WND Admits Farah Acts As An Enemy, Not A Journalist
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah has long presented himself as a journalist when it was more than clear to everyone else that he was acting as a right-wing partisan. But WND appears to be conceding that Farah was acting in enemy mode when he targeted the Clinton administration in the 1990s. It's right there in the headline of this April 18 article:

It's also right there in the lead of the unbylined article:

If you want to learn what Hillary Clinton meant by “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” part of the extensive collection of dossiers the Clinton White House kept on its media enemies was released Friday by the Clinton Library.

The most important of the documents, “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” originally some 331 pages, was reduced to only 28 pages in the sanitized and heavily redacted version posted by the presidential library.

One of the components of this "stream of conspiracy commerce" was the Western Journalism Center, which Farah founded and from which WND sprang.

The article does quote Farah later on trying to keep up the journalistic pretense: "This was a report distributed to select U.S. reporters in an effort to discredit a new breed of investigative journalism into what was, until now, already emerging as the most scandal-plagued administration in the history of the United States."

Farah will never admit that his "new breed of investigative journalism" is nothing more than the basest, sleaziest rumor-mongering that has no basis in fact and which nobody believes. In other words, the kind of stuff you write when you're acting as an enemy, not a journalist.

CNS' Starr Finds A Way To Attack Obamas For Their Tax Return
Topic: CNSNews.com

It seems to be an official CNSNews.com policy -- nothing positive must ever be reported about President Obama and his administration, and any story must lead with the most negative spin possible.

Penny Starr, being a loyal CNS employee, implements the policy perfectly in an April 14 article on Obama's tax returns. Here's how she starts it:

President Barack Obama gave $1,500, or 0.3 percent of his income, to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., according to his 2013 tax return.

The tax return, made public on Friday and filed jointly with first lady Michelle Obama, shows Obama’s income for the year was $503,183. In Schedule A, under “cash contributions,” the $1,500 donation to St. John’s is listed.

It's not until the fourth paragraph that Starr gets around to mentioning that the Obamas donated more than $59,000 to charities last year.

Starr has performed her Obama-bashing duty. Her boss, Terry Jeffrey, must be proud.

WND Still Pushing Discredited Bundy Ranch-China Conspiracy
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily is simply not letting go of its Bundy ranch standoff conspiracy. James Simpson writes in an April 16 WND article:

Supposedly at issue was the desert tortoise, a reptile on the endangered species list that purportedly could not coexist on the land with Bundy’s cattle. But why, many asked, would the turtle suddenly be threatened by animals it had cohabited with for the 100-plus years the Bundy ranch has been in operation?

A BLM document unearthed last week discusses mitigation strategies for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone, just southwest of the Bundy ranch. The “mitigation strategy” proposed to use the grazing lands near the Bundy ranch as a kind of sanctuary for the desert tortoise, because the entire region is slated for a large number of solar, wind and geothermal energy generation facilities.

The solar projects will obliterate most of the turtle’s natural habitat.

Bloggers quickly made a connection between the effort to remove Bundy’s cattle and a solar energy project in Southern Nevada financed by the communist Chinese energy firm ENN. It was to be the largest solar farm in the U.S.

Reid had lobbied heavily for the company’s business, even traveling to China. Reid’s son, Rory Reid, formerly a Clark County commissioner, became a lobbyist for ENN, and the Senate majority leader’s former senior adviser, Neil Kornze, now leads the BLM.

But as we've pointed out, other conservative websites have reported that the land for the proposed solar project is nowhere near Bundy's ranch.

It's only after he's written the above that he admits it's bogus: "But the solar energy complex financed by the communist Chinese was not at the heart of the Bundy Ranch fiasco after all. The project died last year."

But wait! The conspiracy lives!

However, the BLM’s library of renewable energy projects revealed it was only one of more than 50 solar, wind and geothermal projects planned for Nevada, California, Arizona and other Western states. Reid was focused on at least one, and maybe more, of the projects, much closer to the Bundy ranch.

