WND's Ellis Washington Again Pretends He's Not Likening Obama to Hitler Topic: WorldNetDaily
For a guy who insists he's not likening President Obama to Hitler, Ellis Washington sure spends a lot of time likening Obama to Hitler.
Washington does so again in his Oct. 4 WorldNetDaily column, while of course denying he's doing any such thing:
One aspect of Hitler’s socialist universal health-care model was “racial hygiene,” the removal of certain “undesirable” segments of society who are judged beneath the Aryan ideal, thus “life unworthy of existence,” as Hitler would repeatedly say. Using his brutal panzer divisions, Hitler literally rolled out his universal health care throughout occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands – those nations with mainly “Aryan” populations. Hitler used his military thugs of the Gestapo and SS Stormtroopers to implement universal health care in those very countries that he desired to Aryanize and perfect by sanitizing the populations through sterilization and medical murder of all persons unfortunate to have physical or mental defects.
Of course, I do not contend that Obama is Hitler, but if America foolishly adopt policies of national socialism, then we fail to learn from history the innumerable grotesqueries, inhumanity and genocide of previous nations who tried universal health care. To grant governments this god-like power over birth, life and death issues will be misused, not exactly as it was in Nazi Germany, nevertheless a tragedy for society.
Pro tip: If you've written a column titled "Hitlercare vs. Obamacare," if you've included the above Hitler-Obama image with your column, and if you've stated that "Obama is using his Gestapo and SS Stormtroppers or so-called “navigators” (e.g., the youth, the unions, Planned Parenthood, NAACP, ACORN, La Raza, etc.) to propagandize the poor, the miseducated and minorities who are being exploited to lead this final blitzkrieg toward forcing universal health care," you are, in fact, contending that Obama is Hitler.
Stop lying to us, Ellis. Especially stop telling us lies that are so transparently false.
MRC Runs With Distortion Of Harry Reid's Words on Cancer Research Topic: Media Research Center
Last week, it came to light that members of the conservative media are working to coordinate messaging on the government shutdown with the office of Sen. Ted Cruz. The Media Research Center has not mentioned this development to its readers (just like it has yet to mention the existence of another right-wing message coordination effort, Groundswell, despite its outrage ofer a liberal-leaning listserv, Journolist).
Whether or not anyone at the MRC is actually involved in Groundswell or Cruz's office, it's certainly trying to reinforce right-wing talking points. That was made even more clear with its effort to distort something Sen. Harry Reid said.
Susan Jones writes in an Oct. 3 CNSNews.com article about an exchange between Reid and CNN reporter Dana Bash about a Republican attempt to fund the government on a piecemeal basis by, for instance, funding cancer research at the National Institutes for Health:
Bash tried again: "But if you can help one child with cancer, why won't you do it?"
"Listen," Reid said. "What -- why would we want to do that? I have 1,100 people at Nellis Air Force Base that are sitting home. They have -- they have a few problems of their own. To have someone of your intelligence suggest such a thing maybe means you're as irresponsible and reckless."
Jones conveniently left out the fact that Reid's statement "why would we want to do that?" wasn't a response to Bash. As the video accompanying Jones' article shows, after Bash answered her question, Sen. Charles Schumer said, "Why pit one against the other?" and Reid picked up on that.
The rest of the MRC ran with the distortion:
NewsBusters' Tom Blumer got angry with responsible reporters putting Reid's words in their proper context, insisting that Politico's Dylan Byers "pretended that an interjected remark by New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer meant something, when it didn't."
NewsBusters' Randy Hall also edited out Schumer's statement in recounting how Reid's response was "loaded with venom."
The MRC's Matthew Balan wrote that "Nancy Cordes stood out on Wednesday's CBS Evening News for pointing out Senator Harry Reid's eyebrow-raising "why would I want to do that" answer to a question about approving funding for cancer research for children."
NewsBusters' Blumer later huffed in response to a claim that Republican outrage over Reid is "manufactred": "As to what Harry Reid said on Wednesday, it was self-evidently outrageous. CNN reporter and virtual card-carrying liberal Dana Bash, the person who questioned Reid, certainly felt that way. As if that wasn't enough, Reid, attacked Bash for having the nerve to ask a reasonable question."
