NewsBusters Anonymously Screeches At ESPN For Hiring 'Leftist, LGBT Activist' Soccer Player
Topic: NewsBusters

"Bruce Bookter" whines in a May 5 NewsBusters post:

In what might go down as the most redundant and superfluous hire in the history of redundant and superfluous hires, a network already dominated and run by leftist, LGBT activists hired…wait for it…a leftist, LGBT activist.

The network doing the hiring, in this case, was ESPN. The hired activist is former U.S. women’s soccer gold medalist, and World Cup champion Abby Wambach.

"Bookter" goes on to misread the title of Wambach's new ESPN podcast "Fearless Conversation" as "fearless conviction": "I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Wambach’s 'fearless conviction' will not be that gender is not a choice, and that bathrooms made for women should only be used by women."

Not only does "Bookter" know nothing about proofreading his own work -- funny, since he considers himself to be a "sports journalist" who presumably knows better -- he knows nothing about "fearless conviction" since he possesses none himself. Remember, "Bookter" is a gutless coward using a fake name lest he be held personally accountable for what he writes.

Alleged Ex-Clinton Mistress Discredits Herself By Partnering With WND
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily has trotted out the latest step in its anti-Hillary jihad: publishing a book by Dolly Kyle, known as Dolly Kyle Browning during the Clinton presidential years, bashing Hillary Clinton despite the two presumably not having much contact given that Kyle was supposedly Bill Clinton's secret lover for years.

In the promotional article for the book, WND quotes Kyle pushing WND-style right-wing anti-Clinton talking points:

“Billy Clinton is an untreated sex addict and serial rapist, serial sex abuser,” alleged Kyle. “He’s a sexual predator and Hillary is complicit in all of that. I’m over being outraged about it because I’ve been watching this for 40 years and at this point I’m so sick of them I could puke. But the fact of the matter is, it did outrage me when Hillary Clinton sat in front of the television cameras and said women who have been raped and sexually assaulted should be believed. That was actually the last straw that made me want to write this book. She says women who were raped or sexually assaulted should be believed – unless, of course, it’s Billy who did it.”

Kyle says Bill Clinton benefited from a culture in which many rapes and sexual assaults were simply never reported. Now, she says, that culture of silence is changing, even among the feminists who traditionally have defended the Clintons.

“In the book, I talk about the National Organization for Women and how their traditional stance on abortion has overridden everything,” Kyle told WND. “Now that they are celebrating their 50th anniversary, they are finally coming around to embracing more issues. And one of the huge issues is rape and sexual assault. Younger women appear to be catching on to that. Older women, some of whom may have been raped or sexually assaulted and never reported it, are still in some kind of denial.”

Of course, the problem for Kyle is that she has aligned herself with WND, whose utter lack of credibility undermines anything Kyle has to say. And Joseph Farah and WND's 20-year obsession will be seen as further evidence that, as with being the premier Obama birthers, WND is simply pursuing a personal vendetta of destruction, not reporting facts.

Speaking of birthers, Jerome Corsi trots himself out in a May 5 WND article to vouch for Kyle, claiming that "Kyle’s assessment aligns with the conclusions of Roger Stone and Robert Morrow in their 2015 bestselling book 'The Clintons’ War on Women,' which contends Hillary is an 'accomplice after the fact.'"

WND has taken care to hide Stone's swinger lifestyle from its readers, lest a lifestyle that under normal circumstances WND would denounce as deviant and immoral detract from his usefulness as a Clinton smear artist.Morrow, meanwhile, has some bizarre and creepy sexual fantasies about Hillary -- another thing you'll never read about at WND.

Thanks to WND, Kyle is now lumped with the fetid, discredited likes of Stone and Morrow. 

And Corsi, too: In a May 9 WND opinion piece, Kyle parrots Corsi's obsession with Hillary Clinton's alleged health issues, suggesting that she's "cognitively impaired" and medically unfit to be president.

Two days later, WND excerpted a section of Kyle's book opining about foreign policy, of all things. The fact that she repeatedly refers to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama"  and apparently goes birther by claiming that Obama is "some part 'black' due to an unidentified mix from his mixed-race father," as well as repeating right-wing anti-Hillary talking points about Benghazi, tells you she's on the same wavelength with WND as far as personal destruction is concerned.

WND's latest attempt to promote Kyle's book is a May 14 article repeating an anecdote from it claiming that Hillary used an epithet 30-plus years ago. But it's third-hand hearsay attributed in part to "Arkansas State Police troopers" -- the same '90s Clinton-bashers who, when asked to testify under oath, backed off their most lurid accusations -- and is not verified.

Strangely, though, WND buries to the end of this lengthy article one place where Kyle deviates from WND's anti-clinton dogma:

Kyle said she believes a good portion of the Clinton death list is “unsubstantiated baloney” and includes accidental deaths of people whose names have been added to the list by conspiracy theorists.

