NewsBusters Defends Bradlee Dean Topic: NewsBusters
As has been pretty much standard procedure in Larry Klayman's legal work, his lawsuit on behalf of lyingpreacher Bradlee Dean against MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has been dismissed.
Needless to say, WorldNetDaily -- for whom Dean writes an error-filled weekly column -- sought to spin this latest loss in the best possible light. A Nov. 14 WND article by Bob Unruh recounts the case in a Dean-friendly way and permits Dean and Klayman to spout off at length about the dismissal and to bash the judge for dismissing it. Not only does Unruh make no apparent effort to balance his story by contacting Maddow's legal team for a response, he copies-and-pastes claims from Dean's website that he "is endorsed" by various musical instrument makers. In fact, he's endorsing them, not the other way around.
But Dean has another champion in the ConWeb: NewsBusters' Jack Coleman.
In a Nov. 15 post, Coleman recounts the dismissal in Dean-friendly terms, stating that "Superior Court Judge Joan Zeldon dismissed the case yesterday after Dean refused to pay $24,000 in Maddow's legal costs as ordered by Zeldon in June." But Coleman fails to explain the history of that ruling.
As we've detailed, the fine was imposed because Klayman and Dean wanted to move the case to a different court specifically to prevent Maddow from invoking the anti-SLAPP defense cited in her response to Dean's lawsuit, and that $24,000 fine was a condition of the move, meant to reimburse Maddow's legal team for having to come up with a new defense due to the proposed venue change. Dean and Klayman refused to pay, so the lawsuit was dismissed.
This attempt at after-the-fact venue-shopping can arguably be seen as incompetence on Klayman's part -- shouldn't he have picked the court in which to file his lawsuit against Maddow a little more carefully in the first place?
Coleman also uncritically note that Klayman "filed a motion requesting that Zeldon recuse herself for bias against Dean and ruling in favor of questionable attorneys' fees for Maddow." He doesn't mention, however, that Klayman's bill of particulars against the judge included such petulant complaints as the judge referring to Maddow's legal team, but not Klayman, as "distinguished." The motion also insulted the judge by claiming she acted like a "woman scorned" by Klayman's attempt to change venue.
Though it seems the next lawsuit Dean files should be against Klayman for incompetent representation, Coleman simply regurgitates the attacks by Dean and Klayman. But give Coleman brownie points for something, though: Unlike WND's Unruh, Coleman does claim he tried to contact MSNBC for a response.
Meanwhile ... Topic: WorldNetDaily
Richt Wing Watch catches WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah's appearance on the radio show of the American Family Association's Tim Wildmon, where he again likens Aaron Klein's identity fraud stunt of doating to President Obama's re-election campaign under the name of Osama bin Laden to "what Martin Luther King did, sometimes you’ve got to actually commit civil disobedience to get people’s attention to the injustices that are going on."
MRC Can't Stop Freaking Out About A Boy's Painted Toenails Topic: Media Research Center
It seems that a boy's painted toenails is being for the Media Research Center's Culture & Media Institute what George Allen's "macaca" remark is for the MRC's Tim Graham -- a touchstone of obsession.
Last year, CMI freaked out about an ad for clothing retailer J. Crew that featured a picture of the one of the company's designers painting her 5-year-old son's toenails pink, ranting that this was "blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children." CMI showed no evidence that it ever considered the concept that both young boys and girls like bright colors.
Later that year, CMI decided that its transgender fearmongering was vindicated when the female designer reportedly romantically linked to another woman.
That brings us to a Nov. 15 CMI post by Lauren Thompson, which reports that the designer "appears to have come out as a lesbian." Thompson also defends CMI's toenail freakout, declaring that "social conservatives' concerns that J. Crew was exploiting and normalizing the feminization of the boy with 'blatant propaganda'" were legitimate.
How does painting a boy's toenails equal "normalizing the feminization" of him? Thompson never explains, yet feels the need to add, "Move along, no agenda here, right?"
The only agenda we see is the gay-hating one of Thompson and the MRC.
If there is such a thing as evil, bipartisanship surely deserves the label. First, because it’s nothing more than code for Republicans going along with never-ending, anti-constitutional, Democratic legislation. Second, and more important, to be “bipartisan” requires that one compromise between liberty and tyranny, and, given that the two are mutually exclusive, that’s a moral impossibility.
