CNS Finally Happy That More Christian Refugees Than Muslim Refugees Admitted to U.S. Topic: CNSNews.com
During the Obama administration, CNSNews.com and particularly reporter Patrick Goodenough were obsessed with comparing the number of Muslim refugees admitted to the U.S. with the number of Christians admitted. He complained a lot about the number of Muslims being admitted while only occasionally conceding that the reason the numbers of Christians were so low is because they tended to not use the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees camps from which he pulled his numbers as reprted to the State Department. Goodenough and CNS also had trouble admitting that Muslim refugees in Syria were fleeing religious persecution just like Christian refugees were.
But now, under the Trump administration, Goodenough has the numbers he likes, as stated in a Nov. 6 article:
The first month of the new fiscal year saw 1,834 refugees admitted to the United States, more than three-quarters of them Christians, as agencies involved in resettlement began operating under the lowest refugee admission cap set by an administration since the Refugee Act was enacted in 1980.
Despite the 30,000 ceiling set for fiscal year 2019 – down from 45,000 in FY 2018 and 85,000 two years earlier – more refugees were admitted during October than during the same month last year (1,248), although significantly fewer than the numbers admitted in October 2016 (9,945) and October 2015 (5,348).
Of the 1,834 newcomers, 1,425 (77.7 percent) were Christians of various denominations, and 362 (19.7 percent) were Muslims (including Sunnis, Shi’ites and Ahmadis.) Ahmadi beliefs are deemed heretical by many mainstream Muslim clerics and outlawed in the criminal code of Pakistan – the country of origin of the 15 Ahmadi refugees admitted in October.
Rounding out the October refugee admissions were 47 non-Christian and non-Muslim refugees, including 17 Buddhists, five animists, four Hindus, three Jews, and several others who gave their religious affiliation as “other” or “none,” according to State Department Refugee Processing Center data.
Goodenough did not explain why he thought the number of Christian refugees increased while the number of Muslims declined, though you'd think that the anti-Muslim leanings of the Trump administration would have played a big role in that.
These body-count articles are silly and serve only to serve CNS' political agenda -- anti-Obama and anti-Muslim a few years back, pro-Trump and pro-Christian now.
CNS Presents WH's Doctored Video To Justify Acosta's Suspension, Lets Trump Lie About It Topic: CNSNews.com
Needless to say, the folks at the Jim Acosta-hating Media Research Center couldn't have been happier that the White House suspended Acosta's "hard pass" for White House access, and that also goes for the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com. A Nov. 7 blog post by Craig Bannister cheered Acosta's pass suspension, adding that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders "tweeted that the White House stands by its decision to suspend Acosta and invited Americans to watch the video of the incident she embedded in her post," and embedding the Sanders tweet containing the video in his post.
Just one problem: the video was doctored. A video expert enlisted by the Associated Press documented how the video tweeted out by Sanders had frames speeded up to make Acosta's action in trying to keep a White House intern from taking the microphone from him while he was asking President Trump a question look more aggressive than it was in reality, while other frames were slowed down to make the video's run time the same as an unaltered video. The doctored video apparently came from a reporter for far-right conspiradcy site Infowars. Heck, even one of CNS' favorite conservatives, Ben Shapiro, called out Sanders for sending out a doctored video.
Despite all that, Bannister's post was never updated to reflect the controversy over the video.
Two days later, an article by Melanie Arter addressed the issue not by admitting the clear, unambiguous evidence that the video was doctored, but by starting out in stenography mode, giving Trump three paragraphs to falsely rant that the video wasn't doctored:
President Donald Trump called out the media for reporting that a video that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders released of a White House intern trying to take the microphone away from CNN’s Jim Acosta at Monday’s White House press conference was doctored.
When asked why Sanders “shared a doctored video of the incident in the East Room,” Trump said, “The taped video of Acosta? What are you talking about? Nobody manipulated it. Give me a break. See that’s just dishonest reporting. All that is is a close-up.”
