Glenn Beck’s Tax Problems

Glenn Beck has already been exposed as one of the most dishonest pundits now working. He also turns out to be quite hypocritical. He has devoted a lot of time attacking Democrats for tax problems, as described by Politico:

No one has been less forgiving than Glenn Beck when it comes to Democrats with tax problems. Not just the well-known ones like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but also less serious ones such as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, whose husband only recently paid off $6,400 in tax liens on his auto repair business, and Nancy Killefer, who withdrew her nomination to be White House chief performance officer, citing a $946.69 tax lien on her Washington home.

Their tax issues are just one indicator of “a culture of corruption among some of the left,” Beck declared just last month in a segment on his hugely popular Fox News television show, in which he branded Geithner, Killefer, Solis and a handful of other Obama nominees “tax cheats,” whom he wouldn’t trust “with my children, let alone my children’s future.”

Mocking the excuses offered by the nominees, Beck sarcastically intoned: “Oh, the tax thing, it was an accident. It was my husband’s fault. I didn’t do it, he did it. I didn’t mean to do it. I was just working hard for the people.”

After all this mocking of excuses, it turns out that he did it too:

As Beck evolved from a medium-market local radio personality to a one-man media empire with top-rated radio and television shows, best-selling books, a monthly magazine and a traveling one-man comedy tour, his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, has at times struggled to keep up with the heightened tax and filing demands accompanying his success.

Mercury, a private corporation that lists Beck as chief executive officer and his wife, Tania Beck, alternately as vice president or secretary, since 2007 has fallen behind on its New York City business income taxes and has been cited for filing errors related to its obligations under Texas franchise tax and New York state workers’ compensation insurance rules.

Beck certainly fits in with others on the right wing, such as drug abuser Rush Limbaugh who attacks others with drug problems, and all those Republicans who have spoken out about family values before getting caught having affairs.

“Game Change” Has Embarrassing Moments For the Clintons, the Edwards, Harry Reid, and Sarah Palin

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin doesn’t come out until Tuesday but advance copies are out. Marc Ambinder has some of the juiciest portions:

Hillary Clinton had a “war room within a war room” to deal with Bill’s libido:

The war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that Bill was indeed having an affair — and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship.  …. For months, thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any moment.

The identity of the woman is not revealed.

Harry Reid has already issued an apology for this:

[His] encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately.  Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

Barack Obama has accepted the apology:

Harry Reid called me today and apologized for an unfortunate comment reported today. I accepted Harry’s apology without question because I’ve known him for years, I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart. As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.

Ambinder summarized the material on John Edwards’ affair:

I would be remiss if I did not point to the chapters about the unbelievably dysfunctional husband and wife team of John and Elizabeth Edwards.  Not only, it turns out, did many senior Edwards staffer suspect that John was having an affair, several confronted John Edwards about it, and came away believing the rumors.  At least three campaign aides resigned because of their knowledge of the affair well before the national media picked up on those early National Enquirer stories.

And John and Elizabeth (who the book says was known to Edwards insiders as “abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending, crazywoman”) fought, in front of staffers, about the affair. The authors describe a moment where Elizabeth, in a such a state of fury, deliberately tears her blouse in the parking lot of a Raleigh airport terminal, “exposing herself. ‘Look at me,” she wailed at John and then staggered, nearly falling to the ground.” (That’s page 142.)   (This was in October, by the way, well before the media took the reports of the Hunter affair seriously.)

New York Magazine has an extended excerpt from the book on John Edwards. Long time readers of this blog may recall that even before the scandal broke I considered Edwards to be a light weight and a phony who had no place on a national ticket (and realistically was not even fit to be a Senator). Apparently many Democratic leaders agreed with my feeling in 2003 that neither Clinton or Edwards would make satisfactory candidates:

Edwards never expected to be the third wheel in 2008. The race was going to be Hillary versus him. That was how he saw it from the start. She would be the front-runner, of course. But as sure as night follows day, there would be an alternative, an anti-Hillary, and he would be it.

The Democratic Establishment agreed that there would be—and certainly should be—a viable challenger to Clinton. The party’s pooh-bahs on Capitol Hill were privately terrified about the prospect of Hillary rolling to the nomination. They feared that she was too polarizing to win, that she would drag down House and Senate candidates in red and purple states; and they worried, too, about Bill’s putative affairs. But while the Clintons themselves regarded Edwards as Hillary’s most formidable rival, there existed a deep wariness about the North Carolinian among his fellow Democrats. In the Senate, in particular, Edwards was regarded almost universally by his former colleagues as a callow, shallow phony. Quietly, the Establishment began a quest to find a different alternative, eventually settling on the unlikely horse that was Obama—with Harry Reid personally, and secretly, urging the Illinois senator to run against Clinton.

Ben Smith reveals why Ted Kennedy was so mad at Bill Clinton:

[A]s Hillary bungled Caroline, Bill’s handling of Ted was even worse. The day after Iowa, he phoned Kennedy and pressed for an endorsement, making the case for his wife. But Bill then went on, belittling Obama in a manner that deeply offended Kennedy. Recounting the conversation later to a friend, Teddy fumed that Clinton had said, A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.

This is reminiscent of  Clinton’s racist attacks on Obama as the campaign heated up.

The book is full of stories of Sarah Palin’s ignorance.

In the days leading up to an interview with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson, aides were worried with Ms. Palin’s grasp of facts. She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Anderson Cooper has interviewed former McCain campaign  adviser Steve Schmidt for a story on 60 Minutes regarding the upcoming book. Schmidt said that Palin’s preparation for the debate with Joe Biden was going so badly that they feared “the debate was going to be a debacle of historic and epic proportions. … She was not focused … not engaged.”  She also had trouble remembering her debate opponent’s name:

Sarah Palin’s charming opening debate line for now-Vice President Joe Biden — “Hey, can I call you Joe?” — was scripted after she repeatedly referred to him as “O’Biden” in preparation sessions, former McCain campaign senior adviser Steve Schmidt told “60 Minutes.”

Update: More from Game Change

Twitter vs. Terror

Senator Richard Lugar, writing in Foreign Policy, suggests that the State Department use social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook in a global fight for freedom. He sees these sites as being “an important leap forward from traditional U.S. outreach efforts, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.”

Lugar gave examples of their use in Iran, the Congo, and Pakistan and wrote:

The adroit use of social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and others, coupled with text messages and increasingly widespread mobile-phone technology, can help lend support to existing grassroots movements for freedom and civil rights, connect people to information, and help those in closed societies communicate with the outside world. It also promises to give a strong economic boost to small entrepreneurs and the rural poor. The World Bank estimates that for every 10 percent increase in the number of mobile-phone users in a developing country, there is nearly a 1 percent increase in its economic output…

…social networking technologies are more often used to enable individuals across a country, or across the globe, to interact, engage, and become empowered. Although this means that our government will not be able to control the message as well as it might with conventional public diplomacy tools, I believe it is a risk worth taking. Terrorists and other anti-American propagandists have for some time been using the Internet and other techniques to communicate and recruit. America needs to beat them at their own game, especially since we invented most of the technology.