CNS' Starr Has Another Anti-Gay Freakout Topic: CNSNews.com
Penny Starr is CNSNews.com's leadhomophobe, and she shows it again in a pair of recent articles.
Starr used a Feb. 24 CNS article to inform us that "Former Olympic figure skating champion Johnny Weir has not tried to hide his homosexuality as NBC’s daytime figure skating analyst. He has worn bright pink and huge, sparkling jewelry as he and former champ Tara Lipinski commentated on this year’s skaters at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia." Because wearing flashy clothing could only mean that Weir is gay.
In another Feb. 24 article, Starr complains that an "American Idol" contestant has two moms:
MK Nobilette is “making history” as the first openly lesbian contestant on "American Idol," but she is also the first contestant to have two lesbian mothers supporting her in the audience.
Nobilette, 20, was selected to go to Hollywood during the San Francisco, Calif., audition, where she lives with her girlfriend. On Thursday, she was named as one of the Top 13 on the show.
[...]
A Feb. 19 article on the 429 website noted Nobilette’s “two mothers.”
“Following her first performance of John Legend’s ‘All of Me’ on Tuesday, February 18, the San Francisco-raised Nobilette received a standing ovation from the crowd—which included her two mothers, one of whom was unable to hold in happy tears,” the article stated.
Starr must have had to work hard to find a news article that mentioned Nobilette's parents so she could work up the proper outrage. 429 is not even a news organization per se -- it's a website serving as "a go-to destination for the LGBTA professional set." It probably pained Starr to comb through that website as it did to say something positive about a gay person.
Starr ironically closes the article by quoting Nobilette as saying of her sexuality, "I hope in 10 years we won't even have to talk about this." Not if Starr and CNS have anything to do with it, and continue to feel they can get away with creating opportunities for their right-wing audience to mock and slander gay people -- as the comment thread on both articles indicate.
CNS' Jeffrey Keeps Up His Electricity Freakout, Still Ignores Efficiency Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey is still freaking out about decreased electricity production in a Feb. 21 article:
Historically, in the United States, rising electricity prices have not been inevitable. In the first decades after World War II, the U.S. rapidly increased it electricity production, including on a per capita basis. Since 2007, the U.S. has decreased its electricity production, including on a per capita basis.
[...]
Over the last seven years, according to the EIA, the U.S. has actually decreased its total net electricity generation, although not in an unbroken downward line from year to year (generation did increase from 2009 to 2010 before going down again in 2011 and 2012).
The EIA has published historical data going back to 1949 on the nation’s annual total net electricity generation, which EIA measures in million kilowatthours.
In 1949, according to EIA, the U.S. produced 296,124.289 million KWH of electricity. By 1959, it produced 713,378.831—an increase of 417,254.542 million KWH or about 141 percent.
In 1969, the U.S. produced 1,445,458.056 million KWH—an increase of 732,079.225 or about 103 percent from 1959.
In 1979, the U.S. produced 2,250,665.025 million KWH—an increase of 805,206.969 or about 55.7 percent from 1969.
In 1989, the U.S. produced 2,967,146.087 million KWH—an increase of 716,481.062 or about 31.8 percent from 1979.
In 1999, the U.S. produced 3,694,809.810 million KWH—an increase of 727,663.723 or about 24.5 percent from 1989.
In 2009, the U.S. produced 3,950,330.927 million KWH--an increase of 255,521.117 or about 6.9 percent.
In 2007, according to EIA, the U.S. generated a net total of 4,156,744.724 million KWH of electricity, which, so far, is the historical peak. In 2012, the last year for which full data is available, the U.S. generated a net total of 4,047,765.26 million KWH. That represents a drop of 108,979.464 million KWH--or about 2.6 percent--in the nation’s electricity production since 2007.
As before, Jeffrey fails to acknowledge the primary reason why electricity production has dropped: Increased efficiency of appliances and electronics.
Instead, Jeffrey tries to blame the decline on "a decrease in the electricity produced by coal—which has not been replaced by a commensurate increase in the electricity produced by natural gas or the “renewable” sources of wind and solar" -- again, without acknowledging the fact that less demand for electricity has allowed for that reduction.
