Matt Barber Peddles Long-Debunked Lie About Obama Topic: WorldNetDaily
Matt Barber uses his Oct. 12 WorldNetDaily column to repeat an outright lie about President Obama:
Moreover, during the 2008 campaign, Obama lamented that the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”
Let that sink in a moment. In his own words, this man – a man solemnly sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution – has betrayed utter disdain for it. He has, in essence, admitted that he views our most sacred founding document as a “constraint” against his thinly veiled efforts to “fundamentally transform” America into Greece.
As we documented four years ago, Obama was not "lamenting" that the Warren Court didn't "break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" -- he was making the accurate observation that because it didn't, the Warren Court wasn't as "radical" as people think it is.
Barber dishonestly took Obama's quote out of context and lied about what Obama said. On top of that, Barber falsely claims that Obama said this in 2008; in fact, it comes from a 2001 interview that surfaced in the 2008 campaign.
Barber works for right-wing legal group Liberty Counsel. Surely he knows what happens when you deliberately tell a lie -- some people call that perjury. Does Barber have the moral character to correct his lie and apologize for telling it? Doubtful.
MRC Botches Unemployment Rate Analysis; WIll It Correct? Topic: Media Research Center
An Oct. 5 Media Research Center Business & Media Institute item by Dan Gainor and Julia Seymour repeated claims that September's drop in the unemployment rate was driven by "a huge jump in part-time workers." Turns out that's wrong.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people with full-time jobs increased by 838,000 in September to 115.2 million, while the number of people with part-time jobs declined by 26,000 to 27.7 million.
In other words: All of the gains in employment were due to full-time jobs.
It’s right there in Table A-9.
How did all of those people get it wrong? By looking at separate table ( Table A-8 ) that shows a big spike in the number of people who want a full-time job but who are forced to settle for less than 35 hours of work because of the tepid economy or weak demand at their company.
The BLS explains that the number of people involuntarily working part-time rose, even though the total number of part-timers declined. It’s the total number of part-timers that helps determine the unemployment rate.
The MRC is not exactly known for correcting items unless they're so obviously wrong that it can't be avoided. You'd think this would fall under that category, but it's more likely that Gainor and Seymour will just shove this under the rug and stay silent about their error.
WND's Ellis Washington Ludicrously Likens Obama to Caligula Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ellis Washington regularly beclowns himself in his WorldNetDaily -- see, for instance, his insistence on turning Socrates into a right-wing nutjob like he is. Washington achieves a new level of ... something in his Oct. 12 column by drawing wildly wrong, and unintentionally hilarious, parallels between President Obama and, yes, Caligula by treating every lunatic Obama conspiracy theory -- up to and including Obama killing his gay lovers -- as proven fact:
And now comes, I, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus-Caligula (A.D. 12-A.D. 41). I was the third son of Germanicus (nephew of Tiberius), and Agrippina the elder and was born at Antium in A.D. 12.
And now comes, I, Barack Hussein Obama (1961-). I was the illegitimate first son of Stanley Anne Durham and my real father, the Soviet agent and communist propagandist, Frank Marshall Davis. We were born four weeks apart (Aug. 4/Aug. 31).
[...]
I, Caligula, know that there were rumors surrounding the death of Tiberius. It is very likely that the 77-year-old emperor did not simply die of old age. On my authority, Naevius Cordus Sertorius Macro, commander of the Praetorians, rushed inside and smothered Tiberius with a cushion, suffocating him.
I, Obama, had several gay lovers that I had to dispense with including – Donald Young, the openly-gay choir director of the church in Chicago of which I, Obama, was a member for some 20 years – Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ black liberation theology. There were two other openly gay men in Wright’s church: Larry Bland and Nate Spencer. We were all members of Wright’s “Down Low Club.” In late 2007, as I, Obama, began my ascent to be the Democratic Socialist Party’s presidential nominee, in a span of one-and-a-half months, all three men conveniently died.
[...]
