CNS Columnist's Revisionist History of The Depression Topic: CNSNews.com
Kevin Price ("a syndicated columnist, publisher and managing editor of US Daily Review, and host of the Price of Business radio show") serves up this, er, interesting take on history in his Sept. 10 CNSNews.com column:
Another president who inherited a terrible economy was FDR from Herbert Hoover. How did FDR compare to Obama? Well, in spite of the romantic notions of liberal ideologues, Roosevelt was a disaster as he took a serious recession into the nation's worst Depression. Interestingly, Obama's approach to solve our economic crisis is similar to FDR's and we are getting similar results. Big government, outrageous subsidies, and massive increases in regulations guaranteed that the Great Depression would be the worst economic period in our nation's history to date. It appears Barack Obama may be committed to out performing FDR in this notorious area.
Actually, mosteconomistsagree that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies lifted the country out of the Great Depression, not deepened it.
And this guy hosts a radio show about business? Apparently an understanding of economics and history was not required for Price to get that gig.
WND's Klayman Goes On A Clinton Derangement Head Trip Topic: WorldNetDaily
Given his record of legal and personal failure in recent years, it's no surprise that Larry Klayman would want to relive his glory years of filing harrassing lawsuits against the Clinton administration. And that's exactly what he does in his Sept. 7 WorldNetDaily column.
And since this is Larry Klayman we're talking about, he kicks things off with a huge blast of the derangement syndromes that occupy his fevered brain, of the Clinton and Obama varieties:
No matter how much gloss conservative talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity try to spin in favor of the Grand Old Party, the hard reality is that presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his minions of timid, disorganized and confused Republicans took a bath this week at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. That’s because the largely uneducated and ill-informed American electorate was treated to extensive brainwashing by black Muslims, leftists, feminists, radical gays and lesbians, atheists, anti-Semites, anti-Christians and others who wrapped themselves in sheep’s clothing. And, when it all was over last night, there was blood on the floor, this time ironically not from the over 80 people who mysteriously “died” during the Clinton administration – including former White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster, who many, including myself, believe to have been Hillary Clinton’s at one time extra-marital lover – but now figuratively from Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate.
And who better to spill this blood than Hillary’s “faithful” husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Klayman, it seems, still believes in the discredited "Clinton body count."
In his laundry list of mostly ginned-up Clinton "scandals," Klayman inserts the claim that the Clintons were "simply stealing the White House furniture." In fact, the government found that there is little evidence that furniture orncomputers were stolen or damaged at the end of the Clinton administration.
Klayman proudly proclaims that Al Gore "lost the 2000 presidential election, largely due to the work I did at Judicial Watch, then hilariously insists that "I never went after Clinton to influence the election." If you can read that sentence without laughing yourselves silly, you're made of better stuff then we are.
Klayman is also incensed that the Bush administration didn't follow on his highly partisan anti-Clinton witch hunt, which means Clinton has come back to torment Klayman some more:
But when George W. Bush was predictably elected president in 2000, rather than ordering his Justice Department to work with me at Judicial Watch to put the Clintons away where the sun don’t shine – in prison – Bush, true to his establishment blue-blood roots, instead invited the Clintons to the White House for tea, praised them, and told Attorney General John Ashcroft to drop all legal matters concerning them. The establishment, Democrat and Republican alike, when push comes to shove, will always circle the wagons in high-level criminal and civil cases to protect itself. Only lower-level officials, if anyone, are burned at the stake and held legally to account.
Now, having been let off the hook by W. and congressional Republicans, 14 years later Bill Clinton has risen from the politically and legally dead and come back with a vengeance, fully “rehabilitated,” to deliver crushing blows to presidential candidate Mitt Romney at the DNC convention.
Poor Larry Klayman. All he has is his frivolous lawsuits from the Clinton administration to cling to, since he has no recent accomplishment he can point to now.
Noel Sheppard Falsely Claims Gore Said He Invented the Internet Topic: NewsBusters
One of the very first items we wrote for ConWebWatch 12 years ago was about how conservatives were misinterpreting Al Gore's comments about his role in creating the Internet. We're still writing about it.
