Last month, we predicted that Pamela Geller would be the next Newsmax columnist to go too far -- following in the footsteps of John L. Perry and Pat Boone -- resulting in Newsmax quitely deleting one of her offensive screeds.
Looks like it's already happenened.
We noted that in a Nov. 17 column, Geller asserted that President Obama was "dropping another O-bomb on America with the decision to try the masterminds of the shocking attack of Sept. 11, 2001, in a New York courtroom," going on to assert that "America electing an America-hater for president vanquished our moral authority" and concluding that "As long as he is president, the man will never stop punishing America for being so foolish as to elect him."
But in updating the links to Geller's columns in our article following Newsmax's recent re-indexing of its website, we discovered that the Nov. 17 column has disappeared. Columns are now grouped by month, and Geller's November grouping is missing the one from Nov. 17.
As per usual, Newsmax did not tell its readers the column was removed, let alone explain why.
Interestingly, an Aug. 26 column in which she first asserted that "America electing an America-hater for president vanquished our moral authority" remains live. Also in that column, Geller describes Obama's proposed "civilian community service corps" as a "stateside army" -- which, as we've previously detailed, is a utter lie.
Looks like Newsmax has more pruning to do in order to eradicate Geller's obsessive Obama hatred.
Joseph Farah seems to think that Fox News has an obligation to cover whatever silly stuff WorldNetDaily publishes.
Last October, Farah whined becuase Fox wouldn't cover the WND-published anti-CAIR book to his satisfaction, even though the anti-Muslim bias of the book's authors is more than clear to everyone, even Fox. Now WND is taking a more histrionic approach to said whining.
Farah gives it another shot in his Jan. 11 column, this time expressing anger and jealousy that CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper has been on Fox News while he hasn't, suggesting that this is because a Saudi businessman who has donated to CAIR is also an investor in Fox News' parent, News Corp. Because of this, Farah writes, "Fox just isn't the news organization many of you think and hope it is."
Thisis accompanied by an unbylined Jan. 11 article that begins this way:
Long a reliably patriotic media source in the war on terror, Fox News may now be among news outlets who have fallen under the spell of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' propaganda machine.
"We own the media," CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper privately brags, according to a source currently working inside the aggressive Islamist lobby group.
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly last week invited the TV-savvy Hooper on his show to debate passenger profiling, the second guest appearance by the CAIR spokesman in a month. At the end of the segment, O'Reilly thanked Hooper and called him a "stand-up guy," sending shockwaves through the conservative blogosphere.
So it's patriotic to give airtime to Muslim-haters?
Like a 2-year-old, WND likes to throwtantrums when it doesn't get what it wants. That's basically what's happening here.
A Jan. 11 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas uncritically quotes Mychal Massie:
Mychal Massie, chairman of the black conservative group Project 21, denounced Reid’s remarks.
“Harry Reid is a loathsome individual whose apology was based on exposure, not repentance,” Massie said in a statement. “Reid's comments are proof positive that the racial animus of the past is alive and prevalent among liberals today, notwithstanding the fact that their standard-bearer is a black man.”
Lucas doesn't mention that Massie has engaged in his own hate speech against Reid, likening him to Bull Connor and Orval Faubus. (and hypocritically denouncing Charlie Rangel for saying "George Bush is our Bull Connor") and claiming that Reid's supposed racisim means "He is simply being true to his inbred familial heritage" as a Mormon.
Most people would say such virulently hateful attacks make Massie unqualifed to offer a reasonable opinion about Reid. Not Fred Lucas.
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Bailed-Out Businesses Topic: NewsBusters
A Jan. 9 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard laments the existence of "a campaign started by the far-left website the Huffington Post to get people to pull their money from the larger national banks and deposit their savings into 'smaller, community-oriented financial institutions.'" Sheppard asserts that "an organized run on these banks" could result in "more financial insolvencies, layoffs, and further damage to an already teetering economy." Adds Sheppard: "With ten percent unemployment, and America's banks struggling to get back on their feet, ABC should be ashamed of itself for reporting on this campaign by Huffington and her ilk."
Sheppard omits the full purpose of the campaign: to move money into smaller institutions "that generally avoided the reckless investments and schemes that helped cause the financial crisis."
Which brings us to the hypocrisy part -- while Sheppard wants to save big banks that had to be bailed out, his NewsBusters colleague Tom Blumer has long been rooting for the demise of automakers that accepted a federal bailout.
