Newsmax Lets Dick Morris Make A Prediction Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax's Dick Morris rehabilitation campaign continues apace by giving him an April 30 column in which he explains how Rick Perry can make a presidential run in 2016:
Acceptable to Latinos based on his Texas record. Draws strong Tea Party support without being defined by it. A Southerner, he is clearly ready to play on the national stage. A big state governor whose record on jobs has only gotten better. He can’t be dismissed.
Will his debate brainlock disqualify him? Not if he doesn’t repeat it. Clinton recovered from a disastrous 1988 Convention speech. He’s probably had enough time to recover from his dismissal of Social Security as a "Ponzi scheme" in his book.
But Rick Perry has to develop a truly national perspective to win. He can’t forever be repeating "in the state of Texas" before each line. He needs to know more about issues other than energy. In 2012, he showed the same lack of depth and laziness in issue preparation as Sarah Palin did in 2008, but he wasn’t caught as easily because he’s a man.
[...]
Republicans don’t like to take chances. They want their candidates to have served their apprenticeship as losers. The Republican voters are agoraphobic, fearful of new situations and people. It takes them a while to get used to new candidates and those who have run once and learned their lessons have great appeal. So keep your eye on Perry.
Given Morris' track record on predictions, we can probably assume that Perry now has no chance whatsoever to become president.
WND's Cashill Rhapsodizes Over James O'Keefe Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill devoted his April 30 WorldNetDaily column to rebutting the idea that Donald Sterling was the victim of being "James O’Keefe’d":
As Esquire writer Charles Pierce and others have commented in the wake of Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s sudden notoriety, Sterling’s lady friend V. Stiviano “appears to have James O’Keefe’d him.”
Pierce is referring to the work of imaginative young journalist James O’Keefe. Not yet 30, O’Keefe has pioneered the art of quietly recording the damning words of a range of duplicitous individuals – from ACORN workers to NPR executives to union honchos to campaign officials – and exposing those words to the light.
Pierce, however, does not quite get the verb “O’Keefe.” O’Keefe goes after corrupt and/or hypocritical organizations that have prospered through taxpayer largesse, and he always tries to work within the law, however ambiguous that law sometimes is.
[...]
The media do not share O’Keefe’s hierarchy of values. On CNN, after O’Keefe released the first video of ACORN office workers abetting his apocryphal scheme, the Washington Post’s Keith Richburg expressed his outrage – about O’Keefe.
“It sounds to me like that’s just entrapment,” Richburg said of O’Keefe’s sting. “You know, let’s go around various offices until we can finally trick somebody.”
On that same CNN show, Salon’s Joe Conason added, “It’s not journalism unless they report everything that happened. It’s propaganda.”
In fact, in just about every ACORN office O’Keefe visited the workers obliged his teenage-prostitution schemes. To prove they did, O’Keefe made a practice of posting the videos unedited to show that the damning quotes were not taken out of context.
Cashill is severely overstating O'Keefe's "values." In fact, before O'Keefe released his unedited videos, he released a heavily edited video designed to play up his most salacious accusations. And when O'Keefe got around to releasing his unedited videos, they usually showed that he was taking people out of context. Indeed, O'Keefe agreed to pay $100,000 to a former ACORN employee for falsely portraying him in a video and for illegally taping him.
Cashill goes on to declare that O'Keefe "has not once been sued for libel or defamation." Actually, the above cited case aside, he has been sued for defamation -- by one of his own former employees.
And Cashill was too busy rhapsodizing over O'Keefe's "hierarchy of values" that he mention a botched sting in which O'Keefe "hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session."
Those are apparently the kind of "values" Cashill can get behind.
MRC's Bozell and Graham Again At War With Grammar And Perspective Topic: Media Research Center
Last week, we noted that a column by the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell and Tim Graham cited an "early childhood memory" without explaining to which of the authors the memory belonged.
Bozell and Graham do it again in their May 2 column:
Saint Mary's Institute is the Catholic grade school in my wife's New York hometown, Amsterdam. It is affiliated with Saint Mary's Catholic Church, whose pastor Rev. John Medwid pens the opening to the Saint Mary's Institute annual newsletter.
