Terry Jeffrey's Immigration Metaphor Misfire Topic: CNSNews.com
Terry Jeffrey writes in his July 16 CNSNews.com column:
Sam, the wealthiest man in his neighborhood, lives in a big beautiful house with a massive backyard punctuated by a large, deep swimming pool.
While Sam is personally not very fond of children — he supports abortion on demand and believes the government should force all employers to offer female workers free sterilizations — he nonetheless lives in a neighborhood that teems with little ones.
The children are particularly attracted to Sam's beautiful pool — and, on those rare occasions when Sam is actually in his backyard, he frequently finds himself shooing these children away.
Worried relatives have repeatedly warned Sam that he ought to build a fence around his yard — or at least around his pool — to guard against the awful possibility that a neighborhood child might otherwise drown.
But Sam does not want a fence. He objects that it would mar the aesthetics of his yard, and that if some kid really wanted to get into the pool he could climb over the fence.
So, should Sam build one? If he went out one morning and found a boy had drowned in his pool, would he have some culpability for that child's unnecessary death?
The answers are yes and yes.
And, although it is not a perfect analogy, Sam's pool is a little like Uncle Sam's territory near our border with Mexico.
There is no doubt people are tempted to enter U.S. property without the permission of the U.S. government. There is also no doubt this can be a dangerous, even deadly, thing to do.
No, Mr. Jeffrey, your analogy isn't perfect -- heck, it's not even remotely analogous. The act of crossing the border isn't deadly, and America is not an "attractive nuisance" like an unfenced pool where something could go wrong simply by being in the presence of it.
Jeffrey goes on to cite the example of a teenager from Guatemala whose body was found in Texas. But the United States didn't kill him; the trip from Guatemala likely played a factor.
If Jeffrey wants a more perfect analogy, he should have that unfenced pool surrounded by miles of barbed wire, thorns and a few land mines thrown in for good measure.
If Jeffrey thinks America is an unfenced pool in need of a double-layer fence with armed border guards, he clearly doesn't understand anything about immigration. But given his previous attempt at analogy, we already knew that.
CNS Parses Diplomatic Deaths Under Bush To Keep Benghazi Alive Topic: CNSNews.com
Patrick Goodenough didn't like Bill Clinton's highlighting how Republican members of Congress failed to criticize deaths of embassy personnel during attacks occurring under the Bush administration the way they are freaking out over Benghazi, and he devoted a June 30 CNSNews.com article to parse how Clinton's criticism is purportedly meaningless:
Unstated by the former president, however, was the fact that those U.S. diplomatic personnel who were killed during the George W. Bush administration died in circumstances other than an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission:
[...]
U.S. diplomatic missions around the world did come under attack a number of times during the Bush years, but those attacks killed foreigners, and in some cases American civilians – not serving U.S. diplomatic personnel:
Gotta love how Goodenough insists those deaths under the Bush administraiton don't count because they don't fit the exact circumstances of Benghazi.
Is CNS really this desperate to keep Benghazi alive that it must portray other deaths as insignificant by comparision?
CNS' Jeffrey Is Obsessively Counting Obama's Words Again Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey really did devote an entire July 11 article to this piece of worthless trivia:
Not counting instances when he quoted a letter from a citizen or cited dialogue from a movie, President Barack Obama used the first person singular--including the pronouns "I" and "me" and the adjective "my"--199 times in a speech he delivered Thursday vowing to use unilateral executive action to achieve his policy goals that Congress would not enact through the normal, constitutional legislative process.
Jeffrey is bizarrely upset that Obama's speech does not favorably compare to the Gettysburg address:
The White House presented Obama’s speech, which the president delivered at Austin’s Paramount Theatre, as “Remarks by the President on the Economy.” The remarks, the White House reports, ran 40 minutes, and the full transcript (including annotations for “laughter” and “applause”) is more than 5,500 words.
By contrast, President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettyburg Address was only 272 words--and did not include any form of the first person singular.
In President Obama’s speech, he used a first person singular, on average, every 12 seconds. At that rate, had Obama spoken for just 15 more minutes, he would have used the first person singular more than 272 times in one speech—exceeding all the words in the Gettysburg Address.
In one 68-word passage--in which he vowed to act unilaterally if Congress did not enact legislation he liked--Obama used the first person singular five more times than the zero times Lincoln used it in his 272 words at Gettysburg.
Jeffrey and CNS have a weird fixation on the words Obama uses -- Jeffrey even devoted a column to Obama's supposedly excessive use of the first person back in 2009. This ignores the fact that one analysis found “Obama has distinguished himself as the lowest I-word user of any of the modern presidents.”
