CNS' Starr Keeps Shilling for Oil Industry Topic: CNSNews.com
A couple weeks back, we noted how CNSNews.com's Penny Starr has become a reliable shill for the oil industry -- presumably because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars ExxonMobil has given to CNS' parent, the Media Research Center.
Starr turns in another sycophantic effort in a June 10 article uncritically repeating claims by American Petroleum Institute officials in favor of a new U.S.-Canada oil pipeline. Only two paragraphs mention EPA concerns about the pipeline, while Starr devotes a whopping 12 paragraphs to the API's arguments in favor of it.
That bias, it seems, is what ExxonMobil is paying for.
Mychal Massie writes in his June 14 WorldNetDaily column:
In his column, "2nd 'black president' likely to build on legacy of first," Jack Cashill wrote, "Indeed, in his audio book, 'More Than Sex: The Secrets of Bill and Hillary Clinton,' Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson contends that Clinton referred to Jesse Jackson, among others, as a 'nigger' as late as 1992 and routinely tolerated racial slurs by others. Patterson is not alone in making this charge."
Of course, as Cashill's title infers, Clinton went on to become known, amongst other things, as America's first black president. But their hateful comments and tolerances pale in comparison to the rabid Marxist mindset of Michelle Obama and her intentionally polarizing speeches.
In fact, Patterson has no credibility as a Clinton accuser.
As we've detailed, Gene Lyons and Joe Conason point out in their book "The Hunting of the President" that Patterson "was said to harbor a grudge" against Clinton "for going to Washington without setting [him and a fellow state trooper] up in federal jobs" and because he didn't push a bill funding a state police lobbying group Patterson had helped to found through mandatory dues from state troopers' paychecks. Lyons and Conason also quote Patterson's former supervisor as saying Patterson's "mentality and objective in life was to sleep with as many women as he could. You could not have a conversation with Larry Patterson more than five minutes that sex didn't enter into it and whose britches he was trying to get in. ... If Bill Clinton had a meeting with a woman behind closed doors, Larry assumed it was for the purpose of sex, because that's what it would have been if he had been there."
Further, as we've also noted, Patterson and the other anti-Clinton Arkansas troopers backed away from their lurid claims when placed under oath.
It's rather sad that Massie feels he has to stoop to rehashing ancient claims from a discredited, disgruntled accuser in order to fuel his hatred of Michelle Obama. (It doesn't exactly enhance Cashill's credibility, either.)
Meanwhile, Massie's hatred of the Obama's has festered on Twitter:
Andrew Reinbach at Huffington Post takes a look at a June 3 CNSNews.com article by Terry Jeffrey claiming that "China has dropped 97 percent of its holdings in U.S. Treasury bills." While the article is "perfectly truthful as far as it goes," Reinbach writes, it leaves "an impression that's an almost total lie, probably floated to stoke fears that China's about to dump its Treasury portfolio and crash the American economy."
Corsi Downplays How WND Fell For Fake Obama Birth Certificate Topic: WorldNetDaily
For some reason, WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi -- who's desperately trying to prove that the long-form birth certificate released by President Obama is fake -- is obsessing over actual fake birth certificates.
Corsi promises in a June 13 article that this is "the first in a series examining the role supporters of Barack Obama have played in forging fraudulent birth certificates." But Corsi whitewashes the role he and WND played in promoting those birth certificates without bothering to verify them first.
Corsi writes:
On Aug. 2, 2009, WND reported that eligibility lawyer Orly Taitz had made public what became known as the "Bomford" birth certificate, seen here as Exhibit 1, by filing a motion in federal court to determine the document's authenticity.
Taitz's filing of the Bomford birth certificate caused such a stir that a thread discussing the document on Free Republic drew more than 10,000 postings.
On Aug. 4, 2009, Joseph Farah wrote an editorial expressing strong suspicions the document was not authentic.
That same day, Internet bloggers revealed that the Bomford birth certificate had been forged from an authentic "Certified Copy of Registration of Birth" issued in 1964 to an Australian citizen, David Jeffrey Bomford, born April 10, 1959, at Thebarton Community Hospital, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
What Corsi doesn't tell you: WND endeavored to portray the Bomford certificate as authentic.
As we detailed, WND asserted in that Aug. 2 article that "WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical." WND followed up the next day with an article touting how the document "has been entered into the Congressional Record – by a Democrat no less." Another article, on Aug. 4, noted the Washington Independent's detailing of how the document is apparently a altered version of an Australian birth certificate, but it devoted more text to how a website linked to Taitz "provided replies to the point-by-point criticisms."
