Purps, I don't think Beck ever pretended that he wasn't seeking donations to cover the rally and that everything after that would go to the SOWF. Last I heard, he had raised over $5 million for the fund and donations are still coming in. There are lots of donations that he is funneling straight to the fund. You don't have to buy anything to donate. There are lots of groups, like school groups, who sell items for fundraising. Everyone who buys a box of chocolates from a schoolchild knows that the company that provided the chocolates has to get paid and that the excess goes to the school. I'm not quite sure why this is an issue for you. It seems like a typical fundraising practice to me.
Glenn Beck
by will_the_apostate 157 Replies latest watchtower bible
-
-
purplesofa
I guess for me at the end of the day, I totally forgot that the event was to raise money.
It became all about Becks message for all to turn to God, so I got confused, if It was church, a charity, a rally, just what was going on.
But the more I research about this event the more I understand how people work a/the system/rules.
How to get around certain things. It's clever, it's legal.
FRIDAY, AUG 27, 2010 07:01 ET
Is Glenn Beck profiting from his "Restoring Honor" rally?
Saturday's self-promotional, "non-political" rally will raise money for -- and be financed by -- a charity
Despite Glenn Beck's insistence that his "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday is devoted to honoring troops, the event is, indisputably, all about Glenn Beck.
Dubbed "Beckapalooza" by Politico, it has already garnered Beck untold hours of free media coverage and, however high or low the turnout is, it is guaranteed to make Beck the center of attention for a few more media cycles next week. For a man selling books -- "Arguing With Idiots" comes out in paperback Sept. 14 -- free media is a valuable thing.
So it's worth noting that Saturday's rally -- and all the publicity that will come with it -- isn't going to cost Beck a cent. That's because it's being organized as a fundraiser for a charity, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. And, as the fine print at the bottom of the Restoring Honorwebsite notes, "All contributions made to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF) will first be applied to the costs of the Restoring Honor Rally." One SOWF official estimated the rally will cost $1 million. The rest of the money will go to SOWF, which says it provides scholarships to children of special operations soldiers killed in action or in training.
So Beck and Sarah Palin, his fellow featured speaker, will get their free self-promotion rally, and SOWF will get the rest; they've reportedly already raised $5 million. (The event was originally billed as the unveiling of a new Beck book called "The Plan," which would outline steps to take over the next 100 years to "restore our great country." That was later scrapped for a vague focus on restoring honor.)
The one catch is that the sponsorship of SOWF -- a tax-exempt charity -- means that the event cannot be "political," as Beck's promotionalliterature emphasizes.
But this does not mean that Beck is barred from making political statements. To the IRS, nonpolitical actually means nonpartisan, said Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at Arent Fox in Washington. "If speakers endorsed specific candidates or political parties at the event, that could create an IRS problem for the charity," Kappel told Salon.
That may explain why Beck felt free on Thursday to say of the rally: "This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement." Tea Party groups have also reportedly provided financial assistance for the rally.
Time reported today that SOWF has required speakers, including Palin, to sign an agreement "not to talk politics." On Saturday, we'll see what that really means.
-
sammielee24
Always follow the money.....sammieswife.
------------------------------
Obama, Beck and America
How Glenn Beck can get away with turning civil rights into its opposit
- Michael Tomasky
Glenn Beck speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA I was at a dinner once, about four years ago, at which both liberals and conservatives were gathered to discuss questions of American political and civic life. I was giving a short talk on the question of the Democrats and the common good, which was a theme of mine (and still is, albeit sublimated in these days of constant warfare). I was talking about the struggle involved throughout US history in including all Americans in said common good. Hodding Carter picked up my point and spoke about historic notions of beloved community in the US.
We were both defending the liberal tradition in America, but we were both also critiquing it, saying (as you've read me saying previously) that contemporary liberalism is sometimes too obsessed with group or individual rights to stress mutual civic obligations, and that missing piece of liberalism needed to be restored.
Then a woman I didn't know spoke up. She was southern. She was very friendly and chatty. She said she was all for beloved communities. But what was clear to her, the really important point, was that in the good old days, those communities had nothing to do with government. And when we started thinking it did was when it all went wrong.
It was a small group, so I was polite and didn't say anything, but what I thought was: you idiotic, irresponsible, egotistical cretin. Nothing to do with government? Let's go ask the black people of your age cohort and home town whether they felt part of a beloved community, and let's ask them whether they think government had anything to do with the change in their status in your community over the decades.
It's just incomprehensible to me that a person could be so thoroughly incapable of stepping outside her own shoes and seeing big questions from others' vantage points. I mean it's genuinely beyond my comprehension. I can assure you that in America, black people – yes, even today, when discrimination isn't remotely like it was – have little choice but to consider the big matters from the white point of view.
I mostly avoided the Beckathon on Saturday, but to the extent that I read about it, I thought of that dinner. This woman was undoubtedly sincere. Beck's attendees were undoubtedly sincere. They believe government strangles their liberty. I guess they really believe, as Beck put it, that "we are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights movement."
