Newsmax Writer's 'News' Article Stuffed With Editorializing
Topic: Newsmax

Nick Sanchez's Dec. 2 Newsmax article on Chris Rock's comments about President Obama is filed under "The Wire," which presmably means it's supposed to be a "news" article. But Sanchez goes on a severe editorializing bender:

Comedian Chris Rock thinks President Barack Obama turned out more like a Shaquille O'Neal than the Michael Jordan that the nation expected.

"Everybody wanted Michael Jordan, right? We got Shaq. That’s not a disappointment. You know what I mean? We got Charles Barkley. It’s still a Hall of Fame career," Rock told New York magazine in an interview published Sunday.

Rock's analogy is shaky at best, as Obama will likely finish his presidency with one of the lowest approval ratings of any outgoing president. The broad strokes of his presidency – the failed stimulus, the undoing of progress in Iraq, and the ongoing disaster of Obamacare – doesn't put him in league with either the highest rated or most accomplished presidents. He's no FDR or Reagan, that’s for sure.

Even by Rock's own standard, which he laid out in the same breath as the Shaq/Jordan analogy, Obama is nowhere near Hall of Fame status.

"The president should be graded on jobs and peace, and the other stuff is debatable. Do more people have jobs, and is there more peace?' asked Rock. "I guess there’s a little more peace. Not as much peace as we’d like, but I mean, that’s kind of the gig. I don’t recall anybody leaving on an up. It’s just that kind of job."

Peace is on the wane. The U.S. is looking at active threats from resurgent terrorist groups – which Obama likened to "jayvee" teams in Lakers jerseys – and diplomatic relations with traditional allies like Turkey and Israel are in shambles. That's not even to mention ever-worsening threats from Russia and Iran.

In fact, the stimulus wasn't a failure, Obamacare is an "ongoing disaster" only to right-wingers like Sanchez whose failed attempts to repeal it are the real ongoing disaster, and it's hardly solely Obama's fault that "peace is on the wane." So it's not even factual editorializing.

If this is what passes for "news" at Newsmax these days, its efforts to be taken seriously as a news outlet are doomed to failure.

WND Fearmongers About Gays Donating Blood
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bob Unruh's Dec. 2 WorldNetDaily article on a proposal to allow gays to donate blood is your usual festival of one-sided Unruh reporting, citing anti-gay activists and making no mention of the fact that blood can now be easily tested

to detect both the antigen and antibodies for HIV.

But WND's promotion for the article goes where Unruh didn't when it comes to raw fearmongering. The front-page carousel promo used the headline "Will getting blood kill you next time?"

And the article's URL indicates that the article originally had the headline "Bloody hell: Feds to let 'gays' donate blood." (WND always puts the word "gay" in needless scare quotes, and we assume it did so here as well.)

Of course, both Unruh and WND have a clear antipathy toward gays, so it's no surprise they would fearmonger about this policy change.

CNS' Jeffrey Thinks Refinancing Debt Is A Ponzi Scheme
Topic: CNSNews.com

The headline on Terry Jeffrey's Nov. 28 CNSNews.com article reads "Ponzi: Treasury Issues $1T in New Debt in 8 Weeks—To Pay Old Debt." ANd yes, that's exactly what Jeffrey thinks:

The Daily Treasury Statement that was released Wednesday afternoon as Americans were preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving revealed that the U.S. Treasury has been forced to issue $1,040,965,000,000 in new debt since fiscal 2015 started just eight weeks ago in order to raise the money to pay off Treasury securities that were maturing and to cover new deficit spending by the government.

During those eight weeks, Treasury took in $341,591,000,000 in revenues. That was a record for the period between Oct. 1 and Nov. 25. But that record $341,591,000,000 in revenues was not enough to finance ongoing government spending let alone pay off old debt that matured.

[...]

This mode of financing the federal government resembles what the Securities and Exchange Commission calls a Ponzi scheme. “A Ponzi scheme," says the Securities and Exchange Commission, “is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors,” says the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Well, no. Refinancing debt by rolling it into new debt is not a "Ponzi scheme" -- it's a universally accepted way of financing debt for both private businesses and for government, particularly if that old debt is at a higher interest rate than can be today. 

