When the Washington Post reported last week that the federal government had decided to stop serving pork to federal prison inmates, citing unpopularity and cost, it quoted Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations saying that the decision would prompt anti-Islam groups would spin the decision into a case of the federal government acting under pressure from Muslims, adding: “This is just the kind of thing that drives them crazy. ... It will stoke the fires of Islamophobia based on the usual conspiracy theories.”

Cue the ConWeb, which used the Post story to build their own articles, done in their own biased style.

Newsmax gave its story the full top-of-front-page treatment on Oct. 9:

The article, by Greg Richter, made sure to prominently mention CAIR.

CNSNews.com gave it a "CNSNews.com Staff" byline that also prominently featured CAIR, but took Hooper's comment out of context, claiming that he "warned that it might spark 'Islamophobia.'" Well, no, Hooper warned specifically that anti-Islam groups like CNS would do that.Curiously, CNS cited only the unpopularity angle, failing to mention the government's claim that pork was too pricey -- a strange omission given how close an eagle eye CNS normally keeps on government spending.

WorldNetDaily was a little late to the party, with an Oct. 13 article by Douglas Ernst (like fellow WNDer Cheryl Chumley, someone for whom the Washington Times apparently wasn't right-wing enough) going straight for the conspiratiorial angle:

The Obama administration wants Americans to believe federal prisoners are so unlike the rest of the world they even hate bacon.

The federal Bureau of Prisons is removing pork products from its menu. The decision will affect 200,000 inmates.

Ernst also made sure to mention CAIR but, like Newsmax, didn't mention Hooper's statement about the Islamophobia that would come from anti-Muslim groups over the decision -- you know, like WND.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:06 PM EDT

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Friend, this administration seems literally hell-bent on silencing Christians, taking away private gun ownership, opening our borders to illegals and even promising them schooling, health care, driver’s licenses and especially voting rights, while he and his appointed attorney general announced they didn’t intend to enforce immigration laws!

The current captain of our ship thumbs his nose at the Constitution and to the intended equal authority of Congress. He and his hoped-for successors actively promote homosexual activists, Muslims and actual Communists to created regulatory positions, gathering to themselves uninhibited, absolutely unconstitutional powers.

Can you not feel this ship tilting to its side, dangerously close to capsizing? If Communists and Islamists were to create and put in place a puppet to do their bidding, toward the actual destruction of our very vessel, they could hardly have furthered their purpose better than this president has. Trading known terrorist leaders already in custody for a pathetic deserter, claiming “we never leave our own behind.” Negotiating with our sworn enemy, guaranteeing they will have nuclear capability, and even granting them billions of dollars to fund their goals of destroying Israel and America – this isn’t just a nightmare.

It’s real. It’s happening. Our ship is sinking. Can’t you feel it?

-- Obama-hater Pat Boone, Oct. 12  WorldNetDaily column

Posted by Terry K. at 12:44 PM EDT

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How is CNSNews.com hating on gays lately? Here's a couple of examples.

Melanie Hunter did another of her "how dare the federal government fund gay things!" articles, an Oct. 9 piece complaining that "The National Institutes of Health has awarded $603,412 to the University of Pittsburgh for a five-year study of patterns of healthy aging among gay men." Here's the image CNS chose to illustrate Hunter's article with:

Then, an Oct. 12 column by  Eric Metaxas warns against young-adult literature that isn't sufficiently hateful of gays:

If your teens read a lot, and I hope they do, they’re bound to come across books that promote the gay lifestyle. What to do about that next.

The way to win over a culture is to capture the minds and hearts of its young people. The gay-rights movement has certainly learned that lesson, which helps explain a current trend in youth literature. Anyone who reads books for teens these days will tell you that portrayals of gay relationships and characters are rapidly increasing.

In fact, they’re increasing to the point where they’re all out of proportion to reality. If you know the statistics on rates of homosexuality in the real world, you know that it’s somewhere around 3 percent, maybe less. Not so in the world of Young Adult fiction; there, it’s far more pervasive.

Book reviewers on the Youth Reads page at our website BreakPoint.org, are noticing that the subject is coming up in more and more contemporary teen novels. It doesn’t matter if they’re romances or fantasy novels or any other genre—the theme runs through all kinds of books for this age group. Acclaimed author Rainbow Rowell is just one prominent recent example. She wrote a bestselling young adult book about a college girl who writes stories about a gay couple—and then Rowell wrote her own young adult book about the gay couple in her character’s stories!

