NEW ARTICLE: A Collusion of Dunces
Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell and Tim Graham have a new book that rehashes its tired right-wing agenda by blaming the "liberal media" for Mitt Romney's election loss. Read more >>

CNS Misleads on Judicial Nominee's Views
Topic: CNSNews.com

Fred Lucas writes in a July 23 CNSNews.com article:

The Senate will consider the nomination of Cornelia Pillard, a vocal abortion advocate who said abstinence education was unconstitutional for violating “reproductive justice,” to serve as a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a hearing Wednesday.

But in the very next paragraph, Lucas quotes Pillard -- and it's clear she is referring to abstinence-only sex education, not "abstinence education" (emphasis added):

“The equal protection critique of abstinence-only curricula is strengthened and rendered more amenable to judicial resolution by the fact that sex education classes are designed not only to expose students to ideas, but also to shape student behavior,” Pillard, a Georgetown University Law professor, wrote in a 2007 article titled “Our Other Reproductive Choices: Equality in Sex Education, Contraceptive Access and Work Family Policy” in a faculty publication.

Lucas waits until the 13th paragraph of his article to explain what exactly Pillard says is "unconstitutional" about absinence-only education -- that it is discriminatory because it "prescrib[es] chastity and maternity for women while assuming lustfulness and autonomy for men."

Lucas then quotes Valerie Huber, president of the National Abstinence Education Association, attacking Pillard and defending abstinence-only education, but neither Lucas nor Huber mention the fact that abstinence-only education has been repeatedly criticized for promulgating inaccurate and biased information.

 

Newsmax's Ruddy Planted The Idea of Peter King As President
Topic: Newsmax

Last week, we noted Newsmax's burst of promotion for the idea of New York congressman Peter King as a presidential candidate. Turns out Newsmax is responsible for planting the idea in King's head in the first place.

Time reports:

Blame it on the chicken scarpariello.

Rep. Peter King made news last week when the New York Republican announced he was considering a run for President in 2016, an idea first reported by the conservative website Newsmax. Left unreported in that initial story was the spark that ignited King’s interest in running for the top job. It came at a dinner weeks earlier at an Italian restaurant called Campagnola on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with Chris Ruddy, editor-in-chief of Newsmax, and Vito Fossella, a former Republican congressman from New York.

King told TIME that Ruddy showed up unannounced. “I didn’t even know he was going to be there,” King remembered. “And he said he’d been hearing from a number of people that someone like me could bring together the national security Republicans and the old Reagan Democrats and that I should consider a run. And he said, ‘You mind if I do a story?’ And I said, ‘On what?’ And I didn’t hear from him until I guess last Friday [July 12].”

Five days later, he received another call saying Newsmax had published a story about his possible ambitions. “I realized I had to start thinking about it more seriously when I got the phone call at 11 o’clock on Wednesday night,” said King.

[...]

“I think people are open to someone new and different,” Ruddy told TIME. “I think Peter has a lot of assets going for him. He is well-liked. He is great on television. He has great visibility. He’s a straight shooter. People want that and I think the Republican Party also needs a little something different. Because if they couldn’t beat an unpopular president in a recession last time, they are going to have an uphill battle in 2016.”

Newsmax has yet to tell its readers about Ruddy's direct role in planting the idea of King as president.

Meanwhile ...
Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ed Brayton does a fine job of breaking down WorldNetDaily's factually challenged attacks on the American Civil Liberties Union, as forwarded in Jerome Corsi's book on the ACLU. It's what we've come to expect from Corsi -- scare tactics and flat-out lies.

NewsBusters' Sheppard Peddles Another False Claim
Topic: NewsBusters

Noel Sheppard writes in a July 22 NewsBusters post:

As NewsBusters has been reporting, it's been absolutely sick-making watching Obama-loving media members gush and fawn over the President's speech Friday concerning race, the George Zimmerman verdict, and Florida's Stand Your Ground law.

But will they report to the American people that as an Illinois state senator in 2004, Obama co-sponsored and voted for legislation strengthening his state's Stand Your Ground law?

Just one problem: It's not true.