“They showed it close-up, and he was not nice to that young woman. I don’t hold him for that, because it wasn’t overly, you know, horrible, but all that was-- When you say doctor, you’re a dishonest guy, because it wasn’t doctored. They gave a close-up view. That’s not doctoring,” the president said.
Even though the facts are not on Trump's side, Arter chose instead to present the story as a he said-she said, following Trump's rant with a statement that "The Washington Post reported Thursday that Sanders shared a video 'that appeared to have been altered' to make Acosta’s actions 'ook more aggressive toward a White House intern,'" with two additional paragraphs from the Post article.
Giving falsehoods the same credulity as the truth without admitting that the falsehoods are, in fact, false is the very defition of false balance. That's what you do when you're a stenographer and not a reporter.
Arter concluded her article with some uncritical dissembling from Sanders on the doctored video:
After the media questioned the reasoning behind the White House’s decision, Sanders issued a statement Thursday addressing reports that the video she shared was doctored.
“The question is: did the reporter make contact or not? The video is clear, he did. We stand by our statement,” she said.
Arter did not mention that the question was actually about the doctored video, nor did she point out that Sanders refused to answer the question that was asked. She's a stenographer, after all.
CNS Gushed Over Trump's Final Pre-Election Rally, Pre-Spins Election Results Topic: CNSNews.com
On the day or two before the midterm elections, CNSNews.com was in full pro-Trump spin mode -- so much so, in fact, that it tried to pre-spin election results it was basically admitting were not going to go well for President Trump and the Republicans.
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey used a Nov. 5 article to discount any House seats that Republicans would lose because Democratic presidents lost more:
In the post-World War II era, Presidents Barack Obama, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton saw the three biggest midterm election losses for their party in the House of Representatives, according to historical data published by the Clerk of the House.
In 2010, when Obama was in his first term and had signed the Obamacare law, the Democrats lost a net of 63 House seats. In 1946, after Truman had succeeded the late Franklin Roosevelt (who died in April 1945) and real GDP was declining by 11.6 percent, the Democrats lost 55 seats. In 1994, when Clinton was in his first term in which his signature proposal was Hillarycare (a “universal healthcare plan"), the Democrats lost 54 seats.
On Nov. 6, highly biased CNS reporter Susan Jones gushed over one of Trump's final pre-electon rallies by giddily (and, of course, uncritically) reciting Rush Limbaugh's introductory speech:
Massive crowds and surging energy greeted President Donald Trump at his final midterm campaign rally Monday night in Cape Girardeau, Missouri -- home town of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who introduced the president.
In his warm-up-the-crowd remarks, Limbaugh reminded everyone that Democrats call all of them "divisive."
"Divisive?" he asked. "The Democrats haven't even accepted they lost the election in 2016. That's what this is all about! It's serious stuff! All of this," he said.
[...]
He also addressed the size and the enthusiasm of the crowds that have attended Trump's rallies around the nation:
"These rallies, I have to tell you, they are the envy of official Washington. You realize there isn't a single elected official in either party who could do what this is tonight. Other than Donald Trump, there's no one. No one! And they're jealous. They are envious. This isn't supposed to happen. You people are supposed to love them, not Trump.
"And so guess what? They want to get in on it. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their national stadium tour. Have you seen Obama? He's been stumping down in Florida where I live. He's drawing crowds of a thousand people, two thousand people. Joe Biden can't fill a phone booth because he's looking for someone to punch out," Limbaugh joked.
Yes, Jones thought Limbaugh's partisan rant warranted a "news" article.
Jones gushed further in a second article as she tried to portray the crowd at the rally, and Trump himself, as compassionate over an attendee with a health emergency:
The enormous, enthusiastic crowd fell suddenly silent Monday night at Trump's final campaign rally in Cape Girardeau, Mo., when one of the attendees collapsed.
Trump, looking out from the podium, asked, "Is there a doctor in the house, please? Doctor?"
"Doctor, take your time," he urged, as medics and security made their way through the full house.