Metaxas' column is headlined "Disproportionately Gay: Alarming Trend in Youth Lit." Metaxas did not identify what he considered to be a suitably proportionate number of gay characters in young-adult literature, nor did he identify an enforcement mechanism he would use to achieve that desired proportion.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:57 PM EDT

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The Media Research Center's self-promotional efforts tend to feature the grim visage of founder and president Brent Bozell -- not unlike, say, how they do things in North Korea.

This no doubt feeds Bozell's ego -- it's obvious he has a large enough of one to insist on being the face of the MRC, though his photogenicity is up for debate. This is the guy, after all, who spent 15-plus years stealing the credit from the guy who actually wrote his syndicated column, so he clearly wants as much glory for himself as he can get.

So now the MRC is promoting its little dress-up "Gala" shindig devoted to mocking its political enemies, and here's the image it's using:

And what was Bozell so happy about in that photo? To read the description on the MRC page to which the happy-Bozell image links, it appears he was leading the Two Minutes Hate that the MRC Gala apparently is:

MRC President Brent Bozell asked the audience to show their derision, via jeers and noisemakers, of quotes from Lawrence O’Donnell, [Ayman] Mohyeldin and analysts on CNN led by Sally Kohn, who had won a news category earlier in the program. The audience’s very obvious preference was confirmed by Bozell and the presenters and acceptors brought on stage to judge the audience’s reaction.

And then there's this, in which Bozell makes sure his role is noted:

The MRC opened the post-dinner program with Bozell honoring Phyllis Schlafly with the MRC’s ninth annual “William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence.” Schlafly accepted via remarks on video in which she praised the MRC for “playing a big role” in getting out “the proper, needed information.”

Note: Not necessarily accurate or truthful information, but the "proper" information. Again, just like North Korea.

It all comes off as a propaganda operation instead of any sort of "media research," with Bozell attempting to create a cult of personality around himself.

Funny thing is, it was just a few weeks ago that the MRC was accusing Stephen Colbert of leading a "cult of personality." All the better to distract attention from the boss, it seems.

Posted by Terry K. at 4:17 PM EDT

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We've documented how Ben Carson is completely wrong about the idea that gun control laws enabled the Nazis and the Holocaust -- turns out that unless you were a Jew or another persecuted class in Nazi Germany, gun control didn't really exist -- and how the Media Research Center's "news" division, CNSNews.com, didn't see fit to fact-check Carson, instead presenting his false assertions as if they were true.

The MRC is now going one step further by claiming the truth doesn't actually matter.

In his Oct. 10 NewsBusters post, Jeffrey Lord actually whines about Carson being fact-checked:

Media firestorm to follow - immediately. From the Huffington Post to ABC  to Time and more (and more!) the liberal media was out there to dismiss Carson’s comments to Wolf Blitzer’s quite legit question as somehow as wacko as it was inflammatory. Even the Anti-Defamation League jumped in to say that Carson’s remarks were "historically inaccurate and offensive."

Stop.

One has to wonder, do all these media outlets have anybody working for them who is familiar with history?

Actually, yes, they do -- hence all the fact-checking. At no point in his post does Lord refute any of it. Instead, he declares that "In fact, to the question of whether gun-toting Jews could have impeded Hitler the answer was long, long ago answered. And the answer is a decided yes." And he cites the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as if that could be retroactive.

In other words? In other words what Dr. Carson is suggesting -- specifically that a massively armed  Jewish population could have severely hampered Hitler’s Holocaust -- is supported by the true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In which a relatively small minority of Jews inside the ghetto, with a minimum amount of, according to the Holocaust Museum, “mostly pistols and explosives”  managed to “sufficiently disorient” the Nazis and “suspend further deportations” to the death camps, at least delaying the inevitable. Even more importantly, as word spread of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising it “inspired other uprisings in ghettos (e.g., Bialystok and Minsk) and killing centers (Treblinka and Sobibor).”

One can only imagine the damage that could have been inflicted on Hitler’s thugs as they rose to power in the early 1930’s if the Jewish population had been as well armed as the American populace is today.

