By Bill Mann in the USA:
Want to Boycott Fox News Sponsors? Here’s a List
August 21, 2009
Fox News, the future home of Lou Dobbs, aka “The Bill O’Reilly/Megyn Kelly Network,” has recently lost some big-name advertisers on psychic exile Glen Beck‘s race-baiting carnival sideshow, you’ve probably read here.
I mentioned here last week that it’s possible to have your local city council pull that toxin-spewing outfit off the local cable lineup in your town when the cable operator’s contract comes up for But there’s something else you can do in the meantime that could be far more effective in stopping the ringleaders of the Disloyal Opposition.
“I’m ready to boycott all of Fox News‘ sponsors,” one female Commenter on my blog last week here said, adding, “It sickens me to watch Fox News. Could you provide a list of Fox advertisers?”
Hey, we’re here to help. So, as Ko-Ko sang so humorously in Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic comic opera, The Mikado:
“I’ve got a little list.”
Here’s a Clip ‘n Save list of many of Fox‘s current clients taken from several day-parts this week. Not all Fox Noise advertisers are here, because, as the Commenter posted, it’s impossible to watch this cable hatefest for too long without kicking in one’s TV. Ironically, the ads are usually the least objectionable thing on the disreputable, extremist cable net.
You may wish to take note of the companies and products that follow when youre making buying decisions in the future, and/or send them a note or an e-mail reminding them that these are the same Fox “political terrorists” who are, as MSNBC’s Ed Schultz also recently put it so well, “planting intellectual car bombs to drive into health-care debates in town halls.”
Some of these advertisers may not realize — yes, it’s possible — just how disgraceful and mean-spirited Fox Noise’s programming is today, and how it could damage their carefully tended corporate image.
Here, then, a partial list of enablers of the Disloyal Opposition: .
CLIP ‘n SAVE. Print this out … Put it on your fridge!
AARP Medicare Supplemental Insurance
Amway Global
“Anything Goes” CD
Audi Diesel
BMW
Baron & Budd P.C.
Benadryl
Binder & Binder
Broadview Security
Bush’s Baked Beans
Capitalone.com
Celadrin (joint health)
Chef Michael’s Canine Creations
Chevrolet
Citracal
Direct-TV
Dove Deep Moisturizer
Easy Water (water softener)
Expedia
Fidelity Investments
Ford Motor
FreeCreditReport.com
Geico
Goldline International
Gotomeeting.com
HSBC Life Insurance
HealthMart Pharmacy
Lear Capital (gold)
LensCrafters
Liberty Medical
Lincoln (autos)
Loan Modification Help Line
NFL Sunday Ticket
Nextel
NutriSystem
Pearle Vision
Quicken Loans
Re-Bath remodelers
Red Lobster
Scottrade
Slap Chop (kitchen device)
Smart Balance
Travelocity
USPS Priority Mail Flat-Rate Box
Verizon Wireless
Vonage
Walmart
ZeroWater (water tester)
Zyrtec
AP: List of Fox advertisers no longer airing commercials on Beck reaches 33: here.
Right-wing terror groups on the rise in the USA: here.
How far gone is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? He isn’t even willing to reject the “death panel” nonsense pushed by his former running mate: here.
Health Insurers sending thousands of employees to Town Hall Meetings as Teabaggers: here.
James Murdoch’s claim that his hostility to the BBC as a public-service broadcaster is based on concerns for journalistic excellence and consumer choice would make a cat laugh: here.
Now Glenn Beck loves American Nazis: Promotes book by prominent Hitler advocate of the 1930s: here.
How the Fox-Comcast Machine Crushed a Journalist Who Spoke Out Against Bill O’Reilly: here.
Rabbis Protest Fox Host’s Use of Holocaust Imagery: here.
In 1992, Michael Franti from The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy warned that television was “the drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation”. Almost two decades later, the addiction and the ignorance are accepted as the norm: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Posted by: “bigraccoon” bigraccoon@earthlink.net
Fri Oct 23, 2009 1:50 am (PDT)
How Mormonism Created Glenn Beck
October 22, 2009
With Glenn Beck now a mainstay in the national debate, the public is getting
exposure to a peculiar strain of religious political conservatism rooted in
Mormon culture.