In a Sept. 9 NewsBusters post -- the same one in which he complains that someone had the audacity to fact-check Paul Ryan's claim about running an implausibly fast marathon -- Noel Sheppard was just as apolectic that CBS' Norah O'Donnell "actually equated the error to Al Gore saying he invented the internet." Sheppard repeated himself later in the post, saying that O'Donnell "compared his error - about a marathon time from 22 years ago! - to another politician boasting about inventing the internet," huffily adding: "Does O'Donnell really think someone's time in a race is as consequential as an invention that has radically changed our very way of life?"
Of course, Gore never said he "invented the internet" -- he said that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" as a congressman, a claim the Media Research Center has misinterpreted numerous times. And as we've pointed out severaltimes since that original item, the folks who did invent the Internet, like Vinton Cerf, credit Gore for his role in forwarding it.
Sheppard has regularlylied about Al Gore, so it's no surprise that he would cling to this lie for so long.
WND's Ellis Washington Goes Gaga Over Obama-Hater's Speculative Fantasy Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ellis Washington spends two entire columns regurgitating the speculative anti-Obama film "Dreams From My Real Father" and treats every single claim it makes as fact.
How gullible is Washington? Take this passage from his Aug. 31 column, for instance:
When you compare Davis’ doctrinaire Marxist resume with the son-of-a-goat-herder story Obama and his propagandists have fed America for 50 years, it becomes self-evident that the Kenyan story was a cover to hide the fact that Obama’s young promiscuous mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a regular guest at Frank’s house. (Stanley Sr. and Frank were drinking buddies.) Obama’s mom was hell-bent on getting revenge on her father for making her leave all her friends her senior year in Washington for Hawaii, where she knew no one. Ann sought refuge in dad’s new cool friend, Frank Marshall Davis. Soon we would have the pornographic pictures showing Obama’s mother in several sexually suggestive positions. We now know that Davis sold these photos to men’s mail-order stag magazines.
Ironically, the naked pictures we see of young Ann were taken by Davis in December 1960 when she was five weeks pregnant with Barack Obama.
It is a small step from young Ann Dunham sneaking out of high school to Frank’s house to listen to jazz, to take pornographic pictures, have forbidden conversations and to engage in orgies where the fruit of one of those sordid affairs was to be a future president of the United States. But who would elect a “red diaper baby” (i.e., the child of a communist)? That’s why Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham Sr., and Obama’s mother conspired together to formulate the Kenyan student plot – to get Barack Obama Sr., a recent Kenyan national on a temporary student visa recruited by Stanley Dunham Sr., a CIA spy, to become a future CIA operative when he returned back to Africa – one of many Cold War programs fighting world Soviet hegemony.
But as we've previously pointed out, Gilbert never proves that the nude photos in question are of Obama's mother. And where is Washington getting his claim that Ann Dunham "engaged in orgies"? It appears that Washington is trying to slut-shame a dead woman in order to smear her son as an illegitimate bastard. Socrates -- the real one, not Washington's imaginary philosopher -- would not approve.
Washington also claims that Obama made "two well-publicized trips to Kenya in 1987 and 2006." Obama was a senator in 2006, but was an unknown student in 1987, making it highly unlikely that trip was "well-publicized."
Wsahington takes his love-fest for the speculative film to an absurd extent in his Sept. 7 column, devoting paragraphs to what the film's Obama impersonator says as if it was actually coming from Obama's lips or somehow based in reality instead of an Obama-hater's speculative fantasy.
But then, Washington is an Obama-hater who engages in speculative fantasy too, so it was apparently predestined that he's the ideal, uncritical audience for this film.
MRC Hates It When Paul Ryan Is Fact-Checked Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has never thought that its "Tell the Truth!" campaign should apply to fact-checks of conservatives, and it's proven that yet again.
Clay Waters complains in a Sept. 7 MRC TimesWatch item that the New York Times "devoted a full story to probing" Paul Ryan's "claim to have run a super-fast marathon," dismissing it as a "silly atheletic-related controversy" and "partisan-slanted 'fact-checking.'" In Waters' mind, it seems, only "partisan" fact-checkers hold conservatives accountable.
Noel Sheppard brought his hackishness to the issue in a Sept. 9 NewsBusters post, declaring that the marathon in question happened " 22 years ago," huffily adding: "Our nation is struggling with stubbornly high unemployment and spiraling budget deficits that threaten our very existence, and O'Donnell spent time quizzing the Republican vice presidential nominee about his marathon time when he was in college."
