Most recently, Mora wrote an Aug. 31 article headlined "2010 Already Deadliest Year for U.S. in Nine-Year Afghan War." As with the other articles, Mora conveniently omits any comparison to the fatality rate in Iraq at the height of the war there. It's not that he could not easily obtain those numbers -- in fact, a fellow CNS writer noted them less than a month ago.
According to a Cybercast News Service database, the deadliest months of the war for U.S. forces were April 2004 (136 total deaths, 125 hostile), November 2004 (146 total, 139 hostile), December 2006 (117 total, 106 hostile) and May 2007 (125 total, 121 hostile).
All of those numbers are approximately twice that of the peak monthly deaths in Afghanistan that Mora has been reporting:
The majority of all American deaths in the war in Afghanistan have occurred under Obama’s watch, according to a CNSNews.com database of Afghanistan war casualties. 612 U.S. soldiers have died since Obama was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, or about 52 percent of the overall 1,181 fatalities (which includes both combat-related casualties and non-combat fatalities).
Mora gives little attention to the fact that the reason there have been more troop deaths in Afghanistan is because there are more troops in Afghanistan.
It's unclear why CNS has gone the body-count route, but we don't recall it doing this when President Bush was in office, certainly not to this extent.
The MRC Runs to Palin's Defense Topic: Media Research Center
If there's one thing the Media Research Center really can't abide, it's unflattering articles about conservative icons. So when Vanity Fair published an article depicting Sarah Palin as the center of "a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family," the MRC swiftly went into defense mode.
First up was the MRC Culture & Media Institute's Nathan Burchfiel, who dismissed the article as "a list of ill-sourced, hearsay attacks on Palin designed to depict her as a raging psychopath" and "managed to cite just one person to criticize Palin on the record." Burchfiel claimed the article "fits right in with previous coverage of Palin," citing a CMI study as evidence. But as we detailed, the study confuses negative coverage with bias and had a severly limited scope of a time in the 2008 campaign in which Palin very much earned the negative coverage she received.
Next was Noel Sheppard, who touted at NewsBusters how Palin "went after impotent, limp, gutless reporters that quote anonymous sources to attack her" in a sycophantic interview with Sean Hannity.
He was followed by Kyle Drennen, who was annoyed that CBS' "The Early Show" had on the author of the Vanity Fair "article slamming Sarah Palin with outlandish accusations."
The CMI's Burchfiel returned to scowl at the author's appearance on "Morning Joe" talking abouthow he "depicts Palin as a volatile, vengeful, mean-spirited figure." Burchfiel portrayed the writer as an "antagonist" who may not be telling the truth when he claimed that "he set out to defend the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, but that the resulting article 'was forced on me by the facts.'"
Tim Graham then chimed in, complaining that "Morning Joe" covered "anonymously sourced hit jobs against alleged serial liar Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.
That's the MRC's job -- attack the messenger and not once challenge the facts.
WND Can't Tell Difference Between Domestic Violence, Hate Crime Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh uses a Sept. 1 WorldNetDaily article to serve up a bit of concern trolling from a "family group" that merely wants to hate gays.
Unruh writes about a purported epidemic of "lesbians attacking lesbians," and quotes Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, asking why these aren't being charged as hate crimes.
In fact, the three cases of "lesbians attacking lesbians"cited by Unruh appear to instances of domestic violence, not anti-gay hate crimes.
Unruh then brings on anti-Kinsey fanatic Judith Reisman to spout unsupported claims:
Judith Reisman, author of "Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America," told WND her studies of sexual deviancy over the decades has confirmed that "gay-on-gay" battery actually is common.
"Indeed, it is statistically more significant than is heterosexual battery – that is often triggered by repressed memories of pederastic sex abuse," she said.
"My interviews with recovering homosexuals and those still in the 'life' confirm early sexual abuse as a motivating factor in their resulting homosexuality. This bitter background of betrayal supports a higher rate of same sex battery than is found in marital violence.
"This is especially true in lesbian relations. My in-depth interviews with lesbians confirm the data on their high incest rate – much more so than among male homosexuals," she continued. "The claims of low reporting due to police hostility means the high level of same sex violence is drastically underreported by male and female homosexuals."
Reisman went on to portray a book "Men Who Beat the Men Who Love Them," as describing "the commonality of homosexual and lesbian battery as reflecting a generally violent lifestyle." In fact, the book appears to do no such thing -- rather, it merely focuses on the then-taboo issue (at the time of its 1991 publication) of domestic violence in gay relationships, and Reisman offers no evidence that violence in gay relationships is any more "common" than in heterosexual relationships, let alone endemic to the lifestyle. Indeed, the authors, David Island and Patrick Letellier, write:
This book marks agurning point in the movement ot stop gay men's domestic violence. As a community, we must wake up, learn about domestic violence occuring in our midst, unambiguously condemn it, and state to work to eradicate it. We must end the violence.