Whose wife is being referred to here? We might assume that it's Bozell's, but it was revealed in February that Graham does all the heavy lifting in writing with Bozell's contributions unclear at best.
Either Graham has forgotten he deserves credit for his ghostwriter, or he has forgotten that it's a violation of grammar to offer a first-person perspective in a column authored by more than one person.
By the way, it seems that MRC division CNSNews.com has finally settled upon a way of properly crediting Graham after weeks of botching it. But at the MRC's main site, Graham got credit for a while but recent columns carry only Bozell's byline.
WND's Unruh Lies About Detention Bill Topic: WorldNetDaily
It seems that one reason Bob Unruh left the Associated Press to join WorldNetDaily in 2006 was WND didn't believe in things like reporting facts. Indeed, Unruh's WND work is littlemore than propaganda for his pet causes that dismisses or ignores entirely facts that conflict with his right-wing agenda.
We see this yet again in an April 29 WND article by Unruh:
A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” according to critics.
The high court this week refused to review an appeals court decision that said the president and U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals.
The firm of William J. Olson, P.C., which filed a friend-of-the court brief asking the court to step in, noted that not a single justice dissented from the denial of the request for review.
“The court ducked, having no appetite to confront both political parties in order to protect the citizens from military detention,” the legal team said in a statement to WND. “The government has won, creating a tragic moment for the people – and what will someday be viewed as an embarrassment for the court.”
WND reported when the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act were adopted and later challenged in court.
The controversial provision authorizes the military, under presidential authority, to arrest, kidnap, detain without trial and hold indefinitely American citizens thought to “represent an enduring security threat to the United States.”
But Unruh is just regurgitating lies that even his fellow right-wingers have debunked. The conservative Washington Times wrote in 2012 of the military authorization bill whose renewal Unruh is attacking here:
All dramatics aside, no matter what the murky NDAA says or means, it cannot strip Americans of their constitutional rights. Chief Justice John Marshall laid out this logical principle in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, which established the standard of judicial review. He wrote that if a law conflicts with a rule or right under the Constitution, “the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, [therefore] the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.” This is a bedrock principle of American politics. Even if the most expansive reading of the defense authorization is correct and it does represent some kind of White House power grab, it doesn’t matter, because any such provision negating rights held by citizens would be struck down as unconstitutional once it was adjudicated.
There also is the matter of the law’s political context. Those who argue that the NDAA is some kind of enabling act for an impending Obama imperium must also explain how such a bill was passed by a divided Congress, particularly the conservative Republican-controlled House. If control was Mr. Obama’s objective, it would have been more sensible to craft the legislation during the two years when San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House, Democrats enjoyed a supermajority in the Senate and Mr. Obama was not so unpopular. He could have used those purported extraordinary powers to head off the “shellacking” he took during the 2010 midterm elections, assuming he thought he could get away with it.
The true test of the NDAA would be if Mr. Obama attempted to do what some people fear he might do, namely, begin a vendetta against his political opponents or others he wants to deal with “Chicago style.” But should we honestly believe Mr. Obama will soon order mass arrests and detentions of peaceful American citizens? That members of the military would carry out such orders, which go against all other laws and customs and the Constitution? That such actions would not be met with a flood of court cases, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience and active resistance? And all this would happen in an election year? It will take more than a scrap of paper to end freedom in America.
Needless to say, Unruh doesn't bother to report such things in his article -- he's all about fearmongering and propaganda, after all.
Will MRC Admit GOP's Obamacare Study Is Bogus? Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Hadro writes in a May 1 Media Research Center item:
House Republicans determined that just two-thirds of ObamaCare enrollees paid their first month's premium in the federal marketplace, but the broadcast networks ignored their finding on Thursday evening, though FNC's Special Report with Bret Baier ran a full story. If true, the report would drastically undercut the White House's number of ObamaCare enrollees.
Hadro won't tell you, but the operative term here is "if true." Turns out it isn't.
