The Media Research Center is still hating on "GCB": Lauren Thompson's latest column claims that the TV show's latest episode  "fired up to 20 shots on Christians."

As she has throughout her anti-"GCB" crusade, Thompson refuses to publish the entire list of offenses she claims are in the show -- now apparently up to 122 -- so her readers can judge for themselves.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:23 PM EDT

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Like a fly to fresh horse manure or his wife to a hot-buttered biscuit, Obama wasted no time injecting himself into the cruel tragedy of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

-- Mychal Massie, March 26 WorldNetDaily column

Posted by Terry K. at 2:15 PM EDT

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CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson received an award last month from the right-wing group Accuracy in Media, which is best known for peddling wild conspiracy theories. Christopher Isham, CBS vice president and Washington bureau chief, accepted the award in person on her behalf. Attkisson and Isham accepted AIM's award despite news experts warning that Attkisson's credibility would be harmed by doing so.

Since then, AIM has returned to doing what it does best: promoting conspiracy theories. And AIM's Cliff Kincaid has a doozy in his March 26 "special report": He asserts it "has to be seriously considered" that Army Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians, may have been a sort of Manchurian candidate who was working with the Taliban. Kincaid writes that the "rampage had the earmarks of somebody programmed or manipulated to kill."

More from Kincaid:

What can be safely assumed at this point is that the anti-American narrative that the U.S. was backing Bales with a squad of soldiers in a deliberate conspiracy to massacre civilians is almost certainly a conspiracy theory that is part of a global attempt to convince the world of the opposite of what really happened.

Which means that another theory -- that Bales engaged in the killings, with the help of the Taliban, in order to accelerate an American withdrawal -- has to be seriously considered.

There is no direct evidence at this stage for the theory of Bales as an enemy agent or dupe. But Bales' attorney says he has seen "no forensic evidence" and there have been "no confessions" to support the Army's case. The fact is that so little is known about the killings that both sides of the story -- the one told by the U.S. Army and the one told by anti-American foreign propagandists -- have to be questioned.

[...]

If the enemy recruited Bales and then helped him carry out the massacre, so it could be blamed on the U.S., then we gain an additional important insight into the brutal nature of those who want the U.S. to leave so they can take over. Staging a massacre and blaming it on the Americans is something that makes sense, if we examine what is already known about the killings.

Consider that the enemy has infiltrated and recruited among members of the Afghan Army. Is it so far-fetched to believe that an American soldier was recruited as well? Perhaps he was not converted to Islam. But he may have had his outlook on the war completely twisted by the propaganda telling him that he is a member of an occupying force that has to leave the country.

Kincaid goes on to state that "a cover-up may be underway, intended to obscure the nature of the apparent brainwashing that Bales underwent at some point in his military career."

Are Attkisson, Isham, and CBS still proud to have received that award from AIM?

(Cross-posted at Media Matters.)

Posted by Terry K. at 1:33 PM EDT

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Thus far, WorldNetDaily's coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting has been plagued by the plagiarism and theft of intellectual property we've sadly come to expect from WND.

An unbylined March 24 WND article on how "an eyewitness to the incident told police Martin was beating [George] Zimmerman before he shot him" is curiously devoid of any sourcing for its reporting. That, along with the lack of byline, a huge red flag that WND did no original reporting for this article and simply stole the content from other news organizations.

Joseph Farah followed up in a March 25 column by railing against coverage of the Martin case, citing the earlier purloined article as evidence. But an alert ConWebWatch reader noticed that Farah appears to have stolen from a New York Daily News article for an example of "real racism" -- a "13-year-old white boy" in Kansas City who was set on fire by "two black 16-year-olds" -- that wasn't getting noticed.

Farah rearranges things a little, but all the details he cites also appear in this article. From the Daily News article:

"It was pretty bad stuff," Detective Stacey Taylor told the TV station, adding that police are concerned the boy may have suffered damage to his eyes and lungs.

Coon said her son put out the fire with his shirt and called 911 himself. He was rushed to the hospital and was treated for his injuries.

She believes the students also attend East High School with her son, and said he will not be returning to the school. She also told KMBC her traumatized family plans now plans to move.

"My 5-year-old came in and asked me, 'Mom, am I going to get set on fire today?'" Coon said. "I was in tears."

Farah writes:

“It was pretty bad stuff,” Detective Stacey Taylor told a local TV station.

