New Canaan, Connecticut. He counseled the crowd that "charity begins at home first."
With 26 million American workers on the unemployment lines or unable to find a full-time job, millions more having lost their homes, and working people faced with relentless wage-cutting while Wall Street reels in record profits, such complacent clap trap will find no support from the vast majority of the population. If Beck were to advance an explicit political program based on the interests and aims of the financial aristocracy for whom he speaks, the hostility and opposition would be overwhelming.
Behind Beck's fuzzy rhetoric about individualism and patriotism there does lie a program which these wealthy, right-wing layers support. It includes the systematic dismantling of all forms of social spending that constitute a drain on profit, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It envisions the reduction of wages in the US to a level that would be competitive with those in China. And it seeks the even greater strengthening of the police-military powers of the government to suppress all opposition from the working class at home and to escalate militarist interventions abroad.
Beck and his backers wisely chose to keep this "plan" under wraps. They recognize that the self-described clown is hardly the man, and the amorphous and politically confused layers attracted to the Tea Party are not the movement to implement such a fascistic program.
They lack a mass base for such politics in the US today. The real danger arises from the political subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party and the ruling elite that it serves. Those so-called liberals and "lefts" who promote illusions in Obama bear responsibility for this subordination, which impedes the emergence of a genuine alternative to the policies pursued by both big business parties and allows demagogues on the right to exploit the crisis for their own purposes.
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72 immigrants massacred in Mexico - looking for better life for their families and killed by drugwars
source http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/mexi-a30.shtml
The bodies of 72 undocumented immigrants were found in a ranch in northern Mexico by Mexican marines after a gun battle with drug traffickers on August 25. Authorities said the victims included 58 men and 14 women from El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil, and Ecuador
The massacred immigrants had been making the trek across Mexico to reach the Mexico-US border. The mass killing took place in San Fernando in the border state of Tamaulipas about 100 miles from the border city of Brownsville, Texas. The incident is an indictment of the growing militarization along the border and of the increasingly harsh immigrations restrictions in the United States and Mexico.
The area has been hit particularly hard by violence between the drug cartels and the Mexican government. Many gangs prey on undocumented immigrants and kidnap them for extortion money. If a captured immigrant has relatives in the United States, the kidnappers will ask for an especially large ransom.
Mexican authorities were alerted to the massacre when a lone, wounded survivor, Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, made it to a highway and led the marines back to the site of the killings. A gun battle ensued that left three gunmen and one marine dead.
Lala, who was born in Ecuador, is recovering from a bullet wound to the neck and is expected to survive. On Friday, two more bodies where found in the same location.
According to Lala, the shooting began when the group of immigrants resisted extortion demands from their captors, who he said identified themselves as members of the Zetas, a drug cartel based in Mexico's Gulf Coast.
Family members report that Lela had spent two months on the road from his home in Zer, a native village in the Ecuadorean Andes. His goal was to work in the United States to help his family. His parents, already in the United States, had appealed for help in paying some US $9,000 that they still owed to the coyotes, immigrant smugglers.
Local media posted photos of bodies stacked on top on one another, some blindfolded with their hands tied behind their back, and some slumped in chairs where they had been shot, in an abandoned warehouse.
The massacre at San Fernando is by no means unique. Last May, 55 bodies were discovered in an abandoned mine in Taxco, a popular tourist destination. In July, 51 bodies were found after two days of excavation in a field near a trash dump outside of Monterrey. Last week authorities pulled out two more bodies from a mine shaft in the central state of Hidalgo, where seven bodies had already been removed.
In addition to being kidnapped for ransom money, migrants are also seen by gangs as possible recruits for their operations. Many migrants, coming from destitute areas of Central and South America, have little or no protection on their long and dangerous journey to the United States.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón placed the blame for the massacre on a turf war between the Zetas and a rival criminal gang, the Golfo syndicate.
