The American Conservative has a review of a new book about L. Brent Bozell Jr., an early conservative movement leader and the father of Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell III. In it, we learned some of the some of the father's behaviors that have shaped his son -- his "militant Catholicism" which at one point led him to move his entire family to Spain where he became an even more fervent Catholic; his early obsession with "life issues," and his evangelizing zeal"; and "Bozell’s manic depression, the embarrassing early incidents, the alcoholism, the inevitable personal injuries, and the intervention of police and, in one instance, embassy officials."
It's from this environment that Bozell III spring. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
WND Suddenly Has A Problem With Overthrowing The Government Topic: WorldNetDaily
Art Moore writes in a July 1 WorldNetDaily article:
In an in-depth interview aired this week by the Fox New Channel, Weather Underground co-founder and Barack Obama colleague Bill Ayers has been put on the defensive by a well-prepared Megyn Kelly, who has peppered him with facts and substantial allegations of his group’s violent attacks on the U.S. government in the 1970s.
Ayers, while refusing to talk about his specific involvement in bombings, typically defends his group by characterizing it as one of many protesting an unpopular war that was taking innocent lives abroad.
But often lost in conversations Ayers has engaged in over the years about his radical past is the indisputable fact that the ultimate aim of the Weather Underground was to overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with a communist regime.
[...]
Though the war in Southeast Asia may have sparked Ayers’ movement, the many grievances that arose from the war were merely pretexts to justify a greater cause. Ayers obviously recognizes that while some solidarity can be found, even today, for the use of violent tactics in protest of an unpopular war, very few Americans have sympathy for sedition.
So WND suddenly has a problem with overthrowing the government? It sure didn't earlier this year, when it was advocating a military coup led by retired generals. And it certainly had no problem with the heavily armed militia members who came to the defense of scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and their threats of violence against the government.
Moore doesn't explain why it was a bad idea for Ayers to plot to overthrow the government but perfectly fine for retired generals and armed militia to do so.
MRC's Double Standard on Disclosure Topic: Media Research Center
Sean Long rants in a July 9 Media Research Center item:
The liberal media love to hate the Koch Brothers but are far less enthusiastic about connecting George Soros’ billions to liberal policies.
On July 6, Coral Davenport of The New York Times revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new regulations on power plant emissions were largely inspired by the work of environmental activists at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The broadcast networks have not mentioned the NRDC connection to the new regulations, and even the Times ignored that liberal mega-donor Soros has bankrolled the NRDC.
The Times called the EPA regulations “a remarkable victory for the National Resources Defense Council” for developing the “novel” framework that the EPA would adopt, but they also failed to mention the more than $1.7 million in Soros-funding the group received since 2004 ($1,771,893).
This is from the same MRC that defended Richard Mellon Scaife without disclosing that he donated more than $3 million to the MRC.
Apparently, the MRC's disclosure requirement applies to everyone else but the MRC.
WND's Farah Ignores What Akin Actually Said To Defend What Akin Said Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah is pretty much obligated to defend Todd Akin -- after all, his WND is publishing Akin's memoir in which he stands by his dumb "legitimate rape" remarks. But Farah has to find new ways to defend the indefensible. He gives it another shot in his July 10 WND column:
I’m not even willing to concede Akin made a gaffe at all in his famous interview in August 2012. Initially I believed so – before I watched it. I was judging Akin on the basis of what others said he said. After watching it over and over again, I’m truly shocked that so much was made of it.
I invite you to watch the relevant part of that interview in context – probably for the first time.
It was clear to any objective, thinking person what he was saying. He was not questioning that “rape is rape,” as Barack Obama said in a hastily called press conference the next day. He never suggested that rape victims don’t ever get pregnant, as some headlines charged.
As you see, Farah has taken the approach of not addressing any of the actual words Akin used. No mention of "legitimate rape" -- which seems to presume that a woman is lying about being raped until proven otherwise -- or of Akin's idea that a woman can "shut that whole thing down," which depends on the fallacy that women can actively control her fertility depending on who is having sex with her.
While Akin "never suggested that rape victims don’t ever get pregnant," as Farah wrote, he did say that pregnancy through rape was "really rare," which, again, falsely suggests that woman can active control her fertility. Farah and WND have pretended that long-term stress that can inhibit fertility is the same thing as the sudden, traumatic stress of being raped.
