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Saturday, July 25, 2015
WND Embraces (And Possibly Steals From) 'Liberal Media' To Help Trump
Topic: WorldNetDaily

The ConWeb really doesn't hate the "liberal media" as much as they claim -- they're perfectly happy to treat liberals as perfectly credible when it suits their purposes.

Which brings us to the spectacle of the far-right WorldNetDaily enthusiastically reposting from the left-wing magazine The Nation.

WND loves Donald Trump -- indeed, WND editor Joseph Farah calls him "a shot of adrenaline" for "raising issues bluntly and fearlessly." He particularly loves how Trump is shaking up the Republican party: "There’s one guy they really fear. They can’t control him. They can’t intimidate him. He won’t take their advice. He won’t play by their rules. And every day he gets more popular."

In an effort to bolster Trump's attacks on John McCain -- which include claims of McCain purportedly not doing enough to rescue alleged prisoners of war from Vietnam as a senator -- Jerome Corsi did a fine job of serving as Trump's campaign spokesman in a July 21 WND article:

McCain, whose father and grandfather were four-star Navy admirals, has been commended throughout his career in the Senate for enduring five-and-a-half years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison in North Vietnam.

But various critics, including Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Sydney H. Schanberg, have charged that McCain, working with fellow Vietnam veteran and then-Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., suppressed information about POWs believed to have been left behind by the U.S. government at the end of the Vietnam War.

In a 2008 article published by the Nation Institute when McCain was the Republican nominee for president, Schanberg wrote that the senator, who had risen to political prominence based on his war-hero image, “has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home.”

Corsi's article was accompanied by a reprinting of that 2008 article by Schanberg from The Nation.

Interestingly, while WND does credit The Nation for originally printing Schanberg's article, of which WND's reprinting is apparently an "expanded version," it does not indicate that it obtained permission from The Nation's Investigative Fund or from Schanberg to reprint the article.

While WND may have actually sought and received permission from relevant parties to reprint the Nation article, it has such an extensive record of theft and plagiarism that it has not earned the benefit of the doubt here.


Posted by Terry K. at 10:18 AM EDT
Friday, July 24, 2015
Charlie Daniels Tells Lies About Margaret Sanger
Topic: CNSNews.com

Charlie Daniels writes in his July 22 CNSNews.com column:

A small quiz:

Who do you think made the following statement about blacks, immigrants and indigents?

"Human weeds … spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

Who said that they should enlist black ministers to sell black women on the prospect of abortion and the use of contraceptives in what was dubbed “The Negro Project”?

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

[...]

Actually, it was Margaret Sanger, a woman, hailed as a hero in the ranks of feminism, who has coveted awards named after her, is revered by many prominent people in Washington and who founded the nation's largest abortion mill, Planned Parenthood.

Margaret Sanger's views on the controlled birth of children bordered on Nazism, and her views on religion and marital fidelity were akin to hedonism.

She made this statement: “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” And she was a closet advocate of black genocide.

Charlie Daniels is lying.

Planned Parenthood points out that "Sanger never described any ethnic community as an 'inferior race' or as 'human weeds.'" We've caught WorldNetDaily repeating the dubious "human weeds" quote and falsely claiming Sanger was talking about blacks.

While the "spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all" quote comes from Sanger's book "The Pivot of Civilization" -- and is actually a defense of the eugenics ideas she believed in, which were unfortunately popular at the time the book was written, and references to "blacks, immigrants and indigents" appear nowhere near it in the book -- and not the term "human weeds" appears nowhere in the book, making Daniels a further liar for making up a quote.

Meanwhile, FactCheck.org reports that anti-abortion activists like Daniels love to take a certain Sanger quote -- "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" -- out of context to potray the "Negro Project" as some nefarious "black genocide" operation instead of the birth-control campaign it was. According to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University, states FactCheck, “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”

Daniels' rant on how Sanger's views on birth control "bordered on Nazism" is simply bizarre. So if you take birth control, you're Hitler? Please.

Being a famous entertainer like Daniels certainly grants him a soapbox, but he it doesn't mean he has the right to lie.


Posted by Terry K. at 2:27 PM EDT
Thursday, July 23, 2015
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's War Against the Truth
Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is unhappy that the media is accurately reporting on the dishonestly edited anti-Planned Parenthood videos -- and it won't even admit that the dishonesty exists. Read more >>

Posted by Terry K. at 5:26 PM EDT
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
CNS Pretends Only Liberals Are Criticizing Trump
Topic: CNSNews.com

In a July 20 CNSNews.com article headlined "Trump Once Again Dominates News Cycle As Liberals Pounce on His McCain Criticism," Susan Jones writes:

For a candidate knocked by many Democrats and some Republicans as clownish and unserious, Donald Trump once again is generating top headlines on liberal media outlets, blowing out other national concerns.