As recently as January, WND has promoting the "Clinton body count" -- first created in the '90s by then-WND reporter David Bresnahan -- as real and unquestioned, despite the fact it's totally discredited as Kyle states.

But then, Kyle appears to have drunk deeply enough of WND's Clinton-hating Kool-Aid that she eventually come around on that issue.

MRC Whines Media Reported Trump Story MRC's Own 'News' Outlet Ignored
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Tim Graham complains in a May 11 post:

It’s mid-May, which means it’s time for The Washington Post to unload the cheap-shot “investigative” stories on the Republican front-runner. On the front of the May 11 Washington Post is a story on Trump’s sex boasts….and sex life. The online headline is “From playboy to president? Trump’s past crude sex talk collides with his White House bid.“ In the newspaper, it was "Before candidate Trump, there was playboy Trump: Extolling Lothario lifestyle worked for the developer, but now it behooves him to back off old boasts."

Bill Clinton’s crude sex talk? Not front-page news in the Post. Crude sex talk from JFK or LBJ? Not front-page news in the Post. Remember the 2008 Post story on Obama's sex life? But here’s how reporter Mary Jordan began, by quoting from a Trump radio interview with Howard Stern:

[...]

Notice the Post didn’t locate these 19-year-old quotes when there were still Republican opponents in the race appealing for the conservative-Christian vote. The Post somehow couldn’t find the time for this story until the term “presumptive nominee” fit.

Jordan noted Trump’s exchanges with Stern were posted online by BuzzFeed “this year” – that would be in February. The Post thought they became front-page material on May 11. Check the liberal rag's Romney-haircut-bully-from-1965 timing.

You know who else didn't think Trump's sexist comments to Stern were front-page material when BuzzFeed first reported them in February -- or since? The MRC and its own "news"division, CNSNews.com.

BuzzFeed reported on Trump's sexist comments on Stern's show on Feb. 24. Both the MRC and CNS completely ignored them. In other words, CNS and the MRC could have made a big deal about these comments for the past three months had they chosen to do so. They didn't.

This means Graham is being utterly hypocritical in bashing the Post for focusing on the story the MRC itself ignored for months.

Instead, the MRC was much more concerned about a Trump-Stern story BuzzFeed reported a week earlier, in which Trump had told Stern in 2002 that he supported an invasion of Iraq. This time, though, the MRC was bashing NBC's Chuck Todd for confronting Trump about it.

Susan Jones' Feb. 22 CNS article on the comments was framed as allowing Trump off the hook because he wasn't a politician at the time he made the comment. And the MRC's Nicholas Fondacaro instead chose to attack Todd for saying during his Trump interview it's not solely the media's reponsibility for vetting Trump and that "a normal campaign that was running against Donald Trump" should be even more aggressive.

Indeed, for as anti-Trump as most top MRC officials are -- MRC chief Brent Bozell endorsed Ted Cruz and attacked Trump for not being a movement conservative -- they did not leverage the MRC's resources as fully as they could have to take him down.

Instead, the MRC concocted a conspiracy theory that the "liberal media" conspired to make Trump the Republican nominee so he would lose to Hillary Clinton in November.

While Graham's whining about the Post plays into this conspiracy theory, it also shows that the MRC will be acquiescing to Trump by portraying him as the victim of the "liberal media." The fact that Graham considers the Post's Trump-Stern story the equivalent of its 2012 story on Romney's prep-school years -- another story CNS and the right-wing media had no interest in until the Post reported it -- is evidence of that turn taking place.

Newsmax's Gizzi: Brazil Needs A Repression-Loving Dictator
Topic: Newsmax

Newsmax Washington correspondent John Gizzi, apparently responding to the current turmoil in Brazil, tweeted: "Brazil needs Emilio Medici, president from 1969-74 whose reign was called 'years of lead & torture' again."

Well, that may be because that's exactly what it was.

History student Colin Snyder details how Medici was installed as president by a military junta, and while economic growth occurred under his regime, it was better known for repression and torture:

With the economic and athletic success, many Brazilians were blissfully unaware of just how brutal repression had become. Future-president Luís Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who in the early-1970s had just begun his career as a metalworker, later commented that, if there had been a popular and direct election in 1970, Médici would have won in a landslide. He also enjoyed close relations with the United States, drawing on his time spent there as a military attache. In 1971, he made an official state visit to the Nixon White House, where the two men discussed possible ways to overthrow democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende. And to build up support, Médici relied on propaganda in new ways, spending millions of cruzeiros on advertising campaigns designed to drum up patriotic support for the regime through slogans such as “Brazil: Love it or leave it” (“Brasil, Ame-o ou deixe-o“). He finished his mandate in March 1974,  leaving office just as Brazil’s economy started to show subtle signs of weakness that would come to plague the country throughout the rest of the decade and into the 1980s and 1990s. As he left office, he enjoyed a massive amount of popularity, seen as the man who finally “stabilized” Brazil, even while many of the economic policies that had created the “miracle” preceded his administration.