Funny how Farah can declare "It was clear to any objective, thinking person what he was saying" without citing any of the words Akin was saying.
Farah has made this bed by publishing Akin's book, and he is incredibly determined to lie in it. If it means lying about and distorting what Akin actually said, so be it.
MRC Defends Scaife, Doesn't Disclose He Was An MRC Donor Topic: Media Research Center
A July 4 NewsBusters post, attributed only to "NB Staff," complains that a New York Times obituary for Richard Mellon Scaife, "a longtime supporter of conservative causes," contains "nasty personal swipes."
Not only does "NB Staff" not dispute the accuracy of the information -- choosing instead to reprint a 1998 column by Brent Bozell defending Scaife -- it also fails to include a very important disclosure: Scaife-controlled foundations were major donors to NewsBusters' parent organization, the Media Research Center.
The Sarah Scaife Foundation has donated more than $3 million to the MRC since 1998, and the Scaife-controlled Carthage Foundation donated $10,000 in 1997.
Interestingly, Bozell's 1998 Scaife-defending column also fails to disclose his Scaife funding, which surely he must have been aware of at the time he wrote it.
Morgan Brittany Becomes WND Columnist, Spews Obama Derangement Topic: WorldNetDaily
It was only a week ago that fading actress Morgan Brittany joined WorldNetDaily as a columnist -- her only apparent qualifications for doing so are being a friend of WND columnist Gina Loudon and claiming that "her greatest passion is speaking on behalf of the greatness of America" -- and she's already spouting Obama conspiracy theories.
Back on March 16, 2012, Barack Obama signed an executive order that went virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media and a majority of the America public. It was titled the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order, and it completely erased any judicial oversight or due process for any action by the government deemed in the interest of national security.
Actually, even conservatives have pointed out that this executive order merely updates an executive order first issued in 1994 and amended several times since, and it adds no new powers to the executive branch.
But as with many of her fellow WND writers, the facts simply don't matter to Brittany, and she launches into a major fit of Obama derangement:
Ever since the executive order of March 2012 took effect there have been massive changes in many government departments. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion rounds of hollow-point ammunition, 7,000 fully automatic 5.56×45 mm NATO personal defense weapons, plus a huge amount of 30-round high-capacity magazines. Enough to fight a major war, don’t you think? As if that weren’t enough, the DHS recently purchased and retrofitted over 2,799 Mine Resistant Armored Protection vehicles from the U.S. Army. Other departments have been stockpiling as well. The Social Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are just two others.
So when you put the pieces of this puzzle together and you see what is happening on our border, am I crazy to think that this was all a plan that has been put in motion to overwhelm the system and create anger and chaos among the American people?
[...]
It is classic Cloward-Piven. Overwhelm the system, anger the populace, create chaos, and then, martial law takes over. Through his executive orders, the president gave himself the authority to use the military as he sees fit. We saw just a taste of it after the Boston Marathon bombing when there was a huge over-reaction by closing down the city, storming homes and property and keeping people prisoners in their own homes. That was just a test to see how compliant people would become.
If Obama gets his way and the system collapses through illegal immigration or financial means, if he succeeds in confiscating our guns and ammo so that no one but the government has them, then we the people will be at their mercy, and the sad thing is that many people will welcome their control. At that point the American people will be helpless against a totalitarian state, and they will have succeeded in the full transformation of this country.
Perhaps Brittany has proven herself to be a WND columnist after all.
CNS' Jeffrey Touts Pat Buchanan's Whitewashing Of Southern Strategy Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey spends his July 9 column slobbering over Pat Buchanan's new book on his work for the Nixon presidential campaign:
Wherever Nixon's merits and demerits place him among American presidents, Buchanan's first-person chronicle of how Nixon climbed back from a humiliating defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election to win the presidency in 1968 is not just a unique and enduring look at one of this nation's most interesting political campaigns but at a decade that changed America forever.
[...]
Buchanan's book is a great story told by a great storyteller. Along the way are first-person anecdotes that not only reveal how Buchanan's boss plotted and executed what may indeed have been the greatest comeback in American political history, but also how he prepared himself to use the presidency he won to deal with great international problems, including the Vietnam War and U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and China.