Indeed, the day before Sheppard's post, Blumer was attacking "Government/General Motors" (such posts are usually accompanied by the graphic shown here) cheering that it was about to lose its long-held title as America's biggest automaker. Blumer snorted that "the company walked away from about $30 billion in debt in the bankruptcy process and waltzed out of bankruptcy court after having received over $50 billion in government aid."
And in a Jan. 11 post, Blumer bashed both GM And Chrysler for "vaguely holding forth on the prospect of reopening previously shuttered production facilities," chortling that the companies' sales don't justify it, and happily noting that Ford, which did not take bailout money, "is stealing the show, in one case on the energy-efficient turf GM and Chrysler that is supposedly going to be their specialty."
NewsBusters needs to explain why it wants bailed-out automakers to die -- which would result in, in Sheppard's words, "financial insolvencies, layoffs, and further damage to an already teetering economy" -- but not bailed-out banks.
WND Columnist Still Hates Lesbian Mayor Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've previously noted WorldNetDaily columnist Dave Welch's revulsion that a lesbian had been elected mayor of Houston, stating, "We let our position on the wall be breached by the enemy." Well, he's still revulsed.
In his Jan. 9 WND column, Welch lashes out at Joel Osteen for giving a prayer at the inauguration of Mayor Annise Parker -- or, more to the point, Osteen's statement that "we thank you just for raising her up":
Every pastor I have heard from agrees Joel crossed the line in declaring that God "raised up" a mayor who denies Him, mocks him through her life and represents a complete perversion of His creation and created order – then thanking Him for doing so. Did God raise up Barack Hussein Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, etc. as well? Proverbs 16:4 tells us that God makes even the wicked for the "day of evil." Commentator Matthew Henry stated:
He makes some use even of wicked men, as of other things, to be his sword, his hand (Psalm 17:13, 14), flagellum Dei – the scourge of God. ("Matthew Henry Unabridged")
I don't think, by the way, this context is what Joel had in mind during his prayer.
It is an important question, because as in all things we must look past surface symptoms to root causes, whether a lesion on the skin that is an external sign of internal cancer or wicked rulers that are political indicators of cancer of the soul among the people.
As he has before, Welch portrayed Parker's election as a moral failing of the citizenry, claiming that the citizens are "choosing governing leaders for selfish, self-serving and immoral or amoral reasons." Welch doesn't mention any of the civic issues that presumably propelled Parker to victory.
Dear Tim Graham: Complaining about Rachel Maddow allegedly mocking "little Todd Tiahrt" and "tiny Todd Tiahrt" might have been a little more effective had it not been preceded by your MRC colleague Brent Baker devoting an entire post to George Stephanopoulos' booster seat.
The latest example of this is a Jan. 10 WND article -- presented as "news" -- claiming that "new evidence indicates the U.S. Department of Agriculture may be covering up the greatest food shortage in modern history." It goes on to state:
Consumers in the United States are responding to the latest revelations with an unprecedented private-sector emergency preparedness plan. Websites such as SurvivalSeedBank.com are struggling to keep up with orders as people make plans to go "off-grid" in pursuit of food independence.
According to Bill Heid, spokesman for SurvivalSeedBank, demand for the company's "Full Acre Crisis Garden" product appears to be increasing.
[...]
Heid explains why so many people now are focused on food independence and not just financial planning in the event of a collapse.
"In a real crisis, food will be more valuable than gold or silver. When you're hungry, gold or silver coins won't always help you, and the few people who have food may not be willing to trade for something which can't be easily converted. Open pollinated seeds are truly the ultimate barter item in a meltdown. It seems like folks are waking up to reality of some very dangerous market conditions ahead."
More information on planting a full acre crisis garden can be found at SurvivalSeedBank.com.
Yes, SurvivalSeedBank.com is a WND advertiser. From today's WND front page:
This, of course, is a violation of journalistic ethics; the Society of Professional Journalists ethics code states that "Journalists should ... [d]istinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two."
WND needs to tell its readers how much SurvivialSeedBank paid WND for this dishonest placement of an ad as a "news" article, so we can see just how much WND's journalistic soul is worth.
Obama Derangement Syndrome: A Symptom Defined Topic: WorldNetDaily
In his Jan. 9 WorldNetDaily column, Tom Tancredo lists among his symptoms of 'Obama Stockholm Syndrome" this: "You believe that the 1.5 million people who protested excessive government spending on the Capitol Mall on Sept. 12 were all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy."