WND Pretends Australian Aborigines Are "Black Mobs" In North Carolina Topic: WorldNetDaily
The picture WorldNetDaily used to promote Colin Flaherty's latest attempt at race-baiting -- under the headline "Pack of black youth terrorize city" -- sure looks scary enough:
The picture was used again with Flaherty's article:
Just one little problem: The picture does not illustrate what Flaherty is writing about, which is "black mob violence" in Raleigh, N.C. In fact, the people in the picture aren't American, nor are they technically black.
The picture is, in fact, of gang members in an indigenous Aborigine community in Australia, and it apparently first appeared in a 2006 Sydney Morning Herald article:
WND's photo does not include a credit that would accurately identify where the photo came from, or of what is actually of. WND apparently stole the photo from the Sydney newspaper's website, believing that they looked scary enough to illustrate a race-baiting article about "black mobs."
This is how far Flaherty and WND will go in its race-baiting -- pretending that scary-looking dark-skinned foreigners are really "black mobs" in the U.S.
CNS Promotes Views of Suspected Murderer Topic: CNSNews.com
Matt Vespa writes in an Oct. 4 CNSNews.com blog post:
An Obamacare exchange site has been hacked. And, there may be more to come.
John McAfee, founder of McAfee,Inc., noted on Your World with Neil Cavuto on October 2 that the exchanges' health care sign-up system is a "hacker's wet dream."
He noted that any person could set up a fake site, make it look "competitive," and - because it's health care - these hackers can ask very personal questions.
An old woman can have her life savings wiped out and "This is going to happen millions of time," McAfee warned.
In promoting views that conform to right-wing talking points, Vespa fails to mention the, shall we say, colorful history of McAfee that makes him less than trustworthy.
At the top of the list is the fact that he's wanted in Belize for questioning in the death of one of McAfee's neighbors there. McAfee fled the country for Guatemala, then faked a heart attack and made his way to America. McAfee has proclaimed his innocence, but he has no intention of returning to Belize.
The New Yorker has described McAfee's life as "an odyssey of drugs, guns, young women, corruption, the promise of a miracle antibiotic, a secret laboratory, a government raid, a murder, a manhunt, and a healthy dose of paranoia." Wired reported that McAfee's success "was due in part to his ability to spread his own paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack."
But McAfee's paranoia makes Obama look bad, so Vespa seems willing to overlook the fact that McAfee may have killed someone.
Yes, Larry Klayman really did write this in his Oct. 4 WorldNetDaily column:
An African-American woman with her 1-year-old child crashes her car into the White House gate, is pursued by President Obama’s henchmen and is shot dead in the streets of Washington, D.C., while another African-American, the black “Muslim in chief” safely parties on with our nation’s future, as the government is shut down over his refusal to negotiate a budget compromise with Republicans.
So Klayman thinks that protecting the president from an apparent threat makes the Secret Service and the Capitol Police (the two law enforcement agencies that responded to the incident) Obama's "henchmen." Klayman also left out the fact that the woman led police on a car chase from the White House to the Capitol, and that the woman also hit a Secret Service officer with her car.
How utterly consumed with Obama Derangement Sydrome has Klayman become? One only needs to read the rest of his column, in which he encourages to engage in "revolution" against the government. Klayman claims he wants to do so with "well thought out civil disobedience," but his inflammatory, increasingly deranged rhetoric doesn't exactly create an atmosphere for reasoned thought.
MRC's Chief Heatherer Hates It When Heathering Is Called Out Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham is perhaps the chief Heatherer at the Media Research Center, taking to task anyone who dares deviate from right-wing dogma and branding them as insufficiently conservative.
So what does Graham do when a conservative calls out said Heathering? Why, he goes into Heathering mode, of course.
Conservative Bernard Goldberg has gotten tired of being bashed by conservatives who get offended when he "falls out of lock step" with right-wing ideology:
This is a letter to you, the conservative American ayatollahs who demand purity, just like the ones over there. I’m not talking about all of you, of course. But this open letter is for many of you; maybe even most of you – the ones who say you agree with what I write on this Web site and what I say on the O’Reilly Factor almost all of the time, but as soon as I fall out of lock step with you … you vow to never listen or read another word I say or write. You are the ayatollahs this letter is aimed at.
