Not merely content to be merelyxenophobic about immigration, E. Ralph Hostetter also peddles misleading claims about illegal immigrants. In a July 3 NewsMax column, Hostetter writes:
Only a physical structure of substantial proportions will stop the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who now slip into the United States, unhindered, every year. The 12 to 20 million illegal aliens presently in the United States arrived in the same manner.
Actually, no. In fact, as many as 45 percent of those illegally in the U.S. are people who arrived legally but have overstayed their visas. A wall on the Mexican border, which Hostetter enthusiastically favors, would be ineffective at stopping visa violators.
In a July 3 FrontPageMag article, Ben Johnson writes: "I missed Chris Matthews' comments on the Scooter Libby pardon, but I'm told it sounded as if half his face were paralyzed." Johnson also asserts that Matthews "bellows for much of the Left, which wants to see a lynching."
In fact, Matthews was not hosting "Hardball" last night, though he did call in with his reaction to the Libby verdict, a fact Johnson doesn't mention -- and really, everyone sounds "as if half his face were paralyzed" over the phone. What Matthews said was hardly "bellowing" for a "lynching":
He was President Bush's political ally, so I certainly understand that he sympathizes with Scooter Libby and his family. The human aspects of this are totally understandable. And it may well be that Libby has suffered enough already and will suffer in the future... you could argue that the punishment has been exacted without Libby going to prison.
[...]
The misinformation in this country [that "that 40 percent still think that Iraq attacked us on 9/11"] remains after all these years -- because of the propaganda before we went to war. The results are still in effect. We’re still under a misunderstanding of the nature of why we went to war. That’s the tragedy here.
And the idea that Matthews "bellows for much of the Left" isn't true, either.
Additionally, Johnson references Plame's alleged "potentially perjurous testimony before Congress," linking to Byron York's May 25 article asserting that a recently released memo shows that Plame lied when she said that she didn't "recommend" or "suggest" her husband, Joseph Wilson, for a CIA misson to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq was trying to buy uranium. But as we've demonstrated, the memo actually backs up Plame's assertions; the idea for sending Wilson to Niger came from CIA officials, not Plame.
Finkelstein Still Thinks Libby Didn't Leak Topic: NewsBusters
In a July 3 NewsBusters post, Mark Finkelstein claimed that NBC's Lester Holt was "obfuscating an important fact" when he suggested that the prosecutor in the Valerie Plame outing investigation, who obtained a conviction against Scooter Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice, "never really got to the root of this case." Finkelstein responded: "The prosecutor never got to the root of the case? Sure he did. He knew all along that the leaker wasn't Libby, but Richard Armitage over at the State Department," further insisting that "the fundamental reason that Libby wasn't charged with leaking was that he was not the leaker."
In fact, Libby did leak Valerie Plame's name to at least two reporters. Finkelstein is making the absurd argument that because Armitage leaked Plame's name to Robert Novak, and Novak was the first to report it ahead of the reporters to whom Libby leaked, that Libby's leak somehow magically didn't happen.
A July 3 NewsMax article by Dave Eberhart attacks Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee for not being an "authentic" conservative. Among the reasons Eberhart listed was his "liberal policy of criminal pardons" while Arkansas governor:
Case-in-point: Wayne Dumond, a convicted rapist who was released during Huckabee's tenure as governor and who subsequently sexually assaulted and murdered a woman in Missouri following his release.
In October 1996, Huckabee met privately with the parole board to talk about the Dumond case. Some members of the board have since stated that they were pressured to re-examine and vote in favor of Dumond's parole. Huckabee has denied influencing the parole board in any way, but acknowledges some responsibility for signing Dumond's parole.
Dumond's case had gained some celebrity status in the mid 1990s from critics of President Bill Clinton who felt the former Arkansas governor had been too harsh with Dumond because Dumond's initial victim was a distant Clinton relative.
What Eberhart doesn't mention: A few years ago, NewsMax sang a much different tune as one of those "critics of President Bill Clinton" who tried to tie the DuMond case to Clinton and steer it away from Huckabee. As we've noted, NewsMax ran a November 2002 article uncritically quoting Huckabee, who was running for re-election as governor, claiming that Clinton "is running the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Jimmie Lou Fisher, who has made a 1984 rape case the central focus of her bid to replace Huckabee as the state's chief executive." The article added: "Clinton's role in resurrecting the rape case against Huckabee is particularly ironic, given the still unrefuted charges that he himself raped Arkansas businesswoman Juanita Broaddrick in 1978."
The article went on to identify DuMond's victim, Ashley Stevens, as "the daughter of Clinton cousin and campaign contributor Walter Stevens," asserting that "Stevens herself botched descriptions of the truck DuMond was driving at the time of the crime - and even got the color of his eyes wrong."
