Last week, Salon published an interesting profile of Cleon Skousen, who has emerged as the ideological mentor of Glenn Beck. You will not be surprised to learn that WorldNetDaily loves Skousen as well.
WND is currently including as a bonus for subscribing to its Whistleblower magazine "the book Glenn Beck has been raving about," Skousen's "The 5,000 Year Leap"(also available in the WND store). WND says of the book:
The author explains in clear, concise terms all that came together to create a nation that literally accomplished a 5,000-year leap in progress. Skousen covers in detail what went into the design of the U.S. Constitution, highlighting the original sources for the principles that inspired the United States, and showing how the Founders developed these principles from the studies of Cicero, Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith.
Well, actually, not so much. At Salon, Alexander Zaitchik says of the book:
"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).
Zaitchik goes on to note that "Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy."
Skousen is also known for another screed, called "The Naked Capitalist," whcih Zaitchik calls "a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene" (which makes it somewhat of a surprise that WND doesn't sell it). Indeed, Zaitchik writes that "The Naked Capitalist" is a screed against "the dynastic rich" and "liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations" (WND sells otherworks that conspiracy-monger about the CFR too, so its failure to stock this is doubly puzzling).
Then again, Skousen's work does have a bit of bad press surrounding it. A highly respected Brigham Young University history professor named Louis C. Midgley reviewed the book in 1971 and was not kind, pointing out that Skousen's personal position seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."
As we all know, only Barack Obama gets likened to Nazis (not to mention the Antichrist) at WND these days.
CNS Tries to Link Health Care Reform to Illegal Immigrants Topic: CNSNews.com
We've noted that CNSNews.com has latched onto a conspiracy theory tying together the issues of health care reform. As CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has summed up: "Illegal immigrants won’t get federal health insurance benefits under Obama’s plan because they won’t be illegal immigrants anymore, they will be legal immigrants." CNS has pushed that conspiracy over the past week.
A Sept. 16 article by Matt Cover gave away the whole thing in its overly long headline: "[Steny] Hoyer Won't Answer Directly Whether Immigration Reform Would Make Current Illegal Aliens Eligible for Federally Subsidized Health Insurance Under Obamacare." Cover followed up the next day in the same vein, asking other senators "whether people who are currently illegal aliens in the United States would become eligible for health insurance subsidies under the proposed health-care reform plan if they were made into legal residents and put on a pathway to citizenship by an immigration reform bill."
CNS then latched onto what it seems to consider its smoking gun on the non-issue: a statement at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute that, as summarized in a Sept. 18 article by Nicholas Ballasy, "llegal immigrants would not get government funded health insurance under his health care reform, but said the debate over that plan underscores the need to legalize illegal immigrants so they can get that coverage."
Of course, all of this is nothing more than an attempt by CNS and its fellow conservatives to attack health care reform by hitching it to another issue conservatives despise, comprehensive immigration reform. As we've noted, CNS has repeatedly and baselessly attacked comprehensive immigration reform as "amnesty."
Shocker: NewsBusters Concedes Fox News Ad Is False Topic: NewsBusters
A Sept. 18 NewsBusters post by Matthew Balan is noteworthy for calling a conservative spade a spade.
Balan writes that "CNN’s Rick Sanchez correctly pointed out that a full-page color ad by the Fox News Channel incorrectly claimed that his network missed the massive September 12 Tea Party rally in Washington, DC," adding that Sanchez "completely discredited the ad’s claim."
The shocking thing here is Balan's deviance from the official Fox News line -- which is, according to Howard Kurtz, that the ad "refers to the other networks' missing the larger story, not failing to cover the demonstration itself -- although the photos suggest that the headline refers to the protest."
Since unmitigated praise for a non-conservative news outlet cannot be allowed to stand at any division of the Media Research Center, Balan makes sure to add that Sanchez "went on to paper over CNN’s own double-standard on covering left-wing protests versus conservative protests." Balan added that "Sanchez also accused Fox News of trying to 'promote' the Tea Parties" -- which Balan doesn't contradict.
Balan asserted that "on March 22, 2003 CNN broadcast 38 separate reports on another anti-Iraq war demonstration," but he offers no count on Fox News' coverage of the 9/12 protests, which included not only numerous reports the day of the protests but organization of the protest by Fox News personnel and heavy promotion of events leading up to the protest -- something that can't be said about CNN's coverage of anti-war protests.
UPDATE: Oh, and the boys of NewsBusters have been silent so far on a video showing a Fox News producer rallying the crowd at the 9/12 protest -- something the "mainstream media" has never been accused of doing at the anti-war protests.
