Michelle Goldberg reports on the latest in Glenn Beck’s anti-George Soros jihad:
If you know this history, you’ll understand why Glenn Beck’s two-part “exposé” on George Soros, whom Beck calls “The Puppet Master,” was so shocking, even by Beck’s degraded standards. The program, which aired Tuesday and Wednesday, was a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Nothing like it has ever been on American television before.
“There is a crisis collapsing our economy—George Soros,” Beck said on Tuesday’s show. “When the administration and progressives look for a savior to step in and save the day—George Soros… He’s pulled no punches about the end game. It’s one world government, the end of America’s status as the prevailing world power—but why?” Because, Beck suggests, Soros wants to rule us all like a God: “Soros has admitted in the past he doesn’t believe in God, but that’s perhaps because he thinks he is.”
I only heard about this recently. The ADL has mostly avoided criticizing Beck, presumably because Abe Foxman sees Beck as an ideological ally.
One thing I find interesting is that the Washington Post’s Charles Lane — who specializes in attacking public figures he sees as anti-Semitic (Chas Freeman, Mary Robinson) — is perhaps Beck’s biggest fan among national pundits; he spoke glowingly of Beck’s rally and even attacked Obama for “not getting” what a beautiful outpouring of real Murkiness the whole thing was.
As always, IOIYAC.
The Dangerman
If George Soros came out and said he has converted to Islam, their heads would explode (I’m not saying this as a bad thing).
matt
You missed out on the best part: Beck outright called Soros a Nazi Collaborator.
KG
I’ll say this for the guy, he’s maximizing his 15 minutes. But, yeah, clock’s ticking.
Kryptik
Like I said before: If there’s this massive left-wing conspiracy and Soros and ACORN and the like already run everything…then why the fuck do the GOP and their ‘business allies’ seem to overtly own every fucking thing in this country now? You’d think any good conspiracy of this scale would manage to keep things ‘left wing’ instead of this ridiculously continuous right wing tilt further and further. Creeping Soshulism my fucking ass.
Lancelot Link
You know who else hates George Soros?
Check out Glenn Beck’s allies;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL9MaZQORfI
asiangrrlMN
I truly don’t get the right’s fascination with George Soros. I mean, why him? What makes him among all the lefties particularly galling? Is it his funny last name? Is it his glasses? What? Why is he the ultimate evil?
Oh, by the way, I got my BJ pet calendar today. It’s teh awe-sums!
catclub
in this case the C in IOIYAC is crazy.
Is it already time for a reprise of Lewis Black’s
takedown of Glenn Beck?
RinaX
@KG:
Doesn’t matter. There will be another one plugged into his place once his time is up. The Republican machine exist independently of any pundit or politician. Limbaugh could die tomorrow and the same type of crap that he spouts will just roll on.
I saw this really come to fruition as a teenager during the Clinton years. As much as people praise the Bush communication while he was in office, they really had to do little more than plug into what was already in place and go from there. The uncomfortable truth is that the left simply failed a long time ago to set up a similar independent machine that had any sort of unity over a period longer than an election.
I read a blog today that pointed out that Republicans pretty much just called themselves Republicans, and that was that, and when in public those fuckers shrug off all of their individual preferences and lockstep like a motherfucker. How many different names do Dems have to describe just how different they are from the “standard” Dem? The first real civil war in forever is brewing in the Republican party because now they have a bunch who just might want to put their agenda above the party, and are even labeling themselves differently. I will find it absolutely fascinating if this split indeed becomes something other than wishful thinking, and because essentially Republicans will be acting like…Democrats.
Jay
“The ADL has mostly avoided criticizing Beck, presumably because Abe Foxman sees Beck as an ideological ally.”
On Beck’s latest, The ADL may have been late in coming, but in the very article you link, DougJ, Michelle Goldberg points to strongly-worded criticism from Foxman. I don’t see Beck & Foxman coming together after those pointed remarks.
Further, as Charles Johnson, at that onetime cesspool LGF, has pointed out, the ADL singled out Beck in its comprehensive 2009 report on Wingnuttia.
The ADL opposition to Park51 pissed me off, and Foxman’s treatment of some of Israel’s critics is hard to take, but I’m not quite sure he & the group have exactly been in bed with Beck in recent times. If there’s evidence that they endorse each other, or that the ADL really has been soft on Beck, I’d be open to seeing it.
catclub
@asiangrrlMN:
Because he is a billionaire and is thus seen as a class traitor.
SATSQ
Joseph Nobles
Media Matters has caught Beck pulling a Breitbart with Soros video.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@asiangrrlMN: That’s easy, he’s wealthy and he earned it by being liberal. Also, he calls out businesses when they try to pull crap like stock options being free.
DougJ
@Jay:
Goldberg is too kind, the ADL waited a long time to criticize Beck and their “we like to wait” line is pure bullshit. They normally send out a lacerating press release ASAP when they hear something they think is overtly anti-Semitic….as they should. They sat on this because they’re a Republican organization at this point.