The horrendous crime, however, reveals a great deal about the government's own policy toward migrant workers. On paper, being an undocumented migrant is an administrative issue. Mexico decriminalized undocumented immigrants in 2007. However, in the framework of the Merida Initiative (a.k.a. Plan México) the government is committed to a policy designed to repress the right of immigrants to move across the region. Merida, a so-called joint security project between the United States and Mexico has, using the pretext of national security, criminalized undocumented migrants as they move through Mexico
The government's policy toward immigrant workers has been denounced for some time by non-governmental agencies and by pastoral groups as a human rights travesty.
Mario Santiago, research director of Foundation I (dh)eas, told El País, "What is clear is that in Mexico there is a criminalization of migrants: they are prey for organized crime. Every day there are kidnappings of migrants who pass on the trains going north, they are extorted, and those who cannot pay for their release are killed. Women are made to work with the kidnappers or they prostitute them. And the share ranges from 50 pesos to thousands of pesos, the latter especially when they have relatives in America. But the worst is that there is no prosecution or investigation of many of these cases,"
Mexico's National Civil Rights Commission (CNDH) has also been critical of the Mexican government. CNDH's President Raúl Plascencia Villanueva declared that his organization would watch over federal authorities to ensure a proper investigation of the Tamaulipas massacre. The CNDH is also involved in trying to positively identify the victims. So far 20 have been identified; when found, none of the immigrants had identity papers.
Last year the CNDH raised the alarm over attacks on migrants from South and Central America, and from Mexico itself, as they move toward the border. In a "Special Report on Migrant Kidnapping," the Commission detailed 9,758 cases of kidnapping of immigrants between September 2008 and February 2009, approximately 1600 per month. The CNDH campaigns for the Mexican government to protect these migrants as they move across Mexican territory.
The report, the result of thousands of interviews of immigrant workers, reveals that assaults on migrants from countries other than Mexico are endemic and are not limited to the northern frontier. Neither are they committed solely by mafia-like elements. They take place throughout Mexico and frequently involve corrupt members of the Mexican police, who, according to the CNDH document, often "brutally beat them, humiliate them and extort money from them with threats of death, prison and deportation."
There is ample evidence that police and army personnel work hand in hand with organized crime in the kidnapping and extortion of immigrants. The CNDH investigation confirms, migrant workers avoid contact with the police and try to stay away from frequently travelled roads. Many migrants travel in groups or 20 or 30 to better protect themselves.
Immigrant shelters frequently report that migrants arrive ill, dehydrated and with serious wounds. Some are suffering from psychological traumas and extreme fatigue, victimized by sexual assaults, often at the hands of the Mexican military or police. Some have been severely injured from falling, or being thrown from, trains.
The CNDH estimates that some 140,000 non-Mexican workers cross the US-Mexico border each year. These migrant workers generally have little money and, as they go from town to town, often wire their relatives back home for more funds. This practice makes it easier for those who would prey on them. Often the hapless migrants fall victim to false offers of food, employment and transportation to the US. Women and children are particularly vulnerable.
The Mexican justice system is largely indifferent to their plight and acts in direct violation of Mexican and international law governing the rights of migrant workers. Even though Mexico is a signatory to those conventions, Mexican courts routinely demand that foreign workers who are victims of crimes first provide proof of their legal immigration status before acting on any complaint.
The CNDH investigation clearly laid out that the human and democratic rights of migrant workers are being grossly violated and called on the Calderón government to protect immigrant workers as they move across Mexican territory toward the US border.
In truth, the opposite is taking place, in cooperation with the US government, the Calderón administration is committed to making it harder for immigrants to cross Mexico's southern border with Guatemala and discouraging the movement of workers across its territory. In addition to the use of biometric technology to check identity documents, Mexican and US authorities oppose any measure that would make the movement of immigrant workers across Mexican territory any easier. The brutality of immigration authorities, the predatory criminal gangs and the collaboration between elements of the police and military with the very same gangs, are part and parcel of these policies.
Incredibly, Mexican President Felipe Calderón used the massacre as evidence that the drug gangs have weakened during his term in office and that his military campaign against them is working. Alejandro Poire, of the Mexican National Security Council said that the violence is evidence that the government's crackdown on drug trafficking in the region is increasing the pressure on drug gangs to search for new recruits and sources of income.
