If you're going to ridicule the conspiracy theories of others, it works better if you haven't promoted conspiracy theories of your own.

Just sayin'.

Posted by Terry K. at 8:54 AM EST

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As a possible attempt at damage control for his video of two weeks ago endorsing the execution of gays in Uganda, Molotov Mitchell has cranked out one of those some-of-my-best-friends-are-gay testimonials.

Mitchell's stance might be taken a bit more seriously if he wasn't denigrating said friends in the process.

Mitchell begins by insisting that he knows "the data" and "some of the scientists," as well as because "I have personally worked with ex-gays for years," he has concluded that "there's absolutely no evidence to support the gay activists' claim that same-sex attraction is genetic, and it's definitely not immutable." He adds: "When I say I'm against homosexuality, I mean I'm against a self-destructive lifestyle that is both unnecessary and dangerous."

The problem is that Mitchell isn't just "against homosexuality"; as we detailed, he favors the "abolition of homosexuality." He has not directly explained how he favors such abolition, but his enthusiastic support for the Uganda law is one possible clue.

But Mitchell then declares he has "gay friends." This leads to a story from his days of working in "actor circles," when he was confronted at a party by a "flaming homosexual" who asked him -- as Mitchell lapses into stereotypically fey, limp-wristed mannerisms and lisping voice -- if he's going to hell for being gay. "I smiled, looked him in the eye, and I said, 'Yeah, it looks like you are headed for hell.'"

He claimed this confrontational behavior went on for several weeks until a going-away party for the "flaming homosexual," during which, according to Mitchell, he was told by the "flaming homosexual" that "you're my only friend because you told me what I always knew." He added: "And then he started sobbing, and I grabbed him and I hugged him, and he just cried into my shoulder." Mitchell's lesson: "Faithful are the wounds of friends."

Mitchell concluded: "Over the years, I've had lots of homosexual friends, and I've been straight with all of them about my aversion to their sexual lifestyle. A few have walked away, sure, but for the most part, they all stayed close, because they knew I really loved them."

But will they love him when they find out he wouldn't object to seeing them punished or even killed by the government for their "lifestyle"?

Posted by Terry K. at 12:24 AM EST

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NewsBusters' Jack Coleman is upset with Rachel Maddow. Why? Because she had the audacity to put a statement by Janet Napolitano in its proper context.

Coleman goes on at great length in a Jan. 2 NewsBusters post to express his unhappiness at Maddow for pointing out that Napolitano's statement that "the system worked," placed in its proper context, applies to events after the Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing incident, and not to the failure to detect the bomber, and that by suggesting that the phrase applied to pre-bombing events, Republicans were "attacking her for saying something she never actually said." We'll let Coleman take it from here:

Nice try, Ms. Maddow. The problem for Napolitano isn't that Republicans are putting words in her mouth -- it's that they are quoting her accurately (as shown by Maddow's footage of Congressman King). And what Napolitano said, starting with a simple declarative sentence that stands or falls on its own, was ludicrous.

In fairness to Maddow, she gets it half right, which is certainly encouraging. Napolitano did gloss over the lunacy of her "system worked" assertion by whittling "the system" to only those components functional on the day in question.

What makes Maddow's defense of Napolitano's inanity all the more bizarre is that it came after Napolitano backpedaled on it herself, appearing on the "Today" show Dec. 28 and agreeing with Matt Lauer when he asked if "the system" had "failed miserably" to prevent a terrorist with explosives from boarding an airliner.

Maddow condemns Republicans for "selective editing" and taking Napolitano's remarks "out of context." Having set the bar high for others, Maddow then shows her unwillingness to abide by the same standards.

Note that at no point does Coleman contradict the fact that Republicans were taking the line out of context or even express shame for having done so -- indeed, he praises the statement as "a simple declarative sentence that stands or falls on its own" and, presumably, a perfect target for taking out of context.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:59 PM EST

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It's axiomatic that when someone insists he's not comparing someone to Nazis, it's exactly what he's doing.

Behold Barry Farber's Jan. 6 WorldNetDaily column, the second paragraph of which begins with the statement, "OK. I'm not calling those who run our government Nazis." Of course, Farber goes on to do exactly that, in the most bizarre, elitist way possible.

Farber's argument is that because New York's Tavern on the Green -- with its "Overpriced, mediocre cuisine" and "long waits" --  is closing, and because there are "shuttered businesses" on the mean streets of Manhattan's Upper West Side, the government, the media, and everyone else is lying to us about the economy starting to recover, likening them to, yes, Nazis: "I propose the minting of a new award, like the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and Golden Globes, for today's cheerleading, sycophantic media.  We'll call it the 'Ludwig,' named after Hitler's favorite broadcaster during the war, Ludwig Sertorius."