As TPM detailed, the GOP survey was rigged to produce that result -- it included language that explicitly left out the fact some people would still have time to pay their premium after April 15, which is when the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked companies to return their answers.Nearly 40 percent of Obamacare enrollees signed up after March 15, which means their first premium wasn't due until after the committee finished collecting its data.
Having demanded that the media cover a bogus study, will Hadro now report that the study was bogus and admit no self-respecting news outlet should have covered it in the first place?
WND's Klayman: Under Obama, Whites Are 'At The Back of the Bus' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Obama and his cronies spent the next five years favoring African-Americans and people of color over all other groups of society, and it became painfully obvious that this socialist saw himself as the one person who could extract a pound of flesh for all the years of insidious discrimination against blacks, dating back to even the years before the founding of the republic. In effect, Obama and his friends – ranging from black Muslims, to anti-Semites, to anti-Christians, atheists and other ultra-leftists – saw his presidency as an opportunity to “settle the score” with not just conservatives but rich whites. If this meant bankrupting the country with higher taxes on rich whites and other means to extract what in effect were reparations, then this was the price that needed to be paid for past discrimination. It was time for “whitey” to pay up, and to hell with the economic and social health of the nation.
One saw this early on in Obama’s presidency, with his continuous references to “income inequality,” his role in increasing the tax burden primarily on rich whites, his choking, anti-capitalist over-regulation of businesses, his and his Democratic colleagues’ enactment of Obamacare, his alignment with racist anti-white black Muslims and others like Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah White, now deceased Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell (which helps explain his latent anti-Semitism, disdain for Israel and pro-Muslim/Arab foreign policies), his prejudicial comments during and after the Trayvon Martin case, where he condemned George Zimmerman and effectively called the incident a race-based attack on blacks, his 2012 presidential campaign, where he pitted African-Americans and other people of color, such as Latinos, against whites, and a host of other actions designed to favor blacks and people of color over whites.
In this context, and as I have written before, the irony is that under the Obama presidency there has been a role reversal; whites, and particularly rich ones, are now at the back of the bus. While it is not politically correct in today’s world for whites to raise this feeling in public, there has developed regrettably and tragically an undercurrent of deep resentment among whites, which is now starting to manifest itself in major ways.
In April, the unemployment rate dropped from 6.7 percent to 6.3 percent, and 288,000 jobs were created. CNS clearly had to spin that away: A May 2 article by Michael Chapman grumbled that "The national unemployment rate was 6.3% in April, which is the same unemployment rate America experienced halfway through the last recession, in the fall of 2008." At no point in his article did he mention that the rate declined 4/10 of a percent.
Another article by Chapman claimed that the "total unemployed" rate was 12.3 percent. Chapman then discredits himself by admitting that rate counts "have looked for full-time employment but have had to settle for a part-time job," which means they aren't "unemployed."
CNS cranked out three more articles designed to blot out the good news:
WND's Reporting On Evangelical Minister's Fall Eventually Makes Sense Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily usually doesn't devote original coverage to wrongdoing by evangelical ministers, especially one it has championed.
Doug Phillips has long been a WND buddy. in 2002, for example, WND touted how Phillips led a team of homeschoolers that found a dinosaur skeleton. In 2007, WND gave Phillips a column space to "highlight the stark differences between the secular left’s revisionist view of America’s founding and what he sees has 'the historical and providential record of the Christian legacy of law in liberty which was birthed for America at Jamestown in 1607.'"
Which makes it all the more unusual that instead of hiding or outsorcing to other outlets reports on the sordid sexually oriented allegations against Philips, an April 15 article by Chelsea Schilling was devoted to it, highlighting how Phillips "resigned from his position after confessing to an 'inappropriate' relationship" and "is now the subject of a lawsuit that claims he “methodically groomed” and made unwanted sexual contact with a young woman after serving as an authority figure in her life for more than a decade."
