Excuse me, because I have to throw up, wash my hands, and disinfect my keyboard -- not necessarily in that order.
I'm nauseated...talk amongst yourselves.
-- Noel Sheppard, in an Aug. 19 NewsBusters post reacting to news that Rachel Maddow has been given her own show on MSNBC. Sheppard further called the news an "abomination" and described Keith Olbermann as "the most hateful and biased person on the airwaves today." (Apparently, Sheppard has never heard of Michael Savage.)
Is AIM Blaming Tubbs-Jones' Aneurysm On Obama? Topic: Accuracy in Media
In an Aug. 20 Accuracy in Media blog post, headlined "Clinton Supporters Dropping Like Flies," Don Irvine writes that "It looks like Hillary Clinton may be without a couple of her top supporters at the Democratic National Convention next week," noting that "Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) has been hospitalized after police found her unconscious behind the wheel of a moving car." Irvine added: "Will there be any more 'accidents' before the convention?"
Is Irvine suggesting that Obama killed Tubbs-Jones to spite Hillary? Does he really want to go there?
Such crassness is normally beyond AIM (though it's not above calling Obama a "revolutionary sociopath"). Irvine might want to explain himself -- and apologize.
UPDATE: Removed reference to news report erroneously claiming Tubbs-Jones had died.
UPDATE 2: She has now died. Is Irvine still looking to be crass and insensitive and do the Obama version of the discredited Clinton body count?
Obama is ostensibly explaining to a crowd what he is looking for in a vice-president [Dick Cheney need not apply.] But tell me if you don't get the feeling that it was at least as much about Obama on an ego trip, fantasizing about occupying the Oval Office, right down to his imagining the veep addressing him as "Mr. President."
Note also Obama mentioning that he wants "somebody who in their gut knows where they came from." The kind of person who wouldn't need to write two autobiographies to figure that out, maybe?
And—sorry Hillary—as Kiran Chetry pointed out, Obama repeatedly refers to his fantasy veep as "he."
Note also Obama's down-home pronunciation of "country." Was it in Hawaii or at Harvard that he picked that up? Couldn't be an affectation, could it?
An Aug. 18 FrontPageMag article by Alex Alexiev attacks CNN for debunking the film "Karachi Kids," which focused on the wrong Pakistani madrassa in portraying children as being brainwashed by al-Qaeda and Taliban sympathizers (as we've noted). "What is certain is that the network, not the kids’ champions, is in the wrong," Alexiev claims, adding, "For anybody familiar with Pakistan’s madrassas, the CNN ‘gotcha’ not only serves to undo their entire argument, it proves beyond much doubt that in attacking “Karachi Kids” and Congressman McCaul, the network engaged in disinformation."
Well, not quite. In trying to split hairs about just how extremist a particular madrassa is, Alexiev fails to contradict, or even acknowledge, a couple important points CNN made.
First, director Imran Raza conceded the error. CNN quotes him as saying, "I do need to take responsibility for these things in terms of these were errors that sort of spun out of control. ... I have to take responsibility for the mistakes. I take responsibility for the error in the allegation that Osama bin Laden was there. I take responsibility for the error that some of the Taliban leaders were there."
Second, the teenage "kids" that are the focus of the film -- whom Alexiev makes no mention of whatsoever -- denied that they were taught extremism or saw any al-Qaeda or Taliban members. They also say the filmmaker took their comments out of context.
Alexiev -- vice president for research at the conservative Center for Security Policy -- concluded by claiming, "CNN has with its attack on 'Karachi Kids' earned yet another distinction in journalistic malfeasance: proud purveyor of jihadist disinformation." But by ignoring pertinent facts, Alexiev is running his own disinformation campaign.
An Aug. 18 FrontPageMag article by Alex Alexiev attacks CNN for debunking the film "Karachi Kids," which focused on the wrong Pakistani madrassa in portraying children as being brainwashed by al-Qaeda and Taliban sympathizers (as we've noted). "What is certain is that the network, not the kids’ champions, is in the wrong," Alexiev claims, adding, "For anybody familiar with Pakistan’s madrassas, the CNN 'gotcha' not only serves to undo their entire argument, it proves beyond much doubt that in attacking 'Karachi Kids' and Congressman McCaul, the network engaged in disinformation."
Well, not quite. In trying to split hairs about just how extremist a particular madrassa is, Alexiev fails to contradict, or even acknowledge, a couple important points CNN made.
