CNS' Jeffrey on Stonewall Anniversary: 'Obama Celebrates Anti-Police Riot Started at Mafia-Owned Bar for Transvestites' Topic: CNSNews.com
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has decided to really get into pushing his employer's anti-gay agenda.
Apparently seeking a way to denigrate gays as much as possible, Jeffrey headlined his June 16 CNS article on President Obama's marking the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which launched the modern gay-rights movement, this way: "Obama Celebrates Anti-Police Riot Started at Mafia-Owned Bar for Transvestites." The first paragraph of Jeffrey's article elaborated slightly by calling the Stonewall Inn -- the name of which does not appear until the third paragraph of the article -- "an illegal Mafia-owned bar for transvestites."
Jeffrey linked to, and selectively quoted from, a 2010 New York Times obituary for Seymour Pine, the police inspector who led the raid, highlighting the "anti-police" aspects of the riots while failing to quote from the article why the LGBT community was driven to do so. From the Times article, which did not make into Jeffrey's article:
Altehough the ostensible reason for the raid was to crack down on prostitution and other organized-crime activities, it was common at the time for the police to raid gay bars and arrest cross-dressers and harass customers.
The club, on Christopher Street near Seventh Avenue South, was owned by members of the Mafia. Inspector Pine later said he conducted the raid on orders from superiors.
[...]
In 2004, Inspector Pine spoke during a discussion of the Stonewall uprising at the New-York Historical Society. At the time of the raid, he said, the police “certainly were prejudiced” against gays, “but had no idea about what gay people were about.”
Why didn't Jeffrey include that important context in his article? The only possible reason was that he was determined to present gays in the most negative light possible -- as if his headline wasn't already a clue to that.
It seems that Jeffrey supports the kind of bigotry and prejudice with which the police treated gays back then. Is that really an acceptable attitude for someone who heads a so-called "news" organization to have?
WND's Kupelian Falsely Tosses Around 'Marxist' Smear Topic: WorldNetDaily
David Kupelian writes in a June 17 WorldNetDaily column:
Obama admits in “Dreams From My Father” that, during college, he was attracted to the “Marxist professors.” Indeed, the Marxist student leader at Occidental College at the time, John Drew, says Obama was far more radical than even Drew was, actually believing that Marx’s prophesied proletariat revolution to overthrow capitalism was imminent in the United States. Today Drew, who has long since repudiated his former radicalism, says that even in his Marxist days he attempted to rein in Obama by trying to persuade him to work within America’s political system to bring about the Marxist transformation they all desired.
After college, Obama followed in the footsteps of Chicago Marxist Saul Alinsky and went on to practice and teach Alinsky’s revolutionary street-organizing methods.
As we've previously documented, Drew had precious little personal interaction with Obama -- he had graduated from Occidental before Obama enrolled there, and the two met only twice on social occasions. That makes him a dubious judge of how "radical" Obama purportedly was at the time.
Further, Saul Alinsky was not a Marxist. He said in a 1972 Playboy interview: "I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism."
And in his book "Rules for Radicals," Alinsky disparaged Lenin as having "said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns!" He also mocked those who like to quote "Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara," who he said were "as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport."
Kupelian, by the way, is WND's managing editor. We'd complain about his egregious inattention to the facts, but he's just following the falsehood-strewn example of his boss, Joseph Farah.
AIM's Kincaid Still Repeating False Smear of Panetta Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid just can't stop peddling a lie. He writes in his June 14 Accuracy in Media column:
Congress gave Panetta a pass when he became CIA director and then Secretary of Defense, despite his long record of associations with identified communist Hugh DeLacy, who had connections to the Chinese government. Not surprisingly, the Soros-funded Media Matters came to Panetta’s defense, accusing conservatives of a “smear” for raising the inconvenient facts about his record, including opposition to President Reagan’s anti-communist defense policies. Media Matters has White House connections and specializes in intimidating the media when they dare to question the White House line.
Fortunately, the facts, including some of a personal nature, were included in a column by the courageous Diana West, who commented that the evidence showed that Panetta had “a cordial, long-term relationship in the 1970s and 1980s” with Hugh DeLacy, a Communist Party USA member elected to one term in Congress while pretending to be a Democrat in 1944. Incriminating “Dear Hugh” and “Dear Leon” documents were obtained by researcher Trevor Loudon at the University of Washington.
