MRC's Bozell & Graham Mansplain Feminism Topic: Media Research Center
Shailene Woodley is fast-rising movie star, and at age 22, she's already thrown the country's most uptight feminists into a tizzy.
Time magazine asked Woodley: "Do you consider yourself a feminist?" To say she didn't give the Hollywood answer would be an understatement.
"No, because I love men, and I think the idea of 'raise women to power, take the men away from the power' is never going to work out because you need balance."
Many women continue to reject "feminism" because it evokes an ideological rigidity grounded in the hostility toward men. That, in turn, drives feminists around a bend.
[...]
This sputtering is a bit amusing. Feminists insist you support their entire agenda or you're guilty of waging a "war on women." Apparently a woman who isn't a feminist is anti-woman.
Feminists insist they care only for equality between the sexes, but if that were so, why would so many women balk? Because they hate themselves? Or because after 40 years of screaming, it is pretty apparent that activist feminists in academia, the media, and politics will never stop complaining. Forty years from now they will still be waging a war on intolerable "patriarchy."
It's becoming faddish again to mentally bra-burn. The Times found twenty-something feminist actresses who are perpetually outraged at people's failure to bow to feminism.
[...]
Many people don't accept the term "feminist" because it sounds like a very serious kind of pagan religion, with its own dogma and doctrinal enforcers. Others find feminists to be boors, pure and simple. Still others see the hypocrisy of it all. If feminists really believed women should be liberated to make their own path, wouldn't they embrace a debate over feminism? Such is the world of the "tolerant" left.
NEW ARTICLE: The Worldview Review Topic: WorldNetDaily
Drew Zahn's movie reviews for WorldNetDaily are as much about reinforcing his employer's right-wing right-wing Christian agenda as they are about the film he's ostensibly reviewing. Read more >>
CNS' Starr Upset Abstinence Not Mentioned As Solution To Sexual Disease Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com reporter Penny Starr -- who likes to make false, alarmist claims about how morning-after pills cause abortion -- has a freakout about someone else's supposed alarmist claim in a May 19 CNS article:
Dr. Vanessa Cullins, vice president for external medical affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, says in a video that the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted disease that everyone will contract.
“In terms of sexually transmitted diseases, expect to have HPV once you become sexually intimate,” says Cullins, who is an obstetrician and gynecologist. “All of us get it.”
Starr's only source of rebuttal is Dr. Donna Harrison, "executive director and director of research and public policy at the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists," so you know it's biased:
Harrison said an HPV diagnosis can “change a woman’s life forever.”
Harrison said she also is sexually active as a married woman but she has not contracted the virus because she is in a monogamous relationship.
“That is the safest way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases,” Harrison said.
Neither Harrison nor Starr mention Gardasil, a vaccine that can prevent HPV infections, but Starr's fellow Media Research Center co-workers have been busy fearmongering about that. Her article, oddly, includes a picture marked as "HPV vaccine."
Starr doesn't seem to be upset that Planned Parenthood may be overstating the prevalence of HPV -- even she concedes that "79 million Americans are infected with the virus" -- but, instead, she's upset that Planned Parenthood and the Centers for Disease Control are living in the real world, not in her right-wing Christian world, and do not mention absinence as a way to avoid catching HPV.
Also, this Planned Parenthood video Starr is writing about is not a new one -- it was released in 2009. Starr does not explain why it took her five years to write about it.
WND's Erik Rush: My Conspiracy Theories Are True! Topic: WorldNetDaily
In his May 21 WorldNetDaily column, Erik Rush bashes a Newsweek writer's attempt to shoot down various conspiracy theories (though, characteristically, he doesn't provide a link to this article so his readers can see for themselves), complaining that Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald "mixes lies with the truth, in that he similarly mocks both the most preposterous, nearly universally rejected conspiracy theories and those that have already been proven to be factual."
He's particularly upset that Newsweek dismisses right-wing Agenda 21 freakouts as a conspiracy theory:
The “award-winning plan” to which he refers was indeed a United Nations Agenda 21 design. Like Smart Meters mandated in municipalities and then installed in private homes while local law enforcement stands menacingly by, there are literally hundreds of Agenda 21 “suggestions” in regulatory queues across America, sponsored politically and financially by radical local politicians and ideological millionaires. In my community, we certainly know who they are.