First, director Imran Raza conceded the error. CNN quotes him as saying, "I do need to take responsibility for these things in terms of these were errors that sort of spun out of control. ... I have to take responsibility for the mistakes. I take responsibility for the error in the allegation that Osama bin Laden was there. I take responsibility for the error that some of the Taliban leaders were there."
Second, the teenage "kids" that are the focus of the film -- whom Alexiev makes no mention of whatsoever -- denied that they were taught extremism or saw any al-Qaeda or Taliban members.
Alexiev -- vice president for research at the conservative Center for Security Policy -- concluded by claiming, "CNN has with its attack on 'Karachi Kids' earned yet another distinction in journalistic malfeasance: proud purveyor of jihadist disinformation." but through ignoring pertinent facts, Alexiev is running his own disinformation campaign.
Savage's Boss Has Wackier Ideas About Autism Than Savage Does Topic: The ConWeb
Remember Michael Savage's comments about autism, how "[i]n 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out"? Ever wonder where Savage got such an idea? It may have come from his boss.
Savage's syndicator, Talk Radio Network, is operated by the Roy Masters family (Masters' son, Mark Masters, is TRN's CEO). As we've detailed, Masters heads the Foundation of Human Understanding and has been accused of being a cult leader who sways disciples through hypnosis and meditation. (Masters also has ties to WorldNetDaily, which, among other things, hosts Savage's website.) Masters hosts a TRN-syndicated overnight radio show.
ConWebWatch has discovered an audio clip of the July 22 edition of Masters' show, in which he addressed the controversy over Savage's remarks. Masters not only declared that "Savage is dead right," he claimed autism is caused by "[b]ad parenting" and cited the pursuit of "the benefits the parent gets for having their children pronounced with autism." He also appears to blame dominating moms and weak dads: "And you, sir, who just sit on the fence crying like a rooster. Well, one of these days you’ll wake up, you’ll cackle like a hen and become a homosexual or something because you’re not a man to let this happen to your children."
From the July 22 edition of Talk Radio Network's "Advice Line Overnight With Roy Masters":
MASTERS: So, I will discuss autism with -- the kind of induced autism, the one that is induced by inoculations and, of course, people are born that way, which is a very small number indeed, but most of them are made that way by the school, by parents, and I -- I’ve seen some awful things in my life, how parents treat their children, especially the bright ones. They demoralize their own children. And those are the parents, possibly, who misunderstood what Savage says, the parents who destroyed their own children. And don’t you think parents don’t destroy their own children? Most parents do to some degree. Some of them are just simply practicing Munchausen by proxy. They create the problem and then -- unconsciously create the problem and yet -- and if you’re bright enough, you can actually see some of those people when they’re interviewed on television, you can see the mother -- I’ve seen one where the mother was degrading this boy right in front, talking to him like he was a stupid idiot. The kid was as bright as he could be, and the silly little stupid old father sat there and let it happen. And -- but the trouble is if don’t look at it right because we’re all kind of nuts in some way. We’re all sympathetic for the mama to put up with this poor little kid, but she’s created it. She created it, and the father, well, he just lets it happen. He sits like a rooster on the fence. And so therefore, whatever happens, he don’t get any blame. So, that’s how he thinks anyway.
So, anyway, we can talk about that if you want to, but there’s very few cases of real autism. It’s all created. And the medicine, medical people -- I told you about medicine, and I told you the other night about the VA, that the country -- don’t you get it? The country is infected. It’s infiltrated with our enemies. This is not paranoia. It’s a fact. They go for the health – the healthcare system. They go for the social services and healthcare system, so they can decide what disease is, and what common sense it is and what it isn’t. And that’s what’s wrong with the schools. I heard one of the politicians running for president, I just heard him say -- I’m not going to give any credit to any one of them, but you can guess which one it is if you like. Just -- I just want to say what he said. He said “I know there’s something wrong with the school system” -- this is not his words exactly, but my interpretation of it. He says, “But the problem with the school system, the worst place you can find this is in the inner city, the black schools.” Now, how did black schools get the worst share of the system? Is it the Republicans? No. It’s always the left that have degrading, always degrading, always degrading. The people always demoralizing and robbing us of our -- our -- our sovereignty. And the school system, you won’t find any -- hardly any normal people there. You’ll find all these lef- wing people who are on a payroll and they’re programmed to demoralize your children. And then, of course, it’s Munchausen by proxy again. See, so the children don’t do well in school, so they get drugs so they can pay attention to the crap they give them -- excuse me for saying that. They’re not learning anything, they’re being brainwashed, socialized, sensitized to their environment so they can’t think for themselves. That’s what’s happening.
