CNS' Bannister: Sebelius Will 'Poison ... Students’ Minds' Topic: CNSNews.com
It's not often you see a purported journalist demanding that someone be censored, but that's exactly what Craig Bannister does in a May 14 CNSNews.com blog post demanding that Georgetown University disinvite HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from an upcoming speech there.
Bannister rants that Georgetown is giving Sebelius "the opportunity to poison the school’s students’ minds with her anti-Catholic, pro-abortion, contraception mandate doctrine" despite several Catholic and religious organizations calling for Sebelius to be censored. Which means that Bannister himself is advocating Sebelius' censorship as well.
Of course, Bannister offers no evidence that Sebelius will be "poisioning minds" with "doctrine" -- indeed, he has no idea whatsoever what she will be talking about in her Georgetown appearance. Nevertheless, Bannister insists that Sebelius will "indoctrinate its students."
Um, aren't universities supposed to be open to exploring different points of view, even religiously oriented ones like Georgetown?
By screeching about Sebelius' purported "indoctrination" -- a claim that has no basis in reality because he does not know what she will say -- Bannister is the one who is advocating indoctrination by insisting that Georgetown students not be exposed to views that conflict with a certain interpretation of Catholicism.
If people should simply be automatons for a particular ideology and be trained to automatically reject anything that conflicts with said ideology, why have schools and colleges at all? That's the logical end point of Bannister's thinking.
For him, it seems, obedience is more important than independent thought -- an odd position for someone working in the leadership of a so-called "news" organization to take.
Les Kinsolving Anti-Gay Tirade Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
Think about that.
“The equal rights of all.”
If that should mean marriage rights for homosexuals, why not marriage rights for polygamists and polyandrists?
Why, for that matter, should there be a law allowing marriage for that orientation, which repeated records reveal has the highest percentage of AIDS – and now syphilis – if those orientations with no such AIDS rates should be denied the right to marry: such as the incestuous, necrophiliacs and zoophiliacs (bestiality)?
NEW ARTICLE -- Out There, Exhibit 55: Fighting Bigotry With Bigots Topic: Accuracy in Media
How does Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid respond to a black commentator making a reference to a "bow-tied white boy"? By calling in a white supremacist to comment on it. Read more >>
WND's Cashill: Obama Didn't Write His Own Love Letters Topic: WorldNetDaily
A big part of anti-Obama conspiracy-mongering, as practiced by WorldNetDaily, is the ability to move goalposts as inconvenient facts render earlier conspiracies inoperative. For instance, as it became clear that Obama was born in America, Joseph Farah simply lied to people and insisted that neither he nor WND had ever suggested he wasn't.
Now Jack Cashill is exhibiting the same behavior. Back in 2010 (h/t Media Matters), Cashill wrote a column essentially claiming that Obama made up the girlfriend he wrote about in his book "Dreams From My Father" and pushed the theory that the girlfriend in the book was actually the girlfriend of Bill Ayers, which of course dovetails with Cashill's discredited theory that Ayers wrote the book.
A new Vanity Fair piece, however, shoots that theory out of the water. An excerpt from David Maraniss' upcoming book on Obama, it details with the woman Obama wrote about in his book. Obama also said the woman in the book was a "compression" of girlfriends, and the book itself explains that "[f]or the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known."
So, having been thoroughly discredited and exposed for the desperate conspiracy-mongerer that he is, how did Cashill react to this news? By throwing a fit, of course.
In a May 3 column, Cashill desperately likens Obama to James Frey, who infamously invented incidents in his memoirs: "Team Obama is as promiscuous with the facts as Frey. Obama and his muse appear to have created most, if not all, of the racial dramas related in 'Dreams.'" Never mind, of course, that Obama admitted in the book that some characters in the book are composites. While Cashill again portrays Ayers as Obama's "muse" for his book, Cashill doesn't address is now-discredited claim that the woman wrote about was actually Ayers' girlfriend.