As Slate's Dave Weigel points out, Obama supported a change in Illinois' "castle doctrine," which is not analogous to Florida's "stand your ground" law. Florida's law "takes the concept of the castle doctrine and turns it into a traveling force field of sorts," Weigel writes.

Sheppard concludes his post by writing, "I wouldn't advise people holding their breath expecting the current iteration of so-called journalists to pounce on these revelations." We also wouldn't advise holding one's breath waiting for the chronically wrong Sheppard to correct his post.

WND Reduced to Posting Ten Commandments Billboards In Obscure Places
Topic: WorldNetDaily

A July 20 WorldNetDaily article touts the latest posting of a "Ten Commandments" billboard, this time near Schubert, Pa. (which WND mispells), a tiny hamlet (population: 249) outside of Reading.

That's quite a comedown from the start of WND editor Joseph Farah's billboard campaign, which launched in Las Vegas and steadily wound down to "Nashville, Jacksonville, Los Angeles and Branson, Mo.," according to the WND article.

As we noted at the beginning of the campaign, the billboard makes no mention of WND whatsoever, instead promoting the web address thetencommandments.com (which redirects to an earlier WND article). WND seems to know that its brand is damaged from its birther obsession, and it could be argued they don't want to taint Christianity by linking the Ten Commandments to it.

The article solicits donations for the billboard drive, but as per usual for WND's reader-fleecing campaigns, no public accounting for how that donated money is spent has been provided, nor is it indicated such accounting will ever be provided even privately to donors.

MRC Sneers At Summer Camp For Transgender Boys
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's overall hostility to transgenderism continues in a July 17 CNSNews.com blog post (also published at NewsBusters) by the MRC's Lauren Enk, in which she expresses outrage over a summer camp for gender non-conforming boys and their parents." Enk starts by sneering:

Ever wonder what a "Princess Boy" does in the summer? Apparently, if the Boy Scouts aren't gay enough for him, he can grab his tiara and head off to transgender camp, where he can share his pink nail polish and sequined tutus with other gender-bending boys.

Enk goes on to complain that "The media are obsessed with gender-bending children." But aside from the Slate item onthe summer camp, she cites only two other examples of the subject appearing in the media. It would be much closer to the truth to say that the MRC is much more obsessed with the subject than "the media" are.

Logic Fails Ellis Washington
Topic: WorldNetDaily

It seems it was just a few weeks ago that Ellis Washington was lecturing us on the dangers of the Hegelian dialectic, employing his own leaps of logic in the process:

I further wrote that Hegelian dialectic (or Hegelian logic) sounds good, but ultimately it is sophistic, anti-logical and genocidal. Hegelian dialectic is specious propaganda for leftists who portend to be smart, cosmopolitan and “modern.” Applying Hegelian dialectic in modern political discourse has caused societal devolution – Congress routinely creates laws antagonistic to legitimate constitutional principles; our presidents dictate executive orders to enforce laws in violation of natural rights; our judges frequently exhibit a jurisprudence pathology akin to Nietzsche’s Will to Power to create law out of whole cloth from the bench, laws that are diametrical to God’s law and Veritas (truth).

It seems Washington preferred logic process is one that always concludes that liberals are evil. In his July 19 WorldNetDaily column, Washington starts off ranting about eugenics, then ultimately ends up here:

Since 1900 the question of eugenics has been inextricably connected with leftists alarm at population explosion. Their solution: global birth control, genocide and democide. It was not just that the wrong people were breeding, eugenicists protested, but that the planet was becoming choked with humanity. Birth control became more or less standard in utopias since 1900. The Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), paved the way for the legalization of birth control pill, and 40 years ago, in Roe v. Wade (1973), the Court legalized infanticide, now approaching 60 million casualties.

The Progressive Revolution will continue to mandate universal policies of death for unfit populations through their current champion, President Barack Obama, unless and until conservatives raise up their own champion to defeat him.

Washington is definitely being sophistic and anti-logical here. We're not sure what one would call the lightyear-length leap of logic that equates a court decision that legalizes the lawful, noncoercive use of birth control with genocide.

Then again, this is a guy who imagines his far-right rants to be no less than Socratic, so it's not shocking at all to see his logic synapses misfire so badly.

