It appears that WorldNetDaily hasn't given up of promoting sleazy, unproven rumors that President Obama is gay.

WND drives the sleaze home in this front-page promo today:

Posted by Terry K. at 3:29 PM EST

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Penny Starr writes in a Jan. 15 CNSNews.com article:

A new report released by the Family Research Council (FRC) on the demographics of abortion in the United States reveals that when and if a woman undergoes the procedure once or more is tied directly to chastity, monogamy and the use of contraceptives.

The report shows that more than 99 percent of women who have had one or more abortions have used contraceptives.

Starr doesn't mention that the FRC has an anti-contraceptive agenda:

• The FRC has argued that contraception should be denied to unmarried couples, who should be punished for having sex outside marriage.
• The FRC has attacked Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision that legalized birth control, as "judicial activism" that resulted in "discrediting traditional Judeo-Christian norms about the meaning of human sexuality."
• FRC leader Tony Perkins has criticized the Griswold ruling for establishing a "right to contraception," arguing it was not "what the founders intended."

 Does this sound like a group that's capable of looking at issues related to contraception in a balanced and objective way?

Apparently it does to Starr; she simply regurgitates the findings of the FRC report and doesn't bother to contact any pro-choice groups for a response. She also fails to identify the FRC's political ideology, even though it clearly plays a role in skewing the focus of the report.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:40 PM EST

Updated: Saturday, January 18, 2014 11:51 PM EST

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WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh loves to write one-sided press releases masquerading as "news" stories, and he does so again in a Jan. 17 WND article in which he uncritically repeats the laughable assumption that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's signing of a bill that bans anti-gay therapy for minors is much worse than BridgeGate:

Christie has come under fire in the last week for the apparently malicious maneuver by staff members who reportedly created a massive traffic jam to punish a mayor who refused to endorse Christie’s last run for governor.

Christie has disavowed knowledge of the stunt and fired one of his staff members over the situation. He spent nearly two hours in a news conference denying that he knew what was going on.

But his recent signature on a state legislative bill, A3371, suggests he actually knows about the other scandal – the ban on counseling young people when they want to eliminate same-sex attractions.

“A3371 is far more scandalous than the George Washington Bridge lane closure,” said Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. “Gov. Christie signed a bill that blocks licensed counselors from providing and young people from receiving any counsel to change unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, mannerisms, or identity. This law is causing immediate harm to young people and to licensed counselors.”

Unruh devotes his entire article to the arguments of anti-gay activists against the law, and as you'd expect from the gay-bashers at WND, there is no mention of the evidence that sexual orientation not only doesn't work but can be psychologically damaging.

But then, as we've noted, Unruh isn't getting paid to report the entire story -- only the parts that advance WND's right-wing agenda. That would seem to disqualify Unruh from representing himself as a journalist.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:37 PM EST

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Just because Newsmax has been broadly covering the Chris Christie bridge scandal doesn't mean it has abandoned its conservative agenda. As with the Media Research Center, that agenda is all that's needed to attack Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Fox News' Roger Ailes.

A Jan. 15 Newsmax article by David Patten highlights how "liberal media critic" Michael Wolff has criticized Sherman's book.  Patten notes that "Wolff is no friend of Ailes, Fox News or its parent company, News Corp. Wolff wrote his own controversial book attacking Fox's founder Rupert Murdoch." But he fails tomake the more likely connection that it's a competing book, not media analysis, that's making Wolff criticize Sherman's book.

Patten also makes this odd complaint about Sherman:

Sherman insisted fact-checkers carefully reviewed his work prior to publication and said that repeated requests to interview Ailes were declined.

But Sherman never bothered to contact Fox's press department to share his myriad number of allegations against Ailes for "fact checking" and Ailes rebuttal, a standard journalistic practice.

If Fox wouldn't make Ailes available to Sherman, why would they acknowledge his book by permitting him to fact-check it? Yet Patten identifies no fact in the book that anyone at Fox News has substantively contradicted.

