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Arguing with Idiots - Andrea Mitchell

October 21, 2009
 Radio Clips

The Glenn Beck Program


Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government


by Glenn Beck

PAT: Did you see that George Soros is not a leftwing guy?

GLENN: Do you have the audio of this?

PAT: This a relief because we've been worried about George Soros

GLENN: Yeah.

PAT: being, you know, kind of out there on the leftwing fringe. Not at all.

STU: I was fairly convinced. But hey, ACORN is endorsing Republicans. So who knows.

PAT: That's right. So I mean, the whole world is kind of changing. I think you've said it before. The paradigm is changing.

GLENN: Yeah. So when you have a Republican being endorsed by ACORN which if I were a Republican, I would run from that endorsement. But when the Republicans decide, hey, let's pick this person as a candidate and they are endorsed by the working family parties and also ACORN, then you know you've got a paradigm shift and you pretty much know what you have in the Republican Party. But hey, there is hope. Lindsey Graham is stepping to the stage.

Now, the second thing is Andrea Mitchell on television talking to, who was it?

PAT: Orrin Hatch, Senator Hatch, yeah. He's being picketed, I guess, because of his what was it? It's his support for something or other.

GLENN: And Orrin Hatch is not I mean, is not the guy that you think of as a tiger for, you know, for anything. I mean, you know, God bless Orrin Hatch. He is a very nice man.

PAT: I'm sure he is.

GLENN: And I love him, you know, and he's a good man. However, I mean, he is not exactly the defender of liberty at this point, you know.

PAT: I won't call him like his good close personal friend Ted Kennedy was the liberal lion. I certainly wouldn't call Orrin Hatch the conservative lion.

GLENN: The conservative lion, yes. But he's not anyway, so he's on with Andrea Mitchell, and Andrea Mitchell tears into him. Now listen to this.

HATCH: Now, by the way, moveon.org is an ask your will you say organization. It's funded by George Soros, he is about as leftwing as you can find in this country and they are up to one thing and that is to smear good people and frankly they are not going to smear me without getting kicked in the teeth by me.

GLENN: Stop, stop, stop. That's the Orrin Hatch that I miss!

STU: That's a lion.

GLENN: There's the conservative lion.

PAT: That's not a teddy bear.

GLENN: That's the Orrin Hatch that I want to see more often.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: That guy. Yes, Orrin! Yes!

PAT: Exactly.

GLENN: By the way, did you notice that when the president didn't have a problem with the Chamber of Commerce when they were in the bag for the bailouts, when they were in the bag for the stimulus package. But now that they've come out against healthcare

PAT: They are the worst.

GLENN: They are the worst and need to be destroyed. It's the politics of the past, okay? Wait, wait, wait. You liked them the last two times, but they disagree once and they must be destroyed by the White House. This should tell you exactly what we've been talking about this week. They are this White House does not enjoy your right to free speech. But let me tell you this: I predict the harder the Chamber of Commerce fights against Barack Obama's policies, the more money and the more power they'll gain. And let me make this prediction: The fewer candidates that the Republican Party runs like Lindsey Graham and those endorsed by ACORN or the Working Families Party that actually mean it, the more Republicans sound like Orrin Hatch did here in this little snippet, the more money they'll raise, the better chance they'll have of winning. Call me crazy.

All right. So Orrin Hatch just let Andrea Mitchell have it about George Soros and here's what happened.

MITCHELL: I don't know. I wouldn't characterize George Soros that way. He supports a lot of different groups including the Clinton global initiative. But you're entitled to your opinion on that.

PAT: Awesome.

GLENN: So George Soros is not lefty.

PAT: No.

GLENN: Because he does a lot of great things like the Clinton global initiative. Right?

PAT: That rightwing kookery? He supports that?

STU: That is a that's not a perfect, like, example of how out of touch media people are.

PAT: Oh, my gosh.

GLENN: You don't think that Clinton you do remember was a Democrat, and he's talking about a global initiative which if I I mean, if I remember right it's all about climate change and all these other leftwing causes and she doesn't even consider that leftwing. What is leftwing? It's the Democratic president's global initiative!

GLENN: Somebody go to Clinton global initiative or whatever it is. Go to that website. Look at their mission statement. Been a while since I've seen it. Just read their goal or objective or mission statement, whatever it is. I mean, and tell me this isn't, this isn't crazy, socialist, leftwing nonsense, no.

STU: Well, first of all it's a dot org. So we know it's nonpartisan. Let's see. Commitments? Or about us? Let's see what "About us" is.