Lord's focus on guns ignores the fact that gun restrictions for Jews in Nazi Germany were far from the only thing that targeted them. Mother Jones reports:

"But guns didn't play a particularly important part in any event," says Robert Spitzer, who chairs SUNY-Cortland's political science department and has extensively researched gun control politics. Gun ownership in Germany after World War I, even among Nazi Party members, was never widespread enough for a serious civilian resistance to the Nazis to have been anything more than a Tarantino revenge fantasy. If Jews had been better armed, Spitzer says, it would only have hastened their demise. Gun policy "wasn't the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group."

The truly hilarious thing is that Lord titled his post "Ben Carson, Guns, and the Holocaust: Doesn't History Matter?" Not to Lord, obviously.

Posted by Terry K. at 9:57 PM EDT

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Almost before the bodies of the Umpqua Community College shooting victims were cold, Barack Obama was lecturing the American people: “We collectively are answerable to the families who lost loved ones.”

Obama seethed like a child. (The people have told Obama to pound sand every time he’s tried to exploit a tragedy and install gun control.)

This Marxist doesn’t care about the shooting victims. But he knows that as long as we are armed, he can’t assert total control over us.

[...]

I would not say, Mr. President, that you are directly responsible for the Oregon massacre. Only the killer is. What I can answer, though, is the question of who is more “answerable” for the Oregon massacre: the American people or you. Mr. President, you win that one hands down.

-- Jesse Lee Peterson, Oct. 4 WorldNetDaily column

Every time I see or even hear Obama’s voice I have a visceral reaction, and his “commie take-our-guns-away” speech in the immediate aftermath of the Oregon mass shooting was a prime example of what invokes my contempt for him.

Obama’s rush to the microphone to give a national speech was an unconscionable act of self-promotion and an opportunity to further his goal of abrogating the Second Amendment.

A true leader would have sought to comfort the grieving families and the horror stricken community as a whole. But a narcissistic megalomaniac would seize the moment to do exactly what Obama did – turn the tragedy into a treatise about himself.

[...]

Obama isn’t a leader – he is a usurper. He is a usurper of privilege and a usurper of what America has to offer to the extent that it benefits him personally. Additionally, he is a destroyer. Obama doesn’t look forward to a better America; he looks forward to an America created in the image of Saul Alinsky.

Obama envisions a government based on nationalism and collectivism. Even worse, Obama is bereft of propriety but filled with ghetto hubris and the pop-culture swagger of commonality.

The dark hand of fate presented Obama with another opportunity to lead. Instead he reduced a moment that could have defined his time in office as having a brief modicum of decorum, to one of base commonality, lies and attempted subjugation.

-- Mychal Massie, Oct. 5 WND column

It is instructive that Obama rages at conservatives and scapegoats the weapons themselves rather than the criminals involved or the state of the human condition that underlies their actions.

It is remarkable that he demands an unconstitutional and meaningless change in the laws purportedly to save innocent lives but vigorously opposes all laws that would protect innocent babies in the womb.

And it is disgraceful that he seeks to inflame our emotions to seduce us into ignoring the facts and suspending our critical faculties long enough to surrender our vital Second Amendment rights.

-- David Limbaugh, Oct. 5 WND column

My track record on these things has gotten pretty good, so I’m willing to go out on a limb here:

The Internet forum milieu would be the perfect opportunity for covert psychological operations (i.e., grooming disaffected individuals to commit violence) on a mass scale. It would be child’s play for a government (ours, for the sake of argument) to set up or infiltrate such venues and enlist online “handlers” to cultivate relationships with the losers present, manipulating them psychologically with an expertise similar to that of, say, President Obama’s celebrated Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST).

My guess is that it would be the handlers themselves who occasionally leak information concerning acts of violence about to be executed by their protégés, in order to energize the remaining contingent of “beta males” when the mayhem does in fact take place.

-- Erik Rush, Oct. 7 WND column

What of the current president, Barrack Hussein Obama, aka Barry Soetoro?

Barry cries out the plea for necessity whenever a criminal pulls the trigger. He says he wants to keep America safe. Therefore, he wants to get rid of the guns! How does he want to do that? He wants to disarm you. This is also the same man who voted 242 times to make sure babies are murdered in the womb.

He does this while he has 25 armed, gun-toting Secret Service members in view when he goes out in public to protect himself from the people that he is to serve.

-- Bradlee Dean, Oct. 8 WND column

As if that were not bad enough, the pre-final draft of the Treaty of Paris, establishing a bureaucratic-centralist, totalitarian global government powerful over all and elected by none, has now been published. It is a Magna Carta of enslavement and subjugation. Mr. Obama, who hates America, will of course sign it, and at a stroke of his communist pen bring to an end two centuries of freedom, democracy and prosperity.

