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Glenn Beck says, "There's some actual journalism happening."

In one of his recent television and radio shows, Glenn Beck marveled over "The Anatomy of a Smear," in the July issue of Townhall Magazine.

He also was thrilled to see his #1 placement on the Top 100 Americans the Left Hates Most. In the most recent issue of Townhall Magazine, we examine how the American Left treats people like Glenn Beck. And as we have watched the ongoing fight in America over the direction of the country, the actions of the Obama administration and Democratic Congress, and the efforts of the tea party movement, the Townhall editorial team has noticed a disturbing pattern: the Left is trashing everyone who dares to stand against them.

The more effective the voices that oppose their agenda, the greater the venom the Left spews in their direction.

It's this out-of-control behavior from our fellow citizens who are sold out to the ultraliberal progressive Obama agenda to "radically transform" the United States that led us to create this list of "The 100 Americans the Left Hates Most."

The Townhall editorial staff compiled a massive list of those we believe have the largest bull's-eyes painted on them by the Left and the Democrat-dominated government. From that list, through a process of voting, debating and prioritizing, we assembled the final 100.

There were only two absolute requirements: 1) They had to be living, which is why Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. are not featured; and 2) they had to be American, which explains Mark Steyn and the Pope's absence from the list.

Here's an excerpt from our Glenn Beck #1 entry:

Glenn Beck has been doing his thing for years. … It wasn't until the last couple of years that the rabid hatred of Beck went mainstream. What happened?

On Jan. 19, 2009, just in time to counter the progressive agenda of the Obama administration that would be sworn in the next day, Beck launched his Fox News Channel (FNC) show. Though he had been on CNN’s Headline News since May 2006, doing a very similar show, it took joining the Fox News family for Beck to really gain the ire of the Left—as long has he was on a low-rated cable channel that also happened to share the ultimate liberal agenda, they felt they could at least co-exist with the conservative talker.

But it wasn’t just Beck's joining the Democrats' most-hated network that has driven liberals to hysteria and resulted in some sort of mental condition that causes them to go into conniption fits at the mere mention of his name in even casual conversation. … No, it's more than Beck becoming one of Roger Ailes' minions—much more. …

Beck's real sin is that he has successfully combined his concern for the direction of this country—a direction currently being dominated by progressives who hate what America has been—with a powerful defense of American exceptionalism and a passion for the Founding Fathers and the system of government and nation they created to produce a show that both educates and entertains. …

Americans—Democrats and Republicans, young and old, those who've been political for ages and those who are just beginning to get engaged—now truly sense the threat to the American way of life that the radical Left's agenda poses. They hadn't realized it before—both because they had never seen such an extremely progressive, uber-liberal, revolution-loving president and because they had either forgotten or never learned the real history of the United States.

Thanks to Beck, Americans are waking up to what our government is up to and are hungering for the real story of their nation—the one that the progressive movement, using the schools and universities, has tried to keep from them.

We are falling in love with our country again.

That is why the Left hates him.

You can get entire Glenn Beck essay and the complete list of 100 by ordering Townhall Magazine today.

If you think we're way off base with some or all of our rankings or believe we missed somebody, please let us know.

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We should've seen it coming.

As his Fox News Channel television audience exploded in 2009, it was only a matter of time before the liberal Left organized itself into a full-court press against Glenn Beck.

Since the conservative radio phenom made the jump from CNN's Headline News to FNC, Beck has set cable ratings records, adding more fans to his radio audience of millions. His five o'clock timeslot on Fox has grown to rival the primetime titans of cable news, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Though O’Reilly and Hannity are no strangers to hatred from liberals, Glenn Beck’s "fusion of entertainment and enlightenment" incites a particularly unique level of vitriol unmatched by any other television commentator today.

The concentrated disdain for Beck has also united the Left behind one common goal: getting him off the air. Various levels of the Left—from grassroots organizers to the Obama White House—are working in an all-hands-on-deck concert to discredit Beck with a barrage of attacks in a relentless smear campaign.

Read the entire feature on the anti-Glenn Beck movement titled "The Anatomy of a Smear by subscribing to Townhall Magazine.

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The Obama Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Eric Holder, seems more interested in playing politics with the prosecution of terrorists and defending jihadists than in nailing down convictions to help protect Americans.

Exhibit A of this might be Holder's initial decision to hold 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial in federal court. But after political blowback, that appears almost certain to change to either a military trial or a civilian trial outside Manhattan.

The about-face came after months of defending the policy by the White House and the attorney general. Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee last November, "Failure is not an option." That guarantee is impossible to make and contradicts the basis of the original decision of civilian trials to maintain the constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty.

While there were indications that sending KSM back to a military court was part of a deal with Republicans to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, Holder has yet to make a final call on the trial's venue.

Even New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer became frustrated with the delay, saying in April, "We know the administration is not going to hold the trial in New York. They should just say it already."

In "Eric Holder: Whose Attorney General?" in the July issue of Townhall magazine, Fred Lucas examines the behavior Eric Holder, the DOJ and the staffers Holder and Obama have chosen to run the DOJ.

Here's an excerpt:

For those who issued the most dire warnings about Obama's AG nomination, Holder has not disappointed. Aside from the KSM trial and commencing a probe of CIA interrogators, Holder defended his call to treat the Christmas Day bombing suspect as a "criminal."

"Neither advising Abdulmutallab of his Miranda rights nor granting him access to counsel prevents us from obtaining intelligence from him," Holder wrote in a Feb. 3 letter to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Ky. "On the contrary, history shows that the federal justice system is an extremely effective tool for gathering intelligence."

Most of this could have been foretold given Holder’s shaky history.