This is not the first time Farber has done this; in September, back when he was still with Newsmax, Farber similarly claimed, "I think it's time we awarded the president's spokespeople, spin-meisters, and agenda-crats the 'Ludwig' prize."

So, yes, Farber is very much likening people to Nazis, no matter what he says.

Even more laughable than Farber's invocation of Godwin's Law is the snootiness of his attack -- the idea that unless Upper West Side elitists like Farber are able to go to overpriced, mediocre restaurants like Tavern on the Green with impunity, the economy can't possibly be recovering.

Especially since Farber has pretended he's no elite.  In another 2007 Newsmax column, Farber attacked Nancy Pelosi for, near as we can tell, supporting the idea of diplomatic overtures to Syria: "That makes you an elitist. And elitists lose. Elitists may command the respect of the European peasantry but not of the American Common Man."

Farber seems not to be aware that, unlike him, the American Common Man is not terribly fond of overpriced, mediocre restaurants either.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:42 PM EST

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A Jan. 4 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein features the comments of Larry Johnson, "former CIA analyst and former deputy director at the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism," attacking President Obama for setting a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. The article even includes a picture of Johnson.

Klein is silent about the fact that Johnson helped spread a vicious lie about Obama.

As David Weigel details, Johnson -- a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Demcoratic primaries and a rabid Obama-hater -- was instrumental in spreading the never-proven rumor that Republican operatives possessed a tape of Michelle Obama railing against "whitey."

Needless to say, WND promoted the rumor at the time, peppering reports of denials with skepticism and anonymous comments asserting it as fact. Klein himself granted the rumor a passing mention back then as well.

Those are the only two mentions of it, however, indicating that even WND -- which is an even more rabid Obama-hater than Johnson -- didn't consider the rumor credible.

So why is Klein and WND treating the promoter of the lie as credible now?

Posted by Terry K. at 9:21 AM EST

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David Limbaugh writes in his Jan. 5 column, published by WorldNetDaily and Newsmax:

On NBC's "Meet the Press," [White House counterterrorism adviser John] Brennan volunteered that the administration is still bound and determined to close Gitmo – come hell, high water or the risk of increasing the terrorist threat against this country as a result.

"We will decide and determine when we should send additional people back," said Brennan. "But we're going to do it in the right way, because Guantanamo should be closed. It was used as a propaganda tool by al-Qaida, and the president is still committed to it."

I wonder how Obama knows the terrorists use Gitmo as a recruiting tool? Have Gallup's people been matriculating in madrassas taking the jihadists' pulse? If terrorists do think negatively about Gitmo, is it because of the fabled mistreatment they've received there or the fact that we're demonstrating our weakness by administering five-star luxury treatment to homicide bombers?

The answer is Obama is a liberal, and he has deliberately surrounded himself with like-minded, weak-willed leftists who are congenitally incapable of grasping the presence of evil in the world. They are blind to the reality that the terrorists hate us because of their ideology and theology and not because of any alleged misconduct at a detention facility. Do you really think it's plausible that people who engage in the brutal tactics these people engage in would bother recruiting on the absurd bases that Obama claims?

In fact, numerous experts and military officials have stated that terrorists have successfully used the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay as a major recruiting device.

Limbaugh -- who has been on a roll of right-wing misinformation lately -- might want to try doing something called research before writing his next column.

Posted by Terry K. at 7:16 AM EST

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You would think that, just a few weeks removed from getting caught red-handed spreading falsehoods about Kevin Jennings and being forced to issue an embarrassing retraction, Accuracy in Media would want to stay away from the subject of Jennings, lest it stray into further misleading smears. But AIM doesn't, and it does.

In a January 4 AIM column, Cliff Kincaid tries once again to falsely link Jennings to pedophila -- defying AIM's retraction statement that it has "no evidence" to support such a link -- by bringing up Jennings' praise for gay-rights pioneer Harry Hay, stating that Hay was a "supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association" and insisting that "The praise of Hay by Jennings has led to questions about Jennings's relationship with NAMBLA itself."

In fact, Jennings' praise of Hay has only "led to questions" among those determined to mischaracterize that praise. Jennings praised Hay's role in helping start "the first ongoing gay rights groups in America" in 1948, which has nothing to do with NAMBLA.

(Just as unacceptable to Kincaid, it appears, is that Hay was also "a prominent member of the Communist Party USA and ‘Radical Faerie' who believed in the power of the occult.")

Kincaid also curiously embarks on a defense of a proposed anti-gay law in Uganda, asserting that any claim that it would result in the death penalty for homosexuality is "flat-out disinformation" and that the death penalty is for "aggravated homosexuality," which is, according to Kincaid, "pederasty, pedophilia, homosexual parent/child incest, homosexual abuse of a disabled ward, and knowingly spreading AIDS."