The purpose of an opposition party is not to “reach across the aisle,” not to compromise, not to be “bipartisan.” It is to oppose. It is to fight tooth and nail for the natural rights of every citizen – rich or poor, gay or straight, male or female, black, brown, or white. It is the duty of the opposition party not to give an inch when it comes to defending the Constitution and making certain that neither Congress nor the president be allowed to take actions that are not expressly granted to them by the Constitution.
Plain and simple, the objective should be gridlock – gridlock that prevents, rather than encourages, more legislation from being passed. I don’t want to see Congress accomplish anything other than dramatically reduce taxes, dramatically reduce regulations and dramatically reduce intrusions into our personal lives.
Forget all the political mumbo-jumbo you’re hearing from the television analysts about why the most failed president in history was able to win a second term. The Republicans lost because they once again chose a stand-for-nothing candidate who was not passionate about liberty and free enterprise.
NewsBusters Puts Words In Susan Rice's Mouth (With Help From John McCain) Topic: NewsBusters
Matthew Balan writes in a Nov. 14 NewsBusters post:
Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell took turns hammering Senator John McCain on Wednesday's CBS This Morning over his promise to block any potential nomination of Susan Rice to be secretary of state. Rose grilled McCain after the Republican slammed Rice for blaming a "spontaneous" mob for the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi: "Didn't Susan Rice say that...all the information was not in, and she did not know everything there was to be known....what should she have said, based on what she knew at the moment?"
In fact, Rice did not blame a "spontaneous" mob for the Benghazi attack. In one of her TV appearances shortly after the attack, Rice said that "soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that -- in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent." Rice made similar statements on the other Sunday shows she appeared on.
Rice never claimed the attack was solely a "spontaneous" act. McCain got it wrong, and Balan can't be bothered to correct him.
Jack Cashill writes in his Nov. 14 WorldNetDaily column:
On Tuesday, for instance, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that in 59 inner-city voting divisions, Mitt Romney received no votes.
“These are the kind of numbers that send Republicans into paroxysms of voter-fraud angst,” reported the Inquirer glibly. Well, yes they do.
When Barack Obama outscores Romney by a combined 19,605 to 0 votes cast in these 59 districts, the stench of fraud is surely in the air. Saddam never did this well! Yet, as far as I could tell, not a single major media outlet picked up on the Philadelphia story.
If they had, they would have likely scolded the implicitly racist Republicans for imagining fraud in an attempt to “suppress” the vote. This the DMC has routinely done whenever Republicans have attempted to tighten the voting process.
Even worse than fraud, though, is the process that turned 20,000 citizens into sheep. Years of crude, vile, racist propaganda by the DMC and its local operatives have transformed the birthplace of democracy into a laboratory of mind control Goebbels would have envied.
Aside from the immediate link to Godwinism, Cashill ignores inconvenient facts.
If Cashill had actually read beyond the headline of the Inquirer article, he would have seen that this is roughly as well as John McCain did in Philadelphia in 2008, in which he got no votes in 57 precincts. The Inquirer goes on tostate that there is "little hard evidence" of fraud despite those results because those precincts are "almost exclusively black" with very few registered Republicans. As one political science professor quoted in the article said, many parts of Philadelphia and other big cities simply lack Republican voters, a fact of campaigning that has been true since Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
Cashill also fails to make mention of the fact that the opposite is true in other areas of the country -- Obama got no votes in some precincts in Utah, for instance.
We suspect that Cashill won't be screaming "voter fraud" about that.
Newsmax's Kessler Gives American Crossroads A Pass on Election Failures Topic: Newsmax
Ronald Kessler uses a Nov. 15 Newsmax article to allow Stephen Law, head of the American Crossroads super PAC, to spin away the election results by insisting that they "do not represent a seismic shift but show Republicans need to work harder at wooing certain population groups."
Curiously, Kessler doesn't bring Crossroads' own dismal election record, other than to note that "Between American Crossroads and its affiliate American Crossroads GPS, Law put nearly $200 million into beating Obama."
In fact, Crossroads failed across the board. According to the Sunlight Foundation, only 1.29 percent of the $104 million American Crossroads spent ended in the desired result, while about 41 percent of the $70 million Crossroads GPS ended in the desired result. None of that money, by the way, resulted in winning candidates.
