For the second time in just over a week, Fox News is coming under fire for misusing old news footage. The latest flap is leading some people to charge that the cable news network is intentionally misleading its audience, while Fox claims a "production error."

Wednesday's incident occurred when Fox News host Gregg Jarrett mentioned that a Sarah Palin appearance and book signing in Grand Rapids, Michigan had a massive turnout. As footage rolled of a smiling and waving Palin amidst a throng of fans, Jarrett noted that the former Republican vice-presidential candidate is "continuing to draw huge crowds while she's promoting her brand-new book,'' adding that the images being shown were "some of the pictures just coming in to us.... The lines earlier had formed this morning."

The current mishap comes on the heels of a controversy sparked last week when footage from a conservative rally held over the summer was played on "Hannity" during a segment on a more recent rally. During the clip, host Sean Hannity marveled over the large turnout for a Washington, DC protest. The Daily Show later pointed out that there seemed to be some inconsistencies with the video shown on Hannity's show, namely that the atmospheric conditions seemed to vary from shot to shot

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts988

Last month, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League appeared on The 700 Club to promote his new book, "Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America."

During the interview, the question of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church came up when Robertson asked if "all these scandals in the Catholic Church part of this secular agenda to undermine to undermine the moral fabric of the church." Donohue replied that indeed they were:

"There's no question that within the Catholic Church you have a you a left element ... I regard them as termites sitting within, trying to eat away the fabric of the Catholic Church. So they lie about it in the Catholic Church, they say "oh, we had a pedophilia problem." It's been a homosexual problem all along. It's not my opinion, it's the actual data from the John Jay Criminal Justice System College (sic) here in New York City which looked at the data. I'm not saying homosexuality causes predatory behavior; I'm saying that most of the priests who have been predators have been homosexuals."

What do you supposed Donohue has to say about this?

A preliminary report commissioned by the nation's Roman Catholic bishops to investigate the clergy sex abuse scandal has found no evidence that gay priests are more likely than heterosexual clergy to molest children, the lead authors of the study said Tuesday.

The full report by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice won't be completed until the end of next year. But the authors said their evidence to date found no data indicating that homosexuality was a predictor of abuse.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/what...

The list of what the right wing defending the indefensible continues to grow...
HPV
KBR gang rapists
The coup in Honduras
And now pedophiles

The American Family Association (AFA) usually frets about homosexuals and pornography, but in the aftermath of the shootings at Fort Hood last week, the ultraconservative religious right group has a new concern: Muslims in the U.S. military. Ban them, urges Bryan Fischer, AFA director of issues analysis.

The day after Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born Muslim, is alleged to have shot and killed 13 people at the Texas army post and wounded more than two dozen others, Fischer posted his anti-Muslim screed on the AFA website.

“It is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military,” Fischer wrote. “The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security. Devout Muslims, who accept the teachings of the prophet as divinely inspired, believe it is their duty to kill infidels. Yesterday’s massacre is living proof.”

Fischer conceded that most U.S. Muslims don’t shoot their fellow soldiers. No matter, because “the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to lie to you through his teeth,” Fischer writes. “You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Islamophobia. It is Islamo-realism. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They’re inside the fort, and it’s time for the insanity to stop.”

Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said that barring Muslims from serving in the U.S. military would violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment that ensures equal application of laws among people regardless of their race, faith and the like. “That’s a bigoted, racist, vile position,” Weinstein said of the AFA article. “It’s un-American. It’s inhuman. It violates our Constitution.”

Brigham Young University law professor Cole Durham agrees that barring people of a particular religion from military service would be unconstitutional. Durham, who specializes in international religious freedom law, added that barring Muslims from military service would be foolish even if it were legal given that the U.S. government is trying to convince the world that it is not anti-Muslim. “This is obviously a terrible tragedy,” Durham said of the Fort Hood shootings. “ to hold the entire Muslim community in America hostage to one terrible incident does not respect Islam and the rights of Muslims to be full citizens in this country.”

Even so, Fischer’s Muslim rant isn’t the first time AFA has piped up about a religious minority in the United States. When it learned that a Hindu chaplain from Reno, Nev., would be allowed to deliver the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate in 2007, AFA urged its members to E-mail, write letters and call their senators and object to “seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god.”

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/11/12/v...