This book, paradoxically, validates gay relationships and gay coupling by demonstrating through an intelligent analysis of this problem taht gay men are subject to the same problems that heterosexuals are. The time has come for a book written by gay men that gakes gay coupling seriously, while at the same time forthrightly examining the severe problem of domestic violence without blaming thte dominant, homophobic, and homohating culture for it.
Needless to say, Reisman blames all of this on Alfred Kinsey, and Reisman just happens to have written a new smear book about him.
Unruh, meanwhile, just can't stop lying about the hate-crimes bill:
The Hate Crimes Act, signed into law in 2009 by Obama, was dubbed by its critics as the "Pedophile Protection Act" after an amendment to explicitly prohibit pedophiles from being protected by the act was defeated by majority Democrats. During congressional debate, supporters argued that all "philias," or alternative sexual lifestyles, should be protected.
In fact, as we detailed, since the federal government's definition of "sexual orientation" already excludes pedophilia and the other "philias" Unruh is hinting at, the amendment was redundant, and the law does not protect pedophilia.
WorldNetDaily has touted an affidavit by retired Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney in the case of Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, who's currently throwing away his military career to satisfy the birther movement.
McInerney is also a Fox News military analyst with more than 200 appearances over the past eight years. Media Matters has more.
McInerney is not the only birther to have popped up on Fox News, as Media Matters goes on to note -- WND's Aaron Klein and Jerome Corsi have as well.
WND Quick to Link Discovery Gunman to Gore, Ignores Own Links to Extremism Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has gotten into politicizing the hostage crisis at the Discovery Channel headquarters with a Sept. 2 article by Bob Unruh trying to portray the hostage taker, James Lee -- whose name Unruh gets wrong -- as merely channeling Al Gore's environmental views by citing so-called "experts."
Needless to say, Unruh fails to note that Lee dovetails nicely with WorldNetDaily's right-wing anti-immigration agenda by denouncing "anchor baby filth."
WND has a longtime aversion to introspection when the perpetrators of violent acts have agendas that parallel its own. We've detailed how WND was quick to dismiss Scott Roeder, convicted killer of abortion doctor George Tiller as "allegedly suffered from mental illness" and "not associated with the mainstream pro-life movement" even though WND had long published articles sympathetic to anti-abortion extremists. WND later published several columns by Jack Cashill praising Tiller's murder as "frontier justice."
WNd has also failed to acknowledge that it shared several viewpoints with Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn, including Obama birtherism and hatred of the Federal Reserve.
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Spinning a Tragedy Topic: NewsBusters
A Sept. 1 NewsBusters post by Lachlan Markay predicted that "the left will be working overtime in the next few days to spin ... any way they can" the hostage crisis at the Discovery Channel headquarters, claiming they won't highlight "the radical, militant environmentalism he espoused, and that "anti-war groups" make "similar claims."
Markay doesn't mention that NewsBusters leads the way in doing this kind of spin.
In a May 31, 2009, post, Tom Blumer touted a LifeNews.com article claiming that Scott Roeder, shooter of abortion doctor George Tiller, "appears to have an affiliation with extremist political groups but not with the mainstream pro-life movement." Blumer similarly insisted that "George Tiller's murderer was not affiliated with the prolife movement."
Except, of course, that he was. As we detailed at the time, Roeder had numerous contacts with mainstream anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, and Randall Terry, for years considered a mainstream figure in the pro-life movement, tacitly endorsed Roeder's shooting of Tiller.
Similarly, a June 11, 2009, post by Noel Sheppard insisted that James von Brunn, who shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, was "hardly conservative" even though, as we noted, he held such right-wing views as Obama birtherism and hatred of the Federal Reserve (views also held by WorldNetDaily).
Why doesn't Markay want others to do what NewsBusters has done?
Conflict of Interest: WND Writer Promoted Author Whose Book She Edited Topic: WorldNetDaily
When we wrote our blog post on WorldNetDaily pretending that attendance at Glenn Beck's rally last Saturday was racially diverse, we noted that one of the articles was written by Anita Crane, a name we didn't recall seeing on a WND byline before (though it turns out she has written twoprevious articles for WND, and she is identified in a 2006 WND article as "editor of Celebrate Life magazine").
Now we know a lot more about Crane -- and one of the people she wrote about.
A Sept. 1 Southern Maryland Online article focuses on local author Ron Miller, who was quoted extensively in Crane's article, which also made sure to mention Miller's new book, "Sellout: Musings from Uncle Tom's Porch." The Drudge Report linked to Crane's WND article, and sales of Miller's book spiked on Amazon.com, he said.
The end of the article includes the following note:
Note: Ron volunteered that the article on WorldNetDaily which mentioned him was written by the woman who edited his book.