Ever since Calderón declared an offensive against drug traffickers in late 2006, over 28,000 people have died from fighting between drug cartels and government and military forces. The vast majority are working-class and poor Mexicans and other Latin Americans who are caught in the crossfire, like those who died in San Fernando.
The repression of immigrants by Mexican and US authorities is increasingly coupled with the war on drugs and presented as a security issue. The militarization of US-Mexico border by both the Pentagon and the Mexican armed forces is impeding the movement of immigrants, whose increasing desperation makes them easy prey for organized crime and government corruption on the Mexican side.
The death of 74 immigrant workers in northern Mexico is a horrific episode in a far broader human tragedy. Every year tens of thousands of migrant workers leave their countries in search for a way out of grinding poverty and unemployment in countries where they come from. They leave families behind. Tragically, some are never heard from again, as they perish, victims of the combined repression of the US and Mexican governments and predatory crime.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Lest We Forget - August 28, 1963 - Martin Luther King
source http://newstalgia.crooksandliars.com/gordonskene/lest-we-forget-august-28-1963-martin-l
Dr. Martin Luther King at the Mall in Washington 1963 - the pivotal moment
Probably one of the most referenced speeches in history, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech to a crowd of civil rights marchers estimated at over 200,000, assembled at the Washington Mall, August 28, 1963.
Dr. Martin Luther King at the Mall in Washington 1963 - the pivotal momentClick here to view this media
Probably one of the most referenced speeches in history, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech to a crowd of civil rights marchers estimated at over 200,000, assembled at the Washington Mall, August 28, 1963.
In light of how Dr. King's words have been distorted, taken out of context and abused in recent times, I thought it would be appropriate to run this speech in its entirety today as a reminder of how just powerful and universal his message was, and still is today.
Things you just don't want to forget.
NY BILLIONAIRE MEG WHITMAN'S TARP $$ SILENCE
MEG WHITMAN HAS NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT where HER POLITICAL BUDDIES BUSH JR~ KARL ROVE $750 BILLION TARP PONZI $750 BILLION U.S.TAXPAYERS BAILOUT MONIES REALLY WENT !!!
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TARP Billions Shipped Overseas Can't Halt Global Slowdown
Thursday, 12 Aug 2010
By: David A. Patten
Economists and conservatives reacted sharply Thursday to reports that tens of billions in TARP bailout money flowed out of the United States and into the coffers of big banks in France, Germany, and other nations during the government rescue of the U.S. financial system.
That news came as the U.S. economic picture continued to worsen, with rising unemployment claims and a surge in U.S. homes lost to foreclosure.
CATO Institute budget analyst Tad DeHaven tells Newsmax: "The economy has become increasingly global, so it's not shocking that TARP bailout money ended up at foreign financial institutions. Nonetheless, bailing out U.S. financial firms was bad enough — that foreign institutions also benefitted from the largesse just adds insult to injury."
J.D. Foster, senior economics fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said: "The overwhelming force slowing the economy down now is a lack of confidence among American businesses and consumers. The primary reason for that lack of confidence is the policies out of Washington seem completely out of touch with that reality."
That reaction follows Thursday's report from the Congressional Oversight Panel report that, when the United States injected hundreds of billions of TARP money to stabilize the U.S. financial system in September 2008, it also bailed out more than 40 major institutions based overseas that had invested in collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities.
"There were no data about where this money was going," Elizabeth Warren, head of the panel investigating the bank bailout, explained in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. "The American people have a right to know where the money went."
The TARP money flowed to overseas banks largely because of their investment in AIG, which received about $182 billion in federal bailout funds. Roughly half of the 87 banks and investment firms who would have lost billions without the AIG bailout were headquartered overseas, the Oversight Panel reports.
The major foreign beneficiaries included the French bank Societe Generale ($11.9 billion in AIG money), the French bank BNP Paribas ($4.9 billion in AIG funds), and Germany's Deutsche Bank ($11.8 billion), according to The Associated Press. Banks in Canada, Switzerland, and Britain cashed in on the AIG rescue as well.
