In an April 11 WorldNetDaily column listing reasons that Attorney General Eric Holder should be impeached, Dean claims: "Eric Holder has directed the DOJ not to enforce the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In doing so, Holder has violated his oath of office and clearly shows his violation of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God."
Dean is lying again. In fact, the Department of Justice stated that it would no longer defend DOMA in court, but that it would still enforce the law while it remains in effect.
Dean also claimed: "As we all know, Eric Holder is guilty of putting thousands of assault rifles into the hands of Mexican drug lords in an attempt to blame the American people for the crimes administration officials are guilty of contriving and committing." In fact, an investigation by the DOJ's inspector general found no evidence that Holder knew of the Fast & Furious gun-running operation.
Dean further wrote: "Soon after being sworn in as Obama’s attorney general, Holder ordered the voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers during the 2008 presidential election to be dropped." In fact, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that DOJ attorneys "acted appropriately, in the exercise of their supervisory duties in connection with the dismissal of the three defendants in the NBPP case." Experts on both sides of the political spectrum agree that the New Black Panther case is a phony scandal.
Dean went on to dramatically declare: "It is time to bind criminals such as Eric Holder down with the chains of the Constitution." When will Dean feel the need to bind himself to the Ten Commandments, particularly the one about bearing false witness?
Newsmax Tries to Goose Sales of Roger Ailes Bio Topic: Newsmax
Zev Chafets' friendly biography of Fox News chief Roger Ailes is tanking -- it sold less than 3,000 copies in its first week, despite being heavily promoted on the channel Ailes runs.
For some reason, Newsmax has decided to enter the breach and goose sales of the book.
An April 12 Newsmax article touts how Chafets' book "has soared to the top of Amazon.com’s list of best-selling books," going on to assert that "Chafets' book is drawing high praise not only for its penetrating look at the man credited with building Fox News into the top-rated cable news channel, but also for the significant revelations it offers about Ailes, his confrontation with President Obama, and other fascinating vignettes."
One significant fact Newsmax fails to mention: Two days earlier, it sent out an email to its mailing list imploring readers to buy the book at Amazon.
Scattered throughout that email are links stating, "Note: You can get this best-selling book from Amazon now — Go Here Now." It takes you to Amazon's page for the book, its URL coded so that Newsmax gets a cut of sales.
Both the email and article make the ludicrous claim that "Chafets is not a conservative — a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a former columnist for the New York Daily News, he was given unprecedented access to Ailes and others at Fox News with no strings attached." But as the New Republic details, Chafets certainly has special relations with conservatives like Ailes:
The author of more than a dozen books, Chafets has established himself as someone with special access to conservative figures, earned by the sympathetic profiles he writes of them. He seems credible, writes well, does actual reporting, and is published in center to center-left outlets like the New York Times Magazine and Newsweek. He frequently identifies himself as a member of the “mainstream media” or “lamestream media,” complete with quotation marks to deny an endorsement of either appellation.
The email even touts Rush Limbaugh's endorsement of the book without mentioning that Chafets also wrote a friendly bio of Limbaugh.
Newsmax might want to explain to its readers why it has felt the need to goose sales of Chafets' book. Out of the goodness of Christopher Ruddy's heart? Because Chafets' publisher is paying them? Please tell us.
WND's Klein Ignores Big Picture on Al Qaeda And Gun Shows Topic: WorldNetDaily
Aaron Klein huffed in an April 12 WorldNetDaily article:
In a clear push for gun control, CNN and MSNBC yesterday hyped false claims by an al-Qaida spokesman that America is awash with easily obtainable, fully automatic “assault rifles.”
The networks played an al-Qaida propaganda video from June 2011 that until now has received little news media attention.
In the video, American al-Qaida spokesman and operative Adam Gadahn urged jihadists to obtain automatic rifles at U.S. gun shows, wrongly claiming those weapons are sold without background checks.
Klein conveniently ignores the fact that criminals and terrorists have, in fact, purchased weapons at gun shows where background checks are lax. While Gadahn was incorrect about being able to buy fully automatic guns at gun shows, one can buy the parts to make a semi-automatic rifle fully automatic at gun shows.
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Possibly Illegal Leaks Topic: NewsBusters
An April 10 NewsBusters post by Matthew Balan fretted that ABC was covering "startling secret tape" from Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell's office "revealing how the Senate's top Republican was planning to go after... [Ashley] Judd if she ran against him," and that said coverage was "omitting left-of-center ideology of the publication that released the audio clip and minimizing the possible illegality of its recording."