Three-and-a-half minutes later, Trump urged his supporters, "Say a little prayer." And he stepped away from the podium, as heads bowed and eyes closed.
The somber president again urged doctors to "take your time."
Almost seven minutes elapsed, when voices swelled into a stanza of "Amazing Grace." Everyone joined in.
The woman who collapsed was conscious as she was wheeled out of the arena moments later, the crowd cheering for her.
Trump returned to the podium:
"That was really something,” he said. “I want to just thank everybody for the way you behaved. That was beautiful. And at the end -- was beautiful. ‘Amazing Grace,’ thank you very much. That was beautiful. Hopefully, she'll be okay. Hopefully -- she'll be okay.”
This was also a "news" article. Given that CNS is basically pro-Trump state media these days, that's not a surprise.
CNS Echoes Trump's Call To End Birthright Citizenship Topic: CNSNews.com
President Trump says "jump," and CNSNews.com asks, "How high?" That's pretty much CNS' editorial agenda these days -- support pretty much anything Trump proposes.
When the Trump administration floated the idea of trying to end birthright citizenship -- in which any person born on American soil is officially a U.S. citizen, CNS knew it had to bolster the legal case for it. And bolster it did with a barrage of opinion pieces.
An Oct. 30 column by the Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky insisted that the long-established legal case for birthright citizenship is based on a "misunderstdanding" of the 14th Amendment.
The same day, CNS published a column by conservative law professor Lino Graglia, who asserted that "A policy of granting birthright citizenship to children born here of illegal aliens is not merely unreasonable and harmful, but irrational and self-contradictory, a matter of both punishing and rewarding the same conduct."
The next day, Craig Bannister published a "flashback" from a 1993 speech by Democratic then-Sen. Harry Reid cvlaiming that "no sane country" would permit birthright citizenship. It's not until the final paragraph that Bannister gets around to noting that Reid has repudiated his remarks a few years, citing a Fox News article to blame that repudiation on "union pressure."
Bannister also wrote another blog post citing the author of the 14th Amendment, Sen. Jacob Howard, stating that the amendment "“settles the great question” and “removes all doubt” about citizenship.
CNS then called on its favorite right-wing radio ranter, Mark Levin, promoting the alleged constitutional expert's claim that "Nobody really knows how birthright citizenship was instituted." Levin was able to double-dip with an item complaining that House Speaker Paul Ryan is "utterly wrong" and "has no idea what he's talking about" in criticizing Trump's call to end birthright citizenship.
On Nov. 1, von Spakovsky popped up again to declare that "the president is correct when he says that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution does not require universal birthright citizenship" and that "Contrary to popular belief, the 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all people born in the U.S. are citizens." Levin popped up again as well to rant that he was challenging "practicing lawyers or former federal this or former that ... to show me the evidence in the 1860s that supports your position that birthright citizenship was enshrined in the 14th Amendment."
A Nov. 2 syndicated column by anti-immigrant writer Pat Buchanan asserted that "in challenging birthright citizenship, Trump has some constitutional history on his side."
Von Spakovsky showed up once more with a Nov. 5 column pushing the case that Trump can end birthright citizenship with an executive order.
The "news" side of CNS (which is that pretty much in name only) wasn't much more balanced. Bannister wrote a blog post cheering Sen. Lindsey Graham for saying that he was glad Trump was addressing the "absurd policy of birthright citizenship."
And an Oct. 31 item credited only to "CNSNews.com Staff" spent more space attacking Nancy Pelosi forsaying that Trump does not have the power to alter the Constitution over birthright citizenship then it did quoting her saying that.
CNS clearly knows how to jump very high at Trump's request.