Many economists credit TARP with staving off a worse financial crisis. But TARP, and the subsequent $862 billion stimulus, also failed to lift the economy out of chronic, massive joblessness and spiraling federal debt.
"TARP was a waste of money and should never have been implemented," Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Employment Policy for the Hudson Institute, tells Newsmax. "Rather, the funds should have been spent on tax cuts to stimulate the economy."
The news that foreign as well as U.S. firms were bailed out by TARP, a program already unpopular with voters, is expected to add intensity to the recent Republican mantra of House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner and RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who continue to demand, "Where are the jobs?"
The Oversight Panel offered the veiled criticism that U.S. leaders should have asked the countries whose banks received the most benefit from TARP to share in its cost.
One criticism of the global bailout is that the United States contributed more, via is action to salvage AIG and other institutions, than foreign governments spent on their entire bailout plans. France spent $35 billion on its financial rescue plan, for example. Germany spent $133 billion. The Oversight Report states the TARP bailout probably helped overseas banks more than their own nations' financial rescue packages did.
Reports on the economy issued Thursday, meanwhile, indicate the nation's economic problems continue to worsen.
The RealtyTrac organization reported that July marked the 17th consecutive month when foreclosure activity exceeded 300,000 homes. The company reported "near-record levels of bank repossessions," which have increased for eight months in a row.
One a brighter note, total foreclosure filings dropped down 9.7 percent compared to July 2009. That marks the second straight month of year-to-year declines.
Adding to the overall sense of economic malaise, the Labor Department released weekly jobless numbers that show an uptick in first-time claims for unemployment benefits, which reached 484,000 last week. That's a seasonally adjusted increase of 2,000 from the week before. Those claims have increased three of the past four weeks. The Dow Jones Industrial average reacted to the economic news by dropping over 70 points before rebounding.
Thursday's economic news also indicates the global economy now appears to be softening, making it unlikely that economic growth in China or India can stimulate business in America.
Derek Scissors, the Heritage Foundation's international economic analyst, tells Newsmax that the notion that strong economic growth overseas, in China for example, could be relied upon to boost the U.S. economy was always suspect and based on "misinformation."
"China's economy is slowing," Scissors confirms. "We continue to be an engine for the world economy, and China continues to benefit from that. It doesn't work the other way, and it's not going to work the other way this year, or next year, or for the foreseeable future."
Adds Scissors: "All of this is very easy to anticipate. You have this massive government stimulus, and it automatically works for a while because they're injecting money into the country, then it doesn't work as well. That happened in the U.S. and it happened in China and it happened everywhere where government stimulus was relied upon as the savior. When you spend a lot of money the first year it has an effect, then the next year it doesn't have that much of an effect. And that's what we're seeing now."
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@glennbeck Beck's big rally just a long-winded and boring sermon. And boy, was the crowd white
source http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/snoring-honor-becks-big-rally-just-l
Click here to view this media
Glenn Beck promised there wouldn't "be a dry eye in the house" after his big speech today at the Lincoln Memorial for his "Restoring Honor" rally -- because, you know, it was going to be "so stirring."
Riiiiight. Well, Glenn Beck's eyes certainly weren't dry. He started weeping while telling the crowd that somewhere out there was "the next George Washington".
Dunno about you, but when I saw pan shots of the crowd -- which was one of the whitest crowds in D.C. in recent memory -- I mostly thought I saw "the next Timothy McVeigh." But your mileage may vary.
As for the speech itself: Lunesta in verbal form. I'm having to pick my head up from my desk just to write something about it.
It was essentially Beck's call for a return to the religious life in America -- which was why he assembled 240 representatives of various churches in the crowd and dubbed them his "new Black Robe Regiment". This part was particularly creepy, since it came with an admonition that religious leaders needed to focus on "fundamental values" -- as defined by Glenn Beck, of course.
This means, naturally, that the "social justice" for which Martin Luther King fought -- and which Glenn Beck has vigorously condemned -- would not be part of those fundamental values.