Posted by Terry K. at 7:26 PM EST

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Erik Rush tells a whopper in his Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily column:

This week it was reported that Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett gave the “stand down” order during the Sept. 11 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. This would in the very least convict President Obama of negligence in delegating such responsibility to an unelected, inexperienced subordinate, as well as explaining “all of the serial lies and the cover-ups and the obfuscation and all of the efforts that were made to distract people’s attention from this,” as characterized by talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

In fact, the complete opposite was reported: Both the House Benghazi transcripts and the Senate bipartisan report found that no stand-down order was given, by Jarrett or anybody else. Rush is simply lying.

But when has the truth ever stood in the way of Rush's Obama derangement? (Remember, he thinks Malcolm X is Obama's father.) Rush blithely continues on to advocate a military coup:

There is the possibility that certain military personnel might lend their support to an effort by Congress to remove the president through methods other than impeachment, although this is less likely than it otherwise might have been given the widespread purge that has taken place within the military.

Rush has also avocated Obama's assassination.

Presumably, us pointing this out is more evidence that we'll first against the wall when the Erik Rush revolution/military coup comes.

Posted by Terry K. at 4:03 PM EST

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CNSNews.com has long cranked out highly biased reporting that smears Planned Parenthood. One of its favorite tricks is to falsely imply that federal money pays for abortions there.

CNS performs that dishonest trick again in a Jan. 14 article by Barbara Boland:

Planned Parenthood’s net revenue increased 5% to total of $1.21 billion in its organizational fiscal year ending on June 30, 2013, according to its new Annual Report 2012-2013, and about 45% of that revenue--$540.6 million--was provided by taxpayer-funded government health services grants.

In the same report, Planned Parenthood said that in the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2012 it did 327,166 abortions.

Nowhere does Boland feels the need to mention that no federal money pays for abortions at Planned Parenthood because it's prohibited under the Hyde Amendment, and she makes no effort to prove that any non-federal government money does. Instead, she allows the juxtaposition to imply something she can't prove.

That's sloppy and slanted reporting. But that's how CNS rolls.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:07 AM EST

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Jerome Corsi introduced a new source in a Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily article:

An eyewitness to the attack at the main U.S. compound in Benghazi interviewed exclusively by WND from Libya via Skype confirmed the report released Wednesday by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that concluded the Obama administration misled the American public by maintaining the incident was not related to terrorism.

Speaking from Libya, Ahmed Salem, a young political activist opposed to radical Islamic terrorism who witnessed the Benghazi attack, told WND that al-Qaida and other radical Islamic militia groups, including some from Egypt, launched a pre-planned, well-organized, heavily armed attack on the U.S. compound.

Corsi tells us nothing further about Salem than the above. He does not explain how he became acquainted with Salem enough to Skype with him, and no picture of Salem is included in Corsi's article.

Curiously, a Google search for "Ahmed Salem Benghazi" uncovers no other reference to Salem being a witness to the Benghazi attack other than Corsi's article -- odd, since one would think that given how politicized right-wingers like Corsi have made the attack, Salem's story would have surfaced long before now.

That search, however, uncovers something else -- a November 2013 article in a magazine called the Libya Herald stating that a Libyan Special Forces officer in Benghazi named Ahmed Hamouda Salem was killed while manning a checkpoint.

Is Corsi's Benghazi source assuming the identity of a dead man? We have no idea. But given Corsi's history of substandard, vengeful reporting -- from going to Kenya to retrieve fake documents to pushing a story about Obama's wedding ring that was so false that Corsi's birther buddies were compelled to shoot it down -- there's no reason to take anything Corsi writes at face value.