[...]

A company called First Solar is listed on a BLM renewable energy project map of southern Nevada, one of 11 sited in Clark County. Additionally, the map shows six wind projects in Clark County and also lists the K Road Moapa project under “transmission projects.” In other words, there is a lot more going on than media have reported.

First Solar investors comprise a who’s who of Democratic insiders, including major Obama campaign bundlers, billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, Al Gore, Ted Turner and Goldman Sachs. First Solar’s CEO is Michael Ahearn, former fundraiser for both Obama and Harry Reid.

First Solar has at least three other solar projects in California. So it becomes apparent why the BLM, Reid and many other interested parties have such an intense interest in the desert tortoise.

The lucrative business opportunities explain both why Cliven Bundy has been facing such intense intimidation and why all the other ranchers have been chased out. Bundy represents a financial threat not merely to Reid, but a whole gamut of Democrats tied to Obama, Clinton and Gore.

The conspiracy must live. What would Simpson and WND have to write about otherwise.

MRC's Graham Sneers At Chelsea Clinton's Pregnancy
Topic: Media Research Center

Yesterday we asked if the Media Research Center's Tim Graham would learn a lesson from that Sally Kohn column he's been touting -- you know, the one where she realized her conservative opponents were personable and human.

The answer, apparently, is no.

Graham used the opportunity of Chelsea Clinton's announced pregnanacy to sneer in a tweet, "Congratulations! The Clintons have decided it's a baby, not a women's-rights-problem."

It seems that Graham is continuing to refuse to acknowledge the Clintons as human, and he is apparently incapable of being nice to someone without turning it into a snide partisan attack. But we knew that about him already, didn't we?

WND's Farah Just Can't Stop Peddling Birther Lies, Continued
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Joseph Farah reminds us what a dedicated birther he is in his April 16 WorldNetDaily column raging at President Obama for daring to tell a birther joke:

I don’t think he has stopped thinking about how he conned the American public into giving him the presidency without genuine, fraud-free documentation. He only produced something a few days after Corsi and WND Books released the No. 1 best-selling book in the nation, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” – with the intent of halting the sales of a book that proves beyond a reasonable doubt Obama is as phony as his birth certificate.

Watch the video for yourself. Obama’s laughs went on self-consciously long.

“Ha, ha. I think it’s still up on a website somewhere,” he said. “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Then he took a long pause.

“You remember that? That was crazy,” he said. “That was some crazy stuff. Ha, ha, ha.

“I hadn’t thought about that in a while,” he said, shaking his head. “Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha.”

Har har hardy ha har.

Are you laughing about this?

Were you part of the media establishment chorus that laughed off the eligibility question?

This is where that laughter leads.

Are you still laughing?

Now that he has hoodwinked the American people into allowing him to be president for five years without proper identification, the story is that he wants anyone to VOTE without it, too!

[...]

I’m glad he brought up his birth certificate again. Maybe it’s time for Americans to give that phony document the examination it should have received when he released it.

If Obama thinks the birth certificate non-troversy is a joke, it's people like Farah that have made it that way. It's clear that no documentation Obama could produce would satisfy the likes of Farah, Jerome Corsi and the other birthers.

If Farah actually cared about the birth certificate, WND would have reported the evidence debunking the birthers' claims. But it hasn't -- which tells us that Farah doesn't care whether it's real or not, only that he can use the issue as a cudgel against a political enemy.

And Farah can't even do his birther rant without telling a lie. Obama released his long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011 -- three weeks before Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate was released, not "a few days after" the book came out as Farah claimed.

Farah's impotent rage at Obama for making fun of him demonstrates that he's still sore about sqandering what little credibility WND had for a five-year birther crusade that backfired because of his own arrogance and desire for vengeance. Nobody believes him or WND anymore, and he only has himself to blame.