As predicted, the whole show was a hoax -- a civil rights rally for easily frightened white people.
Oh, and what about those predictions of 100-200,000 people? This looked to me more in the 50-70,000 range for D.C. (We'll update when we get an official crowd estimate.)
Meanwhile, have fun recalling all the amazing things Beck predicted would come of this rally. Yeah, that was some historic turning point, all right.
@glennbeck a civil rights rally for easily frightened white people.
source http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/glenn-beck-does-remind-us-civil-righ
Glenn Beck does remind us of the Civil Rights Era -- that is, the people who hated Martin Luther King
What no one has really pointed out about Glenn Beck's upcoming pep rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is that, in claiming he's following the example of Martin Luther King, he's actually positioning this gig as a civil-rights event. But whose civil rights? Well, judging by what we've seen at the Tea Parties inspired by Beck, it's gonna be pretty damned white.
It is thus, in essence, a civil-rights march for white people. Or more particularly, for right-wing white people who feel threatened by the growing presence and power of the nonwhite population.
Of course, they don't put it that way. They know that race talk will just get them called out for what this is all really about. So they talk about "government oppression" and "taking away our freedoms" and "preserving the Constitution" and "what it means to be American". Strip these down to the bare bones -- especially when you peel away the layers of illogic required to support these claims -- and what's really at issue here is a black man leading nonwhite minorities to power, which is always perceived by authoritarians as a sign of their loss of power.
So that's what it's really about. If the rhetoric all seems terribly vague to you, that's why.
And what's really bizarre and Orwellian about this whole spectacle is that it's part of Beck's larger campaign to demonize progressives -- even though the civil-rights movement was always a progressive phenomenon, and indeed Martin Luther King Jr. often proclaimed some of the very themes, such as "social justice," that Beck loves to demonize as part of progressives' eeeeeevil plot to destroy America.
Moreover, as we've said previously and often, there's a reason conservatives like Beck should never, ever try to claim his mantle or his legacy: Because it was conservatives who attacked and demonized and opposed King at every turn in his career.
Indeed, having grown up in conservative Mormon Idaho in the 1960s, I recall the visceral hatred and fear with which King was widely regarded in those quarters. I remember seeing sheets like this:
This was a flier that was distributed nationally as part of a campaign to discredit King as a Communist. Among the foremost leaders in that campaign, especially among Mormons, was none other than the Church's future president, Ezra Taft Benson. And Benson, in fact, was close friends with Glenn Beck's guru, W. Cleon Skousen -- who was also known to smear King.
And when I watch Glenn Beck, I'm reminded of those days. Because just like the Bensons and Skousens, Beck is one of those guys who is always eager to point the finger and call someone a "communist" or a "marxist" or a "socialist".
Indeed, Media Matters put together a lovely compendium of the many ways Glenn Beck would have demonized King had they been contemporaries -- and were Beck not eager to try to claim some kind of cultural mantle from him.
Also, be sure and check out Glenn Beck Is Not Martin Luther King.
Meanwhile, Justin Elliott at Salon points out that Beck stands to make a pretty penny from this shindig.
Plus, this statement from People for the American Way:
"Forty-seven years later, Glenn Beck is trying to appropriate Dr. King's legacy in order to push his agenda of intolerance, fear, and division. Beck says he's 'reclaiming civil rights.' In fact, he's insulting exactly what Dr. King and his movement stood for. Beck has made himself famous for his attacks on progressives, Muslim Americans, union members and even churches who preach the social justice values to which Dr. King dedicated his life. He claimed that President Obama has 'a deep-seated hatred of white people.' Beck is not 'restoring honor' to our country; he's just fanning the flames of tired old prejudices amplified and enlarged for political gain.
"Beck's histrionics and his deeply cynical appeals to bigotry are anathema to Dr. King's legacy. In honoring the life work of Dr. King, Americans should stand for justice and equality for all people, and against hate and those who speak, teach and promote it."
[H/t The Other 98% and Nicole.]
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