Corsi is such a rabid Obama-hater, and he's put his agenda before the truth too many times, that he simply can't be trusted.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:45 AM EST

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It wouldn't be the Media Research Center if its writers weren't whining that gays are allowed to be on television, and Kristine Marsh keeps up the tradition in a Jan. 13 MRC Culture & Media Institute post:

ABC Family’s controversial lesbian drama “The Fosters” returns from a hiatus tonight, Jan. 13, with its two women stars in bed, kissing.  In Hollywood, that’s subtle pro-gay messaging.

The New York Times welcomed the show’s return with an interview with the creators in the Jan. 12 arts section. Apparently the show’s openly gay creators have been getting complaints from their gay audience about there not being enough sex scenes in the show. 

[...]

The Times neglected to mention that this “family drama” was created by two gay men, Bradley Bredeweg and Peter Paige, who were also  the creators and writers for the vulgar gay drama “Queer as Folk.” Bredeweg also recently joined the board for “Raise a Child,” an advocacy group that promotes same-sex foster couples, according to The Huffington Post.

Times critic Mike Hale called “The Fosters” the “most realistic” portrayal of same-sex couples on television. In an interview with The Times, Bredeweg and Paige admitted they sometimes get advice on how to convincingly portray a lesbian couple from their executive producer Joanna Johnson, who is a lesbian.

And because gays must somehow be tied to President Obama, Marsh obliges:

The show’s creators are well-connected in Washington. In a June 2012 interview with gay entertainment website, The Backlot, Paige revealed that the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center he works for “received a $13 million dollar grant from the Obama Administration to develop the first ever LGBT foster protocol, to protect gay and lesbian kids in foster care.”  A search on Open Secrets revealed that the group similarly gave more than $36K, collectively, to Barack Obama’s campaign and Democrats in 2012.

Marsh concludes by lamenting, "'The Fosters' is only the latest broadcast TV show to depict 'The New Normal' of gay couples on TV that has become commonplace." Marsh, along with her fellow MRC employees, apparently prefer the "old normal," when gays could be discriminated against with impunity.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:12 PM EST

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So much dishonesty in Joseph Farah's Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily column. Let's start with this:

I have been labeled by the Big Media as “the birther king.”

I have been systematically blacklisted by all cable news networks for raising the issue of Obama’s eligibility and trying to discuss it rationally and openly.

False. Farah has never been interested in discussing Obama's eligibility "rationally and openly."

If he was, his website would have reported that all the major birther conspiracies have been discredited. 

If he was, his website wouldn't have spent so much time trying to fluff Joe Arpaio and get a seat on his Cold Case Posse to ensure that the so-called investigation would be shoddy and biased.

If he was, his website would never have published a fake birth certificate without bothering to verify its authenticity first.

In fact, Farah's actions over the past five years have been all about ensuring that birther conspiracies wouldn't be discussed rationally and openly.

Farah continues:

Having never scrutinized the basic facts still surrounding Obama’s questionable case for eligibility, the news media are already in a feeding frenzy over the potential eligibility of conservative Republican Ted Cruz, who has not even announced his intentions about running for president in 2016 or thereafter.

If it wasn’t clear before, it is transparent now: It was never a matter of what the Constitution said for the news media. It was never a matter of the established facts of Obama’s parentage and birth. It was all about protecting Obama.

We will presume that by making this statement, Farah is admitting the opposite -- that his birther crusade was all about destroying Obama, not about the truth.

Farah makes that even more clear by writing the following:

So if anyone has the right and the duty to weigh in on Ted Cruz’s eligibility, it’s me – even though no one is asking.

My answer is, “I don’t care.”

I don’t care because the Constitution was not written and ratified to be applied to some and not others. If no one cared about Obama’s questionable eligibility, despite his shocking lack of transparency and thin paper trail, then they have no business questioning Ted Cruz – who has released his birth certificate, renounced his Canadian citizenship and upheld every provision of the Constitution to the best of his ability throughout his life.

