Bookmarking the Paranoid Style

The Huffington Post has the latest on the website Glenn Beck has just strategically launched only days after his Washington D.C. rally. Included in the article is this excerpt from the site:

"Too many times we see mainstream media outlets distorting facts to fit rigid agendas," he wrote on The Blaze. "Not that you've ever heard me complain about the media before. Okay, maybe once or twice. But there comes a time when you have to stop complaining and do something. And so we decided to hire some actual journalists to launch a new website."

Beck Rally Pre-Show

Alternet has an account of the "Restoring Honor" rally pre-event. An event steeped in religion and politics:

Divine Destiny was a three-hour mix of gospel music and patriotic songs from an “all-star” choir of local singers and dancers, inspirational exhortations for people and churches to do good work in their communities, and speeches by Religious Right figures about America’s need to repent for the nation’s sins and turn back to God.

Included in the line-up?

Miles McPherson is a former professional football player and current pastor of the Rock Church, a San Diego megachurch that was active in the campaign to pass Prop. 8 and strip gay couples in California of the right to marry.

Shock Jocking Our Politics

The New Republic has a piece by Alexander Zaitchik that reminds us what Beck is really up to with his "Restoring Honor" rally:

“It’s hard for people who never worked in FM radio during the 1980s to really understand how deep publicity-hunger runs in Beck’s blood,” says Kelly, a radio veteran who worked with and against Beck in two markets. “Morning radio DJ’s were the Navy Seals of getting your name out there and keeping it out there. It was all about finding the biggest stage to promote yourself and your shows. Take away the high rhetoric, and Saturday is just a masterful lesson in the art of the publicity stunt. Old DJ’s like me can only stand in awe.”

"The Waterworld of White Self Pity"

Slate gives us Christopher Hitchens' view of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington D.C. this past weekend. Slate's accompanying video bolsters Hitchens' observation that like the rally, Beck supporters are vague and undirected:

Until recently, the tendency has been to think of this rather than to speak of it—or to speak of it very delicately, lest the hard-won ideal of diversity be imperiled. But nobody with any feeling for the zeitgeist can avoid noticing the symptoms of white unease and the additionally uneasy forms that its expression is beginning to take.

More Lost History Found in the Theater

From the NY Times:

For almost three decades beginning in 1936, many African-American travelers relied on a booklet to help them decide where they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor, shop on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, or go out at night. In addition to hotels, the guide often pointed them to “tourist homes,” privates residences made available by their African-American owners. Mr. Ramsey has written a play, “The Green Book,” about just such a home, in Jefferson City, Mo., where a black military officer and his wife and a Jewish Holocaust survivor all spend the night just before W. E. B. DuBois is scheduled to deliver a speech in town. The play will inaugurate a staged-reading series on Sept. 15 at the restored Lincoln Theater in Washington, itself once a fixture of that city’s “black Broadway” on U Street.

The Kansas Kochtopus

A long investigative piece about the tea-party funders, the Koch brothers of Koch Industries (headquartered in Wichita, KS) is in the New Yorker: The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Oh, and David H. Koch is a big-time philanthropist and arts enthusiast.

One Man's Garbage

From the London Guardian:

Bids are also being invited for Lennon's toilet from Tittenhurst Park, his Berkshire home between 1969 and 1972.

Lennon told a builder, John Hancock, to keep the porcelain lavatory and "use it as a plant pot" after he had installed a new one. It was stored in a shed at Hancock's home for 40 years until he died recently. The toilet is estimated to fetch £750 to £1,000.

The auction organiser, Stephen Bailey, said: "The toilet might be worth something, and it might not, but it is certainly one of the more unusual items we've sold."