The boy himself struggled to call 9-1-1, according to his mother, Melissa Coon. He was rushed to the hospital where the medical team fears he may have suffered permanent damage to his eyes and lungs.

Coon said she believes the students attend East High School with her son. But she will not be returning her son there even if he recovers. In fact, her family is so traumatized by the attack they plan to move from the area.

“My 5-year-old came in and asked me, ‘Mom, am I going to get set on fire today?’” Coon said. “I was in tears. We were told it’s a hate crime.”

Reads strangely familiar, doesn't it?

Farah also writes: "By the way, it is entirely plausible, though it is too early to assume, that the perpetrators in this hideous attack were actually inspired by the media’s drummed up hysterics about racism in the case of Trayvon Martin."

Well, no, it isn't. Martin was shot and killed on Feb. 26; the Kansas City incident occured on Feb. 28. The Martin case did not receive any substantial media coverage outside Florida until mid-March. There were no "drummed up hysterics" in the media over Martin at the time of the Kansas City incident.

Which makes Farah not only a thief but a liar too.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:18 AM EDT

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Terry Jeffrey, it seems, still can't get over his failure to keep Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan from ruling on a legal challenge to health care reform.

We've documented how Jeffrey has spent the past several months trying to manufacture a conflict of interest that would keep Kagan from ruling on health care reform challenges, while simultaneously ignoring a more clear conflict of interest involving a conservative justice, Clarence Thomas.

Jeffrey gave it one final shot in a March 26 article:

When the Supreme Court on Monday began hearing oral arguments in the cases challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—AKA “Obamacare”—Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan showed up to hear the arguments and gave no indication she would recuse herself from judging the cases even though she had cheered enactment of Obamacare as an Obama political appointee and had personally assigned her top deputy in the Obama Justice Department to defend the law in federal court.

Jeffrey doesn't explain how Kagan appointing someone else to handle defending the law equates to an actionable conflict of interest (perhaps because it doesn't). As for the the claim that Kagan "cheered enactment of Obamacare," this is limited to an email in which she wrote to law professor Lawrence Tribe: "I hear they have the votes, Larry!! ... Simply amazing." Again, Jeffrey doesn't explain how thisequates to having "expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy."

As before, Jeffrey makes no mention whatsoever of Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, is a right-wing activist who founded a group that has attacked health care reform. Thomas also failed to report his wife's income on financial disclosure forms, despite the fact that she earned hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last several years working for right-wing groups that oppose health care reform. 

Jeffrey apparently wanted to get the old, unsubstantiated claims out there one last time before he is forced to retire these tired, ineffective talking points once and for all.

Posted by Terry K. at 1:19 AM EDT

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In the last weeks in particular – following the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House to discuss the Iranian nuclear threat – Barack Hussein Obama has stepped up his “Muslim crusade” to discredit the Jewish state’s assessment that Iran is close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction and that a pre-emptive joint military strike is now necessary. In this way, Obama hopes to justify his refusal to join with Israel to use force to remove these nuclear weapons before they are targeted against the Jewish state, the United States and our European allies to further Tehran’s Islamic revolution. Outrageously, in so doing Obama’s “evil anti-Semitic and anti-Christian express” has committed additional acts of treason against the United States, seriously compromising our national security.

[...]

Our so-called president must not only be quickly removed from office by all legal means, but he must also be prosecuted for treason. If the Justice Department or a military tribunal won’t act, then the “citizen’s grand jury,” which the Supreme Court has acknowledged exists in principle in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, must now be taken out of the legal closet to indict Obama for these treasonous acts.

The nation’s national security and well-being depend on quick and forceful justice for this truly evil president and commander in chief – particularly since time is short with regard to Islamic Iran and its nuclear plans to annihilate Israel and to kill other infidels, meaning Jews and also Christians worldwide.

-- Larry Klayman, March 23 WorldNetDaily column

Posted by Terry K. at 2:29 PM EDT

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Dan Gainor's title as the Media Research Center's T. Boone Pickens Fellow doesn't mean he's limited to shilling for the oil industry -- he'll also do PR work for the meatpacking industry too.

Which seems to explain Gainor's March 23 MRC column defending "pink slime" -- a meat byproduct used as a filler in ground beef. His column is headlined "ABC Takes a Pro- E-Coli Position in Hit Job on Meat Industry." That's right -- according to Gainor, if you don't like "pink slime," you're a lover of deadly bacteria.