Until you get toward the end of the article, that is. Schilling devotes a section of it to homeschooling activist Michael Farris -- with whom Phillips worked for six years as an attorney for Farris' Home School Legal Defense Association -- throwing Phillips under the bus and distancing himself from the patriarchy/quiverfull movement Phillips was a leader in:
HSLDA Chairman Michael Farris told WND, “The reason Doug left HSLDA is because [President] Mike Smith and I, who were his bosses, were growing more and more uncomfortable as he started developing his patriarchy theory. We started limiting his ability to speak on those things while traveling on our behalf. We basically made it clear that he could not pursue those things with his HSLDA hat on. So he eventually chose to leave us so he could do those things because we were not comfortable with where he was headed.”
As for the patriarchy movement, Farris said the teachings are not widely accepted in the broader homeschool community.
“It’s a minority of homeschoolers that believe in it,” he said. “But unfortunately, until very recently, they were getting a lot of visibility in certain places. We have sought to avoid inviting any patriarchy speakers to speak at our national conference.”
While state homeschool organizations run their own events and may choose to have such speakers, Farris said HSLDA has never promoted them.
“Doug has never been invited to speak at our national conference since he left,” Farris said. “We have tried, by example, to keep this stuff outside the mainstream of the homeschooling movement.”
He added, “Frankly, we think it’s time for us to stand up and publicly say this is just wrong.”
Farris, who said he has known Phillips for two decades, expressed concern that Phillips could re-emerge in the homeschooling movement and as a leader in a Christian ministry.
As we've previously noted, Farris' claim not to be a part of the quiverfull movement is dubious given the fact that he has 10 children.
Farris is an even bigger buddy to WND than Phillips was. By contrast, WND has yet to devote any original coverage (or any coverage at all that we're aware of) to allegations that Patrick Henry College -- founded by Farris and where he still serves as chancellor, and where WND editor Joseph Farah sent at least one of his children -- ignored allegations of sexual assaults involving the school's students or blamed the victims.
MRC Obsesses Over Sterling's Long-Ago Dem Donations, Ignores He's A Registered Republican Topic: Media Research Center
Scott Whitlock huffs in an April 28 Media Research Center item:
In just over 36 hours, the three network morning and evening shows have already devoted 70 minutes of coverage to racist comments apparently made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Yet, ABC, CBS and NBC have ignored Sterling's long history of supporting Democrats, including Senator Patrick Leahy, Bill Bradley and Gray Davis.
But Whitlock failed to report that -- as we noted when his colleagues at NewsBusters also obsessed over Sterling's donations to Democrats more than20 years ago -- Sterling is a registered Republican.
The "MSM ignored something" meme fails when the person making the accusation is ignoring something as well.
Fox News Is Too Liberal for WND Columnist Topic: WorldNetDaily
Recently, Laura Ingraham was a guest on Howard Kurtz’s Sunday Fox show, “Media Buzz.” She offered what I thought was an intelligent solution to a problem that has been annoying me for some time.
As we all know, Fox remains an oasis on TV, the only news network that isn’t in the tank for Obama and the liberals. However, in attempting to comply with Roger Ailes’ desire that Fox be “fair and balanced,” too many shows have fallen into the habit of teaming up a liberal and a conservative, and having them spend five or 10 raucous minutes shouting over each other and trading insults. We wind up with a lot of heat and absolutely no light.
Ingraham’s suggestion was to unload the liberals and, instead, invite conservatives on board and let them hash out their differences. She’s right. We already know the liberal positions because we read them in every newspaper and we hear them trumpeted every day over at the three major networks, along with CNN and MSNBC.
It would be far more enlightening to hear Republicans share their differences over immigration reform, same-sex marriages, gun laws, health care and foreign policy. What’s more, we would be spared ever again having to listen to the likes of Juan Williams, Geraldo Rivera, Bob Beckel and Alan Colmes flapping their gums.
CNS' Jeffrey Manipulates Numbers To Downplay Issue Of Minimum-Wage Workers Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com loves to play fast and loose with economic numbers. Editor in chief Terry Jeffrey demonstrates again how it's done in an April 30 article:
A majority of the Americans who worked for the minimum wage or less in 2013 were 24 years old or younger, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and only 0.8 percent of American workers were 29 or older and worked for the minimum wage or less.