Jeffrey goes on to highlight one piece of Buchanan's work:
Buchanan anchored the right flank of Nixon's immediate staff, and part of his job was to help keep the conservative movement — which had backed Goldwater in 1964 — in Nixon's camp for 1968.
Beyond that was a longer-term political vision. "The crucial elements of the new majority I had in mind," writes Buchanan, "were the solid centrist GOP base that had stood by Nixon in 1960, the rising conservative movement, to which I belonged, the 'northern Catholic ethnics' of German, Irish, Italian, Polish and other East European descent, and the Southern Protestants, who saw themselves as abandoned by a Democratic Party moving leftward."
Jeffrey won't tell you, but Buchanan's plan is better known as the Southern Strategy -- which in large part sought to recruit racist whites unnerved by blacks' voting rights being protected.That was one of several racially divisive strategies Buchanan sought to implement on Nixon's behalf.
But Jeffrey doesn't want you to know that. After all, CNS also published Buchanan's column touting his whitewash.
WND's Unruh Pretends Ed Klein Is Credible Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh uncritically promotes Ed Klein in a July 7 WorldNetDaily article:
Ed Klein, the longtime journalist, author and commentator, once described Barack Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett as the “de facto” president.
[...]
Now there’s a report from Klein that Jarrett has been meeting with a woman that Obama may want to promote as the Democrats’ presidential nominee for 2016 who could continue his legacy.
And it’s not Hillary Clinton.
Klein, interviewed on “Fox and Friends” about his new book, “Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. The Obamas,” said Jarrett has been holding meetings “inside the White House and outside” with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Klein said Jarrett is the consigliere of the Obama White House and has “huge power.”
Warren, who drew attention for her dubious claim to be a minority, is being “urged” to run, because the White House believes she would “carry out his legacy a lot better than Hillary,” he said.
Klein said his source is someone “close to Valerie Jarrett I’ve been talking to for the past couple of years.”
He said it’s part of the “blood feud” in the Democratic Party, which has pitted Obama’s far-left positions against the more “centrist” Clinton.
What Unruh won't tell you: Nobody believes Ed Klein.
Salon's Jim Newell points out that Klein's sourcing -- almost entirely anonymous and untraceable -- "doesn’t appear to stand a second’s worth of scrutiny." Newell adds regarding Klein's so-called source on the Jarrett-Warren claim:
That’s interesting; don’t you wonder how a high-ranking Obama administration official could get so close to the president yet still somehow believe that he’s a “committed progressive” who “wants to transform America into a European-style democratic-socialist state”? Did Dick Morris or Mark Levin slip on an Obama White House staff badge and go undetected in the West Wing for some length of time? Shocking, if true.
Indeed, Klein's new book is chock full of outlandish, dubiously sourced claims. Yet Unruh doesn't see fit to inform his readers of this important caveat.
Why? Mostly because Unruh is a stenographer, not a reporter, who's only interested in pushingpropaganda, not reporting facts.
How fitting that an outlet nobody believes lets a writer who doesn't know how to report promote an author nobody believes.
CNS Still Considers Spending On LGBT Issues To Be A Waste of Money Topic: CNSNews.com
Last year, we documented how CNSNews.com's "Waste Watch" list disproportionately portrayed LGBT-related issues as evidence of wasteful federal spending. It's still doing it.
The latest "Waste Watch" item appears as a July 1 article by Melanie Hunter:
The National Institutes of Health has awarded $357,783 to the Fenway Community Health Center in Boston, Mass., to reduce health disparities in LGBTQ youth of color.
The purpose of the grant is described as “to establish a sustainable community-based participatory research process to reduce health disparities among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth of color.”
According to the grant, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) youth of color abuse alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, engage in risky sexual behaviors, and attempt suicide “in high rates that are disproportionate to those of both white LGBTQ youth and heterosexual youth of color.”
Hunter didn't explain why she considers improving the health of gay youth to be a waste of money.
WND's 'Pink Slip' Money-Making Scheme Is Back Topic: WorldNetDaily
Back in 2009, WorldNetDaily ran a campaign of sending "pink slips" to all members of Congress threatening them by claiming that if they don't support WND's right-wing agenda, they would face unspecified consequences. WND charged its readers $29.95 for the privilege of sending those "pink slips." We calculated that this venture was quite profitable for WND.