Cashill moved into shoot-the-messenger mode for his May 9 column, attacking Maraniss for "unforgivably sloppy reporting," even though it's clear Maraniss has done much more footwork on the subject of Obama's life than Cashill, who seems to be content sitting around at his Kansas City home concocting conspiracy theories.
Still, Cashill whines: "I am hoping Maraniss corrects the record, but given his track record, we can take at face value nothing Maraniss says about Obama not even his story of the missing girlfriends."
Cashill follows that up by demonstrating what happens when you sit around your house all day concocting conspiracy theories: they become increasingly detatched from reality.Thus, Cashill's May 14 column posits that Obama didn't write his own love letters. No, really:
As an Obama biographer – his book “Barack Obama: The Story” is due out next month – Maraniss obviously knows that controversy surrounds Obama’s writing skills.
Given that controversy, he owes his reader some proof of the letter’s legitimacy. He should tell us whether he saw a hard copy of the letter, whether it was typed or hand-written, and why it reads so much better than Obama’s published work of the same period. He does none of the above.
[...]
Recall that Obama, in the words of friendly biographer David Remnick, was an “unspectacular” student. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.”
And yet writing longhand, presumably from memory, Obama has the wherewithal to put an umlaut over the “u” in Münzer. In college, I was an Honors English student and a Classics minor, not a political science major like Obama. I had not even heard of Münzer before reading this letter.
That Obama could embark upon a sophisticated, spontaneous discussion of T.S. Eliot – he claimed not to have read “The Waste Land” for a year and never bothered “to check all the footnotes” – should have alerted Maraniss.
Nowhere in “Dreams” is there any mention of T.S. Eliot, Münzer or Yeats, or any of the themes in this letter that so excited Adam Hirsch. As Obama tells it, he and his pals “discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” This I can believe.
[...]
In the Harvard of 1990, with his name fully emblazoned upon his work, Obama was not hesitant to share syntactically challenged clunkers like this one: “No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind.” Huh?
The letter Maraniss reproduces, by contrast, is exquisitely punctuated and free of all such errors. The author of the letter even uses his or her participles correctly.
Uh, yeah.
This is what happens when you can't admit your own errors and choose to live a life of delusion -- you descend further and further down the rabbit hole.
But crazy as it is, it's still primo Obama-hate, so WND will continue to publish Cashill's lunacy.
At The MRC, The Truth Is A 'Smear' Topic: NewsBusters
Only at the Media Research Center would the truth be treated as a "smear."
In a May 13 NewsBusters post, Noel Sheppard complains about "the [Washington] Post's recent smear of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney."That's a reference to the story about Romney's boarding-school years, in which he took part in a forced hair-cutting of a student suspected to be gay.
Where, exactly, is the "smear"? Sheppard doesn't say. After all, not even Romney himself has challenged the accuracy of the story. The Post is standing by the story, with ombudsman Patrick Pexton pointing out that it talked to five different sources about the hair-cutting incident.
In other words, Sheppard is attacking the Post for reporting the truth. But that's what we've come to expect from the MRC, whose "Tell the Truth!" campaign gets upset when the truth is told about conservative.
Sheppard's snit fit was merely the silliest reaction among MRC and NewsBusters writers to the Romney story.
A May 10 NewsBusters post by Tom Blumer endeavored to explain away Romney's behavior:
Of course, this wouldn't make anyone's list of their proudest moments as an 18 year-old (Romney had just turned 18 at the time). But [Post writer Jason] Horowitz did not note any physical injury Lauber might have suffered as a result of the incident, wasn't able to pin any specific anti-homosexual utterance to Romney, and provided no proof that Romney might have known for certain that Lauber had homosexual tendencies. No one can possibly believe that the WaPo writer didn't try to find evidence of all of the above, or that he would have eagerly reported it had he found it.
Blumer went on to assert that the story was "an archetypal example of why their newspaper publishing segment is in so much financial trouble" -- even though he, like Sheppard, could not identify any factual errors.
