Like Tiger Woods, President Barack Obama arrived Friday for the finale of the Copenhagen climate gathering eager to give cold cash to get hot love.

-- Lowell Ponte, Dec. 18 Newsmax column

Posted by Terry K. at 12:09 PM EST

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A Dec. 18 NewsBusters post by Scott Whitlock bashes Stephen King for liking thte show "Breaking Bad" for "examining the American dream: shiny and addictive on top, hollow at the core. And dark. Very dark." Whitlock then sneers: "Hasn’t King made millions of dollars off the "hollow" American dream?"

But then Whitlock adds: "In a unique choice, he also praised Rachel Maddow as 'insightful' and 'pretty in a no-nonsense way.'"

Why is a "unique choice" to call Maddow pretty? Alas, Whitlock fails to elaborate. But the commenters on Whitlock's post are more than happy to do so:

• Based on his spectacles and assesment of Ms. Maddow it is also clear that he is myopic.
• King's writing shows a taste that favors the macabre, and the guy hails from Maine.  No surprise, then, that he thinks MadSow is pretty and leans to the Left.
• Yes, she would fit perfectly into one of your novels.
• I'm quite certain that Maddow's makeup selection...is patterned on Stephen King's Pennywise character from "It".
• I find it odd that he thinks a man is "pretty in an on nonsense kind of way".
• Can someone post a photo of Maddow next to one of King?  I think it will be obvious why he thinks his clone is pretty.
• Rachel Maddow looks a lot like a guy I knew in high school -- a good friend of mine, actually. She's not a bad-looking guy.
• Oh come on he is a lot prettier than Madcow is

You stay classy, NewsBusters folks.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:56 AM EST

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Is it OK for a reviewer to give away the ending of a movie if he doesn't like it?

That seems to be what Ted Baehr believes. And Baehr really, really does not like "Avatar," the new James Cameron movie. But Baehr's giving away the plot pales in comparison to the derision he heaps upon the movie.

In his Dec. 15 WorldNetDaily review, Baehr writes:

In the story, a group of nature-worshipping aliens triumph over the greedy, evil human corporations that want to destroy their planet. The aliens eventually send the humans back to a dying earth to die. How marvelous!

If you think this sounds as if Al Gore wrote the script for "Avatar," not James Cameron, you may be right. This theme of kill all the humans, especially the pro-American, capitalist humans, has long been an underlying message of the left-wing, environmentalist movement, beginning with Rachel Carson's hysterical plea to ban DDT, even though, to this day, there is no evidence that DDT is harmful to humans or the environment, and even though the use of DDT can save millions of human lives from the deadly disease of malaria.

Not only does Baehr give away the end of the movie, he's wrong about DDT. As we've previously noted, DDT has in fact been found to cause cancer, endocrine disruption, adversely affect the immune system; it also persists in the environment and affects the food chain. It is, however, more effective than other, more safe mosquito eradication treatments, so it's returning in a limited way in developing countries.

But never mind the factual errors; Baehr is off to the races since "Avatar" offends his delicate far-right senibilities:

For hundreds of years, the pagan, communist ideas expressed in this movie circulated among a threadbare group of outcasts with dirty fingernails and greasy hair, who shared their obtuse, occult ideas amongst themselves with manic, alienated glee. Now, James Cameron has made these insane views the major bulwark of a very spectacular movie, but the spectacle does not make these Neo-Marxist views any more coherent, rational or uplifting.

Baehr concludes: "What the people in the movie need to deliver them from their greed and the aliens in the movie need to deliver them from their severe group think is the loving salvation available only through the true God, Jesus Christ."

Baehr's problem is that he's not reviewing the movie that was made; he's complaining that Cameron didn't make the movie he wanted to see. That's not how reviewing works -- but Baehr is too busy cramming his bias down the throats of his readers to notice.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:07 AM EST

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A Dec. 18 NewsBusters post by Scott Whitlock complained that ABC's "Good Morning America" played video of "Senator Al Franken’s disrespectful snub of Joe Lieberman during a health care debate" by not granting him more than the alloted time to speak, but "never once mentioned what happened," which included John McCain coming "to the defense of [his] longtime friend."

But Whitlock doesn't mention that McCain wasn't telling the truth in his defense. Whitlock noted only McCain's statement that "I’ve been around for 20 some years, first time I’ve ever seen a member denied an extra minute or two to finish his remarks...I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen a member denied an extra minute or so, as the chair just did."