While he was popular while serving as president, his popularity quickly faded away. The growing economic turmoil of the 1970s, which proved increasingly difficult to curb, led more and more people to question the policies of his administration. In the 1980s, the Catholic vicariate of São Paulo and Protestant ministers managed to secretly obtain thousands of classified documents that detailed the use of torture in Brazil during Médici’s government; the documents, ultimately compiled and published as Brasil: Nunca Mais (“Brazil: Never Again,” translated into English as Torture in Brazil) shocked millions of Brazilians who had been unaware of (or had chosen to ignore) the extensive use of torture in the 1970s. Though at the time people referred to the Médici years as the “economic miracle,” these years ultimately became known as the “Years of Lead,” due to the regime’s heavy repression.

The New York Times reported that "According to the Brazilian Amnesty Committee, 170 opponents were killed and many were tortured in army and police cells" under Medici's rule, adding: "For many Brazilians, the principal memory of the Medici years was the pervasive fear of being caught up without documents and vanishing during a police sweep."

Y'know, maybe Medici isn't the kind of guy Brazil needs after all. 

WND Writer Still Dishonestly Championing Cause of Tax Evader
Topic: WorldNetDaily

In February, we detailed how WorldNetDaily author Alex Newman mounted a dishonest defense of tax evader Doreen Hendrickson by claiming the government is forcing her to commit perjury by signing an accurate amended tax return. Newman never accurately described the offense Hendrickson committed, Hendrickson did, let alone demonstrate what was supposedly false about the amended tax returns she was allegedly compelled to sign.

Well, Hendrickson recently lost an appeal of her prison sentence, and Newman is back to dishonestly defend her again.

In a May 7 WND article, Newman once again asserts that the government ordered Hendrickson to "perjure herself," and once again he fails to explain exactly why she disputes her income is exempt from the income tax. As we pointed out before, Hendrickson falsely claimed she earned no income at all, not that her income was exempt from taxes.

Newman also seems weirdly surprised that the appeals court ruling -- which he fails to provide a link for so WND readers can check it out for themselves -- rejected the bizarre argument from Hendrickson's attorneys that likened the government's actions "to Islamic Shariah law demanding the affirmation of Allah."

He also complains that the appeals court invoked the "collateral bar" principle to deny Hendrickson's challenge of the constitutionality of the laws under which she was convicted, calling it an "obscure legal theory" and a "rarely used doctrine" and parrots Hendrickson's attorney's assertions that her conviction is "transparently invalid." But according to the appeals court ruling -- which was actually issued in March, making Newman a couple months late to the party -- explicitly explains why Hendrickson's conviction does not fall under exceptions to the collateral bar prinicple.

Newman completely ignored another section of Hendrickson's appeal , that the standby attorneys assisting her in representing herself at her trial refused to ask her questions under examination that she had instructed them to ask. As the appeals court noted,Hendrickson didn't raise this objection until after her trial, and the standby counsel explained that the government had repeatedly objected to similar lines of inquiry (related to "her beliefs regarding the legal validity of the order") and that he did not ask the questions because Hendrickson had already “struggle[d] to provide answers to some of the questions she had provided.”

As before, Newman lazily glosses over the fact that Hendrickson and her husband, Peter, are tax protesters and that Peter Hendrickson has written an anti-tax book that, as we noted, caused at least one other person to face criminal penalties for following them. Instead, Newman parrots the Hendrickson's assertion that "the government hopes to suppress arguments made by Mr. Hendrickson in his book “Cracking the Code – The Fascinating Truth About Taxation In America.”

Despite the fact that Newman has had three more months to read the book aso he can properly explain its arguments -- which appear to be at the core of the controversy he's writing about -- he once again states that "WND has not read the book or independently verified its arguments."

And aside from a few paragraphs attacking the appealks court ruling, Newman makes no effort whatsoever to present the government's case against Hendrickson with anything resembling fairness or accuracy. Instead, Newman devotes nearly the entirety of his article to letting her, her husband and her attorneys attack the government with impunity and portray Doreen Hendrickson as a victim. That's a violation of WND editor Joseph Farah's oft-violated edict that "WND reporters and editors are always encouraged and required to seek out multiple sources and contrary viewpoints in news articles."

MRC Flip-Flops, Demands That Media Go With Never-Verified Guccifer Story
Topic: Media Research Center

It was just a few weeks ago that the Media Research Center was demanding that the media ignore tabloid reports of affairs by Ted Cruz, dismissing them as "factually unsupported" and having "a complete lack of solid sourcing." Now, the MRC is demanding that the media cover an unverified anti-Hillary Clinton story.

