Glenn Beck 4/11/2011 -- Goodbye and Hello

Beck's exit from Fox is timely for someone who understands creativity, growth and innovation. A permanet position at Fox produces Shephard Smith -- a creative person like Beck must go to the next thing. I've enjoyed watching his Fox show, and for those who've said Beck's success is due to Murdoch's power, well, none of these petty critics could produce a 10th of the creativity and energy that Beck created 5 times a week, on top of doing a funny and informative radio show for three hours. I don't know how he did it.

Now Beck can focus his energies on informing a young audience through the internet. Young people in America are over-loaded with re-hashed leftism from public school through media through college and through the music industry. Young people get their news from Jon Stewart, a sharp and snarky light-weight thinker who prefers sarcasm and easy targets to critical thinking and bold creative ideas.

I have my disagreements with Beck, but it's odd that saying this is even necessary -- the Left pillories anyone who even slightly acknowledges the value of something Beck might say, yet they are constantly promoting an open-minded, no-labels approach to thinkers and ideas, so that certain thinkers aren't dismissed because of ideological closedness.

The media and the Left have been hysterically closeminded when it comes to Beck, yet Beck has handled this biased, ignorant and vicious attack with good humor and courageous gusto. Give me Beck anytime over the potted plant journalists, yacking pundits and prissy intellectuals who wouldn't know honest creativity if it bit them on the arse.

See ya in cyberspace, Beck.

Why libertarians and modern liberals don't mix right now

I won't say this is true of all people who think of themselves as modern liberal, but the power structure of the Democrat Party lacks integrity. So does the power structure of the Republican Party, but at least there's a schism in the Republican Party and there's an attempt by a faction of limited government conservatives to regain integrity. While the Democrat Party has it's critics on the left in the form of progressives who believe the Democrats are not going far enough to the left, fast enough, there has not been a Democrat base movement to reveal the lack of integrity and demand changes.

Democrats are desperately dishonest at this point becaue they know they're in trouble, and the liberal base is not calling the party on the dishonesty, they're justifying the smear campaigns by acting as if they are truthful. There's no grass roots movement on the left comparable to the Tea Party to call for an end to business as usual in government and no criticism of the Democrat power structure -- Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, the administration, and the rest of the gang -- for framing each issue in a divisive way which distorts the facts.

At least the Republicans are trying to reform their party and focus of several issues in a honest way -- reduce the deficit, quit over-regulating businesses, don't raise taxes. The Republicans have admitted that under Bush, government grew too much and took on too much power over the economy. The liberals show no signs of realizing or caring how the Democrat Party is growing goverment power at a much faster pace than Bush's Big Government conservativism.

There also appears to be an Eisenhower-Republican movement to re-evaluate our military involvement overseas. Eisenhower was careful with the use of the military, and many Republicans are warning against a nation-building slog in Afghanistan with no clear American interests justified. Liberals should be raising hell about a Democrat administration and congress expanding the involvement in Afghanistan and the questionable use of drones when targets aren't clearly identified -- plus, the expansion of executive power in the war on terror should be a liberal concern, not to mention the continuing violations of power, the talk lately about government subsidizing news organizations and the divisive racial issues brought up and stirred by Democrat supporters.

Liberals are obsessing over Limbaugh and Beck, yet they're saying nothing about extreme rhetoric from Democroat supporters, nothing about the echo chamber of liberal jounalists like Bob Schieffer, and the incident with Journolist - liberals are rationalizing all these concerns and making excuses. I say "nothing" but what I mean is that if there is any criticism, it's quiet and measured.

Plus, liberals are not showing enough concern regarding the economic situation, choosing to blame Bush and overlook the wrongheaded policies of the Democrat Party. All this is contrary to libertarianism and an objective approach to serious issues. Liberal supporters of the Democrat Party have nothing to offer libertarians at this point, regardless of whether Republicas are any better. One thing's for sure, the faction of Republicans who are seriously addressing the flaws of statism and the misuse of the military are much closer to the libertaran vision.

Eclectic Gang upset at own medicine

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/25/the-overlooked-story-from-the-weigel-kerfuffle/

Karl, at Hot Air, brings up a different angle to the David Weigel affair -- Weigel was hired by WaPo to report on conservatives, ostensibly as a conservative, or a new libertarian type of conservative, or something like that -- I don't really care about this part of it -- then he was fired because emails from a private site of moderate-to-liberal journalists were leaked by one of the members. The emails revealed Weigel exoriating conservatives and discussing strategy for the Democrat Party to overcome the Scott Brown win in Massachusetts.

It appears WaPo fired Weigel because of the inappropiateness of the content of the emails. It also appears that a group of writers, Conor Friedersdorf, Andrew Sullivan and Julian Sanchez, to name few identified by Karl in the above link, have come to the defense of Weigel.

I have named this group of writers The Eclectic Gang because they're all over the place politically, but mostly in the center and left of center, although some claim kinship to a type of conservative thought -- the good, intelligent conservative thought, not the wacky rightwing extremist thought.

I hope the Eclectic Gang learned a lesson and follow their own advice. Too often, they've taken opinionated comments from Limbaugh, Palin, Beck and others to make mountains out of molehills. The Eclectic Gang will likely claim there's a difference between private email groups and public commentary, but their big opposition to the firing is that journalists ought to have opinons and passionately express these opinions unless all journalists become overly-cautious, homogenized, boring drones. So the heated rhetoric argument is now used against one of the Eclectic Gang members and they don't like the suppresion -- good for them -- I just hope they remember that when Beck gets carried away with passion.