If we cut back on regulations, the market will police itself this time. Trust us.

If we privatize this service, it will create competition and jobs this time. Trust us.

If we cut taxes, businesses and the wealthy will create jobs this time. Trust us.

At noon today, five members of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a press conference at the House Triangle with Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR has been listed as an anti-immigrant hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2007.

Stein will discuss “loopholes” in pending health care legislation that he claims will allow benefits to go to “illegal aliens.”

All five House members meeting with FAIR — Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) — are members of the hard-line House Immigration Reform Caucus (IRC). The IRC is headed by U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), who is a former lobbyist for FAIR. In 2002, Bilbray told a group of anti-immigrant activists, “We are creating a slave class that criminal elements breed in.” He also warned, “We could have a terrorist coming in on a Latin name.”

FAIR has a decades-long history of anti-immigrant hatred. The group has employed key staff members with ties to white supremacist groups, accepted more than $1 million from a racist foundation dedicated to the study of racial differences in intelligence, and promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico’s secretly coveting the American Southwest. In 2006, a top official of FAIR in met with former members of a Belgian political party banned by that country’s highest court for “racism and xenophobia.”

The group’s animus toward immigrants reaches all the way back to its founding in 1979. FAIR’s founder, current board member and intellectual leader, John Tanton, has repeatedly described contemporary immigrants as inferior. He has questioned the “educability” of Latinos and written that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” In a letter to Roy Beck, head of NumbersUSA, Tanton wondered “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California … can run an advanced society?”

Stein recently defended Tanton, telling The Washington Post that Tanton is a “Renaissance man” of wide-ranging “intellect.”

It is unclear whether these elected officials are aware of FAIR’s racist track record. In October, another Republican congressman, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, came under fire by immigrants-rights advocates in his home district for participating in a September event put on by FAIR that featured live broadcasts by talk radio hosts. Ryan quickly issued a statement saying he did not endorse or support FAIR and had only granted a radio interview to discuss “health care reform and the Green Bay Packers.” According to Ryan’s statement, he had his name removed from FAIR’s website where it had been noted that Ryan took part in the FAIR’s event.

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/11/06/d...

A 22-year veteran kindergarten teacher in the Texas Bible Belt could lose her job for refusing, on religious grounds, to give fingerprints under a state law requiring them.

The evangelical Christian, Pam McLaurin, is fighting a looming suspension, claiming that fingerprinting amounts to the “Mark of the Beast,” and hence is a violation of her First Amendment right to practice her religion. Her case is similar to a lawsuit by a group of Michigan farmers, some of them Amish, challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are also the devil’s mark.

The latest case is the first in which a teacher is refusing fingerprinting on religious grounds, the woman’s lawyer said. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide whether the First Amendment is implicated in fingerprinting, especially at a time when states, local governments and civic organizations are increasingly making them mandatory for anyone wanting to drive a car or coach a youth basketball team.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/m...

Oh please look at the tragic press release for Bill Donohue’s new-ish book, Secular Sabotage. Not one person—not a single graphic design intern, or PR guy, or someone at the publisher’s office—had any objection to including this blurb. Chilling.

http://wonkette.com/412020/heartbreaking-b...

Hey, remember when the HPV vaccine came out and the Christian Right opposed it, but then kind of softened their stance a little bit when they found out it might look kind of bad for them if they came across as being in support of cancer?

Well, looks like that didn't last.

"You'd think that with a name like Concerned Women for America, the group would be concerned about women and their health and support efforts to inform women on the proper way to conduct regular breast exams.

But you'd be wrong, because that is what the Washington, DC ABC affiliate tried to do yesterday with this report entitled "Touch of Life: The Guide to Self-Breast Examination" in which they showed a woman giving herself such an exam. As ABC explained:

" We are about to teach you how to potentially save your life by showing a full breast examination. Our very brave volunteer is unclothed so that a doctor can show both her and you the proper way to catch breast cancer. In all of our reporting, we were amazed to find the vast majority of women had no idea how to do a breast exam, when to do it, and how often they should do it."

CWA's Wendy Wright was outraged,accusing ABC of exploiting women and using nudity to bolster its ratings during "sweeps":

"It could be done on a model or mannequin. It can be done through diagrams. & This is exploiting women in order to exploit the audience," said Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group that promotes biblical values. "It's pretty clear that there's one point in doing this, and that is to try and increase their ratings."

