WND Can't Stop Lying About Obama Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily lies and lies and lies about Barack Obama, to the point where the only possible conclusion for its existence is that Joseph Farah and crew have decided its readers are suckers and will believe anything they publish.
WND's inability to stop lying about Obama is approaching the pathological. An April 2 WND article repeats one of those lies:
Obama believes the Constitution is flawed, because it fails to address wealth redistribution, and he says the Supreme Court should have intervened years ago to accomplish that.
Obama told Chicago's public station WBEZ-FM that "redistributive change" is needed, pointing to what he regarded as a failure of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in its rulings on civil rights issues in the 1960s.
The Warren court, he said, failed to "break free from the essential constraints" in the U.S. Constitution and launch a major redistribution of wealth. But Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, said the legislative branch of government, rather than the courts, probably was the ideal avenue for accomplishing that goal.
As we've explained, Obama NEVER said any of that. WND is putting words in his mouth and lying about him -- something it has repeatedlydone on this issue.
The Obama-hate at WND headquarters must be at a toxic level. How else to explain WND's utter disregard for the facts and its willingness to trash what little credibility it has by repeating such obvious lies? Farah appears to be disturbingly eager to immolate his own website in order to bring down Obama.
Sadly, it appears no WND employee has the guts to stand up to their employer's lies -- indeed, this article lacks a byline -- despite the fact that WND's complete lack of credibility destroys their own as well.
More Global Warming Bamboozlement From Phil Brennan Topic: Newsmax
Longtime global warming bamboozler Phil Brennan is at it again in his March 31 Newsmax column, declaring that "The climate stopped warming around 1998. During the past 10 years, she's lowered the thermostat to the extent this year is moving rapidly toward the distinction as one of the coldest on record."
In fact, 2008, while slightly cooler than previous years due to a La Niña cycle, was the 10th warmest year on record, and actual scientists point out that the Earth remains in a warming trend.
FrontPageMag Substitutes Obama Birth Certificate Conspiracy With New Conspiracy Topic: Horowitz
Good news: A major right-wing site is denouncing the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. Bad news: It's substituting an even more stupid one.
Following up on David Horowitz's March 30 attempt to get his fellow right-wingers to back away from Obama Derangement Syndrome (because it worked so well with them the last time he tried it), an April 1 FrontPageMag article by Andrew Walden attempts to put a stake through the heart of the birth certificate conspiracy:
For Obama to have been born in Kenya, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. would have had to fly from Honolulu to Mombasa, give birth in a substandard third world hospital, fly back and then somehow arrange for a fraudulent birth certificate to be entered by the State of Hawai'i on August 8, 1961 (at the time governed by Republican William Quinn). They would have also somehow planted the phony birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser (at the time edited by Republican Thurston Twigg-Smith) and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Hawai'i’s current Republican Governor Linda Lingle would also have to be complicit in the cover-up as would all of the leftist 1960s University of Hawaii friends of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr—among them US Rep Neil Abercrombie.
Walden even calls out WorldNetDaily -- one of the mainpromoters of the conspiracy -- for getting stuff wrong:
Since Hawai'i law forbids the release of birth certificates to anybody not authorized by Barack Obama or his family, Obama further feeds the paranoia by choosing not to grant such permissions. A World Net Daily story claiming Hawai'i’s Republican Governor Linda Lingle ‘sealed’ the birth certificate is totally false. The governor’s office has asked for a retraction.
It's rather curious, not to mention yet another breach of journalistic ethics, that WND has not reported the governor's denial or otherwise responded publicly to it -- indeed, the Oct. 26, 2008, WND article by Jerome Corsi making this apparently false claim remains live. Erik Rush even repeated the false claim in a December 2008 Newsmax column.
Then, Walden blows it by claiming that right-wing obsession over the birth certificate is exactly what Obama wants them to do:
By refusing media requests for a look at the actual paper birth certificate, Obama’s campaign gave sly backhanded assistance to the forgery hype. The internet release of the birth certificate via hyper-partisan website Daily Kos on June 12 before posting it on a campaign website was likely calculated to fuel the frenzy. This is Obama’s Gramscianstrategydesigned to redirect the opposition down a blind alley.
[...]
Obama benefits from creating an opposition which seems to be standing by the side of the road impotently pointing to a piece of paper as if it could stop 63 million voters from anointing their ‘chosen one’. Birth certificate lawsuit plaintiff Phil Berg is a Democrat and whether he understands it or not, he has done great work on behalf of his party.
It is time for folks to stop being played by the Obama campaign and drop this counter productive ‘phony birth certificate’ nonsense.