[...]
When I wrote about liberal bias while I was still a CBS News correspondent, conservatives applauded me. But some of my liberal CBS News colleagues called me a “traitor” because I didn’t toe the party line. They were afraid of dissent. Dissent would force them to consider another point of view, and that’s the last thing they wanted to do. Now I’m called a traitor again – this time by you conservative ayatollahs, for expressing a few opinions you don’t want to hear. Once again, you are what you condemn in liberals.
There is little difference between the authoritarians on the hard left and those of you ayatollahs on the hard right. You’re both closed-minded. You both demand ideological purity.
Graham used an Oct. 3 NewsBusters post to bash Goldberg, apparently oblivious to the fact that it's people like him Goldberg was calling out:
Former CBS News vet and O’Reilly Factor regular Bernard Goldberg is hopping mad at conservatives who’ve written him to tell him they will no longer watch him or read him. Goldberg even stooped to suggesting his critics “don’t want to even hear the other guy. You want the other guy dead (in some cases, I suspect, literally dead!)”
At what point does this kind of rage at the audience start hurting Fox’s ratings? Comparing American conservatives to Islamist Iranian dictators? He unleashed on them in a column called “An Open Letter to the Ayatollahs.”
Of course, Graham will never admit that he is one of those "ayatollahs" Goldberg is calling out -- if, indeed, he picked up on that at all.
What WND Didn't Report About Esquire Lawsuit Hearing Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've already reported on what WorldNetDaily's Garth Kant didn't report about what happened in a hearing on WND's defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine. Now you can listen for yourself.
Via Fogbow, we've learned that the federal appeals court where the hearing took place has posted audio of the hearing, so you can hear Larry Klayman's incompetent lawyering in real time.
One Fogbow poster who listened to the hearing pointed out that despite WND and Kant making a big deal out of the claim that Esquire "lied" about its blog post about WND pulping Jerome Corsi's anti-Obama birth certificate book being tagged as humor (in fact, it's Joseph Farah and WND who are lying by submitting a screen shot of the post that cut off the tags), Klayman didn't bring up the issue in his arguments:
I've listened to the oral argument at the cadc site listed above. KKKlayman says that firstly, this case has nothing to do with eligibility issues, that Esquire's exhibits are not 'authenticated' (though the judge pointed out that Klayman had not challenged the documents' authenticity, Klayman said that this was "not relevant"), and that the case is about commercial injury and Farah's 1st amendment rights. Unfortunately though the attorneys are easy to hear, the judges are not, so it's hard to get a sense of what the judges are asking, particularly as Klayman seems to find it difficult to stick to answering the questions without saying things like [paraphrase] anyone calling us birthers are mean poopyheads, and that the previous judge was biased for making a ruling that Obama was born in the USA.
Klayman touches on eligibility issues more than once, asserting that 25% of the population have doubts about Obama's eligibility, calling the birth certificate the "alleged" birth certificate. He didn't argue about the fake screenshots.
[...]
squire's lawyer who seemed more focused on the issue of whether this was satire, and thus protected by the first amendment, or whether, as Klayman argued, the Esquire blog was designed to defraud the public. He pointed out that any commercial injuries that the plaintiffs claim would have had to be suffered only within the first 90 minutes after the blog was posted, before the clarification that it was satire was added. He stated political debate is protected speech, that satire and rhetorical hyperbole are accepted to be part of political commentary. He made a point of the 'humour' tag, which Klayman didn't address either in his argument or in rebuttal. One judge asked about the font size of the humour tag on the screen. Klayman in his argument, in response to a question, accepted that if the blog piece is satire then it is protected speech and Esquire's lawyer underlined this. However, Klayman seemed to resile from this in rebuttal. Both lawyers cited to the Falwell (?) case and another one which I couldn't hear properly.
Esquire's lawyer argued that the reasonable reader would think that it was satire; especially given the improbable quotes, and that the book was published three weeks after the release of the birth certificate and it is therefore unlikely that the publisher would do nothing to withdraw the book during those three weeks but ship the book to bookstores and then recall it the next day. He also stated that even if some people didn't recognise it was satire, it should be obvious to the 'reasonable reader', and therefore the case should not go ahead.