MattR
Does George Soros actually own anything other than a financial company? I am trying to figure out how exactly he is able to control the world.
@DougJ:
I almost spit out my drink when I read that. That is some chutzpah.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
This is the kind of crap that completely pisses me off about wingers – and I’m using the term to describe anyone who listens to Beck, Limbaugh, and Bachmann – if they were to think for two minutes, they would realize it’s the fact that we’ve cut taxes so much that we cannot run the country any longer. Until they will pause long enough to see what is going on, we’ll never get through to them.
The Dangerman
@asiangrrlMN:
I think it’s because he has a huge pile of money, yet is still a liberal. How could that be?
More seriously, if the Right complains about it, ya know they are doing it, too.
Soros = Kochs
Miss Kublik
Well, let’s just say that this time, Abe Foxman and the ADL were not amused.
jl
@asiangrrlMN: I think that much of the right is financed by a few nutcase gazillionaires, like the Kochs. They want to distract from this little open secret.
And maybe they see their sugar daddies as the source of their power in the media and in getting attention. A rival liberal sugar daddy scares them.
Those are my guesses.
The Beck smears are not new. I remember GOP politicians smearing Soros as an international drug dealer and sinister foreign influence (even though he has been a US citizen for over 30 years, I think) at COP conventions in the last two presidential elections. Wish I knew were to look for the clips.
I don’t think it is fair to the GOP to blame this solely on Beck’s vileness and insanity. It has been a talking point of the GOP liemasters for some time. It gets more attention when Beck raves on for half an hour at a time, than when a GOP Congress person mutters a few slanders in an interview during a national GOP convention.
Edit: Dangerman beat me to it.
Svensker
@DougJ:
No, you’ve got it backwards. They like Beck because he’s an Israel supporter, and that’s what matters at this point. What happens to individual Jews isn’t important, particularly if those Jews are not zionists. Soros is not a zionist, so he can easily be thrown under the caterpillar tractor. What matters is that hardline Israel gets support and whatever they have to do to promote that — even if it means shutting up about horrible scum like Beck — will get done. Being Republican has nothing to do with it.
Jay in Oregon
@Kryptik:
This reminds me of Ask a Ninja, a series of goofy webvideos where a ninja answers questions sent in by viewers.
In one episode, someone asked a question to along the lines of “If ninjas are so awesome, how come they don’t rule the world?”
The ninja’s response? “We do. We just like it this way.”
Roger Moore
@Kryptik:
You should know better than to expect sanity or even consistency out of people like Beck. His listeners just want something to be angry and resentful about, and they don’t particularly care if it holds together as a coherent theory. If there’s anything inconsistent, it’s just because the conspiracy has muddied the waters. The truth is out there, and Beck is the only one looking for it, etc.
MattR
@Svensker: I agree with your take. The list of personal characteristics the ADL cares about is:
1) do you support the state of Israel unconditionally
2) see number 1
It just so happens that the current batch of Republicans are mostly Zionists, but the political affiliation is largely irrelevant.
Steve
The ADL finally went to town on Beck over this, as have many other Jewish groups. Calling Soros a Nazi collaborator used to be reserved for wingnutty blog commentors, and it really crosses all kinds of lines.
Of course, some liberals say Bush’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator, so as always, Both Sides Do It!
Joseph Nobles
@The Dangerman: But Warren Buffett and Bill Gates give to liberal causes all the time. They certainly have been advocating for a higher tax rate for the upper brackets. And Mark Cuban is a big-time liberal, and Steve Jobs…
…but it’s just George Soros that gets the special consideration.
Maybe Soros and Murdoch have some history? I don’t know. I’m just waiting for Soros to hit Beck and Fox with a slander suit. Beck’s show runs in the UK, and the standards for proof are much lower than here. Of course, that may be just what they want.
KG
@RinaX: oh, I know there will be someone else plugged into his spot, I’m just it’s hoping that whoever it fills the void will be less of a crazy asshole.
As for your second point, I’ve been hearing about the Republican civil war since my teenage years during the Clinton Administration. I’m not going to believe it until I see… while this election was interesting in that regard, I’m not convinced that the Tea Partiers are anything other than standard issue socially conservative populist Republicans.
But yeah, the GOP has always been a bit more organized as a party. Which is why I still suspect that Romney gets the nomination in 2012, it’s his turn (look at 2008, the GOP noise machine was railing against McCain and yet he came out on top for the same reason). For whatever reason, the elected leaders of the party can convince each part of the coalition to support them while they back burner their pet issues. I suspect it’s because the primary issue for a lot of them is lower taxes.
kdaug
@asiangrrlMN:
Or the corollary – Soros is an old man. When he’s gone, who’s the next one? What are the criterion for the evil leftist? Money, obviously, is requisite. But what else?
Foreign-born?
