05/18/15

Stephanopoulos Fiasco is Par for the Course

What is surprising about the latest George Stephanopoulos controversy is that most of the media are treating it as something unusual rather than an acknowledgement of a problem that’s been plaguing the media for decades. We at Accuracy in Media are happy to see this issue receive the scrutiny it deserves. However, anyone convinced that Stephanopoulos’s ongoing political conflict of interest and failure to disclose it to his viewers is the exception, not the rule, hasn’t been paying attention to a long history of media corruption.

Stephanopoulos interviewed Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on April 26. But the ABC host, formerly a Senior Advisor on Policy and Strategy, and unofficial hatchet-man, for President Bill Clinton, treated his broadcast as more of an interrogation than an interview in an effort to discredit Schweizer and defend, in turn, the Clintons. A real interview would have endeavored to understand Schweizer’s critique of the Clintons, not demand to see a “smoking gun” or “evidence” of a crime.

Stephanopoulos’s conflict of interest was blown wide open by an excellent outfit, The Washington Free Beacon, which started the ball rolling when it contacted ABC News about Stephanopoulos’s donations to the Clinton Foundation. ABC’s spokeswoman, Heather Riley, said that they would respond, but then turned first to a friendly ally—Politico—to spin the story favorably for the network and its golden boy.

“I thought that my contributions were a matter of public record,” said Stephanopoulos in his apology. “However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the Foundation.”

ABC News initially incorrectly stated that he had given only $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation—an amount he later amended to $75,000 over three years.

But there’s more, much more.

The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles reported that Ms. Riley “worked in the White House press office from 1997 to 2000,” including serving “as a press contact for then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.”

But beyond that, Schweizer followed up on the week’s revelations, and found that Stephanopoulos’s ties with the Clinton Foundation were much closer than just cutting checks to the foundation. Schweizer called it “the sort of ‘hidden hand journalism’ that has contributed to America’s news media’s crisis of credibility in particular, and Americans’ distrust of the news media more broadly.”

He pointed out that Stephanopoulos “did not disclose that in 2006 he was a featured attendee and panel moderator at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).” Nor did he “disclose that in 2007, he was a featured attendee at the CGI annual meeting, a gathering also attended by several individuals I report on in Clinton Cash, including mega Clinton Foundation donors Lucas Lundin, Frank Giustra, Frank Holmes, and Carlos Slim—individuals whose involvement with the Clintons I assumed he had invited me on his program to discuss.” And on it goes.

Stephanopoulos inadvertently revealed in another setting what donations such as his are all about. “But everybody also knows when those donors give that money—and President Clinton or someone, they get a picture with him—there’s a hope that it’s going to lead to something. And that’s what you have to be careful of,” Stephanopoulos said to Jon Stewart about Schweizer’s theory on April 28. “Even if you don’t get an action, what you get is access and you get the influence that comes with access and that’s got to shape the thinking of politicians. That’s what’s so pernicious about it.”

“Could Stephanopoulos, who is also ABC News’s chief anchor and political correspondent, be hoping for access to and exclusives from Bill and Hillary, giving him a competitive edge during the 2016 presidential campaign?” asks Lloyd Grove for The Daily Beast.

On the May 15 broadcast of Good Morning America Stephanopoulos “apologized” again—while patting himself on the back for supporting children, the environment, and efforts to stop the spread of AIDS. “Those donations were a matter of public record, but I should have made additional disclosures on air when I covered the foundation, and I now believe that directing personal donations to that foundation was a mistake,” he said. “Even though I made them strictly to support work done to stop the spread of AIDS, help children, and protect the environment in poor countries, I should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict.”

The extra mile?

This is, basically, the same argument the Clintons and their Foundation have put forth to explain their conflicts of interest or “errors,” after having taken millions of dollars from companies and countries that had business with the U.S. government while Mrs. Clinton served as Secretary of State. Their failure to disclose many of these donations resulted in them refiling their tax returns for five years, once the obvious conflicts of interest came to light.

In reality the Clinton Foundation gives about 10% of what it collects to direct charitable grants, according to a study by The Federalist, as reported in National Review. “It looks like the Foundation—which once did a large amount of direct charitable work—now exists mainly to fund salaries, travel, and conferences,” writes David French. The study pointed out that “Between 2011 and 2013, the organization spent only 9.9 percent of the $252 million it collected on direct charitable grants.” In other words, less than $10,000 of the money that Stephanopoulos paid as tribute to the Clintons went to the causes he claims to care about.