So, what do you do with seven million children -- someone want to correct me? It’s bad enough if it’s three million, I’m just hoping someone correct -- no, it’s not seven, it’s only three. So, in my day it wasn’t like that at all. We didn’t have that much of problems at school, it was halfway decent. Wasn’t the greatest education in the world that I came from, but it wasn’t like it is today. And in England it’s even worse. We’re not far behind them. And there’s the -- these pharmaceuticals, they’re having a heyday on the demoralization of our children. And all the sick parents are out -- yeah, you want to call me? You call me. Now, I understand, and I give it to you, some children are born that way, but most of them are made that way. Bad parenting, see, and the benefits the parent gets for having their children pronounced with autism. Actually, Savage is dead right. And you have a problem with me? You call me. I’ll show you who has autism. It’s you, sir, you, ma’am -- mostly you, ma’am. And you, sir, who just sit on the fence crying like a rooster. Well, one of these days you’ll wake up, you’ll cackle like a hen and become a homosexual or something because you’re not a man to let this happen to your children.
OK, now, I’ve said all that, I feel better. I hope you feel worse, but remember, I’ve got no sponsors, I don’t need -- it’s just you. Look, if you have an autistic child, I’ll show you how to fix him if you’ve done it. So why don’t you own up to it? It could be you. It could be you, sir, letting your wife do it while you’re away. It could be that you have a bright, beautiful kid there and you can’t tolerate his brightness, any more than you can tolerate Savage’s brightness, or mine for that matter. And you won’t dare to pick up the phone and call me or him for that matter. All you can do is get together like a big bunch of cowards you are.
Last time we saw Andrea Shea King, WorldNetDaily was pretending she was a reporter. WND has brought her back in a more honest role as a commentator in an Obama-bashing, Jerome Corsi-defending Aug. 19 WND column. She's particularly impressed by Corsi's "nearly 700 footnotes."
But look at the tag line at the end: "This column was commissioned by the Western Journalism Center."
The WJC, if you'll recall, was co-founded by WND chief Joseph Farah in the early 1990s (with a hefty chunk of Scaife money) with the purpose of attacking the Clinton administration; when Bill Clinton left office, the WJC went dormant. Farah created WND as a project of the WJC, and we can presume that the WJC still possesses a piece of WND.
We presume that the WJC is currently run by James H. Smith, co-founder along with Farah and publisher of the Sacramento Union when Farah served as editor (and did his part to help kill it). When several staffers were laid off from a revival of the Union in 2005 (shortly before Smith himself was ousted), it was noted that "at least one laid-off staffer has gone next door to a job at the Western Journalism Center." So it has seemingly been doing something, even if its website is empty is useless.
It is rather curious that after eight years of effective dormancy, the WJC is springing to life just as a Democrat is mounting a serious claim to the presidency -- which would seem to put the lie to Farah's claim that "[t]he center's mission was not ideological."
WND needs to explain its current relationship with the WJC -- specifically, how much of WND the WJC still owns. And the WJC needs to admit the truth about itself. With websites like Talking Points Memo and ProPublica demonstrating how freelance investigative reporting really operates, will the WJC abandon its shaky pretense of being an "investigative reporting" organization and finally admit to being a right-wing pressure group like all the others?
An Aug. 18 WorldNetDaily article defends Jerome Corsi from the charge that he is a 9/11 "truther," insisting that Corsi "has rejected the arguments from '9/11 Truthers' who allege the U.S. government brought about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." It includes the following claim:
Obama's rebuttal used as evidence for its claim a radio interview in which Corsi discussed a story he was researching concerning the chemical analysis of debris from the Twin Tower collapse.
While Corsi claims in the interview that he intended to publish the story, the WND editorial panel rejected the article, with Corsi's agreement, after reaching a consensus that the research failed to answer several critical questions which left the results inconclusive.
"After the review of my draft article by the WND editorial staff, I agreed the piece should be withdrawn," Corsi affirmed.