Bradlee Dean's Obama Derangement: 'Kissinger Is The Man Who Sits Next to Obama' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Rubio then went on to say his opposition to Obama is not personal. If you are truly an American, it is totally personal.
Three thousand seven hundred babies a day are aborted in America. Since President Obama’s time in office, over 4 million babies have been slaughtered in the womb.
Americans are outraged by Hitler’s holocaust that killed 6 million Jews, Polish and other innocent civilians, yet the past eight presidents are responsible for 55 million babies who have been killed on American soil (Proverbs 6:17).
It doesn’t stop there. The DNC, at its convention this week, is attempting to mandate through totalitarian means taxpayer-funded abortion. In essence, the American people will become forced accomplices to murder.
And the establishment minions have the audacity to say that Obama is just a “bad president”?
Where is the outrage, America? Is this not personal?
Day by day, we hear of another American soldier killed in Afghanistan. Bob Woodward, in his book “The Final Days,” quoted Henry Kissinger’s shameful statement, “Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.” Kissinger is the man who sits next to Obama while telling us that he is pushing for a New World Order. Our soldiers died fighting against the ideology America is tolerating through the Obama administration.
As our military men swear an oath and lay down their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies (both foreign and domestic), the establishment uses them for their own political games.
Where is the outrage, America? Is this not personal?
How many shots does this administration need to take at you and your country before you realize his intention is to sink your ship?
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Rooting Against Films Topic: NewsBusters
In a Sept. 6 NewsBusters post, Tom Blumer claims that "far-left Hollywood" is "so upset" with Clint Eastwood's bizarre, rambling lecturing to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention that they're rooting for his new film, "Trouble With the Curve," to fail at the box office.
Why, you'd think NewsBusters would never be so gauche as to root for the failure of a film because they didn't agree with some political aspect of it, right?
Wrong. Back in 2009, NewsBusters' P.J. Gladnick proudly proclaimed the movie "Che" to be "one of the worst box office bombs in film history," on the scale of the infamous "Heaven's Gate." It wasn't true of course -- it wasn't even the biggest bomb of 2009. Gladnick also baselessly posited that a movie's quality is measured by its popularity, which, as anybody who saw "Batman & Robin" can attest, is definitely not true.
WND: Foreigners Make New York Look Like 'Star Wars' Bar Scene Topic: WorldNetDaily
We already know WorldNetDaily doesn't like black people (those who aren't WND columnists, anyway), so it's no surprise it's pretty hostile to foreigners too.
That was driven home in a promo email for a WND article. Carrying the headline "New York to look like 'Star Wars' bar scene?"it reads: "If you recall the bar scene from "Star Wars," you know it was filled with a cast of sordid characters. Well, New York City will host such a cast, with you-know-who leading the pack ..."
The email links to a Sept. 7 WND article by Stewart Stogel on how "the leaders of Israel and Iran both will be attending the United Nations General Assembly later this month. President Obama also is expected to be on hand." Stogel also notes that "French President Francois Hollande and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron also will attend the U.N. forum."
How, exactly, does this equal a "'Star Wars' bar scene"? We have no idea -- Stogels article doesn't even mention "Star Wars" or bars. Apparently, to WND, all foreigners -- even Israelis -- are misshapen and inferior to Americans. And, apparently, Obama counts as a foreigner, which dovetails nicely with WND's birtherobsession.
Most people would call that attitude kinda racist. What say you, WND?
CNS Disappears Limbaugh From Another Article About Sandra Fluke Topic: WorldNetDaily
Back in April, CNSNews.com managed to publish an article about Sandra Fluke being a "national figure" without mentioning the fact that she became one due to Rush Limbaugh spending three days denigrating her as a "slut" and a "prostitute" for talking about birth control in public.
CNS pulled off that little trick again in a Sept. 6 article by Susan Jones on Fluke's speech at the Democratic National Convention. She wrote:
Fluke, now an attorney, headed a "reproductive justice" group during her days at Georgetown Law School.
At an unofficial House hearing staged by Democrats last February, she said she chose to go to law school at Georgetown because it offers a quality education, but she also expected the school to accommodate students who do not share the Catholic belief that contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization are immoral.
“When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected by this lack of contraceptive coverage," Fluke testified at an unofficial house hearing in February 2012.
Jones curiously didn't mention what happened after that hearing: Limbaugh's three-day misogynistic tirade. Indeed, Limbaugh is mentioned nowhere in Jones' article.