Geoffrey Dickens writes  in a May 5 post:

Romanian hacker Marcel Lazar AKA “Guccifer” told FNC’s Catherine Herridge that accessing Hillary Clinton’s server was “easy. For me, for everybody.” But Herridge, who appeared on Wednesday’s Kelly File to discuss the bombshell accusation, wasn’t the only reporter with the story.

A May 5 NBC News online story reported the Romanian hacker revealed “in an exclusive interview” with correspondent Cynthia McFadden that Clinton’s server was “like an open orchid on the Internet.” However, as PowerLine’s Scott Johnson pointed out, “NBC interviewed Guccifer during his pre-extradition detention in Romania. That means the reported interview took place at least a month ago.”

According to the online article, the interview will be featured on tonight’s (Thursday’s) edition of NBC Nightly News. But the questions have to be asked: did FNC’s report force NBC to finally air the interview and why did they sit on it, initially?

The answer can be found, had Dickens bothered to look for it, in the transcript of a Fox News transcript he attached  to his item, in which correspondent Catherine Herridge states that "Lazar’s claims cannot be independently verified."

Dickens doesn't explain why unverified reporting is unfair to Ted Cruz but perfectly fine for Hillary Clinton.

WND's Kupelian Abandons Morality, Touts Trump
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian kicks off his May 8 column fin his usual way -- spewing Obama-hate and lamenting that America is not the lily-white enclave he grew up in:

Right now, in 2016, tens of millions of American citizens feel exactly like the citizens of these terrorized ancient kingdoms in the classic stories. They see their once great nation ravaged by terrible forces. Their leaders seem to have gone mad – intentionally leaving the nation’s borders unguarded, allowing hordes of invaders to swarm into their country, plunder their wealth and commit heinous crimes. Their supreme ruler is widely seen as hating his own country, continually betraying longtime allies while aiding her mortal enemies. The nation’s youth are corralled into ivy-covered brainwashing centers and indoctrinated into bizarre beliefs and destructive behaviors. The land’s once-robust economy has been decimated, with onerous taxes and regulations strangling businesses, and the nation’s major industries – along with the millions of jobs they provide – leaving their homeland for foreign shores. On top of all this, a genocidal, worldwide mind-control cult has declared war on their troubled nation, murdering and maiming people at will, yet their leader won’t even utter the enemy’s name, let alone fight it. Millions suspect he sides with the enemy.

Americans, beholding their nation’s increasing woes, wistfully recall the happier land of their youth, one blessed above all other nations, where despite its flaws, unparalleled liberty, prosperity and opportunity were in abundance.

[...]

Reality check: Speaking as a 35-year journalism veteran, I can confirm that the “mainstream media” are, to use Trump’s strong language, indeed “disgusting.” Americans couldn’t possibly have twice elected such a catastrophically bad president as Barack Obama were it not for the disgraceful cheerleading and gross journalistic malpractice of the entire elite media.

Says the guy whose "news" organization he helps lead has its own lengthy history of journalistic malpractice.

Anyway, Kupelian's main point is to justify endorsing Donald Trump despite the fact that his personal history is as sordid, if not more, as he likes to believe Hillary Clinton's is. He admits Trump's faults -- then hand-waves them away because, in his fevered, hate-filled imagination, Hillary is infinitely worse:

Trump has obvious faults, as his detractors continually highlight. There are his sometimes vulgar and crude language and gratuitous attacks on critics (including his Twitter attack on Cruz’s wife). There are his former liberal positions on abortion and other issues, as well as his past campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats as a businessman. There are his three marriages and supposed past infidelities, and the various business controversies involving bankruptcies, eminent domain and Trump University. Trump is egotistical, rarely admits to mistakes or apologizes (at least not publicly), is not well informed on some issues, and has made at least a few outrageous statements – such as that George W. Bush launched the Iraq War knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction there (a statement Trump later walked back into a reasonable formulation). His always-on-offense modus operandi – “If someone punches me, I punch back twice as hard” – actually works admirably well in many cases, but not all cases, and sometimes causes significant problems.

[...]

Remember, if a Trump presidency poses reasonable questions and doubts as to what kind of president he’d actually be, a Hillary presidency poses none; she has a decades-long record as a breathtakingly dishonest, corrupt, dissembling, ambitious, soulless, left-wing political elitist who lies as easily as breathing and whose presidency would further debase the very soul of America, especially its youth. Moreover, as president, she would appoint several progressive-left, Constitution-despising Supreme Court justices, who would in turn determine America’s destiny for the next generation and inevitably result in the end of fundamental rights like that guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Yet, to some “conservatives” in the “Never-Trump” movement, Donald is worse than all that.

I think it is reasonable to describe this better-Hillary-than-Trump attitude as insane, infantile and suicidal for the nation.

Donald Trump has serious flaws. But he also has remarkable talents and abilities that many miss, or misinterpret. After all, he didn’t become one of the planet’s most dazzlingly successful real-estate developers, entrepreneurs and best-selling authors by being a stupid, ignorant, racist buffoon, as his critics would have you believe.