As the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins put it, Walden is "substituting an utterly insane conspiracy theory with a thunderously obtuse one."
Walden might not be a fan of the birth certificate conspiracy, but he has been a promoter of other Obama conspracies: As we've noted, Accuracy in Media has reprinted Walden's purported exposure of "the Frank Marshall Davis netweork in Hawaii,"and AIM's Cliff Kincaid has approvingly cited Walden's work of examining "Davis’s Sex Rebel book."
Ultimately, Walden's complaint seems to boil down to that the birth certificate conspiracy is drawing attention away from his own conspiracy.
Bozell Wrong on Poll Methodology Topic: Media Research Center
In his April 1 column, Brent Bozell writes about a Washington Post poll that prompted responses he doesn't like (namely, that Americans like President Obama):
They did the usual tricks for a more liberal sample of “public opinion” – they polled on the weekend and oversampled Democrats (36 percent Democrat, 25 percent Republican). By themselves, these things are shameless – but expected. And still that wasn’t enough of a slant. Check out the way this question was asked by the Post pollsters.
As we've previously detailed, polling more Democrats than Republicans is a reflection of reality. Even Rich Galen, Republican strategist and columnist for Bozell's CNSNews.com, concedes that "those who claim to be Democrats outweigh those who claim to be Republicans by 7 to 9 percentage points."
As for Bozell's unsupported assertion that weekend polling skews liberal, Jamison Foser at County Fair points out that it's spurious at best.
Reisman: GLSEN = Hitler Youth Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's April Fool's day, but Judith Reisman sounds deadly serious in her April 1 WorldNetDaily tirade:
Such American classroom indoctrination is now found in "hate" and sexual diversity training and in 3,500 nationwide Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) school clubs. Under color of a "Safe Schools Movement" battling alleged "bullying" of so-called "gay" children (K-12), some see GLSEN as a modern version of the Hitler Youth and as preparing the ground for a larger, sweeping, schoolroom Youth Brigade.
The similarities between Hitler's National Socialist Teachers Association (NSTA) and the Rockefeller and Playboy funded National Education Association (NEA) and American Library Association (ALA) troubles some World War II elders. Like Hitler's NSTA, our NEA also largely guides the "ideological indoctrination of teachers." (Ronald J. Berger "Fathoming the Holocaust," Aldine Transaction, 2002, p. 50) Moreover, NSTA, the NEA, GLSEN and the Hitler Youth all seek to sever schoolchildren from their parent's religious and sexual training.
Both the GLSEN youth and the Hitler Youth were trained to be revolutionary leaders of the brave new world order.
Nobody could be this hateful in real life, could they? Actually, Reisman arguably is -- we've documented her smears of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, about whom she is completely obsessed. Plus, she's writing for a website that loves to hurl Nazi smears.
Ellis Washington's Obama Insult du Jour: Idolatry! Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ellis Washington seems to have taken our advice to come up with new, more creative ways to insult President Obama to heart. His April 1 WorldNetDaily column accuses Obama of idolatry:
Let's look at Obama the messiah who even before he had secured the presidency had the arrogance and self-deification to invent out of whole cloth the "Office of the President-Elect," replete with his own graven image (seal) signifying his transcendent power, authority and divinity.
[...]
Other examples of graven images of Obama the messiah are the following:
His trusty teleprompter goes wherever Obama goes. I wonder whose words are spoken into his ear for him to parrot. Words that are "engraved" on that conspicuous electronic devise that has such control over our president and over our nation. For example, Obama recently thanked himself for hosting a leader from Ireland. Why? Because the teleprompter told him to. Who is this invisible, mysterious, diabolical voice We the People did not elect to any office?
Obama's multi-billion-dollar bailouts are a form of graven image to the almighty dollar. These unconstitutional acts are similar to the fascist totalitarian tactics of Mussolini. Obama has all but dispensed with any pretext of a company having to take money from the federal government for him to usurp control.
Under Obama "Corleone," all private enterprise is vulnerable to his seemingly insatiable lust for power and control. Monday's action against GM's CEO was just his most blatant deification of himself.
Obama sees himself as a demigod, a living breathing graven image to be worshiped through the bureaucracy of the State, like Wilson, FDR and LBJ before him. Constitutional strictures are irrelevant to him.
Needless to say, Washington doesn't actually support any of these contentions with facts. And the part about Obama " thank[ing] himself for hosting a leader from Ireland" was actually a joke.
Washington can't change old ways, however, as he revisits previous insults. In addition to the "Corleone" reference, Washington likens Obama to a Nazi. Washington also declares that Woodrow Wilson "was America's first fascist president" and that "Wilson is a closer model to Obama than FDR, JFK or LBJ."