WND must be needing the money, because it's running the campaign again. It touted the return in an article last month:
What happens when more than 9 million messages warning Congress to shape up or ship out?
The only time it ever happened was 2009. That’s when WND launched the “Send Congress a Pink Slip” campaign resulting in an avalanche of imminent firing notices that were carefully and successfully delivered to every member of Congress over a period of several months.
The warnings were delivered on pink paper – depleting all supplies of pink paper in North America. Piled on top of one another, they would tower above the tallest building in the Capitol, the Washington Monument – eventually even the tallest building in the world. Some members extolled the campaign against overspending and irresponsible behavior, while others whispered and murmured about it behind closed doors.
Ultimately the pink slip campaign presaged the tea party movement and one of the biggest voter revolts in American history in 2010.
And that’s why WND is bringing it back – updated, rejuvenated and refined – in 2014.
Needless to say, WND is overstating the impact of its campaign. Divide those 9 million "pink slips" WND claims to have sent (offering no documentation that this in fact happened) by the 535 members of Congress they were sent to, and you get approximately 16,822 people who sent WND $29.95. The more impressive number is that WND raked in more than $500,000 through this scheme, and you know it didn't cost anywhere near that much for WND to print and send those slips, especially since, according to the pictures accompanying the article, WND sent those slips out in large boxes and not individual envelopes.
WND goes on to inform us that it's charging the same this time around:
For just $29.95 you can send an individualized notice to every member of Congress in the form of a “pink slip.” It will bear your name and your address and be sent and delivered to every member of the House and Senate, giving them plenty to think about before the November election.
Are you ready for another revolution in 2014? Only you can make it happen.
Are you ready to make WND some easy money to take its mind off the fact that it has forefited all credibility? Only you can make it happen.
MRC's Bozell & Graham Upset Obama's Horning In On Their Media-Bashing Topic: Media Research Center
Tim Graham and Brent Bozell write in their July 2 column:
President Barack Obama treats the press like a spoiled child treats his parents. Despite the pampering, he just keeps complaining about them until he gets his way. As America tires of his inflated sense of self-importance while the economy limps and his foreign policy crumbles, Obama travels around the country complaining that the mean old media aren't complimentary enough.
[...]
He's trying to intimidate the press — especially those who are now elbowing their colleagues to hold him accountable for his growing list of fiascoes. How far the spoiled child has fallen.
Bozell and Graham seem upset that Obama's horning in on their territory. After all, intimidating the press and complaining that the mean old media aren't complimentary enough to their agenda is the raison d'etre for the Media Research Center.
Apparently, only conservatives are allowed to criticize "the media."
WND's Corsi Plagiarizes From Wikipedia Topic: WorldNetDaily
A July 5 WorldNetDaily article by Jerome Corsi (Google cache) contains the following passage:
If that looks familiar, it's because Corsi copied it pretty much word-for-word from the Wikipedia entry for CinemaScore:
The current version of Corsi's article has removed the plagiarized passages and, for some reason, managed to misspell CinemaScore. The article does not inform readers that it has been altered to remove plagiarism.
Between this and the chart-reading fail, one has to wonder how Corsi could continue to write for WND. But Corsi has alwaysdonethis, and one realizes that, unlike with any other journalist, factual accuracy or journalistic integrity is not required to be a WND reporter.
Anticipating the mid-term 2014 elections in November, the Obama administration appears to be manipulating unemployment numbers to mask an economy about to slip back into recession.
The Bureau of Labor Force announcement that unemployment dropped from 6.3 percent in March to 6.1 percent in April was partly attributable to the more than 92 million Americans classified as out of the labor force, reducing the labor participation rate to 62.8 percent, a historic low dropout rate that has remained the same since April.
Adjusting the BLS unemployment number to report what is known as “U-6” – a measure that includes total unemployed, all persons marginally attached to the labor force and the total part-time employed for economic reasons – unemployment in April was 14.6 percent.
Actually, the person manipulating unemployment numbers is Corsi. Here's the BLS chart to which Corsi links to back up his claim -- the bottom row is the U-6 rate:
The 14.6 percent rate Corsi cites is, in fact, an unadjusted rate from June 2013. The adjusted U-6 rate for April -- we have no idea why he's writing about April if the most recent numbers are from June -- is 12.3 percent. And the rate for June is 12.1 percent.