-- Christopher Monckton, Oct. 11 WND column

Posted by Terry K. at 8:47 AM EDT

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Melanie Hunter was in full stenography mode in an Oct. 9 CNSNews.com article:

GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday that the “likelihood” of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler accomplishing his goals in the Holocaust “would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”

“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” said Carson.

[...]

“So just clarify: If there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would 6 million Jews have been slaughtered?” Blitzer asked.

“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” responded Carson.

“Because they had a powerful military machine, as you know, the Nazis,” said Blitzer.

“I understand that,” said Carson.

“They could have simply gone in, and they did go in and wipe out whole communities,” said Blitzer.

“But you realize there was a reason that they took the guns first, right?” Carson replied.

Hunter didn't see fit to investigate the accuracy of Carson's statement -- apparently she believes, as the rest of CNS seems to, that statements by conservatives are axiomatically true. But Carson's statements regarding gun control in Nazi Germany are fundamentally false.

The people were, in fact, armed. Alex Seitz-Wald explained in 2013 that the Nazis actually deregulated gun possession for most Germans and exempted some classes of people, such as Nazi party members. The only Germans who were subject to any sort of severe form of gun control were Jews and other persecuted classes.

What isolated incidents there were of Jews fighting back against the Nazis tended to be ruthlessly crushed, as the Huffington Post notes; the famous Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 resulted in the deaths of about 13,000 Jews and just 20 Nazis.

Even the Anti-Defamation League shut down Carson's line of reasoning: "Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate. The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state."

But you won't read about any of this in Hunter's article, even though this information was available to her at the time she wrote her article. Carson has spoken, and apparently that's all that matters to her.

UPDATE: CNS is perfectly capable of fact-checking, as it does in this Oct. 12 article by Patrick Goodenough asserting that "In ‘60 Minutes’ Interview, Obama Muddles Facts on Ukraine."

Posted by Terry K. at 8:55 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, October 12, 2015 8:50 AM EDT

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One almost has to admire the stubborn single-mindedness of WorldNetDaily's dedication to its right-wing agenda -- so much so that it ignores little things like internal logic. Take, for instance, the order of stories on the promotion carousel of today's WND front page.

A story warning about persecution of one particular religion ...

Posted by Terry K. at 10:39 AM EDT

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Jerry Newcombe begins his Oct. 6 WorldNetDaily column with a lie: "Are pro-lifers violent? No."

Not true. Not even close to being true. Here's one incomplete list, for example.

But Newcombe is serving as an apologist for Operation Rescue's Troy Newman and his recent misadventure in Australia:

Troy and his wife flew out to Australia because he was invited to speak at a pro-life conference. But lies on the Internet bubbled up, and Troy ended up in a holding cell in Melbourne for three days.

The heart of the controversy is simple: Has he or Operation Rescue engaged in or ever advocated for violence? The answer is an unequivocal “No.” But there are false reports swirling around on the Internet to that effect.

No, it's not, Jerry. The accuation was never whether Operation Rescue "engaged in" anti-abortion violence; it's whether Newman tacitly endorsed such violence through his heated rhetoric. And the answer to that, as we detailed when Operation Rescue itself tried to deny the truth, is an unequivocal yes.

But Newcombe continued to deny reality and regurgitated Operation Rescue's PR:

This was unjust because of Newman’s track record of non-violence. Not only does his group eschew any form of violence, but these pro-life activists want to see those who are caught up in the abortion business saved.

[...]

Their website states: “Operation Rescue explicitly denounces violence in any form as a means of ending abortion.”

What the Operation Rescue website states is irrelevant compared to what's stated in the book Newman and Cheryl Sullenger wrote -- which Operation Rescue sells on its website -- which endorses the idea that abortion providers must be executed "to expunge bloodguilt from the land and people." You know, because the Bible says so.

Newcombe then takes his ludicrous denial of anti-abortion violence to an even more ludicrous extent, claiming that only six people have ever engaged in it. No, really:

It is not a pro-life act to kill an abortionist. Of those six or so people who have committed violent attacks on abortion clinics or personnel, I know of two professing Christians. One of them repented of his wrongdoing in jail; the other has already received the death penalty.

Every Christian leader denounced that violence. Those few who have committed such violence are a very tiny minority on the fringes. One violent attack is one too many. No one is advocating violence, least of all Newman and Operation Rescue.