Indeed, the Treasury Department's new debt is financed at a longer term to lock in current low interest rates.

This, by the way, is another piece of CNS' business and economic reporting that's credited as being "funded in part with a gift made in memory of Dr. Keith C. Wold." Even if Wold was a rock-ribbed conservative, it's probably unlikely he would accept such biased and misleading reporting occurring in his memory.

WND's Double Standard On A Country's 'License to Kill'
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bob Unruh dramatically writes in a Nov. 30 WorldNetDaily article:

The chief of a Christian organization in Pakistan is warning that the nation’s blasphemy laws, essentially, are a license to kill Christians.

The comments came from the president of the Pakistan Christian Congress, Nazir Bhatti, in a report from the Gatestone Institute’s Mohshin Habib, who was looking at the fallout from the recently torture deaths of two Christians accused – but never convicted – of burning a page from the Quran.

By contrast, if a state essentially grants a license to kill, say, homosexuals, Unruh and WND will look the other way and even cheer it on.

When a proposed law in Uganda would have permitted the death penalty for homosexuality, there was no editorializing at WND against it. In fact, WND videographer Molotov Mitchell enthusiastically endorsed it by saying a state has the right to establish its own laws. And anti-gay activist Scott Lively -- who is said to have inspired the proposed law -- was given space at WND to distance himself from the law while also ranting that gays are "murderers."

Lively was also recently quoted as saying that homosexuality is worse than murder.  If Lively is willing to say such things in public, what did he tell Ugandan officials in private, who then went on to draft the kill-the-gays law?

Of course, Unruh has no concern with the lives of homosexuals -- after all, he's a gay-hater too, and it appears that to him, the lives of Christians are inherently more valuable.

AIM Trots Out Rabid Obama-Hater To Trash GOP Benghazi Report
Topic: Accuracy in Media

WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein isn't the only right-winger who can't accept the results of the Republican-led House committee's debunking of right-wing Benghazi conspiracy theories.

Accuracy in Media -- home of the little kangaroo court of Obama-haters and birthers that calls itself the "Citizens' Commission on Benghazi" -- can't accept it either. So AIM has trotted out commission member Clare Lopez to rant that the House report is "a whitewash of the CIA" designed to "exonerate the Intelligence Community (IC), and, by extension, the Obama administration, of responsibility for intelligence failures prior, during, and after the terrorist attack that took the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods."

But Lopez has shown herself -- like much of the rest of AIM's commission -- to be a rabid Obama-hater with an agenda who cannot be trusted to fairly and objectively investigate Benghazi.

In an August WND interview, Lopez made her hatred of Obama very clear, asserting that President Obama is just like Osama bin Laden because they share the same goal of removing U.S. troops from the Middle East and putting jihadis in power.

Lopez also told WND that Obama had bin Laden killed only because he “thought it might look good,” and that Obama switched sides in the war on terror by endeavoring "to bring down the secular Muslim rulers who did not enforce Islamic law."

Does this sound like someone capable of being objective on anything involving Obama? Didn't think so.

Nevertheless, AIM's Roger Aronoff is touting Lopez's "debunking" of the House report in a Dec. 2 article, complaining that the conspiracy theories the report debunked -- and to which AIM still clings -- were described as conspiracy theories.

Phil Elmore's Anti-Liberal Tirade
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily columnist Phil Elmore is capable of common sense not typically found at WND, such as pointing out the phoniness of the WND-hyped link between vaccines and autism. But he can also be as rabidly reactionary and kneejerk right-wing as any given WND columnist.

Elmore's Nov. 26 column, unfortunately, was one of the latter, which he devotes to how liberals are lying to you on the Internet:

Very few people stop to understand the social media culture war that is raging around them. Culture wars are nothing new. Totalitarian, statist Democrats, the would-be fascists of the modern era, have long conspired to subjugate the American people. Barack Hussein Obama’s quest to “fundamentally transform” the United States is just the latest iteration of this long-fought battle, which has seen Democrats perverting everything from the meaning of the word “liberal” to every other traditional moral value and social norm.