Not only did the 2002 article not mention, as Eberhart did, that Huckabee "pressured to re-examine and vote in favor of Dumond's parole," it allowed Huckabee to claim that Fisher's campaign "completely mischaracterized his role in the case":
"My opponent has used one issue," Huckabee told Imus, "and that is over a commutation that was actually done by [Clinton's successor] Jim Guy Tucker. ... He commuted the sentence of Wayne DuMond, a convicted rapist, and then the parole board released him. In the middle of that, I did give consideration to an earlier release, but I denied it."
Worse still, many believe DuMond never committed the rape in the first place.
The 2002 article also failed to mention that DuMond had been arrested for the Missouri murder in 2001. He died in prison in 2005.
Why has NewsMax flip-flopped on Huckabee and his role in the DuMond case? Doesn't Bill Clinton-bashing play anymore? Or is NewsMax simply trying to clear the path for Mitt Romney? Perhaps Eberhart can explain that.
Noel Sheppard's habit of hiding the inconvenient political agendas of those he promotes in his attacks on his political enemies appears to be spreading throughout NewsBusters -- and even outside of it.
A July 2 post by Ken Shepherd MTV's Kurt Loder's attack on Michael Moore's "Sicko," uncritically repeating Loder's citing of a documentary called "Dead Meat" that attacks Canada's socialized health system. But as News Corpse notes -- unmentioned by both Loder and Shepherd -- "Dead Meat" is a conservative film that debuted at David Horowitz's right-wing Liberty Film Festival. Further, "The film’s credits include special thanks to the rightist Manhattan Institute, the Pacific Research Institute, and the Heartland Institute." The latter institute, you may recall, is the one whose conservative leanings Noel Sheppard has been trying to obscure.
We can probably assume that "Dead Meat" is as least as biased as "Sicko," and both Ken Shepherd and Loder should have noted that.
Gore Derangement Syndrome Watch Topic: NewsBusters
Noel Sheppard continues to exhibit a full-blown case of Gore Derangement Syndrome, devoting a July 2 NewsBusters post to attacking him over effectively responding to anything Gore actually said in a New York Times op-ed.
Sheppard blasted away at the op-ed, calling it "factless, feckless, feculent foolishness" and continuing to bash Gore: "This guy was actually once the vice president, and was a few electoral votes away from being president? And there are people who voted for him back then, and believe him to be sane now?"
The only substantial attempt Sheppard made to disprove a Gore claim is reponding to a statement that carbon-dioxide levels "have been driven from 280 parts per million at the beginning of the coal boom to 383 parts per million this year" by citing "a study done recently by a scientist named Ernst-Georg Beck, wherein after researching papers done many others in the past two centuries, he concluded that as recently as 1940, the atmospheric CO2 level was above 400 ppm." Sheppard then claimed, "Of course, science is unimportant to Gore."
But it may be even more unimportant to Sheppard and Beck. As RealClimate points out, Beck "ignores the last 50 years of carbon cycle research" by assuming that "all chemical measurements in the 19th and early 20th century actually were fine" (they're not; CO2 measurements are highly inconsistent). Further, the spike in CO2 levels in 1940 Beck reported does not corellate with other known atmospheric data.
Sheppard also writes that he's going on a "much-needed vacation." Here's hoping he takes the opportunity to get treated for his bout of Gore Derangement Syndrome.
WorldNetDaily has been cranking up the anti-gay rhetoric (and name-calling) of late.
-- A headline on a June 30 article by Jay Baggett about anti-gay protesters at a gay pride festival calls the event a "homosex-fest," as does a June 29 article by Jennifer Carden. WND does not explain why such a term is used or considered an acceptable description of the event, or why something like "gay pride festival" is not acceptable.
Not even an afternoon at a baseball game apparently is going to be safe for parents who want to protect their children from advocates for homosexuality, with the San Diego Padres' confirmation their July 8 game will simultaneously offer free caps to attract children, and a formal recognition of the area's homosexual organization.
It's not until later in the article that you learn that what Unruh calls "formal recognition" of "advocates for homosexuality" is the Gay Men's Chorus of San Diego singing National Anthem and a block of tickets made available through the local gay-pride organization. Unruh suggests in the lead that the "advocates for homosexuality" are giving away the caps, but that's not true either; it's a separate promotion unrelated to gays buying baseball tickets.
Unruh quotes the usual gay-bashers and a Padres rep but nobody from the gay pride group -- not surprising given that the overall tone of the article is that gays should not be allowed to attend baseball games. Does Unruh's (and WND's) fundamentalist Christianity prohibit him from even speaking to gay people for his news articles?
CNS on Peter Paul: Closer, But... Topic: CNSNews.com
A June 29 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas comes closer to a complete telling of the Peter Paul story than anyone else on the ConWeb -- such as WorldNetDaily, whose Art Moore might as well be fellating the guy -- but there's still a few flaws that fall to Paul's favor.