But Rush never responds to what Eichenwald has to say in debunking the Agenda 21 conspiracies:
The idea was simple: Under the auspices of the U.N., those countries expressed their interest in managing urban development and land-use policies in ways that minimized the impact on the environment. At the time, mainstream conservative and liberal politicians considered the concept to be fairly inconsequential.
No more. Extremist organizations latched on to Agenda 21 as an attempt by the U.N. and the “New World Order” to seize private property to advance the causes of communism and to crush all dissent. Death maps will be created to determine where people will be allowed to live, some of the theories go. Trees will be given the same rights as humans. Electricity companies will conduct surveillance on customers.
By 2012, the Republican National Committee—overlooking that a Republican president had signed Agenda 21—adopted a resolution slamming the document as an “insidious scheme” designed to impose a “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.” That language was toned down by the time of the Republican National Convention, but wild claims about Agenda 21 survived, saying the barely financed, unenforceable declaration was “insidious” and “erosive of American sovereignty.”
Today, the Agenda 21 conspiracy is raised around the country when local zoning boards—many of whom have never even heard of the U.N. statement—attempt to adopt development plans that control willy-nilly construction while considering environmental impact.
Rush goes on to stick to one of his more outlandish conspiracy theories:
Back in March, I revealed that a source in the intelligence community had informed me that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 was hijacked in a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored operation reeking of corporate and government intrigue, that the airliner had not crashed and that the manufacturer, Boeing, had likely been involved due to the technical implications of such an undertaking.
I was roundly ridiculed, of course, yet this week Malaysia’s influential former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused the CIA and Boeing of having done just that, describing the very scenario I outlined, and detailing how it might have been accomplished in the same way it was initially explained to me. Mohamad also charged that the missing aircraft’s current whereabouts are known to the alleged conspirators.
This is just one of the recent “conspiracy theories” and “phony scandals” that have either borne out in truth, or appear to contain more than an element of truth.
Just because a public official (or, in this case, a former public official) echoes your conspiracy theory doesn't mean that it has been "borne out in truth." You know, just like Joe Arpaio spouting birther conspiracy theories doesn't mean they've been proven true.
Cheryl K. Chumley writes in a May 20 Newsmax article:
While the United Nations and the Obama administration assert that climate change is settled science and requires dramatic regulatory oversight, 31,072 U.S. scientists have signed the Petition Project, saying the issue remains decidedly unsettled.
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition says.
Urgent: Who Is Your Choice for the GOP's 2016 Nominee?
"The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of 'settled science' and an overwhelming 'consensus' in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong," the petition asserts. "No such consensus or settled science exists."
Over 9,000 of the petition's signatories have a Ph.D. in a scientific field.
We first wrote about this petition in 2008, when the number of signees was also at around 31,000. As we noted then, few of those signees have degrees in fields related to climate science. Further, there have been more than 10.6 million science graduates as defined by Robinson's group since the 1970-71 school year, making the 31,000 on the petition a tiny fraction of that -- 0.3 percent, to be exact -- small enough that one could call it "fringe."
The rest of Chumley's article consists of right-wing talking points by climate change "skeptics."
WND's Farah Still Clings To Clinton Conspiracy Theories Topic: WorldNetDaily
The Daily Beast talked to some of the most notorious Clinton-haters of the 1990s, and finds that many of them have kept their hatred stoked for lo these many years. At the top of that list, of course, is WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, who still clings to many of the old Clinton conspiracies, like the death of Vince Voster:
“We were simply asking questions about the death of a high-ranking administration official in very peculiar circumstances, and we were just supposed to accept the conventional answers even though when you look at the forensic evidence there were a lot of questions,” said Joseph Farah, the editor of WND.com and the former head of the Western Journalism Center
In 1996, the Columbia Journalism Review described the WJC as dedicated to “trying to inject the dark view of Foster’s death into mainstream reporting and thinking. Last year, to this end, the Center bought full-page ads in several major newspapers, including The New York Times… to offer for sale special Vince Foster reports.”
That Foster was murdered, Farah says now, “is not something you will ever see me saying. I am a journalist. I don’t draw conclusions unless there is proper evidence for it. I don’t what happened but I don’t think he committed suicide in Fort Marcy Park.”
Of course, Farah is being utterly disingenuous. If you reject the idea that Foster committed suicide, the only other possible conclusion you can come to is that he was murdered.
But that's not the only thing Farah is willing to lie about. He even denies being a Clinton-hater, even though WND's early days were dripping with hatred for Clintbn:
“They called us Clinton-haters. I was never a hater,” Farah says. “But you could certainly say I was one of his enemies.”
