Is there “income inequality” in America? Yes, there always has been, but what Obama does not talk about is the “income mobility” that permits low income Americans to secure employment and higher wages when the economy is improving. It is another Big Lie from a President who is wedded to Marxist “solutions” that have never worked.
Caruba seems to have missed the fact that Obama gave an entire speech last month on the subject of income mobility in which, yes, he talked about the system that "permits low income Americans to secure employment and higher wages when the economy is improving." We'll evenhighlight the key word so Caruba can find it easier:
The problem is that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a 2-in-3 chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is. In fact, statistics show not only that our levels of income inequality rank near countries like Jamaica and Argentina, but that it is harder today for a child born here in America to improve her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies -- countries like Canada or Germany or France. They have greater mobility than we do, not less.
The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough. But the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care, or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us and it should compel us to action. We are a better country than this.
So let me repeat: The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe. And it is not simply a moral claim that I’m making here. There are practical consequences to rising inequality and reduced mobility.
[...]
And rising inequality and declining mobility are also bad for our families and social cohesion -- not just because we tend to trust our institutions less, but studies show we actually tend to trust each other less when there’s greater inequality. And greater inequality is associated with less mobility between generations. That means it’s not just temporary; the effects last. It creates a vicious cycle. For example, by the time she turns three years old, a child born into a low-income home hears 30 million fewer words than a child from a well-off family, which means by the time she starts school she’s already behind, and that deficit can compound itself over time.
And finally, rising inequality and declining mobility are bad for our democracy. Ordinary folks can’t write massive campaign checks or hire high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else’s expense. And so people get the bad taste that the system is rigged, and that increases cynicism and polarization, and it decreases the political participation that is a requisite part of our system of self-government.
Caruba also writes:
A President who thinks that extending unemployment compensation “creates jobs” is so out of touch with reality that it should come as no surprise that Obama has the worst record of unemployment rates since the days of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
In fact, no less an authority than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office agrees with Obama that unemployment compensation boosts the economy because that money is spent in the economy.
WND's Cashill: Trayvon Martin Died Because His School Didn't Treat Him Like A Criminal Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill is desperately trying to keep his bomb of a George Zimmerman-defending book (as of this writing, it's No. 199,906 at Amazon) in the headlines, which WorldNetDaily, as publisher of said bomb, is happy to oblige. His latest attempt comes in the form of a Jan. 18 WND article:
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced new guidelines for classroom discipline that he says are intended to end racial disparities in discipline and punishment in America’s public schools.
But several educational experts and commentators have blasted the move as an attempt actually to erect a race-based system of punishment in public education.
Journalist Jack Cashill, who has covered racial issues extensively and whose latest book, “If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman,” investigated the racially charged trial of Zimmerman, told WND that several school districts throughout America, including Trayvon Martin’s Miami-Dade School District, have already implemented similar guidelines and are partially responsible for the tragic end of Trayvon Martin.
“In a way, the Miam-Dade School Police Department was ahead of its time in trying to racially balance the criminal activity of its students. Trayvon Martin was the beneficiary of that policy, meaning that the crimes he committed that otherwise would’ve gone into juvenile justice, were treated as mere school disciplinary problems,” Cashill explained.
To Cashill, Trayvon would still be alive today if his school district had treated his actions in the appropriate manner.
“Trayvon Martin would be alive if Miami-Dade School District had treated his infractions as crimes and his parents would then have been aware of what he was up to and they would not have allowed him to roam the streets as though he were just a mischievous teen and not a likely criminal,” Cashill stated.
And what is this "descent into criminality" to which Cashill refers? Curiously, this article does not detail the offenses, which tells us they could not have been that serious, let alone worthy of automatically branding him as a criminal.
Cashill wrote in an April 2013 WND article that "Martin had been suspended twice already that school year for offenses that should have gotten him arrested – once for getting caught with a burglary tool and a dozen items of female jewelry, the second time for getting caught with marijuana and a marijuana pipe," and that Martin was never charged because the school has a diversion program purportedly designed to artificially reduce the arrest rate of the school's students.