Similarly, an April 10 post by Jeffrey Meyer fretted that the McConnell tape may have been "made without McConnnell's knowledge could potentially be a serious violation of federal law" and that nobody in one TV segment seemed "concerned that McConnell’s privacy might have been violated."
Funny, we don't recall such concern over privacy and potential illegality when stolen emails from the University of East Anglia were blown up into "Climategate." To the contrary: NewsBusters was upset that the contents of the possibly illegally taken emails weren't being reported. A November 2009 post by Jeff Poor, for example, called it merely a "breach of data" by "a hacker" and whined that instead of covering it, ABC reported on "A sea lion glut in San Francisco, an orphaned moose in Vermont and the meal selection on the President's State Dinner."
Apparently, NewsBusters is concerned about the propriety of reporting information that may have been illegally obtained when that information makes Republicans look bad.
The ConWeb Ignores, Buries Rand Paul's Flip-Flop on Civil Rights Act Topic: The ConWeb
During an April 10 speech at Howard University, a historically black school, Republican Sen. Rand Paul said that he has "never wavered" in his "support of civil rights or the Civil Rights Act." Which is simply not true. Paul has argued that the public acommodations clause of the Civil Rights Act shouldn't apply to private businesses -- in other words, he thinks that business should be able to discriminate by race.
But the ConWeb really doesn't want you to know about any of that.
A Newsmax article by Todd Beamon highlighted Paul statement on the Civil Rights Act, obliquely following that by noting, "He added that he did 'question some of the ramifications' of the act on business."
By contrast, a CNSNews.com article by Melanie Hunter made no mention whatsoever of Paul's statement or the fact that it contradicts his previous stance.
A WorldNetDaily article by Taylor Rose mentioned Paul's contradiction, but only in the final paragraph of his 24-paragraph article. For some reason, Rose devoted part of his article to Peter Brimelow, "financial journalist, author and founder of the immigration restrictionist website VDARE," calling Paul's outreach a waste of time because "Republicans will cut the programs so many blacks [and other minorities] are dependent on."
Rose's description of Brimelow's VDARE as "immigration restrictionist" is misleading -- in fact, it's basically a white supremacist website. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that VDARE "regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites."
MRC Fearmongers About Soros To Raise A Few Bucks Topic: Media Research Center
You may have been seeing web ads like this for the past week or so:
We saw them mostly at the Media Research Center. There's a reason for that: It's an MRC fundraising campaign.
The target is George Soros, and the MRC musters all the demonization it can to scare a few bucks out of gullible conservatives, starting with the awesomely evil image at the top of the "StopSorosNow.com" website:
The "puppet master" imagery is steeped in anti-Semitic stereotypes -- Soros was born a Jew -- but the MRC is too busy fearmongering for its money grab to worry about propriety:
George Soros is on a crusade to destroy the freest nation on earth and transform it into a hard-left, socialist state. He funds more than 180 media outlets and leftist front groups to advance his anti-American propaganda.
BUT—the MRC has the strategy and the courage to stand up to George Soros' ruthless anti-American empire. But we can't do this without your help. Your donation will give the MRC the firepower needed to dismantle the Soros Web by exposing his influence over the liberal media, and your support has never been more critical.
Curiously, an earlier version of the MRC's appeal was much more detailed, which promised many specific things it would do with the money (bolding and underlining in original):
There is nothing that can match the depth and intricacies of the George Soros media web.
But that's where the Media Research Center plays a pivotal role, and with your help, we can expose and stop his assault on America by:
Operating a full-time team of researchers devoted solely to fully investigating George Soros' deep ties to the liberal American media.
Funneling this information out to the American people by providing all we uncover to Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the conservative blogosphere.
Countering and neutralizing the lies, smears, and propaganda that these leftist connected groups like Media Matters spread through their Soros ties in the liberal American media.
The MRC has the strategy and the courage to stand up to George Soros' ruthless anti-American empire. But we can't do this without your help.
Your donation gives the MRC the firepower needed to dismantle the Soros Web by exposing his influence over the liberal media. Two of the MRC's trustees are so convinced that George Soros poses a grave threat to America, they have offered to match dollar for dollar every gift made to the MRC by April 11. That means your gift will have DOUBLE the impact in our fight to stop Soros. Your support has never been more critical. Your gift will go TWICE AS FAR in saving America from George Soros' socialist agenda.
But we must receive your gift by midnight on April 11. Please don't wait to help us stop George Soros. Make your gift to the MRC today.
The appeal as it currently stands removes the specifics of how the money would be spent, and there's no mention of donations being doubled.