Meanwhile...
Topic: Newsmax
Right Wing Watch catches Newsmax radio host Steve Malzberg mocking President Obama's remarks on race by speculating that the reason people locked their car doors when he walked by is because he was high on drugs.

Aaron Klein Anonymous Source Watch
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Aaron Klein writes in a July 21 WorldNetDaily article:

The Obama administration has quietly presented a plan in which the Palestinian Authority and Jordan will receive sovereignty over the Temple Mount while Israel will retain the land below the Western Wall, according to a senior PA negotiator speaking to WND.

The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism.

The proposed plan is part of the basis for U.S.-brokered talks that are set to resume in Washington next week after Secretary of State John Kerry announced that both Israel and PA President Mahmoud Abbas have agreed to open negotiations aimed at creating a Palestinian state.

Israel has not agreed to the U.S. plan over the Temple Mount, with details still open for discussion, stated the PA negotiator.

As is usual for Klein, his source is anonymous, and he provides no evidence that the "plan" he's writing about even exists beyond his imagination.

Klein frequently hides behind untraceable anonymous sources to attack the Obama administration and advance his right-wing agenda.

Note to MRC: IRS 'Bombshell' Acually Is Old News
Topic: Media Research Center

Geoffrey Dickens writes in a July 19 Media Research Center item:

The Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC ) networks have essentially censored the latest IRS scandal news. Not a single network reported on the bombshell coming out of Thursday’s congressional hearing that IRS employees were ordered to send Tea Party tax-exemption applications to the office of the IRS’s Chief Counsel, which was headed by William Wilkins, who at that time was the only Obama political appointee at the IRS.

Dickens is essentially censoring the fact that his "bombshell" revelation is nothing new. As Media Matters details, a report from the Treasury Inspector General, released two months ago, details a timeline of events noting that the chief counsel's office was made aware of the issue in August of 2011.

Dickens' post is headlined "ABC, CBS and NBC to Viewers: IRS Scandal? Please, That's Old News." So is the the "bombshell" Dickens is trying to peddle.

WND Has Links to Racist Tea Party Group
Topic: WorldNetDaily

The group TeaParty.org recently sent out a email promoting a new endeavor by sister organization Citizen Freedom Project -- a campaign where "For just $29.95 you can send a PINK SLIP to all 535 members of the House and Senate telling them to IMPEACH OBAMA! Let this Pink Slip serve as 'official warning' that they are to put the president on notice right now!"

Does that sound and look familiar? It should --  four years ago, WorldNetDaily was running a very similar "pink slip" campaign, with a similarly factually challenged message, for exactly the same price.

It turns out that idea-sharing is not the only link TeaParty.org has with WND.

The TeaParty.org publishes "exclusive" regular commentaries by WND "reporter" Jerome Corsi. In his most recent commentary, for example, Corsi falsely claimed that President Obama refused to express support for "the verdict of the jury. In fact, Obama specifically said: "The juries were properly instructed that in a -- in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works."

But that's not all. WND publicist Tim Bueler is an official with TeaParty.org, serving as its secretary and media director. Bueler also accompanied Corsi on his ill-fated 2008 trip to Kenya, where they were briefly detained and Corsi brought back fraudulent documents he used to try and falsely smear Obama before the 2008 election.

Why do we care? First, TeaParty.org, also known as the 1776 Tea Party, is headed by Dale Robertson, who is best known for carrying around a sign at a 2009 rally with the (misspelled) N-word on it. Other tea party groups couldn't run from Robertson fast enough.

Second, Bueler and TeaParty.org executive director Stephen Eichler have another nefarious connection. They used to work with the Minuteman Project, the border vigilante group founded by Jim Gilchrist. (Corsi was a supporter of Gilchrist as well -- he also wrote a book about Gilchrist -- until Gilchrist endorsed Mike Huckabee in the 2008 election, whom Corsi deemed insufficiently anti-immigration.) The Minuteman Project's "border operations director" was Shawna Forde, best known for her role in the 2009 killings of a 9-year-old girl and her father, for which she was found guilty of first-degree murder.

