Smells like Beck in here.

When I first moved back to Minnesota I was skeptical. But I've learned to love the place after some time here. Two wonderful safety-net hospitals, great music, vibrant immigrant communities, Al Franken and a bunch of fiery Dems and my two most-favorite hard-luck sports teams.

But lately things are looking worse. It's starting to smell a little like Beck in here. Tim Pawlenty an oily excuse for an afterbirth, much less a human being is encouraging laws decrease the amount of foreign languages spoken in Minnesota.

One backwards town has already passed an English-only law which mostly amounts only to a legal proclamation of xenophobia and racism. Luckily the throngs of immigrants hell-bent on cul-de-sac life in Lino Lakes have been headed off at the pass.

Anti-Islam sentiment is high here as well, and there are Tea Party movements on Minnesotan soil. Beck's recent perverse rally churned my stomach. What hurts more than the fact that MLK's niece is a bigoted idiot is seeing so many young people in attendance. Looking at national trends, one of the greatest hopes is the numbers games. Those against gay marriage are dying out. But misguided youth are falling back into the GOP co-opted Tea Party under the guise of some bogus new libertarian scheme.

I listened to Beck and listened hard, and his message seems two-fold. The first fold is that our country is going to shit, and we've been on the brink of an apocalyptic disaster that only he can predict. The second fold is that we need to bring America back to freedom. At face value he speaks like a libertarian. But inside that second fold is a third fold, and the third fold is purulent and ugly.

Beck wants a theocracy with deregulation and Christendom only, and it's alarming that so many of his followers want this too. True libertarians want nothing, and rich libertarians want to stay rich, and Glen Beck is a way of getting a bunch of simpletons to vote in favor of some thing that will have libertarian-esque tax policies.

America is founded on religious freedom. Yet there is this perverse movement to call Islam anti-American. We are supposedly a haven for freedom. The Tea Party movement is supposedly for freedom too -- but it propagates hatred and a mean-spirited drive toward Christian theocracy. The debate on the Muslim community center by the old WTC site shouldn't even be a debate, but because we had a low flu season last year and apparently idiocy is contagious, here again we have a debate. But for a debate to move forward you have to actually have an argument.

The craziest part of all of this is that the mere presence of democrats in congress has all these crazies foaming at the mouth. And even crazier than that is the sheer amount of crazy people who believe absolutely anything as long as it came from a slightly overweight guy who sort of looks like a plain-clothes Nazi.