A March 31 Newsmax article by David Patten on how New York Republicans are seeking "a wide-ranging injunction to prevent Minnesota-style snafus seen in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman race from disrupting the hard-fought 20th congressional district race in upstate New York" carries the headline: "NY GOP Moves To Block Franken-Style Vote Grab."
At no point in the article does Patten support the headline's contention that questions about the Minnesota election and recount, in which the lead transferred from Coleman to Franken, equates to Franken "grabbing" votes from Coleman.
Patten has previouslyaccused Franken of instigating a "vote grab" -- also baselessly.
In a March 31 FrontPageMag article, which he claims is the speech he would have given to a college Republican group railing against hate-crime laws had he not be subject to "an organized and highly disruptive demonstration by a mob of socialists, 'peace activists,' and homosexuals," Don Feder writes:
Take the 1998 homicide of Matthew Shepard. Was Shepard murdered because he was a homosexual? Possibly. But it’s equally plausible that he died because his murderers wanted drug money, and Shepard (weighing in at 105 pounds) was an easy mark. According to a 2004 report by ABC’s “20/20,” that’s what many close to the case believe.
As we detailed, what Feder portrays as "many close to the case" is in fact merely one of the men who killed Shepard -- who has a history of telling lies about his role in the death of Shepard and who mounted a gay-panic defense during his murder trial -- changing his story. The others are right-wingers like Feder who believe the killer because his new story fits in with their anti-gay agenda.
Here's what an actual person "close to the case" -- the former police chief of Laramie, Wyo. -- said at the time about the killer's new story: "Only three people know what really happened that night. ... One of them is dead and the other two are known liars and convicted felons -- murderers."
Indeed, Feder is a veritable font of misleading far-right talking points in this speech-that-never-was. He recounts the overblown case of anti-gay protesters who were arrested at a 2004 gay event in Philadelphia, claiming they "could have been sentenced 47 years in prison and $90,000 in fines," adding, "They weren’t disruptive. They didn’t attempt to block access to the event." In fact, as we detailed at the time, the leader of the protesters, Michael Marcavage, carried a bullhorn, leading his protest in the middle of the celebration and refusing to obey an order to go to an area on the edge of the event. (Feder doesn't explain how the use of a bullhorn can be anything but disruptive.) Further, even the attorney for the gay group that organized the event said, "They might get six to 12 months probation. ... Nobody's going to jail for 47 years" (the charges were ultimately dropped).
Feder also repeats the case of college librarian Scott Savage, who was accused of "sex-discrimination and harassment ... for recommending four books," one of which was David Kupelian's anti-gay "The Marketing of Evil." We realize Feder could care less about getting facts straight (witness his work for Accuracy in Media's anti-New York Times website), but as we've noted, the actual accusation against Savage was "harassment based on sexual orientation," something functionally different from what Feder said.
Newsmax Mum on PAC's Role in NY Special Election Topic: Newsmax
A March 31 Newsmax article by David Patten on the special congressional election in New York made an attempt to explain away how Republican Jim Tedisco's 18-point lead over "Democratic upstart" Scott Murphy disappeared in a month's time: the economy, the popularity of President Obama and Kirsten Gillibrand (whose vacant seat Tedisco and Murphy are vying for after Gillibrand was named to fill Hillary clinton's Senate seat), "the surrogate war" and "negative campaigning."
One factor that Patten didn't name: the National Republican Trust PAC.
As the Washington Independent reported, the PAC has spent more than $190,000 in ads on behalf of Tedisco that attacked Murphy, ads that have been criticized as being too negative, so much so that they were turning off voters:
According to the Siena Poll released on March 12, Murphy has closed a double-digit gap and is now just four points behind Republican candidate Jim Tedisco. Only 12 percent of voters said the ads they saw for Tedisco made them more likely to support the Republican, to 28 percent who said they became less likely to support him.
Why won't Newsmax talk about the National Republican Trust PAC's role in the Tedisco-Murphy race? Perhaps because the PAC has a relationship with Newsmax columnist Dick Morris, or because its executive director, Scott Wheeler, also writes a Newsmax column -- a recent Wheeler column touting Tedisco failed to disclose his PAC's role in bankrolling hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro-Tedisco ads.
Or perhaps because the PAC is a Newsmax advertiser. For instance, the PAC used Newsmax's mailing list to send out atleastthree emails since March 19 supporting Tedisco and attacking Murphy (one of which was signed by Dick Morris).