CNS' Jeffrey Touts Pat Buchanan's Whitewashing Of Southern Strategy Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey spends his July 9 column slobbering over Pat Buchanan's new book on his work for the Nixon presidential campaign:
Wherever Nixon's merits and demerits place him among American presidents, Buchanan's first-person chronicle of how Nixon climbed back from a humiliating defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election to win the presidency in 1968 is not just a unique and enduring look at one of this nation's most interesting political campaigns but at a decade that changed America forever.
[...]
Buchanan's book is a great story told by a great storyteller. Along the way are first-person anecdotes that not only reveal how Buchanan's boss plotted and executed what may indeed have been the greatest comeback in American political history, but also how he prepared himself to use the presidency he won to deal with great international problems, including the Vietnam War and U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and China.
Jeffrey goes on to highlight one piece of Buchanan's work:
Buchanan anchored the right flank of Nixon's immediate staff, and part of his job was to help keep the conservative movement — which had backed Goldwater in 1964 — in Nixon's camp for 1968.
Beyond that was a longer-term political vision. "The crucial elements of the new majority I had in mind," writes Buchanan, "were the solid centrist GOP base that had stood by Nixon in 1960, the rising conservative movement, to which I belonged, the 'northern Catholic ethnics' of German, Irish, Italian, Polish and other East European descent, and the Southern Protestants, who saw themselves as abandoned by a Democratic Party moving leftward."
Jeffrey won't tell you, but Buchanan's plan is better known as the Southern Strategy -- which in large part sought to recruit racist whites unnerved by blacks' voting rights being protected.That was one of several racially divisive strategies Buchanan sought to implement on Nixon's behalf.
But Jeffrey doesn't want you to know that. After all, CNS also published Buchanan's column touting his whitewash.
CNS Still Considers Spending On LGBT Issues To Be A Waste of Money Topic: CNSNews.com
Last year, we documented how CNSNews.com's "Waste Watch" list disproportionately portrayed LGBT-related issues as evidence of wasteful federal spending. It's still doing it.
The latest "Waste Watch" item appears as a July 1 article by Melanie Hunter:
The National Institutes of Health has awarded $357,783 to the Fenway Community Health Center in Boston, Mass., to reduce health disparities in LGBTQ youth of color.
The purpose of the grant is described as “to establish a sustainable community-based participatory research process to reduce health disparities among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth of color.”
According to the grant, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) youth of color abuse alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, engage in risky sexual behaviors, and attempt suicide “in high rates that are disproportionate to those of both white LGBTQ youth and heterosexual youth of color.”
Hunter didn't explain why she considers improving the health of gay youth to be a waste of money.
The latest employment numbers were very good news, with 288,000 new jobs created and the unemployment rate falling to 6.1 percent. But what's good news for the economy under a Democratic president is bad news for CNSNews.com, so it had a mission: Bury that good news under a pile of cherry-picked numbers.
And CNS did just that with an onslaught of articles:
None of these articles mentioned the fact that 288,000 jobs were created in June.
Additionally, an article by Penny Starr quoted an officials with the right-wing group Generation Opportunity -- described by Starr only as "a Millinneal think tank" with no mention of its ideological slant -- claiming that “My generation needs more jobs." That article, too, failed to mention that 288,000 jobs were created in June.
CNS Falsely Links Border Crisis to DREAM Act Topic: CNSNews.com
A June 26 CNSNews.com article by Brittany M. Hughes, detailing her visit to an overcrowded detention facility in Texas for the influx of Central American refugees currently crossing the border, carries the misleading headline "The ‘DREAM Act’ I Saw."
But the surge in refugees has nothing whatsoever to do with the DREAM Act, which was never implemented. A separate CNS article appears to concede this, approvingly quoting a bishop pointing out that the influx is primarily caused by "the rise of violence against children, fomented by organized criminal networks, including drug cartels. They act with impunity, threatening families and coercing children and youth to join their membership or face violence or even death."
Further, even if the DREAM Act -- which would provide a path to citizenship for certain children of illegal immigrants -- had been implemented, it wouldn't apply to the current influx of refugees. The act would apply only to those who were in the U.S. before June 2007.
CNS Equates Gays With Satanists Topic: CNSNews.com
The Media Research Center has an anti-gayagenda, so why wouldn't its "news" division try to portray gays as satanists? That's exactly what CNS managing editor Michael Chapman does in a June 11 article headlined "Satanic Temple: Gay Marriage is 'a Sacrament’":
While Chapman goes on to admit that the Satanic Temple considers heterosexual marriage to be as much of a sacrament as gay marriage, much of the article is given over to "why TST focuses on gay rights." It's clear that the only reason this article exists is for Chapman to liken homosexuality to satanism.