Tim Graham rants in a May 10 NewsBusters post: "Did The WashPost Report a 5,000-Word Expose on Obama's Cocaine Use In the Last Cycle? Of Course Not." Graham conveniently ignores the fact that Obama disclosed his youthful drug use himself in his 1995 bio, "Dreams From My Father," while Romney made no such self-disclosure -- even as he quotes a Post article citing political experts who claim that "it is better for a politician to disclose his own transgressions, rather than be put on the defensive by revelations."
This is what passes for "media research" at the MRC. Simply reporting inconvenient facts makes you guilty of "liberal bias."
Sue-Happy Defamer Klayman Defames Again Topic: WorldNetDaily
For a guy who makes his (meager) living these days suingpeople for defamation, Larry Klayman shows surprisingly little reticence in libeling people.
Klayman shows this again in his May 12 WorldNetDaily column, in which he repeatedly smears and libels President Obama:
He twice refers to Obama as the "mullah in chief," despite the fact that Obama is not a Muslim.
He falsely accuses Obama of personally having "disclosed that so-called double agent CIA operatives infiltrated al-Qaida and uncovered an airline bomb plot." There is no evidence to support this claim.
He insinuates that Obama is gay becuase he he endorsed gay marriage, writing: "If there is any humor to this – which there is not – one could ask, 'What’s a guy to do if he is married to Michelle?'"
Maybe a libel lawsuit against Klayman might teach him some manners. Obama clearly has a case.
MRC Thinks Lance Loud Was A Fictional Character Topic: Media Research Center
In the midst of his May 10 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute column complaining that Hollywood "has long used its influence to purposely swing public opinion in favor of homosexuality," Paul Wilson writes: "In 1973, 'An American Family' was the first television show to feature an openly gay character (Lance Loud) 'as an integral member of family life.'"
Loud was not a "character"; he was a real person who came out as gay during what's considered the first reality TV show, 1973's "An American Family."
Aside from confusing real people with fictional characters, Wilson seems quite put out that Lance Loud was treated as "an integral member of family life." Can't have that, can we?
That comports with the overall theme of Wilson's piece (not to mention the MRC's overall anti-gay agenda), in which any depictions of gays that are not outright hostile are "pro-homosexual," even if they commit the offense of treating gays like normal people. Wilson can't that either, apparently.
Wilson also complains that the 1970s show "Soap," in which Billy Crystal played a gay character, was kept on the air "despite the fact that the show consistently lost money." Wilson falls into the trap others at the MRC have fallen into, buying into the fallacious assumption that profitability equals quality.
Many voters, including those who voted for BHO in 2008, now view the Obamas as shameless and classless. But when it comes to acts of moral turpitude, there are few who challenge them. Nothing bears this out more than Michelle Obama’s latest attempt to portray her husband’s disastrous presidency as something of godlike proportions, orchestrated by a “divinity” named Barack Hussein.
[...]
Even an honest, casual observer must admit the actions of the Obamas are at best arrogant and haughty – and Michelle Obama comports herself with an air of race-based entitlement. For her to use veiled supraliminal references to the Holy Scriptures is morally opprobrious, but obviously not out of character for her. It is, however, the very essence and definition of moral turpitude.
But the one thing we can thank her husband (and her) for is being autocrats and racialists. Thanks to their autocracy, “We the People” have been awakened and now stand united in our opposition to the abrogation of our traditions and his wanton defiance of the Constitution.
Speaking of Obama, I understand that his initial reaction to the news that Romney’s family preferred taking their beloved dog along on their vacations was to question why they would stick their pooch on the car roof instead of inside the picnic basket.
There’s a problem even bigger than Obama afflicting America. And that means it is a huge, monumental, fundamental, almost overwhelming crisis, because Obama, given another four years in office, will effectively destroy the very fabric of everything good that set America apart from the rest of the world.