Instead, there is a notice that the campaign has been extended for a day, until April 12 -- an all-but-certain sign that it's not going well.
Remaining at the end of the appeal, however, is a version of the MRC logo with the addendum "100% Guaranteed No B.S."
Remove the word "no," and it would be a lot closer to the truth.
Diana West begins her April 4 WorldNetDaily column this way:
Get ready for the last straw.
First, though, I’d like to suggest that anyone reading this column in a local newspaper or news site pat the editor on the back for publishing what in our neo-medieval world of fear amounts to a “forbidden” column.
Yup, I am about to say something about the Great Barack Obama Identity/Eligibility Scandal again.
Well, no. We know West loves to play the victim when publications refuse to publish her increasingly fringe, far-right views. What she's writing isn't "forbidden"; it simply proves that West is willing to ignore all logical evidence in order to cling to her birther conspiracy theory.
West continues:
I know that this is one rich and urgent topic that doesn’t see the light of day in certain so-called news outlets – and I say that from the experience of watching my own syndicated columns fail to appear when covering news of the White House press conference where the president’s long-form birth certificate was unveiled, news of courtroom proceedings in various states on Obama’s ballot eligibility and news of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigators presenting evidence that the online Obama birth certificate is a forgery.
Actually, the Arpaio cold case posse has been discredited. Not that anyone would know that by reading WND, since WND writer Jerome Corsi was/is a de facto member of the posse and has plenty of motive to keep up the illusion of credibility. Also, pretty much every birther lawsuit has been laughed out of court, and that's before the subpar lawyering of Orly Taitz and Larry Klayman is taken into consideration.
West then goes the revisionist-history route:
In fact, the whereabouts of Obama’s nativity is in no way the main bone of “birther” contention, despite the blinkered focus on it by the enforcers of silence. Of far greater concern to me, for starters, is the purportedly original documentation President Obama belatedly provided the American people to attest to his identity.
So has Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse out in Maricopa County, Ariz. So, too, has the Israel Science and Technology website, a national database and directory of science- and technology-related sites in Israel established by Benjamin Netanyahu’s former science adviser, molecular biologist Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.
As for the supposed expertise of "Benjamin Netanyahu’s former science adviser, molecular biologist Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.," Dr. Conspiracy sums it up: "Israel Hanukoglu is just another crank birther conspiracy theorist with no credentials in what he’s writing about. He doesn’t even pretend to employ the scientific method with experiment, nor does he cite sources with credentials any better than his."
West continues:
Having weighed the arguments, it seems to me that by virtue of having a British subject for a father, Barack Obama Jr. is constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States, no matter where he was born.
With a British father, Obama cannot meet the constitutional requirement of having been “natural born,” which is a different and more restrictive category than “native born.”
Again, no. Most legitimate legal authorities consider "natural born" and "native born" to be interchangeable. And nowhere in the Constitution or in federal law is "natural born citizen" defined only as the child of two citizen parents.
From there, West proceeds to whining:
Aside from Alan Keyes, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and a Republican candidate for the Senate and the presidency, no prominent Republican – from John McCain to Mitt Romney to John Boehner to Ron Paul – and no prominent conservative, from William Bennett to Sarah Palin to Rudy Giuliani, ever faced or raised the issue.
Similarly, no think tank, no committee in Congress, no judicial body, no civic group and no mainstream media organization has advanced any responsible inquiry into these troubling questions.
We're glad she admits that Arpaio's cold case posse did not conduct a "responsible inquiry." Oh, wait -- you mean it's not a "civic group"? Then again, she appears to be putting noted crazy person Alan Keyes in the "responsible" category.
Finally, West unironically claims: "What chance does any free society in such deep denial have to continue?" The only person we see in deep denial about this is West. You'd think the fact that WND is her most prominent media outlet these days would serve as a clue.
Noel Sheppard Touts Defense of Fox News Reporter Without Noting It Comes From Fox News Employee Topic: NewsBusters
Under the hyping headline "Judy Miller: Media Ignore Reporter Facing Jail Time Because She's From Fox News," an April 9 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard states:
[T]he media have been largely ignoring the plight of Fox News reporter Jana Winter who may end up going to jail for maintaining the secrecy of her sources on a report concerning Aurora, Colorado, shooter James Holmes.
Former New York Times reporter Judy Miller - who spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for withholding her source regarding the Valerie Plame affair - told NewsMaxTV's Steve Malzberg Monday, "If this were CNN or if this were the New York Times, yeah, I think it’s almost certain that there would have been more coverage and more publicity than there’s been to date (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):
Actully, Sheppard did need to add one bit of additional commentary: the fact that Miller is a paid Fox News contributor, something that may have played a role in her speaking out on Jana Winter.