A Sept. 18 Newsmax article by Rick Pedraza carries the headline "Biden: Iran Not a Threat." But at no point in Pedraza's article is Vice President Joe Biden quoted as saying that.
The closest thing to that statement is, "I am less concerned — much less concerned — about the Iranian potential. They have no potential at this moment; they have no capacity to launch a missile at the United States of America." But Pedraza also quotes Biden as saying, "I think we are fully capable and secure dealing with any present or future potential Iranian threat. ... The whole purpose of this exercise we are undertaking is to diminish the prospect of the Iranians destabilizing that region in the world."
By oversimplifying a Biden statement and taking it out of context, Newsmax misleads its readers.
I was at the D.C. rally, and I can tell you that the voices were not shrill, though some of them were at times loud – as well they should have been. But take a cue from Che Prez, because he comes from the ranks of the enemy – the enemy who invented loud and shrill.
You may not be old enough to remember the antics of the hippies in the '60s, but they mastered the art of loud and shrill to move the country irreversibly to the left. Loud and shrill ended the Vietnam War. Loud and shrill kicked the deadly "green movement" into high gear. Loud and shrill reduced God's role to that of a bench player. And loud and shrill brought Barack Hussein Obama out of the manger and into your wallet.
WND Gets It Wrong on Obama, ACORN Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Sept. 18 WorldNetDaily article by Chelsea Schilling repeats numerous misleading and false claims about the relationship between President Obama and ACORN.
Schilling wrote that "in 1992, while he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama headed the Chicago operations of Project Vote!, an ACORN effort to register voters nationally. " In fact, as we've detailed and as Obama's Fight the Smears states, Project Vote was not operated by ACORN at the time.Schilling includes a screenshot of the Fight the Smears page containing that statement, but she failed to include it in her article.
Schilling wrote that in 1995 Obama "sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal 'motor voter' law," failing to mention that ACORN's fellow plaintiffs in the case also included the Department of Justice and the League of Women Voters.Further, Obama was not the onlyattorney representing ACORN; indeed, he was not a lead attorney in the case but, rather, an associate.
Schilling claimed that William Ayers "selected Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the Annenberg Challenge." In fact, the New York Times reported that "according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama's appointment."
Schilling wrote that "newspaper evidence shows Obama was a member of the New Party, which sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda." In fact, the Aug. 23 WND article by Aaron Klein that Schilling cites for this claim quotes a New Party official as stating that to his knowledge Obama was not a member of the New Party "in any practical way."
NewsBusters Don't Like Them Furriners Tellin' Them What to Do Topic: NewsBusters
Amy Ridenour complains in a Sept. 17 NewsBusters post that Andrew Sullivan is "not a citizen of the United States," yet he has "been commenting on U.S. domestic policy for the last couple of decades as if he had a citizen's stake in the nation" and "telling us how to arrange our domestic affairs." Sullivan "has been happy to tell Americans how to vote while owing his allegiance to a foreign power," Ridenour writes.
NewsBusters Touts Another Dubious Poll Topic: NewsBusters
A Sept. 17 NewsBusters post by Terry Trippany touts a Towers Perrin survey claiming that, in Trippany's words, "a majority of employers surveyed will reduce benefits resulting from the proposed Democrat Health Care Reform bill that is working its way through Congress if it increases costs." But like the similarly anti-reform Investor's Business Daily poll NewsBusters touted earlier in the week, this survey has some problems.
According to the poll's methdology, "The Tower Perrin Health Care Reform Pulse Survey drew responses from 433 HR and benefit executives from a cross section of midsize and large organizations in the U.S. ... The survey was conducted online in July 2009." Online polling is considered by polling experts to be problematic because participants tend to be self-selecting instead of a true cross-section, skewing results.
A Sept. 17 Newsmax article by Dan Weil claims that a "previously unreleased Treasury Department analysis" concludes that "a cap-and-trade law would cost every American household $1,761 a year — or a national total of nearly $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent."
But the analysis Weil is writing about isn't applicable to the cap-and-trade law currently before Congress.
As Media Matters details, the Treasury memo discusses a proposal that would auction 100 percent of the emissions allowances, which would have generated the "nearly $200 billion a year" Neil references. But the cap-and-trade law currently before Congress provides for giving away 80 percent of those emissions allowances.
Further, both the current legislation proposes, and Obama himself has proposed, methods to reduce the impact of cap-and-trade on consumers -- which is not accounted for in the memo Weil cites. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the current legislation found that that average cost to households in 2020 is $175 per year when various methods of impact mitigation methods are included.