Rather than holding Law's organization accountable, Kessler let him spin away and blame Romney's loss in part on demographic changes, the failure to defend Romney against the Obama campaign's early depiction of him, and failure to breach Obama's "likability firewall."
Needless to say, Kessler remains silent on his pre-election prediction of a Romney landslide.
WND's Flaherty Attacks Standard Police Procedure To Feed His Race-Baiting Topic: WorldNetDaily
It seems that resident WorldNetDaily race-baiter Colin Flaherty believes that all blacks accused of "black mob violence" are, by definition, guilty of it, and that no police investigation is necessary.
That much is clear from Flaherty's Nov. 9 WND article, which begins:
City officials in Baltimore knew exactly what to do when a mob of black people beat John Mason almost to death.
They blamed the victim.
How did Flaherty reach this conclusion? He quotes a Baltimore police spokesperson as saying, “At this point, it’s unclear what the motive was. ... “We’re looking at a variety of possibilities. One of them is an obvious robbery. We’re also looking at the background of the victim, trying to see if there are any disputes that might have resulted in this.”
But that's not "blaming the victim" -- that's called investigating a crime. If you have a crime in which the motive is not obvious, as appears to be the case here, you investigate to find out what happened. At no point did the police spokesperson blame the victim -- he simply expressed a desire to find out the circumstances of the crime, which includes investigating any possible connections between the victim and the perpetrator. That's standard police procedure.
But Flaherty apparently doesn't want any investigation. The perpetrators were black, and that's all he needs to convict.
NewsBusters: Papa John's Critics Know Nothing About Business Topic: NewsBusters
Randy Hall is in a bit of a huff in a Nov. 14 NewsBusters post, complaining that Papa John's Pizza and its CEO, John Schnatter, is being criticized by MSNBC's Ed Schultz and other "liberal" writers for complaining about having to (slightly) raise prices and (not so slightly) cut workers' hours in order to deal with higher costs under health care reform.
Hall's big response to the critics? "It's very obvious that none of the liberals criticizing Schnatter, who founded and oversees the third-largest take-out and delivery pizza restaurant chain in the United States (behind Pizza Hut and Domino's Pizza), have anything anywhere near comparable business experience."
That's it. Hall makes no effort rebut any of the claims being made such as that the estimated additional costs to Papa John's health care expenses are a tiny expenditure to a company the size of Papa John's -- it would add at most 14 cents to the price of a pizza -- and that Schnatter himself lives pretty ostentatiously.
But then, NewsBusters and its Media Research Center parent have never been that interested in backing up their claims, have they?
WND Still Pushing Klein's Failed Anti-Obama Book Topic: WorldNetDaily
Aaron Klein's Obama-bashing book "Fool Me Twice" had absolutely no effect on the presidential election, despite a brief appearance on the New York Times bestseller list. But that's not keeping WorldNetDaily from pushing the book.
A Nov. 8 WND article insisted Klein's book "may now be more relevant than ever" because it purportedly shows how Obama plans to "complete the fundamental transformation of America first pledged in 2008."
In fact, despite WND's claim that Klein's book details what Obama will do, it's nothing but Klein's usual blend speculation and guilt-by-association.
WND touted Klein's book again in a Nov. 11 article claiming that the book "documents how Obama may go about granting mass amnesty in his second term."
Note the weasel word "may." That tells you the slipperiness with which Klein and co-author Brenda J. Elliott wrote the book. It's all speculation, not fact, despite WND's claim that the book "documents Obama’s specific second term agenda in all major policy areas."
The article -- and,, presumably, Klein's book -- baselessly assumes that "immigration reform" and "amnesty" are the same thing. As we've detailed, "amnesty" has a specific meaning apart from immigration reform, and it's a term used (and misused) by critics of reform.
MRC's Bozell Rants Against Claim That Conservatives Cost GOP Election -- But Doesn't Disprove It Topic: Media Research Center
At the Media Research Center, it seems, rantly louding is the same thing as "research."
In a Nov. 14 press release, headlined "Media Falsely Blame Conservatism for Republican Defeat," the MRC asserts that "Following the re-election of Barack Obama, the liberal media are shamelessly using his win over moderate Mitt Romney to scare the GOP away from re-embracing its winning conservatism message." It quotes MRC chief Brent Bozell saying:
“We hear this from the liberal media every single time the Republicans don’t win something. They have only one solution for the Republican Party: don’t be conservative. It’s never about the failures of the candidates or a poor voter turnout effort. It’s that Republicans are too conservative – a false conclusion that ignores the successful campaigns of conservatives Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
“The liberal media discourage candidates from being conservative because it helps their preferred liberal candidates. Mitt Romney didn’t embrace the conservative base and he lost, just like Bob Dole and liberal media sweetheart John McCain. The liberal media’s rush to scare the GOP away from conservatism is a deliberate attempt to divide the party. They don’t want Republicans to embrace conservative principals [sic] because conservative Republicans win.”
But nothing Bozell or the MRC presents here disproves the idea that conservativsm cost the GOP the election. Merely saying something is "false" doesn't equal proof. And Bozell's invoking the "the successful campaigns of conservatives Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush" ignores the fact that the American electorate has changed since the Reagan era in a way that appears to no longer favor current-day conservative policies.
Yet, as we'veseen, this sort of thing -- ranting and pre-determined conclusions -- has been what passes for "research" at the MRC for years.
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah is still pretty bitter about President Obama's re-election (due in no small part to the fact that he bet WND's reputation on personally destroying Obama and ended up destroying WND's credibility instead). Farah's Nov. 13 column reflects that bitterness with an advocacy for secession -- and a claim that people who supported Obama's re-election have "gone awhoring":
Divorce is an ugly word.
For devout Christians and Jews, it’s a particularly unthinkable term.
The Bible strictly discourages it, even forbids it, except in the most exceptional circumstances.
But for Americans faithful to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the heritage of sacrifice and liberty that set apart this country from the rest of the world, it’s time to consider separation and divorce from those who have committed adultery.The election of 2012 provides more stark evidence that we are not really one country, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We are already two peoples – those of us still loyal and faithful to the God-inspired founding American principles and those who have gone awhoring after the idols of government coercion and doing what’s right in their own eyes.
In short, as I have written before, America is flirting with profound judgment. If those of us who disapprove of the same-sex marriage, abortion, tyranny, collectivism, the coerced subversion of religious freedom and forced taxpayer support for the spreading of ungodly, unbiblical values and laws want to avoid that coming judgment, it’s time to separate ourselves wholly from participation.
I don’t pretend to know exactly how this works.
America is a big country that is thoroughly permeated with this treasonous, immoral, adulterous lifestyle.
But I am convinced we’ve got to begin forming new communities of the faithful and declare our separation and independence once again, just as our courageous founders did 236 years ago. Like them, we need to be prepared to defend ourselves, our families, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Barring a miracle, I don’t believe reconciliation with those who have gone awhoring is a possibility. I’m sorry, I just don’t have much in common with Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and George Soros and Bruce Springsteen (even though we are both from New Jersey) and George Clooney and these other looneys.
No mention, of course, of Farah's own immorality in publishing all sorts of smears, rumors and lies in an attempt to destroy Obama, thus putting his own far-right agenda ahead of the truth.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:22 PM EST
Updated: Wednesday, November 14, 2012 12:58 PM EST
Newsmax's Walsh Peddles A Failed Solution To Endear Hispanics to GOP Topic: Newsmax
Ronald Kessler is not the only Newsmax writer to have issued a wildly inaccurate prediction of how the presidential election would go.
Immigrant-basher James Walsh devoted an Oct. 26 column to insisting that President Obama "has never made any attempt to keep his six years of promises to the Hispanic community of Comprehensive Immigration Reform" and as a result, "President Obama may have a November surprise."
Well, not so much. Despite Walsh's insistence that "the myth that the news media and politicians have created about a monolithic Hispanic voting bloc is just a myth" and that "about 57 percent of the Hispanic voters are favoring Obama, down from his 2008 number of 76 percent," Obama received 71 percent of the Hispanic vote and Mitt Romney only 27 percent, the lowest total for a Republican candidate since Bob Dole in 1996.
Thus, Walsh's Nov. 12 column in which he acknowledged this, though not his erroneous prediction. Instead, Walsh examined "Romney’s problem with Hispanic voters," which he immediately blames on the Obama campaign,which along with the media "described GOP failures in detail to the Hispanic community — descriptions that went unchallenged by Romney." Walsh continued:
Where do Republican leaders go from here? Realizing that, with a divided Congress, a comprehensive immigration reform package will not pass both House and Senate, House Republicans need to pass targeted pieces of immigration reform legislation.