CNS Brings In Pro-Trump Rabbi To Praise Trump's Response to Synogogue Shooting Topic: CNSNews.com
We've highlighted how CNSNews.com has a thing for rloopy, abidly anti-Obama and pro-Trump rabbi Aryeh Spero. An Oct. 29 CNS blog post by Michael Morris lets Spero play Trump suck-up by ostentatiously praising President Trump's response to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting:
Spokesman for the National Conference on Jewish Affairs (NCJA) lauded President Donald Trump’s heartfelt response and concern for Pittsburgh’s Jewish community yesterday, saying on behalf of the NCJA, “We commend President Trump for his heartfelt expressions of grief.”
“We commend President Trump for his heartfelt expressions of grief to Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, as well as to all American Jews regarding the slaughter at the Etz Chayim Synagogue on Saturday in Squirrel Hill,” stated Rabbi Aryeh Spero in a Facebook post. “It is quite obvious that the President was deeply distressed by the events Saturday and has made an upcoming priority in his schedule to go to Pittsburgh to be with the victims.”
[...]
Rabbi Aryeh Spero continued later in his Facebook post:
“We know that President Trump feels this tragedy very personally because he himself has attended synagogues and Jewish rituals as a father and grandfather to a Jewish daughter and grandchildren. The President, as did his late father, Fred, has had a history of supporting Jewish synagogues and causes, and the President continually demonstrates his love of the Jewish People and Israel. Safety for Jews around the world is of prime concern for Mr. Trump.”
We know llittle about this group, but any reputation the NCJA has of a legitimate spokesman for Jews in America is sullied by the presence of Spero, who appears to be placing political concerns before religion. Last year, presumably through Spero, the NCJA sucked up to Trumpa again by praising Trump for his allegedly "principled decision" to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, further gushing: "We thank President Trump for acting on the facts regarding the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, and for his resoluteness and courageous leadership in protecting the safety and security of the American People."
The presence on the group's website of an article from the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute complaining about "persecution of Christians" (!) is another sign that the group's true agenda is politics instead of Jewry.
Weirdly, CNS takes Spero's statement from his personal Facebook page -- not from any NCJA website -- upon which Spero has made only three posts this year, before which his most recent post was January 2014.
There were good numbers again in October's employment figures, and you know what that means: more pro-Trump rah-rah at CNSNews.com. The lead article by Susan Jones laid the rah-rah on thick, with an added pre-midterm boost:
The economy is the second most important issue for registered voters as the midterm election nears, a new Gallup Poll says. And there was very good economic news on Friday, as the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics rolled out the October employment report -- the final one before next week's midterm election.
The number of employed Americans has never been higher. The 156,562,000 Americans employed in October is the twefth record set under President Donald Trump.
In October, the number of employed men age 20 and up -- 80,405,000 -- set the 12th record since Trump took office; and likewise, for the 12th time, the number of employed women age 20 and up set a record, reaching 70,909,000 in October.
The unemployment rate held at 3.7 percent, the same as September, which is the lowest it's been in decades -- since the end of 1969. And the Hispanic unemployment rate, 4.4 percent, has never been lower.
We also got the usual item on manufacturing jobs from editor in chief Terry Jeffrey since those increased -- though not his usual item on governement jobs, presumably because the BLS stated there was "little change" from the previous month, which means Jeffrey couldn't tout how many jobs Trump cut.
Jones' mention of the Hispanic unemployment rate got its own full item from Craig Bannister. A few days later, an MRC Latino post by Kathleen Krumhansl and Ken Oliver complained that news reports on Univision and Telemundo "pointedly neglected to include the third record-low in Hispanic unemployment reached under the Trump administration." That synergystic activism, of course, is the sole reason why CNS bothers to highlight the Hispanic unemployment rate in the first place.
NEW ARTICLE: The Kavanaugh Playbook At CNS Topic: CNSNews.com
Like its Media Research Center parent, CNSNews.com had marching orders to push through Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination and attack his accusers. Read more >>
CNS' Chapman Rants About 'Liberal Media' To Deflect From Trump's Heated Rhetoric Topic: CNSNews.com
We've documented how CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman is, at heart, a hard-right polemicist, and the commentary he chooses to publish -- as well as his own commentary, which leans hard in the hating-gays direction -- reflects that.