Lucas writes: "The Clinton attorneys in recent briefs point out that Paul is a convicted felon. He pleaded guilty to manipulating his company's stock price in 2001 and pleaded guilty to a previous felony of defrauding the Cuban government in 1979." While that isn't a WND-type whitewashing, Lucas still glosses over the more daming details -- not mentioning that investors and banks were defrauded out of $25 million, for instance. And Paul did not plead guilty to the scam in 2001; that's when he was indicted, around the time of which he fled to Brazil and fought extradition back to the U.S. for two years. He pleaded guilty in March 2005 and is still awaiting sentencing after two years -- another suggestion that Paul is stalling for time.
Lucas made a similar claim in a June 19 article. The original version, reprinted at NewsMax, states that Paul "has two previous felony convictions, pleading guilty to fraud in the 1970s and to a drug charge in the 1980s." But the CNS version was later edited to "clarif[y] wording" to state that Paul "has a previous felony conviction of defrauding the Cuban government in the 1970s," removing the reference to the drug-related case. But the cocaine is a separate charge of which Paul was convicted at the same time as the Cuban-defrauding case, as the Washington Post points out. So it makes no sense for Paul and Lucas (through the "clarification") to suggest that it was the same thing.
Lucas states that "Paul accuses the Clinton camp of bringing up his history in a bid to divert attention away from the facts of the case," but he doesn't mention the equally valid argument that Paul is bringing up these charges against the Clintons in order to divert attention away from his felonious history and to attempt to reduce the prison sentence he's about to receive.
Lucas also quotes James Nesfield, president of a group called the Equal Justice Foundation of America, noting only that Nesfield "is not a disinterested party, having bought the troubled Stan Lee Media firm." Indeed, the EJFA appears to be little more than a proxy for Paul to attack the Clintons. Its website declares that "The case of Paul v Clinton has been selected by EJFA as the most important Whistleblowing case in America in 2007"; no other cases are mentioned. The website also states that it had an "Official Site opening" on June 26 -- just three days before Lucas' article appeared.
(And it's apparently not to be confused with the Equal Justice Foundation, which appears to be a conservative-leaning group involved in a number of issues, or the Equal Justice Foundation that funds public-interest work at Georgetown Law School, or the similarly themed Equal Justice America. Nesfield might want to look for a new name.)
Nesfield, by the way, has called himself a "modern-day pirate" and a "Machiavellian creature of the dark" in his role in snapping up distressed dot-com firms a few years back, including Stan Lee Media. That company is currently suing Marvel Comics and Stan Lee himself (who's no longer involved with the company), claiming that it owns a piece of the rights to comic characters created or owned by Lee and Marvel. (And the Freepers -- specifically, "Doug from Upland," who's working with Paul on a Hillary-bashing documentary -- are trying to tie this to the Clintons, too.)
Meanwhile ... Topic: Newsmax
NewsMax reprints a June 30 Dick Morris column in which he misrepresents Nancy Pelosi's ownership of stock in "Alcatel-Lucent (formerly Alcatel SA), a company with extensive investments in Iran and Sudan — nations that sponsor terrorism." In fact, as Media Matters details, Pelosi never owned Alcatel SA stock; Pelosi purchased Lucent stock in 1999, and Lucent merged with Alcatel in 2006. Further, Morris never mentions that Lucent is one of the stock market's most widely held stocks, nor does he single out Republicans who also own it.
NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard regularly attacks Al Gore, calling his film "An Inconvenient Truth" a "schlockumentary" and asserting without evidence that he's "a charlatan who doesn't believe in anything but himself and attaining power."
Sheppard keeps up the mindless attacks in a June 30 post. Repeating a op-ed by an employee of the Heartland Institute -- an activist group whose conservative leanings, secrecy over its funding and dubious ties to the tobacco industry Sheppard has previously declined to share with his readers -- Sheppard calls "An Inconvenient Truth" "political science fiction" and asserts, again without evidence, that Gore has "been lying all along for his own personal and financial gain."
Such unsupported personal attacks -- not to mention hiding the inconvenient facts behind his attacks on Gore and global warming when they conflict with his own agenda -- are quickly turning Sheppard into a shrill, unreliable source.
Sen. John McCain disposed of a snag in his personal financial disclosure requirements and a GOP presidential rival, Mitt Romney, has put off his disclosure obligations.
McCain's wife, Cindy, liquidated the contents of her $500,000-$1 million blind trust and placed the cash in a money market account, an aide said Thursday. The step was necessary to meet requirements of the Office of Government Ethics, which oversees financial disclosures by presidential candidates.
Does this mean we can look forward to Jerome Corsi ranting ominously, "What did John McCain know and when did he know it?"