Liberal Democrats don’t just hate America; they hate free thought, free speech and the free exchange of ideas. This is why liberals fight their endless battle to silence all speech, to quell all ideas, that they find distasteful. If you disagree with a liberal Democrat, you are not just wrong; you are a horrible person who deserves to lose his job and be censured by his peers.

We presume Elmore is totally down with the culture wars his publisher wages against gays and for homeschoolers, which is just as dishonest, if not more so, as anything he accuses liberals of doing.

Somehow, this turned into a tirade against the New York City catcalling video, which Elmore dismissed as " deceptively edited and dishonestly presented" and shows the woman, in fact, "rudely refusing to respond to any greeting." And then, it moved to a defense of caddish men:

Modern women are apparently so incapable of coping with diversity of thought and opinion that even an unsolicited “hello” is “harassment.” These are people so weak-minded that they must have controversial ideas prefaced with absurd phrases like “trigger warning.” They trade in a manufactured argot of victimhood that includes terms like “patriarchy,” “hetero-normative” and “cis-gender.” They hate men and maleness, they hate heterosexuality, they hate families, and they hate traditional norms. They lie, blatantly and constantly, to attack these facets of our culture.

The message of the faked “drunk girl” video, by comparison, is that all men are not just rude, but also rapists. This idea – that all men are part of “rape culture” – is part and parcel of a “social justice” movement that now pervades the Internet and social media. According to that movement, all masculinity is wrong, and all men are criminals who simply haven’t been punished yet.

These are, like so much of liberal thought and philosophy, all lies – but that never stops Democrats from telling them.

Elmore is starting to sound like one of those anti-feminist men's rights creeps -- which WND happens to like as well.

Newsmax Columnist Goes Godwin on Guns In Israel
Topic: Newsmax

In a Nov. 26 Newsmax column, Stephen P. Halbrook goes Godwin by likening restrictive gun laws in Israel to, yes, Nazis:

Restrictive gun laws, imposed by a well-meaning government, deprive people of the means of self-defense. So say Second Amendment advocates. Modern history and recent headlines alike support their argument.

The recent atrocities in Israel, where terrorists slaughtered four unarmed Jewish citizens at prayer — three of them rabbis — have led that nation’s government to peel back some of its draconian laws restricting the private ownership of firearms.

The new proposals do not go nearly far enough, extending only to a small group of Israelis already licensed to carry firearms, such as security guards. It’s doubtful that such a reform would prevent a repeat of this week’s slaughter.

With all due respect to a grieving, embattled nation, Israeli lawmakers — and freedom-loving Americans — should remember some tragic events of history.

In 1943, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels fulminated, “The Jews have actually succeeded in making a defensive position of the Ghetto . . .  It shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms.” He was outraged at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which impeded deportations to the death camps and allowed partisans to escape and fight from the forests.

[...]

One of Weimar’s emergency decrees imposed strict registration of firearms, and gave the state authority to confiscate them if “public security” so required. But the decree backfired: Law-abiding citizens had duly registered their guns, while the private armies maintained by the Nazis and communists had not. Worse still, this decree put obedient citizens at risk.

As the Weimar Interior Minister warned about the registration records: “Precautions must be taken that these lists cannot . . . fall into the hands of radical elements.”

Just a year later, in 1933, the worst “radical elements” in Germany indeed came to power.

Curiously, Halbrook never explains which Israeli gun laws are so "draconian" as to be Nazi-esque. In fact, those laws appear to be quite commonsensical. The Washington Post summarizes:

Israel limits gun ownership to security workers, people who transport valuables or explosives, residents of the West Bank, and hunters. People who don't fall into one of those categories cannot obtain a firearm permit. Moreover, Israel rejects 40 percent of firearm permit applicants, the highest rejection rate in the Western world. Both Switzerland and Israel require yearly (or more frequent) permit renewals to insure that the reasons are still applicable.

Janet Rosenbaum, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center School, explained: "Ten years ago, when Israel had the outbreak of violence, there was an expansion of gun ownership, but only to people above a certain rank in the military. There was no sense that having ordinary citizens [carry guns] would make anything safer."