But CNN reports that the death penalty could also apply to those who "engage in homosexual sex more than once," as well as "people who test positive for HIV." The law would also apply even to Ugandans participating in same-sex acts in countries where such behavior is legal.

Kincaid's source for his claims about the Uganda law is anti-gay pastor Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries -- which is on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups. The New York Times reports that Lively "has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss" the proposed law and was one of three evangelical activists who headlined a recent conference on the "gay agenda" in the country in which, according to the Times, they "discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.' "

Kincaid quotes Lively stating that the bill "does not emphasize rehabilitation over punishment and the punishment that it calls for is unacceptably harsh. However, if the offending sections were sufficiently modified, the proposed law would represent an encouraging step in the right direction." According to Kincaid, Lively defends the law as "a response to the history of the country, where Christians were persecuted and even killed for resisting the homosexuality of King Mwanga, a violent pedophile." Lively also cites "homosexual political activists from Europe and the United States [who] are working aggressively to re-homosexualize their nation" and claims that "Ugandan citizens report a growing number of foreign homosexual men coming to their country to turn desperately poor young men from the slums into their personal houseboys, and that some girls in public schools have been paid to recruit others into lesbianism."

Kincaid joins WorldNetDaily's Molotov Mitchell in defending the Ugandan bill.

Thanks to Kincaid's smear, AIM owes another apology to Jennings. They might want to quit while they're behind.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:28 AM EST

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Molotov Mitchell is expanding his hate-filled empire at WorldNetDaily, adding a second weekly videocast, a supposed "humor" clip hosted by D.J. Dolce. The inaugural edition included this charming little bon mot:

Finally, after suggesting that Obama present his birth certificate to the public, then-CNN correspondent Lou Dobbs and his wife were shot at outside their home in New Jersey. Police are looking for a biracial man in the back of a black limousine with tiny American flags on the hood.

The video's canned laughter loves it. Too bad Mitchell couldn't find any actual humans who found it humorous.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:10 PM EST

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WorldNetDaily has regularly likened President Obama to Nazis and the Antichrist, so why wouldn't it liken him to Satan? Mychal Massie -- according to his end-of-column bio, "the 2008 Conservative Man of the Year by the Conservative Party of Suffolk County, N.Y." -- does just that in his Jan. 5 WND column:

Obama was quick to publicly insult the Cambridge Police, saying they "acted stupidly," while surreptitiously playing the race card when an officer followed protocol designed to protect himself and the safety of professor Gates. But in the aftermath of Nidal Malik Hasan's terrorist attack at Fort Hood, he instructed Congress not to get involved in the investigation. He has yet even to recognize Hasan as a terrorist.

Since even Satan has his worshippers, it comes as no surprise in the Hasan case that those who worship at the throne of Obama immediately sprang forth with ludicrous assertions that it was military stress that led to the attacker's actions.

You stay classy, Mychal.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:47 AM EST

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It seems that the egregiously false Accuracy in Media blog post attacking Kevin Jennings -- which AIM later removed then apologized for, followed by another attempt to smear him -- may be just the tip of the laziness iceberg over there. Cliff Kincaid writes in a January 4 AIM Report:

I DON'T WATCH THE SHOW, BUT IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION THAT LESBIAN commentator Rachel Maddow of MSNBC devoted time and attention to the hanging death of a census worker in rural Kentucky with the word "fed" marked on his chest. Maddow thought this was a murder carried out by conservatives opposed to the federal government and inspired by conservatives in the media. Time magazine agreed, running an article claiming that, "The discovery of the body of Bill Sparkman, 51, a substitute teacher and a field worker for the bureau, comes at a time when talk media, tea parties and white-hot town-hall meetings have fanned antigovernment sentiment." Faiz Shakir of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress called it a "gruesome lynching" and tried to blame it on conservative Rep. Michelle Bachman, who had been critical of the Census. It turned out to be a suicide made up to look like a homicide for insurance purposes. It was a personal matter and had absolutely nothing to do with conservatives. Please send Maddow a postcard asking for an apology.

Read that again. Kincaid wants his minions to demand an apology from Maddow, even though he can't be bothered to watch her show and, thus, cannot explain exactly what she should apologize for.

If Kincaid had watched Maddow's show, he would know that while Maddow did cover the Sparkman case when it happened, the show also reported that Sparkman's death was ruled a suicide.

Also note that Kincaid apparently still can't get over the fact that Maddow is a lesbian, as evidenced by his need to identify her as a "lesbian commentator." He has previously described her as "a lesbian with hair so short that she looks like a man."

If Kincaid wants apologies, he might want to start by offering his own. To cite a couple recent non-Jennings-related examples, there's AIM's repetition of the false claim that less than 10 percent of Obama cabinet appointees have private-sector experience, or Kincaid's own sleazy smear of Ted Kennedy, that he "left a party, probably a drunken orgy, with this poor girl [Mary Jo Kopechne]."