Of course, if you actually believe that 1.5 million people actually showed up at the Capitol that day, it's a symptom you're suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Newsmax Career Rehabilitation Watch Topic: Newsmax
In his Jan. 8 Newsmax column, Ralph Reed -- Newsmax's latest attempt at career rehabilitation -- cites as evidence that "Obama’s real-life 3 a.m. phone call has come, and he has flunked the test" that he "took days (while he played golf in Hawaii) to step before the cameras and acknowledge the obvious: a massive, systemic, and nearly disastrous failure of intelligence" in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing.
Reed doesn't mention that President Bush took twice as long as Obama to respond to another attempted bombing, that of shoe bomber Richard Reid, let alone assert that Bush's silence meant that he was soft on terror.
Reed also baselessly attacked the Obama administration for giving accused Christmas Day attempted bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab "full Miranda rights, and allowing him to lawyer up so we can get no information about his al-Qaida handlers." In fact, intelligence officials have already spent "a number of hours" with Abdulmutallab, in which "usable actionable intelligence" was obtained.
Reduced to its lowest common denominator, Marxism is government managing society. Freedom is society managing government. The current arrogant, Marxist majority in Washington could not care less about what the people want or say. They are convinced that they know best how society should be managed, and they are hell-bent to manage it the way they want.
Led by President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, this government has become, as Thomas Jefferson describes governments of force, "a government of wolves over sheep."
[...]
Americans who prefer Marxist, redistributionist, government-managed lives will continue to accept the loss of freedom and the decay of America. Americans who cherish freedom will continue to train their troops and attack at the primaries, in preparation for a full-scale rebellion on Nov. 2, 2010.
WND Lies About CIA And Global Warming, Gets Basic Fact Wrong Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Jan. 10 WorldNetDaily article by Jerome Corsi carries the headline "Obama diverts CIA to spy on ... polar bears!" Corsi himself writes that "President Obama has tasked the Central Intelligence Agency with investigating global warming."
But Corsi and WND are deliberately misstating facts. The truth -- which Corsi conveniently doesn't mention until the sixth paragraph, since it would contradict the first five -- is that the program has little or no impact on current intelligence gathering, since it relies on information already archived or collected when sensors are passing over empty wilderness.
Corsi also quotes Republican Sen. John Barrasso claiming that the CIA's involvement in climate change issues is "irresponsible," but fails to mention the experts who cite climate change is relevant to national security, since it could cause food or water shortages or adverse weather that would result in migration or the need for U.S. relief efforts or military intervention.
Corsi also commits a boner of an error in the lead paragraph. Can you spot it?
Corsi is presumably referring to the shooting at Fort Hood, not "Ft. Collins," which is a city in Colorado that has no active military installations.
UPDATE: WND has corrected the "Ft. Collins" boo-boo. The rest of the article's false statements remain intact.
Kincaid Still Falsely Defending Gay-Killing Uganda Law Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid returns to the subject of the proposed anti-gay law in Uganda in his Jan. 8 Accuracy in Media column, portraying it, as he has previously, as intended "to protect children from homosexual predators and the dangerous public health impact of the homosexual lifestyle." He also asserts that the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart "falsely claimed it would make homosexuality 'a crime punishable by death.'"
But Kincaid is the liar here -- Capehart's statement is essentially true. As we've previously detailed, CNN reported that the law would apply the death penalty to those who "engage in homosexual sex more than once," as well as "people who test positive for HIV"; it would also imprison "Anyone who knows of homosexual activity." The law would also apply even to Ugandans participating in same-sex acts in countries where such behavior is legal.
Kincaid's problem is that he's getting his misinformation about the law (and, apparently, about homosexuality itself) from virulently anti-gay pastor Scott Lively, whose Abiding Truth Ministries is on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups. The New York Times reported that the Uganda law was incited in part by people like Lively, who participated in a recent conference on the "gay agenda" in the country in which, according to the Times, they "discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.' "
Kincaid has never offered meaningful evidence to contradict any of the details we or anyone else have reported about the law, which makes him the liar when he insists that the death penality doesn't apply to homosexuals.
Earlier this week, WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah stated that "I am recommitting my energies and resources to the search for verifiable truth on this matter of eligibility. " Apparently, that also includes redoubling his efforts to hide from his readers Orly Taitz's record of shoddy lawyering and allegations of criminality.
A Jan. 8 WND article by Bob Unruh touts the latest court filings by Taitz, who "now is asking a California judge to investigate possible fraud against the court," alleging "a high probability of criminal acts of identity theft and Social Security fraud committed by the respondent." In apparent contradiction of Farah's claim that WND journalists operate, in Farah's words," the highest standards of ethics" -- Unruh fails to report that the same judge has levied a $20,000 fine against Taitz for repeated frivolous filings in the case. Nor does Unruh mention that Taitz has been accused of suborning perjury in the same case.