Newcombe failed to mention that Tiller's killer -- yes, Tiller was killed, Mr. Newcombe, not just "shot" -- had connections to Operation Rescue; its phone number was found on a note inside Roeder's car when he was arrested, and he had a lunch with Newman in which Newman . Or that Newman's lieutenant, Cheryl Sullenger, used to advocate violence so much she served time in prison for plotting to blow up an abortion clinic.

And whether or not any of these perpetrators "repented" their crime is irrelevant (which Sullenger also claims she has); abortion doctors aren't any less dead, or their clinic properties any less vandalized, or their employees any less threatened, because of it. 

And we haven't even got to the regular stalking and harrassment  abortion providers and their employees suffer. But Newcombe is probably OK with that, because nobody's getting murdered.

Posted by Terry K. at 8:46 AM EDT

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WorldNetDaily has an announcement: Ir's running a weekday 3-minute webcast by right-wing talker Franklin Raff.

Raff has impeccable fringe credentials: he was a sidekick to domestic terrorist G. Gordon Liddy's radio show and a producer of the short-lived radio show of WND editor Joseph Farah.

There's more on Raff's fringe bona fides: he has suggested that "many" schoolteachers are wannabe child molesters, inflated attendance numbers for a right-wing anti-health care rally, and has birther queen Orly Taitz as a Facebook friend.

And he's bringing the crazy to WND as well, from what appears to be his basement or a closet or some similar tiny space hastily designed with an American flag. One show last week featured this weird rant about gas masks that is, in reality, a commercial for gas masks from the WND store: "For all the time and money you've spent on prepper prep, you can't yell 'Wolverines!' when lying in a pool of your own sputum in a fetal position on the floor."

Another rant claims that "ISIS is actually operating a camp a few miles from El Paso" -- and also includes a plug for the WND-published book "The Islamic Antichrist."

Oh, the thing about ISIS operating a camp near El Paso is not true, so it's nice to see Raff maintaining the WND tradition of not letting the facts get in the way of a good scaring of the sheeple.

Posted by Terry K. at 8:55 PM EDT

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The Media Research Center's flip-flop rhetoric on who is allowed to criticize the Catholic Church and the pope (conservatives) and who isn't (non-conservatives) has flipped again.

In their Oct. 7 column, Brent Bozell and Tim Graham sneered at Nancy Pelosi for allegedly expressing "smarter-than-the-pontiff feminist arrogance" for pointing out that, as a mother, she might know a little more about having children than a celibate priest.

As we've noted, conservative columnist George Will wasn't attacked by Bozell and Co. for expressing "smarter-than-the-pontiff arrogance" by asserting that Pope Francis "stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies" and that he embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony," offers "shrill" social diagonses and "embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary." Rather, the MRC made Will's column an "Editor's Pick" at NewsBusters.

The gist of Bozell and Graham's column, though, is a defense of its CNSNews.com "reporter" Sam Dorman for asking a gotcha question of Pelosi. (The writers hide the fact that Dorman isn't an actual reporter but just an intern.) They insist that Dorman's question was "very simple and pertonent" and tout how Pelosi was made "clearly angry" by it.

Which, of course, was the whole point. Dorman said himself on a CNS website trying to profit off the confrontation how proud he was that "after Pelosi erupted with anger, I knew I had pushed the right button." Why should Pelosi apologize over an act deliberately designed to provoke her anger?

Bozell  and Graham conclude by declaring that Pelosi isn't sufficiently Catholic, ranting, "She should be excommunicated." Now who's portraying themselves as smarter than the pope?

Posted by Terry K. at 3:48 PM EDT

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WorldNetDaily gets quite devoted to the counterfactual when it suits its right-wing agenda -- like promoting right-wing victimhood.

An Oct. 1 WND article by Bob Unruh highlighted how Operation Rescue leader Troy Newman "has been detained in Australia based on 'false accusations' from a member of the nation’s parliament." The article is another one-source wonder from Unruh, quoting only Operation Rescue employee Cheryl Sullenger defending Newman:

The reason for the detention apparently, Sullenger said, was a letter from Terri Butler, an abortion-promoting member of parliament, who accused Newman of being an “extremist” and of arguing that abortionists should be “executed.”