And even with the remove of two decades, Farah stands by his reporting—although he acknowledges that not all of it was in the tradition of even-handed journalism.
“Accurate? Yes. Fairness is a nice thing that we try to do in journalism. We don’t want to smear people. We don’t want to be untruthful. But the most important thing is holding power accountable, and that is what we tried to do.”
As we have seen with WND's coverage of Obama, Farah has absolutely no problem smearing people and being untruthful.
By contrast, Newsmax's Christopher Ruddy has tried to distance himself from his Clinton-era excesses:
“At the time, I think I was just trying to do a good job as a journalist, but it was to just get caught up in this anti-Clinton movement and belief that he was a bad guy no matter what he did,” said Chris Ruddy, CEO of the conservative media company NewsMax, and close ally at the time of both Scaife and Farah.
[...]
“It becomes almost like trench warfare. You have a permanent stalemate and a permanent sense of war and anger and it keeps escalating and there is nobody to bring a truce,” Ruddy said.
He found his way out of the hysteria, he says, during the Bush years, a period which by comparison made Clinton look sober and judicious. At New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s urging, Ruddy and Scaife reached out to Clinton, and met with him for lunch at his Harlem office in 2007.
Now, he says, “I don’t feel like I did anything wrong. I think that at the time I was acting as the opposition press. Do I think it was over the top? Yes. This was 20 years ago. It was my first big adventure in journalism. I was caught up in the moment. You live and learn and you grow. Do I think it was a mistake to be attacking the president? Um… Yes, in the way I did, yes.”
Of course, true believer Farah was having none of that:
“Scaife and Ruddy have run from what they did,” said Farah. “Without any real explanation that makes any sense. You won’t see them talking about Vince Foster any more. They think Clinton has grown up since leaving the presidency, that he is somehow a changed man. Well, maybe they are the ones that changed.”
Farah has not changed -- he's as willing to spew hate and lies as ever.
Terry Jeffrey rants in a May 21 CNSNews.com column:
Two Senate committees held hearings this month on the nomination of Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell to succeed Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services, the federal agency most responsible for overseeing implementation of Obamacare.
In these two hearings, according to transcripts published by CQ Transcriptions, the senators and the nominee spoke approximately 49,000 words. Not one of these words directly addressed the contraception-sterilization-abortion-inducing drug regulation that Sebelius issued under Obamacare and that is now the target of more than 90 lawsuits.
[...]
The central question in the lawsuits filed against Sebelius is whether the federal government can force Americans into complicity with the taking of innocent human life by compelling them to buy or provide health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs.
[...]
As the enforcer, Burwell will effectively tell Americans: Under Obamacare's individual mandate, you must buy health insurance, and under our regulation, that insurance must cover abortion-inducing drugs.
As we've repeatedlydocumented, no drugs that fit the medical definition of "abortion-inducing drugs" are covered by Obamacare.
Why must Jeffrey and CNS continue to lie about this provision?
WND Thinks People Getting Robbed Is 'Delicious' Topic: WorldNetDaily
A May 21 WorldNetDaily article by Jay Baggett carries the headline "Delicious irony at 'no guns allowed' restaurants." What was that "delicious irony"? A robbery:
The armed robber who shot and robbed a 20-year-old man outside this Houston Jack in the Box Sunday probably didn’t know the fast-food chain had only nine days earlier banned guns at their restaurants.
Or maybe he didn’t care.
Or maybe he realized his chances of encountering meaningful resistance were slim.
The shooting came on the heels of the chain capitulating to demands by the anti-gun activist group Mothers Demand Action that law-abiding gunowners be banned from bringing their weapons into the restaurants.
“Creating a warm and inviting environment for all of our guests and employees is a top priority for Jack in the Box,” read the corporation’s news release. “The presence of guns inside a restaurant could create an uncomfortable situation for our guests and employees and lead to unintended consequences. While we respect the rights of all our guests, we would prefer that guests not bring their guns inside our restaurants.”
Unfortunately, defenseless customers create a “warm and inviting environment” for the wrong people.
How callous and amoral is WND that it finds schadenfreude in someone being the victim of a crime?
AIM's Kincaid Is Still Promoting Falsehood-Prone Joel Gilbert Topic: Accuracy in Media
WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi is not the only right-winger who's sticking with Joel Gilbert.
Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid follows in Corsi's footsteps by devoting a May 20 column to Gilbert's latest Obama-bashing film. Kincaid lionizes Gilbert as "the filmmaker who exposed Barack Obama’s Marxist background, and debt to a pro-Soviet Communist Party operative," and proclaims that Gilbert's previous film, "Dreams From My Real Father," "examined the hidden history of America’s first black president in a serious and matter-of-fact manner."
Kincaid, of course, refuses to acknowledge that "Dreams From My Real Father" has been utterly discredited and Gilbert himself exposed as a charlatan unconcerned with facts or reality. But Kincaid has alwaysignored that particular truth.
Kincaid works for an outfit called Accuracy in Media, yet he champions a filmmaker notorious for his inaccuracy. Funny, that.
The Perfect WND Storm: Corsi Quotes A Birther to Defend Criminal D'Souza Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi inadvertently reveals the ulterior motive for sticking up for admitted criminal Dinesh D'Souza and perpetuating the notion of an Obama conspiracy against him: He wants to help D'Souza cash in on his next movie.
Getting prosecuted by the Obama Justice Department is likely to increase the box office for Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary, “America,” scheduled to open in theaters July 4, according to some Hollywood observers.
If the Obama administration had calculated that a criminal prosecution would silence him, as some critics charge, D’Souza appears to have turned the tables. The early consensus is that D’Souza has affirmed the Hollywood truism about publicity.
Moreover, even if D’Souza is sentenced to prison, he remains out on bail until the fall, free to promote his upcoming documentary without restrictions.
Even better from a marketing point of view, D’Souza, by advancing the theme of “selective prosecution,” has succeeded in positioning himself as yet another member of an Obama “enemies list” that extends far beyond the tea party.
“In Hollywood, any publicity, good or bad, is better than no publicity at all,” said Bettina Viviano, a successful Hollywood producer who includes among her credits having worked as vice president of production for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.
She told WND that with “the IRS scandal targeting tea-party conservatives, a lot of people are on to the theme that the Obama administration targets its enemies.”
“People are smart enough to know that Dinesh D’Souza was targeted by the Obama administration,” she said.
Corsi doesn't mention that Viviano is a birther who got some right-wing ink claiming without evidence that Bill Clinton once claimed that Obama wasn't eligible to be president.
To sum up: Birther and Obama-hater Corsi quotes a fellow birther to defend an admitted criminal (and, yes, an Obama-hater). It's the quintessential WND article.
The Very Uncivil Brent Bozell Lectures On Civility Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell and Tim Graham write in a May 21 column:
Just before the 2010 midterms, Comedy Central star Jon Stewart drew a large crowd to Washington to celebrate a "Rally for Sanity." He gave a closing speech, intended to be inspirational and not comical, on how "we can have animus and not be enemies."
The same man who succeeded in convincing CNN to cancel "Crossfire" in 2004 because its squabbles were "hurting the country" felt the need to sermonize about overdoing caricatures of our political opponents on television. This raises the question: Does this man watch his own show?
"The country's 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder," Stewart proclaimed in his address. "The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing."
Simply put, Stewart is lecturing the media not to behave like ... Stewart.
That's right. The man who likened President Obama to a "skinny ghetto crackhead," verbally abuses his fellow TV panelists, and hires misogynists as employees -- among numerous other examples of incivility -- is lecturing Jon Stewart about civility.
Mychal Massie's Favorite Racist, Donald Sterling Topic: WorldNetDaily
Mychal Massie asserts how down he is with Donald Sterling's racist sentiments in his May 19 WorldNetDaily column:
Donald Sterling has been treated unjustly; I’ve said it before, and I remain recalcitrant pursuant to that opinion. Mr. Sterling is being used by race-mongers and melanin pimps as validation of institutional racism – which loosely translated means the modern-day equivalents of Joseph Goebbels are using Mr. Sterling’s private conversation as proof that in America, rich white men are impeding progress for blacks.
For those who remember the riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers charged with beating Rodney King, America was told that the malevolent voices, those such as Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, et al., represented blacks nationwide. The only problem is, that wasn’t remotely the case. In fact it can be validly argued that it was precisely because of the malicious heterodoxy and vitriol of those who supposedly spoke for all blacks that black conservatives organized and made their presence known.
We are witnessing another such seminal moment with respect to Mr. Sterling. Persons of color who understand and believe in the Constitution support his right to the free expression of his personal opinions.
[...]