Unfortunately for Kincaid, as we've previously pointed out when he pushed this smear, that Media Matters piece tells the truth about the "long-term relationship" between Panetta and DeLacy: The correspondence between them is nothing more than that of a congressman and a constituent.
At no point does Kincaid make any effort to refute any of the specific claims made in the Media Matters piece, nor does he challenges its accuracy vis-a-vis the "facts" offered by West. Instead, he goes for a lazy ad hominem attack on the organization (disclosure: I'm a Media Matters employee).
Kincaid, by the way, is bringing up this false smear as part of suggesting that Panettamight be responsible for releasing information about President Obama's counterterrorism efforts, or in Kincaid's words, "betrayal of state secrets." Kincaid goes on to claim that Panetta is among individuals in the Obama administration "who could not pass a basic FBI background check," presumably because of his purported relationship with DeLacy.
Joseph Farah's Obama-Bashing Pack of Lies Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah's June 14 WorldNetDaily column claims to offer "38 reasons why Obama should not be re-elected," which he claims is "a work of collaboration by me and some friends of mine – some of whom feared retribution for speaking so plainly." But as could be expected from the editor of a website so willingandeager to peddle falsehoods about President Obama, Farah's column is filled with lies and misleading claims. Let's go through some of them.
WHEN he refused to disclose who donated money to his election campaign, as other candidates had done, people said it didn’t matter.
In fact, while the Federal Election Commission found that the 2008 Obama campaign failed to disclose a small fraction of its contributions, Farah offers no evidence the Obama "refused to disclose" contributions in a manner that violated federal law.
WHEN he said he favors sex education in kindergarten, including homosexual indoctrination, people said it didn’t matter.
In fact, Obama said he favors age-appropriate sex education, which for kindergarteners means teaching them about "inappropriate touching." Farah's reference to "homosexual indoctrination" presumably means teaching something other than that gays are evil and deserve eternal damnation -- in other words, that they're human.
WHEN his personal background was either scrubbed or hidden and nothing could be found about him, people said it didn’t matter.
Farah offers no evidence to back up this claim, which is contradicted by the fact that his own reporter, Jerome Corsi, wrote a factually challenged book on Obama's personal background during the 2008 campaign.
WHEN the place of his birth was called into question, and he refused to produce a birth certificate, people said it didn’t matter.
WHEN he appointed a science czar, John Holdren, who believes in forced abortions, mass sterilizations and seizing babies from teen mothers, people said it didn’t matter.
In fact, Holdren doesn't support "forced abortions" and doesn't support "mass sterilizations." The part about "seizing babies from teen mothers" is taken from an alarmist WND article; the section in question discusses possible ways to encourate "responsible parenting" and discourage "illegitimate childbearing" -- which is something we thought WND wants to encourage as well. Regardless, there's no evidence Holdren "believes" in that either beyond throwing it out as a suggestion.
WHEN he appointed Cass Sunstein as regulatory czar, who believes in “explicit consent,” harvesting human organs without family consent and allowing animals to be represented in court, while banning all hunting, people said it didn’t matter.
The claim about "harvesting human organs without family consent" refers to Sunstein's idea that one should opt out, rather than opt in, of organ donation, which he argues would "save many lives while also preserving freedom." And far from "banning all hunting," Sunstein has said that "I strongly believe that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to possess and use guns for purposes of both hunting and self-defense."
WHEN Anita Dunn, White House communications director, said Mao Zedong was her favorite philosopher and the person she turned to most for inspiration, people said it didn’t matter.
Farah is deliberately taking Dunn out of context, Dunn actually said that Mao, along with Mother Teresa, were "two of my favorite political philosophers ... that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices."
WHEN he traveled around the world criticizing America and never once talking of her greatness, people said it didn’t matter.
In fact, Obama has never gone on an apology tour. Further, Farah's claim that Obama "never once talk[ed] of [America's] greatness" is destroyed by what Obama said in one of his supposed "apology" speeches, in Cairo: "The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words -- within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum -- 'Out of many, one.'"
WHEN he took away student loans from the banks and required they go through the government, people said it didn’t matter.
In fact, banks can still make private student loans. Obama's policy -- which was approved by Congress and not mandated by fiat, as Farah suggests -- removes banks from the federal student loan program, from which banks made significant profits.