After all, CNS is part of an organization with an anti-gay agenda, so of course Chapman would do this.
CNS' Hollingsworth Serves As Right-Wing Stenographer Yet Again Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's Barbara Hollingsworth has a disturbingtradition of simply serving as a stenographer of right-wing talking points, making no effort to seek out an alternative view. She does this again in a May 29 CNS article in which she regurgitates "eight pervasive 'myths' about the Affordable Care Act," as claimed by the right-wing National Center for Policy Analysis.
Hollingsworth simply takes the NCPA's word for their claims and makes no apparent effort to seek out any response.
The sad thing is, Hollingsworth is a senior editor at CNS. You'd think someone claiming a title of senior editor would be capable of doing more than copying right-wing talking points. That's apparently not how that works at CNS.
The U.S. economy added 217,000 jobs in May, pusing the number of jobs in the country past its pre-recession peak -- but you'll never read about that at CNSNews.com.
Following its anti-Obama agenda, CNS once again ignored good news about jobs to cherry-pick stats that make Obama look bad, as demonstrated in two articles by Ali Meyer:
The fact that Meyer could find only two statistics to cherry-pick shows that there is little bad news about the economy for her to report. That just goes to show once again that good news for America is bad news for CNS.
CNS Afghanistan Body Count Obsession Watch Topic: CNSNews.com
cns'CNSNews.com's Afghanistan body-count obsession resurfaced last month, and now Ali Meyer keeps feeding the body-count beast with a June 2 article:
Eighty-six percent of the U.S. troops who have been wounded in the war in Afghanistan incurred their injuries after January 2009, the month President Barack Obama was first inaugurated, according to the Department of Defense.
Unusual for CNS, Meyer does acknowledge the existence of war casualties before Obama became president, noting that 'From 2003 until the first quarter of 2009, the majority of the major limb amputations due to battle injuries occurred in [Operation Iraqi Freedom]." But she doesn't mention who was president from 2003 to early 2009 (hint: it wasn't Obama).
CNS Blogger Cheers Putin's Disrespect of Obama Topic: CNSNews.com
Barbara Boland devotes a May 23 CNSNews.com blog post to expressing her pleasure that Russia's Vladimir Putin dissed President Obama and got cheered for doing so:
Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to Obama's accusations that he's lied about the Ukraine with: "Who is he to judge? Who is he to judge, seriously? If he wants to judge, why doesn't he get a job in court somewhere."
Putin's answer brought cheers and clapping from the crowd at the St. Petersburg economic conference where he was interviewed.
The CNBC interviewer asked Putin: "You have said 'we are a room full of adults,' so let's have an adult conversation. President Obama has accused you of untruths, as you know, when it comes to supporting some of the separatist groups in the Ukraine..."
Putin responded through an interpreter:
"Who is he to judge? Who is he to judge, seriously?" The crowd began to laugh and clap. "If he wants to judge people, why doesn't he get a job in court somewhere?"
"I don't think he accused me," Putin added for emphasis. "It's his point of view. And I have my point of view when he comes to certain things."
Then, after a pause, "What is it that interested you about what [Obama] said?"
At that point, both the interviewer and the crowd broke out in laughter.
Boland certainly does not disapprove of Putin's insult. Perhaps she should move to Russia if she prefers him as a leader.
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.
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?
Since October 2001, when the Afghanistan war began, 1,798 children and 1,107 widows had their loved ones pass away in the conflict, according to CNSNews.com’s database of U.S. casualties.
In the more than 12 years that have passed since U.S. troops first entered Afghanistan, 2,195 service personnel have given their lives in and around Afghanistan in support of U.S. military activities in that country. Those 2,195 men and women left behind a combined 2,905 widows and children -- 2,083 of those widows and children, or 71.7%, came after President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009.
As has happened so often in CNS' Afghanistan body count obsession, two words are missing from Meyer's article: "Bush" and "Iraq." Meyer does not identify the president who presided over more than 4,000 U.S. troop deaths in Iraq -- or 28.3 percent of the deaths in Afghanistan -- nor has CNS made an effort to count up the widows and orphans of troops killed in Iraq.
Terry Jeffrey writes in his July 16 CNSNews.com column:
Patrick Goodenough didn't like Bill Clinton's highlighting how Republican members of Congress failed to criticize deaths of embassy personnel during attacks occurring under the Bush administration the way they are freaking out over Benghazi, and he devoted a June 30 CNSNews.com 
Last year, we 
CNSNews.com's Barbara Hollingsworth has a 
The U.S. economy 
Barbara Boland devotes a May 23 CNSNews.com 
CNSNews.com reporter Penny Starr -- who likes to make 