What’s ironic is that these dark, right-wing conspiracies – race, homosexual and economic oppression, as well as others – are as phony as the Marxist variety are real. Through all of this, Obama and his surrogates continue to pretend he’s just another Democratic president trying to accomplish the things to which he gives lip service. It has truly become as surreal as an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Obama isn’t piloting our economy down the proverbial swirly, subverting the Constitution, substantially eroding our civil liberties, emboldening our enemies, empowering Islamofascists, compromising our sovereignty, fomenting racial tension, or setting the stage for a totalitarian state, despite everything he has done being indicative of these things.
And the press? As far as the press is concerned, the mere mention of these things is simply “Obama paranoia.” The last hundred years of communist longing, preparation and subversion, the confluence of communists in government with the rapid infusion of Marxist policy into our government, the installation of an inscrutable Marxist prince in the White House – all of this is merely coincidence.
When a young voter in Michigan or Ohio or Florida fills up the gas tank in his Mini Cooper, is he thanking Obama for deliberately driving up gas prices to $5 a gallon? Or is he asking himself, “Do I really need a president who hopes for European gas prices of $8?”
Obama’s war on youth is the war of low expectations: Instead of nation of young entrepreneurs, Obama wants a nation of young bureaucrats – government clerks, poultry inspectors and IRS agents. Yes, Uncle Obama can help you get a government grant if that is following your dream. But young Americans’ dreams are bigger than that.
“Hope and Change”? Today’s young voters are starting to look at Obama’s anti-jobs economy and realize they need to pray for change.
Start with one part reckless presidential re-election campaign. Add one part top-down government central planning. Mix in one part bureaucratic overreach. Spice with shredded Constitution. Bring to boil with class warfare and racial division.
A bitter brew indeed. As Jimmy Kimmel said at the White House Correspondents’ dinner over the weekend, “There’s a term for President Obama. But not two terms.”
Barack Obama happened to be president when the U.S. military finally caught up with Osama bin Laden. Regarding Mr. Obama’s role, not much more can be said – unless, of course, we might dare find it appropriate to touch upon the blatant hypocrisy of Obama.
So the political flash mob is in place. They have their leader and their slogan. You will see “Forward” plastered everywhere and chanted by the Obamanistas at every rally. And every time you hear “Forward” in a commercial or see it on a bumper sticker, just add the words, “into the Abyss” in your own mind. It is the true message of the Obama campaign.
The college boy shows his parents his report card – five F’s and a D – and explains he’s been spending all his time on one subject.
The student is Obama, and the D is on his foreign policy. And the reason it doesn’t work is because America’s foreign policy doesn’t deserve a grade as high as D!
Based on who and what I knew Obama to be – and I knew this well before he was elected – when he did win the presidency, my immediate thought was This is one mother****er who’s going to do his level best to stay in office permanently.
[...]
It might be hard at times to discern whether Obama is a communist, an Islamist, or a nihilist who simply wants to see the world burn. His actions in America certainly indicate a desire to culminate 100 years of Marxist wet dreams; however, his furtive participation in the “Arab Spring” that is sweeping Middle Eastern and Arab nations suggests a yearning to touch off a global conflagration that would indeed have the world burning for decades, so pernicious are Islamists’ designs for a worldwide caliphate. This obviously could not be actualized without tens – if not hundreds of millions – of deaths.
Mitt Romney got in trouble last week over a Washington Post story reporting that when he was attending an exclusive boarding school in the mid-1960s, he took part in an incident in which he cut the longish hair of a student who was presumed to be gay.
That didn't look good for Romney. That means it was time for Romney fluffer extraordinare Ronald Kessler to do some damage control.And that's exactly what Kessler does in a spin-laden May 11 Newsmax column:
As a high school prankster myself, I know that pranks can get out of hand. Looking back, we can’t believe that we could have been so stupid and wrongheaded.
[...]
