MRC Hates It When Paul Ryan Is Fact-Checked Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has never thought that its "Tell the Truth!" campaign should apply to fact-checks of conservatives, and it's proven that yet again.
Clay Waters complains in a Sept. 7 MRC TimesWatch item that the New York Times "devoted a full story to probing" Paul Ryan's "claim to have run a super-fast marathon," dismissing it as a "silly atheletic-related controversy" and "partisan-slanted 'fact-checking.'" In Waters' mind, it seems, only "partisan" fact-checkers hold conservatives accountable.
Noel Sheppard brought his hackishness to the issue in a Sept. 9 NewsBusters post, declaring that the marathon in question happened " 22 years ago," huffily adding: "Our nation is struggling with stubbornly high unemployment and spiraling budget deficits that threaten our very existence, and O'Donnell spent time quizzing the Republican vice presidential nominee about his marathon time when he was in college."
Bradlee Dean's Obama Derangement: 'Kissinger Is The Man Who Sits Next to Obama' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Rubio then went on to say his opposition to Obama is not personal. If you are truly an American, it is totally personal.
Three thousand seven hundred babies a day are aborted in America. Since President Obama’s time in office, over 4 million babies have been slaughtered in the womb.
Americans are outraged by Hitler’s holocaust that killed 6 million Jews, Polish and other innocent civilians, yet the past eight presidents are responsible for 55 million babies who have been killed on American soil (Proverbs 6:17).
It doesn’t stop there. The DNC, at its convention this week, is attempting to mandate through totalitarian means taxpayer-funded abortion. In essence, the American people will become forced accomplices to murder.
And the establishment minions have the audacity to say that Obama is just a “bad president”?
Where is the outrage, America? Is this not personal?
Day by day, we hear of another American soldier killed in Afghanistan. Bob Woodward, in his book “The Final Days,” quoted Henry Kissinger’s shameful statement, “Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.” Kissinger is the man who sits next to Obama while telling us that he is pushing for a New World Order. Our soldiers died fighting against the ideology America is tolerating through the Obama administration.
As our military men swear an oath and lay down their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies (both foreign and domestic), the establishment uses them for their own political games.
Where is the outrage, America? Is this not personal?
How many shots does this administration need to take at you and your country before you realize his intention is to sink your ship?
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Rooting Against Films Topic: NewsBusters
In a Sept. 6 NewsBusters post, Tom Blumer claims that "far-left Hollywood" is "so upset" with Clint Eastwood's bizarre, rambling lecturing to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention that they're rooting for his new film, "Trouble With the Curve," to fail at the box office.
Why, you'd think NewsBusters would never be so gauche as to root for the failure of a film because they didn't agree with some political aspect of it, right?
Wrong. Back in 2009, NewsBusters' P.J. Gladnick proudly proclaimed the movie "Che" to be "one of the worst box office bombs in film history," on the scale of the infamous "Heaven's Gate." It wasn't true of course -- it wasn't even the biggest bomb of 2009. Gladnick also baselessly posited that a movie's quality is measured by its popularity, which, as anybody who saw "Batman & Robin" can attest, is definitely not true.
WND: Foreigners Make New York Look Like 'Star Wars' Bar Scene Topic: WorldNetDaily
We already know WorldNetDaily doesn't like black people (those who aren't WND columnists, anyway), so it's no surprise it's pretty hostile to foreigners too.
That was driven home in a promo email for a WND article. Carrying the headline "New York to look like 'Star Wars' bar scene?"it reads: "If you recall the bar scene from "Star Wars," you know it was filled with a cast of sordid characters. Well, New York City will host such a cast, with you-know-who leading the pack ..."
The email links to a Sept. 7 WND article by Stewart Stogel on how "the leaders of Israel and Iran both will be attending the United Nations General Assembly later this month. President Obama also is expected to be on hand." Stogel also notes that "French President Francois Hollande and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron also will attend the U.N. forum."
How, exactly, does this equal a "'Star Wars' bar scene"? We have no idea -- Stogels article doesn't even mention "Star Wars" or bars. Apparently, to WND, all foreigners -- even Israelis -- are misshapen and inferior to Americans. And, apparently, Obama counts as a foreigner, which dovetails nicely with WND's birtherobsession.
Most people would call that attitude kinda racist. What say you, WND?
CNS Disappears Limbaugh From Another Article About Sandra Fluke Topic: WorldNetDaily
Back in April, CNSNews.com managed to publish an article about Sandra Fluke being a "national figure" without mentioning the fact that she became one due to Rush Limbaugh spending three days denigrating her as a "slut" and a "prostitute" for talking about birth control in public.
