NewsBreakingOnline

As Bill O’Reilly leads a Fox News peasants’ rebellion against the royal wedding pageant, Glenn Beck is off to get his gun Bill O’Reilly The week got off to a bad start for Bill O’Reilly, who was deeply disturbed by the news that Standard & Poor’s have downgraded long-term US debt to a negative rating because of concerns that policy makers may fail to reach agreement on our budgetary challenges anytime soon ( view clip ). Even worse, the Democrats and the president are still harping on about the need to raise revenue by rolling back the tax cuts awarded to rich people by former President Bush (which were temporarily extended last year), yet remain reluctant to cut additional services to the poor, the elderly and to women’s reproductive health. O’Reilly analyses the situation with Brit Hume, who shared his gloomy outlook. While both men took comfort in the fact that at least the Republican party seems absolutely determined this time around not to back down from their plan to redefine America’s social compact by forcing through additional spending cuts for the poor while awarding additional tax cuts for the rich, they remain fearful that this strategy may backfire come election time. On a later segment, O’Reilly puts on his commoner hat to have a go at the royal family for foisting Prince William’s lavish wedding plans on the American public, which has no time for Britain’s culture of entitlement. He discusses the issue with Fox News anchor and royal enthusiast Martha MacCallum. I submit to you this is sport for England. It’s fun for England. They got the old Windsor Castle. They got the old Queen running around. They’ve got all the scandals. It’s fun for the peasants – and I’m a peasant, all right – it’s fun for them. But for America, we don’t recognise this, we don’t have royalty in this country and people like you try to foist it upon us. MacCallum posits that a strong monarchy is good for America and for western civilisation in general because it’s rebuilding a nationalistic feeling in the UK that will help counteract the failed multiculturalism experiment that Prime Minister David Cameron recently talked about . O’Reilly still finds the idea of people like Prince Charles and Camilla, whom he describes as “two pinheads”, living the high life and running up “millions of dollars on the taxpayer’s back” while the poor and downtrodden of Britain are struggling to cope with job losses and savage spending cuts, too undemocratic for his liking. So, how did they get all of their carriages and all the maintenance on their castles and everything? Because they stole it from the peasants! From you and me and all the others, I’m Irish, but how do you think the kings got all their castles? They stole them! MacCallum, who is of Scottish descent, agreed that some of that kind of thing may have gone on in the past, particularly in Scotland where the royal family did their share of pillaging and plundering. This infuriates O’Reilly. This would be like us in America celebrating the wedding of Al Capone’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter because he stole the money. Come on! O’Reilly closed out the segment insisting that he won’t be going anyway near the royal wedding, even though he wasn’t invited anyway. And then he gets back to discussing the problem of the working class in America – or union thugs, if you prefer – who continue to protest about losing their collective bargaining rights, and even went so far, this past weekend, as to boo former Governor Sarah Palin when she suggested that it was a good thing that workers had their take home pay reduced so corporations could enjoy a lower tax rate. Sean Hannity Despite the cold reception Sarah Palin received in Wisconsin and the booing from the crowd, Sean Hannity thought she did a fine job with her speech last weekend ( view clip ). He was also impressed by the speech given by Donald Trump, who spoke at a Tea Party rally in Florida. He discussed both Palin’s and Trump’s chances of winning the presidency in 2012 with conservative commentator Ann Coulter. Coulter thought that either candidate would be outstanding compared to the president we have to put up with at the moment, who she thinks had a free pass getting elected last time because he was “a 14 year old with no record”. Hannity agrees but says that President Obama will not have such an easy go of it this time around, now that the public knows what he is all about. The deficit still exists. It’s Obama’s deficit now; he can’t claim that it’s not. He now has a record, as you point out, so “hope and change”, reading a teleprompter, “Yes we can” slogans aren’t going to cut it this time. He’s got to deal with his debt, his deficit, his weak and timid foreign policy. I think it becomes extraordinarily more difficult for him just based on the fact that he now has to run on his record. Coulter agreed that the president’s record is a disgrace, particularly his foreign policy and that he has been running around dragging us into senseless conflicts, like the one in Libya, that we can’t afford and shouldn’t care about, which she adds is “typical Democrat foreign policy”. (I shudder to think what she must have thought of former Republican President George W Bush, who spent billions of dollars on his senseless invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.) Anyway, in terms of records, they both agreed that President Obama would not fare well in a match up against either of the afore-mentioned presidential hopefuls, which makes sense if not having much of a record to speak of is the barometer. Palin didn’t manage to serve out even one term as governor and Trump has never held office. Glenn Beck Glenn Beck was somewhat subdued this week as he returned from vacation to serve out the lame duck session of his cancelled TV show, but he did manage to work up a sweat about a story he read in the right-of-centre blog Redstate.com that drew attention to a new study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) that looked at the importability of certain shotguns ( view clip ). Redstate concluded from reading the study that the ATF may be trying to spring new regulations on gun owners by imposing more restrictions on firearms that are not designed for a “sporting purpose”. Beck thinks that preventing American citizens from owning weapons that were designed to kill human beings is unconstitutional and he suspects that it is just one of the many ways that President Obama is trying to undermine the founders’ work. The second amendment is the right to own a gun to protect yourself against who? Clay pigeons?! No – an oppressive government! And don’t start, “Oh, they got tanks.” Yes, and they’ll roll over you. Positive charter . This is what he (President Obama) wants to change it to. First limited speech – no hate; no conspiracy theories. We’ve got to watch that speech. There’s got to be something in the constitution. The government-funded media – we should all just watch al-Jazeera, as Hillary Clinton said because “there’s no commercials on it” and, my favourite, “there’s not people arguing all the time.” So, in addition to this latest perceived assault on second amendment privileges, Beck fears that because of the president’s recent calls for more civility and because Secretary Clinton suggested that we check out al-Jazeera for more comprehensive foreign news coverage – and perhaps because his own show, which specialised in conspiracy theories, has been canned – that the first amendment is also under threat. These assaults on Beck’s freedom put him in no mood to listen to Nancy Pelosi’s recent plea to Republicans and Democrats to try to overcome their differences and to remember that they have “shared values”. I don’t know about you but we don’t have shared values. If you see the constitution as a positive charter, I don’t have anything in common with you. I’m sorry. I see it this way [as a negative charter]. Now, we can still love each other but Hillary Clinton will cry, because then there’ll be people disagreeing on television and then they’ll have to break for a commercial. Beck may find when it comes to the banning of assault weapons, many Americans don’t share his values either. Royal wedding Monarchy Republicans United States Sarah Palin Donald Trump US politics Wisconsin US elections 2012 Barack Obama George Bush Tea Party movement Fox News US television Glenn Beck US gun control US constitution and civil liberties Democrats US unions US foreign policy Hillary Clinton Al-Jazeera Sadhbh Walshe guardian.co.uk