That's right -- Anita Crane featured an author whose book she edited in her WND article. Of course, neither she nor WND disclosed this, even though she had previously promoted Miller's book on her personal website by describing herself as "Ron's editor and contributor."
WND has a longhistory of violating journalistic ethics by failing to disclose its personal and financial interests in the subjects and people it writes about, so it's probably not surprising that Crane thought she could get away with it too.
A freelancer like Crane perhaps shouldn't be looking to WND as guidance for ethics, since its endemic ethical lapses may very well keep her from getting further freelance work (from publications other than WND).
New Article: More Than An Endorsement Topic: Newsmax
Not only did Newsmax slant its coverage of the Republican primary for Florida governor in favor of Bill McCollum and against Rick Scott, Newsmax CEO hosted a undisclosed fundraiser for McCollum -- all on top of Newsmax's editorial endorsement. Read more >>
Molotov: Obama's Going to Hell Because He's 'Pro-Sodomy' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Apparently feeling left behind by his wife's recent outbursts of hate, Molotov Mitchell brings the rage in his Sept. 1 WorldNetDaily video, in which he purports to explain -- as the "flag-waving, Bible-thumping enemy" of the "liberal media" -- why people think President Obama is a Muslim and not a Christian:
If Obama is indeed a Christian, as he has claimed many times, then he should be promoting Judeo-Christian values and opposing evil as it is defined in Scripture. The Bible instructs its readers to define a tree by its fruit, and Obama's fruit is blood-drenched and fatal if consumed.
According to Christianity, those who pervert the faith and lead others to hell by justifying and promoting their sinful lifestyles will end up in hell themselves. And if hell is a manifestation of you reaping what you have sown in sin, I shudder to think of what Obama's pro-abortion, pro-sodomy eternity could look like.
Did we mention that Molotov hates gays (despite claiming to have them as friends, which we somehow suspect is no longer the case after he endorsed the proposed Kenyan law that would kill people for being gay)?
But he wasn't done with the hate -- he still had to mock Obama some more:
Let's get one thing abundantly clear -- Obama's no Muslim. I mean, the guy doesn't pray to Mecca, he denies Islam, he eats barbecue, his wife wears the pants in the house. The guy is about as Muslim as Brad Pitt is Buddhist.
But after dropping charges against confessed terrorists, holding iftar dinners to kick off Ramadan on multiple occasions, and promoting the 9/11 Islamic victory screw-you-New-York mosque, he might as well be Muslim. Seriously, Barry, you're halfway there. Now grow a beard and cover up your woman, you swine-eating apostate.
To push the hate even further, Mitchell puncuated the idea that Obama's "wife wears the pants in the house" with this image:
WND Columnist Portrays Obama As Forrest Gump Topic: WorldNetDaily
Christopher Grey decides to use his Aug. 30 WorldNetDaily column to portray President Obama as Forrest Gump, and the results are about what you'd expect:
Hello America, My Name is Barack Gump.
Some people think I was born in Hawaii. Others think I was born in Indonesia. I really don't know, but I'm glad that I stayed in America. Indonesia is a scary place, and I never could have been president over there. I never really knew my father. My mother said he was a great man. My grandparents didn't think so highly of him. I really don't know, but I wrote a book about him.
Some people say I'm black. Others say I'm mixed race. Some people say I'm not black enough. Others say I hate white people. My mother didn't like white people even though she was white. My grandparents didn't like black people even though liked me. I really don't know what I think, but I used a lot of drugs in high school trying to figure it out. White girls always liked me, but I didn't really like them.
[...]
So I'm doing everything I can to make sure that the Republicans take back control of the House in November. That way I can have somebody to campaign against. I can get back to doing what I know how to do. That is, I give speeches and win elections. Maybe the Republicans can even figure out how to fix the economy, and then I can take the credit for it. It's like my mother always said, "Barry, you can't trust anybody in this world. You've just got to believe in yourself. Good things will happen for you because people like you." My mother was a smart woman. Now I need to go have a cigarette and relax with my best friend, the teleprompter. All this talking about serious stuff is stressing me out.
Wash. Times Sells for $1; Will Bozell Snark About it? Topic: Media Research Center
When the Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek magazine to Sidney Harman for $1 and assumption of debt, the Media Research Center issued a statement by president Brent Bozell being all snarky about it:
There's something entirely believable about the Newsweek sale. A left-winger pretending to be centrist sold it to another left-winger pretending to be centrist. Newsweek is a dying magazine because no one wants to read their left-wing propaganda masquerading as 'news.' The $1 price tag, then, is probably just about right.
U.S. News is now reporting that News World Communications is selling the Washington Times to founder Rev. Sun Myung Moon for, yes $1 and assumption of debt.