“Newman has never advocated violence against abortion providers or facilities and has instead adamantly encouraged pro-life activists to work through the legal, legislative, and justice systems to bring abortionists who are breaking the law and harming women to justice,” Sullenger wrote.

[...]

OR said the pro-abortion politicians “falsely” accused Newman of “advocating the execution of abortion providers, which [Australian Minister of immigration Peter] Dutton never bothered to fact-check.”

[...]

“Troy has been treated like a criminal even though he has never been convicted of a crime and is being detained and deported based solely on his religious and pro-life beliefs that are opposed by certain abortion lackeys in the Australian government,” said Sullenger. “This is unjust and as a representative of Operation Rescue, I demand his immediate release and an apology from Minister Dutton for the trouble he has caused by acquiescing to false accusations of those who oppose Newman’s pro-life stance.”

Curiously, Unruh never actually quotes from the letter by Butler, and Sullenger also fails to mention its contents. Presumably, that's because they both know that the facts don't make Newman look good and, contrary to Sullenger's claim, no fact-checking is necessary.

In her letter -- a copy of which is ironically posted at Operation Rescue -- Butler quotes from Newman's book "Their Blood Cries Out," in which Newman (and co-author Sullenger) did, in fact, call for abortion providers to be executed:

In addition to our personal guilt in abortion, the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes in order to expunge bloodguilt from the land and people. Instead, the act of abortion has been elevated to a “God-given right” and the abortionists canonized as saints. Consequently, the entire nation has the blood-red stain of the lives of the innocent upon its head.

In a folow-up article later the same day reporting that news that Newman had been expelled from Australia, Unruh  again uncritically repeated Sullenger's claim that Newman was the victim of "false allegations," again talked to nobody but Sullenger, and again refused to quote from the Newman book in which he did indeed call for abortion providers to be executed.

Meanwhile, over at the Operation Rescue, Sullenger and crew are spinning even harder to deflect attention from what Newman (and Sullenger) actually wrote:

Newman has never supported violence against abortion providers and statements from a book co-written by Newman have been taken out of context in order to twist the meaning to one that was never intended in the context of the book. Newman’s remarks were in the context of a theological study of a government’s ability to institute capital punishment, and was never in advocation of violent acts against anyone. What was never mentioned by Newman’s detractors was that the book also explained that in addition to judgement is mercy, and the ability to receive repentance, forgiveness, and restoration through Jesus Christ.

Note that this explanation does not provide the name of the book (which, by the way, is for sale elsewhere on Operation Rescue's website), the name of Newman's co-author (Sullenger) or any direct quote of the actual words from the book. That's the sign of an organization with something to hide.

Operation Rescue's insistence that Newman is being taking out of context doesn't really help him -- he may want abortion providers legally executed, but the fact remains that execution is still at the top of the list for dealing with these people. Indeed, he states that "lawful execution" of abortion providers "is commanded by God in Scripture."

And as Right Wing Watch states in a review of the book, Newman repeatedly uses violent and hostile imagery that is anything but moderate. For instance, Newman uses numerous passages in the book likening abortion doctor George Tiller -- murdered by Scott Roeder, who had connections to Operation Rescue -- to Hitler, argues that women who have abortions are guilty of murder and suggests they should be executed like the abortion doctors, declares that "The argument can logically be made that abortion is a sacrifice to demons," and declares that 9/11 and AIDS were God's warnings about abortion.

Newman, Sullenger and Operation Rescue really can't explain Newman's unambiguous words away. But Bob Unruh and WND are sure doing their best to try.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:46 PM EDT

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When House Majority Leader candidate Kevin McCarthy effectively admitted that the House Benghazi Select Committee was a scheme to drive down Hillary Clinton's poll numbers, right-wingers knew the game was up. Now comes Accuracy in Media's Roger Aronoff to deny the obvious, even insisting that AIM's own "Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi" kangaroo court is political:

Following a series of rather uneventful hearings on Benghazi, other than Hillary’s line, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” plus the stacked-deck hearing by the “independent” Accountability Review Board, we at Accuracy in Media (AIM) decided to do something about it. In July of 2013, we formed the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB), with a group of top retired military leaders, former CIA officers, and congressmen, including the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, with the purpose of doing our own independent investigation in an attempt to reveal the truth about what happened—before, during and after the terrorist attacks in Benghazi on September 11 and 12, 2012—and hold people accountable. We have made much progress, and are still at it.