Gainor serves up this benign description of the byproduct:

The meat, often called lean finely textured beef, is made up of beef that is just harder to get at, so the meat isn’t lost. It’s treated to get rid of the fat and included with the rest of the ground beef. The USDA declares it healthy, but it is less expensive. As an added bonus, it is treated tiny amounts of ammonium hydroxide to make it safer to eat. But network broadcasts and activist videos act as if this treatment is somehow bad. 

You know what else contains ammonium hydroxide? Household cleaning products and furniture stain. Gainor doesn't mention that. Nor does he mention that, while the USDA considers the byproduct as generally safe, the scientist who coined the "pink slime" term points out that it apparently has never been specifically approved for use in ground beef.

Instead, Gainor rants that ABC, by promoting the story, "is out to destroy a family owned business to push the agenda of a couple of 'whistleblowers' who don’t like the company’s beef ," dismissing one of them as a "loony activist" while not backing up the insult.Gainor also touted how " The International Association for Food Protection gave its singularly best award – called the Black Pearl Award" to the company that makes "pink slime."

Gainor goes on to attack the media in general: "Major media have attacked a long list of industries in recent years – coal, oil, guns, Wall Street, banks and more. Each time, they savage an industry, they do it for ratings, never caring what damage they do to a company, shareholders or employees who might soon be looking for work." This from an employee of an organization that manufactures controversies over museum art it doesn't like.

Gainor even complains that an ABC commentator has advised viewers to limit their intake of red meat to six ounces a week over two servings: "When’s the last time someone dealt you just six ounces of red meat in a week – or in one sitting. The ABC food police think they know better than you what you should eat and how much."

Dietary advice is "liberal bias" too? We had no idea.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:45 AM EDT

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WorldNetDaily is joining Accuracy in Media in defending anti-gay pastor Scott Lively's anti-gay activities in Uganda.

A Jan. 14 WND article by Bob Unruh uncritically repeats Lively's defense against a lawsuit filed against him on behalf of what Unruh described as "an organization of homosexuals in Uganda" accusing Lively of helping to inspire a proposed law that would permit the death penalty for mere homosexuality.

According to Unruh, Lively claims that "I opposed the death penalty provision of the Ugandan bill from the beginning. … It is a baseless charge for which they have not a shred of proof, but in any case advocacy for legislation is speech." But Unruh does not present any documentation to back up Lively's claims -- indeed, it appears that the only person Unruh talked to for this article was Lively.

Unruh didn't mention that in a February 2011 WND column, Lively ranted about how "lavender Marxists" are "murderers" who "have fixed their malevolent gaze on Christian Uganda." If Lively was this harsh while in the U.S., it's entirely possible he was even more inflammatory while in Uganda, where he was out of the reach of U.S. media. Indeed, the lawsuit includes quotes from Lively in Uganda in which he calls pornograhy a "tool of 'gay' social engineering," held a closed-door meeting with pastors there, after which he claimed he described how "America was brought low by homosexual activism," and equated homosexuality with sexual violence against children.

Unruh, curiously, did not mention any of these statements from Lively in his article, stating only that "a multitude of Lively’s comments and statements" are cited in the lawsuit.Unruh also does not provide a link to the lawsuit so his readers can check it out for themselves.

Unruh followed up with a March 24 article that attacked the lawsuit by complaining it targeted Lively's "speech" under a law "that usually is used to target torture, genocide, war crimes and summary executions."This, apparently, is the defense being used by Lively's lawyers from the right-wing legal group Liberty Counsel.

Unruh also whitewashed the allegations against Lively, claiming only that he "shared his opinion on homosexuality and pornography" in Uganda. Unruh completely omits the fact that the lawsuit claims that Lively helped inspire a proposed law that would permit the death penalty for mere homosexuality.

Unruh quotes Liberty Counsel repeating an earlier defense Lively made regarding the murder of Ugandan gay activist David Kato: "The suit leaves out the fact that the suspected killer is a male prostitute with which Kato had sex and refused to pay." In fact, as we've noted, Ugandan police may be trying to cover up a motive of homophobia in Kato's death, and that observers say that the man who was convicted in Kato's death may have been set up to murder Kato for being gay and thought if he established a homosexual sex demand, he would be treated leniently.