I, Obama, like my predecessors, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, am indeed a narcissist neophyte, like the ambitious, arrogant Phaeton of Greek mythology, who assumed he could drive Helios’ (his sun god father’s) chariot to prove he was divine, but all his tragic leadership accomplished was to scorch the planet and render large parts of the earth a perpetual desert wasteland. To stop Phaeton and his genocidal madness, Zeus was forced to kill him.
Will Romney/Ryan be able to stop Obama’s socialist madness from ruining America, killing liberty and deconstructing our sacred Judeo-Christian traditions beyond remedy?
A better question: Is Ellis Washington's madness, in the form of a raging case of Obama Deragement Syndrome, beyond remedy? It appears so.
No wonder Washington complains that he can't get a tenure-track teaching job. What sane person would hire someone who writes such a ludicrous and hate-filled analogy like this?
Newsmax's Kessler Gets Some One-On-One Romney-Fluffing Time Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax's Ronald Kessler finally gets to do his Romney-fluffing one-on-one with a Oct. 12 interview with Mitt Romney.
In the 11-minute video of the interview attached to the article, Kessler tosses softball after softball to Romney, heavy on "somebody did this, what's your reaction" type of questions that prompts Romney to spout his usual talking points. These are hardly the kind of challenging questions one expects from someone who purports to be a journalist, though is exactly the kind of question one expects of a Romney sycophant.
Sample question from Kessler:
Ann Romney mentioned to me that when you are at Bain Capital,, you almost never brought work home because you were devoted to your family, you wanted to spend time with your kids. Looking back, I wish I had been that way as a father. That's pretty remarkable, and I wonder how that translates into a desire to strengthen families, what you would do in that regard.
It's unclear when the interview was conducted (it appears to have been on Oct. 12 because Romney referenced the vice presidential debate "last night"), but at one point Kessler said to Romney that "wholesale gasoline prices went up again today." But gas prices have been trending down for the past month.
Even Birthers Aren't Buying WND's Obama Ring Story Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi has managed to write something that even birthers are skeptical about.
We've noted the craziness of Corsi's claim that blurry, blown-up photos prove that a ring Obama has worn reads "There is no god except Allah." Turns out we're not the only ones.
The Birther Report blog (aka Obama Release Your Records) cited a "prominent computer software and graphics expert" who says that the claim by Corsi, via Obama-hating filmmaker Joel Gilbert, is a "major hoax," that Gilbert's images were Photoshopped, and that a high-resolution image of Obama's ring shows that it has no Arabic symbols on it.
That prompted Corsi to pen a follow-up article responding to the Birther Report's then-unnamed expert having Gilbert insisting that he "made no alteration whatsoever" to the pattern on the ring. Corsi made no mention of the high-resolution image.
In response to that, the Birther Report named its "expert" -- turns out it's none other than Mara Zebest, a birther who made a supporting appearance alongside Corsi last year at WND's press conference announcing its defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine (recently booted out of court). In a June 2011 article, Corsi touted Zebest as "a nationally recognized computer expert who has served as contributing author and technical editor for more than 100 books on Adobe and Microsoft software."
Corsi has not addressed the issue at WND since the Birther Report's "expert" was revealed to be Zebest.
This isn't the only instance of right-wingers backing away from Corsi's ring claim:
A Free Republic thread on Corsi's article is filled with detractors, one of whom wrote, "there is a reason why WND is known (even here) as 'World Nut Daily.'"
Richard Bartholomew notes that anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller, who initially blogged in support of Corsi's article, apparently deleted that post without explanation.
Meanwhile, Corsi's boss, WND editor Joseph Farah, was wondering (as he's prone to do) why nobody else was covering Corsi's big scoop:
Would you consider this to be a rather explosive story weeks before the presidential election?
I would, too.
But the abject lack of curiosity by the media – both establishment and alternative – is, shall we say, somewhat stunning.
That’s not to say the public isn’t fascinated. In fact, the story is off the charts in terms of readership. More people read the story and viewed the images and analysis in the first few hours of its release than watch CNN in the same time period.
Yet it is another of those stories about which we cannot speak – at least insofar as the self-appointed information cops have determined.
[...]
