AIM's Kincaid Touts Andy McCarthy's Discredited Book Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid uses an Aug. 9 Accuracy in Media column to tout Andrew McCarthy's "virtual indictment of top State Department official Huma Abedin as a security risk." Kincaid cites no direct evidence from McCarthy to back up his claim.
Nevertheless, Kincaid talks up McCarthy's supposed credentials: "In addition to prosecuting terrorists, McCarthy wrote a book, The Grand Jihad, the title of which is taken from a Muslim Brotherhood document obtained by the FBI and which identifies front groups and collaborators in the U.S."
In fact, as we've documented, McCarthy devotes a chapter of "The Grand Jihad" to claiming that Barack Obama, during a 2006 visit to Kenya, campaigned for presidential candidate Raila Odinga. In fact, he did no such thing: PolitiFact agreed that there is "no evidence to indicate that Obama 'openly supported' Odinga." Indeed, much of the book is dedicated to peddling the conspiratorial idea that Obama is an "Islamist."
OF course, the facts don't really matter to Kincaid -- after all, McCarthy is reliably anti-Obama, and that's all that matters to Kincaid's anti-Obama agenda.
WND Race-Baiting Watch: Colin Flaherty Gets Busted Topic: WorldNetDaily
Colin Flaherty is back at WorldNetDaily to fearmonger some more about alleged "racial violence," this time to suggest that because violent crime is not always reported to police, "racial violence" may be even much worse.
Of course, Flaherty offers no evidence tha all -- or even any -- of the crime supposedly not reported is "racial"; instead, he serves up only anecdotal examples.
Meanwhile, Flaherty's long, hot summer of race-baiting has gotten the attention of Salon's Alex Pareene, who portrays it as "the story of how and why the right suddenly became very, very frightened of black people":
I’ve never been entirely clear on the definition of the right-wing epithet “race hustler” (it usually seems to mean “a black person who talks about racism”), but I’d figure a person writing a silly book designed solely to scare white people would qualify.
So here’s the thing: If you look for every example of crimes committed by black people in every American city over the last three to five years, you’ll find enough examples to make it sound like a lot of crime, because America is a violent country with a lot of crime, a lot of poverty and a lot of impoverished minority neighborhoods located conveniently close to much wealthier white neighborhoods (and business districts where everything is also owned by white people).
Pareene also catches Flaherty in exaggerations and false claims:
In addition to having decided to make racial fear-mongering his profession, Flaherty’s also a sloppy aggregator. He gets wrong the simple details of the stories he’s abusing to make his argument, and he also seems to invent facts from thin air. Some examples from his column on a series of random incidents in Minneapolis, which became a chapter of his silly book: A woman who was badly beaten by a group of teenage girls is said to have been attacked by “a gang of 20 black women.” The number of attackers appears nowhere in the linked story. (He also seems to intentionally elide the stated motive for the attack, which wasn’t anti-white animus but a missing pair of sunglasses.) “In September of 2011, a crowd of 1,000 black people rioted through downtown fighting, stealing, destroying property,” he writes. There’s no way of knowing how many people were in the crowd, but it doesn’t look to me like 1,000. In the book he seems to have changed number to 800, though he still has no possible way of counting. (The person who uploaded video of the crowd’s brief marauding wrote of “a few hundred.”) Flaherty says “a group of black people attacked a mobile alcoholic beverage cart in Minneapolis,” but there’s no such thing as “mobile alcoholic beverage carts” in Minneapolis. The thing attacked was a bunch of people on one of those stupid group bicycles with a beer keg. This is all pretty basic stuff, and my folks always taught me that if you’re going to use a bunch of random incidents to try to convince people of the existence of a secret nationwide pandemic of racial violence, it’s best to get the details right.
Will WND make Flaherty correct his work -- and, more important, if it does, will it let readers know that corrections have been made? We shall see.
MRC Still Defending Taking Obama Out of Context Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has longdefended taking President Obama's "you didn't build that" comments out of context. The latest excuse: grammar.