CNS pulled off that little trick again in a Sept. 6 article by Susan Jones on Fluke's speech at the Democratic National Convention. She wrote:
Fluke, now an attorney, headed a "reproductive justice" group during her days at Georgetown Law School.
At an unofficial House hearing staged by Democrats last February, she said she chose to go to law school at Georgetown because it offers a quality education, but she also expected the school to accommodate students who do not share the Catholic belief that contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization are immoral.
“When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected by this lack of contraceptive coverage," Fluke testified at an unofficial house hearing in February 2012.
Jones curiously didn't mention what happened after that hearing: Limbaugh's three-day misogynistic tirade. Indeed, Limbaugh is mentioned nowhere in Jones' article.
Jones also misleads about anti-abortion legislation that Fluke opposes:
Fluke and others have interpreted the Protect Life Act to mean that women denied abortion coverage would be left to die. ("When the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor, and health care providers do not have to intervene," Rep. Nancy Pelosi said in Dec. 2011.)
(In fact, the text of the bill does make exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.)
In fact, the part of the bill that could cause pregnant women to die is a "conscience clause" that would allowing hospitals that receive federal funds but are opposed to abortions to turn away women in need of emergency pregnancy termination to save their lives.
Jones also ignored the fact that anti-abortion congressmen tried to narrowly define the rape exemption as applying only to "forcible rape," which could be defined as excluding pregnancy from statutory rape or rape while a woman is drugged.
Jones' article is dishonest and incomplete. Is that the standard of right-wing journalism today?
Another Dishonest WND Headline Topic: WorldNetDaily
It seems that WorldNetDaily really has abandoned what little pretense it has made toward journalism and has become a propaganda site bearing only a passing resemblence to the truth.
The headline of a Sept. 5 article by Jerome Corsi reads, "Top Dem: Christians want Jews 'slaughtered.'"
And who is this "top Dem"? According to Corsi, it's a "Democratic county chairman" from Florida.
So, not a national Democratic Party official, as the headline insinuates -- some guy who's barely a "top Dem" in the town where he lives.
Add this to the ever-growingpile of false or dishonest WND headlines.
AIM's Kincaid Attacks Liberal Group for Watching TV Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid is very unhappy that Todd Akin was accurately quoted by a liberal group. He rants in a Sept. 3 Accuracy in Media column:
The controversy over Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s abortion comments was started by a George Soros-funded Democratic Party Super-PAC and the “bait” was taken by Republican Party officials who wanted him out of the race for other reasons, says John Putnam, Missouri state coordinator for the national Tea Party Patriots group.
The Super-PAC, American Bridge, was started by former conservative turned liberal and homosexual activist David Brock, who also runs the Soros-funded Media Matters group. American Bridge sends “trackers” to follow conservative and Republican candidates in the hope that the candidate makes some controversial statements that can be distorted or taken out of context and used for partisan political purposes.
And how did American Bridge nefariously catch Akin making a statement that even Kincaid can't prove was taken "out of context" despite quoting Putnam calling the statement "distorted"? By watching it on TV. Kincaid writes:
Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times is one of the few reporters noting the key role played by American Bridge in the controversy. She reported, “What got the story out was a Democratic tracker for American Bridge, a pro-Obama SuperPAC. Ty Matsdorf, a senior adviser for American Bridge, told me their Missouri tracker saw the interview live and flagged it for his bosses. They posted a clip on YouTube and sent it around to some reporters. The explosion was just a matter of time.”
That's pretty much all Kincaid has -- that an activist watched TV and accurately quoted Akin. No substance here.
Jerome Corsi's Revisionist History of Financial Crisis Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi serves up a factually dubious account of the financial crisis in a Sept. 4 WorldNetDaily article:
In the current narrative presented by Democratic Party operatives, the banking industry collapse of September 2008 was caused by tax cuts under George W. Bush and supply-side economics tracing back to the era of Ronald Reagan.
The narrative, however, ignores the personal responsibility Barack Obama and Democratic Party operatives played in creating the subprime mortgage market, beginning with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.
In fact, financial experts agree that the CRA "was not a significant factor in subprime lending or the crisis" -- the subprime crisis was mostly driven by mortgage lenders who were not subject to the CRA.
Corsi also misleads about what the CRA does:
The Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 with the goal of forcing banks to provide credit to businesses and homeowners with poor credit.
The CRA’s purpose was to stop banks from “red-lining,” or refusing to lend to people in low-income areas because the risk of the loan not being repaid was too high.
Even though lending to people with poor credit is inherently risky, the Carter administration was intent on forcing banks to accept a social responsibility to provide credit to homeowners and businesses in low-income neighborhoods.