The only chance Farah has to salvage his reputation is to admit the obvious -- that the birther crusade was a sham all along. But that would require him to show some humility and have an attitude of repentence, and we know that ain't gonna happen.

CNS Promotes Claims of Serial Health Care Misleader
Topic: CNSNews.com

Susan Jones devotes an April 15 CNSNews.com article to the musings of Betsy McCaughey:

A leading Obamacare critic sees trouble ahead for people who signed up for health insurance on the new government exchanges.

First, even the insurance companies that issue the plans are worried about "public pushback" from rising insurance premiums, Betsey McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and author of the book "Beating Obamacare," told Fox News's Neil Cavuto on Monday.

"That's only part of the bad news," she said. "You're also going to see a million people or more default. In other words, they have paid their first premium, but when they discover what it really means to have a $3,000 or $5,000 deductible on their plan, they go to their doctor again and again and have to pay full freight, even though they're paying a premium, they're going to stop paying their premium.

Jones makes no attempt to get reaction to McCaughey's dire views. Because she's in stenography mode, Jones is certainly not going to tell her readers that McCaughey has a lengthy history of misinforming about Obamacare.

Jones is presenting as authoritative the views of someone who has been repeatedly caught distorting and misinforming. That's pretty much the opposite of journalism.

WND's Kupelian Distorts Study on Autism And Antidepressants
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian has long fearmongered about antidepressants, most recently straining to link them to autism (WND's attempt to blame autism on vaccines was a dismal failure). Kupelian is at it again in an April 15 WND article:

A major new study released Monday finds that pregnant woman taking antidepressants are significantly at risk for giving birth to children with autism – especially if the baby is a boy.

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is titled “Prenatal SSRI Use and Offspring With Autism Spectrum Disorder or Developmental Delay,” and was conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, and the Department of Public Health Sciences at UC Davis. It was published in “Pediatrics,” the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Read entire study here (pdf).

Consistent with most previous human and animal studies on the question, researchers concluded in this latest study that so-called SSRI antidepressants (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) – including virtually all major antidepressant brands, like Prozac, Paxil, Luvox, Zoloft and Celexa – appear to constitute a significant risk factor for autism spectrum disorders, or ASDs, particularly in male children.

But Kupelian is exaggerating the study's findings. U.S. News & World Report puts things in perspective and points out that untreated depression in a pregnant woman is a risk factor as well:

While the study found an association between prenatal use of SSRI antidepressants and autism risk in boys, it did not prove cause-and-effect.

The study authors were quick to point out that there are risks to both the mother and fetus from untreated depression.

"It's a complex decision whether to treat or not treat depression with medications during pregnancy," Lee said. "There are so many factors to consider. We didn't intend for our study to be used as a basis for clinical treatment decisions. Women should talk with their doctors about SSRI treatments."

[...]

Dr. Eyal Shemesh, chief of behavioral and developmental health in the department of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital, in New York City said: "It's very hard to do a definitive study of this. The confounders here are huge. They [the study authors] initially found no difference between the groups -- it was only when they looked specifically at gender-adjusted differences that they saw an association. We still don't know whether SSRIs are associated with more autism. We need to look further."

Shemesh added: "The one thing we really know with certainty is that depression is not good for pregnancy. Women who are depressed have bad outcomes and their kids don't do well. We need to treat depression, and there are psychotherapy options and medication options. You need to make a reasoned decision with your doctor. I would be very concerned about any woman just stopping her medication."

Kuupelian concedes the issue of depression, but he quotes some doctor claiming that “non-drug approaches to depression, such as psychotherapy and exercise, are as good or better for the treatment of depression in many women."

While Kupelian fearmongers about the supposed "significant" risk, U.S. News quotes one doctor saying: "If the risk of autism is around 1 percent now, and you raise it to 3 percent, that still means that 97 percent of the time, you won't have an autism spectrum disorder. The chances are still overwhelming that they won't have a child with an autism spectrum disorder."