The latest controversy centers on Trump's comments about Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). The hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" talked about little else for the first hour on Monday.

Jones seems not to be aware that the main host of "Morning Joe," Joe Scarborough, is not a liberal -- he is a former Republican congressman.

That's just one of many clueless things about Jones' article. She also seems to be unaware that it's not only "liberal media outlets" that have been covering Trump's latest outrage. The fact that Jones is writing about it means right-wing media outlets are covering it too.

Jones appears to be even more clueless about the fact that Trump's comments about McCain have been roundly criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike -- which she would know if she had read the other websites run by her employer, the Media Research Center. (Oh, yeah, she thinks only the "liberal media" is covering Trump.)

One NewsBusters article notes that Trump's comments have received "universal condemnation." Another highlights how Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry "has been one of Trump’s harshest critics." A third points out that "most Republicans condemned Donald Trump."

And a CNS article by Melanie Hunter published the same day as Jones' quotes Republican pollster Frank Luntz as saying that Trump does not appreciate the “significance” of being a prisoner of war. (Trump had bashed McCain's former POW status as a sign he wasn't a war hero.)

Is Jones suddenly working for a "liberal media outlet" now? Nope -- she's just so desperate to crank out a tired attack on the "liberal media" that the facts simply don't matter to her.


Posted by Terry K. at 2:16 PM EDT
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
WND Columnist Mercer Sneers At Race-Mixing
Topic: WorldNetDaily

As befits someone who's pining for the return of apartheid, South Africa native Ilana Mercer is not a big fan of the mixing of the races, lest they bespoil white folks. Mercer spends her July 16 WorldNetDaily column telling us that Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP official who portrayed herself as black despite being white, was "racially abused" because her white parents adopted black children, then drags Angelina Jolie into it for adopting non-white children:

Was not Ms. Dolezal displaced for real in her parents’ affections? Rachel’s story should begin with parents Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, who adopted four children, “three of whom were African-American while the other was from Haiti.”

Does this fashionable adoption not send a message to a vulnerable girl that she and her biological brother are too pale for their pious parents?

Spokesperson for the quasi-black Brady Bunch is Ezra Dolezal. Ezra grew up in the diversity-worshiping, evangelical Dolezal household. He now lectures his estranged sister about her shenanigans in black-face.

The chutzpah!

The once anemic-looking, fair-skinned Rachel was raised with a real sense that she was not black enough for her parents. Why do I say “real”? Because, like Angelina Jolie, Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal kept acquiring kids more colorful than their own.

Kids are needy creatures. Parenting is a complex endeavor. However great their reservoirs of love, sense of fair play and goodwill – two parents do not have enough of the good stuff to spread among six kids. Mark my words: Brangelina’s beautiful, biological offspring will also one day display signs of childhood racial abuse.

Mercer also expounds on other reasons Dolezal might want to be black:

In American society, black is beautiful.

To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage – heavier than the Holocaust – and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores.

To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society.

To be black it to be born with an IOY; it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.

Why can’t Rachel have some of that?

Mercer's racism is showing again.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:40 PM EDT
Monday, July 20, 2015
CNS' Climate Denier Fail
Topic: CNSNews.com

Emily Richards writes in a July 13 CNSNews.com article:

A British professor's new model of solar cycles predicts that the Earth could be heading toward a "mini ice age" that would create conditions not seen since 1645 during the "Maunder minimum" - when London’s Thames River froze over.

Solar activity may fall by as much as 60 percent during the 2030s, according to Mathematics Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in England.

Um, not so much. As Slate points out:

If you look closely at the original press release, the study’s author, Valentina Zharkova, never implied a new ice age is imminent—only that we may see a sharp downturn in the number of sunspots. Yes, the sun is a variable star, but its output is remarkably stable. The amount of energy we receive from the sun just doesn’t change fast enough to cause a rapid-onset ice age in just a few decades.

The root of the problem here may be a poorly worded quote in the press release implying an imminent 60 percent decline in solar activity. Yes, numbers of sunspots can vary by that much or even more on an 11-year cycle, but the sun’s output—the total amount of energy we get—is extremely stable and only changes by about 0.1 percent, even in extreme sunspot cycles like the one Zharkova is predicting.