In an Aug. 10 MRC TimesWatch post, Clay Waters berates a New York Times writer for accurately pointing out that Obama "was talking about roads and bridges, a point that was ignored" by his right-wing critics. Waters responded: "Really? If Obama really was talking about 'roads and bridges,' a plural phrase, why did he follow up with the word 'that,' which is singular?"
That's right -- Waters has to nitpick on grammar to justify distorting Obama's remarks. Never mind the fact that Obama made his point clearer immediately after saying those words: "The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."
WND Still Censoring Facts About Birther 'Investigation' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Just how far in denial is WorldNetDailiy about the fact that its highly touted cold case posse "investigation" of Barack Obama's "eligibility" to be president completely botched the facts?
In his Aug. 9 column, WND editor Joseph Farah continued to insist that Obama's birth certificate was "found to be fraudulent by the only law enforcement investigation to examine it."
In fact, that biased "investigation" was caught rehashing previously discredited WND birther conspiracies and, most recently, cold case posse leader Mike Zullo (and de facto posse member completely screwed the pooch by using the wrong coding system to examine Obama's birth certificate.
Farah and WND have continued their blackout on Zullo's screw-up -- or any other factual criticism of the "investigation." It seems that WND's credibility is tanking along with the posse's (as well as Joe Arpaio, who WND manipulated into doing an investigation in the first place).
Noel Sheppard Roots For Censorship, Proud He Encouraged Gay-Bashing Topic: NewsBusters
Noel Sheppard is quite a piece of work.
Sheppard wrote an Aug. 12 post headlined "National Review's Rich Lowry Destroys MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Meet the Press." In fact, all Lowry did is argue with Maddow over her accurate point that Paul Ryan's proposed budget has the same $700 million in cuts to Medicare that was in President Obama's health care reform plan.
Sheppard followed that with a post proudly noting that his post was reposted on the Drudge Report, followed by Maddow tweeting that this will result in an "onslaught of ALL CAPS swearing misspelled tweets & emails informing me that I am gay." Rather than fret that he encouraged gay-bashing, he's proud of it: "Well, maybe if she had answered Lowry's simple question concerning whether or not she supports the $700 billion of Medicare cuts in ObamaCare she could look forward to praise for her appearance."
But Sheppard wasn't done: He wrote another post rooting for censorship.
In that post, he noted that CNN's Howard Kurtz asked "libtalker" Stephanie Miller if she was worried that she and "some of the few liberal national voices on talk radio be drowned out in this election" but right-wing radio hosts. Sheppard called it "a question that most right-thinking Americans pray the answer is 'Yes,'" adding: "you can rest assured millions of Americans across the fruited plain hope the fallacious propaganda being spread by the likes of Miller and Schultz will indeed be drowned out. I'm not sure based on the question that would make Kurtz happy, but count me amongst them."
Remember, the Media Research Center employs Sheppard as NewsBusters' associate editor. Is rooting for censorship and encouraging gay-bashing really appropriate behavior from someone on the MRC payroll?
To say that Obama is a bad American is not to cast doubt upon either his citizenship or his birthplace. While the inept forgery that the White House attempted to pass off as his birth certificate does tend to raise questions, the larger problem is that the erstwhile eater of dogs appears to have a more tenuous grasp on America and what it means to be an American than the average European whose only exposure to the country was MTV and re-runs of “Dallas.” Americans are born rebels, a people born in violent rebellion, who view authority with a suspicious and jaundiced eye. Obama, on the other hand, instinctively bows to it and appears to be genuinely surprised when the American public don’t show an inclination to follow suit.
If Karl Marx were alive he could sue Barack Obama for plagiarizing his famous bedrock definition of Marxism. Look at the two quotes side-by-side. Marx said, “From each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs.” Obama puts it like this (exact quote): “A fair shot for everybody; a fair shake from everybody.”