CNS' Jeffrey Undermines His Argument Against Raising Minimum Wage Topic: CNSNews.com
Terry Jeffrey writes in a Feb. 17 CNSNews.com article:
Sixty-four percent of Americans who earned the minimum wage or less in 2013 were 29 years old or younger, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 63 percent worked in restaurants, bars or retail.
People 30 years or older equaled only about 36 percent of those who earned the minimum wage or less in 2013--and only 0.8 percent of the people employed in the United States.
[...]
Of the 75,948,000 who were paid an hourly wage in 2013, 3,300,000 earned at or below the minimum wage.
That means only about 4.4 percent (3,300,000) of hourly wage earners (75,948,000) earned the minimum wage or less in 2013--or only about 2.3 percent (3,300,000) of all U.S. employees (143,929,000).
Jeffrey thus takes the latest line of attack peddled by other minimum-wage-raise opponents like Fox News -- so few people minimum wage, so there's no need to raise it.
But as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert points out, that argument shoots down the normal conservative opposition to raising the minimum wage: "Because if hardly anyone makes minimum wage, than why the movement-wide opposition to changing it? If so few people earn minimum wage, why demagogue the issue and stand in the way of an increase?"
CNS Joins Right-Wing Government Ammunition Conspiracy Theory Topic: CNSNews.com
A right-wing staple over the past couple of years is fearmongering about the government buying ammunition. CNSNews.com apparently felt left out, because it decided to hop on the bandwagon with a Feb. 19 article by Ali Meyer:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is contracted to purchase 704,390,250 rounds of ammunition over the next four years, which is equal to a total of about 2,500 rounds per DHS agent per year, according to a January 2014 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled Ammunition Purchases Have Declined Since 2009.
Much of the article is devoted to explaining how the DHS says that really isn't that much ammo for training purposes. But Meyer leads with the sensational and out-of-context claim and doesn't bother to explain the whole right-wing conspiracy thing.
That makes this a lazy and uninformative article. But have we come to expect anything less from CNS?
CNS' Starr Tries To Manufacture Outrage Over Public Radio Story She Doesn't Like Topic: CNSNews.com
Yes, CNSNews.com's Penny Starr devoted an entire "news" article to someone else's news article:
On its “All Things Considered” news program Monday, National Public Radio (NPR) aired a story that included a reporter attending a “live porn shoot.”
The “porn shoot” took place at the headquarters of Kink.com where the reporter interviewed “internet porn mogul” Peter Acworth.
The story, entitled “Hurting for Cash, Online Porn Tries New Tricks,” was produced by KQED public television and radio station in San Francisco, Calif.
The NPR story, posted on its All Tech Considered website pages, portrays the story as a business piece and Acworth as a victim.
"We're suffering what happened to the music industry a while back,” Acworth stated. “It's becoming much more easy to get content for free and people are less apt to want to pay for it.”
Describing how it's harder to make money on pornography hardly equates to portraying someone as a "victim."
Also: Why does Starr care what another news outlet reported? Why did she cherry-pick this story out of the hundreds and thousands of stories reported in the news each day? Because she thinks there's tax money involved, and she wants to destroy public radio:
KQED, which is affiliated with NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), did not respond to an inquiry from CNSNews.com asking if reporting on pornography helped the media outlet meet its mission and whether or not they believe the reporting is beneficial to taxpayers, who help fund public broadcasting.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting – the congressionally created funding arm for public radio and television – was appropriated $445,000,000 for fiscal year 2014, according to its financial records.
Given that KQED was reporting on a local business and did not include any pornographic content in its news report, it's entirely likely that the story fits within the station's mission statement.
Starr is simply trying to impose her right-wing morality on others, like she did when she manufactured outrage over a National Portrait Gallery exhibit because she doesn't like gay stuff.
CNS Swings, Misses At Kerry For Pointing 'Shoddy' Climate Change Denialism Topic: CNSNews.com
Patrick Goodenough takes a rather sad whack at Secretary of State John Kerry for criticizing "shoddy scientists" who dispute climage change and pointing out that “97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible.” In his Feb. 16 CNSNews.com article on Kerry, Goodenough offers this rebuttal:
Last year a peer-reviewed academic journal published the results of a survey of more than 1,000 professional engineers’ and geoscientists’ views on climate change. It found that only 36 percent fitted into a group that “express[ed] the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”
The other respondents to varying degrees expressed skepticism about the causes of climate change, the extent of risk it poses, and the accuracy of IPCC modeling.