We'll be keeping an eagle eye out for Bozell's comment that the price is probably just about right, given that the Times is a dying newspaper because no one wants to read their right-wing propaganda masquerading as "news."
D.J. Dolce 'Joke': Coulter Paid '30 Pieces of Silver' to Speak at GOProud Topic: WorldNetDaily
D.J. Dolce continues her painfully unfunny "comedy" stylings in her latest WorldNetDaily video:
Ann coulter has been axed from speaking atWorldNetDaily's Taking Back America conference due to a prior agreement to speak at a gay Republican conference called -- get this -- HomoCon. Homocon is not to be confused with ComicCon, although women find the terms interchangable.
Even more surprising was Coulter's speaking fee: 30 pieces of silver.
OK, that was too harsh. She was paid 10 gold coins from Goldline.com.
Now we know why Molotov Mitchell married Dolce -- she hates gays even more than he does.
Newsmax's Hirsen Promotes Misleading Auto Worker Claim Topic: Newsmax
Noting a made-for-cable movie about the financial crisis based on a book by the New YorkTimes' Andrew Ross Sorkin, James Hirsen writes in an Aug. 31 Newsmax "Left Coast Report" item:
Although Sorkin appears to fit in quite well with Hollywood liberalism, he once argued for a government-sponsored bankruptcy for General Motors. In a Nov. 17, 2008, Times column, Sorkin wrote: “At General Motors, as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs.”
This caused ever-irritated Keith Olbermann to place Sorkin in his MSNBC “Countdown” show’s “World’s Worst Person” segment.
I wonder if this means there’s a smidgen of hope for objectivity in the flick.
Hirsen didn't mention why Sorkin's claim got singled out by Olbermann -- because it's highly misleading.
As FactCheck.org points out, automakers didn't actually get "paid $70 an hour" even including health care and pension costs -- wages averaged only $29 an hour, and adding health and pension gets you to only $55 an hour. The rest was benefits paid to retirees, not to current workers.
WND Still Hiding Key Klein Statement on Obama Birth Topic: WorldNetDaily
Why is WorldNetDaily so afraid of a simple sentence?
An Aug. 30 WND article asserts that, according to Aaron Klein's Obama smear book "The Manchurian President," "While there is no evidence he was born overseas, President Obama has not released sufficient documentation to prove his place of birth."
But Klein's book also states, on page 70, that "the authors find no convincing evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, nor that his birthplace was any place other than Hawaii, his declared state of birth."That statement is missing from this WND article.
This is not the first time WND has deliberately omitted this statement from Klein's book because it conflicted with WND's birther agenda. As we detailed, WND also omitted the statement in an July 27 article making a similar argument about Obama's birth.
What is it about this single sentence by Klein that makes Joseph Farah and crew so afraid? Is it that if it is repeated, it undermines WND's entire birther agenda?
Vox Day: If Obama's So Smart, Why Didn't Do Well on PSAT? Topic: WorldNetDaily
The very smart Vox Day decides to play stupid in his Aug. 30 WorldNetDaily column, sneeringly referring to Barack Obama as "President Soetoro" and snarking, "I wouldn't be astonished to be informed that Barry Barack Soetoro Obama Hussein Soebarkah's real name was Henry Smith. Or, for that matter, Hasan al-Mansoor."
Day then decides to beat us with his brain and pass judgment on the intelligence of Obama:
Setting aside the obvious lunacy of accusing someone who believes that Bill Ayers was Soebarkah's ghostwriter of being a birther or thinks that Soetoro was the beneficiary of some extraordinary affirmative action in getting into both Columbia and Harvard Law despite being an exchange student who didn't score well enough on his PSAT to qualify for National Merit– the correct terms would be "authorer" and "colleger," respectively, there remain a remarkable number of questions about the man who has managed to destroy the Democratic Party's electoral chances faster than George W. Bush eviscerated the Republicans.
[...]
There is the question of his intelligence. That he is inarticulate does not mean he is not highly intelligent; many very smart people find it difficult to communicate with those whose IQs are 75 points lower than their own. However, one of the few things we do know about Soetoro is that he attended an elite school in Hawaii where all of the students take the PSAT. In fact, Punahou is famous for the number of National Merit Award winners it produces. In 2010, it boasted 25 National Merit semifinalists out of the 425 students in its senior class, a rate nearly six times higher than the national average.
Since we know Obama was not recognized by National Merit, we can be assured that he possesses a sub-Mensa standard IQ. For this and other reasons, I have estimated that Soebarkah's IQ is in the 115-120 range.
Day (aka Theodore Beale) must be smarter than all of us -- his Mensa membership is listed on his bio. (Though he's not so smart to actually know for sure whether Obama's school made all students take the PSAT at the time Obama was there.)
After all, who but a very smart person like Mr. Day would design an 18-button mouse?