Needless to say, Cashill is exaggerating things. The Miami Herald reports that while Martin was caught with jewelry and a screwdriver (the alleged "burglary tool"), but he refused to say where the jewelry came from, and he was never disciplined over the incident. And Martin was not caught with marijuana; according to the Herald, he was caught with a bag with marijuana residue.
Further, WND is falsely attacking the Department of Justice's discipline guidelines as "a race-based system of punishment in public education." To the contrary: The guidelines remove race as a factor in discipline, and current zero tolerance policies disproportionately result in minority students being unfairly and excessively punished.
But as we've seen, facts don't matter to WND or Cashill, and the former tees up the latter to rant about race:
“When Holder was called onto the carpet for his release of the New Black Panthers involved in voter intimidation, Bartle Bull, a civil rights lawyer, commented that this was the most egregious voter intimidation case he had ever seen and Holder called those comments an insult to ‘my people,’” Cashill explained.
“The fact is that Holder has created two different systems of justice – one for everyday Americans and the other for ‘my people.’ Unfortunately, that causes more problems for ‘my people,’ not fewer problems.”
In Cashill’s opinion, these policies have proved to be disastrous for the black community and have created more problems, not less.
“Over the last 50 years, virtually every policy designed to help black people ends up hurting black people and this one seems particularly ill-designed. It is designed to simply appease and not to resolve. If you don’t discourage bad behavior, you encourage it. You can’t be neutral about it,” Cashill said.
As usual, Cashill is ignoring an inconvenient fact: No voter, white or otherwise, has ever come forward to say they were intimidated by the New Black Panthers.
And Cashill is certainly never going to admit that George Zimmerman, whom he lauds in his bomb of a book as a civil-rights martyr, has committed more crime than Martin did before his death, and that's not counting Zimmerman's shooting of Martin. After all, unlike with Martin, Cashill has absolvedZimmerman of responsibility for his criminal behavior.
MRC Tries to Script an Anti-Abortion Documentary Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center informs us in a Jan. 15 article by Katie Yoder:
Each year, the March for Life is by far the largest annual rally in Washington, D.C., and each year, it’s met with a near-black-out from major media. But for 2014, there’s a way for the pro-life movement to change that. In a new initiative to combat media censorship on abortion, the Media Research Center (MRC) is inviting marchers to donate video for a documentary on the movement the media hide.
In 2013, the networks spent a mere 17 seconds on the half million participants at the 40th March for Life (in comparison, they spent 521 times more on the Manti Te’o football scandal). The life censorship only continued with the trial of Kermit Gosnell and beyond. Simply put, the old media fear giving pro-lifers the coverage a movement of this size and vitality deserves.
In response, MRC will produce a film from a compilation of amateur March for Life footage. If you plan to attend the March as an individual, with a church group or other organization, please document your experience and allow us to share it with the world.
But just because this is supposed to be a documentary of something that hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that the MRC doesn't have an idea of how they want it to go. In fact, they've issued rules for exactly what they want to see in the submitted footage:
What we’re looking for:
Footage of you and/or your friends looking into the camera (either individually or as a group) and saying, “I am pro-life.”
Footage of you and your friends briefly saying why you are pro-life or why you are attending the March
Behind-the-scenes footage of you and/or your group preparing for/attending the March. This can include footage of creating signs, your bus ride into D.C., planning meetings, marching to the Supreme Court, etc. Be creative!
If you're trying to get documentary participants to adhere to a script, it's hardly a documentary, is it?
NEW ARTICLE -- 2014 Slanties: 11 Years A Slantie Topic: The ConWeb
The war of ConWeb aggression has continued unabated. It's time to once again honor the biased and bizarre from the past year. Read more >>
Is Right-Wing Activist A 'Social Scientist'? CNS Thinks So Topic: CNSNews.com
Barbara Hollingsworth does her best to puff right-wing activist Janice Shaw Crouse, describing her as "a social scientist and expert on women’s issues" in a Jan. 16 CNSNews.com article devoted exclusively to Crouse's attacks on Maria Shriver’s new report on women’s economic status.
But is Crouse who Hollingsworth says she is?
Public Eye notes that Crouse majored in speech and English in college, and that her doctoral dissertation in communications theory at State University of New York at Buffalo was on "the decidedly secular topic of who won the Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford 1976 televised presidential debates."