Despite his massive factual error, Corsi goes on to quote some guy who makes up his own unemployment rates attacking the BLS numbers as "virtually 'meaningless.'"
Here's a screenshot of Corsi's false claim, in case he and WND try to change it without telling readers:
WND Fails At Defending Todd Akin Through Attacking Hillary Clinton Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's highly questionable campaign to promote Todd Akin's new book by trying to defend his indefensible comments about "legitimate rape" took a completely expected partisan turn in a June 26 article, in which WND and Akin try to make hay off Hillary Clinton's long-ago defense of a man accused of sexually assaulting a child:
Hillary Clinton apparently didn’t like a challenge from Todd Akin that she “de-legitimized” a 12-year-old rape victim’s claim in defense of a perpetrator she knew to be guilty as charged, as reported in the London Daily Mail Wednesday.
So she fired back in a retort to Politico Thursday through her rapid-response team: “Nobody should take advice from Todd Akin on women’s rights following his opposition to equal pay laws, his opposition to choice and opposition to rape protection laws, and his belief that women’s bodies ‘shut down’ during ‘legitimate rape’ to block unwanted pregnancy,” said communications director Adrienne Elrod.
Akin, a member of the House from Missouri who was attacked for a comment about “legitimate rape” during a 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate, quickly responded in kind.
“It is curious to see that the Clinton camp chose to assassinate my character rather than to address my basic charge,” he told WND. “It is not so much that Hillary Clinton defended a child rapist – lawyers are required sometimes to do those things. But how can Ms. Clinton say she is for women’s rights when she laughed her way through an interview about getting a man she knew to be guilty off the hook for raping a 12-year-old?”
[...]
The interview took place in 1980, and recordings were recently unearthed at the Clinton Library in Little Rock. She conceded in that recording to seizing on loopholes to minimize the sentence of the man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. Heard laughing in the recording, Clinton said the polygraph test her client managed to pass “forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”
Akin tasked the media with making clear that “liberal Democrats like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are the true perpetrators of the ‘war on women.’” He added that by laughing while discussing the case, Clinton “de-legitimized the legitimate claims of the 12-year-old victim,” and that she “slandered the victim to justify her tactics.”
Akin seems to be unfamiliar with the American system of law in which defendants get a defense lawyer. It's absurd -- not to mention un-American -- for Akin to believe that a man does not deserve a legal defense because many people believe he's guilty. Clinton was assigned to the man's case and was required by law to provide the strongest defense she could.
Further, it's clear from the full context of her remarks that Clinton was laughing about the legal process, not getting a criminal off. Akin also provides no evidence that Clinton "slandered" the 12-year-old victim.
The WND article then descends into its usual boilerplate defense of Akin's "legitimate rape" remarks, suggesting that some rape claims are "an excuse to avoid an unwanted pregnancy" because "There have been women who have lied about being raped."
If Akin is automatically presuming that any rape claim is automatically false because some undetermined number of women have lied about it in the past, that's hardly a solid defense of his remarks.
The latest employment numbers were very good news, with 288,000 new jobs created and the unemployment rate falling to 6.1 percent. But what's good news for the economy under a Democratic president is bad news for CNSNews.com, so it had a mission: Bury that good news under a pile of cherry-picked numbers.
And CNS did just that with an onslaught of articles:
None of these articles mentioned the fact that 288,000 jobs were created in June.
Additionally, an article by Penny Starr quoted an officials with the right-wing group Generation Opportunity -- described by Starr only as "a Millinneal think tank" with no mention of its ideological slant -- claiming that “My generation needs more jobs." That article, too, failed to mention that 288,000 jobs were created in June.
Art Moore writes in a July 1 WorldNetDaily 
Sean Long rants in a July 9 Media Research Center 
Joseph Farah is pretty much 
It was only a week ago that fading actress Morgan Brittany 
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey spends his July 9 
Bob Unruh uncritically promotes Ed Klein in a July 7 WorldNetDaily 
Last year, we 
Back in 2009, WorldNetDaily ran a campaign of sending "pink slips" to all members of Congress threatening them by claiming that if they don't support WND's right-wing agenda, they would face unspecified consequences. WND charged its readers $29.95 for the privilege of sending those "pink slips." We 
Tim Graham and Brent Bozell write in their July 2 
WorldNetDaily's 
The latest employment numbers were 