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/conc...

HPV? Check!
KBR rapists? Check!
Breast cancer? Check!

Hey righties, any other things out there that you think get a bad rap and don't deserve it? I hear that malaria and cannibals both need someone in their corner.

First off, just get this out of the way...



OK then.

"The Liberty Counsel — the lawsuit-friendly organization that helps Exodus International and other Christian Rightists sue defenders of religious freedom — is defending the new president of the United Nations General Assembly, former Libyan Foreign Minister Ali Abdussalam Treki, who on Sept. 15 disagreed with a 2008 General Assembly statement by 66 nations urging decriminalization of homosexuality.

According to PrideSource, Treki said: “As a Muslim, I am not in favor of that. I believe it is not accepted by the majority of countries (and) it is not really acceptable by our religion, our tradition.”

In an Oct. 24 statement to American Family Association’s OneNewsNow propaganda service, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel rose to defend Treki, who rose to his position at the U.N. through the sponsorship of Libya’s longtime terror mastermind Muammar al-Qaddafi. Barber said Treki’s views on criminalization were in tune with much of the world.

On that count, he may be right:

Private consensual homosexual behavior is punishable by imprisonment in 70 of 195 nations.

But Treki’s statement is contrary to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Act.

Barber’s public support for imprisonment of gay people worldwide might be considered refreshing by cynics; his allies at Exodus continue to offer discreet support to vigilantism and imprisonment in Uganda and Barbados, and they refuse to offer an official public statement condemning imprisonment and vigilantism.

According to the AFA, Barber says that groups which voice disagreement with Treki and imprisonment…

“…are completely intolerant of other people’s belief systems of other cultures,” says the Christian attorney. “We hear talk of cultural diversity — there is no cultural diversity as far as the left is concerned and as far as homosexual activists are concerned. It’s either their way or the highway.”

Barber’s support for tolerance of terrorism, imprisonment, and vigilantism against LGBT people takes the Christian Right’s notion of “tolerance” to a whole new level."

http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2009/10/4...

Ebay announced yesterday that it will block an online auction planned to support the legal defense of Scott Roeder, the alleged murderer of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, MD. According to the Los Angeles Times, eBay said, "Based on the details we know about the anticipated listings, we believe these would violate our policy regarding offensive material. The company intends to remove any listings that are posted due to policies that bar listings promoting or glorifying violence or hatred.

After plans for the auction were announced, Kathy Spillar, executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation told the Kansas City Star that "the network of extremists promoting and defending the murder of doctors is contributing to escalating threats against clinics and doctors across the country." Items Roeder's associates planned to sell included an Army of God manual, an autographed protest bullhorn, and a prison cookbook written by Shelley Shannon, who shot Dr. Tiller five times in 1993.

The trial for Roeder has been postponed until January 2010. Roeder's trial for first degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault had originally been set to begin in September of this year. If convicted of all charges, Roeder faces life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

Dr. Tiller, who was medical director of the Women's Health Care Services clinic in Wichita, Kansas, was killed in May at his church. The Department of Justice opened an investigation in June to look into possible federal crimes associated with the murder. The federal government also convened a meeting of the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers in the days following the murder and Attorney General Eric Holder deployed US Marshals to protect highly threatened clinics and staff.

http://www.msmagazine.com/news/uswirestory...

President Barack Obama plans to sign legislation today adding gays to the list of groups covered by the federal hate-crime law, the biggest expansion of such protections in decades.

Obama will sign a defense policy and funding measure that includes the provision and, according to a White House statement, will save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars by reducing waste and fraud.

The bill authorizes $680 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2010, which began Oct. 1. In an advanced text of his remarks released by the White House, Obama said the legislation shows that “change is possible” in “eliminating business as usual” in the annual military funding process.

Democrats in Congress who long have been pushing for expansion of the hate-crime law added it to the bill. The 1968 statute, passed in the aftermath of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., applies to people attacked because of their race, religion or national origin.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20091028...

STUPID!

During his Fox News show on Tuesday night, right-wing pundit Sean Hannity attacked a new ad campaign soon to be appearing in New York City subway stations that raises awareness about atheism. The ad, sponsored by The Big Apple Coalition of Reason, reads: “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?”