That's the level of factual accuracy we've come to expect from Farah and WND. Anyone surprised?
CNS Falsely Tries to Portray Obama Immigration Action As 'Amnesty' Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com has long tried to tag any action that doesn't involve deporting illegal immigrants as "amnesty," despite the fact that the word has a specific definition that in no way applies to things such has a proposed "path to citizenship."
With President Obama's recent announcement of a delay in deportation hearings for certain undocumented immigrants who meet specific criteria, CNS is at it again. The fact that the program is clearly not amnesty isn't keeping CNS from suggesting that it is.
A June 15 article focusing on a Homeland Security press release carried the headline "Amnesty? Immunity? Administration Calls It a 'Deferred Action Process.'" The word "amnesty" appears nowhere in Jones' article, and Jones doesn't explain what part of the program constitutes "immunity."
That was followed by an article by Matt Cover thatstarts: "Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that the administration’s new program for young illegal immigrants is 'not amnesty' despite the fact that it will remove them from the deportation process." Cover didn't explain how anything under Obama's action, let alone "removing" certain illegal immigrants "from the deportation process," meets the standard definition of "amnesty."
UPDATE: A June 18 CNS article by Penny Starr carries the headline "Obama Campaign Sends ‘Dreamers’ Fundraiser Letter Hours after Amnesty Announcement." Starr goes on to falsely claim that the proposed DREAM Act "gives amnesty to certain young illegal aliens who were brought to this country as children." In fact, because the DREAM Act imposes numerous conditions on the citizenship being granted, it cannot be "amesty," which by general definition does not require preconditions.
While reading Walter Laqueur’s biography of Josef Stalin, I was struck by a couple of similarities between Stalin and Obama. Even though Stalin’s life and personality were for very different from Obama’s, there are a couple of important similarities between the two men. The most obvious one, which almost certainly laid the foundation for the hatred that was embedded in the souls of both leaders, was their extremely dysfunctional and unhappy childhoods.
A second similarity is their remarkable success in portraying themselves to be men of great character and morality, the exact opposite of who they really were/are. Stalin, much like Obama today, succeeded in carrying out a nonstop propaganda campaign in which he was portrayed to the public as the kindly “Uncle Joe,” notwithstanding his ruthless murdering of tens of millions of his own countrymen.
We already know that Obama is a trillion-dollar bailout queen. And why not? After all, it’s not his money – or for that matter, his country. Why would he care?
Is Romney their man also? I’m guessing yes, but we’ll find out soon enough.
No, there’s something very threatening to the media establishment about the eligibility story. It’s simply this: Should the real story ever be told of how Obama hoodwinked Americans into making him president when he wasn’t constitutionally eligible for the job, the finger-pointing and blame-making isn’t going to be limited to the community organizer and his supporters. It’s going to come back to haunt – and, quite possibly, destroy – the careers of those who enabled it all.
Obama’s failure to act on this real threat and his support of other radical Muslim interests, such as the ascension of the granddaddy of terrorist groups the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, is perceived by many to be the result of Obama’s own conflicted Muslim roots – his Kenyan father having been a Muslim who had to be deported from the United States. Obama’s actions and words over the last three and a half years have supported this view, and now even many leftist Hollywood Jews, who previously voted for him, believe he is a not too latent anti-Semite bent not just on harming the interests of Israel but also American Jews and evangelical Christians in general.
The latest numbers on jobs and the economy do not bode well for the Obama campaign. The bad news on the economy will add fuel to the brushfire that will soon turn into an inferno. Can you spell O-b-a-m-a- M-e-l-t-d-o-w-n?
Obama’s campaign meltdown will soon yield to the Obama panic, which means the country will be in store for even more dramatic Obama theatrics. This summer will be a very dangerous period for our country because there are no limits to the nasty measures Obama and his gang of SEIU thugs will undertake to hang onto the White House.
The fact is, Obama’s administration far more closely resembles the Roman government in ancient Judea than he resembles Jesus Christ.
It goes without saying that Obama has a ridiculously high opinion of himself. As a result, when he was told that Jesus had once advised people to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s, and render unto the Lord that which was the Lord’s, he naturally assumed, being a combination of the two, that everything should therefore be rendered unto him.