Romney said he didn’t remember the Lauber incident from almost 50 years ago, but he didn’t dispute that it happened. He stressed that he didn’t know either student was gay.
Indeed, having grown up in the same era in Belmont, Mass., where Romney later lived, I know that we had only the vaguest idea of what being gay meant. Other Romney classmates have said that Romney was not a bully nor homophobic when a student at the private Cranbrook School. Moreover, as governor and as a presidential candidate, Romney has hired individuals who are openly gay.
Of course, having "only the vaguest idea of what being gay meant" was more than enough license to lash out at anyone suspected to be so, especially in the mid-'60s when such things were simply not discussed in public and vagueness ruled the day.
Kessler then segues into a story from a childhood friend of Romney's about what a "master" prankster he was.
Way to furiously spin for your candidate there, Ron.
UPDATE: Kessler does a two-in-one for his May 14 column, which has Romney adviser Bay Buchanan on to not only plug her book for shill for Romney as well.
WND's Kovacs, Corsi Still Pursuing Silly Obama-Breitbart Death Conspiracy Topic: WorldNetDaily
Contrary to what we might have believed, it appears that WorldNetDaily's Joe Kovacs is not done embarrassing himself in trying to forward a conspiracy that President Obama is somehow involved in the death of a medical examiner who he thinks was involved in the autopsy on right-wing activist Andrew Breitbart.
In a May 10 WND article, Kovacs declares that "Law-enforcement officials in California are now speaking out on the mysterious death of one of their own forensic technicians who died the day autopsy results were released for conservative powerhouse Andrew Breitbart." And what are they speaking out about? Kovacs' discredited suggestion that the man played a role in Breitbart's autopsy.
Kovacs doesn't admit that he peddled that claim, of course -- that would be acting like a real journalist, which his involvement in promoting this silly conspiracy demonstrates he is not, despite his claim that he joined WND to report on the "real news."
We apologize for suggesting Kovacs might have a sense of shame about what he "reports" for WND. It's clear he does not. We apologize.
Meanwhile, one person we know has absolutely no sense of shame is Jerome Corsi. After writing a breathless article about how "the only eyewitness to the sudden death of media innovator and conservative activist Andrew Breitbart" had mysteriously disappeared,he followed up with a May 11 article going all conspiratorial about a purported "thick white band around Breitbart’s forehead."
In the same article, Corsi shows off how deficient his reporting skills are. After beginning the article by touting how "On assignment from WND, Los Angeles private investigator Paul Huebl found" that missing witness, Corsi writes later in the article:
Huebl earlier sold a video of his first interview with Lasseter to TMZ.com.
WND asked Casey Carver, a spokesman for TMZ.com, how much TMZ.com paid for the video interview and why it had decided not to air the interview with Lasseter that it purchased from Huebl.
Carver did not respond to WND’s inquiries.
Nowhere is it indicated that Corsi ever asked Huebl how much TMZ paid him -- despite the fact that Huebl is on WND's payroll.
And if Corsi is so interested in disclosure, why doesn't Corsi tell us how much he and WND are paying Huebl? Is the money for hiring sleazy private investigators -- and as the screenshot above from Corsi's video indicates, Huebl certainly does look sleazy -- acoming out of the Super PAC-esque operation Joseph Farah is begging his readers to fund?
NewsBusters Comes to Bill Donohue's Defense, Doesn't Disclose MRC's Link To Him Topic: NewsBusters
In a May 10 NewsBusters post, Brad Wilmouth complained that "CNN host Piers Morgan mocked Catholic League president Bill Donohue's declaration that Catholicism demands that gay children should still be loved by their parents by suggesting in a later segment that he would have more respect for Donohue's opposition to gay marriage if he would just claim to 'hate' homosexuals instead of being 'wishy washy.'"
Wilmouth failed to mention that his boss, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell, is on the board of advisers of Donohue's Catholic League. That seems relevant to Wilmouth's defense of Donohue.