“These ads inform New Yorkers that a million or more of their neighbors are good without God,” said Michael De Dora Jr., the executive director for the New York branch of the Center for Inquiry. “That is, a million of us have found or created natural morality, and lead good, productive, and meaningful lives without appeal to religious dogma or God.”

Sensing an opportunity to exploit the ads for political benefit, Hannity told his audience that a Christian group could never get away with airing ads like that:

"Can you imagine the outrage if a Christian group put pro-God ads in the New York City subways? What outrage."

Uh, Sean...



http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/24/hannit... /


BACK TO THE 13th CENTURY!

Virginia's GOP candidate for Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli says:

"My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that."

http://gay.americablog.com/2009/10/gop-can...


And of course, RACISM!

Perhaps no one noticed. Perhaps no one cared. But hours after a liberal news forum brought attention to a series of days old controversial photos on the Republican National Committee's Facebook page, the photos were finally taken down.

Among them was a picture of President Barack Obama eating fried chicken, subtitled with a call to prohibit interracial marriage. The photo's caption read: "Miscegenation is a CRIME against American Values. Repeal Loving v. Virginia."

Miscegenation refers to the "marriage or cohabitation between a man and woman of different races." Loving v. Virginia was a landmark Supreme Court case that, in 1967, struck down all of the US's laws against interracial marriage.

http://rawstory.com/2009/10/gops-facebook-...

Shawna Forde, the anti-immigration crusader who has been accused of murder in the home-invasion killings of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter, got the full treatment on Sunday from her hometown paper.

The full treatment — more than 5,000 words of it by reporter Scott North in The Herald of Everett, Wash. — provides the most extensive account to date of the lies, betrayals and self-promotions carried out over the years by Forde, 41, one of three people awaiting trial for the murders of Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia on May 30 in Arivaca, Ariz., a town near the Mexican border. Police say she believed Flores was a drug smuggler and she planned to use any drugs or money she found in the home to support her Minuteman American Defense group.

The story provides example after example of how Forde, presenting herself as an energetic patriot with deep concerns about illegal immigration and border security, found a warm welcome in the Minuteman movement, “a loose-knit, fractious network that needed volunteers enough to set aside skepticism.”

One of the people interviewed for the story was a private investigator and security consultant named Mike Carlucci. Over the years, the story said, Forde described Carlucci to reporters and her Minuteman associates as “her link to legal muscle and even how she got dirt on her enemies.”

The story continued:

"That is a lie, Carlucci said. It’s one of many that apparently went down easy in Minutemen circles, he said.

Some within the border-watch movement seem particularly susceptible to manipulation and fraud, Carlucci said. Their groups are largely volunteer, emotional about patriotism and love of country. They can’t agree how to conduct themselves and, he said, for some that ambivalence extends to whether they should follow the nation’s laws.

“I think it is a user-friendly environment for folks who aren’t necessarily accountable because there are not hard and fast standards of accountability,” he said."

As border patrollers, the story made clear, Forde and her band were generally hapless, disorganized and ineffective. Early this year, Forde tried to piggyback onto a better-organized, better-equipped patrol operation called Project Bluelight, operated by a former private investigator and onetime Marine named Joe Adams. Adams didn’t welcome the attention, as he indicated in a May 11 E-mail to Forde:

“Here is what I am suggesting. 1. Stop dropping mine and Project Bluelight’s name to give you and your amateur operations credibility. 2. Stay in Washington and off the border for the good of the movement. Shauna (sic), you are a dangerous sociopath and anyone who would listen to your (expletive) is an idiot. You do not know what you are doing, and you put people in the border movement in harms way. … Go away. Good luck in prison.”

The Herald has been tracking Forde’s antics for a long time. In February, after Forde suggested that Mexican drug cartels had targeted her for a series of violent attacks, the paper ran a profile that cast serious doubt on Forde’s claims, and summarized her troubled past, which included felonies starting from age 11 and repeated convictions for theft, burglary and prostitution.

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/10/26/l...

In 1999, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah criticized the use of anonymous sources -- as done in a profile several years earlier by the Columbia Journalism Review on Farah's tenure as editor of the Sacramento Union -- as "usually quotes made up out of whole cloth to help make the story read better."

Such an attitude has never prevented Farah from banning anonymous sources at WND. In fact, they're not only used in much the same manner he criticized a decade ago, their use has expanded -- even granting anonymity to terrorists.