Will MRC's Graham Learn A Lesson From Sally Kohn?
Topic: NewsBusters

Tim Graham writes in an April 16 NewsBusters post:

Liberal pundit Sally Kohn is on Yahoo! this morning with an article titled "What I learned as a liberal talking head on Fox News." She learned conservatives were personable and human.

What? Yes, she says that would amaze "fellow liberals who had not watched much Fox News but had seen the most outlandish clips of Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity that had made it to 'The Daily Show' or YouTube. They perhaps imagined that walking down the hallway outside makeup, Mr. O'Reilly might yell then, too, instead of just saying hello. That's a funny notion, but it couldn't be further from the truth."

The obvious thought here is: Why can't liberals just turn on Fox News for themselves and spend an hour? Why must they only watch it after it's "curated" by Jon Stewart?

Graham won't mention that Kohn has learned lessons that his fellow MRC employees apparently haven't.

Would a conservative who recognized the humanity of liberals call President Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead," as MRC chief Brent Bozell has? Or get into a shouting matchh with a liberal guest, as Bozell did?

Would a conservative who recognized the humanity of liberals call Sandra Fluke a "horizontal laborer" and a "Lincoln Tunnel hitcher," as the MRC's Matt Philbin has? Or respond to a critic by telling him to "fuck off," as Philbin has?

Would a conservative who recognized the humanity of liberals dismiss a liberal's calmly argued statements as nothing but shrieking and ranting, as NewsBustsers' Jeffrey Meyer did?

Would a conservative who recognized the humanity of liberals smear a criticism he disagreed with as "effete," as Graham himself did?

Instead of merely praising Kohn for recognizing that conservatives are human, Graham should be following her example by reminding his fellow MRCers -- including his boss -- that liberals are human too.

WND Columnists Cheer On Lawless Rancher, Militia Thugs
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily columnist Barry Farber cheers on lawless rancher Cliven Bundy and the militia thugs who defended him, even excusing Bundy's lawlessness:

This is a tremendous victory for The People! The Bureau of Land Management must have thought that American apathy, timidity and passivity (a subject given masterful treatment by Stu Tarlowe in his recent well-received column in American Thinker) would bring rancher Cliven Bundy and his family out with their hands up. But when so many volunteers sped to the “front” to stick up for the Bundys, the Bureau of Land Management instantly issued a “Game-Over-We-Lose” statement making mention of the danger to their personnel. Arizona Rep. Kelly Townsend, a tea party Republican, jumped into his car and drove from Phoenix to Bunkerville to join the protest.

[...]

Are we being a bit quick to dash to Cliven Bundy’s defense without stopping to consider the feds’ charge that he’s an outlaw who’s been letting his cattle graze on that land illegally for more than 20 years? Yes, but Bundy’s family has been doing that since the 1800s, and he’s the last of 52 ranchers in Clark County – and the tactics of the BLM were worse than boorish, so my conscience can handle it all until we know a lot more about the legalities at play here.

Foreigner Christopher Monckton does pretty much the same thing in his WND column, going on to claim that Republicans should exploit the opportunity:

Now, I am no expert in the complex land laws of the United States, and I do not pretend to know whether the federal government has any lawful right to the vast sums of money it now demands. However, in the U.K. rights of common grazing (or, in Scotland, crofters’ rights) are jealously protected and defended. There would be no question of demanding grazing fees from farmers some of whose rights predate the last successful invasion of Britain, the Norman conquest in 1066.

Also, we have a statute of limitations that says a civil debt that is not pursued for six years ceases to be a debt. Here, Mr. Bundy might well not be liable for grazing fees going back six years or more.

But the case raises a wider concern that the moribund Republican Party would do well to wake up and champion. Federal land holdings, particularly in the southwestern states, are enormous. In a nation that once prided itself on allowing the free market to thrive, a staggering percentage of the land is nationalized.