Yes, there’s a “new” voting bloc called “Failures” – “Losers,” if you prefer – and Obama can pluck that guitar deep into the night without striking a losing chord. “You didn’t build that business. Somebody else made that happen!” “Success is mostly luck.” Luck, that is, well-marinated in the monotonous flavor of big government. That Roanoke-Rebellion text is not long. It’s all there in plain English. And the attempts of Obama supporters to pretend he meant something else are as pathetic as the caught-in-the-act speaker who denies what he just said by screaming, “Who do you believe? Me or a Japanese microphone?”
Dear reader, the facts speak for themselves. These are many pieces of a puzzle that do not add up to a pretty picture of the president as regards the Jewish state of Israel. Remember, this next election is not the Super Bowl; it’s not a matter of rooting for your team. This next election is not about bumper stickers but rather about profound issues that will change the world we live in. There is nothing wrong with voting as an American and as a Jew who cares about the fate of the Jewish homeland. African-Americans, omosexuals, Hispanics and numerous other citizens vote proudly to defend their respective sects and interests – why can’t Jews be unabashed in taking their regard for their people into the voting booth as well? Maybe it’s time to ask a modified version of Golda Meir’s famous question: Do you hate Mitt Romney more than you love Israel? Now go cast your vote.
Suppose someone who truly hated America got elected president – using deception, fraud and, as extremist radicals like him would put it, “by any means necessary.”
What would such a person do to bring America, the land of liberty, to its knees?
One of the things he would do would be to nationalize 17 percent of the private sector in one fell swoop by mandating citizens to participate in a government-run health-care system.
Another thing he might do is to nationalize the one corporation that, more than any other, was a symbol of private enterprise – General Motors, stripping shareholders like my 88-year-old mother of part of their life savings and turning it over to a bunch of union thugs and coercing the company to build cars and trucks no one wants.
[...]
That’s just some of what a president who truly hated America would do if elected.
If you want to find out what a president like that would do if he were re-elected, read “Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Secret Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed.”
America used a lower set of criteria to elect the first black president (affirmative action), and America is now paying a price for its bad decision. America did not even demand to see his sealed college transcripts to see how smart he really is.
Barack Hussein Obama, the first president without any executive experience of any kind, must be removed from office so we can save America from any more of his destruction.
There is no question that Barack Obama, assuming that is his real name, is a bad president, a bad American and a bad man. Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons to believe that as bad as Obama has been, the Republican alternative being offered in November, Mitt Romney, will actually be a good deal worse.
Neither Obama nor Romney is a man of strong character or principle. Obama has always skated along on the goodwill of others, being a pragmatic charlatan reliant upon affirmative action, white guilt and his image as the good, clean and articulate negro to get ahead. Every private school has a student or two like him, who always receives the benefit of the doubt and seven strikes for everyone else’s three, although none have ever before been able to ride the scam all the way to the White House.
On Thursday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted on his website his most recent anti-Semitic tirade, saying global forces should join together to annihilate Israel. Meanwhile, in Orlando, Fla., President Obama had a take-out plate of pulled pork and rice.
[...]
Fellow Americans, America and the world need a U.S. president who will restore our economy and steady international chaos in the world, not usher in Armageddon with his anti-Semitic, non-committal, conciliatory, laissez-faire leadership. The very personage of the U.S. president should emanate deterrence, not indifference.
They hope I’ll think their question is casual and that I won’t suspect they’re worried about my sanity, but I see through it right away and I’m not offended. The question: “Barry, how can you stand by your prediction of a landslide for Romney?”
Actually I’m predicting a landslide against Obama. Oh, I know all about Obama leading Romney in key battleground states and Obama’s negative ads seemingly working in Ohio. The polling data, indeed, amount to a statistical “sand castle” against Romney. But have you ever seen what a tsunami can do to a sand castle? Or even a nice big wave?
NewsBusters Pretends Limbaugh Ad Boycott Isn't Working Topic: NewsBusters
Remember last week, how NewsBusters' Matthew Sheffield -- while gloating that Carbonite's profits were down after wirthdrawing its advertising from Rush Limbaugh's radio show over his three-day misogynistic tirade against Sandra Fluke -- was insisting that the ad boycott against Limbaugh's show was "collapsing on itself"?