Jones also misleads about anti-abortion legislation that Fluke opposes:
Fluke and others have interpreted the Protect Life Act to mean that women denied abortion coverage would be left to die. ("When the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor, and health care providers do not have to intervene," Rep. Nancy Pelosi said in Dec. 2011.)
(In fact, the text of the bill does make exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.)
In fact, the part of the bill that could cause pregnant women to die is a "conscience clause" that would allowing hospitals that receive federal funds but are opposed to abortions to turn away women in need of emergency pregnancy termination to save their lives.
Jones also ignored the fact that anti-abortion congressmen tried to narrowly define the rape exemption as applying only to "forcible rape," which could be defined as excluding pregnancy from statutory rape or rape while a woman is drugged.
Jones' article is dishonest and incomplete. Is that the standard of right-wing journalism today?
Another Dishonest WND Headline Topic: WorldNetDaily
It seems that WorldNetDaily really has abandoned what little pretense it has made toward journalism and has become a propaganda site bearing only a passing resemblence to the truth.
The headline of a Sept. 5 article by Jerome Corsi reads, "Top Dem: Christians want Jews 'slaughtered.'"
And who is this "top Dem"? According to Corsi, it's a "Democratic county chairman" from Florida.
So, not a national Democratic Party official, as the headline insinuates -- some guy who's barely a "top Dem" in the town where he lives.
Add this to the ever-growingpile of false or dishonest WND headlines.
AIM's Kincaid Attacks Liberal Group for Watching TV Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid is very unhappy that Todd Akin was accurately quoted by a liberal group. He rants in a Sept. 3 Accuracy in Media column:
The controversy over Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s abortion comments was started by a George Soros-funded Democratic Party Super-PAC and the “bait” was taken by Republican Party officials who wanted him out of the race for other reasons, says John Putnam, Missouri state coordinator for the national Tea Party Patriots group.
The Super-PAC, American Bridge, was started by former conservative turned liberal and homosexual activist David Brock, who also runs the Soros-funded Media Matters group. American Bridge sends “trackers” to follow conservative and Republican candidates in the hope that the candidate makes some controversial statements that can be distorted or taken out of context and used for partisan political purposes.
And how did American Bridge nefariously catch Akin making a statement that even Kincaid can't prove was taken "out of context" despite quoting Putnam calling the statement "distorted"? By watching it on TV. Kincaid writes:
Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times is one of the few reporters noting the key role played by American Bridge in the controversy. She reported, “What got the story out was a Democratic tracker for American Bridge, a pro-Obama SuperPAC. Ty Matsdorf, a senior adviser for American Bridge, told me their Missouri tracker saw the interview live and flagged it for his bosses. They posted a clip on YouTube and sent it around to some reporters. The explosion was just a matter of time.”
That's pretty much all Kincaid has -- that an activist watched TV and accurately quoted Akin. No substance here.
Jerome Corsi's Revisionist History of Financial Crisis Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi serves up a factually dubious account of the financial crisis in a Sept. 4 WorldNetDaily article:
In the current narrative presented by Democratic Party operatives, the banking industry collapse of September 2008 was caused by tax cuts under George W. Bush and supply-side economics tracing back to the era of Ronald Reagan.
The narrative, however, ignores the personal responsibility Barack Obama and Democratic Party operatives played in creating the subprime mortgage market, beginning with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.
In fact, financial experts agree that the CRA "was not a significant factor in subprime lending or the crisis" -- the subprime crisis was mostly driven by mortgage lenders who were not subject to the CRA.
Corsi also misleads about what the CRA does:
The Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 with the goal of forcing banks to provide credit to businesses and homeowners with poor credit.
The CRA’s purpose was to stop banks from “red-lining,” or refusing to lend to people in low-income areas because the risk of the loan not being repaid was too high.
Even though lending to people with poor credit is inherently risky, the Carter administration was intent on forcing banks to accept a social responsibility to provide credit to homeowners and businesses in low-income neighborhoods.
In fact, redlining was the practics of denying, or charging more for, banking services in certain neighborhoods due to their racial makeup, not because of the actual riskiness of the loan. Ellen Seidman, who headed the Office of Thrift Supervision in the late 1990s, points out that the CRA does not either encourage or condone bad lending; further, CRA enforcement became a lower priority in the early 2000s, around the time that CRA-covered entities wandered deeper into "higher priced loans."
