Glenn Beck & Frances Fox Piven - WTF?

This is an interesting story, though confined mainly to the blogosphere (so I can't talk to my wife about it).

On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.

On Jan. 5, 2010, Glenn Beck delivered one of several attacks on Richard Cloward, now deceased, and his wife and collaborator, Frances Fox Piven, who wrote about ending poverty.
Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.”

Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.

Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.

Glenn Beck rails against the ideas of an avowed, lifelong, far left liberal college professor by ACCURATELY QUOTING HER? This is retarded.

Death threats are bad, although if I had a quarter for every death threat or unpleasant comment posted on the internet I would also have a Lear Jet on 24 hour standby. And I am not a big Glenn Beck fan in general. But all the guy did was to QUOTE HER ACCURATELY. If that generates a bad reaction, isn't that, uh, HER OWN DAMN FAULT?

I had never heard of this Frances Fox Piven until recently, and if I had heard of her, it didn't register. But I have been doing some reading about her. She's a socialist, and I do not like socialists. She is well intentioned, I think, but in that uniquely Orwellian way that socialists tend to be - that is, we need to do X, and if you disgare with that you need to be censored and/or shipped off to the gulag.

I am most disturbed by her connection to President Obama. If this is someone who influenced him, he needs to be out of the White House.