Halbrook doesn't explain how anything he proposes for Israel -- by way of invoking Nazis -- would change that.

Meanwhile ...
Topic: WorldNetDaily
Richard Bartholomew does a fine job of unpacking the back-and-forth between the Berean Call magazine and WorldNetDaily over the former's criticism of WND editor Joseph Farah and his buddy Jonathan Cahn over Cahn's questionable prophecy-mongering. Farah, an inveterate liar, laughably accuses the Berean Call of lying by claiming that Cahn has claimed that the financial collapse of the dollar may happen in September 2015 -- Cahn has, just not in the particular speech the Berean Call cited.

MRC's Graham Baselessly Accuses Melinda Gates of Lying
Topic: Media Research Center

Tim Graham writes in a Nov. 30 NewsBusters post:

Melinda Gates is the ideal philanthropist in the eyes of the liberals at Time magazine – after all, she and her husband Bill Gates became Time’s Persons of the Year...about the same time they gave Time money for a health summit. Anyhow, Melinda was recently honored with the “Ten Questions” interview  with Belinda Luscombe in Time’s December 1 and 8 issue.

They promoted “The philanthropist on the importance of contraceptives, her daughters and her growing optimism.” The contraceptive talk turned to....vagina mints? Then Mrs. Gates lied to (or at best, misled) Time about her foundation's support for abortion advocates.

How so? Gates said that her foundation "only funds contraceptives. We do not do the abortion piece." Graham's evidence:

That’s simply not true. While they declared this June that they would no longer fund abortion advocacy, Josh Craddock at Live Action News noted the Gates Foundation is a major funder of Planned Parenthood and other international abortion advocates -- to the tune of about $117 million over the last five years. The Gates Foundation explicitly states it's funding "Global Policy & Advocacy."

Actually, Graham appears to be the liar. Funding Planned Parenthood does not equal "funding abortion" -- after all, only 13 percent of its revenue comes from abortion.

The source for Graham's baseless accusation, Live Action, is notorious for its deceptive entrapment videos designed to smear Planned Parenthood, and Live action founder Lila Rose has repeatedly stated her intent to destroy the group. So it's hardly an objective source of information.

Beyond citing the highly biased and dubious extremist group Live Action, Graham provides no evidence whatsoever that any Gates money is funding abortion "advocacy," let alone actual abortions.

Don't expect Graham to apologize for his false accusation -- as long as he can link Gates with abortion, however fraudulently, that's good enough for him.

NEW ARTICLE: Aaron Klein's Benghazi Fiasco
Topic: WorldNetDaily
The WorldNetDaily reporter capped a rough year by trying to ride the right-wing Benghazi bandwagon with his new book. Even the Republican-led House committee looking into the attack shot down his claims. Read more >>

NewsBusters Complains GOP Staff Is Being Held Accountable For Her Words
Topic: NewsBusters

Melissa Mullins whines in a Nov. 30 NewsBusters post:

This past Thanksgiving weekend, with all the stories going on in the country today, one seems to have topped the list: an unknown GOP staffer decided to voice her negative opinion about the Obama daughters after they were pictured during the White House turkey pardon ceremony…on her Facebook page. Yep.  That’s the story.

[...]

You could imagine the backlash Lauten got from the online world – and a few “reputable” news organizations. (Start with The Huffington Post.) Apparently, there are even Malia and Sasha partisans that were calling for Lauten to be fired from her job.  Really? What if we were to go around inspecting every Democratic communications director for whichever Democrat they work for – are their personal Facebook posts fair game too?

Well, actually, if Mullins had checked the NewsBusters archive, you'd find that it does, in fact, highlight the content of people's and organzations' Facebook pages. And Mullins might want to check her own writing as well: A Nov. 25 post by her highlights a comment Fox News' Geraldo Rivera made on his Facebook page.

So let's not pretend that a publicly accessible Facebook feed is suddenly off limits because the person writing it is a Republcan.

Mullins then lamely tries to equivocate by invoking criticism of the children of Republican presidents:

For those who insist presidential or vice presidential children (or those of potential candidates) are off limits and should oblige by those wishes – does that mean it’s still ok to give them a free pass when they are older or being trotted out for show and tell to help with a candidacy? 