But the truth is, Obama, whose only god is the one he sees reflected in his bathroom mirror, is attacking the First Amendment. If he can get away with forcing the Church to go against its own basic tenets, it would mean he could do just about anything. And after running our national debt up to $16 trillion, gutting the military and taking control of the automotive, energy and health-care industries, you can easily see where he’d get that idea.
We at WND, however, never allowed ourselves to be duped. When I first picked up “Dreams” in 2008, Obama’s “excess of talent” left me not spellbound, but suspicious. WND shared my suspicions.
For the last five years, despite limited resources, we have been building a case against Obama’s credibility that Ferguson and his peers have fully ignored, if not actively mocked.
When I challenged the legitimacy of “Dreams,” for instance, Remnick implied that I was a racist and exiled me to “the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit.” From the Weekly Standard’s perspective, there I remain.
The president is a serial killer. The Surveillance State has metastasized under Barack Obama, whose growing fleet of armed Predators and Reapers – operated by both the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command – each has its own kill list, overseen personally by the president. As I write, Obama is likely pouring over pictures of Yemeni teenagers (“terrorists”), deciding who’ll live and whose time is up.
Couple his kill-list venture and his leadership role in the leveling of Libya, and Obama is up there with the “best” of dictators.
MRC's Whitlock Offended By Insult To Nixon, Not His Boss Likening Obama To 'Skinny Ghetto Crackhead' Topic: Media Research Center
You gotta love the wildly off-kilter calibration of the Media Research Center's outrage meter.
MRC researcher Scott Whitlock devotes a June 13 NewsBusters post to foaming at the mouth over MSNBC's Chris Matthews likening accused child molester Jerry Sandusky's wife to Pat Nixon for their apparent stand-by-their-man qualities. Whitlock hufed:
To compare President Nixon's life and example to that of a man charged with some of the most abhorrent crimes possible is reprehensible.
Matthews should apologize for his disgusting remarks.
Whitlock doesn't elaborate on what he meant by "President Nixon's life and example." What say you, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein?
In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.
Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House.
Your mileage may vary on whether a man debasing the presidency with criminal acts is akin to being a child molester, but Whitlock apparently clearly has no problem with Nixon's criminality.
By contrast, to our knowledge, Whitlock found nothing disgusting or outrageous about his boss, Brent Bozell, likening President Obama to a "skinny ghetto crackhead."
Here's a little advice for Whitlock: He should clean up his own act -- and that of his boss -- first before he feigns offense at what others say.
WND's Farah Lies Again About Claiming Obama Was Born in Kenya Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah whines in his June 12 WorldNetDaily column:
I’ve been called “the king of the birthers” because of my commitment to pursuing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Obama’s life story. Yet I have never claimed he was born in Kenya. In fact, when pushed in countless interviews my answer has always been the same: I don’t know where Obama was born.
Farah is lying. We've documented how Farah used his column at least twice to tout the (discredited) claim that Obama's grandmother said he was born in Kenya. And obviously, WND's promotion of a purported "Kenyan birth certificate" for Obama qualifies, especially given WND's egregious breath of journalistic ethics by not bothering to verify its authenticity before publishing it, which most certainly had to be signed off at the highest levels of WND -- meaning, of course, Farah.
Farah is a stunningly shameless liar by claiming he never pushed the idea that Obama was born in Kenya in the face of evidence showing the contrary. But that kind of shameless lying is what it takes, apparently, to run WND.
MRC Is Unhappy That NY Times Is Reporting the Truth About George Allen Topic: Media Research Center
We've detailed how the Media Research Center's "Tell the Truth" campaign doesn't apply to news organizations that tell the truth about Republican candidates -- in those cases, the MRC very much does not want the truth to be told.
That double standard strikes again in a June 14 MRC TimesWatch article by Clay Waters, in which he complains that the New York Times is reporting accurately on the past of Virginia Republican Senate andidate George Allen -- or, in Waters' words, "injecting all the old controversies and rumors of racism into the current news cycle."
Waters makes no effort to contradict anything that was reported -- he's simply complaining that it was reported at all.
We've previously reported on MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham's longtime upset over the media reporting accurately about Allen's notorious "macaca" comment.
Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Erik Rush Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
Have you ever heard the name Mark Ndesandjo?
Mark Ndesandjo is the son of Barack Obama’s late father and his third wife, which makes him President Obama’s half-brother. His background is that of a music teacher; among other things, he also runs an Internet company – in the People’s Republic of China.