Funny accent?
Donations to the democratic party?
And what, by any criteria, is the difference between Soros and Murdoch?
Projection, indeed.
FlipYrWhig
OT: Did people see the Rachel Maddow interview with Jon Stewart? I thought he was surprisingly testy. Then Lawrence O’Donnell had on Jane Hamsher, who complained about “leadership” on the tax cut thing and threw in some odd remarks about the deficit commission thing, so that was a swell use of my not-terribly-precious time.
WyldPirate
@MattR:
Fixed.
Sounds like most of the posters here.
MattR
@kdaug: The obvious answer is Bloomberg, especially if he does not run in 2012 or 2016.
Jewish, check.
Billionaire, check.
Owns financial company, check.
ETA: Philanthropic, check.
Plus the company he owns largely controls the flow of financial information in this country. Now we have our angle.
asiangrrlMN
@Joseph Nobles: This was my point. There are other gazillion-aires who are “class traitors”, but none are excoriated quite like Soros.
@kdaug: Damn. I think you actually got it. The projection thing again. Republicans know they do X, Y, or Z, so they assume Democrats do it, too.
Kryptik
@FlipYrWhig:
He seemed disappointingly too concerned with tone, and not enough with fact. He took MSNBC to task over things like the town hall meetings and treating them like they were astroturfed, despite…you know…them actually being astroturf.
It’s a depressing thing to think, but it seems he’s fully bought into the ‘fair and balanced’, ‘it’s not the policy, it’s the process’ bullshit that permeates the so-called narrative. And even when Rachel tried to point out even the gulf between the tone on the left and the right, he still tried to pull the same ‘pox on both houses’ shit. It wasn’t an endearing interview for me.
WyldPirate
@FlipYrWhig:
Once upon a time, the POTUS was considered the leader of his political party.
I suppose that’s not operative anymore because leaders usually have to take responsibility for things.
Li
The thing is, that there is plenty of evidence that the US economy is about to take a dive, one that will go into the history books, if people keep downgrading our bond status. But this is due to our militarism and the rampant criminality in our bloated financial sector, not Soros. But accuracy is not the point.
The point is, that when the economy does collapse, these sad victims of concerted brainwashing will have a prepared, and conveniently leftwing (at least supposedly, I’ve seen a disturbing number of pics of Soros laughing away with Murdoch at the various gatherings of the ultra-rich that are all the rage) scapegoat. And then, they can achieve transference through some slight-of-mind, and it’s like magic! The big collapse is not because a bunch of rich fascists decided to hollow out the economy with a series of destructive and criminal moves, it’s because of George Soros, liberals, and booga-booga! Of course, the only correct response to this vile socialist conspiracy is to give even more power to the plutocracy (ignore that detonator in their hands). I knew something was up when Mom called about how Soros the evil said that he believed he is God, ect. ect. It’s brilliant, and it’s terribly evil.
jl
As I hinted above, I am not sure that when Beck spouts some crazy BS, that it is just Beck.
These stooges get their ideas from somewhere. To me, a nerdo, there are clues. One that sticks in my mind is the David Brooks column where he dissed John Maynard Keynes as not knowing any math, therefore his analysis is dodgy. Besides that fact that Keynes’ book on probability has had a continuing influence on the foundations of probability, how on earth would such a notion come to Brooks? Some hack told him that, and that it would be a good line to use. So Brooks typed it up like a good little hack.
Maybe the tell is that the bigwigs are talking about Soros’ Open Society project that operated in Soviet dominated countries. This was a methodical and professional operation that supported conferences, developed journalism and academic centers, in many countries. It had a big influence.
Maybe the money masters and the GOPers who whisper into Beck’s ear are scared of Soros, who has shown he can make funding go a long way, and that he is persistent, and is willing to play a long game for projects he believes in.
Some bigshots are scared of Soros, told Beck to go after him, and Beck’s fevered imagination and near lunacy took things from there.
Those are just my speculations.
Kryptik
@asiangrrlMN:
I’m not sure it’s them assuming Democrats do it, at least all the time. It’s the same Rovian ‘attack their strengths’ bullshit. They KNOW they do this stuff, so they have to push to make it SEEM like the Dems are the ones really doing it. It’s not just projection, but deflection. Not only attribute your sins to your opponent, but do it explicitly to hide your sins to begin with.
And it always seems to fucking work, because our Media continues to believe the best of Republicans and the worst of Democrats.
FlipYrWhig
@WyldPirate: Well, I have a high standard, I guess. I want the people who go on TV to say something I haven’t heard 50 times that day and is approximately as meaningful as a sportscaster saying that “it all comes down to who wants it more, Chris.”
asiangrrlMN
@Kryptik: Hm. I think your take is more cynical–and probably right. Alas.
@jl: I like the way you speculate. Keep going!