WND's penchant for anonymity goes way back -- for instance, a 2002 article featured an anonymous "former White House veterinarian" asserting that the Clintons didn't treat their pets very well while in office. The election of Barack Obama to the presidency, however, has resulted in an explosion of anonymous claims being hurled in WND articles:

* An April 18 article promoting Farah's G2 Bulletin, "the premium, online intelligence newsletter edited by the founder of WND," asserted that Obama employed "restrictive rules of engagement that actually hampered the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips and extended the drama at sea for days." The article cited anonymous yet purportedly "reliable military sources close to the scene" to back up the claim, which is otherwise unsubstantiated.
* A July 30 article by Joe Kovacs touted an anonymous YouTube video claiming that the Bible depicts Obama as the Antichrist. Kovacs even interviewed the video-maker, claiming that he "spoke to WND under condition of anonymity out of concern for members of his local church." Kovacs didn't explain why, if the person's scholarship was solid (which, as ConWebWatch detailed, it wasn't), he had anything to fear from "his local church."
* A July 29 article touted a video -- like the Antichrist video, anonymously posted on YouTube -- purporting to demonstrate "how easy it is to fake" a Hawaiian certificate of live birth, like the one Obama has presented. But the video contains a major factual error, claiming that "there's not even a hint of a (raised) seal" on the certificate released by the Obama campaign. In fact, it contains a raised seal. WND made no mention of this error.
* When WND promoted a document claimed to be a "Kenyan birth certificate" for Obama, it it stated that Orly Taitz, the birther attorney who WND has long been fawning over despite increasing concerns about her legal work, "told WND that the document came from an anonymous source who doesn't want his name known because 'he's afraid for his life.'" WND made no apparent effort to find the source of the certificate, even after it concluded that it was a forgery.
* An Aug. 9 WND article promoted a story in the Globe supermarket tabloid "proclaiming Barack Obama's 'official birth document' a fake and suggesting the president may actually have been born in Canada." The article added that the Globe "also cites WND's reporting about the changing stories about the hospital in which Obama was born." According to WND, the Globe cited "reports by unnamed document analysts" for its claim. That would seem to make WND's reporting on par with that of supermarket tabloids. Most legitimate news organizations would be embarrassed by such a comparison; WND apparently is not. (Indeed, as ConWebWatch has detailed, the ConWeb denounces the tabloids when they report on Republicans but embrace them when they report on Democrats.)

Another way WND hurls smears without accountability is by quoting anonymous commenters who are purported to have written to WND. For instance, in an Aug. 5 article dedicated to spreading the falsehood that a White House email address set up to collect reports of misinformation being spread about President Obama's health-care reform plan is a "snitch" program that collects data on people, Bob Unruh included the following:

Bloggers and readers were livid.

Wrote one observer to WND, "In my life I never thought I’d see this happen in America. What are they going to do with the information they get?? Pure terrorism."

Added another, "Why wait for a snitch to turn your name in, when you do it yourself and save them the trouble. It only makes sense."

A third reader simply sent a link to an online history resource that cited the use of informants during the prelude to World War II.

Unruh offered no explanation as to why these particular responses were chosen, or why they were granted anonymity. After all -- as former newspaper editor Farah should very well know -- newspapers do not publish anonymous letters to the editor. Nor does WND explain why anonymous comments, a lower grade of commentary because no one is accountable for it, should be given a privileged place in a bylined "news" story.

http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2009...

"A report is circulating among the wingnuts that I had a peek at Barack Obama's senior thesis. It is completely false. I've never seen Obama's thesis. I have no idea where this report comes from--but I can assure you that it's complete nonsense.

Update: Michael Ledeen now has apologized to me on his blog, claiming that he, Limbaugh and others were punked by a satire. I appreciate the apology...but I wonder about what the willingness to take this cheesy crap as gospel says about Ledeen's--and Boss Rush's--sensibility. Actually, on second thought, I don't wonder all that much."

Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/10/23...

You'd think after the Kenyan Birth Certificate debacle, they might do a little research first, but nooooooo.

Republicans are really asking for it. We should just start making stuff up, crazy and fantastic stories about Obama, spread them around, and see how long it takes before they start showing up on WorldNutDaily, NewsMax, and maybe even Fox News.