Given WND's anti-gay agenda -- and the fact that one of its own opinionators, Molotov Mitchell, embraced Uganda's proposed "kill the gays" law -- it's no surprise that Unruh and Co. would defend Lively. After all, WND sells Lively's factually challenged book "The Pink Swastika."

UPDATE: Warren Throckmorton focuses on Unruh's claim that Lively was expressing "his biblically based religious beliefs," adding:

Where does the Bible say that homosexuality is responsible for the Holocaust? For the Rwandan genocide? That gays are pedophiles? Are those Biblically based beliefs?

Even if one disagrees with the suit, the truth is that Lively is not being sued for his beliefs that homosexuality is a sin. There are many evangelicals who believe that in the U.S. and in Uganda who also abhor the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and tell the truth about their GLBT fellow citizens.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:50 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, March 26, 2012 8:15 PM EDT

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The headline cliches never stop from the pen of NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard. Here's what he's done in the past month or so:

• Krauthammer Smacks Down Shields on Ryan Plan: 'Your Guys Haven’t Introduced a Budget at All'
• Charles Krauthammer Schools Nina Totenberg on Romney Not Denouncing Limbaugh
• Zuckerman Smacks Down Clift: 'That's Nonsense to Say Israelis Don't Think Through Consequences of War'
• National Review's Salam Schools Klein, Vanden Heuvel and Zakaria on Tea Party and Taxes
• Gingrich Schools Stephanopoulos: 'I'll Be Glad to Swap History Credentials With You'
• Geist Schools Brzezinski on Koran Riots: 'Americans Wouldn’t Go in the Streets and Start Killing People'
• S.E. Cupp Smacks Down Margaret Carlson for Calling Santorum a Zealot
• Chris Christie Smacks Down WaPo's Capehart: 'I’m Not Going to be Cross-Examined By You'

And his cliches are spreading among his fellow NewsBusters. Tim Graham headlined a March 24 article, "The Danish Jon Stewart Schools Obama on Using the Same 'Punch' Lines with Every Ally."

Posted by Terry K. at 8:49 AM EDT

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We've detailed how CNSNews.com, led by Terry Jeffrey, has twisted a proposed Obama administration mandate that sterilizations be covered for free under health plans offered by universities to their students, suggesting coercion by claiming that sterilizations "must be offered." CNS is now using that misleading wording in the questions they ambush membwers of Congress with.

This is made clear in a March 20 article by Thomas Cloud:

At a pen-and-pad meeting with reporters on Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol, CNSNews.com asked [Rep. Steny] Hoyer: “The administration has approved a regulation under Obamacare that says, quote, ‘all women with reproductive capacity,’ end quote, must be offered free sterilization –”

Hoyer interrupted: “How is that related to a pre-existing condition?”

CNSNews.com continued: “--hold on--free sterilization in their health care plans. Do you support the mandate for free sterilization for college-age women?”

Hoyer said, “Free sterilization? I don’t know anything about free sterilization. I don’t know anything about that. I’m sorry. The answer is, I don’t. But I don’t think anybody is proposing that.”

This same wording shows up again in March 21 article by Patrick Burke:

CNSNews.com asked [Rep. Tom] Price, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee and a physician, this question: “(T)he administration has offered a regulation under the Affordable Care Act that says ‘all women with reproductive capacity’ -- including college age women -- must be offered free sterilization in their health-care plans. Do you support that particular mandate?["]

As we've previously pointed out, CNS is engaging in propadanda, not reporting the news, by deliberately twisting the facts.

Posted by Terry K. at 4:27 PM EDT

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Like everyone else, Barack Obama’s perception of a just society is based on his upbringing, his education and his personal experiences. Though the media refused to vet him when he ran for president, it is common knowledge that he had a tragic childhood – a childhood that, as Dinesh D’Souza explains it in his book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” justifiably made him a very angry person.

Shortly after his birth, Obama was abandoned by his alcoholic, polygamist father. Later, his mother virtually abandoned him as well, and he was left to be raised by his philosophically far-left grandparents.

-- Robert Ringer, March 14 WorldNetDaily column

So, as odious as everything about communism is, historically speaking, why is it scarcely worth reporting? Well, the second point I was fortunate enough to get across on Hannity’s show is also the reason that some desensitized fools in the conservative community don’t see fit to address Obama’s closeted Marxism: It’s because the political left has, in a very large measure, succeeded in legitimizing radical socialist and communist thought in America.

