Flush from his new $100 million five year radio deal with Premiere Networks, Glenn Beck is going to bat for the latest poster child for the American right, lemonade stands. “I don’t know about you but I just can’t take it any more . . . we can’t have any lemonade stands,” he’s lamenting on his web site. “The nanny state is out of control.”
The famous blackboard is up and Beck is listing various lemonade stands that have been shut down by the cops in areas where [gasp] permits are required to sell food, among them a venture in Midway County, Georgia.
“It’s the entrepreneurial spirit” that is threatened, Beck insists.
Beck even has a lemonade page on his site, supporting National Lemonade Stand and Bake Sale Hug-A-Thon Day, which happens today, Wednesday, June 13. Apparently lemonade stands have been so repressed that there will be at least two hundred of them up and running across the country on that day.
It’s unclear why Beck has added bake sales to the endangered species list. “Can’t have a bake sale?!!” he alarums, despite offering no evidence that such events have been curtailed. I’d be surprised if they were. After all, thanks to the huge Bush era tax cuts that Beck supports, bake sales are our educational system’s last financial hope.
Where did Beck get this latest cause from? Probably from NPR actually, which ran a piece last July titled America’s attack on lemonade stands. From whence came NPR’s evidence of a McCarthyite police spree on lemonade selling children? The same Georgia story and another in Montgomery Country, Maryland, plus a couple more stands that were robbed by teenage miscreants.
But, unmentioned by Beck, the NPR essay also notes the lemonade stand movement’s great leap forward, the World’s Longest Lemonade Stand—a crowning achievement of the Beverly Elementary School of Beverly Hills Michigan.
It went up on August 20, 2011. “Our stand length of 1,399 feet and 11 inches far exceeded the Guinness World Record requirement of 1,200,” the project’s organizers claim.
Sounds like lemonade venture capitalism is alive and well. “It’s the first time that a kid will say, ‘you know what? I can be somebody. I can make my own money’!” Beck declares, but also adds: “What I think they learn is that nobody buys lemonade from lemonade stands.”