A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found the following:
Nearly all institutions, including those with more profitable programs, loosened their credit standards on CRA loans relative to standards on their conventional loans. These institutions did so without appreciable increases in loan losses. Further, nearly all indicated that credit risk on CRA loans is manageable.
Corsi even gets his facts wrong about a notable lending-discrimination case:
Obama himself played a role as an activist lawyer in Chicago, representing ACORN in the 1994 case Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank. In the case, ACORN pressed Citibank to make more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants “in a race neutral way.”
Corsi is selectively quoting the ruling to mislead about what it did -- and it wasn't about making "more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants." The full quote from the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse item on the case Corsi links to:
The parties settled the case on May 12, 1998, with an agreement that provided for waiver of some fees for class members, should they reapply for a loan, and also for various procedures to ensure that Citibank followed its own loan policies in a race neutral way.
Unless Corsi is saying that it was Citibank's longstanding policy to issue loans to "marginally qualified" non-white people, he's lying about what the lawsuit accomplished.
Which means that Corsi has demonstrated that he can lie about more than birther conspiracies. Of course, Corsi's been lying about this for years.
Newsmax Declares No 'Bounce' For Obama From Convention -- Before Obama Gives His Speech Topic: Newsmax
The top of Newsmax's front page is an article carrying the headline "Obama Fails to Get Convention Bounce, Enthusiasm."
Never mind that at the time Newsmax posted that headline, President Obama had yet to give his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
In other words, Newsmax is reporting something that has not happened and may not happen.
The article, by the way, is an Associated Press article with an original headline of "Obama eager to sketch path forward for nation." The "bounce" reference fromwhich Newsmax apparently manufactured its headline comes from the eighth paragraph in a quote from David Axelrod that "You're not going to see big bounces in this election."
Farah's column was promoted on the WND front page with a picture of the target in question, Current TV's Cenk Uygur.
The first thing most people will think of when they see the words "holocaust denier" is that the person in question is denying the mass killings of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II -- indeed, the word "holocaust" is shorthand for Nazi genocide.
But you would be wrong, which means that Farah and WND have told yetanotherlie.
Farah devotes his column to attacking Uygur for allegedly denying the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th century.
We do not know enough about the history of the incident or Uygur's position on it to make an informed judgment about whether Uygur is a "denier." We do, however, know lies and deception when we see it, and we know Farah just can't stop lying, which makes any pronouncement he makes immediately suspect. Even if Farah is correct, he has so undermined his own credibility that anything he says simply cannot be believed (just like his WND employee Jerome Corsi).
Because Farah's goal is to smear and not to inform, he has overplayed his hand yet again -- thus further beclowning himself and his website.
CNS' Starr Desperately Trying To Manufacture Another Controversy Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's Penny Starr is desperately trying to smear Michelle Obama, but sadly for her, nobody seems interested.
Starr -- who's best known for her manufactured controversy over a gay-themed art exhibit -- tried to manufacture another one over Michelle Obama's stint as a "guest editor" at the women-oriented website iVillage.com.
Why is Starr so faux-outraged by this? Because iVillage, according to her Aug. 22 CNS article, "offers sexually explicit material, including graphic sex tips from prostitutes, '20 kinky things you SO can do,' and a list of 'naughty' apps for mobile devices."
It seems that Starr has some issues with sex that perhaps shouldn't be played out in public as she's doing. And she's still outraged even though she concedes that "the first lady herself does not discuss sex."
When that story didn't get enough attention for her, Starr rewrote it for a Sept. 4 article with the hook that "Michelle Obama tweeted and shared a link to iVillage on Monday," using the opportunity to again rehash her manufactured outrage over the site's "sex tips from prostitutes." Again, Starr offered no evidence that Obama provided sexual content.
It's clear, however, that Starr's manufactured controversy has been a failure -- so much so that Starr is begging her Twitter followers to promote. In a Sept. 5 tweet linking to her article the day before, she let out the anguished cry, "WHY is this story not getting more attention???"
Um, because it's obviously written by an Obama-hater trying to manufacture a controversy? Starr seems not to have considered that her politically motivated wolf-crying is making people tune her out.
Oh, and iVillage is not a "sexual explicit" website -- it's an news, advice and "conversation" website for women that occasionally discusses sex because, hey, women have sex. Starr never explains why talking about sex is so horrible.