Sheppard would likely not have let financial considerations go unmentioned if a paid contributor for a "liberal" network defended a reporter for the same network.
WorldNetDaily columnist Mychal Massie runs his own website, The Daily Rant, which promises "Hard Hitting Conservative Commentary." If you describe Massie's anti-Obama vitriol and depraved lies as "hard hitting," then sure.
Massie has a few lower-level writers that also pump out screeds on his website. One of them is someone named Daniel J. Bubalo, who has the following bio:
Daniel J. Bubalo was hired by the venerable firm of Kidder Peabody in 1978, before becoming a shareholder and partner with Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1984. He ultimately bought his own brokerage firm and steered it successfully through the market crash of 1987 before starting a venture capital and advisory company in the early 1990's. He has been a broker, manager, owner, trader, financier, and advisor on mergers and acquisitions, and throughout his career has opined regularly about the intractable nature of government and its inextricable hold and influence on financial markets. A securities violation landed him in federal prison from 1999 to 2003 which served to only sharpen his observations, watching in dismay at the dissolution of the Glass-Steagall Act, the 2001 dot.com bubble burst without so much as an investigation or arrest, and has since lectured between 2005 and 2011 at the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University on government intervention and ethics, as well as being presciently critical about Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank.
Note how quickly Bubalo glosses over the fact he spent four years in prison on what he downplayed as a "securities violation." Needless to say, theres a lot more going on than what Bubalo is telling you.
As a federal appeals court recounted in a failed appeal by one of Bubalo's co-conspirators, Bubalo was on the board of a failing orange juice maker that, in the early 1990s, had solicited investors based on fraudulent claim that it had contracts to sell goods to former Soviet countries, while Bubalo and his co-conspirators kept the investors' money for themselves. The court's ruling sums up Bubalo's crimes:
Bubalo pled guilty to securities fraud, mail fraud, engaging in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property, and conspiracy to commit securities and mail fraud. More than 400 investors lost all the money they invested in O-Jay/Omni, a total of about $4.8 million.
So, a lot more than a simple "securities violation," and seemingly worth at least four years in prison.
And there's also this intriguing entry from a 2000 Senate hearing on bankruptcy reform:
Daniel J. Bubalo of Edina, Minn., was sentenced June 8 to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay $85,000 in restitution following his conviction on two counts of bankruptcy fraud. After Bubalo's bankruptcy case was converted from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7, and without the Chapter 7 trustee's knowledge, Bubalo sold for $70,000 a Duluth, Minn., bar valued at $175,000. He later testified that the property's status had not changed since his case was converted.
This is the guy who Massie trusts to contribute to his website.
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Vulgarity Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters spends a significant amount of time complaining about alleged vulgarity in the media; for example, a Feb. 8 post declared that "Martin Bashir once again demonstrates that he represents the bottom of the admittedly deep MSNBC barrel" by asking if "by his questioning at the Senate confirmation hearing of John Brennan, Senator Marco Rubio sought to demonstrate that he had 'very strong testicles.'"
So imagine our surprise (or not) when the headline of an April 11 post by Kyle Drennen complaining that a New York Times profile of "disgraced former Congressman" Anthony Weiner's ambitions to run for mayor of New York City began with the words "Weiner Rising":
NewsBusters engaging in the very same behavior it attacks when others do it? Color us not surprised.
An April 9 WND article by Stewart Stogel cites "a senior South Korean diplomat with strong ties to the intelligence community" claiming that "now is the time to increase, not decrease, pressure on what he calls the 'crazy' North Korean regime." Stogel claimed that the anonymous diplomat was "speaking with WND on background because of the sensitivity of his position."
You might remember Stogel as the guy who is even more thin-skinned than his boss, Joseph Farah, about criticism.
CNS Publishes Dishonest Attack on Obama White House Salaries Topic: CNSNews.com
Fred Lucas declared in an April 8 CNSNews.com article:
President Barack Obama designated April 9 as National Equal Pay Day, even though 70 percent of White House staffers in the top-salary bracket were men, and male White House staffers earn on average 13 percent more than female staffers.
[...]
CNSNews.com reported on March 15 that 70 percent of White House staffers earning the maximum salary of $172,200 last year were men and 30 percent were women, according to the White House numbers posted on staff compensation. Further, men on the White House staff are paid $86,260.89 on average. Women on the White House staff are paid an average of $76,162.65. So men on the White House staff are paid about 13.26 percent more than women. Put another way, women earn 88.29 percent of what men earn.