In fact, redlining was the practics of denying, or charging more for, banking services in certain neighborhoods due to their racial makeup, not because of the actual riskiness of the loan. Ellen Seidman, who headed the Office of Thrift Supervision in the late 1990s, points out that the CRA does not either encourage or condone bad lending; further, CRA enforcement became a lower priority in the early 2000s, around the time that CRA-covered entities wandered deeper into "higher priced loans."
A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found the following:
Nearly all institutions, including those with more profitable programs, loosened their credit standards on CRA loans relative to standards on their conventional loans. These institutions did so without appreciable increases in loan losses. Further, nearly all indicated that credit risk on CRA loans is manageable.
Corsi even gets his facts wrong about a notable lending-discrimination case:
Obama himself played a role as an activist lawyer in Chicago, representing ACORN in the 1994 case Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank. In the case, ACORN pressed Citibank to make more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants “in a race neutral way.”
Corsi is selectively quoting the ruling to mislead about what it did -- and it wasn't about making "more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants." The full quote from the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse item on the case Corsi links to:
The parties settled the case on May 12, 1998, with an agreement that provided for waiver of some fees for class members, should they reapply for a loan, and also for various procedures to ensure that Citibank followed its own loan policies in a race neutral way.
Unless Corsi is saying that it was Citibank's longstanding policy to issue loans to "marginally qualified" non-white people, he's lying about what the lawsuit accomplished.
Which means that Corsi has demonstrated that he can lie about more than birther conspiracies. Of course, Corsi's been lying about this for years.
Newsmax Declares No 'Bounce' For Obama From Convention -- Before Obama Gives His Speech Topic: Newsmax
The top of Newsmax's front page is an article carrying the headline "Obama Fails to Get Convention Bounce, Enthusiasm."
Never mind that at the time Newsmax posted that headline, President Obama had yet to give his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
In other words, Newsmax is reporting something that has not happened and may not happen.
The article, by the way, is an Associated Press article with an original headline of "Obama eager to sketch path forward for nation." The "bounce" reference fromwhich Newsmax apparently manufactured its headline comes from the eighth paragraph in a quote from David Axelrod that "You're not going to see big bounces in this election."
Farah's column was promoted on the WND front page with a picture of the target in question, Current TV's Cenk Uygur.
The first thing most people will think of when they see the words "holocaust denier" is that the person in question is denying the mass killings of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II -- indeed, the word "holocaust" is shorthand for Nazi genocide.
But you would be wrong, which means that Farah and WND have told yetanotherlie.
Farah devotes his column to attacking Uygur for allegedly denying the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th century.
We do not know enough about the history of the incident or Uygur's position on it to make an informed judgment about whether Uygur is a "denier." We do, however, know lies and deception when we see it, and we know Farah just can't stop lying, which makes any pronouncement he makes immediately suspect. Even if Farah is correct, he has so undermined his own credibility that anything he says simply cannot be believed (just like his WND employee Jerome Corsi).
Because Farah's goal is to smear and not to inform, he has overplayed his hand yet again -- thus further beclowning himself and his website.
CNS' Starr Desperately Trying To Manufacture Another Controversy Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's Penny Starr is desperately trying to smear Michelle Obama, but sadly for her, nobody seems interested.
Starr -- who's best known for her manufactured controversy over a gay-themed art exhibit -- tried to manufacture another one over Michelle Obama's stint as a "guest editor" at the women-oriented website iVillage.com.
Why is Starr so faux-outraged by this? Because iVillage, according to her Aug. 22 CNS article, "offers sexually explicit material, including graphic sex tips from prostitutes, '20 kinky things you SO can do,' and a list of 'naughty' apps for mobile devices."
It seems that Starr has some issues with sex that perhaps shouldn't be played out in public as she's doing. And she's still outraged even though she concedes that "the first lady herself does not discuss sex."
When that story didn't get enough attention for her, Starr rewrote it for a Sept. 4 article with the hook that "Michelle Obama tweeted and shared a link to iVillage on Monday," using the opportunity to again rehash her manufactured outrage over the site's "sex tips from prostitutes." Again, Starr offered no evidence that Obama provided sexual content.
It's clear, however, that Starr's manufactured controversy has been a failure -- so much so that Starr is begging her Twitter followers to promote. In a Sept. 5 tweet linking to her article the day before, she let out the anguished cry, "WHY is this story not getting more attention???"
Um, because it's obviously written by an Obama-hater trying to manufacture a controversy? Starr seems not to have considered that her politically motivated wolf-crying is making people tune her out.
Oh, and iVillage is not a "sexual explicit" website -- it's an news, advice and "conversation" website for women that occasionally discusses sex because, hey, women have sex. Starr never explains why talking about sex is so horrible.