But that survey is largely meaningless, even if it did appear in a "peer-reviewed academic journal."
The survey Goodenough is citing was conducted by Lianne M. Lefsrud and Renate E. Meyer, and it appeared in the journal Organization Studies. As the Scholars & Rogues blog pointed out:
The vast majority of survey respondents were engineers, not climate scientists.
All respondents were members of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta, which is predominantly employed by the Alberta petroleum industry and its regulators.
The authors themselves has repeatedly stated that the survey's results are not representative of scientists in general.
The study is not about the beliefs of the respondents; it's about their worldviews, the tactics and strategies they use when arguing with others, and how they justify their own claims to have expert opinions on climate science.
In other words, the study is meaningless to the issue of climate change. But Goodenough cited it anyway.
CNS' Starr Pushes Myth That Plan B Is An Abortifacient Topic: CNSNews.com
In a Feb. 11 CNSNews.com article complaining that CVS pharmacies will stop selling tobacco products but continue to sell morning-after pills, Penny Starr repeatedly identifies one such pill, Plan B, as an "abortifacient" or "abortion-inducing drug." But even Starr admits that's not mainly how Plan B works.
Starr accurately cites Plan B's packaging, which states that it "works mainly by preventing ovulation, but she also asserts that Plan B "can prevent the implantation in the uterus of the developing embryo and thus end a human life."
Starr clearly does not understand what an abortifacient is. The National Catholic Reporter tries to clear things up:
To understand why scientists believe that the IUD, Plan B and Ella are not abortifacients, it is important first to understand the biology of conception. In order for a woman to become pregnant after sexual intercourse, her ovaries must release an egg (ovulation). Sperm can remain viable inside her reproductive tract for five days. Therefore, if intercourse takes place up to five days before ovulation or within two days after, both sperm and egg are viable and the egg cell can be fertilized.
Now, just because an egg is fertilized doesn't necessarily mean that it will develop into an embryo. For that to happen, the fertilized egg must be implanted into the endometrium that lines the uterus. Implantation happens seven days after fertilization, if it happens at all. Scientists estimate that, at a minimum, two-thirds of fertilized eggs fail to implant. Some scientists estimate that the number may even be as high as 80 percent, according to Discover Magazine.
For this reason, according to the medical definition, a woman is not considered pregnant until the developing embryo successfully implants the lining of the uterus.
Some church officials argue that a woman is pregnant at the moment of fertilization. If that is the case, then it follows that 60 to 80 percent of the time, this natural process results in a massive loss of life.
The Reporter goes on to explain why Plan B is not an abortifacient:
The drug Plan B is also artificial progestin and therefore impedes the sperm from entering the uterus in the same way as the IUD. But the drug can also stop the ovaries from releasing an egg. If an egg has already been released, Plan B can slow down the movement of the egg. By slowing down both the egg and the sperm, it prevents fertilization.
The effectiveness of Plan B drops considerably if given more than two days after intercourse. But even at its peak of effectiveness, it is only works 50 percent to 80 percent of the time. Some have argued that Plan B acts after fertilization by changing the uterine lining is such a way that implantation is impossible.
But according to Dr. Sandra Reznik, who also wrote for the January-February 2010 edition of CHA's Health Progress, if Plan B "involved a change in the endometrium, then one would expect a higher rate of success [in preventing pregnancy]. ... Taken together, there are biological, clinical and epidemiological data clearly indicating that Plan B's mechanism of action involves only pre-fertilization events."
For five years, staff at CHA collected, reviewed and summarized the great majority of articles on Plan B's mechanism of action, Ron Hamel explains in his article: "Virtually all of the evidence in the scientific literature indicates Plan B has little or no post-fertilization effect ... on the endometrium that would make it inhospitable to implantation."
Starr's boss, Terry Jeffrey, has also pushed the myth that Plan B is an "abortion-inducing drug."