In fact, in a 2002 debate on giving President Bush the power to use force against Iraq, McCain objected to granting Democrats Mark Dayton and Robert Byrd more time to finish their remarks. He eventually acquiesed, then said "From now on, I will be adhering strictly to the rules" by holding speakers to their allotted time -- which is exactly what Franken was doing by not giving Lieberman more time.

Posted by Terry K. at 5:06 PM EST

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Sometimes, when I'm daydreaming about what hell must be like, I envision a place where every day you wake up and have to go work for someone like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, nasty sourpusses who think that their every whim should be immediately pandered to and who regard themselves as God, but with a bigger expense account, a larger staff and a better pension plan.

In short, Pelosi, Frank and Reid and their congressional cronies, could find true happiness working at a TV network, a movie studio or a theatrical agency. Perhaps you think I'm making this up, but I'm not. Liberal politicians are doing their best to shove Obamacare down our throats, pretending it's manna from heaven, but you may have noticed that they haven't the slightest intention of leaving their own medical care up to a lottery system. And can you really blame them? Do you think Pelosi wants a bunch of strangers deciding if she can get another dozen face lifts? You think Robert Byrd wants to leave it up to a death panel to determine if it's time to put the old Ku Kluxer on an ice floe?

You could call them hypocrites, but I call them Hollywood hopefuls. They'd fit right in. This is the town, after all, where people are still whining over the fact that a handful of mediocre actors and hack writers were blacklisted 60 years ago because they were, for the most part, unrepentant Communists whose allegiance was to the evil Soviet Union. But these same people think nothing of blacklisting writers and directors who have done nothing worse than made the fatal mistake of turning 50.

-- Burt Prelutsky, Dec. 18 WorldNetDaily column

Posted by Terry K. at 11:35 AM EST

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For something that has never been proven to be true, WorldNetDaily has sure jumped on the bandwagon of promoting the never-verified claim that the Obama administration threatened to shut down Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base if Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson didn't vote for health care reform.

A Dec. 16 WND article by Joe Kovacs treated the rumor as fact. While Kovacs noted that "Both the White House and Nelson are denying any such threat ever existed," he ignored evidence that the instigator of the claim, the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, is backtracking on it. As Media Matters has noted, on the Dec. 16 edition of Glenn Beck's TV show -- which aired before Kovac's article was posted -- Goldfarb retracted his earlier claim that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was behind the purported threat.

WND has also hidden other doubts about the claim, even by its own reporters. In a Dec. 17 interview with Radio America's Greg Corombos,  Republican Sen. Kit Bond said the claim was a "rumor" that "we haven't confirmed." Yet the headline linking to the interview from WND's front page was a separate Bond quote, "Total blackmail – the worst kind of Chicago politics." Nothing was highlighted regarding Bond's statement about the unverified nature of the rumor.

As if to demonstrate further that WND cares nothing about reporting facts if they don't conflict with its anti-Obama hate campaign -- er, "worldview," Kovacs goes on to note that "Despite the denials, some WND readers have expressed outrage if a threat were indeed made."

Who cares what anybody has to say about a rumor? WorldNetDaily does -- if it can be used to smear Obama.

That's how much it hates Obama. That's the height of irresponsible journalism. But then, irresponsible journalism is the WND way.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:18 AM EST

Updated: Friday, December 18, 2009 12:19 AM EST

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Media Matters catches NewsBusters' Lachlan Markay inadvertently telling the truth -- that according to some people, "every aberration in weather patterns is taken as evidence that there is something seriously wrong with the climate, and humans are to blame."

The problem there, of course, is that's exactly what Markay's fellow NewsBusters do, by regularly portraying pretty much every cold snap and snowfall as evidence that there isn't global warming.

Posted by Terry K. at 8:56 PM EST

Updated: Thursday, December 17, 2009 8:57 PM EST

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Earlier this year, we detailed how CNSNews.com repeatedly and baselessly suggested that the Obama administration demanded that an "IHS" symbol (a monogram derived from the Greek letters for Jesus) be covered during a visit by Obama to Georgetown University, despite the utter lack of evidence that there was ever a specific demand from anyone to do so.

Months later, CNS is still pushing that bogus story. A Dec. 17 article by Nicholas Ballasy and Edwin Mora claims that, in purported contrast to Obama's visit to Georgetown, "Obama has spoken at a number of venues while standing or sitting in front of other prominently displayed symbols and monograms that were not covered up and that thus received national exposure and publicity thanks to the president. These have included the monogram for the American Medical Association (AMA), the monogram for the AARP, and the symbol of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s most prominent gay rights organization."