I don’t know about you, but I think this is an important story – maybe one of the biggest of the presidential election year. That it had to wait so long to be told reflects the inherent mystery still surrounding the man in the White House and a hapless press just too afraid to go certain places in the pursuit of the truth.
Farah appears not to have considered the possibility that nobody else is reporting the story becuase it isn't true.
When can we expect a correction and apology from Corsi and Farah about this? Our impression of that answer is here.
Anti-Muslim Activist Victimizes Blogger With DMCA Complaint Topic: The ConWeb
Richard Bartholomew -- a friend of ConWebWatch who writes the excellent Bartholomew's Notes on Religion blog -- had a run-in with British anti-Muslim activist Charlie Flowers, and it temporarilly shut down his blog.
Bartholomew had written a blog about Flowers in which he quoted comments Flowers made on his Facebook page. In retaliation, Flowers contacted Bartholomew's U.S.-based hosting company and filed a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The host shut down Bartholomew's site, restoring it only after Bartholomew deleted the offending Flowers post. Bartholomew declined to file a counterclaim because it would make his home address available to Flowers, who has clearly demonstrated himself to be vindictive.
Bartholomew correctly points out, "The notion that someone should be able forbid any quotation of their words is manifestly absurd, and if applied generally would make any kind of journalism impossible."
MRC Intern Learns To Shout 'Media Bias!' When A Reporter Asks A Republican A Question He Doesn't Like Topic: NewsBusters
Matt Vespa is an intern at the Media Research Center, and he seems to be learning the MRC's tactics well, all the way down to declaring that any questioning of Republican politicians that isn't completely friendly is obviously "liberal bias."
In an Oct. 10 NewsBusters post, Vespa goes on a tirade against CNN's Soledad O'Brien over her interview of Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz over alleged security lapses:
With a House Oversight committee slated to hold a hearing on the deadly Benghazi consulate terrorist attack at noon today, there was really no excuse for CNN's Starting Point to not cover the story. But alas, anchor Soledad O'Brien checked her journalistic credibility at the dressing room door, going on air with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sounding more like an Obama apologist than a hard-nosed reporter.
O'Brien questioned Rep. Chaffetz -- who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations -- on his claim that this administration hasn’t been forthcoming with the facts surrounding the attack. O’Brien countered by admonishing the congressman for suggesting “collusion” between the Obama White House and the State Department. O’Brien’s hackery became overt when she indirectly blamed Congressman Chaffetz for being complicit to the lack of security at our embassies by voting to cut off their defense funding, attempting to dilute any blame the administration has for lax security by trying to lay blame on Republicans in Congress:
Why shouldn't O'Brien have asked Chaffetz about his vote on State Department security funding? Vespa never really explains. Indeed, he goes on to insist that "the story centers on the state of our security concerning our embassy in Libya. It’s not whether Rep. Chaffetz’s vote to cut off embassy security funding had a hand in the death of Ambassador Stevens."
It seems that, in addition to sounding like he works for Mitt Romney's campaign, Vespa simply did not want the question asked at all. It's another example of how the MRC doesn't want anyone to tell the truth about Republicans and conservatives.
Dealing with Barack Obama is like dealing with a recalcitrant third-grader who has been told every minute of his life by his mommy that he is “special.”
Did you see Michelle’s face after the debate? Can you imagine what she said to him when they got back to their hotel?
After my WND column a couple of weeks back using probability theory to demonstrate that Black Jesus’ “birth certificate” is as bogus as Piltdown Man, the Huffington Pest huffingtoned and puffingtoned about it.
The Pest’s founder, Arianna Stassinopoulos, was with me at Cambridge. She drove around in a racing-green Lamborghini till she neglected the lubrication and the engine seized. Daddy didn’t buy her another one. Hubby got her a website instead.
The fragrant Ms. Katastrophikos’ canting leftoblog was not the only one to whinge about my column. The Sinistrosphere went bananas. Looks like we got them good and worried. Not one of the rants made any serious attempt to challenge my argument. By now they all know the White House website is an embarrassing crime scene.
They also know they can absolutely rely upon the Republicans in Congress not to lift a finger to uphold the Constitution they swore to uphold. The evidence that BJ’s “birth certificate” is a lie is beyond reasonable doubt. Just ask the sheriff who spent nine months investigating it.