[...]

In addition to what the Bush twins endured when it came to criticism from the media, who can forget the Palin kids (here, here, here, and here…just to name a few)? Of course, both parties have had their share of mudslinging when it comes to criticizing children of politicians, but more often than not it’s those with an “R” after their name (or like this post proves – any association with the Republican Party) that are often forced into publicly apologizing.

Mullins omits the critical difference that when the Bush twins "endured ... criticism from the media," they were over 18, and one of the things they were criticized for was engaging in criminal behavior -- namely, Jenna Bush attempted to use a fake ID to buy a drink at a bar. By contrast, the Obama daughters -- age 13 and 15 -- did little more than act like bored teenagers, which last we checked isn't criminal behavior.

Mullins also referenced criticism aimed at Chelsea Clinton, but she ignored the most vile example: Rush Limbaugh calling a teenaged Chelsea the White House dog. Not only did NewsBusters not criticize it, the late Noel Sheppard tried to pretend it didn't really happen. As we noted at the time, Sheppard was engaging in lame misdirection when he should have been demanding that Limbaugh release the video of the segment from his 1990s TV show so we can judge for ourselves.

It seems Mullins' real anger is that a Republican was being held accountable for what she wrote. 

WND's Farah Pushes Right-Wing Fantasy About Thanksgiving
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Joseph Farah dedicated his Nov. 26 WorldNetDaily column to pushing the idea that the Pilgrims originally failed because they were socialists:

Before leaving Europe the Pilgrims entered into a contract, dated July 1, 1620, that would have all profits of their “trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of any person or persons, remain in the common stock until division.”

In other words, the settlement at Plymouth Bay was the first New World experiment in communism – long before Karl Marx supposedly invented it.

To say that social experiment was a total failure would be an understatement. The first winter spelled death and disease and hunger for the colony because the Pilgrims had arrived too late in the season to plant crops and build adequate shelters. Half of them died. The following spring, however, they planted and hunted and fished to get by – just barely. They did invite some of the friendly Indians to join them in their first “Thanksgiving” celebration. But they were not thanking the Indians. They were thanking God for pulling them through.

As William Bradford wrote in his journal: “And thus they found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to bless their outgoings and incomings, for which let His holy name have the praise forever, to all posterity.”

Nevertheless, Bradford remained troubled by the colony’s inability to prosper. He found the answer by studying the Bible and revisiting the notion of private property and incentivized hard work.

[...]

In other words, the introduction of the idea of private property saved the Pilgrims and made their experiment successful.

To coin a phrase, that’s how “the Pilgrims progressed.”

As can be expected from an inveterate liar like Farah, this is a load of hooey. The New York Times talked to actual historians to get the facts:

Historians say that the settlers in Plymouth, and their supporters in England, did indeed agree to hold their property in common — William Bradford, the governor, referred to it in his writings as the “common course.” But the plan was in the interest of realizing a profit sooner, and was only intended for the short term; historians say the Pilgrims were more like shareholders in an early corporation than subjects of socialism.

“It was directed ultimately to private profit,” said Richard Pickering, a historian of early America and the deputy director of Plimoth Plantation, a museum devoted to keeping the Pilgrims’ story alive.

The arrangement did not produce famine. If it had, Bradford would not have declared the three days of sport and feasting in 1621 that became known as the first Thanksgiving. “The celebration would never have happened if the harvest was going to be less than enough to get them by,” Mr. Pickering said. “They would have saved it and rationed it to get by.”

[...]

Bradford did get rid of the common course — but it was in 1623, after the first Thanksgiving, and not because the system wasn’t working. The Pilgrims just didn’t like it. In the accounts of colonists, Mr. Pickering said, “there was griping and groaning.”

“Bachelors didn’t want to feed the wives of married men, and women don’t want to do the laundry of the bachelors,” he said.

The real reason agriculture became more profitable over the years, Mr. Pickering said, is that the Pilgrims were getting better at farming crops like corn that had been unknown to them in England.