Here is an opportunity for the Republicans to propose a way to pay off the national debt that has already crippled Uncle Sam’s armed forces to the point where the once-mighty United States could not intervene to stop Mr. Putin helping himself to large chunks of a neighboring nation’s territory in flagrant defiance of all the most sacred principles of international law.

They should promise to conduct a zero-base audit of all federal land holdings. The presumption of the zero-base audit is that all lands that are now nationalized ought to be in private ownership, and will be sold off to the highest bidders unless the various federal agencies now using or managing them are able to make a case that the elected Republican administration accepts.

Monckton goes on to falsely claim that the land Bundy was illegally using for grazing "had been earmarked for a useless solar farm."

CNS' Starr Repeats Global Warming Denier Propaganda
Topic: CNSNews.com

Penny Starr spent an April 9 CNSNews.com article serving as the willing stenographer for a group of right-wing global warming deniers (not that she'll ever admit that's what they are, of course):

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a naturally occurring chemical compound that benefits plants and thus, the planet and its inhabitants, according to a lengthy  report released Wednesday by the free-market Heartland Institute.
“Carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer that provides many beneficial impacts,” said Craig Idso, one of the lead authors of the report, when CNSNews.com asked him to name the most salient finding of the 37 scientists from 12 countries who contributed to it.

“You can look at thousands of studies – real world data studies that have actually been conducted that demonstrate beyond any doubt that higher levels of CO2 are going to increase the productivity of plants,” Idso said.

“They’re real,” Idso said of the benefits of CO2. “They’re not imagined. They’re not projected. They’re real, and they’re occurring now.”

Starr can't be bothered to obtain any reaction to the Heartland Institute's report, issued by its "Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" -- it's an attack on the much more credible United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- so CNS readers will never know that the institute receives funding from ExxonMobil and Koch-connected foundations, or that Idso formerly worked in the coal industry, thus raising more questions about the report's objectivity. Media Matters notes that while the IPCC reviews the current state of scientific knowledge, the NIPCC's references in its Summary for Policymakers include publications that date back to 1904 and few references from the 21st century other than non-peer-reviewed reports from itself and its authors.

Starr also quotes Heartland Institute president Joseph Bast dubiously calling the IPCC report on climate change “largely discredited” by his own NIPCC. But Starr won't tell you that Bast and his institute was claiming as recently as 1998 that "smoking in moderation has few, if any, adverse health effects."

These are the folks Starr apparently considers so authoritative she doesn't feel the need to seek out any outside comment about their denalist theories.

NEW ARTICLE: Bob Unruh, Homeschool Propagandist
Topic: WorldNetDaily
How far will the WorldNetDaily reporter go to defend homeschooling? He'll liken critics to Nazis and throw an abused child under the bus. Read more >>

CNS' Jeffrey Pushes Dishonest Comparison of Working Women, Food Stamps
Topic: CNSNews.com

Terry Jeffrey writes in an April 14 CNSNews.com article:

People participating in the food stamp program outnumbered the women who worked full-time, year-round in the United States in 2012, according to data from the Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau.

In the average month of 2012, according to the Department of Agriculture, there were 46,609,000 people participating in the food stamp program (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). That contrasts with the 44,059,000 women who worked full-time, year-round in 2012, according to the Census Bureau’s report on Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States.

For each woman who worked full-time, year-round in 2012, there was slightly more than 1 other person collecting food stamps.

But as Media Matters details, Jeffrey's comparion is meaningless because many working women fall into both categories:

In fact, because the majority of recipients are working-class Americans with jobs, senior citizens, or children, an increase in SNAP beneficiaries is an extremely unreliable predictor of the number of full-time workers, let alone evidence of a tipping point before a decline in overall employment. A 2013 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the "overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so"[.]

[...]

A separate report from the USDA pointed out that in 2012, "75 percent of all SNAP households, containing 87 percent of all participants, included a child, an elderly person, or a disabled nonelderly person. These households received 82 percent of all SNAP benefits."