You mean you’ve never heard of Mark? How interesting. Why do you think that might be?
Mark lives in Shenzhen, and his company, Worldnexus, supposedly aids Chinese companies in exporting goods to the U.S. As such – and as the brother of a sitting U.S. president – Ndesandjo would certainly be known to the PLA (People’s Liberation Army – essentially the Chinese government). In fact, given that the Chinese government is a major stakeholder in every business in China – they being communists and all – the PLA would know him very well.
My understanding is that they know him even better than that.
Now, I’m not accusing Ndesandjo of untoward or anti-American designs – yet. Of course, with or without proof, countless individuals would no doubt view such charges as ludicrous as accusing his brother of being the Manchurian President, or saying he might not be a U.S. citizen, or of working toward a hard-line socialist state – right?
Sheppard's reign of error strikes again in a June 12 NewsBusters post on a remark by Joy Behar about wanting to see Mitt Romney's house burn down, which now begins with a notice of a "CRITICAL UPDATE AT END OF POST." And what was that CRITICAL UPDATE?
*****Update: There was an error in the original transcript posted at Mediaite that I missed. After listening to the audio numerous times with headphones, it's become apparent that Behar didn't say, "It would be kind of cool - the Mormon fire patrol." Instead she said, "Who's he going to call, the Mormon fire patrol?" As such, headline, text, and transcript have been corrected.
Newsbusters‘ Noel Sheppard even got a Drudge link out of the deal, aided by our early transcription error that quoted Behar as saying It would be kind of cool – the Mormon fire patrol,” when she actually said, “Who’s he going to call, the Mormon fire patrol?”
Sheppard opined, “Imagine for a moment a conservative commentator making such a remark about President Obama or any leading Democrat,” while The Blaze‘s Jonathon Seidl similarly wondered “do we really need to ask what the outrage would be if the tables were turned?”
Since Joy Behar isn’t exactly beloved among right-wingers (and is probably delighted at the outrage), it seems she isn’t entitled to a reasonable person’s interpretation of her remark, which was clearly meant to raise a hypothetical in response to Romney’s call for fewer firemen, as in “I’d like to see what would happen if Mitt Romney’s house caught fire. Who’s he going to call since he doesn’t want more firemen? The Mormon fire patrol?”
But, hey, fair enough, I’m sure both sides engage in unkind interpretations of their foes’ words, and Joy isn’t some helpless babe in the woods. But what this mini-brouhaha really illustrates is the right wing’s screwed up sense of priorities. They’re at once outraged by what they all recognize as a joke (perhaps a liberal was around to explain it), and they’re outraged by the lack of outrage, and they’re outraged at the hypothetical outrage that would occur if a conservative made the same joke.
Indeed, Sheppard makes no effort to explain the full context of what Behar was responding to, stating only that they were in response o "Romney's comments on the need for more police, teachers, and firefighters." That's an utterly dishonest way to portray what Romney actually said, which was that we don't need more police, teachers, and firefighters.
And this guy is an associate editor at NewsBusters?
If you have to explain that you're not excusing murder, you're excusing murder.
And that's exactly what Burt Prelutsky does in his June 12 WorldNetDaily column:
For openers, Mrs. Sebelius, while a two-term governor of Kansas, vetoed legislation limiting abortion on four separate occasions. Not so coincidentally, the No. 1 contributor to her political campaigns was none other than Dr. George Tiller, a Lutheran, who was notorious for being one of the very few medical practitioners in America who regularly performed late-term abortions. Eventually, he was gunned down by Scott Roeder in a church, of all places.
Not to excuse Roeder, but his crime consisted of committing just a single cold-blooded murder of a 67-year-old man who’d committed over 60,000 abortions. If I had been his defense attorney, I would have been tempted to argue that my client was guilty of nothing more than performing a very late-term abortion of his own. I’m not sure how long a sentence you get in Kansas for practicing medicine without a license, but I know it’s not life.
Prelutsky thus echoes fellow WND columnist Jack Cashill in cheering the murder of Tiller.
CNS' Jeffrey Still Beating The Dead Horse of Kagan Recusal on Obamacare Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has spent years desperately pushing the idea that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan should be/should have been disqualified from deliberations on health care reform lawsuits before the court because of her earlier work as President Obama's solicitor general -- despite the fact that he has never provided any definitive evidence of a violation of the statute that would force her to recuse (and completely ignoring the fact that if she's in violation, Justice Clarence Thomas is as well).