After serving as the No. 2 man in the Clinton Justice Department—where he played a defining role in the pardons of fugitive financier Marc Rich and the FALN terrorists—Holder went on to be a senior partner in the powerful firm of Covington & Burling.

Covington & Burling's website boasts of winning the "Beacon of Justice" award from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association for its work defending Gitmo detainees. The firm has devoted more than 3,000 pro bono hours of legal work to 18 terrorism suspects at Gitmo, seeking to grant the detainees rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and under the Geneva conventions.

"Most of the men have been detained for approximately seven years. None have been charged with any crimes, and none have been accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention," the Covington & Burling site says.

"In Boumediene v. Bush, 128 S. Ct. 2229 (2008), where we were co-counsel for 11 of the detainees, the Supreme Court held that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus extends to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Following that decision, we have been preparing for habeas corpus hearings to be held in federal district court Washington, D.C., for 11 of our clients," it continues.

Thus, there should have been little surprise that the Holder Justice Department would be staffed by at least nine lawyers who have defended or advocated for jihadists in American courts.

Read the whole thing in the July issue.

Subscribe today to make sure you get this issue, featuring not just this piece on the Holder DOJ, but also our much-talked-about list of "The 100 Americans the Left Hates Most."

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Ever since the Supreme Court wrongly delivered the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, the court has rapidly accelerated its hard-right activist tilt. At least that's what People for the American Way claimed in a recent piece of left-wing propaganda that parrots several other liberal activist group talking points.

Is the court really hard-right? Did we miss something?

Actually, no, but liberal activists are trying valiantly to create some doubt about that.

The most interesting question is why they advance a claim with such laughably thin support.

With the nomination hearings for Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, now is the perfect time to examine what the high court's actual philosophy is.

Every year, the court gravely disappoints adherents of the rule of law.

The court certainly did get some important cases right during the last decade. Yet it is a serious error to just infer that any decision most conservatives agree with was ideologically driven.

This is the them of a smart piece by Todd Gaziano titled "What Conservative Court?" in the July issue of Townhall magazine.

Here's an excerpt from the piece:

Why do many liberal activist groups and pundits assert that the Supreme Court is a tool of right-wing interests? …

Some mythmakers' perception of mainstream thought is skewed so far to the Left that they don’t recognize a neutral, legal principle when they see one. Liberal elites have a quasi-religious passion for government-enforced racial quotas (what they call "goals"), unlimited federal power to regulate the environment, the economy, and everything else, and for far-reaching limits on political speech, especially for folks they dislike. These tenets of liberal faith go beyond mere advocacy. Floating in their radical bubbles, the activist mythmakers are sufficiently unmoored from reality and consider their views so superior that they can’t fathom how their fellow citizens could honestly disagree with them—unless they are racists, corporate polluters or dangerous proponents of free speech.

The liberal elites' cramped understanding of (or disregard for) the rule of law is a key cause of the laughable "right-wing" accusations. The philosophical divide between those who want "empathy" judges and those who want "rule-of-law" judges is profound, and while it corresponds roughly with political liberals and conservatives, there are critical differences in how the respective legal philosophies operate.

Certain liberal legal lights and their admirers have advanced a capacious legal philosophy proclaiming that there is very little, if any, objective truth in the law. The sophists of this school argue that studying the text is no less open-ended than any other approach to law. And since they believe all, or almost all, law is subjective, it is imperative for judges to reach "progressive" results. The perfect empathy judge, in their view, reaches the most liberal outcome every time.

Rule-of-law judges and their supporters do not want "conservative" results every time, especially not if the Constitution and statutes do not support that result. The rule-of-law school teaches that judges have a very limited role in our democracy, that the Constitution and laws can be objectively interpreted and fairly applied in almost all cases and that our security comes from a neutral application of legal principles. Rule-of-law judges do not deny that personal bias exists, but they believe it can and should be constrained by the law, not given free reign. The empathy crowd mocks this ideal as impossible to attain, while defenders of the rule of law ask, "Why not try to come close?" …

The war over the courts has been simmering for years, but conservative philosophical gains in recent decades have forced the Left to fundamentally change tactics from openly advocating "non-interpretive" modes of constitutional analysis (I’m not making that up) to pretending to be more faithful, neutral umpires than John Roberts (see Sotomayor's remarkable pretense of fidelity to the Constitution in her confirmation hearing).

As a consequence, liberals must label any decision they don’t like as an example of "right-wing" activism. This is pure projection, but it’s sensible politics. In politics, the best defense often is a good offense, whether the attack is true or not. In a way, it is triumphant proof that the rule-of-law philosophy is prevailing. All that is necessary now is to show that our reading of the Constitution is correct.

To read the whole thing and to ensure you get the July issue, subscribe to Townhall magazine today.

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The new government-mandated food pyramid will be released this year. Are you ready for even more instruction from the feds on how to live your life?

The federal government is using its purse and prerogatives in unprecedented ways to try to achieve a long-elusive slimming of the American diet.

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Also in the July issue:

*Our heroes in Afghanistan

*Cuba and Venezuela share military training

*The Barack Obama Arrogance Edition of The Word

*Allahpundit and Ed Morrissey debate how the president's incompetence will impact the 2010 elections

*Scarlett Johansson drinks the Obama Kool-aid

*Mary Katharine Ham exposes the lies of the hope-and-change man of many promises

*One veteran is taking his campaign to help military men and women across the country -- on foot

*S.E. Cupp predicts the No. 1 issue for the midterm elections.

*Newt Gingrich schools Alan Colmes

*The unintended consequences of ObamaCare

*Who is really on the immigration "fringe"?

And much more.

Subscribe today to make sure you get the powerful July issue.

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