CNS' Starr Can't Be Bothered To Tell A Balanced Story Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's tradition of one-sided reporting continues in a Feb. 11 article by Penny Starr, in which she details how "A coalition of pro-family and traditional values groups sent a letter yesterday to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey asking that the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigations to stop using the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a resource and authority on hate crimes."
Missing from Starr's article: Any reaction from the SPLC to the letter. There's no evidence Starr even bothered to contact them for a response. Thus, conservative smears of the SPLC as "anti-Christian" stand unchallenged, despite CNS' mission statement to "fairly present all legitimate sides of a story."
Students who attended Catholic high schools were approximately twice as likely as students who attended public high schools to go on and graduate from college, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.
According to the report, 61.9 percent of Catholic high school students went on to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher by the time they were 8 years out of high school. By contrast, only 31.1 percent of public school students had gone on to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Jeffrey doesn't mention one key reason why that is: Catholic schools get to be selective about the students they enroll, while public schools do not.
A pro-Catholic education website even admits this, citing as one reason for higher achievement rates that "smarter parents send their smarter students to Catholic schools, an effect called pre-selection."
Since Catholic schools are in large part selective, they can also remove students who do not perform well -- and those students usually end up in public schools.
Michael Chapman writes in a Jan. 30 CNSNews.com article:
The state's attorney report on the horrific murders at the Sandy Hook Elementary School by shooter Adam Lanza found no "conclusive motive" for his actions but did document unsettling facts about the 20-year-old killer, including computer files he kept on the rights of pedophiles, a movie about man/boy love, instant messages concerning "homosexual fantasies," numerous mass murder documents, and a computer game entitled "School Shooting."
This is the second article Chapman has written in the past week that address the issue of child pornography. By contrast, Chapman and CNS have yet to devote any original coverage to the case of Ryan Loskarn, the chief of staff to Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, who was charged in December with possession of child pornography. Loskarn later committed suicide.
Perhaps Chapman should explain to his readers why child pornography accusations against a conservative aren't as newsworthy as when they are brought against, say, a gay man or the perpetrator of a massacre.
NEW ARTICLE: The Catholic -- Er, Cybercast News Service Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com makes its pro-Catholic bias so blatant, the word might as well be part of the name. Read more >>
CNS Columnist Misleads on CBO Obamacare Report Topic: CNSNews.com
The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Hans Bader writes in a Feb. 4 CNSNews.com column:
The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.3 million jobs and contributing to a $1 trillion increase in projected deficits, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released Tuesday.
That's a misleading, if not outright false, description of that the CBO report says. In fact, the CBO stated that the decrease comes on the supply side, not the demand side, because Obamacare subsidies mean that some workers will choose not to work a job they normally would have just to keep health insurance:
The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses' demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).
Further, while the CBO did increase projected deficits by $1 trillion over the next decade, it did not specifically single out Obamacare as a reason. To the contrary: the CBO is still projecting the Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit.
CNS Repeats Global Warming Denier's Distortions Topic: CNSNews.com
Barbara Hollingsworth proclaims in a Jan. 28 CNSNews.com article:
Dr. Don Easterbrook – a climate scientist and glacier expert from Washington State who correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase – says to expect colder temperatures for at least the next two decades.
Easterbrook’s predictions were “right on the money” seven years before Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for warning that the Earth was facing catastrophic warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide, which Gore called a “planetary emergency.”
“When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they’re not even close. They’re off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That’s more than the entire amount of warming we’ve had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it’s luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button,” Easterbrook told CNSNews.com.
“For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC,” said Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including “Evidence Based Climate Science,” which was published in 2011.
There's lots that Hollingsworth has gotten wrong here, starting with her declaration that Easterbrook is right about global cooling.
Skeptical Science serves up this chart showing Easterbrook's predictions of cooling (the green and blue lines) vs. actual temperatures (the jagged black line):
The red line is an IPCC prediction, which brings us to another thing Hollingsworth got wrong: uncritically repeating Easterbrook's claim that the IPCC predicted "one-degree warming." As Skeptical Science points out, the IPCC served up numerous analyses of temperature predictions, and Easterbrook cherry-picked one:
He chose a figure which represented model simulations of temperature responses only to greenhouse gas changes, which neglects for example the temperature response to the cooling effects of aerosols.