Well, not so much. Media Matters notes that Cumulus Media -- which owns 10 major-market radio stations that air Limbaugh's show -- has essentially admitted that the Limbaugh ad boycott has hurt business and contributed to a loss of $5.5 million in revenue on "the top three stations" in Cumulus' portfolio. That presumably includes New York's WABC, Limbaugh's flagship station.
As we've noted, Sheffield's MRC co-workers found nothing offensive in Limbaugh's misogyny, so they certainly can't understand why anyone would drop their ads from Limbaugh's show because of it.
CNSNews.com presents a theoretical as fact in an Aug. 10 article by Sabrina Gladstone, under the salacious headline "Obamacare Mandate: Sterilize 15-Year-Old Girls for Free--Without Parental Consent."
Of course, the claim that "Obamacare" does not mandate that 15-year-old girls be sterlized without parental consent -- which is what the headline claims -- is ludicrous on its face. What Gladstone's article actually claims -- that "Obamacare" allows 15-year-old girls be sterlized without parental consent -- relies on creating a theoretical and presenting it as fact:
Health care reform allows for "the full range of Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for women with reproductive capacity," which according to Gladstone covers "from the time of menarche to menopause."
Gladstone writes, "Menarche is the beginning of menstruation--again, on average, about the age of 12 for American women."
A few paragraphs later, Gladstone writes, "In Oregon, the age of informed consent is 15," which means that "The parents or guardians of a minor girl--between 15 and 18--can neither grant nor deny consent for a sterilization."
That's how Gladstone arrives at her claim -- to the extent that her assertion has any truth whatsoever, it applies only in Oregon. She offers no evidence that anybody, in Oregon or anywhere else, has ever advocated that teenage girls be sterilized.
Gladstone is being dishonest and deliberately provocative. But can we really expact anything different from a "news" organization that puts its hatred of President Obama before the facts?
Ellis Washington's Favorite Book Is Withdrawn Topic: WorldNetDaily
Over the summer, WorldNetDaily columnist wrote a series of columns based on David Barton's new book, "The Jefferson Lies." In one column, Washington called Barton's book "outstanding," adding that he "has once again presented an opus that shines the light of truth on the lies and propaganda of atheism, progressivism, liberalism, humanism and secular elites who possess a venal hatred for American exceptionalism." In a later column, Washington called Barton's book "revelatory."
Now Washington will have to call Barton's book something else: discredited.
Barton's publisher, Thomas Nelson, has withdrawn "The Jefferson Lies" from sale, concluding that the book contained material that was "not adequately supported":
In a statement on Friday, Thomas Nelson said it "was contacted by a number of people expressing concerns about the book. We took all of those concerns seriously, tried to sort out matters of opinion or interpretation, and in the course of our review learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported." The publisher decided to withdraw the book last week but didn't disclose it at that time.
[...]
Casey Harrell, a spokeswoman for Thomas Nelson, declined to say how many copies are in print. "We are in the process of recalling all copies," she said.
Thomas Nelson also said it has ended its publishing relationship with Mr. Barton and that it has reverted the rights to the book back to him.
At this writing, Barton's book is still available in the WND online store, and WND has not reported on the book's withdrawal.
The Trump-fluffing continues at Newsmax with an Aug. 9 article by Jim Meyers onhow "Donald Trump has declined an offer to deliver a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention," citing "sources with knowledge of convention plans."
Meyers adds: "But Newsmax has learned that the billionaire businessman has been asked to deliver a big 'surprise' at the convention in Tampa, Fla., which begins on Aug. 27." But Meyers is not done fluffing:
Trump, who hosts the hit NBC show "Celebrity Apprentice," is also said to be mulling an offer from ABC to join Barbara Walters in her live coverage of election night this November.
Trump’s people also have told the Romney campaign that while he fully supports the Republican candidate’s presidential bid, he cannot spend the full week in Tampa due to pressing global business pursuits.
That focus is what kept Trump out of a presidential run, even though he catapulted to the lead of a presumed field of Republican candidates after he told Newsmax and other media that he was strongly considering a run.