Another Fogbow poster notes that the hearing included one subject WND has yet to mention to its readers -- the fact that, according to the judge who dismissed the lawsuit, WND editor Joseph Farah had admitted the Esquire blog post was satire before it became "inconvenient" for him to do so:
At one point (around 7:45), Klayman said that Mr. Farah's statement to the Daily Caller shortly after Esquire posted the article--where Farah said that the Esquire post was poorly done satire--was evidence that the article wasn't satire at all. That got an outburst of laughter from one judge and a giggle from another.
Kant is not being paid by WND to tell the truth about his employer -- he's being paid to make his employer look as good as possible, even if that is at odds with documented facts. Of course, when have documented facts ever gotten in the way of WND's right-wing agenda?
Newsmax Regurgitates Hannity's Lie About Reid Topic: Newsmax
Sandy Fitzgerald writes in an Oct. 3 Newsmax article:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a "sick, twisted old man" for making comments about refusing to pass a funding bill that would allow young cancer patients to continue with clinical trials during the government shutdown, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity charged.
On Wednesday, the Nevada Democrat questioned why funding should be provided to the National Institutes of Health to "help one child who has cancer," and then attacked CNN reporter Dana Bash, calling her "irresponsible and reckless" for asking him about it during a Capitol Hill news conference.
"What a sick twisted old man to say, 'Why would we want to do that?'" Hannity said on his Fox show later Wednesday. "To help a kid with cancer? Pretty heartless . . . pretty sick. I mean, if you want to talk about cold, callous, heartless, mean-spirited, hateful, all the rhetoric that Harry Reid recklessly throws around about Republicans, it fits him.”
[...]
"I have a question for Harry Reid: How would you feel if it was your grandson or granddaughter? Or your child?” Hannity asked. “Maybe that’s why you’d want to fund the NIH as the House is passing the bill, and put aside your bitter, angry partisanship.”
Fitzgerald doesn't mention that Hannity is lying by ignoring the context of Reid's remarks -- specifically, the fact that he was dismissing the notion that that funding the NIH should be accomplished via a lone spending bill when it could instead be achieved with the passage of a "clean" continuing resolution that would fund the entire government. As Media Matters points out, Hannity's false smear of Reid is particularly callous given the fact that Reid's wife is a cancer survivor.
Will Fitzgerald and Newsmax provide its readers with the full context of Reid's remarks? Don't count on it.
WND Is Still Misleading Readers About His Lawsuit Against Esquire Topic: WorldNetDaily
Given that WorldNetDaily has been utterly dishonest about how it has presented its defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine to its readers, it's no surprise that WND's article about a court proceeding in the case would be similarly dishonest.
Garth Kant does his best in an Oct. 3 article to frame it as a great First Amendment battle:
Federal Judge Stephen F. Williams asked the attorney for Esquire magazine what in the First Amendment permitted his client to accuse someone of making money off of gullible readers?
That question suggested the crux of the matter in the lawsuit brought by WND against Esquire: If a political attack is called satire, is any message permissible, even if it cause damages?
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments Thursday in Joseph Farah v. Esquire Magazine. Farah is the founder and CEO of WND.com.
In fact, as Kant concedes later in the article, WND is appealing the dismissal of the lawsuit, which was granted last year. Unsurprisingly, Kant is heavy on telling WND's side of the case and very light on Esquire's response to WND's claims.
Therefore, there's no mention of the fact that one key reason the lawsuit was dismissed is becuase, according to the judge, WND editor Joseph Farah had admitted the Esquire blog post was satire before it became "inconvenient" for him to do so.
Kant also repeats failed lawyer Larry Klayman's claims that "Esquire and Hearst lied to federal courts in their defense of the article" by claiming that the article had been tagged as "humor" on the website. In fact, as we've documented, it's Farah and Klayman who appear to be lying -- the screenshots WND submitted to the court cut off the part of the post where the tags normally appear.