While Farah did aver that the birth certificate might not be authentic in his Aug. 4 column, he ignored the fact that WND conferred a level of legitimacy on it by publishing it -- and utterly failed in its journalistic duty by refusing to attempt to verify it beforehand.
Corsi also fails to reconcile WND's initial claim that "WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical" with his own claim in an Aug. 6 article that "WND obtained several samples of Kenyan birth certificates in use around Aug. 4, 1961, the date of Obama's birth, showing differences from the Taitz document." Those Kenyan documents couldn't have both proved and disproved the certificate.
As a final touch, Corsi references how "scanner expert Doug Vogt has filed criminal charges with the FBI, alleging that the Obama birth certificate released by the White House April 27 was fraudulently created" without mentioning evidence discrediting Vogt's claims.
MRC Has Another Transgender Freak-Out Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Culture & Media Institute is on quite the transgender-bashing tear of late. Following up on its freak-out over a 5-year-old boy with painted toenails in a J. Crew ad that it painted as transgender "propaganda," a June 7 CMI article by Paul Wilson pulls the usual MRC depiction-equals-approval fallacy of portraying coverage of transgendered people as a "celebration" of them.
Wilson was offended that in one school a student "born a boy and retaining male reproductive organs" was voted prom queen while at another school a student "born female and wishing to be male" was voted homecoming king. Wilson huffed, "In both cases, the issue was presented as one of fairness. Students were voted in by their peers, and were either accepted by a tolerant school or opposed by a reactionary school. The biological identity of Andrew or Oakleigh was irrelevant." Wilson doesn't explain what law is being violated that prom queens must be female and all homecoming kings must be male.
Wilson continued: "But the mainstream media has a history of celebrating high-profile transgendered people as blazing a trail while simultaneously seeking to normalize them. In these stories, skeptics are either absent or presented as bigots." Wilson doesn't explain why they're not.
Diana West Loves Bigoted Author of Dubious Mosque Survey Topic: WorldNetDaily
Diana West's June 9 WorldNetDaily column touts a new study claiming that "More than 80 percent of the mosques in the study feature Islamic literature that advocates violence." West does concede a little bias by noting that study co-author David Yerushalmi is "one of my 18 co-authors on the book 'Shariah: The Threat to America.'"
West won't concede -- as we noted when a WND "news" article similiarly failed to do so -- that Yerushalmi has been cited by the Anti-Defamation League for his "record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry," and that the methodology of his study has been questioned.
But such things don't matter to West; all she seems to care about is that someone she can portray as authoritative (as long as you hide the evidence to the contrary) has produced "alarming data on the promotion of violence within Islam in American mosques."
Newsmax Thrilled Obama Treats It As A Real News Organization Topic: Newsmax
As much as Newsmax may despise President Obama, it's sure isn't ashamed to gush over him when it feels it needs to. Like when it's invited to the White House.
In a June 9 article, Newsmax editorial director Steve Coz trumpeted how the Obama White House considered Newsmax enough of a "leading online media" entity to be invited for a gathering featuring the president:
Newsmax met with President Barack Obama and his senior advisers at a special White House Summit to discuss a wide range of serious economic issues facing the United States and the world.
In a first for the administration, the White House brought together 22 of the country’s leading online media — including Newsmax, Forbes, The Economist, Kiplinger, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL/Huffington Post — to create a platform to better communicate the administration's economic message.
Newsmax Editorial Director Steve Coz and Newsmax magazine Editor in Chief Ken Chandler attended the summit Wednesday and spoke with Obama and his advisers.
It's not until the fourth paragraph that Coz got around to reporting what was actually said during the gathering. But for Newsmax, that wasn't the real news.
Meanwhile, it seems that WorldNetDaily was not invited to this gathering. It doesn't help that WND's White House reporter, Les Kinsolving, has displayed utter contempt for the president and his team.
While many chief executives experience marked aging in the job, Obama looks increasingly drawn and stressed. One can only speculate as to whether he has sought chemical assistance in managing himself during his presidency, but I have heard it suggested. And while I'm no physician, I've enough experience with chemical dependency to say that I would not be surprised, given his demeanor and comportment in recent months. As I write this, Obama is creating a train wreck of decorum during his trip to the United Kingdom, babbling insensibly to Irish citizens who entertained him, botching a toast to the queen and forgetting what year it was.
