Kessler Misleads on Dems, Patriot Act Topic: Newsmax
Ronald Kessler carries water for his Republicans once again: An Oct. 31 NewsMax article makes several false or misleading claims about Democrats and the USA Patriot Act.
-- Kessler writes that "This year alone, the Democrats overwhelmingly voted five times to kill the Patriot Act." In fact, in the final vote on the reauthorization of the act in March, only nine Senate Democrats voted against it.
-- Kessler repeatedly portrays Democrats as opposing the entire Patriot Act when, in fact, most opposed only specific provisions. As Rep. Jane Harman, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “We must extend it, mend it, but not end it.”
-- Kessler suggests that one Patriot Act provision that Democrats opposed was removal of the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but he offers no examples of Democrats who specifically opposed that provision -- perhaps because there are none. No Democratic opposition that we've seen centered on the "wall."
-- Kessler writes the following:
Under the Patriot Act, each roving wiretap, as they are called, has to be approved by a judge, so there is no question about infringing on civil liberties any more than when a judge approves a search of the house of a suspected child molester. Yet Democrats have portrayed the act as a monstrous invasion of rights.
This, again, conflates questions about a specific provision to opposition to the entire Patriot Act. What Democrats actually opposed was a Bush administration proposal to make roving wiretaps permanent; the renewal puts a four-year sunset provision on them.
-- Kessler also offers a strangely backhanded defense of the idea that we should unequivocally trust the FBI:
Since the days when J. Edgar Hoover ordered illegal wiretaps and improper surveillance, the FBI as an organization has not engaged in illegal conduct. If the FBI cannot be trusted to wiretap within the framework of the law, why trust agents to make arrests or carry weapons?
Doesn't the fact that the FBI did, in fact, engage in "illegal wiretaps and improper surveillance" make it imperative that certain safeguards be in place instead of Kessler's "go and sin no more" benediction?
-- Kessler writes that "Democrats have also claimed that under another provision of the act, the FBI can use 'sneak and peek' tactics in libraries to probe people's reading habits without informing the targets until after a search." Then, he claims that "the FBI has no interest in anyone's reading habits." Then why is he complaining about it? He should, therefore, have no problem with a provision in the renewal that offer more protections for library records.
Further, the main issue regarding library searches had nothing to do with the "sneak and peek" tactics Kessler cites; they involve the fact that the original Patriot Act let libraries be served with National Security Letters, a type of subpoena that forces the party being subpoenaed into a non-disclosure agreement severely limiting their legal rights. The renewal eliminates libraries as a recipient of NSLs.
UPDATE: Further contradicts Kessler's suggestion that Democrats oppose the Patriot Act's dismantling of the "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement, even Sen. Russ Feingold -- the only senator who voted against the original Patriot Act law in 2001 -- has said, "Nobody wants to put the wall back up."
NewsBusters Doesn't Need No Stinkin' Context Topic: NewsBusters
Does Mark Finkelstein understand the idea of context? We suspect not.
An Oct. 31 NewsBusters post by Finkelstein dismissed Chris Matthews' claim that John Kerry "meant to go after the president," not U.S. troops, with his comment with without adequate education one will get "stuck in Iraq," retorting, "To quote that keen observer of human nature, John McEnroe: 'you cannot be serious!' ' But Finkelstein fails to offer the context in which Matthews made his claim.
As Media Matters pointed out -- but Finkelstein doesn't -- Matthews made note of an Associated Press article that placed the comment in its proper context -- as part of "several one-liners," such as stating that "Bush had lived in Texas but now 'lives in a state of denial.' "
In fact, noNewsBusterspost to on the issue has reported on the context in which Kerry made his remark, which supports Kerry's claim that it was targeted at Bush, not the troops.
So, NewsBusters guys: How, exactly, does one fight "liberal media bias" by refusing to tell the full truth?
UPDATE: A post by Noel Sheppard appears to excoriate CNN for allowing Kerry to respond to the charge that he insulted U.S. troops, calling it "unbelievable" that correspondent Andrea Koppel would "amazingly" let Kerry defend himself. Huh?
WND Distorts Kerry Remarks (Duh!) Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Oct. 31 WorldNetDaily article continues WND's longstanding policy of spreading distortions and lies about John Kerry. It played up criticism of his remark and conservatives' interpretation of it as an attack on U.S. troops, waiting until the 13th paragraph to note that Kerry has said that it was directed at President Bush, not the troops. The article then goes on to "debunk" Kerry's purported claim that U.S. troops are poorly educated -- something Kerry has made clear he never said.