The two problems here are, first, that while they think they owe government nothing, they actually owe government a great deal. If they're small business people, they depend on the freight rails and the roadways and the utilities and the regulation of interstate commerce and the laws that keep their crooked competitors from undercutting them and the courts' abilities to enforce those laws. Without question the government is an annoyance in their lives in dozens of ways. But they don't see any of the good, only the bad. If you tote it up, the government helps them a lot more than it hurts them, and if they think not, let them go open a hardware store in downtown Mogadishu and see how that works out.
The second problem is the one I saw manifest at that dinner that night. Everybody in this country isn't like you. Yes, you worked hard to get where you are. But the vast majority of people work hard. Some have good luck, some have bad. Some stay healthy, some get sick. Some make only wise decisions, some make an unwise one. Some benefit from free-market oddities and inequities, some lose. And yes, some, because of history or birth circumstances, started the race at a starting line several paces back from the one where you started. Part of citizenship, a crucial part of citizenship, is standing in their shoes for a few moments – as they must stand in yours, and understand your point of view too.
The Beck movement is the we-stay-in-our-shoes movement. It's Grover Norquist's "leave us alone" coalition. It has existed since the republic was founded – the anti-Federalists, who opposed the constitution from the start. Its adherents fomented crises in the early-to-mid-1800s that led to civil war. Today, they have corporate billions behind them and a formidable propaganda machine, and a black cosmopolitan president to rally against, who seems to them to represent everything they hate and fear.
The left has a stay-in-our-shoes contingent, too, and it is not wholly blameless here. The irony about Barack Obama is that he is emphatically not one of those at heart. He's a believer in the beloved community: all that verbiage in my second paragraph above, about today's liberalism not stressing mutual obligation enough and caring too much about group rights, he believes.
It's actually a somewhat moderate position by contemporary standards. For those of you who traffic in such ideas, it's a partial rejection of classic Rawlsian liberalism, which is why it's moderate. But it, too, can be made by opponents to sound like socialism and state coercion, and Obama hasn't had the political skill in office to show people why it isn't.
But what is really missing in this country is that no one is making the affirmative case for mutual civic obligation. In the America of my youth, some sense of that was given. Democrats and Republicans disagreed about what that obligation entailed – how much assistance to the poor, say – and in addition, the lines then were not cleanly along party lines. But majorities of both parties accepted the basic premise of mutuality.
Certainly, there were conservatives who said fie on you both, we dispute the very idea of obligation. But they were marginal headcases then. Now, they're extremely powerful. Most American liberals and moderates still don't quite see this big picture, I think.
Certainly, Democratic politicians don't ever talk in these terms. So Beck can hoist the concept of civil rights and turn it from its actual meaning, about expanding the community, into its opposite, the free zone of the individual; and he can get away with it because the people on the other side don't say no, that is a perversion of the truth. Until non-conservatives come to terms with how to do something about this, American political debates won't change much.
-
Sam Whiskey
How much did Bill Clinton and OBama make last year?
-
beksbks
Didn't the whole thing start as a book tour? His handlers didn't think that was a good idea. He essentially admits he's just a money making machine in this Forbes magazine article. He say he doesn't give a crap about the politics, it's entertainment.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0426/entertainment-fox-news-simon-schuster-glenn-beck-inc.html
-
beksbks
How much did Bill Clinton and OBama make last year?
LOL!!! Don't you guys be mean to Glenn!!!! He's really sincere!!!
-
B-Rock
The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.
Why?
He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.
Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.
Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.
Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.
Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.
Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.
Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.
Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.
Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.
He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.
Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.
Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.
Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.
He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.
See, simple.
Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.
As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.
God bless America.
-
designs
Always be wary of those who like to wrap themselves in the Flag of their country.
Beck is a media firms woody, he sells out tickets wherever he goes. Palin is the Cheerleader, Beck is Quarterbacking this show, and it is a Show be assured.
-
BurnTheShips
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/15295.html
Thanks for that link. I think I finally "get" this Glenn Beck phenomenon. This "Restoring Honor" rally.
I think I finally understand what it is.
This has happened before, in American history. It is a revival.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Great_Awakening
Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution, which took place soon after. Heimert (1966) argues that Calvinism and Jonathan Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology and that evangelical religion embodied and inspired a thrust toward American nationalism. Colonial Calvinism was the basis for the American Great Awakening and that in turn lay at the basis of the American Revolution. Heimert thus sees a major impact as the Great Awakening provided the radical American nationalism that prompted the Revolution. Awakening preachers sought to review God's covenant with America and to repudiate the materialistic, acquisitive, corrupt world of an affluent colonial society. The source of this corruption lay in England, and a severance of the ties with the mother country would result in a rededication of America to the making of God's Kingdom. However, Heimert has been criticized for not recognizing the differences between educated and uneducated evangelists, and for not recognizing the significance of Separate-Baptists and Methodists. [ 13 ]
Some historians, in particular, Gary Nash in The Urban Crucible (1986), have seen the First Great Awakening as a means by which humbler colonial Americans were able to challenge their 'social betters'. Harry Stout (1986) has even suggested that the first Great Awakening radically democratized mass communication in the colonies, setting the stage for new popular politics later in the revolutionary decades that followed [ 14 ] .
Deeep roots in the culture, in the American psyche.
He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.
As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings:
BTS
-
miseryloveselders
Burns, I love your posts even when I disagree with you. Don't tell me you buy this nonsense, do you?
Glenn Beck speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA 