Topic: Newsmax
Following his dalliance with Donald Trump, The Newsmax writer goes back to his first presidential love, Mitt Romney. Read more >>
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
NEW ARTICLE -- Ronald Kessler: A Return to Romney-Fluffing
Topic: Newsmax Following his dalliance with Donald Trump, The Newsmax writer goes back to his first presidential love, Mitt Romney. Read more >>
Posted by Terry K.
at 11:18 PM EST
MRC Falsely Ties Soros to Walmart Strike
Topic: Media Research Center Writing about a planned strike by Walmart employees on Black Friday, a Nov. 21 MRC Business & Media Institute item by Mike Ciandella states that "according to The Daily Caller, the activist group MoveOn.org, which is funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros may help boost their numbers. MoveOn e-mailed subscribers to encourage them to join the protestors on Black Friday." But the Daily Caller article that Ciandella cites has issued a correction:
Will Ciandella issue a correction as well? Don't count on it.
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:41 PM EST
Judson Phillips Doesn't Understand the Constitution (And Neither Does WND)
Topic: WorldNetDaily Judson Philllips' Nov. 19 WorldNetDaily column was dedicated to the idea that President Obama could be kept from returning to office by Republicans boycotting the Electoral College, thus denying the quorum needed to convene:
But Phillips clearly didn't read his Constitution very well. Here's what the relevant portion of the 12th Amendment says:
In other words, it appears that a quorum is demanded only when no candidate has a majority of Electoral College votes and the vote goes to the House of Representatives. That does not apply to Obama, who has a majority of votes. Phillips, by the way, is head of Tea Party Nation, so you'd think he'd know his Constitution better than that. Since publication, WND has added an editor's note admitting the error:
WND didn't explain why no editor at an organization that purports to be Constitution-savvy (witness its longtime birther obsession over the definition of "natural born citizen") made an effort to save both WND and Phillips some embarrassment by catching Phillips' error before it was published. Just consider this yet another reason why nobody believes WND.
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:04 AM EST
CNS Bizarrely Blames Tollway Crashes On Transportation Secretary
Topic: CNSNews.com Susan Jones began a Nov. 19 CNSNews.com article this way:
Were these accidents really LaHood's fault, as she suggests? Of course not. Even Jones herself eventually reports that according to police, "every accident was caused when a driver suddenly swerved or made a sudden lane change to avoid the toll lanes." That has nothing whatsoever to do with LaHood's support for such toll lanes. Jones also ignored the fact that the project to create these toll/express lanes was created in 2007, more than a year before the Obama administration even existed. In other words, LaHood wasn't even present at the creation of these lanes. Yet Jones wants you to think that this is somehow his fault. That willingness to be dishonest is how much CNS hates Obama.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:36 AM EST
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Wayne Allyn Root Still Can't Believe His Prediction Of A Romney Landslide Failed
Topic: Newsmax When last we saw Wayne Allyn Root, he was predicting a "Reagan-like landslide" for Mitt Romney and assailing the New York Times' Nate Silver for insisting that President Obama would win, insising that the election results would mean that "liberals should give delusional and clueless pollster Nate Silver of The New York Times a gold watch and a retirement dinner." Well, not so much. And Root is still a little stunned that his prognistication skills failed him. From his Nov. 15 Newsmax column:
Since he was apparently reluctant to do so before the election, Root launched into a list of reasons why Romney lost, which largely centered around him playing it too safe and, thus, screwing up his prediction. Indeed, he ends his column by writing:
Presumably Root knew all of this before the election. He could have adjusted his prediction to better reflect reality, which he apparently did not, choosing instead to put being a Romney shill ahead of smart analysis. Root also owes Silver an apology, but none was forthcoming in this column.
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:55 PM EST
Updated: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 10:27 PM EST
The MRC's Hypocritical Attack on Christi Parsons
Topic: Media Research Center Who's the journalist the Media Research Center hates the most this week? Christi Parsons. She's the Chicago Tribune writer who made the mistake of congratulating President Obama on his re-election during a press conference last week. In a Nov. 14 MRC item, Scott Whitlock called Parsons "a gushing fan" who "cooed to Obama that she had 'never' seen him 'lose.'" On his weekly appearance on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, MRC chief Brent Bozell sneered that "no one, but nobody seemed the least bit perturbed that she and [President Obama] are playing kissy-face in a press conference. Nobody was at all surprised by that. What does that tell you about our press corps?" It's rather hypocritical that Bozell and Co. are pretending this sort of thing has never happened before. Take, for insteance, this November 4, 2004, press conference by George W. Bush, the first after his re-election:
Who is "Herman"? We don't know. It apepars that the MRC was so uninteresting in his fanboy fawning that it didn't bother to record the event for posterity. Apparently, fanboy reporters are permitted at the MRC when they're fawning over a Republican. (h/t reader A.P.)