Posted by Terry K. at 9:05 AM EST

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Penny Starr managed to avoid calling someone a baby-killer this time, but her anti-abortion bias was clearly evident in her Jan. 4 CNSNews.com article on a poll on the website of "pro-abortion group NARAL Pro-Choice America" to name "the person who has done the most for their movement."

As her description of NARAL suggests, Starr made frequent use of the pejorative and inaccurate term "pro-abortion," while using the euphemistic term "pro-life" to describe her side of the issue.

Starr went on to perform the usual right-wing whitewash of the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, claiming he "was shot by a man known to have mental problems in May." As we've previously noted, Roeder's alleged mental illness has been cited by others, including WorldNetDaily, as a way to distance the anti-abortion movement from any culpability in Tiller's death.

Starr offered no evidence to support her claim. CNS' own reporting on Tiller's murder is scant; the only references at CNS to Roeder's alleged "mental problems" are passing references in AP articles, and no original CNS articles have addressed it.

Starr went on to uncritically quote Operation Rescue president Troy Newman commenting on the NARAL vote, failing to mention his group's ties to Roeder -- an Operation Rescue official helped Roeder track court dates for Tiller.

Posted by Terry K. at 7:16 AM EST

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WorldNetDaily's long history of defying reality and fudging facts in its annual list of "underreported stories" continues with its offerings for 2009.

On first place on WND's list is "Overwhelming evidence the Fort Hood mass murderer was an Islamic terrorist acting as part of a larger, radical Islamic movement bent on infiltrating, subverting and ultimately conquering the U.S." In fact, WND offers no "overwhelming evidence," citing only a relationship with a radical former imam at a Virginia mosque.

Of course, "Obama's constitutional eligibility to be president" is on the list, despite WND's history of fraudulent reporting on the issue. "WND has reported dozens of legal challenges," it continues, even though WND could win one of its own "Operation Spike" awards for its longtime suppression of birther lawyer Orly Taitz's shoddy work.

WND also repeats a misleading claim that "Obama has spent at least $1.7 million to ward off all requests for his documentation." In fact, that money was paid to a law firm, and WND, in the documentation it has provided to back up the claim, offers no evidence that all of the money went to "ward off all requests for his documentation."

In its entry on "The true impact on the U.S. and world economies of cap-and-trade, should it become law," WND noted "the opinion of 31,478 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who agree humans have nothing to do with any "global warming," if such even exists." But as we've noted, many of the "scientists" and "Ph.D.s" on the list are not trained in disciplines related to climate science, making the value of such a petition dubious at best.

Under the entry of "The true cause of the subprime meltdown that led to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression," WND writes:

ACORN has a long history of urging lenders to extend home mortgages to subprime borrowers. In the 1980s, the group pushed charges that the home lending practices of banks amounted to "red-lining" in violation of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act.

In 1994, Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School then fresh from his Project Vote! experience, represented ACORN in a case in which the organization pressured Citibank to make more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants "in a race neutral way."

Infact, most of the subprime lending over the past decade was done by institutions not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act. Further, regarding the Citibank lawsuit, Obama was a junior member of an eight-lawyer team that worked on the case. The lawsuit did not "pressure Citibank to make more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants"; according to the lawsuit, it charged that Citibank "rejected loan applications of minority applicants while approving loan applications filed by white applicants with similar financial characteristics and credit histories."

WND also referenced "The exposure of ACORN's criminality by a freelance undercover probe," citing "Two young enterprising journalists, Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe." Unmentioned : the fact that many of the claims of "criminality" made by O'Keefe and Giles and their handler, Andrew Breitbart, simply aren't supported by the selectively edited videos they have released.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:03 AM EST

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I keep asking myself the same haunting question: How on earth did this community organizer ever become president of the greatest country in the world?

Am I the only one who feels this way?

[...]

By 2012 America will have looked back at the election of 2008 and will wish Sarah Palin had been at the helm. She has more experience in leadership in her bra strap than Obama in his entire empty suit.

-- Craig R. Smith, Jan. 4 WorldNetDaily column

Posted by Terry K. at 11:16 PM EST

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A Dec. 29 Newsmax item by James Hirsen stated that "the unpleasant subject of celebrity doctor shopping has once again been highlighted" due to the death of actress Brittany Murphy, adding that "Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson and Murphy were able to obtain a multitude of dangerous prescription drugs, revealing an apparent failure and inconsistency in the law."

Hirsen conspicuously leaves one famous name off his list: Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh was arrested on a charge of doctor-shopping for painkillers in Florida in 2006; he reached an agreement with prosecutors in which the charges were dropped on the condition that Limbaugh attend a treatment program and pay court costs.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:11 PM EST

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