As befits a Media Research Center employee, Chapman reflexively attacks the "liberal media" for being biased despite running one of the most biased "news" organizations on the planet. His Oct. 29 blog post was a desperate bit of whataboutism designed to take the heat of President Trump's rhetoric in the wake of a series of pipe bombs sent to promient Democrats and actual news organizations by a Trump enthusiast and a massacre perpetrated by a man who hated a Jewish group for bringing in refugees in an echo of Trump's immigration policy:
The liberal media in America -- CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, New York Times, most newspapers -- complain because President Donald Trump often calls them "fake news" and "the enemy of the people." They also charge that Trump's criticism fuels an uncivil atmosphere that sparks violence, e.g., they are now blaming Trump's rhetoric for the mail bomber and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
But the liberal media do not view their own extremist, hyperbolic "news reporting" and commentary as contributing to America's political incivility, even though their diction is far more militant, repulsive, and noxious than anything Trump has said about the press.
For instance, these liberal media prima donnas are comfortable in describing the president of the United States as a sociopath, a disturbed person, a traitor, white nationalist, white supremacist, white bigot, racist, sinister, destructive virus, treasonous, straight out of Munich 1928, Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Nazi, evil, mentally unfit, dictatorship, Hitler, unfit to be human, domestic terrorist, psychologically troubled, hate monger, imperial wizard, neo-Nazi, Axis Power, unfit, a national security threat, piece of sh*t, killer, out of control, domestic terror group, a menace, nuts, dictator, mentally unstable, Putin's c**k holster, madman, giant a**hole, bigot-in-chief, and racist-in-residence.
What follows is a long list of things Chapman copied-and-pasted from his MRC cohorts down the hall of things Trump has apprently been called. They're out of context, of course, since that would take too much work to copy and paste, and most are from commentators offering an opinion, not reporters claiming to be objective. And he certainly would never admit that there's a factual basis to the name-calling.
Funny, we don't recall Chapman ever complaining about vile things conservatives have said about Democratic presidents and politicians -- no mention of Hank Williams Jr. likening President Obama to Hitler, no mention of Ted Nugent calling Obama a "subhuman mongrel" and a "chimpanzee" and telling him to "suck on my machine gun" (and calling Hillary Clinton a "worthless bitch") -- and certainly no mention of his boss, Brent Bozell, calling Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead."
Chapman is being wildly and ridiculously hypocritical by attacking "liberal media" criticism of Trump whiled condoning the smear from the "media prima donnas" on his own side. But then, hypocrisy is the MRC way.
CNS Gives Mark Levin's Hypocrisy A Pass Because Of Course It Would Topic: CNSNews.com
Like it has more than 100 times this year already, CNSNews.com promoted a rant by right-wing radio host Mark Levin on Oct. 25. This time, Levin was ranting about hateful rhetoric:
Do the media in this country understand that they are leading the charge on the heated and hateful rhetoric? Do you know, yesterday alone, Donald Trump – I counted four – four times was compared to Adolf Hitler on MSNBC and CNN? Six times, he was called a racist.
And yet they – they want to know if Donald Trump is responsible for the heated and hateful and divisive rhetoric that’s going on. Did Donald Trump compare somebody to Adolf Hitler? And he’s called a racist all the time.
Because it only does stenography when it comes to Levin, CNS will never report that Levin is a complete hypocrite. The Daily Beast sums it up:
In late 2013, Levin—whose shouty, nasaly radio voice has an obnoxious cartoon character—went on a tear on his show comparing supporters of the Affordable Care Act to Nazi “Brownshirts.”
In June 2015, Levin yelled about Obama being a “low-life” and a “racist” and a “hater” for using “the N-word.” (Levin was not impressed by the fact that Obama is black, or that then president was using the word in a frank conversation about racism.)
“So, Obama has an affinity for Islam far more than Christianity or Judaism, no question about it,” Levin alleged on his radio show two years ago, adding that Obama seeks to “destroy Israel.”