Jeffrey beats this dead horse one more time in a June 12 CNS article complaining that Attorney General Eric Holder "has refused to provide written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee" regarding Kagan's involvement in health care reform.
Jeffrey goes on to rehash his old, failed arguments, suggesting without evidence that because "Kagan had personally assigned her top deputy to handle the expected litigation against Obamacare," that was a violation of the law demanding recusal.
And, needless to say, Jeffrey makes no mention of Clarence Thomas' conflicts.
WND's Real Intent With Esquire Lawsuit: Vengeance Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily and its sue-happy defamer attorney Larry Klayman seem to know they don't have a case against Esquire magazine for its satirical blog post about WND admitting that President Obama was born in Hawaii and that it was destroying Jerome Corsi's birther book. Not that it will admit that at WND, of course.
A June 11 WND article announced that WND would appeal a judge's dismissal of its Esquire lawsuit. It repeats the usual rantings from Klayman that don't address the key finding the judge made in dismissing it, that WND editor Joseph Farah admitted the Esquire blog post was satire before it became "inconvenient" for him to do so.
The article also claims that Klayman said that the judge "prejudged the case, for example, in her material finding that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, even though Obama’s birthplace was not at issue." But if you remember, WND's dog-and-pony show announcing the lawsuit against Esquire featured Corsi and Mara Zebest doing their birther presentation. If the subject of Obama's "eligibility" was not a key component of the lawsuit, what were they doing there?
Despite all the usual legalistic boilerplate in the article, WND's promotion of it was, one might say, a little more honest. Here's what the promotional email WND sent to its readers said:
Esquire Magazine's phony-baloney report claiming the "Where's the Birth Certificate?" book was being pulled off the shelves continues to to be fought in the legal realm.
WND is now taking new action in its effort to punish the rag with $250 million in damages ...
So it's not about justice -- it's about vengeance and a desire to "punish the rag." More to the point, the email arguably demonstrates that WND's lawsuit against Esquire is nothing more than a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate critics, which runs counter to Farah's assertion in the article that the lawsuit is "not because we desire to restrict First Amendment-guaranteed protections, but because we want to police them and guard them."
Can't lawyers be sanctioned for filing nuisance lawsuits? Yes, they can. Klayman better watch himself.
One wonders why WND and Klayman chose to continue this lawsuit and not a previous one against the White House Correspondents Association for not selling WND the number of tickets it demanded for the WHCA's annual correspondents dinner, which was also swiftly tossed out of court.
Perhaps WND and Klayman have decided they haven't gotten the full amount of publicity from the Esquire suit yet. Perhaps they should hold another dog-and-pony show at the National Press Club.
NewsBusters Ponders Media-Bias Study It Could Not Produce Itself Topic: NewsBusters
Matthew Sheffield uses a June 11 NewsBusters post to highlight an Italian study claiming that, in Sheffield's words, "biased media favoring a certain national candidate and party is worth anywhere from 2 to 5.5 points to that candidate and his party in the final election tally." Sheffield then adds, "One hopes that a similar paper might be produced looking at the effects of media bias in this country."
As someone who works closely with the Media Research Center -- he did create NewsBusters, after all -- shouldn't Sheffield expect that the MRC would be interested in doing such a study? Or does Sheffield know that the MRC's research methods aresoshoddy that they cannot be trusted, let alone subjected to any meaningful peer review?
Besides, any such research would have to look at how many points right-wing media outlets -- like, say, the MRC-owned CNSNews.com -- would add to a Republican candidate, and the MRC is certainly not going to address that.
Further, the media environment in Italy is nowhere near analogous to the United States. As Sheffield himself notes, six of Italy's seven main nationwide TV channels are controlled by now-former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, which were apparently biased toward Berlusconi. Media ownership in the U.S., while concentrated among a handful of corporations, is still more diffuse than in Italy.
Then again, the main TV networks aren't producing four-minute attack ads against Romney like Fox News did against Obama, are they? And no, Matt Hadro, airing someone's speech in favor of Obama as part of news coverage is not the same thing.
That Hadro would think it is is just one more reason why the MRC cannot be trusted to conduct such research.