Will WND's Kinsolving Stop Touting His Pulitzer Nominations? Topic: WorldNetDaily
Last week, Jonah Goldberg was busted for touting in a book jacket blurb for his new book as having "twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize." As MSNBC details, that bit of resume padding is utterly meaningless -- all it takes to be nominated for a is filling out an entry form and paying a $50 fee.
But Goldberg is not the only right-winger who does that. The online bio of WorldNetDaily writer Les Kinsolving touts how he was "twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his commentary":
These nominations were expanded upon in the fluffy, WND-published Kinsolving bio "Gadfly," authored by his daughter Kathleen. The first was for a religion column he wrote in the late 1960s and was submitted by the newspaper that syndicated it; no specific examples of the nominated commentary are identified in the book.
The second came in 1973 from the newspaper he worked for -- though, ironically, not for the closest thing to real journalism he ever did: Early reporting on the Jim Jones-led People's Temple, a religious cult then based in San Francisco which later relocated to Guyana and years later staged a mass suicide of its members.
Even if one were to take Kinsolving's Pulitzer nominations at face value, this means that he has done nothing Pulitzer-worthy for nearly 40 years. Of course, if you've seen Kinsolving's biasedquestioning, temper tantrums and rampant homophobia at WND, you knew that already.
Will Kinsolving and WND be as chastened as Goldberg and remove that meaningless bit of puffery from Kinsolving's bio? Don't count on it.
CNS Baselessly Calls Federal Funding to Planned Parenthood 'Fungible' Topic: CNSNews.com
In a May 9 CNSNews.com article about federal Title X family planning money going to Planned Parenthood, Elizabeth Harrington writes:
Although the law prevents Title X family planning funds from being used for abortions, money is fungible and, as the latest data show, Planned Parenthood received a reported $79 million in Title X funding in 2010, and a total of approximately $342 million between 2002 and 2008.
Harrington offers no evidence that the Title X money to Planned Parenthood is "fungible." Instead, she is invoking a common right-wing argument against any federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
That makes Harrington an ideologue, not a journalist. Anyone surprised?
WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh, it seems, is incapable of doing any fact-checking on the articles he writes.
In a May 10 WND article that simply parrots the claims of a right-wing student-rights group Foundation For Individual Rights in Education, asserting that Caleb Warner, a former student at the University fo North Dakota, "was found guilty of sexual assault by a campus court." In fact, as the Associated Press reported, Warner was found guilty by a school tribunal -- not a "campus court" -- of violations of the school's code of student life, not of "sexual assault." Warner was then kicked out of school.
In other words, Unruh told two lies in a mere 10 words. That must be close to a record.
To explain: Warner was accused by a fellow student of sexual assault. Warner insisted the sexual encounter with the woman was consensual. He was later cleared of criminal charges, and the is an outstanding warrant out for the woman for lying to the police. Warner tried to get the school to re-open the case, represented by FIRE, claiming that the college tribunal should be subject to the formality and due process a defendant receives in a court a law. The school declined.
While there is clearly an issue here, it doesn't give license to Unruh to embellish things by inventing a "campus court" that could find people "guilty" of criminal acts.
On top of that, it's clear that Unruh talked only to FIRE; no indication is made that he bothered to contact school officials. He's rather prone to that sort of thing.
Newsmax Baselessly Calls Obama Gay Marriage Stance A 'Debacle' Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax is carrying a front page headline that reads "Biden Apologizes to Obama for Gay Marriage Debacle":
But if you look at the Bloomberg article it links to, it carries the headline "Biden Said to Apologize to Obama for Forcing Gay Marriage Issue." And nowhere in the article does the word "debacle" appear, stating only that Biden's remarks "prompted the president to disclose his support for same-sex marriage before he planned to." Not exactly anyone's definition of a "debacle."
Obama's stance on gay marriage can be described many ways, but a "debacle" isn't one of them. That's just wishful thinking on Newsmax's part.