The Times notes that the version of history Farah is peddling has become gospel among right-wingers despite its lack of accuracy. But then, Farah's WND continues to sell David Barton's book about Thomas Jefferson despite the fact that it was pulled from the market by its publisher due to numerous factual inaccuracies.

CNS' Jeffrey Can't Stop Obsessively Counting Obama's Words
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com's weird obsession with certain words President Obama says (or doesn't say) continues in a Nov. 27 article by editor in chief Terry Jeffrey:

Leaving aside passages in which he quoted a Chicago pub owner and a letter from a citizen from Georgia, President Barack Obama used the first person singular—including the pronouns “I” and “me” and the adjective “my”—91 times in a speech he delivered in Chicago Tuesday to explain his unilateral action on immigration.

But as often as Obama used “I,” “me” and “my” in Chicago this week, it was no match for the speech he delivered in Austin, Texas, on July 10, when he used the first person singular 199 times.

[...]

Obama’s speech, according to the White House transcript, was approximately 4,200 words and lasted 33 minutes. That means that on average Obama used the first person singular every 46 words—or every 22 seconds.

President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, in which he presented his understanding of the moral significance of the Civil War, was only 696 words long. In that speech, Lincoln used the first person singular once.

As we noted the last time Jeffrey went on a pedantic word-counting expedition (and irrelevantly compared Obama's words to Lincoln's), one analysis found “Obama has distinguished himself as the lowest I-word user of any of the modern presidents.” Needless to say, Jeffrey doesn't mention that.

Palestinian Media Follows WND's Lead In Portraying Killers As Victims
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bob Unruh writes in a Nov. 25 WorldNetDaily article:

Much like the pugnacious little boy who comes home from school to complain that “little Johnny” hit him in the fist with Johnny’s nose, the Palestinian media is misrepresenting “murderers of rabbis” as “victims” of Israeli attacks.

Palestinian Media Watch, a research institute that monitors Palestinian Authority media, documented Tuesday a recent Palestinian TV report.

The Palestinian news reader said: “The latest reaction to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s policy and means was the death of two Palestinians as martyrs from occupation police fire in West Jerusalem.”

Palestinian Media Watch, or PMW, noted the TV report did not mention the fact that the two were terrorists who murdered four rabbis and a police officer in a synagogue.

Funny, we remember when WND did the exact same thing.

Back in 2005, an AWOL Israeli soldier named Eden Natan Zada opened fire on a bus, killing four Arabs and wounding a dozen; Zada was then killed by a mob before he could reload. WND reporter Aaron Klein reported that Zada was "murdered" by a "mob of Palestinians," but at no point did he state that Zada's victims were murdered. Klein probably thinks Zada was a martyr.

It appears that the Palestinian media is merely taking their reporting cues from WND. Not that Unruh, Klein or anyone else at WND would ever tell its readers that, of course.

At NewsBusters, Racially Charged Cartoon Is Legitimate 'Conservative Opinion'
Topic: NewsBusters

In a Nov. 25 NewsBusters post, Laura Flint endorses a racially charged cartoon by criticizing the fact that it was denounced as racist:

The liberal thought police have struck again. On Friday, November 21, one day after Obama announced amnesty for five million illegal immigrants, the Indianapolis Star posted a cartoon by Gary Varvel that depicted an American family gathering around the table for Thanksgiving. As the nonplussed father presents the turkey, three people appear to be climbing in the window, and he states, “Thanks to the president’s immigration order, we’ll be having extra guests this Thanksgiving,”
 
It did not take long for the virulent cry of racism to be heard by Indystar.com. Within one day, executive editor Jeff Taylor published an article admitting the newspaper’s error in featuring the cartoon and removed it from the website altogether.

[...]

While Taylor ends his letter by stating that it is “important to encourage a vigorous public debate on issues of this magnitude…with respectful discourse,” the actions of his newspaper have made it clear that no conservative opinion can be viewed as a form of legitimate “discourse.”

So depicting stereotypical Mexicans as people who break into people's houses and steal their food is legitimate "conservative opinion"? No wonder conservatives have trouble being taken seriously on immigration.