In November 2014, Levin warned the American people during a Fox News hit about Obama going “full Mussolini” after the midterm elections.
The year before that, Levin was all about how “the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government,” and that President Obama, though “not a formal member,” was a “sympathizer.”
So, basically Levin’s position for the eight-year duration of the Obama administration was that Barack Hussein Obama was constantly putting the country in Nazi-Islamist danger.
Meanwhile, FAIR found an instance in which Levin claimed that Obama was “really into these big German-like events that he creates in this country.”
Remember, Levin is a close buddy of Brent Bozell, whose Media Research Center runs CNS, and Levin and the MRC have had (and may still have) a cross-promotion agreement.
So Levin gets a pass, just like the misogynous, violent right-winger Gavin McInnes gets one because he has a show on Levin's CRTV.
CNS Managing Editor Downplays Anti-Semitism to Justify Attacks on Soros Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com managing editor does a weird thing in an Oct. 30 blog post: he downplays anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros by claiming that the Israeli government hates him too:
Although some pundits, mostly on the left, have denounced criticism of left-wing billionaire George Soros as anti-Semitic, it is important to note that Israel has officially stated that criticism of Soros is legitimate because he "continuously" seeks to undermine the Israeli government and he funds organizations "that defame the Jewish state."
These same Soros-funded groups also seek to prevent Israel from defending itself, according to the Israeli government.
Chapman offered no substantiation of those "official" charges from Israel. He also did not concede that at least some attacks on Soros are very much anti-Semitic, specifically the oft-repeated false right-wing slur that a teenage Soros was a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. (Not to mention the anti-Semitic imagery Chapman's employer, the Media Reserach Center, has used to portray Soros as a "puppet master").
Chapman then recounts an incident in which "Israel's ambassador to Hungary criticized a government-funded billboard campaign that showed a photo of Soros and stated, 'Let's not allow Soros to have the last laugh.'" which was "deemed anti-Semitic by some organizations, including the Soros-backed Human Rights Watch," followed by Israeli officials backtracking by insisting that "In no way was the statement meant to delegitimize criticism of George Soros."
Chapman then touted a "letter to the World Jewish Congress" in which "Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban wrote that the Open Society Foundation and Soros 'bear personal responsibility for the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe. They have brought people to Europe -- among migrants -- whose political and religious views have dramatically increased the vulnerability of our Jewish communities.'" This was followed by noting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "has praised Hungary's Orban as a 'true friend of Israel,' a leader who has fought against anti-Semitism and supported the Jewish state."
But Chapman didn't mention that the Voice of America article from which he sourced Netanyahu's praise of Israel also pointed out that "Orban evoked anti-Semitic language in denouncing Soros, saying that Hungary's enemies 'do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs,'" remarks that met with "global Jewish condemnation." Voice of America also cited one member of an Israeli opposition party as stating that ""Netanyahu has a thing with anti-Semitic leaders around the world, from Hungary and Poland, to the head of the Philippines, (Rodrigo) Duterte, who compared himself to Hitler, and instead of suffering condemnation, was invited as well for a state visit with the prime minister of Israel."
You might recall that CNS justloves the right-wing authoritarian Orban, whitewashing him as a "populist" who's merely trying to "reintroduce the Judeo-Christian ethic into a secularized Europe."
CNS Privileges Trump's Lie About Pre-Existing Conditions Topic: CNSNews.com
Craig Bannister was in full Trump stenography mode in an Oct. 18 CNSNews.com blog post:
President Donald Trump is slamming claims by Democrats like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that Republicans want to eliminate health care coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
Trump promised that, not only does he totally support pre-existing condition coverage, but all other Republicans do, too – or, they will, when he gets through with them:
“All Republicans support people with pre-existing conditions, and if they don’t, they will after I speak to them. I am in total support. Also, Democrats will destroy your Medicare, and I will keep it healthy and well.”