One of the most telling moments took place a day or so before the debate, when Obama showed up at a public event, telling his groupies that essentially he was playing hooky because his handlers were “trying to make me do my homework.” That was the quintessential Obama, the laziest kid in the 11th grade, whining that grown-ups were demanding he do boring stuff like hitting the books and studying when all he really wanted to do was play video games.
From Day 1, when he had Pelosi and Reid draw up the details of his trillion-dollar stimulus bill and assigned the federal bureaucrats to churn out the 2,700-page tome we now know as Obamacare, he has shown that the only things he really likes about being president is that it allows him to play a lot of golf and to address fawning crowds of union members, college students, welfare recipients and multi-million-dollar donors.
Destroying the enemy’s myth of invincibility is the gift that keeps on giving. After Stalingrad, every Nazi down to the rank of corporal was watching his rear, trying to pin blame on others, living the invidious lie that post-Stalingrad Germany could somehow still win, and blaming Hitler – which was valid – without being seen as blaming Hitler – which was fatal. A lot of doors were slammed by Nazi officers into the faces of other Nazi officers. Profanity ended what had been brotherly conversations since kindergarten. Once the myth of Nazi invincibility was broken, goose-stepping occupiers became unhappy campers.
It was my personal pleasure plus journalistic good fortune to befriend a German soldier who was in a “Hollywood” kind of confrontation toward the war’s end as the unstoppable Americans closed in. Another German of equal rank in that German village called out for “jihad,” suicidal resistance to the last man, woman and child. My friend, Klaus, called him an idiot and took his weapon away and surrendered to the first approaching Americans. Klaus told me it wasn’t hard to take his weapon away!
Now Obama’s myth of political invincibility has been broken.
It seemed to me Obama was on something – or maybe off something he is usually on.
Which raises a very old, lingering question: Why has Obama refused to release – among many other things like a non-fraudulent birth certificate, student transcripts, college and university records, law school writings, passport and travel records, a legit Social Security number, etc., etc., etc. – his health records?
What is he hiding there?
What deep, dark secrets could one of America’s youngest and most physically active occupants of the White House in history be so concerned about?
We know about his admissions to being a major cocaine user back in his wild days. He told us all about that – or his ghostwriter did – in “Dreams From My Father.”
[...]
But what if his drug use continued?
That would be one obvious reason for withholding medical records.
Or maybe Obama is on some prescription drugs for a condition we don’t know about.
That would be another obvious reason for withholding medical records.
But, if you are a healthy young presidential pretender, what other justifications would there be for hiding medical records from the public?
In cyberspace, Obama supporters – almost certainly egged on by the president’s legions of bloggers and social-media plants – have threatened to riot should Mitt Romney win the presidency next month. They’ve also contended that blacks will once again be relegated to slavery should Romney win (something black liberals also said about Ronald Reagan, by the way). It bears mentioning that much of this has been expressed in urban black patois.
When BHO comes at Romney next Tuesday with accusations of lying, talking about his hiding money in the Caymans, exporting jobs overseas while at Bain Capital, not paying his income taxes – even eating little kids for breakfast – Romney had better be prepared to respond with at least B-grade ammo. What he was throwing at President Pansy in the first debate was mere C-grade ammunition, and it was more than enough to make Obama glad he wore Pampers to the event.
It’s obvious that the Dirty Dems are going to prop up His Royal Laziness and try to resurrect his image as the omniscient, omnipotent visitor from Krypton. Thus, Romney’s timid team must convince him that to survive the coming Obama attacks, he will need to use the equivalent of Molotov cocktails – not firecrackers – to defend himself.
In my column “Why do Republicans so fear the truth?” I listed a number of truths that I would like to see Romney and his ad people convey to the public – Obama’s years of mentoring by Frank Marshall Davis, his sealed college papers, starting his political career in the home of Bill Ayers and his current endorsement from the Communist Party USA, to name but a few.
However, even I recognize that it would be difficult to use such A-grade ammunition in a debate, especially now that Romney’s use of C-grade ammo was more than enough to easily make Obama look like a confused and incompetent kid in their first encounter.