They can start with an improved version of the Bracero program (1942-1964), a flawed guest-worker program terminated by President John Kennedy. An updated Bracero program could relieve the illegal-alien problem perplexing the president and Congress.
A 21st century Bracero program could provide guest workers with good housing, safe working conditions, income guarantees, and legal entry and exit papers. Such a program could protect national security concerns while providing the nation with a valued workforce, who would no longer need to pay “coyotes” (illegal alien smugglers) for high-risk entry to the United States.
Why would anyone want an "improved" version of a flawed, decades-old program? Walsh doesn't explain that, nor does he explain why it was flawed in the first place.
The bracero program mostly covered migrant farm workers from Mexico, who tended to be exploited by farmers. One federal official called the program "legalized slavery."
Nevertheless, Walsh insists that "Immigration advocates, farm labor unions, and agricultural interests would welcome such legislation as a new beginning and a 21st Century legislative accomplishment." We're not sure how.
NEW ARTICLE: How Obama-Hate Destroyed WorldNetDaily Topic: WorldNetDaily
WND spewed a steady stream of anti-Obama smears and lies for more than four years -- and Obama still won re-election. Instead, WND's war against Obama obliterated any journalistic credibility it had. Read more >>
MRC Peddles Bogus Obama 'Apology Tour' Meme Topic: Media Research Center
We didn't get around to writing about this when it first came around -- it got lost in the shuffle of pre-election Obama-hate -- but it's still worth highlighting.
The Media Research Center's Brent Baker took to the Fox News website on Oct. 23 to defend right-wing accusations that -- in the face of all honest fact-checking -- President Obama went on an "apology tour." Baker rather absurdly claimed that it's "flimsy reasoning" to point out that Obama never actually used the word "apologize."
Baker even more absurdly bashed CNN's John Berman for failing to "understand the concept of a metaphor" by declaring that Obama's criticism of past foreign policy did not constitute an apology.
The only evidence Baker presents of an "apology tour" is that the conservative Heritage Foundation declared it such:
There’s hardly a shortage, however, of examples of Obama chastising past U.S. foreign policy, so many so that just five months into Obama’s term the Heritage Foundation was able to produce a “Top 10 Apologies” list, starting with the speech in France which Berman quoted.
While Baker cited an openly partisan group to back up his views, he made no mention of the fact-checkers that President Obama correctly noted backed up his claim that there was no apology tour.
FactCheck.org: "Nowhere did we see that the president “apologized” for America. In some speeches, Obama was drawing a distinction between his policies and those of his predecessor, George W. Bush. In other instances, Obama appeared to be employing a bit of diplomacy, criticizing past actions of both the U.S. and the host nation, and calling for the two sides to move forward."
PolitiFact: " We set out to discover whether Obama really had apologized in his speeches, and what he was apologizing for. But in our review of his words, we came up short. Yes, there is criticism in some of his speeches, but it's typically leavened by praise for the United States and its ideals, and often he mentions other countries and how they have erred as well. There's not a full-throated, sincere apology in the bunch. And so we rate Romney's statement False."
Washington Post's Glenn Kessler: "The claim that Obama repeatedly has apologized for the United States is not borne out by the facts, especially if his full quotes are viewed in context."
Indeed, the Heritage Foundation assessment Baker puts his faith in appears to take Obama's quotes out of context in order to paint them as part of an "apology tour."
But that sort of slipshod and dishonest "research" is how the MRC operates as well -- to the point that it attackedfact-checkers for doing the fact-checking it wouldn't -- so it's no surprise that Baker would take refuge in it as well.
As has been pretty much standard procedure in Larry Klayman's legal work, his lawsuit on behalf of lying preacher Bradlee Dean against MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has been dismissed. 
It seems that a boy's painted toenails is being for the Media Research Center's Culture & Media Institute what George Allen's "macaca" remark is for the MRC's 
Aaron Klein's Obama-bashing book "Fool Me Twice" had absolutely no effect on the presidential election, despite a brief appearance on the New York Times bestseller list. But that's not keeping WorldNetDaily from pushing the book.