"As I explained on the radio, I am typically interested in scientific evidence that lies outside the explanation of conventional hypotheses," he continued. "Science advances by rejecting hypotheses, not by establishing hypotheses. In other words, should somebody find convincing scientific evidence that challenges some aspect of any official report, that evidence will not automatically confirm the truth of an alternative hypothesis."
"Put simply, even if we had published the article, all we would have established was that there were some questions yet to be resolved with the government's 9/11 explanation, not that an alternative hypothesis was suddenly correct," he explained[.]
The big revelation here is the suggestion that WND has an "editorial panel" that purports to have certain journalistic standards and would actually refuse to run an article. That's not something we would have suspected -- we thought WND's only standard was to smear Democrats and liberals regardless of whether the smear has any basis in fact.
After all, it has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of journalistic standards, from printing sleazy, never-verified claims about Barack Obama to publishing a series of articles attacking Al Gore that it never fact-checked, ultimately resulting in a libel lawsuit and a (presumably costly) out-of-court settlement in which WND admitted that claims it published were false and that "the sources named in the publications have stated under oath that statements attributed to them in the articles were either not made by them, were misquoted by the authors, were misconstrued, or the statements were taken out of context."
This suggests that WND's status as a horribly biased, unreliable news organization is part of an actual, deliberate plan. Horrors!
What Kincaid Won't Tell You About Obama's 'Mentor' Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid's Aug. 15 Accuracy in Media column proclaims that the Barack Obama campaign's debunking of Jerome Corsi's Obama-bashing book "acknowledges on ... that the mysterious “Frank” in Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, is in fact the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member Frank Marshall Davis," insisting that the admission "can only add to growing public concern about Obama’s relationship with a Communist pawn of Moscow who was the subject of security investigations by the FBI and various congressional committees which examined Soviet activities in the U.S." In an Aug. 17 column, Kincaid complains that the Obama campaign's debunking "doesn’t identify Davis as a hard-core communist and it dishonestly edits an article about Davis to eliminate references to his admitted involvement in CPUSA activities and make the black revolutionary writer and “poet” look like a civil rights activist."
But the Obama report does something that Kincaid has yet to do: put Obama's relationship with Davis in full and accurate context. Specifically, it points out that Obama wrote in his autobiography "Dreams From My Father" that he rejected Davis' alleged radicalism. From the report:
Obama Wrote Of Frank As Someone Who “Fell Short” Of The “Lofty Standards” Of “Martin And Malcolm, Dubois And Mandela.” “Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men—Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew— Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq — fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own — my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!” [Dreams From My Father, Pg. 96]
Obama Wrote That “The Relationship Between Black And White, The Meaning Of Escape, Would Never Be Quite The Same For Me As It Had Been For Frank, Or For The Old Man, Or Even For Roy.” “The relationship between black and white, the meaning of escape, would never be quite the same for me as it had been for Frank, or for the Old Man, or even for Roy.” [Dreams From My Father, Pg. 277]
Obama Recounted Frank’s Diatribe About What Would Happen To Him In College And Then Described Frank As “Incurable” And Living In The “Sixties Time Warp That Hawaii Had Created.” “What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet, a few days before I left Hawaii. We had made small talk for a while; he complained about his feet, the corns and bone spurs that he insisted were a direct result of trying to force African feet into European shoes. Finally he had asked me what it was that I expected to get out of college. I told him I didn’t know. He shook his big, hoary head…’Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same…It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.” [Dreams From My Father, Pg. 96-97]
In his eagerness to smear Obama as a communist sympathizer through his relationship with Davis, Kincaid has yet to report these statements from Obama's book that demonstrate he rejected Davis' extremist views. That, after all, conflicts with his Obama-is-a-secret-commie meme. Then again, an accurate view of Obama is presumably not what Richard Mellon Scaife is payingKincaid to promulgate.
The scene on the final evening of the Democratic convention next week is bound to be a gripping one: Some 75,000 people will be in the stands awaiting healing and anointing in the packed but expansive confines of Denver's Invesco Field.
The entire event has forced the Broncos to make contingency plans for an alternate place to play their home football games just in case the entire stadium is swept away during the pretribulation rapture on the night of 28 August in the year marked by the gathered faithful as 48 B.C. (Barack's Coming, two score and 8 years ago)
As tens of thousands clamor for their savior – the Benny Hinn of wealth redistribution – the high-decibel chants of "Obama" will be broken only by the orgasmic screeches of writhing members of the mainstream media. The tingle up Chris Matthews' leg will hurt so unbearably good that "Hardball" will, for one brief and shining moment, be the most apropos program title in the world.