Jeffrey's article notes that "The business and economic reporting of CNSNews.com is funded in part with a gift made in memory of Dr. Keith C. Wold." As we noted with CNS' dishonest, cherry-picking reporting on unemployment, this sort of coverage may very well be making Dr. Wold spin in his grave.

WND's Blood Moon Blitz
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily has published a book about the "blood moons," and by God, you will be subjected to thinly veiled ads for the book until the last blood moon appears, and probably well after it.

What WND won't always tell you, however, it that it published that book it's so relentlessly flogging. Or that the WND store is selling another "blood moons" book by a more prominent author, John Hagee, that's it's not so eager to promote (except when it accidentially links to it, as in this April 14 article).

Leading up to the book's March 18 publication, WND's coverage of it was shamelessly self-promotional, with articles touting the appearance of the book's author, Mark Blitz, on the "popular" show hosted by once-disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and hyping how the book purportedly achieved a "necessary fourth printing" before its release date. There has also been the requisite fawning review of Blitz's book by WND columnist Jim  Fletcher, who did not disclose the book is published by the same folks who publish his column.

With the blood moon's first appearance this week, WND's promotion has become even more relentless.

An April 13 article promoted some random blogger's claim that "the appearance of the blood moons over our skies may have special significance," going on to quote the guy as being very undecided about the whole thing: "“aybe the message is for us ‘sleepers’ here in the United States. ... We have turned from our faith in the God of Bible. Maybe He has a message for us; or maybe not." Such indecision is probably why Mark Blitz, and not him, wrote the book for WND, who is described as having "found the divine link between prophecy, heavenly signs, historical events, and when they intersect" by finding "the correlation between when blood moons fell on feast days and key historical world events."

The article falsely claims "The last tetrad happened in 1967, during the Six-Day War between Arabs and Israelis." Actually, according to Space.com, the last tetrad happened in 2003-04.

An April 14 article tried to put a political spin on things by baselessly suggesting that the blood moons are a message to President Obama (whom WND can't quite admit is president, since that word appears nowhere in the article): 

Barack Obama quite recently, expressing his frustration that Republican members of Congress won’t give him what he wants, threatened arbitrary executive action, promising that he has a “pen and phone.”

But there are “flashing red warning lights” in the heavens that should command peoples’ attention right now, because the one behind those warnings, God, had “more than a pen and a phone in his hand,” according to the author of “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs.”

Pastor Mark Biltz, whose book is creating a tidal wave of interest right now with the first of four lunar eclipses expected to become visible early Tuesday, was speaking to Breaking Israel News.

“I believe that the blood moons have great historic and prophetic significance just as they did following 1948 and 1967. In the book of Joel it mentions three times about the sun and the moon going dark and in context it also mentions Divine wrath against all countries that want to divide or part the land of Israel,” he said.

“I believe the moons are like flashing red warning lights at a heavenly intersection saying to Israel as well as the nations they will be crossing heavenly red lines and if they do, they will understand as Pharaoh did on Passover night 3,500 years ago that the Creator backs up what He says.

“Like Pharaoh the leaders and pundits of today will realize when it comes to crossing the red lines of the Creator of the universe he has more than a pen and a phone in his hand.”

Another April 14 article features Blitz admitting he doesn't know what the blood moons mean, but dang it, they must mean something:

The pastor whose book, “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs,” explains the biblical links between cosmic phenomena such as eclipses and events on Earth says he’s not sure what will happen in connection to the current series of lunar alignments.

Maybe nothing.

But people need to be watching and listening to God, Pastor Mark Biltz urges.

One thing we do know it means is lots of hype with the goal of putting more money in WND's coffers. Thus, you'll never read at WND the fact that, according to Space.com, "while a tetrad of total lunar eclipses is somewhat rare, it is not extraordinarily so, and probably nothing to make a fuss about."