Weil mentions none of this.
Similarly, a Sept. 17 interview by WorldNetDaily/Radio America's Greg Corombos of Peter Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union touted the memo while failing that it doesn't analyze the bill actually before Congress. Indeed, Sepp distorts things further, claiming that "this should be viewed as the floor of what additional monies taxpayers would have to fork over rather than the ceiling."
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:23 AM EDT
Updated: Thursday, September 24, 2009 11:03 AM EDT
What is with conservatives' weird obession with gay sex?
We've detailed Rush Limbaugh's obsession with it, particularly of the anal variety. Now Erik Rush -- who has previously likened Barack obama to a prison rapist, drops this in his Sept. 17 WorldNetDaily column:
Apparently, shouting at the president is objectionable, but his collectively sodomizing the American people in perpetuity is acceptable as long as it is done with a sense of decorum.
One has to wonder if Rush (either one) is projecting his own creepy fantasies on Obama.
Cliff Kincaid's Sleazy Smear Topic: Accuracy in Media
How consumed with hate is Cliff Kincaid?
It wasn't enough for him to write in a Sept. 17 "AIM Report" that "In their canonization of thet late Senator [Ted] Kennedy, our media failed to note that he left a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die in the bottom of a submerged car." That's a lie -- we defy Kincaid to point out an example of an encompassing mainstream media obituary of Kennedy that didn't mention it.
But Kincaid wasn't done. He went on to write: "A notorious womanizer, he had left a party, probably a drunken orgy, with this poor girl and his car went off a bridge." [emphasis added]
Why is Kincaid making such an offensive claim about Kennedy that he cannot possibly prove? Why is he driven to tell the most outrageous lies about Kennedy?
We've asked Kincaid to substantiate both of these claims.
The tea party march down on Pennsylvania Avenue on Sept. 12 was not only impressive in its size (estimates range from 1 million to 2 million Americans) but also because of the messages on the handmade signs they carried. They proved the marchers were authentic grass roots, not astroturf.
The Whitewash Continues: WND Downplays Accusations Against Taitz Topic: WorldNetDaily
We have the answer to our question. WorldNetDaily will report on the accusation that Orly Taitz suborned perjury -- but only in the most perfunctory way possible.
An unbylined Sept. 17 WND article tackles the allegation -- but only after allowing Taitz to claim without challenge that "doubters should be questioning Obama, not her" and dismissing attacks on Taitz as merely "various accusations" that "have been cluttering the blogosphere in recent weeks."
It's only in the 13th paragraph -- after the non-news of rehashing yet again the eligibility case against Obama -- that WND actually gets around to the actual news of detailing Larry Sinclair's allegation that Taitz suborned perjury. WND makes sure to note that Sinclair's "allegations that Obama shared cocaine with him were undermined by a reported failed lie detector test" -- a display of incredulousness WND did not show in originally reporting Sinclair's claim in early 2008. WND then quotes Taitz dismissing the claim because "a person cannot just come from the street and file a declaration or an affidavit. ... It has to be filed by a party to the action. Either I, as an attorney for the plaintiffs, or attorney for the defendants, assistant U.S. attorney, would file something."
At no point does WND quote Taitz denying the allegation itself.
Interestingly, WND also reports a similar claim "purportedly" from Lucas Smith , "the individual who has reported obtaining a Kenyan birth certificate for Obama," that Taitz asked him to "lie under oath about information that I had no knowledge of at the time I was in Africa." WND offers no direct refutation of that claim by Taitz, either.
WND then quotes Taitz saying, "There was a rumor that there was some complaint filed with the [California] bar and I was disbarred. None of it is true." While it may not be true that Taitz has been disbarred, it is indisputably true that a complaint against her has been filed in the California bar. WND has yet to report on that complaint, and fails to correct Taitz here (as we've detailed).
The entire article reads like something WND was shamed into writing, built around a Taitz blog post and padded with standard WND anti-Obama boilerplace. WND makes no attempt whatsoever to verify the claims Taitz makes.
As much as WND editor Joseph Farah touts that he's "not afraid of the truth" and how "we consistently break stories they don't dare break," he and WND have shown themselves to be quite afraid of the truth about Taitz. Perhaps that's because WND has quite the little birther factory going -- from which WND is profiting handsomely -- and it doesn't dare break the inconvenient truth of Taitz's incompetence as a lawyer lest it interfere with lining Farah's pockets.