During the course of the discussion of Obama’s ideology vis-à-vis racial politics, I contended that the aforementioned viewpoint is no longer acceptable. Marxism, as an ideology antithetical to everything American, which breeds criminality and suffering, cannot be tolerated. This once-conventional wisdom has been turned on its head, not surprisingly by communists and liberals in politics, media and education.

And we can see where allowing this has gotten us.

-- Erik Rush,  March 14 WND column

When the dust settles in Tampa in August, the candidates, Ron Paul included, will unite behind the Republican nominee. They will decide that a flawed candidate – and every candidate is a flawed candidate – is better than a Marxist incumbent. Republicans of all stripes and persuasions are unified in their understanding of one imperative: Removing Obama from the White House is more than a political goal: it is a constitutional imperative.

-- Tom Tancredo, March 16 WND column

Months ago I wrote a column about Obama entitled “A president of ‘His People,’ not ‘We the People.’” This characterization has certainly been borne out even more with the Bell revelations and the president’s penchant to further the Pigford fraud.

The Breitbart videos linking Derrick Bell to Obama, showing the president as a Harvard law student leader asking his black compatriots to open their hearts and minds to this racist and anti-Semite, and then hugging Bell, more than unmasks who Obama really is. Whether it is Pigford black reparations or his disdain if not latent hatred for the Jewish state of Israel and his endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque – or a host of other similar outrages toward whites, Jews and Christians – this president certainly does not represent “We the People” but instead “his own people.”

That is why we must use all legal means to remove Obama and his racist, anti-Semitic comrades from access to the White House, and we must do so in short order before the country devolves further into a racial and religious civil war, and our nation and Israel are destroyed, by virtue of the president’s actions.

-- Larry Klayman, March 16 WND column

It’s hard to imagine how Obama could run on that record and succeed. Is this the change Obama promised?

I always believed it was precisely what Obama had in mind. His own energy secretary, in a moment of candor, told Americans the administration’s policy was to push gas prices higher. That was true of Democrats going back to Al Gore – maybe earlier.

Could it be Obama also intended to create more misery for the American people as a matter of policy?

Could he possibly have done any more to achieve that objective?

Could it be he actually sees political advantage in making more Americans dependent on government?

The answer to all three of those rhetorical questions is yes.

That’s the Saul Alinksy plan.

That’s the Cloward-Piven plan.

That’s the Obama playbook.

Will enough Americans awaken in the next eight months to stop this miserable, Marxist social experiment?

-- Joseph Farah, March 19 WND column

Rescuing “Dreams” from Obama’s sluggish work ethic and sophomoric style was a major investment of Bill Ayers’ time. It would not have been hard, however, for Tom Ayers to make it worth Bill’s while.

This all might have worked as planned – if only Obama had contented himself with Chicago, but as the mailman discovered, Obama had bigger ideas.

-- Jack Cashill, March 21 WND column

Although it would be damnably difficult to prove unequivocally, it is pretty much common knowledge in the conservative community that during the 2008 election cycle, GOP leaders made a “deal with the devil” in agreeing not to press then-Sen. Obama’s eligibility if the Democratic leadership would not press on the eligibility of John McCain. It was supposed that a major issue might have been raised with regard to McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone.

Whether the Republican leadership has made a similar deal for the 2012 election cycle vis-à-vis Obama’s radical associations and history remains to be seen, and there’s neither time nor space for me to illustrate the abysmally treasonous nature of such a “deal,” if it exists. Suffice it to say that neither Republican leaders, candidates, nor conservative pundits are addressing the issue of Obama’s Marxism, despite all indications, including new evidence that has recently come to light.

-- Erik Rush, March 21 WND column

In the White House sits a man touted as the first “black American president” whose only claim to that recognition (his skin color) tacitly validates the inhuman, Darwinian understanding of race used systematically to oppress my dark-skinned ancestors during and after their “Time on the Cross” of American slavery. This pseudo-scientific ideology of racism involves categorizing human beings by purely physical attributes, without regard to their moral characteristics. Though it claims to have some foundation in empirical science, it involves willfully ignoring all that constitutes the special distinctiveness of the human species, an ignorant willfulness that makes empirical observation literally impossible. (We cannot observe what we refuse to see.)