After the polls closed, Patten's article was rewritten to reflect election results (without notifying readers that the article was altered, of course), and all references to the lead Tedisco blew were deleted, save for a reference in the final paragraph that the race "only a few weeks ago appeared to be a virtual lock for the GOP." No reference to the National Republican Trust PAC was added.
UPDATE: Politico reports that the National Republican Trust PAC spent $819,000 trying to get Tedisco elected.
More Details of WND-Orly Taitz Relationship Emerge Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've detailed WorldNetDaily's silence about its relationship with Obama birth certificate obsessive Orly Taitz, including supplying her with a copy of WND's secretive anti-Obama petition to present to Chief Justice John Roberts. More evidence of this relationship shows up in a March 23 post on Taitz's Defend Our Freedoms website:
Today, Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq; or as nicknamed by our volunteer Judith, our Lady Liberty!, was in Washington DC with WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah. Among their tasks in DC was visits to the Department of Justice and to the Supreme Court. It has been learned, proven, and now documented that many of the signed receipt documents send in since December have not been received. Dr. Taitz, or our Lady Liberty, will have a full detailed account for everyone soon.
Thank you Joseph Farah for documenting this historic day!
The claim that Taitz was "with WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah" indicates that Farah had a hand in planning Taitz's trip and the meetings she attended, Farah has not discussed this visit with Taitz, or his apparent squiring of her around Washington.
A week before, Farah wrote a column effusively praising Taitz:
I have to tell you, this lady is rapidly becoming one of my heroes.
[...]
Personally, I'm ready to support Orly Taitz for whatever office she seeks.
I'm ready to give her any support she needs to adjudicate this issue.
Apparently, such support includes violating journalistic ethics by maintaining a close relationship with a person they're supposed to be reporting about without disclosing that relationship to his readers.
In WND's mission statement, Farah declares, "the world has a right to know." Farah seems to have decided that the world has no right whatsoever to know about his relationship with a source.
We've added this information to our earlier article about the questions WND has refused to answer about Taitz and the birth certificate.
In his March 31 CNSNews.com column, Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner writes: "These bonuses, paid to executives at AIG, were specifically authorized by language in the massive 'stimulus' bill passed in February."
In fact, the bonuses would have been paid without the stimulus bill, having been previously agreed to. The stimulus bill language actually restricts future bonuses, which Feulner does not note.
Caruba Can't Stop Lying About Global Warming Topic: CNSNews.com
Alan Caruba asserts in his March 30 CNSNews.com column:
The Earth is not currently warming. It has been cooling for a decade and likely to continue for at least another twenty years or longer.
As we've pointed out every time he makes this misleading claim, British meterological experts and researchers have reported that "[t]emperatures are continuing to rise" and states that "[a] simple mathematical calculation of the temperature change over the latest decade (1998-2007) alone shows a continued warming of 0.1° C per decade." Further, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that "[t]he eight warmest years in the [global] GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990."
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is the Erebusic personification of President Obama's contempt for free-market capitalism. Together they have successfully maligned Wall Street and AIG, et al., vis-à-vis rule 13 of Marxist Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," i.e., "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it."
In brief, pick someone or something you don't like and demagogue the daylights out of it until others enjoin the pile-on.
Of course, by using fancy smear words like "Erebusic," Massie is making use the very same Alinsky tactic he purports to despise against Obama and Geithner.
New Article: The Return of the Western Journalism Center Topic: Western Journalism Center
With a new smear artist at the helm in Floyd Brown, the WJC is armed and ready to hurl discredited conspiracy theories at President Obama the same way it attacked President Clinton when Joseph Farah ran it. Read more >>
Newsmax Bashes Obama for Auto Plan It Praised Romney For Supporting Topic: Newsmax
The following package appeared at the top of Newsmax's front page for most of the day Monday:
The Associated Press article to which the package linked made no mention of Obama as "the most liberal president in history," and Newsmax does not otherwise indicate why it felt the need to point that out.
Indeed, Obama's purported political affiliations have nothing to do with "openly talking of bankruptcy." After all, last November Newsmax approvingly quoted Republican Mitt Romney -- whom Newsmax touted as having "success revamping corporate finances and is credited with turning around the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City" -- saying that "bankruptcy may be the only path to solvency for the Big Three automakers."
Fretting over the ouster of "the head of a major U.S. auto company" is also unexplained, since Romney advocated the same thing, according to Newsmax:
Management as is “must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations.”
In other words, Newsmax is bashing Obama for what it previously praised Romney for advocating. And we're pretty sure Newsmax doesn't consider Romney to be liberal.