GLENN: I don't remember.

STU: Okay. We've got an "About us."

GLENN: Yeah, try

STU: Accomplishments? Our model?

GLENN: Try "Our model."

STU: Okay. Let's see. The Clinton global initiative is unlike any other organization or event. Rather than directly implementing projects, CGI facilitates cross sector partnerships. That sounds fantastic, cross sector partnerships?

GLENN: Partnerships, I love those!

STU: That in turn create and carry our projects carry out projects of their own choosing. CGI members come from a wide variety of professions. Well, that seems very there's nothing wrong with that.

PAT: That's diverse.

STU: Cultural and religious backgrounds. Wow, that's fantastic. And geographic regions. It crosses all those barriers. Heads of state, corporate and nonprofit executives, academics, media representatives, religious leaders, university students and global citizens join global citizens join with the CGI community to develop unique solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges.

GLENN: Yeah, I can't find it, but there's there is this unbelievable

STU: Yeah, I thought there was a mission statement type of thing.

GLENN: There is a mission statement some place that just talks about I can't find it now. Where it just, I mean, it's all about, you know, global citizenry and how we all just need to be together in one global, one global community.

STU: It is called a global initiative. Here's the things that they have accomplished. Are you ready for these? More than 10 million children have gained access to a better education. That's fantastic. That's not right or left. I mean, unless you're left. Then you say that it's left. But when you want to present it in the middle, then you say it's in the middle.

PAT: Well, you say it's left because the rightwing wants to eat children. The left wants to educate them.

STU: You can't educate an eaten children. Children that have been devoured is impossible to educate.

GLENN: Children that have been educated will say, hey, you shouldn't be eating me.

PAT: Good point.

STU: Good point.

GLENN: Thank you.

STU: The equivalent of 60 million metric tons of CO2 emissions have been

PAT: Really?

STU: The equivalent of that.

GLENN: Now, the equivalent of that. Not that.

PAT: What would that mean, the equivalent?

STU: But whatever it is is equal to that.

GLENN: So they planted a really big tree. That's carbon offset nonsense.

PAT: Yeah, yeah, I love that.

STU: In fact, as you brought that up, more than 33 million acres of forest have been protected or restored.

GLENN: Those are or restored.

STU: One of the two.

GLENN: Wait a minute. Is that like jobs created or saved?

STU: Or saved. Trees that have been created or saved under this plan.

GLENN: Wait. Hang on just a second. Give me the forest thing again.

STU: More than 33 million acres of forest have been protected.

GLENN: Protected.

STU: Or restored.

GLENN: Or restored. To what?

STU: I don't know. Like when International Paper cuts down a paper, you know, a forest to build paper and then they plant the trees, does that count?

STU: They do that anyway. Weyerhauser cuts them down and replants them. Otherwise they don't have paper.

STU: Right. Which is in their best interest to do.

GLENN: Weyerhauser, we're just restoring forests, that's all we do.

STU: You joke, but that's where the carbon offsets go.

GLENN: I know, to people who are already restoring the forest so they can cut it down again!

A contested Democratic convention could lead to the ONE candidate who could beat Trump, says Michael Medved

Paul Morigi / Stringer/ Getty

On Wednesday's TV show, Glenn Beck sat down with radio show host, author, political commentator, and film critic, Michael Medved.

Michael had an interesting prediction for the 2020 election outcome: a brokered convention by the DNC will usher in former First Lady Michelle Obama to run against President Donald Trump.

Watch the video below to hear why he's making this surprising forecast:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

FLASHPOINT? Virginia Gov. Northam declares state of emergency to ban firearms ahead of gun-rights rally


Zach Gibson / Stringer

On Thursday's "Glenn Beck Radio Program," BlazeTV's White House correspondent Jon Miller described the current situation in Virginia after Gov. Ralph Northam (D) declared a state of emergency and banned people carrying guns at Capitol Square just days before a pro-Second-Amendment rally scheduled on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Jon told Glenn that Gov. Northam and the Virginia Legislature are "trying to deprive the people of their Second Amendment rights" but the citizens of Virginia are "rising up" to defend their constitutional rights.

"I do think this is the flashpoint," Jon said. "They [Virginia lawmakers] are saying, 'You cannot exercise your rights ... and instead of trying to de-escalate the situation, we are putting pressure. We're trying to escalate it and we're trying to enrage the citizenry even more'."

Glenn noted how Gov. Northam initially blamed the threat of violence from Antifa for his decision to ban weapons but quickly changed his narrative to blame "white supremacists" to vilify the people who are standing up for the Second Amendment and the Constitution.