I interviewed Corsi for my radio show. He patiently went through the carefully researched book (almost 700 footnotes), declining to speculate on matters that could not be fully documented – like the questionable Hawaii birth certificate.
On the August 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Jerome Corsi, author of The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, claimed that the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama "has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website."
[...]
Referring to Obama's birth certificate, which was posted on the Obama campaign's Fight the Smears website in response to unfounded claims that Obama is not a natural-born citizen, Corsi said: "The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website ... The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it." Co-host Steve Doocy asked, "Well, couldn't it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?" Corsi replied: "No, it's a -- there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the website right now."
I do not know of a single incident where WND "spun," "slanted" or outright falsified news events to fit an agenda, all standard fare for the elite's media.
-- Aug. 16 letter to WorldNetDaily by Tony Patterson.
Klein Falsely Impugns Obama's 'Loyalty' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Aaron Klein is moving on from guilt-by-association about Barack Obama to libelous innuendo.
Klein's 49th (at least) anti-Obama article for WorldNetDaily speculates on whether Obama was "a citizen of Indonesia" as a child, asserting that this "could raise loyalty concerns."
How? According to who? Klein doesn't say. It's only Klein making this empty accusation against a candidate he viscerally hates, as part of his attempts to smear Obama.
UPDATE: One would think the fact that John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been a paid lobbyist for the nation of Georgia raises more "loyalty concerns" than what Obama did as a child, but Klein makes no mention of this in apparent deference to WND's pro-McCain agenda.
Accuracy in Media loves to play semantic games -- witness its insistence that the CIA was not operating secret prisons, even though they were secret and people were imprisoned.
Now comes an Aug. 14 AIM Report by Jonathon Moseley that runs to the defense of AIM editor Cliff Kincaid over his claims that the Barack Obama-sponsored Global Poverty Act would cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars:
Obama’s Global Poverty Act is in fact a stunning and sweeping step toward socialism and one-world government. When we look beyond the seductive title, and read the actual contents, we discover that Obama and Biden are setting America up for imposition of a global tax, controlled by the United Nations. For the first time, the U.S. could be forced to adopt a global tax at the behest of an international body. The planned amount is 0.7% of America’s Gross National Product (GNP) or $65 billion per year, in addition to America’s current foreign aid budget.
Obama’s legislative record in this regard is so damaging that the left-wing blogosphere has gone into over-drive to muddy the waters. The left-wing “Media Matters” has gone on the attack, and others have taken up the chorus. When Senator Biden’s opponent for election, Christine O’Donnell, revealed Biden’s promotion of Obama’s Global Tax on Fox News, Media Matters attacked within minutes.
Rather than addressing the substance of Kincaid’s revelations, Obama’s defenders invent a straw man to knock down instead. Media Matters argues that S. 2433 does not directly impose any tax. But Kincaid never said that it did. As Kincaid revealed, S. 2433 is clearly intended to engineer, or lay the groundwork for, a global tax. Kincaid never suggested it would happen in a single step. Yet S. 2433 can have no other long-range purpose.
As Kincaid explained, the bill does not attach a dollar figure—and does not need to—because that is contained in the 2002 so-called “Monterrey Consensus,” which grew out of the 2000 Millennium Declaration, which is cited in the bill. Understanding this critical fact is a simple matter of reading the appropriate U.N. documents. The sponsors could count on the major media not to do so.
Yes, even though (as we've noted, along with Media Matters) the Global Poverty Act has no funding mechanism, doesn't commit the U.S. to a targeted level of spending, and doesn't give the United Nations the power to impose a tax on the U.S. -- and, thus, doesn't mandate what critics claim it does -- Moseley thinks it's a "straw man" to point this out.
Further, it's disingenous for Moseley to take refuge in the semantic that Kincaid "never said" that the act "directly impose any tax" since Kincaid has, for all intents and purposes, claimed that it does. From Kincaid's Feb. 12 column:
The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.
That's a pretty strong suggestion that the bill contains a funding mechanism, is it not? Moseley himself further muddies the waters by doing the exact same thing, referring in the very first paragraph of his article to "Barack Obama’s $65 billion-a-year 'Global Tax' proposal."