Posted by Terry K.
at 11:59 AM EDT
Updated: Thursday, September 17, 2009 12:03 PM EDT
Stanek Turns Pro-Life Shooting Victim Into Martyr Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jill Stanek's Sept. 16 WorldNetDaily column plays up the shooting death of Jim Pouillon, a Michigan anti-abortion protester killed along with another man who was not an anti-abortion activist. Stanek starts off by downplaying the killings of eight abortion doctors and workers by anti-abortion zealots, claiming they were "aborted" rather than murdered. Stanek takes a stunningly dismissive attitude toward them, as if condoning their murders:
Harlan Drake allegedly killed another man the same morning he killed Jim for a totally unrelated reason, they say, as if to dilute the magnitude of Jim's murder.
Oh yeah, we say, and what about Eric Rudolph, who not only killed two abortion workers in a Birmingham clinic firebombing but also planted bombs at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta and the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar?
Blah, blah, blah. It will never end.
But Stanek is much more interested in creating martyrdom for Poullion: "I hope Jim's family sees it that way – more jewels in a dazzling crown as he assumes a place of prominence in heaven with the other martyrs." She repeats claims that he was "a selfless, soft-spoken, kind-hearted man" and that he "needed a portable oxygen tank and leg braces" to carry out his activism, going on to call Poullion "he sort of person the other side likes to pick off" -- even though there's no evidence that his alleged killer was involved in the pro-choice movement.
Stanek might want to hold back a bit on granting Poullion sainthood. Criticism of Poullion's methods has come from an unlikely source -- the right-wing, Davbid Horowitz-operated Newsreal blog, where David Forsmark writes:
Jim Pouillon is a poor choice for a cause to choose as a martyr, both because of who he was—and the stubborn things called facts about the nature of the crime spree that claimed his life.
Jim Pouillon was a dark, and deeply disturbed man. Any dealings I had with him were extremely unpleasant as he tried to force his way into campaigns I was working for. When I denied him access to my candidates, he threatened to picket them– even though they were pro-life– until they sat down with him. So much for principle. Whether the problems were caused by a physical problem, a mental imbalance, or just his own personal demons, I won’t attempt to diagnose.
Pouillon was known for shouting vile things while carrying his signs—and not just at adults. He picketed a Catholic school in Owosso, yelling at students that there were “whores” inside. He was known for directly shouting to or at children who were entering places he was picketing.
Sources I trust implicitly tell me Pouillon taunted a pro-choice candidate’s pre-teen son about having discovered the body of his mother who had committed suicide a few years before. Pouillon didn’t deserve to be shot and killed, but that should have warranted a good thrashing– at the very least.
In short, Pouillon did a lot more than just carry his signs around.
However, it is understandable that there is a little bit of martyr envy from the beleaguered pro-life side, after seeing their most fervent opponents lionized by the media, despite glaring moral faults.
Jim Pouillon didn’t drive his Oldsmobile off a bridge and deliberately leave a friend to die.
Nor was he the nation’s foremost profiteer of legal infanticide. Quite the opposite, in fact.
However, Jim Pouillon did not create jobs in his community, either.
Regardless of the pros and cons of Jim Pouillon, the pro-life “leaders” in their rush to use Pouillon’s death to their advantage, cheapen life and betray their cause by treating Mike Fuoss’s life as meaningless– an inconvenient truth that gets in the way of a good story, that as such, must be ignored.
We must be better than this – and truer to our principles. When pro-lifers assign more value to one life than another, it’s a betrayal of our most sacred prinicple. It’s uncomfortably close to what the abortionist does.
Indeed, Stanek gives short shrift to that other victim, claiming he was killed "for a totally unrelated reason, they say, as if to dilute the magnitude of Jim's murder."
Not only has Stanek put the value of Jim Poullion's life above those her fellow anti-abortion activists have killed, she put it above that of another person killed by the same man on the same day, just because he wasn't an anti-abortion activist.
There's something deeply disturbing in that. Too bad Stanek doesn't think so.
A Sept. 16 WorldNetDaily audio interview by Radio America's Greg Corombos of Investor's Business Daily associate editor Terry Jones touts the "major findings" of a new IBD poll claiming that "Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington."
Corombos failed to mention the fact that, as we've noted, poll analyst Nate Silver has detailed the reasons why the poll is not credible: lack of disclosed methodology, biased questions, dubious conducting of the survey, incomplete results, and general incompetence on the part of IBD's pollster.
If WND editor Joseph Farah is going to demand that anyone who writes about WND contact him for a rebuttal, shouldn't his reporters also be obtaining more than one side of the story before their reports are published?