Engineered with all the craftiness of evil, Obama’s election in 2008 represented the conceptual triumph of this dehumanizing ideology. 

[...]

As I said in the aforementioned article, written soon after Obama’s perjured swearing-in (for he swore to uphold what he fully intends to overthrow): ...

-- Alan Keyes, March 22 WND column

The media in unison call anyone that mentions the Obama birth certificate controversy and Obama’s lack of vetting and documentation as “obsessed and loony.” But Obama himself cannot stop talking about it. This week alone, he has mentioned it in public twice. On March 20, he joked about it while meeting with the prime minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny. The assembled reporters and supporters greeted his snide comment with uproarious laughter.

Also, while in Cushing, Okla., to talk energy, Obama couldn’t help but talk about his birth certificate again. He asked a woman in the crowd who was allegedly born at the same hospital as he was if she could “find her birth certificate.” We know this only because Fox News reporter Ed Henry tweeted about it.

But if the president wants the issue of his birth certificate not to be in the news, why does he personally continue to talk about it? We contend he does want it in the news so that he can wield this “rules for radicals” strategy against his opponents.

-- Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, March 23 WND column

Posted by Terry K. at 1:40 PM EDT

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We've detailed how the comment thread for a March 23 CNSNews.com article about President Obama's remark that "if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” Martin, the teenager killed by a neighborhood watch captain in Florida, has brought out the kind of racist and homophobic Obama-haters CNS appears to be catering to these days.

Well, the parade of hate and racism among CNS readers has been continuing:

Posted by Terry K. at 11:23 PM EDT

Updated: Saturday, March 24, 2012 11:25 PM EDT

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We already know that Fritz Wenzel, WorldNetDaily's favorite pollster, is more than a little ethically challenged. Now he's even more clearly demonstrating his right-wing bias.

In a March 18 WND article detailing the results of a birther-related Wenzel poll, Bob Unruh quotes Wenzel thusly:

“Politically, the findings on this subject spell potential disaster for the Obama re-election campaign in that one in three independent voters does not believe Obama has provided enough documentation to prove he is legally eligible to hold the presidency,” Wenzel said. “These people will not be voting for him.

“This is a substantial bloc of what we think to be swing voters to have taken off the table right from the beginning, and it spells political disaster for the White House.”

However, he said that Obama is not the only one at fault.

“That no serious action has been taken in Washington to confront this issue paints a sad picture of the impotence or spinelessness of the president’s political opponents and a pathetic portrait of a nation’s citizens who are mostly content to sit idly by while an apparent imposter raids their national treasury and runs their once-great nation into the ground,” Wenzel said.

So, apparently, Wenzel is a birther, and an Obama-hater to boot. Such blatant bias on Wenzel's part is all the more reason not to trust the results of his polling, since it appears he's putting a political message over accurate, impartial polling. 

Posted by Terry K. at 8:37 AM EDT

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When your editorial content is increasingly centered around Obama-hating, as CNSNews.com's content has become, it should be no surprise when your readership is increasingly made up of Obama-haters.

A relatively unbiased March 23 CNS article by Susan Jones on President Obama's remark that "if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” Martin, the teenager killed by a neighborhood watch captain in Florida, has brought out the kind of haters that you'd expect to see trolling around websites not operated by a multimillion-dollar nonprofit group.

Here's a sampling of comments in the article's comment thread:

This is apparently the kind of audience CNS wants, and that's exactly what it's getting.

Posted by Terry K. at 6:08 PM EDT

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Ronald Kessler devotes his March 19 Newsmax article to touting "the powerful political action committee American Crossroads." Kessler promotes the role it intends to play in the election:

American Crossroads and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, which focuses on issues, will be major players in the November election. Together, they expect to raise and spend $300 million to defeat President Obama and congressional Democrats.

What Kessler doesn't do, of course, is explain where that money will be coming from. In the 2010 cycle, a large chunk of American Crossroads' funding came from Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, as well as other corporate donations who can hide behind the 501(c)4 nonprofit status of one American Crossroads division, which is not required to disclose its donors.

Kessler is too locked into hagiography mode, however, to concern himself with such things. He'd rather fawn over the "tremendous amount of research" that goes into American Crossroads' messaging and push the idea that "Americans reject Obama’s negative view of America and embrace Republicans’ positive view."

Posted by Terry K. at 4:23 PM EDT

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