Nick
Clearly, if Obama had used the bully pulpit…
too bad he spent September and October flying around the country arguing we should get rid of Soros’ tax cut.
jl
@Kryptik:
Jon Stewart is a comedian. So, why take him seriously when he tries to talk seriously? Would it be a good idea to take George Carlin’s ‘serious’ advice about voting?
I like Jon Stewart, I think he is force for good, but I cannot get upset if his insight into things does not go that deep.
He is a jester, in the best sense of that word. Let him do what he does.
Maybe Wyatt Cenac or John Oliver or Lewis Black would do a little better at a serious interview, not sure.
Joseph Nobles
@asiangrrlMN: Yep. I was going to give you three guesses as to what set Soros apart from the ones I named, but lo and behold, Mark Cuban is Jewish. I did not know that!
FlipYrWhig
@Kryptik: I think that when you get down to it Jon Stewart has a rather grand and slightly nostalgic view of what The News is supposed to be, and he gets very pissed off when The News doesn’t behave. It shouldn’t degenerate into fighting (like Crossfire), and it shouldn’t be amateurish (like Rick Sanchez) or polemical or sarcastic. I think that’s what he meant when he got prickly about the suggestion that Rachel’s territory was similar to his. If The News is merging with The Daily Show, then it’s doing its job poorly. That’s a consistent theme between his conversation with Maddow and his confrontation with Tucker Carlson years ago.
Yutsano
@jl: Possibly. But the fact that they took what was essentially the largest political joke evah (the double your size Washington, DC rally needs to be memorialized in that way) and treated it as some huge liberal uprising just shows how misplaced faith is in Stewart as a political commentator. The Daily Show is meant as pure entertainment, nothing more, nothing less. Anything else is what folks are projecting upon it.
Hmm…there’s that projection thing again.
asiangrrlMN
@Joseph Nobles: Huh. Did not know that (about Cuban).
@Yutsano: Hi, hon. You are right about Stewart. I still can’t help be disappointed in him, though. I’ll live.
Nick
@WyldPirate:
Yeah, AFTER his most important title…President of the United States.
El Cid
Some years ago George Soros killed me in cold blood, because I had found the links between him and Queen Elizabeth in controlling the world’s narcotics trade, and because I decoded the messages he broadcast via Purina commercials to the reptilians.
Yutsano
@El Cid: Pics or it never happened. :)
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Oh noes! I fake-married a zombie!
@Kryptik: This is also true, alas. Although, I would dispute as to whether the Blue Dogs are cynical or not.
Kryptik
@asiangrrlMN:
These days, any Democrat who isn’t cynical is probably deluded or a Blue Dog. Possibly both.
jl
@Yutsano:
I agree. The Daily Show is satire, and it does it very well. Satirists have a history of not having a whole lot useful to say, if you want serious constructive analysis. Take Carlin, for example.
I would not be surprised if you scratched Stewart deeply enough you found a rather naive centrist (though I doubt he could play in the Broder league).
Steve Colbert is more interesting, but I doubt he would ever be so simple minded as to fall out of character. So, if you had a ‘serious’ interview with Colbert, I would practice finding my way through a hall of mirrors first, for practice.
After thinking about it, I would rather hear a ‘serious’ interview with Cenac, Oliver or Lewis Black than Stewart. But then they are the help, and I think better stand up comedians, and can probably mouth off without worrying about endangering the brand of the show.
Anyway, folks, the Satirist is NOT YOUR FRIEND, and does not want to be, no matter who you are. That is their way. So do not be disappointed when they disappoint you.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: That is especially funny to me, considering two of your other hubbies are, respectively, a lawyer and an ebil tax agent.
FlipYrWhig
@Yutsano:
I don’t think I’d say that. It’s political… but not partisan, or at least not as much as it could be. He said during the interview that the political divide that mattered wasn’t liberal vs. conservative but “corruption” vs. “non-corruption.”
Mnemosyne
@Joseph Nobles:
Weird as it sounds, the problem with building a huge conspiracy around Mark Cuban is that he’s too young. Plus he’s a software guy, not in finance like Soros is.
But I really do think the thing that makes Soros such a useful boogeyman is that he’s a Big Scary Joo.
jl
@El Cid: I thought that group hired David Hume, British spy and thug, to knock off people who found them out.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Ha! So, you’re saying he fits right in. Hey, jl, you wouldn’t happen to be a vampire by chance, would you?
jl
@asiangrrlMN: I am an economic statistician, who worked in high finance years ago. Is that close enough?
Edit: Is it true you fake married a whole BJ thread? I’ve been thinking about, well, how to explain that to my sainted mum.
FlipYrWhig
@jl:
That relates to the literary-critical distinction between the “Horatian” satire (playful, tolerant, about foibles) and the “Juvenalian” satire (caustic, indignant, about wickedness).
WyldPirate
@FlipYrWhig:
You know something, FlipYrWhig, I can see why you might feel that way.