In other words, Crouse has no formal training in sociology, which one would think would be a prerequisite to being a "social scientist."
That's simply lazy reporting on Hollingsworth's part. That's in addition to her laziness in refusing to obtain reaction to Crouse's attack from the study's authors.
Hollingsworth's "social scientist" descripion of Crouse comes before a description of her that offers a clue to her ideology -- "executive director of the Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute." That's another clue to Hollingsworth's bias.
WND's Ellis Washington Stands With Assassins Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ellis Washington concludes his Jan. 17 WorldNetDaily column, which rants against LBJ and his Great Society, with this:
If America is to survive this existential Progressive Revolution (circa 1859, Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” to the present), which systematically seeks to replace Christianity, the Bible and intelligent design with evolution, natural law with positive law, capitalism with socialism and the rule of law with tyranny and executive decrees, We the People must tell Obama: Yes, President Obama, you have a pen and a phone, but we have a Constitution and a Congress and the tea party … and God.
Sic Semper Tyrannous – Down with the Tyrant!
First: It's spelled "tyrannis." (And this guy complains about not being able to get a job as a college professor?)
Second: Invoking the phrase, though it has some patriotic history, puts Washington in some unsavory company. From Wikipedia:
In American history, John Wilkes Booth wrote in his diary that he shouted the phrase after shooting President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, in part because of the association with the assassination of Caesar. Timothy McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt with this phrase and a picture of Lincoln on it when he was arrested on April 19, 1995, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Does this mean Washington is joining the likes of Erik Rush in endorsing an overthrow -- or assassination -- of President Obama?
For MRC's Graham, Medically Accurate Term Is An 'F-Bomb' Topic: NewsBusters
The headline on Tim Graham 's Jan. 15 NewsBusters post read, "New York Times Story from Texas Repeatedly Drops the F-Bomb: 'Fetus'." Graham wrote:
The New York Times spent months debating before deciding not to ban the term “illegal immigrant” entirely (it’s simply discouraged), but the word “fetus” is used without any alarm. At the top of page A-14 on Wednesday is the headline “Suing to End Life Support for Woman and Fetus.”
It’s an update on the sad story of Marlise Munoz, who is on life support and whose family wants her and her baby removed from life support. The F-bomb (to pro-life people) was dropped three times in the Manny Fernandez story, in addition to the headline[.]
Yes, medically accurate terminology is the equivalent of a swear word in Graham's world.
At the end of his post, Graham linked to a 2008 rant by his boss, Brent Bozell, demanding that the word "fetus" be banned because it is allegedly a "humanity-negating" word. Like Graham, Bozell does not mention the term's medical accuracy (though he does concede that it has a "dictionary definition").
Neither Graham nor Bozell make any mention of the humanity-negating properties of the right-wing term "illegal alien." Or how they have a double standard on being politically correct word police.
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.
WND's Unruh Continues His Inability To Report Both Sides Of A Story Topic: WorldNetDaily
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.
Newsmax Tries To Attack Roger Ailes Bio Topic: Newsmax
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.
WND's Rush Adds Lies To His Obama Derangement Topic: WorldNetDaily
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.
CNS Still Falsely Implying That Government Money Pays For Abortions At Planned Parenthood Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com has long cranked out highlybiased 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.
Who Is Jerome Corsi's Mysterious Benghazi Witness? Topic: WorldNetDaily
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.
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.
Bamboozler extraordinaire Alan Caruba rants in a Jan. 16 Accuracy in Media column:
Jack Cashill is desperately trying to keep his 
The Media Research Center informs us in a Jan. 15 
Barbara Hollingsworth does her best to puff right-wing activist Janice Shaw Crouse, describing her as "a social scientist and expert on women’s issues" in a Jan. 16 CNSNews.com 
Ellis Washington concludes his Jan. 17 WorldNetDaily 
The headline on Tim Graham 's Jan. 15 NewsBusters 
Penny Starr writes in a Jan. 15 CNSNews.com 
WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh 
Just because Newsmax has been 
Erik Rush tells a whopper in his Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com has long cranked out 
Jerome Corsi introduced a new source in a Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily 
It wouldn't be the Media Research Center if its writers weren't 