For the record, I would have preferred if the issue of natural born citizenship were openly debated and discussed before Obama assumed office and began his all-out jihad on the Constitution. I would have preferred if my colleagues in the news media had taken seriously their responsibility to be watchdogs on government and hold all politicians accountable to the rule of law. I would have preferred if the motivations of those of us seeking the truth about Obama’s eligibility status and life story had never been impugned.

But now that’s all water under the bridge.

Our country is in shambles.

“The new birthers” got their way.

For better or worse, they set the standard of eligibility by precedent.

They can’t have it both ways – revising the standard up when they don’t like the candidate and down when they do.

Actually, it's Farah who's trying to have it both ways. He raised a stink for five years about Obama's purported non-eligibilty, all the while censoring any research proving otherwise. He has never proven his main conceit, that Obama was not born in the U.S. -- the one thing that might make Obama ineligible for the presidency -- and whines that he's been blackballed for putting conspiracy theory ahead of facts.

Now that Farah has a potential candidate who aligns much closer to his right-wing ideology than Obama does, but is by his own definition arguably ineligible to be president becuase he, unlike Obama, was not born in the United States, Farah is taking his ball and going home. He won't be sending Jerome Corsi to Canada to wave around fake documents, nor will Aaron Klein be devoting a WND-published book to Cruz's radical associations.

WND has long refused to get involved in the issue of Cruz's eligibility like it did Obama's, which only proves the hollow, dishonest partisan intent of the whole enterprise.

Farah doesn't give a damn about the Constitution. All he was ever interested in was bashing Obama by turning the birther issue into Obama's Vince Foster. Farah should stop lying to the public by pretending otherwise.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:30 PM EST

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CNSNews.com, it appears, will not stop doing Afghanistan body counts in order to attack President Obama.

Ali Meyer writes in a Jan. 9 CNS article:

Seventy-four percent of the U.S. military personnel who have given their lives serving in the Afghan War died after Feb. 17, 2009, when President Barack Obama announced his first increase in the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, according to CNSNews.com’s database of U.S. casualties in the war.

In the more than twelve years that have passed since U.S. troops first entered Afghanistan with the aim of removing al Qaeda from its sanctuary there, 2,162 U.S. service personnel have given their lives in and around Afghanistan in support of U.S. military activities in that country.

As has been typical of CNS' Afghan body-count obsession, there's no mention of the far higher U.S. troop death toll in Iraq, the vast majority of which occurred under President Bush. Meyer doesn't explain why she's ignoring the Iraq death toll.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:47 PM EST

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You can count on WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh to uncritically forward right-wing talking points without bothering to check them for accuracy, and he serves up another slice of lazy reporting in a Jan. 13 WND article:

The Media Research Center reported late last week just after the news broke that aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a presumptive front-runner for the 2016 GOP nomination for president, apparently were involved in a traffic scandal, there had been 17 times more coverage on that issue than in the last half year over the IRS misbehavior.

The organization reported that the story broke Wednesday and accused the governor’s aides of punishing a mayor with a huge traffic jam after he refused to endorse Christie.

Within 24 hours, ABC, CBS and NBC flooded the airwaves with 34 minutes and 28 seconds on the topic.

MRC reported that since July 1, the networks allowed 2:08, that’s two minutes and eight seconds, coverage of the IRS scandal.

As we've documented, the MRC coverage study relies on a dishonest apples-and-oranges comparison --  the breaking news of the Christie scandal vs. a story that broke two months before the MRC started counting. Also, the lack of coverage also meant that the networks ignored news that the scandal was overblown.

Unruh mentioned none of that, of course -- it's not his job to tell the whole story, just the part that advances the political agenda of his employer, no matter how dishonest it is.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:28 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:28 AM EST

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Tim Graham's Jan. 9 NewsBusters post carried the headline "WashPost Gleefully Pushes Scandal as Christie's 2016 Doom: 'Bridge Scandal Engulfing Christie'." Graham huffs that the post is "leaping all over Gov. Chris Christie," adding, "The partisan Post is on fire today."