Posted by Terry K.
at 5:46 PM EST
Aaron Klein's Big Scoop: Hamas Follows CNN on Twitter
Topic: WorldNetDaily Really, this is the subject of Aaron Klein's Nov. 19 WorldNetDaily article:
We're going to play that game, are we, Aaron? Waddaya say we rummage through the folks Klein follows on his Twitter account, shall we? Aside from nutbars like Alex Jones (both his personal feed and the Infowars feed) and Pam Geller, there's ... wait, what is that right at the top? Yep, it's the Al Qassam Brigades. Note to Aaron: Live by the gotcha, die by the gotcha.
Posted by Terry K.
at 11:36 AM EST
CNS Puts Words In Tim Geithner's Mouth
Topic: CNSNews.com The headline of Elizabeth Harrington's Nov. 19 CNSNews.com article reads "Treasury Secretary Geithner: Lift Debt Limit to Infinity." Harrington starts the article by writing, "Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Friday that Congress should stop placing legal limits on the amount of money the government can borrow and effectively lift the debt limit to infinity." Just one little problem: Geithner never says the word "infinity." While Geithner does advise eliminating the debt ceiling, it's to keep it from being used as "a tool for political advantage," as Harrington eventually concedes, not out of a desire to "lift the debt limit to infinity."CNS has a notable history of putting words in the mouths of their political enemies.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:14 AM EST
Monday, November 19, 2012
WND's Farah: We're All Gonna Die Because Obama Was Re-Elected, But First Let Me Sell You Something
Topic: WorldNetDaily Joseph Farah has been speaking in increasingly angry and apocalyptic terms since President Obama was re-elected: On Nov. 6, he asserted that Obama's re-election was "God’s judgment on a people who have turned away from Him and His ways and from everything for which our founders sacrificed their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor." On Nov. 8, he called for "a counter-revolution in the culture – to start creating new institutions and restoring some of the old ones, to withdraw from the institutions that are corrupting our culture and degrading our principles and to create their own counter-cultural institutions. On Nov. 13, he declared that Obama voters have "gone awhoring." Farah takes it to another level in his Nov. 18 column, by digging around in the book of Hosea to declare that America is "where ancient Israel was before being destroyed by God":
Which, of course, immediately turns into an excuse to try and sell something from the WND online store:
Apparently, if America is about to be destroyed, Farah is going to try and fleece his readers for as much money as he can before the end.
Posted by Terry K.
at 11:05 PM EST
CNS' Starr Misleads on Government Regulations
Topic: CNSNews.com Penny Starr writes in a Nov. 9 CNSNews.com article:
But Starr is falsely conflating notifications with regulations. For instance, one recent notification is an announcement of a meeting by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts -- clearly not a "regulation." And as Starr herself concedes, the "regulations" are often just proposed regulations and requests for comment on them. But because the Regulations.gov website conveniently posts statistics on its website, Starr got a story out of some lazy reporting -- and, judging by the number of comments, it also served as irresistable Drudge link-bait. There's no evidence Starr lifted a finger to make the effort to separate actual regulations from proposals and notifications. Talk about lazy. But Drudge seems to have linked to it, so it doesn't matter how true it is, right?