One gets the feeling that Kupelian is talking himself into liking Trump as much as he is lecturing readers about it. After all, he must abandon his idea of an American leader as strongly moral -- as evidenced by his vicious hatred of all things Obama and Hillary -- to support Trump simply because he wants to be on the winning side for once.

Finally, he declares without evidence that he beleives Trump has a "good" heart and takes yet another shot at Hillary:

Trump, like all other candidates, is a strange brew of good and bad qualities. Despite those defects, he has a powerful leader-fighter personality that many believe is exactly what a decimated and demoralized America needs right now. He speaks from the heart and millions strongly resonate with him.

The real question is: Is Trump’s heart good? (Most everything else can be helped out by the right advisers.)

I think it is.

Besides, Trump may just turn out to be the bold outsider – the flawed but fearless knight – who surprises everyone and slays the dragon.

And that would certainly be better than electing a new dragon in Hillary Clinton.

And that, in a nutshell coming from the guy who runs WND's "news" operation, will be the overall tone of WND's "news" coverage for the rest of the presidential campaign -- playing down Trump's myriad faults while hurling buckets of venom at Hillary. And that imbalance is yet another reason why nobody believes WND.

MRC Loves TV Correspondent Sex Scandals -- Except The One Involving A Fox News Correspondent
Topic: Media Research Center

Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry is one of the Media Research Center's favorite sources. In February and March alone, the MRC highlighted four stories Henry reported that other, less conservative-biased media didn't cover (or "censored," in the MRC's favorite parlance).

But the MRC hasn't mentioned Henry since March 30. In early May, Henry was taken off the air after reports surfaced of the married Henry having an affair with a Las Vegas hostess.

The MRC has yet to mention this scandal to its readers -- which is funny, because it normally has no problem delilghting in the personal peccadilloes of TV correspondents.

In 2011, the MRC reported on NBC correspondent Chris Hansen "caught on hidden camera having an affair with a woman 21 years younger than him" after a sting operation by the National Enquirer (the same folks whose report of affairs by Ted Cruz were dismissed by the MRC). Aubrey Vaughn smugly added: "While there is nothing illegal about Hansen's affair, his being caught by hidden cameras is quite ironic, considering he used the same hidden camera setup to catch unsuspecting predators on his television program during its four-year run."

And when CBS "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft was caught in an affair, NewsBusters' P.J. Gladnick couldn't get enough. In one post, he salaciously asked to "let us look at the kinky details already revealed which Kroft does not deny," which include "kinky tastes such as drinking champagne ala tush and is an incredible cheapskate."

And in another post, Gladnick chortled about the "karmatic kickback" of being ambushed by a (right-wing) New York Post reporter about the affair (who asked, "How do you live with yourself?"), complete with a "review some of the New York Post highlights (or lowlights) of the scandal." Gladnick called the footage of the ambush "must see video."

Needless to say, the New York Post and the MRC's own ambush guy, Dan Joseph, aren't gearing up to pounce on Henry to ask, "How do you live with yourself?" -- the former because the Post and Fox News have the same owner and would never trash a co-worker, and the latter because MRC employees from Brent Bozell on down love to appear on Fox News and wouldn't dare jeopardize that.

If Henry was still working for CNN, Gladnick and the rest of the MRC crew would be pouncing on his affair and gleefully reporting the even more salacious details emerging. But being a Fox News employee with a history of supplying conservative-friendly talking points earns you a free pass from further embarrassment from the MRC.

WND's Chumley: Keep The Colored People Out Of White Suburbs And In The Ghettoes Where They Belong
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily reporter Cheryl Chumley wants to keep America's suburbs white. She effectively says as much in her May 10 WND column, headlined "Obama's plan to colorize white neighborhoods":

 In July 2015, the Obama administration released proposed rules aimed at diversifying white neighborhoods and putting a stop to so-called “segregated living patterns” around the nation. In April 2016, the Obama administration sent out a stern warning to landlords around the country, telling them they couldn’t automatically turn away convicted felons because doing so could be perceived as racial discrimination – the logic being that too many blacks and minorities are unfairly imprisoned as it is.

And now?

As Paul Sperry with the New York Post found, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro is setting in motion a means to divert Section 8 housing funding to rich areas – read, predominantly Caucasian – and give financially strapped homeowner hopefuls “mobility counselors” who can help find them the McMansions of their dreams. As Sperry noted, Castro’s plan moves forward even as a “similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods.”

Interestingly, neither Sperry -- a former WND reporter -- nor Chumley provide any evidence to substantiate the claim that the failure to block people from using Section 8 vouchers in non-poor neighborhoods is "shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods." All we could find regarding it was a listing of minor increases in violent crimes in selected Dallas suburbs without any actual proof that vouchers caused it. And neither Sperry nor Chumley explained why minorities should be prohibited from escaping high-crime neighborhoods.