Considering that Farah had submitted an affidavit "under penalty of perjury" stating that there were no tags, there may be a case to be made that Farah has committed perjury.
Kant certainly isn't going to tell his readers that the man who signs his paycheck may be guilty of perjury.
UPDATE: An alert reader caught that Kant referred to Larry Flynt as "the late publisher of Hustler." Last we checked, Flynt is still very much alive.
MRC Study Complains That GOP Is Accurately Blamed For Shutdown Topic: Media Research Center
Rich Noyes complains in an Oct. 2 Media Research Center "study":
On Monday morning, Time/MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin explained an obvious political reality to his fellow Morning Joe panelists: “The White House does not have much incentive” to negotiate on the government shutdown, because Democrats expect the liberal news media to hand them a public relations victory. As Halperin put it: “The press is largely sympathetic to their arguments that it’s the House Republicans’ fault.”
In fact, as a new Media Research Center analysis of broadcast network evening news coverage shows, ABC, CBS and NBC spent the two weeks prior to the shutdown almost universally pinning the blame on congressional Republicans, especially conservative/Tea Party House Republicans. By the time the shutdown actually took place on October 1, news audiences had been repeatedly instructed to think about it as a GOP-generated crisis.
That couldn't possibly be because it IS a GOP-generated crisis, could it? That's a point Noyes has no intention of exploring, since his job is to defend Republicans.
Noyes goes on to whine:
If Democratic congressmen, or a Democratic Speaker of the House, pursuing a liberal policy objective, was subjected to similar ridicule or insults from a Republican President or a Republican Senate Majority Leader, you can bet that the networks would have made such language the centerpiece of their coverage.
Instead, the media have chosen to foist all of the blame on conservatives for sticking to their promise to oppose ObamaCare.
Given that conservatives have chosen to force a shutdown of much of the government in order to thwart a law that was duly passed by Congress, signed by the president and upheld by the Supreme Court, why shouldn't conservatives be blamed? Noyes never addresses that question.
And as Media Matters pointed out when MRC chief Brent Bozell rehashed the results of this "study" on his weekly Fox News appearance, Fox News -- which has worked long and hard to shift blame from Republicans toward Obama and the Democrats -- is curiously absent from the MRC's work.
Further, according to Media Matters, tbhe "study" confirms that network news is providing reality-based coverage of the shutdown, which persists because of a Republican refusal to extricate its opposition to the ACA from the nation's budget. Bozell fails to acknowledge this fact, and his complaints amount to little more than an argument in favor of journalistic "false equivalence."
Bradlee Dean, WND Still Silent On Apparent Demise Of His Ministry Topic: WorldNetDaily
Well, Bradlee Dean's latest WorldNetDaily column is posted, and like last week, there's no mention whatsoever of the apparent demise of his Minnesota-based ministry.
Instead, Dean spends his column talking about how he has "been on tour rocking the Carolinas" and berating college professors whom he deemed insufficientlyadulatory toward the Constitution. And, of course, shilling to raise money for his essentially dead lawsuit against Rachel Maddow, laughably portraying Maddow's purported wronging of him to be even worse than the Trayvon Martin case.
WND has still not reported on the Dean ministry's demise, nor of the former Dean staffer who calls it a "cultic sham ministry" and described his mistreatment as a member of one of Dean's evangelical "street teams."
Congressional Republicans are rightly outraged about President Barack Obama’s eagerness to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program while he refuses to meet with House Speaker John Boehner to discuss GOP differences over Obamacare that led to Obama's government shutdown.
There also has been a stark difference in the rhetoric Obama and his allies have used concerning Iran and what they are saying about congressional Republicans.
[...]
It’s clear that the Obama administration is prepared to put just about everything on the table in talks with Iran. But President Obama refuses to talk with the GOP at all.
As we've pointed out, Obama has met with Boehner and other Republican congressional leaders to seek a reasonable compromise to end the government shutdown -- something the Republicans aren't too keen on looking for.