Winning the White House takes a “killer instinct,” particularly given Obama’s and Biden’s ruthless socialist and ultra-leftist philosophy – first perfected by the Bolsheviks at Red Square – that the ends justify the means. Even with the electoral map looking somewhat better for Romney and Ryan after Obama’s collapse in the first presidential debate, Obama and his partner in crime, Biden, are only down but hardly out. Like the ruthless Bolshevik thugs they are, expect some major gambits and outrageous acts in the days ahead to destroy Romney and Ryan so they and their leftist minions can retain control of our so-called government – to dominate our lives, remove our freedoms and redistribute wealth to them and their friends, communist style.
CNS' Terry Jeffrey Promotes Another Dishonest Smear of Gays Topic: CNSNews.com
CNS editor in chief has always been a gay-hater -- so much so that he'll distort his work in order to up the gay-hate factor.
Jeffrey does this again with an Oct. 10 article carrying the overly long headline "U.S. Embassy in Libya Sought $13,000-Per-Year Bodyguards With ‘Limited’ English; But Gave Preference to Citizen ‘Same-Sex Domestic Partners’ of U.S. Gov’t Employees."
But Jeffrey's headline is dishonest. As Jeffrey notes in the article, the hiring preference is for "qualified U.S. citizens who were family members of U.S. government employees." Same-sex partners are included in that.
Jeffrey has needlessly and recklessly tainted the journalistic reputation of his "news" organization bymaking dishonest gay-bashing a priority over reporting facts. He hates gays more than he loves the truth.
Jeffrey also seems to love clicks more than the truth as well -- his dishonest story was picked up by Rush Limbaugh, which surely generated an elevated level of traffic to CNS.
How does Jeffrey get away with this? It seems that he is aspiring to the jerkass levels of his Media Research Center boss, Brent Bozell, and MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham.
Noel Sheppard Still Pushing Global Warming Bamboozlement Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters haslongbeen a source of global warming bamboozlement. Why would he stop now?
And stop he doesn't in an Oct. 10 NewsBusters post mocking an Associated Press article carrying the headline Experts: Global Warming Means More Antarctic Ice." Sheppard huffed that climate scientists (of which Sheppard is not) "this truly amazing concept that anthropogenic global warming can melt ice in one hemisphere while creating it in another," going on to sneer that this was "unbelievable."
If it's amazing, that's because it's supported by science -- something neither Sheppard nor the deniers he calls upon to back him up, Christopher Horner and Steve Goddard, want to admit.
As Media Matters points out, the AP article accurately explained that Antarctic sea ice growth is consistent with climate scientists' projections for a warming planet, even as Arctic ice decreases.
Media Matters also reminds us that Sheppard's fellow bamboozlers are suspect -- Horner works at the Competitive Enterprise Institute is funded in part by the oil and tobacco industries, and Goddard is a birther as well as a global warming denier.
Newsmax Rewrites Pro-Ryan Debate Article, For Some Reason Topic: Newsmax
As befits its current Romney-shilling mode, Newsmax was eager to portray Paul Ryan as the winner of his debate with Joe Biden. Shortly after the debate, Newsmax went with this rah-rah story by Martin Gould, under the headline "Grinning Biden Fails to Throw Ryan Off Course":
A grinning Joe Biden became the overwhelming image of Thursday’s vice presidential debate as he made a conscious effort to undermine virtually every point his rival Paul Ryan made.
“Malarky,” “bunch of stuff,” “loose talk,” “not true,” “let me translate that” “not mathematically possible,” “this is amazing,” he said of various points Ryan made during the 90-minute debate.
But Ryan refused to be bowed by the older man’s attempts to talk down to him and belittle his points, hitting Biden with a torrent of detailed figures.
Newsmax promoted this article with a large top-of-the-front-page graphic:
Strangely, though, this article no longer exists on the Newsmax website. The link where the article originally resided now contains what appears to be a heavily rewritten version of the story credited to "Newsmax Wires," which claims that Biden's "grinning, laughing and disrespectful performance was panned by commentators and pollsters." The article's original lead now appears several paragraphs down.