But the point of Chumley's column is to push the WND-fave talking point that President Obama hates white people:

hat’s going on at HUD is simply a reflection of President Obama’s own biases and his personal crusade to right what he perceives as a wrong – the failure of white America to justly treat black America.

We saw this in Obama’s first term when he called out a white Cambridge police officer for “acting stupidly” during the arrest of a black Harvard University professor for disorderly conduct, and likening the event to America’s “long history” of “disproportionately” stopping “African-Americans and Latinos” for law enforcement matters – despite admitting in the same breath he didn’t know “all the facts” of the event.

Given that the professor in question, Henry Louis Gates, was arrested for breaking into his own house after he locked himself out, and that an independent investigation into the incident found in part that the police officer involved in the arrest missed an opportunity to de-escalate the incident, Obama's version of events is backed up.

Then, despite denying Gates' right to enter his own home as he feels necessary, Chumley concludes by whining that a man's hom is no longer his castle because white people can't engage in racially based housing discrimination:

Forget the notion of a home being a homeowner’s castle. Forget the idea of private property rights being sacrosanct; once they’re not, doors to tyranny crack open. Forget the Constitution and the failure of that sacred text to contain any authorities for HUD and the executive to assume these housing-market controls – or for HUD to exist, for that matter. This is free-market America, Obama style, and what that means for the average homeowner, home renter, developer, mortgager and landlord is this: Social justice trumps all. And while all Americans have rights, some Americans have a little bit more rights than others.

Chumley doesn't explain why the racial discrimination she advocates is fighting "tyranny," and that helping people bedtter themselves is "social justice."

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Trump-Media Conspiracy
Topic: Media Research Center
According to the Media Research Center, the "liberal media" (which somehow includes Fox News) is conspiring to make Donald Trump the presidential nominee. And MRC friend Ted Cruz is more than happy to parrot it. Read more >>

WND Ratchets Up the Hillary Derangement
Topic: WorldNetDaily

The overarching theme of WorldNetDaily for 2016 will be its jihad against Hillary Clinton. WND takes that up another level with the new issue of its tiny-circulation (WND doesn't release circulation numbers, but if it had any sort of substantial readership, WND would be publicizing the holy heck out of it) Whistleblower magazine with the subtle theme Hillary = Nurse Ratched from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." And it totally runs with it:

As movie-goers (and readers of Ken Kesey’s novel) well understand, Nurse Ratched is hands-down the craziest and most dangerous person in the whole “Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Today, as America increasingly resembles a sprawling insane asylum – with 50 million people dependent on mind-altering psychiatric meds and another 25 million taking drugs illegally, suicide at a 30-year high, and addiction to alcohol, drugs, food, gambling and porn now a full-blown national health crisis – voters may soon be electing their very own national Nurse Ratched to run things, in the person of President Hillary Clinton.

That’s the premise of May’s groundbreaking issue of Whistleblower magazine, which reveals – perhaps for the first time – just how bad for America a Hillary Clinton presidency would actually be. It is titled “AMERICA’S NURSE RATCHED: How President Hillary would turn the U.S. into an insane asylum.”

[...]

“Make no mistake,” says Whistleblower editor and bestselling author David Kupelian, “today’s Democratic Party is untethered to reality: With ISIS crucifying children and burying them alive, with U.S. joblessness through the roof in a disintegrating economy, with wide-open borders and absurdly reckless immigration and refugee policies transforming America in unthinkable ways, the Democrats’ most urgent national issue seems to be making sure grown men are allowed to pee in the girls’ bathroom.”

But what about the woman who may shortly become president?

There are some obvious parallels to Kesey’s fictional tyrant nurse, says Kupelian: “From her days of vilifying the women victimized by her sex-predator husband, to her betrayal of brave Americans defending the U.S. special mission in Benghazi – and then lying to their grieving parents’ faces about the cause of their deaths – Hillary Clinton has been undeniably two-faced, cold, manipulative and obsessed with power.”

Still, is the whole Nurse Ratched comparison, and all it implies, really fair? And if so, what does it tell us about what a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean for America? “AMERICA’S NURSE RATCHED” definitively answers these important questions.

And by "definitively answers these important questions" Kupelian and crew mean "rehash the last 20 hyears of right-wing rants about Hillary."

Even after listing all the old-news attacks and new smears, Kupelian isn't done fearmongering:

“Try a thought experiment,” says Kupelian. “Fast-forward through the campaign season and imagine that Hillary Clinton has been elected president. The ‘Never-Trump’ people got their wish. It’s January 2017, Inauguration Day has come and gone, and Nurse Ratched is now the leader of the free world.

[...]