But Lucas is making a lazy, bogus comparison. As PolitiFact details, the problem with a simple salary division by gender is that it doesn't take into account the types of jobs being done and the much more important question of whether women are making the same as men for the same job. PolitiFact did what Lucas wouldn't, and found much different results:
When women do the same job as men, the pay gap narrows quite a bit. And in fact, this is exactly what happens when you look deeper into the White House data. Even when you just control for one factor -- people who have the same job title -- the gap narrows significantly.
We found 36 titles for full employees held by more than one person, including at least one man and woman. Of these 36 job categories, there was no difference in pay between men and women in 22 job categories, affecting 121 employees. In another six categories affecting 29 employees, the highest earner in the category was a woman who out-earned at least one man.
In only eight cases affecting 22 employees -- in other words, a small fraction of all employees -- was the highest earner a man who out-earned at least one woman. In a large majority of job categories, there was no salary edge for men. And even in the cases where men did have an edge, it was a small edge -- the lowest-paid women mostly earned between 92 percent and 98 percent of what the top-paid men did.
And don’t forget that we’re only adjusting the data using one factor -- job title. There are other factors that could explain different salaries for people who hold the same job title, such as prior work experience, specific skill sets and the number of years they have spent in the job.
This is just another lazy smear job by CNS, which seems to be allitdoeslately.
NEW ARTICLE: The Right-Wing Paper Chase (And Money Pit) Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell doesn't seem to understand that conservative-leaning newspapers are money-losers, kept in business only through the grace of their deep-pocketed owners. Read more >>
MRC's Hadro Ignores Denials Of Claim By GOP Rep's Gay Son Topic: NewsBusters
Media Research Center "news analyst" Matt Hadro used an April 8 NewsBusters post to uncritically promote a claim by Matt R. Salmon, son of Republican Rep. Matt Salmon, that "both CNN and MSNBC canceled interviews with him after he refused to criticize his father, who opposes same-sex marriage, on the air." Hadro -- the MRC's go-to guy for fretting about the existence of gay people on CNN -- added: "As NewsBusters has reported, CNN is already devoted to the cause of gay activist group GLAAD, as its corporate partner. GLAAD has bestowed honors on CNN for its reporting on gay rights issues."
Meanwhile, in an article posted at almost exactly the same time as Hadro's, Mediaite also reported on Salmon's claims but added something Hadro didn't -- comments from the networks involved:
A spokesperson for MSNBC told TPM that “A producer had initial conversations with Matt, like we do with many potential guests every day, but he was never formally booked for the show.” A source close to Morgan’s CNN show told BuzzFeed: “This isn’t accurate. The show simply booked up with other guests on a different topic. Happens all the time in cable news.”
Hadro also cited Buzzfeed as the source for his Salmon claim, but he faiied to note CNN's denial as contained in the article. And the TPM article Mediaite cites for MSNBC's denial was posted an hour before Hadro's.
Hadro had access to MSNBC's and CNN's denials of Salmon's claims, yet he refused to note them, choosing instead to rehash his employer's anti-gay agenda. That may be the kind of "news analysis" the MRC is paying him to do, but it's unfair and dishonest.
WND Won't Tell You That Anti-Obama Activist Is A Birther Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily used to like to tout when someone to whom it gave a platform to bad-mouth President Obama and his administration were birthers who questioned Obama's "eligibility" to be president. No longer, it seems.
An April 8 WND article on an interview it conducted with Larry Bailey, head of Special Operations Speaks, a group of right-wing anti-Obama ex-special operations veterans, is all about his demand that Congress delve even further into the terrorist attack at Benghazi.
At no point during the audio interview -- where Greg Corombos tosses softball questions to Bailey -- or WND's writeup of it is it mention that Bailey is a birther and Obama-hating conspiracy-monger. As Media Matters details, Bailey believes Frank Marshall Davis is Obama's real father and called Obama "one of the most unlikeable and unprepared politicians we've ever had." Bailey's organization also sent out a fund-rasing email stating, "We are in a war with Barack Obama ... We absolutely MUST remove that anti-American machine from power."
So, hardly an objective source and seemingly driven by hate rather than facts. Too bad WND doesn't think you need to know that.
Diana West begins her April 4 WorldNetDaily 
Massie has a few lower-level writers that also pump out screeds on his website. One of them is someone named Daniel J. Bubalo, who has the following 
Media Research Center "news analyst" Matt Hadro used an April 8 NewsBusters 