[...]

But let’s play devil’s advocate: What if Zharkova is right about the decline in solar activity? There’s still no need to worry (or to become complacent about global warming). Even assuming sunspots are in the process of shutting down, as happened during the Maunder minimum and Little Ice Age, it wouldn’t matter much.

An interesting new study published in June showed that a sharp decline in solar activity to record lows could have a relatively large impact on regional climate over a period of decades. But even the return of a Maunder minimum type slowdown in solar activity—an extreme scenario, by any measure—would slow global warming by only about a half-degree in northern Europe. That’s essentially negligible, on a global scale. 

Unsurprisingly, Richards contacts nobody to respond to the study. Also unsurprisingly, CNS published an July 20 op-ed by H. Sterling Burnett, one of the climate deniers at the right-wing Heartland Institute, to reinforce the bogus claim:

Another recent scientific paper projects an imminent cooling without any caveats about it being regional in nature or overwhelmed by human carbon dioxide emissions. A paper published by the Royal Astronomical Society indicates the Sun will likely go silent within 15 years, leading to an extended period of colder temperatures. Lead author of the report Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University has said, when tested against actual data and measurements, the model the researchers developed to test the relationship between fluctuating magnetic waves on the surface of the Sun and their impacts on solar activity and Earth’s climate had an accuracy rating of 97 percent.

With new research emerging nearly daily to indicate Earth is cooling because of decreased solar activity, it certainly seems wise to shift our concern about future climate to how best to respond to colder temperatures and associated climate effects.

Slate notes that climate deniers like Burnett "have a particular fascination with sunspot cycles," but that the correlation between sunspot activity and global temperatures is weak at best.

Slate adds: "In reality, sunspots fluctuate in an 11-year cycle, and the current cycle is the weakest in 100 years—yet 2014 was the planet’s hottest year in recorded history." Betcha Burnett and CNS won't bring that up.

It seems the deniers have failed again by deliberately ignoring information that undermines their case. Burnett is a paid flack, of course, but what's the excuse for CNS, which purports to be a news organization? Oh, yeah, they get paid to do that as well.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:43 PM EDT
Sunday, July 19, 2015
CNS Censors Fact That Congressman's Outrage Is Hypocritical
Topic: CNSNews.com

Penny Starr channels a little manufactured outrage in a July 16 CNSNews.com article:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday it is a “disgrace” that taxpayer dollars go to support Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States.

“Overall, about half of Planned Parenthood’s money comes from taxpayers,” Franks told CNSNews.com following a press conference by members of the House Pro-Life Caucus on the alleged sale of organs from aborted babies by Planned Parenthood abortion clinics. “And this is an organization that supports the murder of 3,000 children in America every day.

“The fact that we’re funding it is a disgrace that beggars my ability to articulate,” Franks said.

But Starr has omitted one key fact: Franks knew about the dishonestly edited video that prompted his comments weeks ago.

Roll Call reports that Franks is among several members of Congress who were shown the video made by anti-abortion extremists weeks ago, but they said nothing until now. Franks spun wildly when called on it, insisting that “The hope was to have as much information as possible so that the authorities could be notified effectively before the media.”

While the Roll Call article was posted a few hours after Starr's, CNS made no effort to update the article with this important information suggesting that Franks' concern is nothing but politically motivated hypocrisy.

Then again, that kind of politically motivated hypocrisy is what fuels CNS, isn't it?


Posted by Terry K. at 10:56 PM EDT
Saturday, July 18, 2015
WND Repeats Discredited ISIS Link to Chattanooga Shooting
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Leo Hohmann writes in a July 16 WorldNetDaily article about the Chattanooga shootings:

An ISIS affiliated Twitter account tweeted 15 minutes before the attack started a “warning” to America with the #Chattanooga hashtag (see screenshot above article). Could this have been the signal that started the attack? Authorities refused to comment on that Thursday, but a similar Twitter message came just before the ISIS attack in Garland, Texas in early May. This pattern suggests ISIS may have sleeper cells it is able to activate within the United States.

Hohmann's article prominently features the alleged ISIS tweet (at right), though it's curiously not captioned as such, identified only later in the article.

In fact, Hohmann is making a false claim. As Media Matters documents, the right-wing activists who initially promoted the false claim that the ISIS tweet came just before the Chattanooga shootings misread the Twitter timestamp by not accounting for time zones. The tweet actually was issued a few hours after the shooting, not shortly before.