(By the way, the only mention of Forde's crimes at WND come in a May 2011 column by Rob Sanchez complaining that "Shawna Forde got the death penalty even though she did not murder anyone" and that her case shows that "the courts have been corrupted by political correctness, mob rule and race-based politics.")

These are the people who are WND's fellow travelers, with some of them being WND employees. Is it any wonder that nobody believes WND?

MRC Doesn't Like Gay-Related 'What Would You Do?' Scenarios
Topic: Media Research Center

Matt Vespa huffs in a July 17 NewsBusters post:

With the Supreme Court ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act last month, you know that ABC’s “What Would You Do?” just had to produce a segment on gay marriage – again.  In the July 12 broadcast, the show decided to pick the liberal state of New Jersey -- a blue state for a change -- in order to find these nasty, homophobic Americans.  The scenario was simple.  Two lesbians walk into a local bakery picking out their future wedding cake.  The baker is a homophobe.  He hurls insults.  What would you do?

To no one’s surprise, the vast majority of the bystanders were appalled by the baker’s remarks.

Vespa ignores the fact that, location of the stunt aside, the incident is based in reality. In Colorado -- which has something of a progressive tradition -- a gay couple is suing a bakery for allegedly refusing to make a cake for their wedding ceremony.

Still, this inspired the Media Research Center to crank out a July 18 piece by Scott Whitlock, headlined "ABC's Top Five Lamest Hidden Camera Attempts to Expose American Bigotry." As befits the MRC's anti-gay agenda, two involve gay-related scenarios, "a faux Boy Scout who announces he's gay" and "an actor playing a therapist told a homosexual teenager 'we can pray away the gay.'"

Funny, we thought the MRC loved hidden-camera stunts -- at least, when they're perpetrated by the likes of Lila Rose and James O'Keefe.

WND's Unruh Cherry-Picks Dubious Survey To Attack Obamacare
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bob Unruh writes in a July 19 WorldNetDaily article:

In a survey by a top research firm, six in 10 physicians said it is likely many doctors will retire earlier than planned in the next one to three years.

The same percentage say the practice of medicine is in jeopardy as medical experts lose control of their clinics and compensation with the implementation of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, or Obamacare.

[...]

The survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions found that the “future of the medical profession may be in jeopardy as it loses clinical autonomy and compensation.”

But the way Deloitte compiled the survey makes it less than authoritative. According to the survey, Deloitte sent out more than 20,000 surveys to randomly selected names from the American Medical Association's master file of physicians, but received just 613 responses. That's a response rate of well below 5 percent.

That's a rate below even a comically awful survey conducted by the anti-Obamacare Doctor Patient Medical Association claiming that 82% of doctors were thinking about quitting because of "changes in the medical system."

Despite citing a dubious survey, Unruh curiously failed to cite a survey result that was favorable to Obamacare. According to Deloitte, 44 percent of respondents said that the Affordable Care Act is a "a good start," and the number of those who believe that the ACA is a step in the wrong direction dropped 6 percentage points from the 2011 survey, from 44 percent to 38 percent.

CNS 'Waste Watch' Changes Name, Still Considers LGBT-Related Spending A Waste
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNS' "Waste Watch" is perhaps best known for determining that pretty much any spending on LGBT-related issues is a "waste."

CNS -- perhaps to put a slightly nicer spin on things -- has changed the name of its "Waste Watch" page to "The Golden Hookah Award," providing this explanation of the name (though no explanation for the change):

The Golden Hookah is the symbolic token that CNSNews.com confers on government agencies that win our “What Were They Smoking Award” for outrageous government spending. CNSNews.com presents the award to a component of government that has distinguished itself in taking the hard-earned money of taxpayers and sending it up in smoke.

Inspired by CNSNews.com stories that exposed federal grants used to subsidize research on hookah smoking in Syria and Jordan, the “Golden Hookah” symbolizes how a prodigal government squanders the taxpayers’ money on outrageous, unconstitutional and unconscionable programs.

The page's modus operandi hasn't changed, though: Of the 23 items currently  on the page, four are LGBT-related, which continues to make it disproportionately represented.

Or, in CNS' words, spending money on LGBT issues is "outrageous, unconstitutional and unconscionable."