“Can you imagine the effect Hillary Clinton would have on the American psyche as president? Can you anticipate the powerful subliminal message that will be continually communicated to America’s young people by having two people so steeped in corruption and crime, Hillary and Bill Clinton, elevated to the White House? After reading ‘AMERICA’S NURSE RATCHED,’ you will understand on a level you never have before why Hillary cannot become president. This issue of Whistleblower may offer the very best argument for Republican unity.”

Or it may just be yet anotyher shoddily reported smear job masquerading as "journalism" -- you know, like pretty much everything else WND does. Which is why nobody believes WND.

CNS Unemployment Numbers Distortion Watch
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com performs its usual misleading job on the latest unemployment numbers, with Susan Jones' lead story on April's umployment once again leading with the labor force participation rate. She again fails to mention the relevant fact that the labor force number -- since it includes students and retirees who aren't looking for jobs -- is a unreliable number for discussing unemployment.

Jones also writes a sidebar noting the high unemployment rate for African-Americans without mentioning that it has always been much higher for African-Americans compared with whites.But, again, Jones' numbers for African-Americans and Hispanics are framed in the misleading and meaningless labor participation rate numbers.

This time around, CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey contributes an additional politically motivated cherry-picking of numbers with an article on how "The United States has lost approximately 191,000 jobs in the mining industry since September 2014." 

The implication, of course -- though Jeffrey carefully avoids saying it outright -- is that President Obama's environmental policies are solely to blame for this. In fact, the major driver for the current reduction in mining jobs is a slump and decreased prices in the overall energy sector.Even the conservative Washington Examiner admits that "the precipitous drop in oil prices" has driven the current loss in mining jobs.

And Jeffrey also glosses over the fact that the chart accompanying his article shows that mining industry jobs were fewer during most years of the last Republican presidency -- George W. Bush -- than currently under Obama.

WND Still Blaming Obama for Capitalism At Work
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily loves to blame everything it can on President Obama, including capitalism at work in the form of failing businesses. WND's Bob Unruh puts a renewed focus on this in the wake of far-right-fringe radio host (whose website is hosted by WND) Michael Savage's baseless, paranoid declaration that Obama would deliberately sabotage the economy as he left office:

Take it away, Bob:

Talk-radio host Michael Savage recently warned his listeners that President Obama could “crash” the economy “on his way out the door.”

But there are indications the disintegration already has begun.

For example, American retailing icon JCPenney has slashed its payroll, cut hours and frozen overtime.

[...]

There also was the bankruptcy of Aeropostale, a retailer targeting teens. It had lost money for more than three years before announcing it will close 113 stores in the United States, in addition to its 41 stories in Canada, as it seeks to “achieve long-term financial stability.”

The sporting goods giant Sports Authority is trying to sell off parts the company, and hundreds of stores are closing.

Needless to say, in his rush to blame these stores' woes on Obama -- for which he provides no direct action committed by the president that led to said woes -- Unruh mostly ignores the actual reasons these retailers are in trouble. We know he deliberately ignored them because they were in the articles he linked to support his story.

Regarding JCPenney, the story to which Unruh linked specifically cites slow sales earlier this year as well as continued recovery from a disastrous turnaround effort a few years back which led to "its shares declining 51 percent."

While Unruh did admit that Aeropostale "had lost money for more than three years," the story to which he links points out that "sales declines had accelerated recently -- plummeting 16% in the most recent quarter" and that fast-fashion chains like H&M, Zara and Forever 21 are eating older chains like Aeropostale for lunch.

And the story to which Unruh links regarding Sports Authority points out that the chain has been "saddled with debt and an inefficient operations base."

Unruh also omits one other crucial fact: None of those stories even mentions Obama, let alone blames him for the state of their retail chains.

Unruh also copies-and-pastes the ludicrous claim from features analyst Michael Snyder that "In impoverished urban centers all over the nation, it is not uncommon to find entire malls that have now been completely abandoned." That's true, but again, that has nothing to do with the "Obama economy." As we pointed out last time, malls as a general rule are not built in "impoverished urban centers," as Snyder claims; they're mostly found in prosperous suburban and exurban areas. 

Additionally, Unruh's laughable attempt to blame the decline of malls on Obama is undermined by his quoting of another analyst pointing out that "The heyday of malls seems to be passing." Which, again, is not Obama's fault.

Unruh goes on to quote CNSNews.com blaming Obama for the current low labor force participation rate, ignoring the fact that -- as we've pointed out when CNS does it -- the number is meaningless because most people who aren't in the labor force aren't looking for work because they're retired (like a majority of baby boomers) or students.

Unruh concludes his article by taking Obama out of context:

Just a week ago Obama, in an interview with New York Times Magazine, admitted he could have done more to help the economy.

“I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we’d be growing a percentage or two faster each year,” he said. “We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did.”

Actually, the context of the interview was Obama saying he could have done these things if Republicans were interested in cooperating with him in doing them, which they weren't: "But without Congress, the big legislative moves, the ones that would really change history, seemed past."

