July 7, 2010

Beck U. Courses: Your Ideas

Courtesy photo / <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677//vp/38069824#38069824">Countdown with Keith Olbermann</a>

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My, oh my. From Keith Olbermann’s Countdown sendup to your comments and tweets, it seems plenty of folks have gone abuzz over Glenn Beck’s foray into academe. When he announced—just before the 4th of July holiday—that he’d offer “Beck University” classes online for his angry horde faithful viewers, MoJo drew up a short list of course offerings we hoped to see. And since then, you’ve added ever more.

Based upon our cullings from the MJ comment section and tweets with the hashtag #BeckUCourses, we’ve compiled just a few of your crowdsourced course descriptions, with links to the creative readers wherever possible. Below that, check out a live tweet feed of the ideas that just…keep…coming…

Keep an eye out for our next hashtag fandango—what will it be? Post-election job titles for Michael Steele? New policy suggestions from Sharron Angle? The possibilities are—well, if not limitless, a lot of fun, anyway!

  • HITLR 101: Intro to Modern American Politics—@LeahLibresco
  • Art Appreciation with Thomas Kinkade—@S_Shapiro
  • Art 200: Drawing Devil Horns on Obama—@CPUihlein
  • Philosophy 303: Transcending Jus Ad Bellum & Jus In Bello and Just Waging War—@mgdemocracy
  • The Social and Cultural Roots of Founding Fathers Fetishism—@krwilmott
  • Gender Studies 201: Male Tears for Money and Power—@WilliamHarryman
  • Foreign Language Requirement: Tongues (Conversation Class)—@onomatomaniac
  • The Teleology of 911 as Political Weapon: Harnessing the Ineluctable Truthiness—@JoshHarkinson
  • Semiotics 101: Decoding the Hidden Socialist Messages in Household Objects—@sflorini (also known as “Reds Under Beds”—@RedScareBot)
  • Pinko Floyd: Neo-Communist Utopias and Progressive Rock—@thatdanstewart
  • Holocaustic: Appropriating World-Historical Tragedy for Public Speaking Points—@adamweinsteinmj
  • Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death Panels:The Semiotics of Sarah Palin—@joshharkinson
  • From Benedict Arnold to Barack Obama: Hitler’s influence on US History—@whatscottreads
  • EDU 551 Rewriting Curriculum and Textbooks Using the Texas Model—Joe Pribyl
  • Keynes 101: The Problem with Bisexual Economists—Anonymous
  • OB/GYN Seminar: Miscarriage Management: Mocking Women on Air—bg
  • Latin 1: How to Give Your Fake University a Real Latin Motto—Anonymous

 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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