I know that I’ve been raising hell about a lot of things, specifically about the tax cut fiasco. I hadn’t watched any cable today, but i was shocked hearing some of the very same things that I had written (less the rape stuff) towards the end of that long thread we had the civil exchange in at the end.
I know a lot of people here feel as if there is some big conspiracy amongst the “professional left”/progressives/flaming liberal that they’re “out to get Obama”. A lot of them are angry as hell, though. And there are a lot of legitimate gripes people have.
We’re not Obama’s problem, though. We may bitch and piss and moan, but I’m a dyed and the wool flaming liberal and there is no circumstance that I can see myself ever voting for a Rethug.
Obama’s problem is with the independents. Right now in all of those states in the midwest like Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan as well as North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania he’s lost a lot of those people IMO. I don’t think he’s going to get them back, either.
Obama has a big electoral problem looming on the horizon. All of the head burying around here that is going on isn’t going to go away and turnout of young people and minorities is not going to make it go away, either.
I don’t think the problem is going away despite the spin put on things here.
El Cid
@jl:
David Hume wasn’t committed enough, so they turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
asiangrrlMN
@jl: Yes. Close enough. And, yes, I did marry a whole thread once. Actually, upon checking with the Googley, I have married two threads (though I can’t find which ones. I know one was really hilarious, though) and a comment. I also have a standing proposal to Tunchie who has not accepted. I have four fake-hubbies and a fake-wife, and one of my fake-hubbies has brought another fake-wife into the family. Oh, and one of my fake-hubbies has a real hubby in real life. Explain that to your mother!
Here is one thread I married–the second one, I think. Still trying to find the other.
ETA: As I’ve said to Yutsy, I’m not cheap, but I am easy.
Yutsano
@jl: You could go for something like this:
Though I have a strange feeling it would make Thanksgiving, umm, entertaining.
mclaren
So now they’re going after the Jews.
Kristallnacht draws ever closer…
WyldPirate
@Nick:
I don’t know if you noticed last Tuesday or not, Nick, but the people he leads as POTUS don’t seem to be particularly impressed with the political party Obama leads.
Sometime that sort of thing turns out to be pretty important.
And you can save the Clinton comparisons of ’96. The economy was thriving then. It isn’t going to be thriving in two years most likely. I would put even money on things being even worse.
El Cid
@asiangrrlMN: I got better.
Nick
@WyldPirate: Dude, we all know Obama is going to lose in 2012. None of us think he’s not in electoral jeopardy.
But that’s ok. Like I said. Democrats always lose when they do the right thing, so let them do what they can do, and let the masses of idiots reject them and be sorry they did in five years.
Nick
@WyldPirate:
Voters are misinformed idiots, but we knew that already.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Whew! I wouldn’t have to dedded you again.
@asiangrrlMN: Hm. I think I may divorce that thread. The other one was much funnier.
MattR
@asiangrrlMN: And just when I finally caught up on everything that happened after I left it. I do see I utilized my two favorite rhetorical weapons – asking simple questions as if I am talking to an 8 year old and bitter sarcasm.
Martin
@Joseph Nobles: Technically, Steve Jobs is probably Jewish as well. He was adopted, but his birth dad is a Syrian Muslim and his birth mom is believed to be Jewish.
He’s never identified himself as Jewish, but technically, he probably is. His dad’s name was Abdulfattah Jandali. I wonder if the right-wing freak show would be as willing to overlook Steve if he was more obviously half-Muslim.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN:
I shudder to think of the legal wrangling involved in that process.
asiangrrlMN
@MattR: Heh. I just went through and read your comments. Yes, you did it very well. I did my usual method of alternating angry sarcasm and compassion.
I am obsessed with finding the other thread. All I can remember is that it was started by Cole. He asked a flippant question, and the answers were brilliant. Argh.
@Yutsano: No wrangling. I will just cut the knot. Ha!
FlipYrWhig
@WyldPirate:
Here’s the thing, though. It’s _always_ like this when a Democrat is in the White House. When something happens that doesn’t go quite the right way, other Democratic politicians rush to the media, left-leaning columnists start cranking up the disappointment and the outrage, and everyone starts running for cover and/or playing woulda coulda shoulda. And they all say, “The president’s problem is that he didn’t do it my way.” Ya know, sometimes your way can’t be done.
I watched the Philadelphia Eagles very closely for like 8 years when I was living there. Every year the coach would let the running game languish and be totally enamored with the passing game. And I and all the other fans would say, “Why doesn’t he run the damn ball? Just for a change of pace!” Well, you know, maybe there’s a reason for it. Maybe he doesn’t trust the line’s run-blocking, or is very nervous about getting his backs injured, or something. Something that we while watching on TV just don’t know and won’t know. And that doesn’t make it less frustrating to watch.
Basically, my big thing is this. When somebody I’m pretty sure isn’t stupid is doing something that looks stupid, I want to know why that would be. There’s probably a reason. I don’t have to _buy_ the reason, but I’d like to argue about it on the right terms.