In fact, Republicans do want to eliminate health care coverage for those with pre-existing conditions -- something Bannister refused to report.
The biggest example of this is the lawsuit pushed by attorneys general in 20 states, all of them Republican, aimed at abolishing Obamacare -- thus also abolishing coverage for those with pre-existing conditions. Congressional Republicans also voted down a measure to elimiate short-term health plans that don't cover pre-existing conditions.
Further, Trump's own actions -- including reufsing to let Justice Department defend against the GOP attorneys general's lawsuit and the fact that one of the things he ran on was abolishing Obamacare -- show he's not really serious about preserving pre-existing condition coverage.
In other words, Trump is lying. And Bannister won't tell you he's lying.
When it comes to publishing lies and bogus claims, Bannister is having a verybad month. Poor guy.
CNS Runs With Bogus Attack on Pelosi Topic: CNSNews.com
Craig Bannister solemnly intones in an Oct. 18 CNSNews.com blog post:
“So be it,” House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared regarding the possibility of her political opponents suffering “collateral damage.”
In an onstage interview with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Sunday, Rep. Pelosi took aim at “others who don’t share our view”:
“We owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there is some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it, but it shouldn’t be our original purpose.”
“We have to have total clarity about what we do, when it comes to everything,” Pelosi said, citing causes like abortion rights, gay marriage, immigration and gun control.
Bannister conveniently omits the context of Pelosi's conversation with Krugman -- probably because he wouldn't have a blog post otherwise.
As Wonkette explains, Pelosi and Krugman were discussing climate change and its connection to job creation and prosperity, and Pelosi's reference to "collateral damage" refers to those groups who would suffer as a result of efforts to try to stop global warming, i.e., oil companies.
Bannister also included a video of Pelosi's remarks, which Wonkette identified as deceptively edited because it, like Bannister's post, removes the context.
But reporting Pelosi's remarks accurately and fully in context was apparently too much work for Bannister, who took the lazy way out and decided to smear her instead.
CNS has yet to fix Bannister's misquoting of a reporter to justify President Trump's insult of her, so don't expect it to rush to fix this.
CNS Portrays Trump Tax Cuts As Budget-Buster As Partisan Debate Rather Than Actual Fact Topic: CNSNews.com
Last week, we detailed how CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey fretted about the rising federal budget deficit and debt while failing to mention the fact that a Republican-promoted, Trump-signed tax cut played a big role in increasing the deficit this year.
This was followed by an Oct. 17 article by Susan Jones that was only slightly less dishonest in approaching the subject. Jones uncritically let Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spread the blame for the deficits, even though it's his party that's currently in control of the White House and Congress:
The total national debt increased by more than a trillion dollars in Fiscal 2018, reaching $21.5 trillion at the end of September; and the FY '18 budget deficit was almost $779 billion.
Although the situation is "very disturbing," it cannot be blamed on Republicans alone, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Bloomberg News on Tuesday:
It's driven by the three big entitlement programs that are very popular – Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. That's 70 percent of what we spend every year. The subject we were just discussing, the funding of the government, is about 30 percent of what we spend.
There's been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of those programs. Hopefully, at some point here, we'll get serious about this. We haven't been yet.
McConnell said the opportunity for entitlement reform existed during the Obama years, when for six of those years, Republicans controlled either one or both chambers of Congress.
"I talked to President Obama about it a number of times," McConnell said. "It would have been the perfect time to do it. Think of Reagan and Tip O'Neill coming together in the early 80s to raise the age for Social Security. It took it out of the political arena and made it possible for it to be successful... unfortunately, it was not achieved."
Democrats blame the Republican tax cuts for ballooning the FY 2018 deficit, and they consistently resist any attempt to trim entitlements.
In fact, there are three main drivers of the current deficit: The Trump tax cut, military spending and entitlement spending.
Also, note how Jones framed the idea that the Trump tax cuts blew a hole in the deficit as a partisan debate by complain that it's what Democrats say rather than an undisputed fact. Well played, Susan.