Sheppard Hides Agenda Of Another Anti-Global Warming Activist Group Topic: NewsBusters
In a June 29 NewsBusters post, Noel Sheppard continues his deceptive descriptors of anti-global warming activists. This time, he calls the Heartland Institute, which had issued a press release critical of Al Gore, "a non-partisan social and economic think tank."
In fact, the Heartland Institute is a conservative activist group in thrall to big business. According to SourceWatch, the institute "campaigns on what it calls 'junk science', 'common-sense environmentalism' (i.e. anti-Kyoto, pro-GM), the privatization of public services, smokers' rights (anti-tobacco tax, denial of problems from passive smoking), the introduction of school vouchers, and the deregulation of health care insurance. The institute is one of several organizations the tobacco industry has cultivated to promote its interests, and it refuses to publicly disclose who its corporate and foundation funders are.
The institute's press release quoted by Sheppard states: "The Heartland Institute has been running ads in national newspapers calling on Al Gore to debate Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent global warming 'skeptic.'" But as we've previously noted, Monckton has his own credibility problems. The institute's website has a page in which it promotes the dubiousclaims about the environment and global warming made by Michael Crichton in his book "State of Fear."
WND Still Narcissistic About Site Blocking Topic: WorldNetDaily
A June 29 WorldNetDaily article once again complains about Internet filters that block WND's website.
As we've previously noted, WND has taken a narcissistic approach to the issue, caring only about the blocking of WND and not examining the larger question of other news and commentary website that content filters regularly block.
Ironically, WND has regularly criticized libraries who refuse to install content filters on their public computers for the very reason WND is upset -- the filters also block legitimate non-pornographic content. Most notoriously, WND asserted in a January article that one library that refused to use the filters "told porn addicts to go ahead and get loaded."
Shouldn't WND, as a news organization, be wondering what other sites, besides itself, are being blocked by faulty content filters? Or is it just too selfish to care about anyone's freedom of speech other than its own?
MRC Doubles Down on Coulter Defense Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has officially become a Ann Coulter dead-ender.
Another June 28 press release -- the second Coulter-related MRC release of the day -- complains that "[s]ome leading national media are misreporting conservative Ann Coulter’s remarks about liberal Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards." But in repeating Coulter's "entire quote" that "Bill Maher was not joking and saying he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack," the MRC does not note that Coulter distorted Maher's words in a not-dissimilar fashion to the way the MRC accuses the media of distorting Coutler.
The release goes on to quote Brent Bozell explaining Coulter's "humor":
Ann Coulter was making the point that (a) a leftist like Bill Maher made the serious statement that it might be a positive thing to have Vice President Dick Cheney killed by terrorists,” Brent Bozell continued, and, “(b) it received no condemnation from the national press; and therefore (c) she would escape negative media scrutiny in the future were she to take that line against John Edwards.
It is an inescapable truth that Ann Coulter was dripping with sarcasm when she made her remark.
1) That "dripping with sarcasm" excuse doesn't extend to Amanda Marcotte, as we've noted.
2) Bozell softened Coulter's distortion. She didn't say that Maher said "it might be a positive thing to have Vice President Dick Cheney killed by terrorists," she said Maher said "he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack." No "might" involved.
3) Unmentioned by Bozell is that Coulter made the arguably serious statements that "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building" -- which she called "prescient," not exactly the sign of someone who's jokiing -- and that "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee." Both of these statements predate Maher's remark, so it can be plausibly argued that Coulter set the precedent for making death threats against her political enemies and that Maher was merely following her lead.
If the MRC is going to defend Coulter -- which it appears it will do to the death -- it's axiomatic that this defense extends to her death threats as well. Are you really comfortable doing that, Brent? Is Coulter worth this much effort?
A June 28 NewsMax article follows in the Media Research Center's footsteps in portraying Ann Coulter as a victim of the mean liberal media and Elizabeth Edwards.
NewsMax led off by proclaiming that she endeavored to "set the record straight" after "a relentless 24-hour firestorm during which much of the mainstream media used selective quotes to mangle the meaning of several of Ann’s comments about Edwards," stating: "She further explained that she never wished John Edwards would die. She simply said on "Good Morning America" on June 25 that Bill Maher had wished the death of Vice President Cheney by terrorist attack and got away with it." But, as even the MRC has admitted, Coulter distorted Maher's remarks, and Maher did not "wish the death of Vice President Cheney by terrorist attack."
NewsMax went on to claim that Coulter "was blindsided by a phone call from Edward’s wife Elizabeth. Apparently, the call was pre-arranged by Matthews without Coulter’s knowledge." The article later stated, "As Rush Limbaugh said on his Web site, 'Ann Coulter was clearly ambushed' by the Edwards phone call." In fact, Coulter was alerted in advance to Elizabeth Edwards' call.