Unmentioned by Ballasy and Mora: It can be presumed that speeches at which the AMA and AARP logos were displayed likely had something to do with the content of the speech. Obama's speech at Georgetown, however, was about the economy, which does not dovetail with religious symbols.

As before, Ballasy and Mora are still suggesting that the Obama administration specifically demanded that the IHS be covered up -- and again, no evidence is presented to support the claim.

This obsession with a manufactured slight shows just how desperate Terry Jeffrey and CNS are to smear Obama.

UPDATE: Indeed, Obama's speech at Georgetown was a policy speech on the economy, not targeted directly to a Georgetown or religious audience.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:26 PM EST

Updated: Friday, December 18, 2009 9:48 AM EST

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Ronald Kessler has long been obsessed with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, repeatedly using him as a way to attack Barack Obama, even as he has hidden Obama's criticism of Wright's more inflammatory remarks.

Kessler's obsession surfaces yet again in a Dec. 16 Newsmax column, in which he insists that, "In my view, Obama’s 20-year association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. told us everything we needed to know about how he would govern."

So obsessed with Wright is Kessler that he regales how he tried to shop the articles he wrote about Wright for Newsmax in early 2008:

As chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax, I began doing stories about Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ and its so-called Black Value System on Jan. 7, 2008, with “Barack Obama’s Racist Church.” The stories continued until mid-March, when the mainstream media finally began exposing Wright and his connection to Obama.

Beginning with the first story, I sent the Newsmax pieces and later a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on the subject to key reporters, editors, and television producers at major news organizations. A reporter for one of the networks told me she could never pursue such a story.

“The media love Obama,” she said. “If you want to do a critical story about him, you are considered by the network to be biased.”

The problem here is that Kessler is likely hiding his motive for doing promoting this story. He wants us to think that he's being a responsible journalist trying to alert the world, but the more logical explanation is that Kessler -- who demonstrated his anti-Obama bias throughout the 2008 campaign -- was pushing an attack on Obama that he hoped would get him on TV.After all, Kessler was complaining just before the election that Republicans weren't using Wright against Obama to his satisfaction -- hardly the sign of a responsible journalist.

Remember also that Kessler, after months of bashing John McCain in order to promote his preferred candidate, Mitt Romney in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries (remember that creepy profile of Romney's wife?), quickly changed his tune after McCain clinched the nomination and became a committed McCain fluffer, portraying previously negative attributes as positives.

All of which makes it a bit rich that Kessler is complaining that "if the media had done the job the First Amendment envisioned for the press, Obama would not be president today." Kessler's work for Newsmax is largely bereft of evidence that he genuinely cares about journalism. Indeed, we're still waiting for Kessler to address or correct his longtime -- and since debunked -- claim that death threats against President Obama have increased 400 percent over threats against President Bush.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:23 AM EST

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Molotov Mitchell devotes his Dec. 16 WorldNetDaily video insisting that "the facts mean nothing to liberals" and that they "make stuff up to get their way." He ends his video by asserting that "liberal research isn't research," adding, "So the next time you hear some hokey liberal 'research,' I want you to pay close attention to the researcher."

We can't help but think that's directed at us. After all, we've detailed how Mitchell has his own issues with the facts. Indeed, just a couple of weeks ago, he chose to believe a convicted murderer's claims over that of law enforcement (and said convicted murderer's previous statements on the issue) regarding the death of Matthew Shepard. Of course, Mitchell has never contradicted anything we've written about him.

And Molotov being Molotov, he doesn't play straight with the facts even when he's accusing others of lying. For instance, he makes a big deal out of claiming that "our troops discovered roughly 500 metric tons yellowcake uranium last year just south of Baghdad," citing MSNBC and CNN to support the claim, which he says contradicts the liberal insistence that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

But the MSNBC (actually, AP) article he cites tells a different story -- it's about about the removal of yellowcake from Iraq, not the discovery of it. (The link he provides for the CNN article he cites does not work.) In fact, the article states: "U.S. and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre site — surrounded by huge sand berms — following a wave of looting after Saddam's fall [in 2003] that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns." And it was not even discovered by U.S. troops then; as the article states:

Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Further, yellowcake is not WMD; the uranium located within must be first extracted and refined, then enriched to weapons grade. As even Newsmax concedes, what little nuclear capability Iraq had was dismantled after the first Iraq War, had only achieved low-grade enrichment of 1.8 tons of it, and the technology Iraq had to enrich it was buried for years in the garden of the physicist who ran Saddam's weapons program.

In other words, Iraq did not have anything resembling the capability to do weapons-grade enrichement of uranium after 1991. Parts buried in a garden do not equal capability.