An Oct. 31 NewsMax article by John Mercurio -- is this the guy who's a senior editor at National Journal's Hotline On Call blog? -- buys into Rep. Curt Weldon's conspiracy theory about the federal investigation into him.
Mercurio stated that an early report about the investigation into Weldon came out on "quite fittingly, Friday the 13th," called FBI raids related to the investigation "suspiciously timed" and asserted without evidence that the Justice Department broke "its own rules in taking provocative steps against a public official shortly before Election Day." In fact, Mercurio himself contradicts that last claim by quoting a DOJ official as saying that "the Department of Justice and all of its investigative agencies do not take political considerations into play when it comes to discharging their duty."
Channeling conspiracy theorist extrordinaire Jack Cashill, Mercurio also repeated without challenge Weldon's claims that he is "painting the leak as a pre-election dirty trick orchestrated by allies of Sestak, who built connections with national Democrats during the Clinton administration as a Navy admiral and a member of Clinton's National Security Council."
Kinsolving Sucks Up to Tony Snow Topic: The Daily Les
An Oct. 31 WorldNetDaily column by Les Kinsolving reports that he scored a brief sit-down interview with White House press secretary Tony Snow. None of Kinsolving's notorious badgering questions here -- he's in softball mode. Some of Kinsolving's queries:
"Am I correct in my assumption that you are aware that daily newspapers – almost all of which are editorially Democrat-inclined – are almost all suffering serious losses, in both circulation and ad revenue?"
"Am I correct in my assumption that you are aware that the Old Big Media TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC – which once had more than 90 percent of all TV viewers in the nation – are now reduced to around 30 percent – which led NBC to those massive job cuts?"
"Am I correct in my assumption that it is not only your basic fairness as a person that keeps you from ever refusing to let me ask two questions – but because I represent the New Big Media – on both the Internet newssite WorldNetDaily.com and its 6 million visitors, as well as on talk radio?"
"Would I be wrong in my impression that the president, despite your past criticism of him, wanted you in this office enough to provide you the understanding and full support so essential to your being able to function with integrity?"
That's why Kinsolving gets the big bucks -- and a sit-down with Tony Snow.
New Article: Rude, Prude, and (Definitely Not) Tattooed Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Out There article: Are people who get tattoos or body piercings in league with the devil and Charles Manson? At least one WorldNetDaily writer thinks so. Read more.
-- An Oct. 30 article by Susan Jones uses the conservative term "Democrat Party" even though there is no such thing.
-- An Oct. 30 column by Chuck Muth attacks Bush from the far right regarding the Bush administration's failures in the war on terror: Muth believes it's "pussy-footing around and waging a politically correct 'sensitive' war." What should Bush have done instead? Rescind the executive order that bans assassinations of foreign leaders, not federalize baggage screeners, "and The Air Force and the Navy's rockets red glare should have lit up Baghdad in October, not March."
-- An Oct. 30 article by Nathan Burchfiel is the fifth CNS "news" article referencing Jim Webb's fiction. As before, no attempt is made to put Webb's offending passages in the context of the story from which CNS (and the George Allen campaign) plucked them.
Graham Repeats Misleading Stem Cell Talking Point Topic: NewsBusters
In an Oct. 30 NewsBusters post, Tim Graham repeats a misleading conservative talking point about embryonic stem cell research that he had posted in a comment thread on another blog:
You liberals are so boastful about having All The Answers that you're avoiding the main, scientific point: embryonic stem cells have NOT helped one, not one patient.
It cannot be said, if one is paying close attention to science, which is based on proving hypotheses, that favoring more embryo-destroying research is the same thing as favoring a KNOWN cure. There is no known cure in embryo-destroying research.
As we've noted, embryonic stem cell was isolated only in 1998, and relative little research has been done on them compared to adult stem cells; the first adult stem cell was isolated in 1960.
An Oct. 30 WorldNetDaily article by David Bradshaw features a person with something called the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, who accuses the government of having a "keep-gold-weak policy." That person is also quoted as saying "Gold prices could double to $1,200 per ounce in the short term to then run up as high as $3,000 per ounce over the next five years"; Bradshaw adds that he says that "in an exclusive interview this week" with WND's Joseph Farah.
It's not disclosed anywhere in the article -- only in the URL of the link to it -- but that interview is available from Swiss America -- a gold-trading company that is one of WND's major advertisers and sponsor of WND's BizNetDaily site. Further, as we've previously noted, Bradshaw is not a WND employee or even a journalist; he works for Swiss America, where he edits the Real Money Perspectives newsletter.