On this tax cut thing, it looks to me like Democrats in the Senate don’t want to go along with what the president wants to do. He has been clear about how what he wants is a tax cut for the first $250K and not another one for more than that. He was clear about thinking the public option was good policy too. But if there’s not support for it, and he’s been told that, and that the key people aren’t budging… well, if that’s the way things stand, I don’t know what he is supposed to do about it. And I don’t see what good it does to get all het up about the terrible thing he’s doing if he’s not the one making it happen. To me it looks like his own party is trying to box him in. I don’t see how _any_ president could get out of that box. Maybe on some issues you could have a president battle against his own party out in the open and hope to prevail. Not over tax cuts.
frosty
@asiangrrlMN: Moveon.org. That’s all that’s needed.
El Cid
Thanks to Japanese innovations, soon you won’t have to go to a concert to see live bands, with all their complexities and variations.
Now you can go to cheer excitedly at a concert given by a 3D-looking projection of a computer-generated avatar character singing with computer generated voice. Really. Go watch the video. In HD if you want.
And the character and its albums are best-sellers.
On the plus side, Disney may soon not have to worry about the young girl stars they create to sell to the pre-teen crowd burning out and going wild.
Yutsano
@El Cid: Okay, when the Japanese start copying their own science fiction, it gets closer to me seriously considering checking out of this universe.
asiangrrlMN
@frosty: I guess. But why is that the bugaboo? I really don’t understand the concentrated paranoia.
MikeJ
@Yutsano: Is that like Gibson’s Idoru?
Yutsano
@MikeJ: Kinda similar, though Macross Plus pre-dates that by about 15 years.
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
I dunno — Wikipedia says his (and his sister’s) mother is Swiss and German. Possible, I suppose, but not necessarily an open and shut case.
(Jobs and Mona Simpson are full siblings, not half-siblings.)
MattR
So do y’all remember when J-Lo was dating Puffy and there was a club shooting where one of Puffy’s proteges ended up going to jail for a while? That guy is now an Orthodox Jewish rapper who lives in Israel and his father is the Prime Minister of Belize. That is what I learned today.
asiangrrlMN
@MattR: Nice!
And, I just discovered why I can’t find the first thread I married–it’s been deleted/removed/disappeared. I’m a widow and a divorcee in one fell swoop!
ETA: It was the thread, “Hello, World!” that mysteriously popped up well after BJ had been established (during one of the site maintenances, I think).
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Your marriage history is long, sordid, and juicy. I smell a romance novel in the making!
jl
@asiangrrlMN: My deepest condolences, AsiangrrlMN.
I will drink away your sorrows before I sleep.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Bodice-ripper! I could make mad monies.
@jl: Thank you. I still have four fake-hubbies (of which you are one), one fake-wife, a tangential fake-wife, and an outstanding proposal to Tunchie. I, sniff sniff, I will survive!
El Cid
Senate Republicans want to raise taxes on the 60% of Americans at the lower end of the earning scale and cut taxes for those above it.
This is merely a reflection of America’s united rejection of Obama in favor of smaller government, lower spending, and lower taxes. Also because he’s black.
Taxed. Enough. Already?
El Cid
@MattR: The problem with reality today is that it makes satirical fiction that much harder.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Well shit. There goes my jolly mood. But, did you mean for the last bolded sentence to be bolded?
ETA: You fixed it. Damn you.
El Cid
@asiangrrlMN: Putting it in as some sort of bulleted list seems to screw it up.
El Cid
This will have zero consequences, because America is a center-right nation.
Also, economist / sociologist / political theorist David Brooks is really angry at how people who don’t love the Simpson/Bowles deficit enlarging commission draft don’t want America to be Great again.
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t list ‘some of the best ways’ to raise revenue and cut spending. Unless one of the best ways is to once again cut taxes on the wealthy and pretend you’re going to ‘close loopholes’ to make up the difference.
Of course, Krugman may be some piece of shit idiot non-expert ideologue who sees no sign that the bond vigilantes are coming for us because of our debts, but Brooks sure knows better.
Hopefully we’ll be able to get that debt down by cutting taxes, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and letting unemployment stay at 10% or so forever, because who gives a shit about revenue when talking about deficits and the debt?
I.e., ‘There may not be any evidence now for the nightmares I’m summoning out of my ass, but there will be.’
Jason
This is a rhetorical question, right?
He’s a Jew. He’s a dirty, scummy greedy billionaire liberal commie pinko Jew. And deep down, behind their “Israel uber alles” rhetoric, the right still retains a visceral, inherent hatred for scummy greedy billionaire liberal commie pinko Jews. Hence Beck’s unbelievably brutal anti-semitic dog-whistling.
And Soros has the gall to spend millions on liberal causes. He’s a class traitor — he should realize that, like Scaife or Murdoch or “Reverend” Moon, it’s only OK to play daddy warbucks if you’re a Republican.