It also wouldn't be Molotov if he didn't engage in a little gay-bashing. He claimed that "lesbian anthropologist" Margaret Mead "fabricated an entire culture taht allegedly promoted rampant promiscuity in her book 'Coming of Age in Samoa,'" adding that "bitter old lesbians still cite her research to this day, even though it's been throughly debunked by other anthropologists and even the outraged Samoans themselves."

That's an apparent reference to Derek Freeman's book attacking Mead's claims. But Mitchell's version of events doesn't appear to square with the facts either (shocking, we know). According to Wikipedia:

After an initial flurry of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that the truth would probably never be known, although most published accounts of the debate have also raised serious questions about Freeman's critique.

First, these critics have speculated that he waited until Mead died before publishing his critique so that she would not be able to respond. In 1978, Freeman sent a revised manuscript to Mead, but she was ill and died a few months later without responding.

Second, Freeman's critics point out that by the time Freeman arrived on the scene Mead's original informants were old women, grandmothers, and had converted to Christianity, so their testimony to him may not have been accurate. They further allege that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead's original research, that after intense missionary activity many Samoans had come to adopt the same sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead's book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior. Further, they suggested that these women might not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man as they would have been speaking to a woman near their own age.

Further, according to Wikipedia, Freeman's own research "documented the existence of premarital sexual activity in Samoa."

What Michell said about "hokey liberal 'research'" goes double for his own, since he seems determined to prove time and time again that right-wing research -- and his especially -- isn't research.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:56 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, December 17, 2009 9:54 AM EST

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A Dec. 15 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh cites "tresearch [sic] by staff and volunteers for Mass Resistance" to make more questionable accusations against Kevin Jennings -- this time, that "teachers in the state were offered professional credit for attending a now-infamous 2000 seminar in which students were instructed in lewd homosexual practices."

Unmentioned by Unruh: the controversial workshop in question was one of more than 50 workshops held during the seminar, which would more than justify the awarding of professional credit.

Also unmentioned by Unruh: MassResistance is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:47 PM EST

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Ben Shapiro spews numerous false and misleading claims in his Dec. 16 column, published by CNSNews.com and WorldNetDaily. Many of them are related to the National Council of La Raza -- including the false assertion that el Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a statement urging Hispanics to "[reclaim] the land of their birth," was a "founding document" of NCLR.

Shapiro also falsely smears Mari Del Carmen Aponte, a former NCLR board member whom President Obama nominated to be U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, as "an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro." In fact, the FBI cleared Aponte of allegations that she had been recruited as a Cuban spy.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:18 PM EST

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A strategist casting a cold eye on the Gallup poll tracking President Barack Obama’s job approval rating might be tempted to give our president the following advice: Sir, you need more unmarried, unchurched, poor and inexperienced Americans.

[...]

For the week of Dec. 7-13, Obama’s overall approval was 49 percent, with some groups rating him significantly higher than that and some rating him significantly lower. Among people who seldom or never go to church, Obama did relatively well. Fifty-three percent said they approved of the job he is doing. Among those who go to church monthly or nearly weekly, 53 percent approved. But among weekly churchgoers, only 42 percent approved.
 
If there were not a class of citizens in this country who go to church every week, a majority of Americans would still approve of the job Obama is doing.
 
Obama also did very well among the unmarried. Fifty-nine percent approved of the job he is doing. Among married people, however, only 42 percent approved.
 
If marriage could be eliminated in this country—leaving only the never married, the divorced and the cohabitating—a majority of Americans would still approve of the job Obama is doing.
 
Similarly, younger people were far more likely than older people to give Obama a positive rating. Fifty-nine percent of Americans 18 to 29 said they approved of the job he is doing. But only 50 percent of those 30 to 49 approved, only 48 percent of those 50 to 64 approved, and only 40 percent of those 65 or older approved.
 
If everyone in this country were under 30, a majority of Americans would still approve of the job Obama is doing.

[...]

Many Americans who are not among the married, churchgoing or prosperous today, would in the normal course of things become those things tomorrow. In this free country, younger people tend to grow older, get married, prosper and, in many circumstances, find their way back to church if they have strayed from it.
 
A bigger welfare state such as Obama envisions where more people are dependent on government and where the industrious must bear a greater financial burden to support the government will make it harder for all our children to live the American dream—and join the demographic categories that disapprove of the job Obama is doing.

-- Terry Jeffrey, Dec. 16 CNSNews.com column

Posted by Terry K. at 5:33 PM EST

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