In other words, this is not a "news" article -- it's an ad.
Jerome Corsi continues hammering away at Ted Strickland. An Oct. 28 WorldNetDaily column yet again recycles the claim that Strickland hired a campaign manager for his 1998 re-election campaign who, four years earlier, had been convicted on a charge of public indecency. Again, Corsi overstates his claim, calling the man a "convicted criminal sex offender" while not noting that the charge on which he was convicted was, in fact, a fourth-degree misdeameanor -- in other words, it's not as serious as Corsi and his co-author-slash-Strickland opponent Ken Blackwell have made it out to be.
Corsi, meanwhile, has been silent on a similar situation facing his buddy Blackwell: While Blackwell served as Ohio state treasurer, his office hired a man who had a history of arrests -- one for robbery, two for cocaine possession; he was sentenced to probation and drug treatment on one of the possession charges -- and was kept on after Blackwell was alerted to the man's criminal record. Further, three months after the man left his job there, he was sentenced to four years in prison for sexually abusing a girl.
It appears that the Blackwell-linked employee had a much more severe criminal record than the Strickland-linked employee. If it was OK for Blackwell to hire a convicted criminal -- as Corsi's silence about it indicates it is -- why wasn't it OK for Strickland?
We also noted that Corsi has ceased using the name of the offending Strickland employee, even though he used it in a earlier column. Why? Perhaps because the misdeameanor Corsi keeps writing about was officially expunged from the man's criminal record and it may not be, you know, legal to be publicly distributing expunged records. Which may be also why Corsi is protecting the identity of the "Ohio Concerned Citizen" who is his main source for these accusations. While Corsi insists that "[t]he information given me by Ohio Concerned Citizen in the past has been true and verifiable," such use of an anonymous violates WorldNetDaily's policy against using anonymous sources (as articulated by Joseph Farah in a January 1999 WND column: "usually quotes made up out of whole cloth to help make the story read better"). Of course, as we've noted with WND's Aaron Klein, stated policy and practice are two very different things; anonymous sources appear to be quite permissible when needed to achieve WND's agenda.
NewsMax's Misleading Claims on Stem Cells Topic: Newsmax
Opponents of embryonic stem cell research have latched onto a new scare tactic: tumors!
An Oct. 25 NewsMax article largely regurgitating Rush Limbaugh's take on a political ad featuring parkinson's disease victim Michael J. Fox's support for embryonic stem cell research threw out the tumor claim:
In an Oct. 23 story in Canada's Globe and Mail, researchers at the University of Rochester were said to have encountered what the newspaper called the "two extremes that have met in one dazzling, yet devastating experiment.
"Researchers there have for the first time essentially cured rats of a Parkinson's-like disease using human embryonic stem cells. But 10 weeks into the trial, they discovered brain tumors had begun to grow in every animal treated.
"Here we have this method that works so well to reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's," said lead investigator Steven Goldman, "But no matter how you look at it, it's an expanding mass and that's bad news."
Experts say that this has been the result in all cases when embryonic stem cells were used on lab animals. They develop tumors, some cancerous.
That's a somewhat selective quoting of the Globe and Mail article, and it suggests that because one experiment failed, all research should cease. In fact, the article states that "scientists have always known that any stem cell therapy could result in an uncontrolled growth of cells that could give rise to cancer" -- a far cry from NewsMax's claim that anonymous "experts say" that tumors results in "all cases" -- and noted "the possibility that the years-old and scant stem lines available to government researchers in the United States may also have had tumourigenic properties from the start that skewed the experiment." The article also notes that scientists are now "redoing the experiment" to attempt another method of retarding uncontrolled cell growth.
Michael Reagan, in an Oct. 27 NewsMax column, made a similar claim, adding, "Thus far, that is the sole fruit of ESC research – fatal brain tumors."
A Sept. 26 NewsMax column by Michael Arnold Gluek and Robert J. Cihak -- both members of the conservative Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, as we've noted -- threw out another misleading claim: that "human embryonic stem cells have not cured a single human medical condition. That's as in none, nada, zero; not experimentally, or in controlled clinical trials, or in general medical use." But Gluek and Cihak don't say that this is because embryonic stem cells were not isolated until November 1998 and, thus, relatively little research has been done, while adult stem cell research has had many years of a head start on research. As the International Society for Stem Cell Research states, "Because human embryonic stem cells were isolated relatively recently, and therefore we know less about them, it is currently more difficult to work with human systems than mouse."
The Gluek-Cihak coolumn also calls supporters of embryonic stem cell research "bigots" because they are "loudly intolerant of other beliefs and add injury to insult by extracting our tax money to support their activities."