Posted by Terry K.
at 4:18 PM EST
Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Supersize WorldNetDaily Edition
Topic: WorldNetDaily
-- Mychal Massie, Nov. 12 WorldNetDaily column
-- Barry Farber, Nov. 13 WND column
-- Burt Prelutsky, Nov. 13 WND column
-- John Rocker, Nov. 13 WND column
-- Erik Rush, Nov. 14 WND column
-- Jane Chastain, Nov. 14 WND column
-- Matt Barber, Nov. 16 WND column
-- Larry Klayman, Nov. 18 WND column
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:30 AM EST
MRC's Graham Baselessly Claims Susan Rice 'Lied'
Topic: NewsBusters In a Nov. 17 NewsBusters post, Tim Graham claimed that ambassador Susan Rice "lied on five Sunday shows about Benghazi." Graham offered no evidence that this was the case. In fact, Rice was was accurately conveying the consensus of the intelligence community at the time -- that an anti-Islam video played a role in motivating the Benghazi attack, something that appears to have been confirmed by subsequent reporting. So, no, Susan Rice isn't lying. But Tim Graham is.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:21 AM EST
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Aaron Klein Anonymous Source Watch
Topic: WorldNetDaily There's trouble in Israel, which means that WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein is treating is to more untraceable anonymous sources to advance his pro-Israel agenda:
There's no way for any civilian to independently verify anything Klein writes, of course. And it looks like, with his purported quoting of israeli and Egyptian defense sources, that he's more than willing to become a shill for the Israeli government, just as he was for ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak last year.
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:45 PM EST
MRC Writers Still Pushing Tired 'Liberal Media' Argument
Topic: Media Research Center Matthew Sheffield and Noel Sheppard -- executive editor and associate editor, respectively, for the Media Research Center's NewsBusters blog -- have taken to the far-right American Spectator to push the MRC party line on "liberal media bias." But it's just the same old stuff they've been spouting for years, with more whining and fearmongering. Sheffield (who has yet to apologize for denigrating election polling that turned out to be correct about the level of Democratic turnout) and Sheppard (who has been fighting a losing battle against facts the entire election cycle) try to make their longtime bogeyman bigger and scarier than ever: "The 2012 cycle demonstrated that left-wing journalists have far more sway on Americans' opinions than many conservatives have been willing to admit." And those media liberals are everywhere:
By contrast, the authors write, the "audience reach" of conservative media "is still tiny compared to the hundreds of millions who consume news generated by the liberal mainstream media." Despite this, they write, "exposing liberal media bias and finding ways of reaching people who are not interested in the conservative 'alternative media' structure have become even more critical to our political system." But wasn't the the intent of the MRC's $5 million "Tell the Truth!" campaign this year, which seemed much more interested in making sure the truth wasn't told about Republican candidates? Sheffield and Sheppard make no mention of this campaign, let alone its effect -- though the article's lamenting tone tacitly admits the campaign was a failure. (Perhaps if the MRC hadn't squandered money on flashy promotions like a Times Square billboard, it might have had an impact.) Sheffield and Sheppard went on to rehash the usual circa-2008 right-wing whining over Obama -- he wasn't vetted because it didn't "properly expose" his relationship to Jeremiah Wright (wrong), that the media ignored the role of the Community Reinvestment Act in the financial collapse (that's because it played no significant role). The authors are also angry at how the Obama campaign out-strategized the Republicans:
Even if you consider the contraceptive mandate to be nothing more than a political stunt, doesn't the fact that the contraceptive debate resonated with female voters suggest that "there had been absolutely no discussion of birth control from Republican presidential candidates" meant a missed opportunity on the part of the GOP? Not in Sheffield and Sheppard's world -- it just proves that the media is liberal. The authors are also eager to hang Hurricane Sandy around Obama's neck despite offering no real evidence to do so:
Like nobody's ever called a given political event "Obama's Katrina" (Or "Obama's Watergate," "Obama's Waterloo,", etc.) before. Sheffield and Sheppard continue their excuse-making, insisting that Romney's loss was not a loss for conservativsm:
Doesn't this also mean that GOP gains in 2010 were not proof that Americans embraced conservatism or otherwise moved rightward? The authors don't address that. Nor do they address the fact that this theory also means that the millions of dollars the MRC spends every year to fearmonger about "liberal media bias" is essentially wasted. Perhaps that's why this article appeared at AmSpec instead of the MRC.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:48 AM EST
Saturday, November 17, 2012
WND's Gun Columnist Suggests McVeigh Was Set Up By Government
Topic: WorldNetDaily The last time we checked in on WorldNetDaily gun columnist Jeff Knox, he was whitewashing the crimes committed by a gun dealer. Now, Knox is suggesting that Timothy McVeigh was set up by the government to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. From Knox's Nov. 15 WND column:
Rather than shoot down a right-wing conspiracy theory, Knox has chosen to encourage it.
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:13 PM EST
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