[...]
In total in 2013, according to the BLS, 143,929,000 people were employed in some kind of job in the United States. Of these, a total of 3,300,000—or about 2.3 percent—earned the minimum wage or less. Of those earning the minimum wage or less, 1,663,000 were between 16 and 24 years old. That equaled about 50.4 percent of the people earning the minimum wage or less.
Another 436,000 earning the minimum wage or less were from 25 to 29 year of age.
That leave 1,201,000—or 0.8 percent of American workers—who earned the minimum wage or less and were older than 29.
What Jeffrey fails to spell out: These numbers mean that 36% of people making minimum wage were older than 29.
But for some reason he's rather compare it to the much larger pool of all workers -- making the number deceptively insignificant. Wonder why that is...
WND Finds A New Person Who Will Smear Obama As A Nazi Topic: WorldNetDaily
One of WorldNetDaily's favorite pastimes of the Obama presidency is to liken him to Hitler and various other Nazis. It even had a former Hitler Youth, Hilmar von Campe, repeatedly push the slanderous attack, demonstrating he hadn't completely renounced Nazi propaganda techniques.
But von Campe died a couple years back, leaving WND bereft of a handy source of Godwinism. But it has found another supplier, as described in an April 28 WND article by Laura Adelmann:
Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, with its messianic characterizations – the photographs in which a halo was cast around his head, the worship-like adulation from crowds – gave Holocaust survivor Anita Dittman nightmares.
About Adolf Hitler.
The petite 86-year-old over the weekend told a riveted audience at Olive Tree Ministry’s “Understanding the Times” conference it’s because she sees clear parallels between Nazi Germany and present-day America.
A young girl in Germany when Hitler came to power, Dittman said her experiences amplified the alarm she felt.
[...]
Dittman said her nightmares were triggered by the left’s gushing adoration of Obama as a perceived savior.
Establishment media were equally enamored with Obama and failed to vet him to the American public, as most famously exemplified by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who described experiencing a “thrill up (his) leg” when he heard the then-candidate speak.
The media’s infatuation helped cultivate the atmosphere that ushered Obama into the most powerful office on earth.
Establishment media reporters didn’t question his qualifications or competencies; conservative news outlets that investigated his birth certificate were openly mocked.
Media also never asked him hard questions about his disturbing history of close associations with communists and terrorists that included Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, she said.
Liberals’ blind idolization of Obama mirrored Germany’s hypnotic fascination with Hitler, Dittman said of the racist tyrant whose vitriolic rhetoric dehumanized the Jewish people as a prelude to his attempts at total annihilation.
Obama’s empty rhetoric that energized his followers chilled Dittman, who compared it to lies peddled in Germany painting promises of a bright future.
Why is WND promoting this woman's claims, despite the obvious? Why, to make money, of course:
Her miraculous story of God’s overwhelming providence that preserved her life despite brutal Nazi persecution is told in the soon-to-be released and uplifting WND documentary film “Trapped in Hitler’s Hell.”
A 20-minute preview of the film, which was produced by WND founder, Editor and CEO Joseph Farah and directed by WND Films Vice President George Escobar, premiered at the conference where Dittman revealed her concerns for America.
See? WND has learned how to profit off libelous smears.
Newsmax Promotes Gay Republican's Claim of Attacks From Left Topic: Newsmax
California congressional candidate Carl DeMaio has been making the rounds of the conservative media -- helped greatly by Fox News -- complaining that he's being attacked by Democrats. Newsmax joins the parade with an April 30 article by Bill Hoffmann:
Carl DeMaio, an openly gay candidate for California's 52nd Congressional District, says liberals have been trashing him simply because he's a Republican.
"I don't wear my orientation on my sleeve, it's who I am. But it doesn't define the thorough breadth of what I am in terms of a leader for San Diego," DeMaio told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
But, DeMaio added, a number of left-leaning groups who claim to want to support gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender candidates have worked against him strictly because of his GOP affiliation.
