Glenn Beck goes home to face - what else? - controversy

His hometown is giving Beck the key to the city. Before that, his fans paid up to $500 to see and hear the conservative commentator at Safeco Field in Seattle. Did we mention that he has a new book out?

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Anti-Beck protesters claim to have gathered 16,000 signatures in opposition to Beck’s being given the key to his hometown. His fans fought back with signatures and radio call-ins of their own.

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Mt. Vernon Mayor Bud Norris thought it was a good idea to honor a wildly successful hometown boy who got his start in radio there when he was still in high school.

City Council members disagreed. They passed a resolution stating: "Mount Vernon City Council is in no way sponsoring the Mayor's event on Sept. 26, 2009, and is not connected to the Glenn Beck event in any manner."

The mayor of nearby Bellingham has offered a key to his city to Jon Stewart, liberal satirist and host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

Beck gets challenged all the time by what his fans deride as the “mainstream media.”

Sitting for a recent interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, Beck squirmed and huffed as he spent three minutes not answering her question about what he means by “white culture.”

Writing in the New York Times this week, Nobel economist Paul Krugman observed that Beck “informed his audience of a ‘buried’ Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey [the House-passed cap-and-trade climate bill] would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year.”

“Needless to say, no such study exists,” Krugman wrote.

If you couldn’t make it to the events in Washington State Saturday, you can see a pretty funny impression on Saturday Night Live.

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