MRC Still Hiding Behind Levin To Criticize Fox News -- But It's Getting A Little Bolder
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center has a lot of trouble criticizing Fox News -- where MRC chief Brent Bozell has a weekly segment and he and his underlings make regular appearances -- so it uses right-wing talk radio host (and friend of the MRC) Mark Levin to serve as cover.

It does so again via a May 4 NewsBusters post by Tim Graham: "In a LevinTV video made publicly available, conservative author and talk-radio host Mark Levin slammed Fox News for allowing Donald Trump to spread the bizarre National Enquirer smear of Ted Cruz’s father Rafael, suggesting that he was “caught on camera” standing next to John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in 1963."

Graham -- who we can assume is lockstep with Bozell as endorsing Ted Cruz -- keeps the passive Fox voice while quoting Levin or others citing Levin  criticizing Fox News:

Levin offered the same message on his radio show on Tuesday night: “You’re not a news channel anymore. You’re the Fox Channel,” Levin said. “And what the hell is with the hosts on the Fox & Friends show? That didn't even challenged Donald Trump!...Not a damn question! Nothing! Zero!” He also roasted Fox’s The Five for “laughing” about the Trump smear. "They have humiliated themselves,” Levin said. “Does Donald sound like he’s cutting a joke [with this JFK allegation]? Does Kilmeade sound like he’s laughing? No, it’s very serious.”

Over at The Right Scoop, they report Trump also spread the Cruz smear on Sean Hannity's national talk radio show without a serious challenge. When Trump unspooled his smear, Hannity asked "Was that verified ever?" Trump replied "They wouldn't let it in if they could be sued...they're very big professionals." Trump also claimed against videotaped reality  that "I  don't think Ted Cruz denied it at his news conference." Hannity then said "I don't know the truth or veracity of it, but let me move on....."

Graham doesn't mention that for years Bozell had (may may still have) a weekly segment on Hannity's Fox News show in which he regurgitates the MRC's greatest hits of that week. For Graham to call out Hannity in this fairly passive way is probably the closest the MRC has come to bashing Fox News for its Trump fanboyism. After all, even when the MRC demonstrated Fox News' pro-Trump bias, it wouldn't even use the B-word in doing so.

Graham even committed the unusual (for the MRC) tactic of praising CNN's Jake Tapper for being hard on Trump for his atack on Cruz, but he still stayed passive by adding: "A 'pro-truth position' is what we should expect any news channel or journalism organization to take."

Now if Graham could explicitly admit that Fox News is the organization that needs to take that "pro-truth position" regarding Trump, we'd have some real evidence that the MRC actually does care about media research.

Lying Preacher Bradlee Dean Bristles At Being Called A Lying Preacher
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bradlee Dean writes in his April 28 WorldNetDaily column:

As I gathered information for this columns to verify everything I am putting forth, I noticed that the communists are hard at work attempting to attack and discredit anyone and everyone who tells you the truth that exposes their lies.

Bradlee Dean is a “Lying Preacher,” “Gold plated conspiracy theorist,” “Devout conspiracy theorist.” etc. These are some of the things that have been said by those who attempted to denounce the truths about the sodomite communities.

Oops, looks like we struck a nerve. We'll happily take credit for calling Dean a "lying preacher."

Why do we call him that? Because that's exactly what he is. We compiled his lies in 2013 -- they're not just anti-gay slurs, though there's plenty of those -- and he has churned out even more lies since then.

And he hasn't stopped. On April 7, Dean reapeated his false conspiracy theory that the federal government "killed Lavoy Fincium in Oregon for standing up against those who were selling uranium ore to the Russians while stealing away the lands from underneath the ranchers." Dean seems to have missed the part where Finicum was begging government agents to shoot him.

In his April 21 column, Dean libelously asserted the former Rep. Barney Frank is a "known homosexual pedophile." In fact, while Frank did admit involvement with a male prostitute, he was cleared by a House Ethics Committee investigation of any knowledge that said prostitute was working out of Franks' home. He was not accused of engaging in pedophilia.

Perhaps Franks' representatives should have a chat with Dean so he can explain where this nonexistent evidence of Franks being a "known homosexual pedophile" comes from, other than one of Dean's bodily orifices.

And we haven't even gotten into the specifics of this particular column in which he lists as conspiracy theories that are actually "conspiracy facts" old-time warhorses like the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission and the New World Order. And he drops alleged conspiracy names like "The Business Plot" and "The Round Table" in a way such that he expects everyone to think as conspiratorially as he does. That may explain why conspiracy-obsessed WND still publishes him even though his ministry went defunct and he's pretty much down to doing a radio show.

If Dean wants to explain how all of his documented lies are actually true -- or wants to issue a lengthy and substantial correction to all the lies he has peddled -- he knows where to find us. Until then, we will continue to accurately describe him as a lying preacher and correct his lies as he tells them.