The original article was reposted at TeaParty.org, if you want to see the first rah-rah draft.
Why did Newsmax go through all the effort to rewrite the article and not simply post a different one? It's not like Gould's original is more embarrassing than, say, Ronald Kessler's creepy fawning over Ann Romney. Seems like a lot of work for not very much payoff.
Then again, we're not partisan shills, so what do we know?
WND's Corsi Relies On Ethically Challeged Shoebat To Attack Obama Family Foundation Topic: WorldNetDaily
In an Oct. 10 WorldNetDaily article, Jerome Corsi claims that a foundation created by Barack Obama's relatives in Kenya is "on a mission to use the Obama name to transform Kenya from the nation’s current Christian majority to an Islamic majority that will spread Islamic law, or Shariah, through the country." His sole source for this claim: Walid and Theodore Shoebat.
Yes, that would be the same Walid Shoebat whose background as a former self-proclaimed "Islamic terrorist" who converted to Christianity has been credibly challenged. The same Walid Shoebat whose own foundation has had questions raised about its funding.
That's who Corsi is using to smear President Obama (today, anyway). That's how desperate Corsi is to destroy Obama at all costs -- including, it seems, to his own credibility.
Tim Graham has apparently decided to emulate his Media Research Center boss, Brent Bozell, when it comes to acting like a jerk in public.
Graham spent his time before the vice presidential debate issuing personal attacks against the debate moderator, Martha Raddatz. First, Graham tweeted, "Questions lib media never asks: 'Will woman who won't take husband's surname have a feminist tilt?'"
That was followed by another tweet: "Or: will woman who marries three times have a hard time deciding which debate questions to ask?"
Graham's boss has a notable history of issuing personal attacks, from off-air yelling at fellow panelists when he loses an on-air argument to caling President Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead."
Is it really a good thing that Graham is aspiring to become just as much of a jerkwad as Bozell? So much for the MRC's calls for civility.
In the first, Flaherty has decided he knows better than police in a town far from where Flaherty lives about the nature of a series of local crimes. Because black people are involved, Flaherty insists, it can only be "black mob violence," and the police chief who says that race has nothing to do with it is wrong.
In the second, Flaherty again portrays a "knockout game" as solely a "black mob" thing, despite the fact that we've caught him falsely doing so in the past.
MRC's Double Standard on Debate Moderator Conflicts of Interest Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center joined the right-wing intimidation campaign against ABC reporter and vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz with an Oct. 10 NewsBusters post by Matthew Sheffield highlighting that Raddatz invited Obama to her 1991 wedding along with other then-staffers of the Harvard Law Review, to a man (now-FCC director Julius Genachowski) she divorced six years later.
Sheffield wrote: "Of course, if a Fox News employee hosting a presidential debate were to exposed as having such a relationship with a Republican president, the story would be plastered all over the media and left-leaning journalists would be calling for him/her to be immediately replaced. Clearly this would be a good idea in this case as well."
Sheffield doesn't mention that the last time a debate moderator had a personal relationship with one of the debate participants -- which, it turns out, was even closer than the one Raddatz has with Obama -- the MRC said nothing about it.
CBS' Bob Schieffer -- moderator of a 2004 debate between President Bush and John Kerry -- played golf with Bush in the 1990s, and Schieffer's brother Tom, who Bush appointed as U.S. ambassador to Australia, was president of the Texas Rangers baseball team at the same time Bush was a partner in the team.
Yet we could find no evidence in the MRC's archives that this was ever brought up. Instead, the MRC tried to paint him as anti-Bush; for instance, Tim Graham insisted that Schieffer "tilted left against Bush in 2004" and failed to mention Schieffer's personal relationship with Bush.
Meanwhile, Graham rehashed an earlier hit job on Raddatz, which as we've previously noted consists largely of Graham whining that Raddatz failing to put an anti-Obama spin on the death of Osama bin Laden and falsely suggesting that Raddatz was reporting her personal opinion when, in fact, she was reporting what "one officer's wife" said following Nidal Hasan's massacre at Fort Hood.