He chose a single model run with an anomalous temperature spike in 2011.
He only presented the data from 2000 to 2011, which concealed the fact that the temperature spike in 2011 was a short-term anomaly.
He exaggerated his distorted IPCC temperature rise by a factor of two.
Thus Easterbrook's claim that the IPCC TAR projected a 1°C global surface warming from 2000 to 2010 was not even remotely accurate.
Asperusual, Hollingsworth couldn't be bothered to seek out any alternative views. Indeed, Hollingsworth even shared one fawning question she asked Easterbrook: “How does it feel to have been right?”
It's not a feeling Hollingsworth is apparently familiar with. But fortunately for her, her higher-ups at CNS don't appear to be judging her journalism on its accuracy, only on how faithfully she advances her employer's right-wing agenda.
CNS' Jeffrey Blames John Holdren For Decline In Electricity Use Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey spends his Jan. 29 column having a sad that electricity consumption in America is declining:
Americans may look back in a few decades and see that 2007 was the year that production of electricity peaked in the United States and our nation began powering down.
This may make many on the environmentalist left — including President Barack Obama's top science and technology adviser — very happy.
But it will not make life better for you, your children or your grandchildren.
According to data published by the Energy Information Administration, the United States generated a total of approximately 4,157 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2007. We had never produced that much before. We have never produced that much since.
In 2012, the last full year for which there is data, the United States produced 4,048 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity — down 2.6 percent from 2007.
In the first nine months of 2013, the United States produced 3,078 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity — down from the 3,096 the United States produced in first nine months of 2012.
Strangely, Jeffrey doesn't mention the main reason for the decline: increased efficiency. The Associated Press reports:
Because of more energy-efficient housing, appliances and gadgets, power usage is on track to decline in 2013 for the third year in a row, to its lowest point since 2001, even though our lives are more electrified.
[...]
Big appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners have gotten more efficient thanks to federal energy standards that get stricter every few years as technology evolves.
A typical room air conditioner — one of the biggest power hogs in the home — uses 20 per cent less electricity per hour of full operation than it did in 2001, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.
Central air conditioners, refrigerators, dishwashers, water heaters, washing machines and dryers also have gotten more efficient.
Other devices are using less juice, too. Some 40-inch LED televisions bought today use 80 per cent less power than the cathode ray tube televisions of the past. Some use just $8 worth of electricity over a year when used five hours a day — less than a 60-watt incandescent bulb would use.
Those incandescent light bulbs are being replaced with compact fluorescent bulbs and LEDs that use 70 to 80 per cent less power. According to the Energy Department, widespread use of LED bulbs could save output equivalent to that of 44 large power plants by 2027.
The move to mobile also is helping. Desktop computers with big CRT monitors are being replaced with laptops, tablet computers and smart phones, and these mobile devices are specifically designed to sip power to prolong battery life.
It costs $1.36 to power an iPad for a year, compared with $28.21 for a desktop computer, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.
Instead of telling his readers the facts, Jeffrey indulges in a favorite CNS obsession: John Holdren. Somehow this is all his fault:
As President Obama moves forward with his plans for America's future energy production and economic well-being, Americans should remember that Obama's science and technology adviser declared 19 years ago that "a world of zero net physical growth" was something that "needs to be faced up to eventually."
Yeah, efficient use of electricity has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Penny Starr is CNSNews.com's lead homophobe, and she shows it again in a pair of recent articles.
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey is still freaking out about decreased electricity production in a Feb. 21 
A right-wing staple over the past couple of years is 
Patrick Goodenough takes a rather sad whack at Secretary of State John Kerry for criticizing "shoddy scientists" who dispute climage change and pointing out that “97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible.” In his Feb. 16 CNSNews.com 
It's another month of new unemployment numbers, which means it's time for CNSNews.com to cherry-pick the bad ones:
Michael Chapman writes in a Jan. 30 CNSNews.com 
The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Hans Bader writes in a Feb. 4 CNSNews.com 
Barbara Hollingsworth proclaims in a Jan. 28 CNSNews.com 