Graham's complains might be taken a little more seriously were they not immediately preceded on NewsBusters by a post by Matthew Balan gleefully pushing a different so-called scandal by leaping all over President Obama:

ABC, CBS, and NBC ballyhooed former Defense Secretary Robert Gates's attacks on President Obama and other high government officials on their Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning newscasts. NBC's Brian Williams and CBS's Norah O'Donnell also trumpeted the former Cabinet official's "devastating critique" of the President in his upcoming memoir.

The partisan MRC is on fire. Too bad Graham doesn't see the irony.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:11 PM EST

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Bob Unruh writes lovingly of Allen West's race-baiting attack on President Obama in a Jan. 14 WorldNetDaily article:

War hero and former Republican congressman Allen West is asking how long it will take for “you people” – white Americans – to realize that their president “abjectly despises” them.

In a commentary posted Tuesday on his website, West, who represented Florida in Congress after an extended career in the U.S. military, confronted the issue of racism.

[...]

He said Obama’s and Holder’s advocacy for leniency for those who cause trouble essentially makes them racist.

“This is my clear and succinct message to white Americans. How long will it be before ‘you people’ realize you have elevated someone to the office of president who abjectly despises you – not to mention his henchman Holder. Combined they are the most vile and disgusting racists – not you,” he wrote.

The commentary was prompted by Holder’s recent demand that schools “rethink ‘zero tolerance’ disciplinary policies” because they “disproportionately punish minorities.”

A Hill report on the issue said “alarming numbers of young people are suspended, expelled or even arrested for relatively minor transgressions like school uniform violations, schoolyard fights or showing ‘disrespect’ by laughing in class, Holder said during a speech.”

West said the accompanying new federal guidance from the departments of Justice and Education “encouraging (i.e. threatening) schools to adopt disciplinary policies that are ‘fair, nondiscriminatory, and effective’” is a threat from the Department of Justice.

Unruh says nothing about the racist language West is using, or why he deserves special dispensation for saying such things because he is a black conservative.

Then again, wouldn't WND embrace West's race-baiting? After all, it's of a piece with Colin Flaherty's fearmongering over "black mobs" (which, somehow also include non-blacks and non-humans). And it publishes Mychal Massie, who told blacks to go back to Africa and has repeatedly smeared a black woman he didn't agree with as a "Negress."

WND apparently thinks it can get away with racism as long as it's blacks who are saying racist things or blacks can be dismissed as evil thugs.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:25 PM EST

Updated: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 4:03 PM EST

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Matt Vespa was on Chris Christie defense patrol at CNSNews.com, desperately trying to distract from BridgeGate.

Vespa wrote a Jan. 10 blog post headlined "Five Reports of Political Bullying that DON'T Involve Chris Christie," adding the standard right-wing equivocation:"Christie's administration may have caused some traffic problems, but he fired the ones allegedly responsible for the act. Obama did nothing after the IRS fiasco was unearthed."

Vespa followed that with a rehashing of a 14-year-old story of how Al Gore's presidential campaign allegedly caused a traffic jam to hinder voting for his primary opponent. Vespa laughably begins his post by stating, "This isn't meant to excuse what happened on the George Washington Bridge."

Yeah, whatever you say, Matt. But it sure looks like you'd rather talk about anything else but that.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:31 PM EST

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The latest in WorldNetDaily's series of "You Read It Here First" front-page graphics touts Jerome Corsi's Dec. 30 story on Salem Communications' purchase of the company that owns Regnery Publishing and other conservative-orientated operations, paired with a Jan. 13 Yahoo article.

There's just one thing wrong here: It's a lie. As we documented, Corsi's "WND Exclusive" appeared more than two weeks after Buzzfeed reported Salem's purchase on Dec. 13.

So, no, you didn't read that story at WND first. And don't expect WND to whip up an honest graphic stating, "You Read It Here Two Weeks Later."

Posted by Terry K. at 12:42 AM EST

Updated: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 12:43 AM EST

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