Um, isn't that what's supposed to happen -- that DeMaio's political identity is placed before his sexual orientation? He can't exactly claim discrimination because the complete opposite is happening.
DeMaio is also quoted as saying, "These progressive activists are willing to put aside what they claim to want to achieve for LGBT Americans in the name of partisan politics." But isn't what most LGBT Americans want is for their sexual orientation not to be an issue? Isn't that precisely how liberals are treating DeMaio?
Indeed, DeMaio has backed off social issues, in part to attract more conservative supporters. And Hoffmann fails to mention that the conservative National Organization for Marriage has gone after DeMaio for "holding the hand of his gay lover."
So, to sum up: Liberals oppose DeMaio because of his policies; social conservatives oppose DeMaio because he's gay. That's pretty much the way it's expected to be, isn't it?
Colin Flaherty Takes His Race-Baiting to Breitbart Topic: WorldNetDaily
Colin Flaherty hasn't fearmongered about "black mob violence" at WorldNetDaily for more than a month now. It turns out he has decided to take his race-baitingtalents elsewhere.
In an April 30 article at Breitbart, Flaherty tells us about how a "shaky cell phone video shows a group of black teenage boys punching, knocking down, and kicking a white teenage boy, leaving him dazed and confused on the school bus floor." Flaherty's surely impeccable source for this? "The student's uncle found out about the incident and spread the word on Facebook."
Flaherty finally had the impact he couldn't get from WND -- his article got linked by the Drudge Report, it has thousands of comments from like-minded race-baiters, and he claims his WND-published book is "back at #1" at Amazon (which is true if you only count very niche subcategories).
Flaherty's race-baiting finally hit the jackpot, and he couldn't be happier about it. Which tells you all you need to know about Flaherty's motivations.
MRC's Bozell and Graham Mock Idea of Gay Etiquette Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell and Tim Graham start their April 30 column by writing:
The times they are a-changing in ways even Bob Dylan didn't foresee.
I have an early childhood memory riding my bike and coming across a discarded booklet on proper social etiquette. It had the perfunctory rules. Gentlemen always open doors for ladies. Stand when a lady comes in the room. And so on. But the one I remember vividly is this: A lady always extends her hand first in greeting. Why? Fifty years ago I could understand the concept, but even then, I thought it was a bit much. Today that rule's been abandoned.
Whose "early childhood memory" is this? Perhaps it's Graham's since he's been shown to be the actual writer and Bozell just the figurehead. But this is the kind of problem you have when you have a singular memory described in a column written by two people.
Conflicts in literary perspective aside, Bozell and Graham's goal is to further the MRC's anti-gay agenda by mocking the idea of the Washington Post hiring a columnist to address issues of gay etiquette:
"Steven Petrow will be joining our advice ranks," declares the Post, "with a special emphasis on LGBT and straight etiquette issues." Petrow, states his bio, is "the go-to source for modern manners ... known as Mr. Manners." Why was he chosen for the job? He will tell you it's largely because he's the former president of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.
His column is called "Civilities" (get it, homophobes?), and Mr. Manners will tackle many thorny etiquette issues as well. In his introductory piece, he outlines some of the issues he's dealt with in the past.
He muses about the gay cop who wrote in to say he was subjected to homophobic jokes, feeling it was his colleagues' way of convincing him to resign. Or the gay widower upset that his in-laws omitted him from his husband's obituary. Or the most vexing question of them all: How to introduce a married same-sex couple? (Answer: They "should be referred to as you would any legal spouse, and that's 'husband' and 'wife.'")
Questions, questions. "Do parents pay for their gay son or lesbian daughter's wedding?" "Is a dad expected to walk his son down the aisle?" "What pronoun (and restroom) is appropriate for a person who is transgender?" "How do you respond to 'assimilated' gays who find 'flamboyant' ones embarrassing?"
How do you respond to an entire industry you find embarrassing?
Well, you've just seen you Bozell and Graham respond to something it finds embarrassing -- with sneering and derision for their fellow Americans.