CAE
There is a blog called “Yid With Lid” linked at memeorandum on this story, where you can go and see someone in the 21st century suggest that Beck calling this “puppetmaster” Jew a “bloodsucker” was unfairly taken out of context.
I don’t know why I thought I could stop being surprised by the internet.
Resident Firebagger
@Svensker:
Ding. And bonus ding for the Rachel Corrie reference.
steviez314
As I have been saying for 2 years, sooner or later the Right Wing will get tired of hating on the Blacks, the Browns, and the Moslems.
And they will go back to their old favorites, the Jews.
spudvol
Does anyone think this blog will be overrun with anti-semites once they realize that you can rearrange the letters in “BALLOON JUICE” to spell “CLUB A LIE’N JOO”?
OK, OK, I had to borrow an apostrophe to make that work.
aimai
@FlipYrWhig:
I agree with this assessment. I’ve thought for a long time that Obama was essentially isolated by his own party–he doesn’t have good surrogates (other than Biden and Michelle and, oddly enough, Ray LaHood) to get on TV or go around and make speeches for him.
One of the most interesting moments of the campaign, for me, was the moment when Obama walked in to his debate with McCain surrounded by other men and McCain walked in alone. Frans de Waal made the anthropologist’s argument that Obama’s walk, stance, and companions indicated that he was the coming young man surrounded by support and maturity while McCain’s indicated that he was an old loner, stripped of influence and of true power.
But since the election I just haven’t seen Obama as having enough, or good enough, support throughout the Democratic hierarchy. Its totally not his fault, except insofar as he elevated really terrible people (like Simpson and Bowles). Where he could he’s brought in great people (Van Jones but he lost him, Elizabeth Warren).
But he failed to clean house and elevate new people who would be totally loyal to him or effective at pushing his policies publicly. And I think that’s hurt him with the totally disloyal and self obsessed Senators. In the house he had Pelosi to whip for him and she did a bang up job.
aimai
JCT
@steviez314: They never stopped, they just shuffled the order of the “hate rotation”. Besides as long as they can use their “support” of Israel as a cudgel against the rotten Muslims, the Jews are useful to them, at least in their public statements. And look how useful Bibi has been to them in his near constant spats with Obama. Plus, they get evangelical “cred” for supporting Israel to the hilt (even though my beagle is a better Christian than most of them) — talk about the ultimate win-win.
it’s all quite perverse.
Dennis SGMM
@FlipYrWhig:
I think that you’re partially correct: there were/are a number of Democratic Senators who were never on-board with Obama’s agenda. There were others who demanded bill-crippling concessions for signing on. Add Republicans’ general intransigence and you had a perfect wrecking crew.
To me, Obama wasted goodwill and momentum on the tortuously long process of getting HCR passed and then he compounded his own difficulties by allowing Republicans to shape the narrative regarding the bill during the Summer of ’09. By the time that Congress reconvened many in America were convinced that HCR was all about death panels and mandates. The notion of including an option such as Medicare buy-in was off of the table simply because the bill was increasingly perceived as toxic.
Finally, I think that some of the internal contradictions in Obama’s own administration kept him from being more effective in addressing unemployment. His appointments of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, both of whom seem to me to believe that if you take care of Wall Street then that will somehow fix the rest of the country, may not have been the best choices. It may be that the situation in the Senate precluded more effective action on unemployment but, it would have been nice to see the administration try.
liberal
@Joseph Nobles:
Yes, but overall they’re not nearly as partisan as Soros. They tend to fund things like education. It’s like the claim that lots of philanthropies are “liberal.” Something like the Ford Foundation could possibly be construed as “liberal,” but most of what they do is charitable.
And while I don’t recall Soros as being as radical in his critiques of American capitalism as, say, Stiglitz, he’s certainly more radical than Buffett and Gates.
I agree that another thing about Soros is that he’s Jewish and originally foreign and IIRC has a bit of an accent.
Woodrowfan
The comments on the OP on “The Beast” are depressing. So many angry, deluded wingnuts all frothing at their latest targets for their hatred.
liberal
@Dennis SGMM:
That’s an understatement.
That’s the point. It’s not that Obama didn’t get a large enough stimulus; it’s that (possibly due to Summers’ apparent lack of understanding of macroeconomics and economic history) he didn’t even try.
El Cid
One of the reasons that there is an overfocus on the machinations of the evil billionaire puppet master George Soros, or the devious mind-twisters the Tides Foundation, or the secret agents of influence ACORN, and so on, and so forth, is that the populist right is based on and depends upon conspiracy theories in which individuals or groups are given vast powers far beyond those rationally arguable.
liberal
@WyldPirate:
Heh.
Reminds me of one of evil, Obama-hating Glenn Greenwald’s tweets, in response to rootless_e, who I think has commented here in the past. It was along the lines of, “You have thousands of tweets. Can you point to a single one which is critical of something Obama did?”