Did Webb Really 'Defend' Penis-In-Mouth Incident? Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 28 NewsBusters post by Ken Shepherd attacking the Washington Post for not including an example in one of Virginia Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb's novels in which a father greets his 4-year-old son by putting the boy's penis in his mouth, Shepherd claimed that by claiming that claiming that it was "not a sexual act," Webb was defending the practice, calling Webb "quick to defend arguable incest."
That is misleading; nowhere has Webb been quoted endorsing the practice. What Webb, in fact, defended is the inclusion of that incident in his book, not the incident itself. Yet, in a comment on the post, Shepherd adds:
Maybe in that culture it is not. But it says something that the first thing to spring to his mind in an interview is to DEFEND it rather than say, "Yeah, it's pretty sick, but that's part of their culture."
Mind you, this is apparently merely a passing mention in Webb's book -- neither Shepherd nor the CNSNews.com article he quoted offer any indication that it is anything more than that, let alone that Webb's book endorses or celebrates the practice.
This whole Webb fiction controversy -- shopped by the George Allen campaign and eagerly lapped up by Media Research Center arms such as NewsBusters and CNSNews.com -- appears to be yet another example of the depiction-equals-approval fallacy. Shepherd appears to believe that because Webb didn't condemn the act he depicted, he must therefore approve of it. Again, that's a logical fallacy for which he has no evidence.
Shepherd is susceptible to peddling such faulty logic; he did so in an August post claiming that because the Washington Post didn't explicitly condemn the acts of dumpster-diving it depicted in a article, it "glorifie[d]" them.
Graham Channels Biased Corsi on Strickland Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 28 NewsBusters post by Tim Graham complained that the Washington used "one paragraph" to "dispose" of the accusation made by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell that his Democratic opponent, Ted Strickland, allegedly knowingly hired as a campaign manager a man who had been convicted on indecency charges four years earlier, declaring, "This scandal deserves its own story." As background on the case, Graham cites ... Jerome Corsi.
Graham links to a Oct. 25 Corsi article on the Human Events website that similarly overstates the case against the campaign manager in the way that Corsi's articles on the issue for WorldNetDaily do (as we've documented).
But Graham fails to note that Corsi is not exactly an unbiased reporter here: he co-wrote a book with Blackwell. Human Events also fails to point that out as well.
Graham also engages in the conservative game of downplaying the Mark Foley scandal by comparison, repeating a Post article's claim that "No one interviewed for this article could cite any instance in which Foley had sex with a former page." Graham conveniently misses the point of the article, which is that Foley actively and repeatedly cultivated relationships with congressional pages over a period of years that "if a boy seemed willing to go along, some conversations [by Foley with the pages] grew more sexual." The Strickland staffer's behavior, by comparison, occurred four years before his employment by Strickland, did not occur during his employ and was expunged from his record. Given this, Graham (and Corsi, for that matter) needs to explain how Foley and Strickland are equivalent.
Sheppard Follows the Conservative Playbook Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 27 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard complained that CNN followed "the liberal media playbook" in its coverage of the James Webb fiction non-scandal. Which raises the question: Has Sheppard followed the conservative media playbook in his coverage? Let's see...
Inappropriate comparison to a much bigger scandal to inflate its importance? Yup: Sheppard compared Webb's fiction to the Mark Foley scandal. But wait -- wasn't Sheppard, just a few short weeks ago, dismissing the Foley scandal as "one virtually unknown congressman’s sexual indiscretions"?
Refusing to make a more appropriate comparison? Yup: In his first post on the issue, Sheppard made no mention of the sex-in-literature skills of, say, Lynne Cheney. In this post, he attacks CNN for bringing up Cheney's literary efforts, bashing it as "extraordinarily expedient" in using part of the "iberal media playbook." Actually, that's what is known as context; Sheppard might want to check out that concept sometime.
Attacking Webb for defending himself? Yup: Here, Sheppard depicts the allegedly offensive scenes Webb defended as "illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot" as CNN's giving "the offended Democrat an extraordinary amount of print-space to explain his or her position." That is, by the way, not something Sheppard himself did in his first post, since he apparently feels that Democrats should not be allowed to defend themselves.
Ignoring evidence that makes Republicans look bad? Yup: In addition to pretending there are not Republican equivalents to what Webb has done, Sheppard also has not mentioned evidence that the George Allen campaign shopped the story and that his MRC colleagues at CNSNews.com have eager promoters of the story with the Allen campaign's possible help.