Asking an individual what year it is, as you may be aware, is one of the often-employed indicators of mental capacity when a head injury or psychological impairment is suspected.
America's traitorous elitists saw in Obama a figurehead that a nation of poorly educated, but well-indoctrinated student-loan serfs, welfare dependents, public sector union "servants" and "what's in it for me independents" would vote for under the heading of "affirmative action."
They were correct.
What they failed to calculate was the cost of his election to the nation.
[...]
For the nation, the term "natural born citizen" meant at the time the Constitution was written – and means today – someone born in America to parents who are themselves both American citizens. Obama's presidency is illegal – and the elites could have spared this nation a great deal of grief if they had looked it up in the Constitution. You owe America an apology.
Some call Obama the "man-child" in the White House. They're right. He's in over his head. He's so unequipped to do the job the presidency demands that the rest of the world laughs at him, and he's an embarrassment for all Americans and certainly, those we honor on Memorial Day.
Despite the past two and a half years America has been run by a president who is in every respect a socialist with communist tendencies, the pathetic GOP cannot effectively mount a first-tier candidate to seriously challenge this diminutive Marxist professor. Why? Because for 40 years the GOP has used the rhetoric of conservative Ronald Reagan, but the tactics, strategies and policies of RINO Richard Nixon.
People will make mistakes. Some will expose some freaky fetish or even worse. However, these mistakes can be corrected every two years for Congress, six years for the Senate and, thank God, every four years for the president.
Oh yes, I said the president. What outlandish behavior of his has been exposed?
He was deluded enough to actually believe he had the ability to be a leader and statesman. In reality, he is merely a community organizer wholly owned by the various unions who ensured him the vote of members too uneducated to think for themselves.
That behavior is more twisted than Weiner's behavior, in my opinion.
Weiner can merely destroy himself and his reputation. Mr Obama has the ability in his position to ruin an entire country and all of our reputations – especially those who voted for him in 2008.
Oh and yes, he is fully paid for by the unions, George Soros and others foolish enough to believe in the hope and change Mr. O was peddling.
As many a reader is aware, I have maintained for many months now that President Obama is a Marxist-Leninist with a marked affinity for Islam. I don't believe he considers himself a Muslim, but it is – or should be – evident that he displays a dangerous favoritism for radical Islamists over our allies and even the American people.
[...]
Between his Marxist-infused Muslim background and 20 years in Wright's church, of course it should be no surprise Obama has moved to compromise the United States economically, militarily, diplomatically and in terms of national security.
The art of Jiu-Jitsu is to use an opponent's weight and strength to your advantage. I believe this is what the conservatives must do in the coming 2012 presidential election.
Obama's "weight and strength" is that by next year he will have a surplus of $1 billion in campaign money and the mainstream media supporting him. He also has ACORN (or whatever they call themselves now) and other community organizers rallying the liberal troops to make sure he gets re-elected. Add to that his slick-willy youth charm and pseudo-charisma with which he has bamboozled a large part of the American public, who neither follow politics nor understand how he has unraveled the very fabrics of our republic. And tailor that with Obama's unique ability to make one believe he means what he says from a teleprompter, and you have a formidable foe.
But as Rickson Gracie, retired mixed martial artist, an eighth-degree black and red belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and a member of the renowned martial arts family – the Gracie family, once said, "If size mattered, the elephant would be the king of the jungle."
The thick cloud of uncertainty hanging over the country originates far beyond the hallowed halls of Washington politics or the White House. Roots of this darkness are so deep, a new dawn is almost inconceivable – especially with Barack Obama residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The promised hope and change has quickly succumbed to high unemployment, foreclosures, millions on food stamps and an overall sense that the best is behind us, not ahead. We all wonder how this could have happened to a once great nation, and how in the world we are going to get things turned around.
Difficult times are not a new phenomenon in America. We have had hard times before. So why is there such a sense of hopelessness and gloom throughout the land this time?
Barack Hussein Obama.
He doesn't believe in America and her greatness. Oh, he may say so in his teleprompter-scripted speeches, but he surely doesn't believe what he is saying. Otherwise, his actions would be far different. He would not be siccing the National Labor Relations Board on Boeing to stop thousands of new jobs. He wouldn't have force fed us a 2,300-page health-care bill, adding massive burdens on business. The Dodd-Frank bill, which cripples growth in America, would never have received Mr. Obama's signature if he truly believed in the country.