WND's Hypocritical Concern Over Nazi Name-Calling Topic: WorldNetDaily
On Wednesday, WorldNetDaily promoted on its front page a (stolen) article from another news source under the headline "Dem compares GOP guv to Hitler's mistress."
WND's sudden concern over Nazi insults is rather laughable -- after all, WND publishes them on a regular basis when the target is a Democrat in general or President Obama is particular:
WND called the Clinton administration's "third way" political strategy "the original brainchild of Adolph Hitler," likened Monica Lewinsky to Hitler's mistriess, likened Bill Clinton to Joseph Goebbels, liken AmeriCorps to the Hitler Youth, and likened Al Gore to Hitler.
WND not only regularly smeared Obama as Nazi-esque, it defended the idea of doing so because ""The cult of personality and hysteria for a charismatic orator are frightening parallels between Obama and Hitler."
WND's champion of Nazi smears was the late Hilmar von Campe, unsurprisingly a former Hitler Youth who purportedly repented of his Nazi ways. Yet he embraced Nazi-esque "Big Lie" techniques to liken Obama to Hitler.
MRC Can't Stop Taking Obama Out of Context Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center takes its deliberate misrepresentation of President Obama's "you didn't build that" remark to new heights of lameness by sending videographer Dan Joseph to a street festival in Charlotte and asking vendors if they got any governmnet help in building their businesses.
Needless to say, Joseph never fully identifies himself as a partisan right-winger to any of the vendors he's ambushing, and he includes the deceptively edited "you didn't build that" clip of Obama.
And, thus, the MRC continues its work as the media arm of the Mitt Romney campaign.
Another Deceitful WND Headline Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily adds to its recent streak of falseheadlines with a Sept. 3 article by Bob Unruh, carrying the headline "Obama lawyer warned against certifying eligibility."
The headline's clear implication is that a lawyer for President Obama is making that statement. But in fact, it's failed lawyer Larry Klayman, who is most definitely not working for Obama. The "Obama lawyer" Bob Bauer is the receipient of the "eligibility" message, not its sender.
Klayman continues his record of factually inaccurate birther ranting in his letter to Bauer that Hawaii State Registrar Alvin Onaka "undeniably failed to verify that the image posted at whitehouse.gov 'is a true and accurate representation of the original record.'" But Onaka was not required to do so; as indicated by the state law that Klayman quotes in his letter, Onaka is required only to provide verification of the existence of a certificate, which is exactly what he did.
Klayman goes on to rant that "no one can state with any legal certainty that candidate Obama is even old enough to be president, much less that he meets the exclusively high bar of ‘natural-born citizen’ status, required by Article II, Section I, Clause 5."
It's hard to take seriously an unsolicited letter from a failed attorney with a personal grudge against the president and whose law license is on administrative suspension in at least one state, but that's what WND and Unruh want us to do.
Newsmax's Kessler Turbocharges His Romney-Fluffing Topic: Newsmax
How far in the tank is Newsmax's Ronald Kessler for Mitt Romney? He's now making outlandish predictions about how big Romney will win.
Kessler's Sept. 4 column carries the headline "Why Mitt Romney Will Win Decisively." He kicks things off with his usual Obama-bashing:
In the last presidential election, the press hoodwinked Americans into thinking Barack Obama was the messiah.
The press never reported that Obama had no significant achievements. As a community organizer, his only success was removing some of the asbestos from one Chicago apartment project.
After whining yet again about Rev. Wright, Kessler cranks up his Romney-fluffing jets:
Polls cannot measure how many will actually show up to vote for one candidate or the other. Now that Paul Ryan has been added to the Romney ticket, conservatives are fired up. The crowds of students supporting Obama on college campuses are now nowhere to be seen. Blacks who have borne the brunt of Obama’s dismal employment record are far less enthusiastic about him than they once were. Independents who favored Obama now support Romney.
For months before he was elected, Ronald Reagan was behind Jimmy Carter by double digits in the polls. In the end, Reagan won by 10 percentage points.
Romney and the Republican National Committee have more money than Obama. They are starting to flood the country with ads that portray Obama’s failure and replay his comment that businessmen are not responsible for their own success.
The ads portray Romney as the decent man he is: With the exception of some in the press, almost everyone at the GOP convention in Tampa teared up as they heard from members of his church recounting how Romney took the time to visit and comfort their dying kids.
Kessler concludes: "I have faith in the American people and their ability this time to see Obama for what he reveals himself in his own memoirs to be: a pitchman. My prediction is that Romney will win by 10 to 12 percentage points."
Kessler might want to tone down the fluffing a bit.