Birther Erik Rush 'Won't Even Go There' On Ted Cruz's Eligibility Topic: WorldNetDaily
We'vedocumented how WorldNetDaily, which has been aggressively birther (to the point of refusing to acknowledge undisputed facts) regarding Barack Obama's eligibility to be president, is doing its best to avoid the issue when it comes to Ted Cruz. Add Erik Rush to the list, in an Oct. 2 WND column touting Cruz's presidential prospects:
Ted Cruz looks like a white guy, but he’s not – which is a non-issue to people who judge character over color. After all, our president looks like a black guy, but he’s not, and few of us make any bones about that. There are also questions with regard to Cruz’s eligibility for the office (having been born in Canada), but given the history of this issue on the same subject with regard to President Obama, I won’t even go there.
Why not, Erik? By all accounts, Cruz is even less eligible to be president than Obama since he was documented to be born outside the U.S. to a non-citizen father. Or does Cruz's right-wing politics mitigate those eligibility questions you thought were so important regarding Obama?
CNS Makes Apparently False Article Quietly Disappear Topic: CNSNews.com
On Oct. 1, CNS published an article by Barbara Hollingsworth claiming that "The latest version of the House-passed continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government until December includes funding for Planned Parenthood (PP), the nation’s largest abortion provider."
Within a day, however, the article mysteriously disappeared. The link to the article has gone dead, and the article has disappeared from Hollingsworth's CNS archive.
Here's a screenshot of part of the article as taken from Google cache:
CNS has provided no explanation why Hollingsworth's article was deleted, but given that we could find nobody else reporting the claim, which tells us that the article was false.
Instead of simply making a false article disappear, shouldn't CNS follow standard journalistic procedure and issue a correction and apology? If CNS actually cared about journalism, that might make sense.
WND Regurgitates Obama-Bashing Talking Point Topic: WorldNetDaily
Garth Kant huffs in an Oct. 1 WorldNetDaily article:
President Obama is willing to negotiate with the Syrian dictator he wanted to bomb for gassing his own people.
He is willing to negotiate with the president of Iran and the Taliban.
But, Obama said, “Absoutely, I will not negotiate” with Republicans.
But Kant is taking Obama's statement out of context. The statement in question -- as proven by the NPR article to which Kant links -- was a response to whether Obama would negotiate on raising the debt ceiling, not the current government shutdown:
Absolutely, I will not negotiate. And the reason, Steve, is because if we establish a pattern whereby one faction of one party controlling one chamber in Congress can threaten default, that the United States of America is no longer meeting its obligations and fulfilling the full faith and credit of the United States unless they get 100 percent of what they want, then we've established a pattern that fundamentally changes the nature of our government. At that point, any president — not just me — any president is subject to that kind of blackmail continuously.
If you had a Republican president in here and a Democratic speaker said, "We're not going to raise the debt ceiling unless you pass background checks on guns. We're not going to pass the debt ceiling unless you raise the corporate income tax by 30 percent," you know, that Republican president would find him- or herself in a similar position. That's not how our Constitution was designed. Raising the debt ceiling is not raising the debt; it is simply saying Congress is authorizing the Treasury to pay for those things that Congress has already approved.
Further, Obama and his administration have repeatedly stated their willingness to negotiate in a reasonable fashion, and Obama has met with congressional leaders trying to reach an accommodation.
Kant also appears not to have considered Jon Stewart's advice: "If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hardline, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans, maybe he's not the problem."
For a guy who insists he's not likening President Obama to Hitler, Ellis Washington sure spends a lot of time likening Obama to Hitler.
Last week, it came to light that members of the conservative media are 
Matt Vespa writes in an Oct. 4 CNSNews.com 
Yes, Larry Klayman really did write this in his Oct. 4 WorldNetDaily 
Tim Graham is perhaps 
We've already reported on what WorldNetDaily's Garth Kant didn't report about what happened in a hearing on WND's defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine. Now you can listen for yourself.
Sandy Fitzgerald writes in an Oct. 3 Newsmax 
Given that WorldNetDaily has been utterly dishonest about how it has presented its defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine to its readers, it's no surprise that WND's article about a court proceeding in the case would be similarly dishonest.
Rich Noyes complains in an Oct. 2 Media Research Center "
Well, Bradlee Dean's latest WorldNetDaily column is posted, and 
Fred Fleitz writes in his Oct. 2 Newsmax 
We've