You also won't read at WND any criticism of hucksters exploiting the situation. From the Washington Post:

Greg Boyd, a pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., called the predictions a waste of time, maybe even bordering on astrology.

“You have an entire population buying into this stuff so no congregation is immune to this,” Boyd said. “It can strike fear into people, which is so unnecessary and wrong.”

The Jewish holy days carry less theological significance than Jesus’ resurrection for many Christians, said Sam Storms, a pastor of Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City. Any connection between the two events should carry less weight, he said.

“We need to stop giving into some of these sensationalist speculations,” he said. “Maybe Christians are more gullible. One has to twist the data to make it appear as if these are the fulfillment of some biblical prophecy.”

Nah -- you'll never read that at WND, not while it still has blood moon books to shill.

Truth Revolt's Ben Shapiro Gets Desperate For Attention
Topic: Horowitz

We've generally ignored the Truth Revolt media-watchdog blog, largely because it's a second-rate ripoff of NewsBusters and part of the David Horowitz cult of personality. But it appears that Ben Shapiro and Co. are desperate for attention, as painfully illustrated by Shapiro's April 10 column accusing Stephen Colbert of "political blackface," complete with a vintage photo of an actual blackface entertainer. Shapiro goes on to complain that making fun of conservatives is just like racism:

This is the purpose of Colbert’s routine. His show is about pure hatred for conservatives in the same way that blackface was about pure hatred of blacks. In order to justify their racism, racists had to create a false perception of blacks; in the same way, Colbert and his audience can justify their racism only by creating a false perception of conservatives.

Shapiro seems to have ignored the fact that conservatives could come up with a liberal Colbert. But conservatives like Shapiro are too ideological to create genuinely effective political humor at Colbert's level, as anyone who has ever watched NewsBusters' "NewsBusted" or D.J. Dolce's WorldNetDaily videos can attest.

But even if Shapiro had a coherent point to make, it's lost because of his use of the blackface image. That just screams of desperation, a "hey, look at me!" tactic, an attempt to advance a few rungs on the right-wing media ladder by putting provocation before substance.

Will Shapiro succeed? Given his history of shooting himself in the foot with dickishness masquerading as edginess -- smearing a fellow Jew as a "kapo," refusing to admit he got snookered in the "Friends of Hamas" fiasco -- we suspect Truth Revolt will, sooner than later, go the way of the Horowitz group's previous blog effort, NewsReal.

But not before Shapiro provides even more examples of living up to the "revolting" part of Truth Revolt.

WND Censors Ex-Sheriff's Plan To Use Women As Human Shields In Ranch Standoff
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily is moving quickly on the Bundy Ranch standoff, from supporting lawbreakers and militia thugs to promoting bogus conspiracy theories. Now it's taking the next logical step: hiding unflattering information about those it's lionizing.

An unbylined April 14 WND article champions Richard Mack -- identified only as "executive director of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association" but who is also a member of the extremist group Oath Keepers -- and his claim that "his sources inside the federal government warn that Washington’s weekend retreat in a dispute over grazing land in Nevada was only a move to distract attention and diffuse tensions, because a raid on the family’s ranch still is planned."

WND doesn't mention that not only did Mack join other militia thugs in escalating the standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and federal officials over Bundy's decades of violations of grazing laws, he planned a rather heinous plan should the standoff escalate: use women as human shields for the militia thugs.

As the Blaze documents, Mack told Fox News: "We were actually strategizing to put all the women up at the front. If they are going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers."

Given that WND, for instance, approvingly quoted Rush Limbaugh claiming that President Obama was using children as "human shields" to announce new gun regulations, it should be outraged that militia thugs decided that women were expendible enough to serve as human shields in a standoff with federal officials.

But we suspect it's not -- the thugs were sticking it to the hated federal government, and the women would have been acceptable collateral damage who would also serve as convenient martyrs had things escalated that far.