We've previously detailed CNSNews.com's obsession over words President Obama says -- or doesn't say. CNS has decided to expand that obsession to the rest of Obama's administration. Penny Starr writes in a June 20 article:
Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that gay and bisexual men comprise “the only risk group in the U.S. in which new HIV infections have been increasing since the early 1990s” and make up 53 percent of all new HIV infections in the United States each year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did not mention them in a speech she gave about the disease.
[...]
In her speech, Sebelius only referred to “Americans,” “people,” “children” and “human lives.”
Apparently, according to Starr and CNS, gays aren't Americans or even human.
WND's Lamb Misleads About Community Reinvestment Act Topic: WorldNetDaily
Henry Lamb writes in his June 11 WorldNetDaily column:
The housing market crumbled because of government intervention. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and subsequent revisions imposed government management of the housing industry by forcing banks to issue loans to credit risks a free market would never tolerate. To entice banks to make these unjustified loans, the government guaranteed repayment. When some of the people couldn't, or wouldn't, repay their mortgages, the government took your tax money to make good the guarantee. This is the single most important cause of the current economic disaster, and the responsibility rests upon progressive Democrats who firmly believe that government must control and manage human activity.
In fact, experts agree that the Community Reinvestment Act had no significant role in the financial crisis, and that lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky.
CNS' Jeffrey Still Won't Mention Thomas' Conflict of Interest Topic: CNSNews.com
We've detailed how CNSNews.com, led by editor in chief Terry Jeffrey, has been determined to portray Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has having a conflict of interest from serving as as President Obama's solicitor general that should force her to recuse from deciding any lawsuit regarding health care reform that is likely to come before the Supreme Court -- while ignoring that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas also has an apparent conflict of interest due to his wife's activism against the reform measure.
Jeffrey keeps that up in his June 8 column, repeating his previous contention that Kagan's naming of a deputy to handle the administration's case while solicitor general constitutes a conflict of interest, since she had previously recused herself from a case involving Harvard Law School, where she previously served as dean.
Jeffrey didn't mention, as CNS has in previous articles, that the emails CNS obtained from the solicitor general's office through a Freedom of Information Act request offered no evidence that Kagan offered any opinion of the health care law, nor did he note as he did in a June 3 article that the solicitor general's office determined that Kagan had been "walled off from Day One" from health care litigation.
And, of course, at no point did Jeffrey mention Thomas' apparent conflict of interest. Then again, Thomas can be presumed to vote against health care reform, and Jeffrey doesn't want to jeopardize that.
WND's Mercer Pines For the Days of Apartheid Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily columnist Ilana Mercer has already lionized the leader of South Africa's Afrikaner Resistance Movement while hiding the group's history of violence and white supremacism, so it's no surprise to see South Africa native Mercer pining for the days of apartheid.
That's essentially what Mercer does in her June 10 WND column touting her new book, "Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa." She complains:
Washington and Westminster bear considerable responsibility for the "swelling social disorder" in South Africa, having insisted that South Africa pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed.
Ironically, America's Founding Fathers had attempted to forestall pure democracy by devising a republic. Yet under the wing of the American eagle a dispensation was negotiated in South Africa, the consequence of which is the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party.
The time is thus historically ripe to challenge some of the central tenets of a liberal democratic ideology that would bring about the disaster that is post-apartheid South Africa.
While Mercer does concede that apartheid was "racist," she presents it as infinitely preferable to the country's current rule and apparently unable the fundamental unfairness of a tiny minority ruling over others. Instead, she insists that South Africa is a "cautionary tale" and that, apparently, people not like her shouldn't get to vote:
In their unqualified paeans to the will of the majority everywhere, Americans must understand that universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom. As the democratic South Africa (and Iraq) amply demonstrates, political rights don't secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness; ink-stained fingers don't inoculate against blood stains. Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, they are seldom restored.
Lest anyone doubt Mercer's racial ambitions, the preface of her new book is published at VDare, a website whose own editor describes as "white nationalist." In it, Mercer mostly whines that no mainstream publisher would touch her book. That editor, Peter Brimelow, writes an introduction to Mercer's preface.
NewsBusters Ridicules Weiner Conspiracies -- Though It Entertained Them About Foley Scandal Topic: NewsBusters
A June 7 NewsBusters post by Lachlan Markay outlines "The Most Ridiculous Leftist Defenses of Anthony Weiner." It might be funny if NewsBusters and its Media Research Center parent hadn't invoked some of those same defenses in the 2006 scandal surrounding Republican Rep. Mark Foley and his communications with young male congressional pages.