I do not condemn the words of a person such as Mr. Sterling because in America we are privileged to have the right to express our opinions, especially when it comes to the practices of someone we are involved with. I do not view the words of Mr. Sterling as harmful to me as an American of color or to anyone else.
Massie is particularly down with Sterling's opinions about Magic Johnson:
As a father, I have referenced Magic Johnson as a successful businessman, but he is not the person I would hold up as a model for my son. Johnson, by his own admission, lived a debauched lifestyle. He not only endangered himself with his selfish pursuit of sexual gratification, but he also endangered his family and those he was sexually active with. He is not to be championed as a safe-sex advocate, i.e., just wear a condom; he is to be used as an example of why we should teach abstinence and restraint to our children.
But those who espouse commonality for blacks are loath to admit that. They want blacks to be governed by anger and resentment that’s used to tether them to a past when blacks suffered indignities, and to use anecdotal evidences of same as proving the perceived pandemic of institutional racism argued to exist today.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Watch-Chihuahua Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center launches MRC Latino, despite the fact that it has not been historically friendly toward Hispanics or their issues. Read more >>
WND's Jack Wheeler Is On An Obama Derangement Roll Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Wheeler resurfaced at WorldNetDaily a couple weeks back to peddle his brand of Obama derangement. He's apparently on a derangement roll because he has more deep thoughts to share with the world.
in his May 19 column, Wheeler laments that impeachment is too cumbersome and that "there is a much faster and easier way to eject Obama from office. It is the law that can put him in jail." Wheeler unearths the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from authorizing an expenditure exceeding the amount appropriated for it.
What does that have to do with Obama? Wheeler sorta explains:
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has provided 76 examples of Obama’s lawlessness. In each instance, it cost federal government money to implement them. Were any of these implementations authorized by a congressional appropriation? For every one that wasn’t, that’s one count of violating the Antideficiency Act. Every count of which the defendant is found guilty can mean two years in jail.
Mr. Obama needs to be prosecuted in violation of the Antideficiency Act. He can be criminally prosecuted, per §1350, for knowingly and willfully violating it.
Note, however, that §1349 only requires violation of the act (without the knowing/willful qualifier) for the perpetrator to be suspended and removed from office.
First, as we've previously noted, a significant number of Cruz's "76 examples of Obama’s lawlessness" aren't even true. Second, if Wikipedia is to be believed, nobody has ever been prosecuted, let alone indicted, for violating this law.
But Wheeler isn't about to let reality get in his way:
We have the Constitution and the specific federal law to put an end to the tyranny. It’s time to go on offense. All patriots now have the opportunity to actively encourage Republican governors to have their state prosecute the president and to help conservative law firms build their case.
The Antideficiency Act is the means by which Mr. Obama can be thrown out of office and go to jail. Let’s use it.
If Wheeler has not met Larry Klayman, a similarly reality-challenged Obama-hater, WND should really introduce those two.
Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Accuracy in Media Edition Topic: Accuracy in Media
The resignation of Barack Obama would be a victory for the American people, create an opportunity for the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law and allow citizens to regain control of the government. At the same time, the departure of Obama will elicit a torrent of revelations that will likely taint the highest officials in government, the leadership of both political parties and the upper echelons of the media.
Like Obama, the establishment considers itself too big to fail, but no government can survive if the interests of its officials conflict with those of the people.
It is time for Obama to resign and let a hopelessly corrupt government fail.
-- Lawrence Sellin, May 20 Accuracy in Media column
Shailene Woodley is fast-rising movie star, and at age 22, she's already thrown the country's most uptight feminists into a tizzy.
CNSNews.com reporter Penny Starr -- who likes to make 
In his May 21 WorldNetDaily 
Cheryl K. Chumley writes in a May 20 Newsmax 
The Daily Beast 
Terry Jeffrey rants in a May 21 CNSNews.com 
WorldNetDaily's 
Jerome Corsi inadvertently reveals the ulterior motive for sticking up for admitted criminal Dinesh D'Souza and 
Brent Bozell and Tim Graham write in a May 21 
Mychal Massie asserts how down he is with Donald Sterling's racist sentiments in his May 19 WorldNetDaily 
Jack Wheeler 
The resignation of Barack Obama would be a victory for the American people, create an opportunity for the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law and allow citizens to regain control of the government. At the same time, the departure of Obama will elicit a torrent of revelations that will likely taint the highest officials in government, the leadership of both political parties and the upper echelons of the media.