"What he's doing is, he's making all all the law-abiding citizens of Virginia into white supremacists," Glenn said.

"Sadly, that's exactly right," Jon replied. "And I think he knows exactly what he's doing."

Watch the video to catch more of the conversation below:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

Ryan: Trump Louisiana Finale

Photo by Jim Dale

Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

At the end of Trump rallies, I would throw on my Carhartt jacket, sneak out of the press area, then blend in with everyone as they left, filing out through swinging doors.

Often, someone held the door open for me. Just 30 minutes earlier, the same person had most likely had most likely hissed at me for being a journalist. And now they were Sunday smiles and "Oh, yes, thank you, sir" like some redneck concierge.

People flooded out of the arena with the stupidity of a fire drill mishap, desperate to survive.

The air smacked you as soon as you crossed the threshold, back into Louisiana. And the lawn was a wasteland of camping chairs and coolers and shopping bags and to-go containers and soda cans and articles of clothing and even a few tents.

In Monroe, in the dark, the Trump supporters bobbled over mounds of waste like elephants trying to tiptoe. And the trash was as neutral to them as concrete or grass. They plodded over it because it, an object, had somehow gotten in their way.

It did not matter that they were responsible for this wreckage.Out in the sharp-edged moonlight, rally-goers hooted and yapped and boogied and danced, and the bbq food truck was all smoke and paper plates.

They were even more pumped than they had been before the rally, like 6,000 eight year olds who'd been chugging Mountain Dew for hours. Which made Donald Trump the father, the trooper, God of the Underworld, Mr. Elite, Sheriff on high horse, the AR-15 sticker of the family.

Ritualistic mayhem, all at once. And, there in Louisiana, Trump's supporters had gotten a taste of it. They were all so happy. It bordered on rage.

Still, I could not imagine their view of America. Worse, after a day of strange hostilities, I did not care.

My highest priority, my job as a reporter, was to care. To understand them and the world that they inhabit. But I did not give a damn and I never wanted to come back.

Worst of all, I would be back. In less than a week.

Was this how dogs felt on the 4th of July? Hunched in a corner while everyone else gets drunk and launches wailing light into the sky? configurations of blue and red and white.

It was 10:00 p.m. and we'd been traveling since 11:00 a.m., and we still had 5 hours to go and all I wanted was a home, my home, any home, just not here, in the cold sweat of this nowhere. Grey-mangled sky. No evidence of planes or satellites or any proof of modern-day. Just century-old bridges that trains shuffled over one clack at a time.

And casinos, all spangles and neon like the 1960s in Las Vegas. Kitchy and dumb, too tacky for lighthearted gambling. And only in the nicer cities, like Shreveport, which is not nice at all.

And swamp. Black water that rarely shimmered. Inhabited by gadflies and leeches and not one single fish that was pretty.

Full of alligators, and other killing types. The storks gnawing on frogs, the vultures never hungry. The coyotes with nobody to stop them and so much land to themselves. The roaches in the wild, like tiny wildebeests.

Then, the occasional deer carcass on the side of the road, eyes splayed as if distracted, tongue out, relaxed but empty. The diseased willows like skeletons in hairnets. The owls that never quit staring. A million facets of wilderness that would outlive us all.

Because Nature has poise. It thrives and is original.

Because silence is impossible. Even in an anechoic chamber, perfectly soundproofed, you can hear your own heartbeat, steady as a drum. A never-ending war.

I put "Headache" by Grouper on repeat as we glided west. We were deadlocked to asphalt, rubber over tarface.

And I thought about lines from a Rita Dove poem titled "I have been a stranger in a strange land"

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else's chaos.

Wasn't that exactly what I was doing? Looking for an impossible answer, examining every single accident, eager for meaning? telling myself, "If it happens and matters the next year, in America, I want to be there, or to know what it means. I owe it to whoever cares to listen."

Humans are collectors and I had gone overboard.

Because maybe this wasn't even my home. These landmarks, what did they mean? Was I obvious here? When I smiled, did I trick them into believing that I felt some vague sense of approval? Or did my expressions betray me?

Out in all that garbage-streaked emptiness — despite the occasional burst of passing halogen — I couldn't tell if everything we encountered was haunted or just old, derelict, broken, useless. One never-ending landfill.

Around those parts, they'd made everything into junk. Homes. Roads. Glass. Nature. Life itself, they made into junk.

I cringed as we passed yet another deer carcass mounded on the side of the road.

As written in Job 35:11,

Who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds in the sky?