Then again, this does appear to be official WND policy, as Unruh and other WND "journalists" have repeatedlyhidden this information from its readers.
Unruh also fails to note that previous allegations of fraud made by Taitz, also involving the possibility of identity theft and Social Security fraud, have proven to be less than credible. In April, WND's Chelsea Schilling uncritically reported allegations by Taitz that the former webmaster for Taitz's website, accusing her diverting donations and allowing the site to be hacked. Even though Schilling could have gathered a response from the ex-webmaster's website, she instead no apparent effort to report the other side, in which the allegations are denied.
As part of her jihad against the former webmaster, Taitz allegedly sent out emails to the public repeating her accusations, which included the webmaster's Social Security number -- thus opening the webmaster up to identity theft and fraud. That resulted in a lawsuit against Taitz by another birther lawyer, Philip Berg. WND has never reported on that either -- or the fact that, as we detailed, Berg was able to obtain an entry of default against Taitz because of Taitz's incompetency of not following court-ordered procedure in responding to the lawsuit, resulting in the response arriving past the court-ordered deadline.
Unruh also baselessly claims that Obama has funded the "appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation." In fact, while that money was paid to a law firm through "Obama for America," WND offers no evidence that all of the money was dedicated to "defending against all requests for his documentation."
WND Violates AP Stylebook on Transgender ID Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah once insisted that WorldNetDaily hires "only serious and experienced journalists with the highest standards of ethics." It doesn't, of course -- one need look no further than the lies piled on lies appearing on its pages to see that.
Here's another example: One of those high standards journalists are expected to follow is the Associated Press Stylebook, a comprehensive guide to language usage in news stories, from proper identification of officials to, when you list the name of a city, you also name the state it's in. Here's the AP Stylebook guideline regarding transgendered people (h/t Media Matters):
transgender Use the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth.
If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly.
Commerce Department adviser Amanda Marshall was born as a male and underwent a sex change. Guess how WND handles Marshall?
In a Jan. 5 article, not only do Chelsea Schilling and Kathleen Farah repeatedly describe Marshall as "he," they put "Amanda" in scare quotes. They also include anonymous "bloggers" attacking Marshall with hateful comments like, "This administration is like going to see 'Rent.' What is normal? How about a homophobic gay man attracted to sheep as the next commander in chief? I'm down with that."
Yes, we know WND hates gay people. They're apparently not too tolerant of the very existence of transgenders, either.
Doug Wead, in his Jan. 6 Newsmax column, concedes that it's unfair to claim President Obama is soft on terrorism. Still, Wead does so anyway.
Wead asserts that "Obama was too late to talk to the American people about [the Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing]. He was enjoying Hawaii when he should have been out front, instead of sending in his lame, Janet Napolitano, whose defensive answers were so offensive that she has since been banned to the Cheney bunker in the Grand Tetons." Then he asks:
Is it fair? Is Obama really soft on terrorism? Or is this payback for using an economic crisis and the U.S. Treasury to payoff voting constituencies? Or for being too apologetic to non-American audiences?
The fact is that presidents are always criticized this way and it is usually because of a deeper concern. When George W. Bush was tardy responding to Hurricane Katrina, when people were trapped on rooftops without water or food or toilets, in the heat, while he watched football games at the ranch, he was criticized too. It was emblematic, they said. He obviously didn’t care enough about the poor. There was a disconnect.
In both cases, the tardy response is tied to a partisan stereotype. Is it blown out of proportion? Is it fair to say that Obama doesn’t care about security or Bush about black people? No. If Bush didn’t care about poor blacks he wouldn’t have pushed for the biggest AIDS relief package for Africa in world history. And Obama certainly doesn’t want another 9/11. Only Sarah Palin would benefit from that.
Wead avoids mentioning a much more direct analogy: While it took Obama three days -- "too late," in Wead's view -- to publicly speak about the attempted bombing, Bush waited six days to the December 2001 airliner bombing attempt by Richard Reid.
Having thus discredited his own attack, he concludes that suggesting it's justified anyway: "This is partisan politics. But hey, if it forces agencies to work together, if it helps put some spine in Obama’s back, if it makes the country safer, well, keep it up."
Which brings us to the hypocrisy part -- while Sheppard wants to save big banks that had to be bailed out, his NewsBusters colleague Tom Blumer has long been rooting for the demise of automakers that accepted a federal bailout.