El Cid
@liberal: In the case of people like Geithner and Summers, they both appear ideologically committed to anti-regulatory and financial industry favoring policies and economics, something which is particularly easy to see in someone like Summers.
debbie
Flipping around the radio dial on Election Day, I heard Beck say that his main goal for the day was to make George Sorros cry. He acknowledged that that would be difficult because, in Beck’s words, Sorros had watched people being thrown into ovens, but he was determined to make it so, regardless. I thought that was pretty offensive.
liberal
@WyldPirate:
I have to disagree with that, at least in one sense. Just as the Dems did poorly mainly because of the unemployment rate, as shown by simple political science models using the economy as one of three driving variables, they’ll do much better if the economy improves.
Now, of course, I don’t think the economy is going to improve anytime soon, because if anything the Federal government is going to start doing contractionary things. But the notion that independent voters are permanently disaffected is, I think, wrong.
liberal
@El Cid:
Well, it’s difficult to distinguish between true lack of knowledge, and knowledge that’s there but suppressed owing to a rather sharp understanding of where one’s paycheck is coming from.
There’s was a really good Felix Solomon column which (along with some other bloggers) broached this issue exactly as I myself prefer to frame it: Economists claim (correctly, IMHO) that incentives matter. Yet clearly economists themselves face huge incentives to favor answers that benefit the rich and powerful. Therefore…
Summers’ case is interesting in one small aspect. He wrote a paper or monograph outlining why he thinks real business cycle theory is complete bunk. So he’s not nearly as nutty as the full-fledged “fresh water” school (like Prescott). OTOH, that’s just a subtle nuance in comparison to the damage his whoring for FIRE has done to the country.
liberal
Yuck. I’ve increasing found CL bad; he’s now passed into “truly despicable” territory.
Dennis SGMM
@liberal:
The Democrats may get those voters back but, I seriously doubt that they’ll get them back soon and I believe that they are defending twenty Senate seats in the next election.
What mystifies me to this very moment is how no one in the administration seems to have seen this electoral train wreck coming – or that they didn’t care enough to do more to prevent it. Telling someone who’s been unemployed or underemployed for months or years that they’ll be better off in 2014 or some other future date does not win elections. Yes, stupid people will usually cast stupid stupid votes, so will people who’ve been scared stupid.
liberal
@Dennis SGMM:
Agreed. All I meant in my reply to WP was that the empirical evidence is that voters were voting their pocketbook, and they’ll keep doing so.
OTOH, AFAICT the “recovery” is going to take a long long long time, and unemployment is going to be awful for years. And it’s going to be worse if austerity wins out.
Agreed.
If this thread were a bit fresher, you’d have ump-teen attacks from local O-bots by now.
Corner Stone
@Dennis SGMM: Obama plays The Long Game ™.
Corner Stone
@aimai:
I tend to disagree with this in a way. At some point we have to conclude that the policies and outcomes we are seeing are the desired ones.
IMO, it’s a question of agency to say the people around the czar are not properly promoting the policies of the czar.
There’s only one boss, and he hired or promoted these people.
chopper
@Steve:
wow, the ADL really ‘went to town’ on beck. except they didn’t. that was the weakest defense of a jew getting the royal smearjob i’ve ever seen out of the ADL.
they even had to throw in the ‘i disagree with soros on policy…’ shtick. why? why do you have to toss that shit in there?
New Yorker
@Joseph Nobles:
Because Warren Buffett is a Real ‘Murkan from Omaha. Bill Gates is a nerd. George Soros, however, is the dreaded international Jew banker who rules the world. It’s classic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” anti-semitism. Given Beck’s paranoid far-right ranting, I’m only surprised it took him this long to get to this point.
water balloon
@liberal:
“Agreed.
If this thread were a bit fresher, you’d have ump-teen attacks from local O-bots by now.”
I like your use of preemptive name calling. Very classy.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal:
Oh jesus fucking christ this is never, ever going to end. Have you ever been on any sort of committee, and you have a good idea, and you argue for it, but it comes down to a vote and the boneheads win? What can you do at that point?
liberal
@FlipYrWhig:
liberal
@water balloon:
It’s preemptive on this thread, but given thread history over the past year or so, it merely reflects a common idiocy here at BJ and isn’t preemptive at all, but a reasonable description.
liberal
@New Yorker:
Yes, but as I pointed out upthread, Soros is in addition far more partisan than Buffett or Gates.
El Cid
@liberal:
The two aren’t in conflict. The best ideologues are those who don’t realize that the reason they don’t accept strongly demonstrated evidence or very strong arguments against their views is based upon their ideology.
You don’t have to be consciously aware that you’re ignoring relevant information or arrogantly dismissing arguments you don’t like in order to do so.
Bill Murray
@FlipYrWhig: How does what you say have to do with Treasuries decision on what cost stimulus to forward to the President. The only vote seems to have been Summers’.