Markay writes that "the 'it's a coordinated plot to take down Weiner' line mostly originated in the blogosphere, but made its way into the mainstream via some of the usual suspects, such as The View's Joy Behar." But as we detailed at the time, his NewsBusters colleague Mark Finkelstein wrote regarding the Foley scandal in an Oct. 2, 2006, post that "it seems increasingly plausible that the timed release of information - of ever-escalating seriousness - is part of a calculated campaign to keep the story in the news and inflict maximum political damage on the GOP."
Markay also noted that some attacked Andrew Breitbart for forwarding the story. That's the exact same tactic NewsBusters used in the Foley scandal. An Oct. 4 post by Al Brown suggested that ABC's Brian Ross, who first reported the Foley scandal, "willfully lie[d] in order to run with the story and "get" the Republicans five weeks before the elections."
Markay claimed that some invoked the "Nothing to see here. Move along, people" defense. But that's exactly what the MRC did. Brown wrote inhis NewsBusters post that the Foley scandal was nothing more than "two consenting adults exchanging instant messages." And theMRC's CNSNews.com insisted that there were more pressing matters:
While Washington insiders were distracted with a Capitol Hill sex scandal -- and while media outlets and politicians are doing all they can to keep the story alive -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at its second, consecutive record high on Wednesday; President Bush signed a bill that frees up funds for a U.S.-Mexico border fence; and a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that the Bush administration may continue its terrorist surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional.
Last week, Markay accepted a job as an "investigative reporter" for the Heritage Foundation. If he had done some actual "investigative reporting" before he wrote his NewsBusters post, he'd look a little less foolish.
WND's Unruh Begins Anti-Gay Attack With Obsolete Study Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh begins a June 9 WorldNetDaily article touting the rantings of anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera this way:
The chief of a watchdog organization working to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS has launched a campaign to demand a government investigation of – and action over – the homosexual behavior that has been linked to more than 25 million deaths over the last 30 years, likening the problem to smoking, which was blamed for 100 million deaths in the 20th century.
Although statistics on the diseases linked to homosexual activity notoriously are hard to obtain, a report from the International Journal of Epidemiology estimated from a review of the "gay" population of Vancouver, B.C., that HIV/AIDS costs homosexuals up to 20 years of their lives on average.
In fact, as we detailed when WND allowed Molotov Mitchell and Bryan Fischer to make the same claim, the study published by the International Journal of Epidemiology is irrelevant to today; it examined data "obtained for a large Canadian urban centre from 1987 to 1992," and the life expectancy differential was specifically attributed to losses "due to HIV/AIDS," for which treatments were in their infancy and not widely available. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that the authors of the study updated it in 2001, pointing out that advances in treatment of HIV-AIDS even at that point had significantly improved the expected longevity of those infected, which would inevitably narrow any gap between gay and straight life spans caused by the disease. The authors also rejected the attempts of anti-gay organizations to construe the 1997 observations to justify denigration of gays.
This reliance on obsolete data completely undermines the thesis Unruh and LaBarbera have based their article on: that "homosexual behavior" be treated as a public health threat like smoking. Further, as is typical WND behavior, Unruh forbids anyone from responding to LaBarbera's anti-gay hatred.
Geoffrey Dickens has absolutely no evidence that Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" joke that Herman Cain doesn't "like to read" is "racially charged" -- indeed, as the transcript Dickens supplies in his June 10 NewsBusters post demonstrates, the full context of the joke makes it clear that Stewart was mocking Cain's contention that legislation should run no longer than three pages.
But Dickens has decided it is anyway, putting "racially charged" in his headline. His reasoning? "The Daily Show" might have said that if a right-wing radio host had said the same thing about President Obama. No, really:
It would be unfair to call Jon Stewart a racist but when he mocked GOP presidential contender Herman Cain as essentially an illiterate, on Thursday's show, it has to be asked wouldn't Stewart and his cronies at The Daily Show have satirized any sort of conservative talk show host, like a Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, as a bigot if they had joked that President Barack Obama didn't "like to read?"
So it's unfair for Dickens to call Stewart a racist but perfectly in bounds to falsely call Stewart's joke "racially charged" when he has no evidence to back him up? We're confused.
WorldNetDaily columnist Ilana Mercer has already 