There's also no purported "pattern" of ISIS warning of shootings in the U.S. The issuer of the "similar Twitter message" before the Garland shooting was actually issued by one of the gunmen, Elton Simpson, not by someone higher up in ISIS.

Despite this tweet having no actual link to the Chattanooga shooting, Hohmann's boss, WND editor Joseph Farah uses it to illustrate his July 17 column ranting that the shooting was Muslim terrorism despite authorities having yet to even definitively establish that the shooter, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, was a Muslim: "Hello? Since when do Christian or non-Muslim Arabs name their kids Mohammad?"

Farah then goes on to repeat the false claim his writer made, stealing it word-for-word: "An ISIS-affiliated Twitter account tweeted 15 minutes before the attack started a 'warning' to America with the #Chattanooga hashtag (see screenshot above article). Could this have been the signal that started the attack?"

If Farah had done even a modicum of research before writing his column, he would have known that the answer is no. 

And that is yet another reason why nobody believes WND.


Posted by Terry K. at 4:02 PM EDT
Updated: Saturday, July 18, 2015 4:10 PM EDT
Friday, July 17, 2015
MRC Still Complaining About Accurate Reporting
Topic: Media Research Center

It seems the Media Research Center isn't done being upset that the story about the secretly recorded Planned Parenthood official is being accurately reported.

A July 15 NewsBusters item by Curtis Houck complained that TV newscasts accurately identified the Center for Medical Progress, which released the dishonestly edited video, as “anti-abortion activists," whining about "the media’s long-standing refusal to use the 'pro-life' label for conservatives." But the CMP is unquestionably anti-abortion and they're activists, so it's absolutely accurate to describe them as "anti-abortion activists."

Houck even seemed put out that the media is reporting Planned Parenthood's side of the story at all, huffing that one newscast included "more points from Planned Parenthood about how they are 'only trying to help women who want to donate fetal tissue after abortions.'" Funny, we thought the MRC wanted the news fairly reported.

Houck didn't mention the fact that the original video the CMP released was dishonestly edited and did not portray the full context of what actually happened.

Ken Shepherd follows that up with a July 16 post complaining that the Dailiy Beast accurately identified CMP leader David Daleiden as an "extremist":

If you can't counter the message, character-assassinate the messenger. That, apparently, is Daily Beast writer Samantha Allen's tack regarding the sting video wherein a Planned Parenthood official discusses selling aborted-baby body parts above break-even rates to medical researchers.

Allen devoted her July 16 piece, "Maker of Planned Parenthood Video Called Abortion 'Genocide'" to trashing pro-life activist David Daleiden[.]

At no point does Shepherd dispute the accuracy of anything the Daily Beast reported about Daleiden, including the "extremist" descriptor, nor does he explain how reporting indisputably accurate information about Daleiden equates to "trashing" or character assassination. One could say the real character assassin here is Daleiden himself with his deceptive video dishonestly attacking Planned Parenthood -- a deception Shepherd, like fellow MRC employee Houck, does not acknowledge.


Posted by Terry K. at 1:52 PM EDT
Thursday, July 16, 2015
CNS Goes Into Race-Baiting Mode on Obama
Topic: CNSNews.com

The Media Research Center's creeping WND-ization continues by picking up WorldNetDaily's obsession with race.

In a July 13 CNS article, Susan Jones complained that President Obama used his weekly media address to promote his faie-housing initiative. She expressed particular concern that white suburbs might become less white, fretting that communities "must spend the [federal fair-housing] money in ways that move inner-city minorities, for example, into subsidized housing in wealthier, whiter suburbs."

Apparently, Jones doesn't think minorties have any place in those "whiter suburbs."

Since CNS has given up reporting actual news and instead has embraced its role as one more propaganda arm of the MRC, Jones engages in some trolling of Obama. After noting Obama's statement that children living just a few blocks apart may "lead incredibly different lives," Jones sneered: "President Obama could have used his own daughters as examples. They attend an elite private school in Washington, in a city where many poor blacks struggle in failing public schools."

Jones might look to her employer as an example of how her fellow conservatives are handling the issue. A couple years back, the MRC moved its headquaters from Alexandria, Va., a town with a 66.8 percent white population and a 22.4 percent black population, to Reston, Va., a town with a 70.1 percent white population and just a 9.7 percent black population.

The move also put the MRC in one of those "wealthier, whiter suburbs" Jones fears will be overrun by poor brown people; the median income of Alexandria is $85,706, while in Reston it's $107,962.

Yeah, we can see why Jones would be freaking out.