We started off with an all-day conference in September 2013, which can be viewed here. Leading off the conference was Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who already had a House bill with approximately 185 Republican House members as co-sponsors, calling for a Select Committee on Benghazi. The advantage of a Select Committee is that it brings all facets of the investigation under one roof, rather than being divided up between various committees, each with a limited scope and purview. Plus, a Select Committee isn’t limited by the normal rules, in which each questioner has only five minutes, which can easily be eaten up by a single answer. Wolf was the real driving force in Congress behind the formation of a Select Committee. You can watch or read his comments here. It had nothing to do with driving down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.

Aronoff doesn't sound very convincing. He offers nothing to back up his assertion beyond insisting it wasn't political. And if AIM's little kangaroo court wasn't political, why is it filled with Obama-haters and birthers?

Indeed, we've been pointing out the kangaroo-court nature of the CCB since AIM announced it in 2013. Neither Aronoff nor AIM has disputed the fact that it's stacked with birthers and Obama-haters who cannot possibly be interested in an impartial view of the Benghazi evidence that does not implicate Obama or Clinton.

Now we know the CCB is no different from the House Select Committee in its partisan intent. Aronoff should stop pretending that politics isn't his primary motivation.

Posted by Terry K. at 1:43 PM EDT

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The Media Research Center may be insisting that CNSNews.com "reporter" Sam Dorman is a real reporter, but its actions show that he really did serve as a "protester" in asking a loaded gotcha question to Nancy Pelosi, as the Washington Post originally called him.

When a real news organization's reporter gets slighted by a public figure, it usually doesn't try to build a PR campaign off it. The MRC, by contrast, is doing just that. An Oct. 6 CNS article by managing editor Michael Chapman touts how his boss, Brent Bozell, "wrote to Pelosi, noting that good reporters 'ask tough questions,' that her answer was 'disrespectful'; and that she should apologize to the reporter, CNSNews.com’s Sam Dorman."

Of course, Dorman's question wasn't "tough"; it was a gotcha question designed to mock her stance on abortion. Dorman had been going around to various Democratic members of Congress asking the very same question before hitting up Pelosi. Hurling the same gotcha question to multiple people is the act of a protester, not a journalist.

If Dorman's question wasn't an act of protest, the MRC wouldn't be trying to raise money off it. And that's exactly what it's doing.

An Oct. 6 email to followers contained a link to a page at CNS where it requests that readers send it money: "It costs $12,000 to fund an Intern at the MRC, and it is an example like Sam’s as to why your continued support for our MRC Internship Program is so vital!"

Wait, the internship program? Yep. It turns out that Dorman isn't even a real reporter -- he's an intern. The MRC has not admitted that until now, not even in the two stories on the situation written by his boss Chapman.

The MRC tries to elide that in its fanciful description of the Dorman-Pelosi encounter (bold in original):

Sam Dorman was excited to be the intern chosen to represent CNSNews.com at the weekly press briefing on October 1st. Armed with a laptop, recorder, and his journalist credentials, he entered the briefing with intention to ask truthful questions directly related to public policy. When called upon, Sam addressed leader Nancy Pelosi, simply asking:

“In reference to funding for Planned Parenthood: Is an unborn baby with a human heart and a human liver a human being?”

But Pelosi responded with, “I do not intend to respond to your questions”.  

Pelosi even went so far as to belittle the credentials of our CNSNews.com intern.

Somehow, we doubt that the Capital's press office would give out credentials to an intern so easily; you might remember that a decade ago, WorldNetDaily essentially complained that the Senate Press Gallery's standards for press passes weren't low enough for WND to get one (which they eventually did). It may be that the credentials belong to CNS, and Dorman simply had access to them that day.

The MRC is just throwing the "credentials" stuff around to pump up the idea that CNS is a real news organization.

But the ultimate evidence of Dorman's intent comes from Dorman himself, in a statement underneath his picture: "At first I was nervous to ask the question, but after Pelosi erupted with anger, I knew I had pushed the right button."

Journalists try to gather information. Protesters try to push buttons. Dorman's admission that he was trying to push a button on Pelosi and provoke the response he got is all the evidence we need that he was in protest mode, not in journalist mode.

So, that settles it. Dorman is a protester, CNS is an ideological news organization, and the MRC is trying to exploit Dorman's ideological clash with Pelosi to raise money. It's almost as if the whole thing was planned this way.

Posted by Terry K. at 5:15 PM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, October 6, 2015 9:49 PM EDT

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