CNS Editor Compains About Growing Budget Deficit, Censors Trump Tax Cuts That Caused It Topic: CNSNews.com
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey makes some not-so-surprising omissions in a couple of recent articles on the federal budget.
An Oct. 1 article complained that "The federal debt increased by $1,271,158,167,126.72 in fiscal 2018." He went on to complain:
The $1,271,158,167,126.72 in debt accumulated in fiscal 2018 made fiscal 2018 the eighth fiscal year in the last eleven in which the debt increased by at least one trillion dollars.
The $1,271,158,167,126.72 increase in the federal debt was also the sixth largest fiscal-year debt increase in the history of the United States.
The federal government collected a record $1,683,537,000,000 in individual income taxes in fiscal 2018 (October 2017 through September 2018), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
However, the federal government also ran a deficit of $778,996,000,000 during the fiscal year, according to the statement.
[...]
Despite the record amount collected in individual income taxes in fiscal 2018, overall real federal tax revenues in fiscal 2018 were lower than in any of the previous three years. In fiscal 2018, total tax collections equaled $3,328,745,000,000, according to the Treasury statement. That was less than the $3,446,613,230,000 (in constant September 2018 dollars) that the Treasury collected in fiscal 2015; less than the $3,415,674,450,000 (in constant September 2018 dollars) collected in fiscal 2016; and less than the $3,390,373,210,000 (in constant September 2018 dollars) collected in fiscal 2017.
While the federal government was collecting more income taxes from individuals in fiscal 2018, it was collecting less from corporations. Total corporation income tax collections in fiscal 2018 were $204,733,000,000. In fiscal 2017, they were $303,811,700,000 (in constant September 2018 dollars). In fiscal 2016, they were $313,233,700,000 (in constant September 2018 dollars); and in fiscal 2015, they were $364,738,790,000 (in constant September 2018 dollars).
However, two words are missing from each of those articles: Trump and Republicans. The Republican-controlled Congress passed, and President Trump signed, a tax cut bill earlier this yea, which cut government revenue, presumably cut the amount in taxes the government collected from corporations that Jeffrey laments and, yes, blew up the deficit.
By contrast, just like with unemployment numbers, Jeffrey had no problem calling out by name when writing about federal deficits during his administration. For instance:
During the Obama administration, CNSNews.com and particularly reporter Patrick Goodenough were obsessed with comparing the number of Muslim refugees admitted to the U.S. with the number of Christians admitted. He complained a lot about the number of Muslims being admitted while only occasionally conceding that the reason the numbers of Christians were so low is because they tended to not use the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees camps from which he pulled his numbers as reprted to the State Department. Goodenough and CNS also had trouble admitting that Muslim refugees in Syria were fleeing religious persecution just like Christian refugees were.
Needless to say, the folks at the Jim Acosta-hating Media Research Center couldn't have been happier that the White House suspended Acosta's "hard pass" for White House access, and that also goes for the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com. A Nov. 7 
It's time to tally up how many times CNSNews.com did stenography for its favorite sources in October.
On the day or two before the midterm elections, CNSNews.com was in full pro-Trump spin mode -- so much so, in fact, that it tried to pre-spin election results it was basically admitting were not going to go well for President Trump and the Republicans.
President Trump says "jump," and CNSNews.com asks, "How high?" That's pretty much CNS' editorial agenda these days -- support pretty much anything Trump proposes.
We've highlighted how CNSNews.com has a thing for rloopy, abidly 
There were good numbers again in October's employment figures, and you know what that means: more pro-Trump rah-rah at CNSNews.com. The 
We've 
Like it has 
CNSNews.com managing editor does a weird thing in an Oct. 30 
Craig Bannister was in full Trump stenography mode in an Oct. 18 CNSNews.com 
Craig Bannister solemnly intones in an Oct. 18 CNSNews.com 
Last week, we 
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey makes some not-so-surprising omissions in a couple of recent articles on the federal budget.