Posted by Terry K. at 6:45 PM EDT
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
MRC Is Mad That AP Is Accurately Reporting On A Story
Topic: Media Research Center

As one might expect, the ConWeb is all over the story of a secretly recorded video of a Planned Parenthood official talking about how it disposes of some of the fetal remains following an abortion, including selling them for research with the permission of the woman -- even though they are so far highlighting the deceptively edited, out-of-context claims and ignoring the full story.

The Media Research Center's Ken Shepherd does a terrible job of playing media cop, ignoring the deceptive, sensational reporting of his ConWeb peers and instead devoting a July 15 NewsBusters post to bashing the Associated Press for reporting the story accurately:

We've long known that the Associated Press is loathe to refer to unborn children as unborn children, preferring the clinical term "fetus." But in covering a shocking new story about how Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue from aborted babies for profit, the AP bent over backwards to use clinical euphemisms to soften the blow of the ghoulish practice.

Yes, Shepherd is attacking the AP for using a medically accurate term instead of the emotionally charged one he would prefer. Of course, he can't claim his preferred term is an accurate one, medically or otherwise; if you have to qualify the word "children," that means it's inaccurate to use "children" in this context.

But that's what the MRC's "media research" is down to these days.

Interesting that Shepherd is mad about accurate reporting but not about the deceptively edited video first released by the anti-abortion activists who secretly taped the Planned Parenthood official, or the ConWeb outlets who ignore that fact in their reporting of the story.

UPDATE: Shepherd might want to look a little closer to home to vent his outrage over accurate reporting -- say, across the hall at MRC headquarters. At MRC division CNSNews.com, its lead article on the story is an AP article that references "fetuses" instead of his preferred (and inaccurate) phrase. But as in CNS tradition of putting biased headlines on AP articles, it rewrote the headline to refer to "baby body parts," which is just as inaccurate as Shepherd's insistence that the AP refer to "unborn children."


Posted by Terry K. at 3:57 PM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, July 15, 2015 4:10 PM EDT
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
WND Columnist: Multiculturalism Is Just Like Having AIDS
Topic: WorldNetDaily

It’s fashionable to promote multiculturalism in the name of diversity.

According to the most avid supporters, “We all just need to get along. We need to get over our differences and live in peace.”

The problem with this is that it assumes there is no right or wrong. It assumes all beliefs are of equal value. Christianity and Islam are equals. Free enterprise and socialism are equals. Everyone just needs to accept that others beliefs are of equal value to their own.

Such thinking is like the AIDS virus.The human body is designed to fight off colds and flues and to heal from various wounds. Attacks on the health of the body are spotted and biological combat commences. The AIDS virus turns off the body’s defense mechanism. AIDS stands for “Immune Deficiency Syndrome.” It tells the body, “You’re OK,” when it’s not OK.

Multiculturalism says, “Don’t worry about a little socialism. It won’t hurt you.” It says, “Don’t be a stickler about God’s laws. Other people don’t believe them, and they’re just fine.” It says, “Don’t harp about traditional families. Be modern. Accept anything in the name of progress and diversity.”

-- Ted Baehr, July 12 WorldNetDaily column


Posted by Terry K. at 8:00 PM EDT
Monday, July 13, 2015
CNS Gives A Platform to Anti-Gay Kenyans
Topic: CNSNews.com

A July 7 CNSNews.com article by Patrick Goodenough pounds home the anti-gay message in realation to President Obama's upcoming visit to Africa. Goodenough quotes no fewer than seven Kenyan political and religious officials denouncing homosexuality and attacking Obama for even considering discussing the issue of gay rights in Kenya.

Despite the fact that CNS' mission statement claims that it "endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story" Goodenough made no apparent effort to contact any Kenyan official who would not engage in gay-bashing.

Goodenough is apparently so concerned with giving Kenyan gay-bashers a voice that he can't be bothered to tell us what the laws on homosexuality in Kenya are. He obliquoely refers to the situation by noting that "Homosexuality is frowned on in many African countries" and that "same-sex sexual acts are illegal in 76 countries around the world, 36 of them in Africa." But curiously, Goodenough never explains the situation in Kenya.

Homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Tthe Kenya National Commission on Human Rights states that gays "are discriminated, stigmatised and subjected to violence because of their sexual orientation." Additionally, gays "often face arbitrary arrest, are often detained at the police stations, subjected to torture and unnecessary harassment by the police who extort money from them and are only released after bribing their way out."