Glenn Beck leans forward on his elbows. His voice hushes. His eyes grow red
at the corners. He presses his lips together and clears his throat. He
cannot speak. The tears fall, and just for a moment the brashest voice in
American conservatism today falls silent.
This is what happens when Beck tells the story of his 1999 conversion to
Mormonism.
“I was friendless, working in the smallest radio market I had ever worked
in… a hopeless alcoholic, abusing drugs every day,” Beck said in an
interview taped last fall. “I
was trying to find a job and nobody would hire me… couldn¹t get an agent
to represent me.”
That¹s when Beck’s wife-to-be Tania suggested that the family go on a
“church tour,” which finally led (after some prodding from Beck’s longtime
on-air partner Pat Gray, a Mormon) to his local Mormon wardhouse. Six months
later, the Beck family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints.
“I was baptized on a Sunday, and on Monday” — Beck’s throat tightens again;
he wipes tears from his eyes with his index fingers — “an agent called me
out of the blue.” Three days later, Beck was offered his own political talk
radio show at WFLA-AM in Tampa, Florida, the job that put him on the road
from “morning zoo” radio prankster to conservative media heavyweight.
Spiritual narratives of the I-once-was-lost-now-I-am-financially-sound
variety are commonplace within Mormonism, which, like most of American
Protestantism, has never been allergic to wealth. The institutional culture
of the Mormon Church is strongly corporate, down to the dark suits, white
shirts, and red or blue ties church leaders wear instead of vestments;
Mormonism¹s most powerful public figures like Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman Jr.,
and Bill Marriott Jr., come from the business world.
But whether or not one believes that God rewards baptism with fortune, it is
clear that Glenn Beck¹s conversion to and education in the Mormon faith
after 1999 corresponds precisely with his rise as a media force.
Beck, who was raised Catholic in Washington state, has produced, with the
help of Mormon Church-owned Deseret Book Company, the DVD An Unlikely
Mormon: The Conversion Story of Glenn Beck (2008); Mormon fansites
invite visitors to learn more about
Beck’s beliefs by clicking through to the official Web site of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But what these fansites don’t reveal is
the extent to which Mormonism has given Beck key elements of his on-air
personality and messaging.
Teary Tirades and Mormon Masculinity
Before 1999, Glenn Beck told jokes and pulled on-air stunts for a living. He
developed the content of his current conservative messaging (an amalgation
of anti-communism, United States-founder worship, and connect-the-dots
conspiracy theorizing) after his entree into the deeply insular world of
Mormon thought and culture. A significant figure in this world is the late
Cleon Skousen (19132006), the archconservative and fiercely anti-communist
Brigham Young University professor, founder of the Freeman Society, and
author of 15 books, including The Naked Capitalist, The Making of America,
and Prophecy and Modern Times. Beck, who first cited Skousen in his 2003
book The Real America: Messages from the Heart and the Heartland, later
started pitching Skousen’s 1981 book The 5,000 Year Leap on air in December,
2008. He wrote a preface for a new edition of the book issued a few months
later and in his March 2009 kick-off of the 9/12 movement
declared Skousen’s book to be “divinely
inspired.” In a recent article
for
Salon.com, Alexander Zaitchik suggested that Beck “rescued [Skousen] from
the remainder pile of history.” But Cleon Skousen was never remaindered
among the most politically conservative Mormons, for whom he has been a
household name since the 1960s.
It is likely that Beck owes his brand of Founding Father-worship to
Mormonism, where reverence for the founders and the United States
Constitution as divinely inspired are often-declared elements of orthodox
belief. Mormon Church President Wilford Woodruff (18071898) declared that
George Washington and the signers of the Declaration of Independence
appeared to him in the Mormon Temple in St. George, Utah in 1877, and
requested that he perform Mormon temple ordinances on their behalf. Many
Mormons also believe that Joseph Smith prophesied in 1843 that the US
Constitution would one day “hang by a thread” and be saved by faithful
Mormons; this idea was given new life in the 1960s by former US Secretary of
Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, who cited Smith’s 1843 prophecy from the
pulpit while speaking as a member of the Church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles.