The Lies Just Keep Coming From Joseph Farah's Mouth Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah just can'tstop lying, can he? Apparently not, since now he's down to recycling his old lies.
In his Aug. 8 WorldNetDaily column, Farah claims that former White House communications director Anita Dunn "fawn[s] over the greatest mass murderer in history, Mao Zedong. (She calls him one of her two 'favorite political philosophers.')"
As we pointed out when he made this same claim two months ago, 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."
Apparently, Farah thinks that lying is a good business model for a "news" website.
MRC's Baker Whines: Media Won't Report That Record July Heat Is Just Barely A Record Topic: NewsBusters
Brent Baker sums up his whining in the headline of his Aug. 9 NewsBusters post: "NBC Hypes July as ‘Hottest Month Ever’ – Doesn’t Bother to Mention It Was Barely Hotter Than 1936."
Yes, Baker is really complaining about that. He expands a little in his post:
So, all of NBC’s excitement came from temperatures 0.2 tenths of a degree hotter than before the widespread industrialization blamed for global warming and before the widespread development which causes heat islands that mean temperature stations which used to be in isolated areas are sitting next to pavement and buildings.
The heat of 1936 came during a drought that lasted much of the 1930s and contributed to the dust storms the ravaged the plains. By the summer of 1936, much of the plains were no longer being cultivated, and the bare ground contributed to the high temperatures, Burt said.
Further, as Slate notes, the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration adjusts recorded temperatures to account for the heat island effect.
To sum up: Baker fails at being a global warming denier.
WND's Kupelian Lies About Obama, Military Voting Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian uses an Aug. 9 column to claim that President Obama's re-election campaign is trying to "suppress, in that pivotal swing state, the votes of America’s military men and women – people who traditionally lean conservative and vote Republican" by filing a lawsuit in Ohio over early-voting laws that allow members of the military three days longer to vote early than civilians.
Needless to say, Kupelian is lying through his teeth. The goal of the lawsuit is to extend civilian early voting to that of the military, not reduce the military deadline to the existing civilian one.
The funny thing is, Kupelian sort of concedes that by admitting that pretty much everyone else, which he disparagingly characterizes as "the vast, perpetually mesmerized pro-Obama media," as well as "the establishment’s arbiters of All Truth On The Internet, Snopes, Politifact and FactCheck," all disagree with that assessment.
But Kupelian has never been one to let facts get in the way, has he? So he stumbles forward with his anti-Obama attack:
What?, you may ask. How could everybody, including the military, having three more days to vote hurt our soldiers? Indeed, “what’s the matter with everybody having three extra days to vote?” is the current establishment refrain, its purveyors claiming incorrectly that all Ohio voters used to have those same three days for early voting. They didn’t: Although state law allowed it, local voting authorizes could decide if they wanted to implement early voting or not. Only “six counties had weekend voting and extended hours and 82 of them didn’t,” lead defendant and Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted told the Associated Press.
And why was that? Husted explained, in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview, that setting limits on early voting for most Ohioans – other than the relatively few in the armed forces – is necessary so Ohio’s election boards can synchronize the early balloting records with those at 9,800 polling places to prevent voter fraud – people voting more than once. And as Ohio’s state GOP chairman, Bob Bennett, said in a written statement: “Nobody is being disenfranchised here, as Ohio’s voters who choose to vote early can do so by mail 24 hours a day, seven days a week or at early voting polls.”
The REAL issue at stake here, the one virtually no one is talking about, and the reason it hurts the military if the judge forces Ohio to open all its polling places for all voters for the final three days, is the legal precedent that will be set – namely, that our soldiers cannot constitutionally be given a break, a few extra days, to get their votes in.
Friends, you can’t obtain “reasonable results” through abominable means and then call it good. (That would be like me robbing a bank and then going home and saying, “Dear, I made a lot of money today.”) The price America will pay to obtain in Ohio a totally unnecessary “three extra days for everybody to vote” (if the judge rules the way Obama for America is asking it to rule) is the creation of a new legal precedent that it is unconstitutional to give any special consideration to military voters. After all, that is precisely the plaintiffs’ legal argument.