Nobody. Look at nature and you feel something powerful. Look at an animal, in all of its untamable majesty, and you capture a deep love, all swept up in the power of creation. But, here, all I saw were poor creatures who people had slammed into and kept driving. Driving to where? For what reason? What exactly was so important that they left a trail of dead animals behind them?

So I crossed myself dolorously and said an "Our Father" and recited a stanza from Charles Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.

Out here, nothing but darkness. Needing some light, by God. Give me something better than a Moon that hides like an underfed coward.

Jade told me about some of the more traumatic things she'd seen while working at the State Fair.

"Bro, they pull roaches out of the iced lemonade jugs and act like nothing happened."

"All right but what about the corn dogs?"

"You do not want to know, little bro."

She looked around in the quiet. "Back in the day, the Louisiana Congress refused to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21," she said. "They didn't want to lose all that drunk gambler money. So the federal government cut off funding to highways."

We glided through moon-pale landscape for an hour before I realized what she had meant. That there weren't any light poles or billboards along the road. Nothing to guide us or distract us. Just us, alone. And it felt like outer space had collapsed, swallowed us like jellybeans.

Like two teenagers playing a prank on the universe.

In the cozy Subaru Crosstrek, in the old wild night, brimming with the uncertainty of life and the nonchalance of failure, we paraded ourselves back to Dallas. Alive in the river silence that follows us everywhere.

New installments come Mondays and Thursdays. Next, the Iowa caucuses. Check out my Twitter. Email me at kryan@blazemedia.com

Amid election security concerns, states should look to blockchain

Wikimedia Commons

The Iowa primary is just around the corner, and concerns of election interference from the last presidential election still loom. Back in 2016, The Associated Press found that a majority of U.S. elections systems still use Windows 7 as an operating system, making them highly susceptible to bugs and errors. And last year, a Mississippi voter tried multiple times to vote for the candidate of his choice, but the system continuously switched his vote to the other candidate. It's pretty clear: America's voting systems desperately need an update.

That's where blockchain voting comes in.

Blockchain voting is a record-keeping system that's 100% verifiable and nearly impossible to hack. Blockchain, the newest innovation in cybersecurity, is set to grow into a $20 billion industry by 2025. Its genius is in its decentralized nature, distributing information throughout a network of computers, requiring would-be hackers to infiltrate a much larger system. Infiltrating multiple access points spread across many computers requires a significant amount of computing power, which often costs more than hackers expect to get in return.

Blockchain voting wouldn't allow for many weak spots. For instance, Voatz, arguably the leading mobile voting platform, requires a person to take a picture of their government-issued ID and a picture of themselves before voting (a feature, of course, not present in vote-by-mail, where the only form of identity verification is a handwritten signature, which is easily forgeable). Voters select their choices and hit submit. They then receive an immediate receipt of their choices via email, another security feature not present in vote-by-mail, or even in-person voting. And because the system operates on blockchain technology, it's nearly impossible to tamper with.

Votes are then tabulated, and the election results are published, providing a paper trail, which is a top priority for elections security experts.

The benefits of blockchain voting can't be dismissed. Folks can cast their vote from the comfort of their homes, offices, etc., vastly increasing the number of people who can participate in the electoral process. Two to three-hour lines at polling places, which often deter voters, would become significantly diminished.

Even outside of the voting increase, the upsides are manifold. Thanks to the photo identification requirements, voter fraud—whether real or merely suspected—would be eliminated. The environment would win, too, since we'd no longer be wasting paper on mail-in ballots. Moreover, the financial burden on election offices would be alleviated, because there's decreased staff time spent on the election, saving the taxpayer money.

From Oregon to West Virginia, elections offices have already implemented blockchain voting, and the results have been highly positive. For example, the city of Denver utilized mobile voting for overseas voters in their 2019 municipal elections. The system was secure and free of technical errors, and participants reported that it was very user-friendly. Utah County used the same system for their 2019 primary and general elections. An independent audit revealed that every vote that was cast on the app was counted and counted correctly. These successful test cases are laying the groundwork for even larger expansions of the program in 2020.

With this vital switch, our elections become significantly more secure, accurate, and efficient. But right now, our election infrastructure is a sitting duck for manipulation. Our current lack of election integrity undermines the results of both local and national elections, fans the flames of partisanship, and zaps voter confidence in the democratic system. While there's never a silver bullet or quick fix to those kinds of things, blockchain voting would push us much closer to a solution than anything else.

Chris Harelson is the Executive Director at Prosperity Council and a Young Voices contributor.