Goodenough and CNS, it seems, are totally down with all of that Kenyan anti-gay hate.


Posted by Terry K. at 4:52 PM EDT
Sunday, July 12, 2015
CNS Publishes Birther Lawyer Again
Topic: CNSNews.com

Last month, CNSNews.com demonstrated the creeping WND-ism that is taking over the Media Research Center by publishing an anti-gay marriage column by Herbert Titus, a WorldNetDaily favorite who's perhaps best known for claiming that Barack Obama can't be president because he did not have two parents who were American citizens and that his "loyalties" purportedly lie with his Kenyan-born father.

Well, apparently CNS can't get enough of Titus' legally suspect opinions, so he's back in a July 6 column declaring that  the Supreme court's ruling on same-sex marriage is "illegitimate and unlawful" and "Worthy only to be disobeyed." Titus concludes his article by he will "will continue to release articles" on how Americans can breakt the law -- a strange position for a so-called legal expert to take.

Well, Titus' view on Obama's eligibility and the definition of "natural born citizen" can be found nowhere in U.S. jurisprudence, which makes anything he has to say on any legal issue rather suspect. We also don't see Titus running around enforcing his extremely narrow definition of "natural born citizen" on Ted Cruz the way he was on Obama, so that makes him a hypocrite as well.

Those flaws, apparently, make him the perfect person to write op-eds for CNS, apparently.


Posted by Terry K. at 9:53 PM EDT
Saturday, July 11, 2015
WND Can't Stop Stringing The Birthers Along
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily isn't done stringing its faithful birthers along, it appears.

Following Aaron Klein's interview with Joe Arpaio -- in which Klein failed to ask Arpaio any meaningful birther-related questions --  Art Moore interviews cold case posse chief Mike Zullo for a July 9 article. Under the pretense of explaining away Zullo's claim of forthcoming "universe-shattering" evidence he made in late 2013, Moore uncritically lets Zullo declare that "there is no credible evidence of where Obama was born" and doesn't bother to challenge Zullo's claims that the unnamed thing that's keeping his purported investigation "under lock and key"could "prevent me from ever disclosing what this is."

As his fellow WNDer Klein did, Moore fails to ask Zullo about important revelations  that have surfced that discredit his investigation:

The documentation that what Arpaio, posse leader Mike Zullo and other birthers have claimed as evidence that the online version of Obama's birth certificate released by the White House is a manufactured fraud -- the various layers in the PDF document -- are easily reproduced by using a common Xerox scanner to scan in the document.

Arpaio's admission in the documentary "The Joe Show" that the only reason he latched onto the birther movement was to generate donations to his own re-election campaigns.

The statement by former posse member Reilly that Hawaii's verification of Obama's birth certificate constitutes sufficient proof that Obama is a "natural born citizen" -- and puts the lie to any claim by Arpaio that the investigation is fair and designed to clear Obama.

Moore also curiously fails to make any mention in his article of another fellow WNDer, Jerome Corsi, even though Corsi not only was (and may still be) a member of the cold case posse, it was his presentation to the Surprise Tea Party that, as Moorepoints out in his article, spurred Arpaio to set up the cold case posse in the first place.

Corsi's books on the issue aren't even promoted in Moore's article -- just a category list of "the resources you need to understand the critical constitutional issue ignored by Washington and establishment media — the essential qualifications for the person responsible for the nation’s security." And, yes, WND is still trying to desperately unload copies of Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate?" for 99 cents.

It's almost as if Corsi and WND now ashamed of their role in forwarding the birth certificate issue or something.

Nevertheless, Moore tries to demonstrate his own birther bona fides:

Some scholars point to the Naturalization Act of 1790, passed shortly after the Constitution was issued, as a guide. It defines a natural-born citizen as the offspring of two U.S. citizens, regardless of the place of birth. While the law was repealed by the Naturalization Act of 1795, which removed the term “natural born,” some argue the 1790 law, passed only three years after the Constitution was signed, represents the intent of the Framers.

Regardless of his place of birth, Obama would fail the 1790 Naturalization Act test, because his father was a Kenyan visiting the U.S. as a student.

Of course, given that the Naturalization Act of 1790 was repealed in 1795, it does not have the force of law. Moore avoids mentioning another inconvenient fact WND doesn't want to talk about: WND's favorite presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, would also fail Moore's test.

We've written Moore to ask for an explanation of his omissions. We'll let you know if he responds.


Posted by Terry K. at 6:39 PM EDT
Updated: Saturday, July 11, 2015 6:44 PM EDT

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