But as the Ohio defendants’ legal response points out so eloquently, America has always made special concessions for its soldiers to assure their opportunity to vote, going back to the Revolutionary War.
In fact, even right-wing voting rights activist Hans von Spakovsky agrees that there is no massive problem with voter fraud in American elections, so that argument falls flat. Further, Ohio is apparently the only state that has such a two-tiered system.
But Kupelian's not done misleading yet:
Then in 2010, ex-DOJ attorney M. Eric Eversole spoke out against the Obama Justice Department for its failure to safeguard the military vote.
Although Congress had passed in 2009 a law mandating that military personnel overseas be given sufficient time to participate in U.S. elections, the DOJ’s Voting Section was ignoring the new laws, potentially allowing thousands of uncounted ballots to fall through the cracks, said Eversole, a former litigation attorney for the DOJ Voting Section.
Eversole was hired by DOJ under the Bush administration during the period the Justice Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility said that Schlozman was improperly considering political affiliation when hiring career attorneys. What he and Kupelian portray as the DOJ purportedly "ignoring the law laws" -- for which Eversole provided no substantial evidence -- was actually the DOJ working with states that had not changed their primary voting deadlines for to preserve the intent of the law.
If WND's managing editor is promoting such lies and dishonesty, is it any wonder that the rest of WND reads the same way?
CNS' Jeffrey Tries to Heather An Archbishop Topic: CNSNews.com
The Media Research Center's practice of Heathering -- berating and shunning conservatives who fail to march in total lockstep with the right-wing agenda -- gets a big expansion by CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey, who not only expands it to religion but targets one of the most prominent Catholic officials in America.
President Barack Obama, who is moving ahead with a regulation that forces observant American Catholics to act against their consciences and the teachings of their faith, will be one of the keynote speakers at an Oct. 18 white-tie fundraiser hosted by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The fundraiser—the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner--will benefit the foundation, which Cardinal Dolan serves as board president. The foundation's website says it provides funding “for healthcare causes.”
Al Smith, a three-term governor of New York, became the first Catholic presidential candidate in U.S. history when the Democratic Party nominated him in 1928.
Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts determined that Catholic hospitals in that state would be required to distribute Plan B abortion pills to rape victims, will join Obama as a keynote speaker at the white-tie dinner.
It takes some chutzpah -- to mix religious metaphors -- to suggest that the archbishop of New York is failing at being a Catholic.
In addition to the Heathering, Jeffrey starts deviating from the facts -- for instance, he falsely claims above that Plan B is an "abortion pill." He also claims that Obama is "outspokenly and unambiguously pro-abortion," refusing to acknowledge the fact that favoring abortion rights does not equal "pro-abortion."
Jeffrey also misleads with this statement:
In Illinois in 2001, Obama was the only state senator to speak on the senate floor against legislation that would have simply said a born baby is a “person,” a “human being,” a “child,” and an “individual” and thus entitled under the 14th Amendment to equal protection of the law.
In fact, the bill is not as "simple" as Jeffrey claims. Jeffrey is referring to a "born alive" bill, which would have defined any aborted fetus that showed signs of life as a "born alive infant" entitled to legal protection, even if doctors believe it could not survive. Critics said that the bill could have been used to challenge Roe v. Wade. Obama specifically said on the Illinois senate floor regarding the 2001 bill that it "would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute."
So not only is Jeffrey bashing a Catholic bishop for not being Catholic enough, he's being dishonest.
Jeffrey ramped up his dishonestly by waiting until the 27th paragraph of his article to let an archdiocese spokesman explain that "It is the tradition of the Smith dinner to invite the presidential candidates in the presidential election years in the spirit of nonpartisanship, good humor and good fellowship."
Jeffrey is not only an inflexible Catholic, he's a dishonest reporter. Will he confess his sin at confession time and seek forgiveness for his dishonesty?
NEW ARTICLE: Larry Klayman, Failed Lawyer Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's favorite lawyer loves filing lawsuits, which lately have been even more unsuccessful than usual. Read more >>