Moseley continues:
S. 2433 is clearly setting the stage for a global tax, by backing the U.S. into a corner. Once the U.S. commits through international diplomacy to the goal of contributing 0.7% of its GNP and the Congress enforces this goal through Obama’s legislation, the U.S is on the road to accepting the global tax to pay for it.
This is the critical point: S. 2433 mandates that the president actually implement these goals and not merely discuss them. A future president— possibly a liberal like Obama himself— would be obligated to actually “make it happen.” Obama’s bill does not just declare policy. It mandates actual implementation of the $65 billion-a-year “contribution” to foreign aid by the next president. If the U.S. has already agreed to this through Congress, the final step in international negotiations over implementation of a global tax will become difficult, if not impossible, to resist.
Like Kincaid, Moseley assumes that 1) current U.S. foreign aid would not count toward the U.N. goal, and 2) the only possible way for the U.S. meet the goal is through a "global tax" -- neither of whcih Moseley offers any non-speculative evidence to support.
Just as the "Monterrey Consensus" that supposedly forces the U.S. to spend $845 billion mandates nothing -- indeed, it calls the 0.7% figure a "target," not a mandate -- the Global Poverty Act mandates nothing other than that the president "develop and implement a comprehensive strategy" on global poverty. After decades of ineffective U.N. leadership on world affairs, do Kincaid and Moseley suddenly think it has the absolute power to force the U.S. to strictly adhere to a "target"?
A target is not a mandate. Do Kincaid and Moseley understand the difference? Maybe not -- they also seem to think that the truth is a straw man.
An appeals court ruling has trashed the right of Oregon residents to vote on issues in their state by affirming the state's refusal to count referendum signatures even when they were verified in person by the voter.
[...]
The ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an Oregon judge's decision denying state citizens the right to vote on a referendum on a new state law critics contend violates the state's voter-approved definition limiting marriage to one man and one woman.
The appeals court cited the opinion of a handwriting analyst instead of the voters who signed the petition and called the state's "interests" more important than voters' rights.
[...]
The district court at that point simply ruled that Oregon voters have no legal right to have their signatures counted, and the appeals court has upheld the ruling.
The court, of course, denied nobody's rights; it merely affirmed that the method for checking signatures on a conservative-promoted Oregon petition to place on the ballot a reversal of the state's recognition of same-sex couples was valid.
WND quotes only right-wing groups criticizing the ruling, such as Alliance Defense Fund and Restore America, and offers its own creatively biased view of the case:
The state reviewed the tens of thousands of signatures submitted on the referendum issue by a sampling method, ultimately determining there were 55,083 valid signatures, 96 short of what was required. However, a change in just a half a dozen signatures in the sampled portion would have tipped the decision the other way.
At the time the state made that announcement, individual voters checked with their local county officials and found their valid signatures had been arbitrarily disallowed, and state officials had issued orders that county election offices not allow anyone to correct the mistakes.
[...]
The court opinion, instead of citing the voters who signed the petition on the issue of the validity of their signatures, cited a handwriting analysts' opinion on whether the signatures were valid or not.
The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, offers a clearer, more truthful view of what actually happened:
Needing 55,179 valid signatures, sponsors of the referendum turned in 62,000 signatures on petitions to election officials, who followed standard procedures by examining a random sample. After invalidating signatures that didn't match those on registration cards, they concluded that only 55,083 valid signatures had been submitted.
The judge upheld the signature-counting process on Feb. 1 and was affirmed Thursday by a three-judge appeals court panel, which said Oregon took reasonable measures to validate petition signatures.
Sponsors of the referendum argued that election officials should have notified voters whose signatures were rejected and given them a chance to prove their identity. But the court said county registrars are trained in signature verification, allow sponsors of a ballot measure to attend the counting sessions and challenge their decisions, and refer all rejected signatures to a second elections official for added scrutiny.
The question was never about "rights" as WND repeatedly claims. The court did not eliminate or even question the right of voters to intiate ballot referendums -- indeed, WND states "the campaign on the recognition of same-sex relationships now will be restarted with plans for voter decisions on the issues in November 2010." The issue at hand was whether Oregon state law on ballot signature verification was followed and was reasonable. The court ruled that it was.
Given that state law "allow[s] sponsors of a ballot measure to attend the counting sessions and challenge their decisions," WND does not explain why those sponsors did not challenge the disqualification of the signatures at the time.