Many key elements of Beck’s on-the-fly messaging derive from a Mormon
lexicon, such as his Twitter-issued September 19 call: “Sept 28. Lets make
it a day of Fast and Prayer for the Republic. Spread the word. Let us walk
in the founders steps.” This call to fasting and prayer may indeed have been
an appropriation
of the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, but it is also rooted in the
traditional Mormon practice of holding individual, familial, and collective
fasts to address spiritual challenges.
Even the overt sentimentality Beck now indulges from time to time was formed
within the cradle of Mormon literary culture. Take, for example, his novel
The Christmas Sweater (2008) (co-authored by Mormon writer Jason Wright) and
its accompanying children’s picture book, which tell the story of an
impoverished twelve-year-old boy who rejects a “handmade, ugly sweater” his
widowed mother knits him for Christmas, only to watch his mother die in a
fiery car crash hours later. This punishing sentimentality is a consistent
feature of Mormon storytelling from Church-produced cinematic classics like
Cipher in the Snow (1973) and The Mailbox (1977) to the New York
Times-bestselling novel The Christmas Box (1995) by Mormon author Richard
Paul Evans.
Finally, Beck’s oft-ridiculed
penchant for punctuating his tirades with tears is the hallmark of a
distinctly Mormon mode of masculinity. As sociologist David Knowlton has
written, “Mormonism praises the man who is able to shed tears as a
manifestation of spirituality.” Crying and choking up are understood by
Mormons as manifestations of the Holy Spirit. For men at every rank of
Mormon culture and visibility, appropriately-timed displays of tender
emotion are displays of power.
Peace on the Religious Right between Mormons and Evangelicals?
Indeed, Beck, who grew up without a father, narrates his conversion and
personal transformation around a series of tearful bonding moments with
Mormon men, from the Sunday School teacher who first taught him about the
Mormon concept of Zion — “Tears started to roll down his cheeks, and he
said, ‘It can only happen if I truly love you and you love me”‘ — to his
baptism by immersion by his longtime friend Pat Gray, who was so choked up,
according to Beck, that “he couldn’t get the words out.”
Not typical of Mormon masculinity are Beck’s high-decibel swings between
bombast and self-deprecation. Such demonstrative excesses are socialized out
of most Mormon men during a regimented process of masculine formation that
begins with entry into the lowest ranks of Mormonism’s lay priesthood at age
12, intensifies during compulsory missionary service from age 19 through 21,
and continues throughout a lifetime of service within hierarchical
priesthood quorums. A textbook example of the traditional Mormon “man of
steel and velvet
” is Mitt Romney, whose inability to connect with the Republican base may
have as much to do with his lack of familiar jocularity and chest-thumping
outrage as it does with the perceived weirdness of his Mormon beliefs. As a
convert, Beck missed out on crucial early years of Mormon male
socialization. Consequently, his renegade persona may endear him even more
to his Mormon male fans who might like to comport themselves as he does, but
feel they cannot.
It’s true that his Mormonism sometimes gets Beck into trouble with
evangelical Christians, who have long antagonized Mormons by denying the
authenticity of their belief in Jesus Christ and deriding the Mormon Church
as a cult. Last December, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family Web site pulled
a Beck column
, citing concerns about his Mormon
ties. Still, Beck’s spectacular rise suggests that evangelical conservatives
(especially those under 40 who may not remember the anti-Mormon cult
crusades of the 1980s) are increasingly willing to set aside their
reservations about Mormons when it suits their pragmatic and political
interests.
Glenn Beck marks an unprecedented national mainstreaming of a peculiar
strand of religious political conservatism rooted in, and once isolated to,
the Mormon culture regions of the American West. That Mormons are capable of
leveraging disproportionate political influence with decisive results was
one of the great lessons of California’s 2008 election season, wherein
readily-mobilized Mormons
, who make up 2% of California’s
population, contributed more than 50% of the individual donations to the
successful anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 campaign, and a sizeable
majority of its on-the-ground efforts.
How much traction Glenn Beck can muster remains to be seen. But if the
American religious right has sometimes been imagined as a monolithic product
of the evangelical Deep South and Bible Belt, the rise of Glenn Beck
suggests that those who would understand American conservatism might also
look West, toward Salt Lake City.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/143381/
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