Stephanopoulos has removed himself from the ABC-sponsored Republican presidential primary debate next February. Yet he simultaneously claimed, “I think I’ve shown that I can moderate debates fairly.” His decision to not participate ignores the bigger picture.

As we have pointed out, the incestuous relationships between the Democrats and media are almost endless. It’s not just ABC’s Sunday show, but the two other main broadcast networks that also feature highly partisan Democrats as hosts. NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd “served as a staffer on Democratic Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential bid,” according to Politico. John Dickerson, the new host of CBS’s Face the Nation gave the following advice to President Barack Obama in 2013: “The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.”

Stephanopoulos says he should have announced his conflict of interest. If such announcements become commonplace, which they should, where exactly will that end? Should CBS News announce each and every time it broadcasts news about President Obama’s foreign policy or national security issues that the president of CBS News is actually the brother of White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes? Or should ABC News have regularly disclosed that its former ABC News President Ben Sherwood had a sister with the Obama White House? She still works with the Obama administration. And, NBC? That’s the network of Al Sharpton, Brian Williams, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow. Need I say more?

Chris Harper, formerly of ABC News, has posted his views, along with those of other mostly liberal former ABC News people, as cited by Kevin Williamson of National Review: “During the 15 years we worked for ABC News,” wrote Harper, “we remember that we had to sign a yearly disclosure of gifts worth more than $25 and contributions. Perhaps these documents no longer exist in the muddled world of TV news.”

Added Harper: “Mr. Stephanopoulos has few defenders among his former colleagues. According to a Facebook page, ABCeniors, the rather liberal bunch of former network staffers discussed the problems with his contributions. ‘That shows either indifference or arrogance. Or a nice cocktail of both,’ wrote one former ABC hand. A former producer noted: ‘He knew what he was doing, and he didn’t want us to know. That’s deceit.’”

Geraldo Rivera recalled that he had been fired from ABC back in 1985 because of a $200 political donation. At least that was the reason given at the time. Rivera wondered why Stephanopoulos was being treated differently: “The point is ABC treated my undisclosed $200 donation harshly because the network wanted me out for that unrelated reason,” Rivera continued. “Now ABC is bending over backward to minimize and forgive George Stephanopoulos’s $75,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation because he is central to the network’s recent success.”

Former ABC News reporter Carole Simpson said Sunday on CNN’s Reliable Sources that she “was dumbfounded.”

“But I wanted to just take him by the neck and say, George, what were you thinking?

“And clearly, he was not thinking. I thought it was outrageous, and I am sorry that, again, the public’s trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.”

She added that “there’s a coziness that George cannot escape the association. He was press secretary for President Clinton. That’s pretty close. And while he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really is not a journalist. Yet, ABC has made him the face of ABC News, the chief anchor. And I think they’re really caught in a quandary here.” She believes that ABC, despite their public support for Stephanopoulos, is “hopping mad” at him.

When the left has conflicts of interest involving money, the media allow the perpetrators—including themselves—to portray this as charity and supporting good causes. “[NBC’s Brian] Willams wrapped himself in the flag; Stephanopoulos cloaked himself in charity,” writes Grove. MSNBC identified 143 journalists making political donations between 2004 and the start of the 2008 campaign. “Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes,” according to NBC News.

But when conservatives are shown to have financial conflicts of interest, or even to have accepted legitimate campaign donations, they are generally portrayed as serving the interests of evil, greedy businessmen or lobbyists who are paying off politicians to allow them to pollute, destroy the environment, fatten up defense contractors and avoid paying taxes.

“As you know, the Democrats have said this is—this is an indication of your partisan interest. They say… you used to work for …President Bush as a speechwriter. You’re funded by the Koch brothers,” Stephanopoulos told Schweizer during the interview, casting the author as biased. Stephanopoulos, however, they want us to believe, is just an impartial journalist inquiring after the truth.

This is what happens when you have a corrupt media that don’t play fair, but instead put their thumb on the fairness scale to tilt it towards their partisan interests.

05/12/15

Phony “Conservatives” and Britain’s Cultural Collapse

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The usually astute Heritage Foundation commentator Nile Gardiner calls the win by the Conservative Party in Britain a defeat for socialism. Yet, Conservative Party head David Cameron ran on a platform boasting that “we have protected the National Health Service, with 9,500 more doctors and 6,900 more nurses, and ensured generous rises in the State Pension.”

Based on this precedent, we can anticipate that Republican Party politicians here in America will one day run on a platform of making Obamacare more affordable, rather than seeking to abolish it. This, then, will be defined as the “conservative” position.

The coverage of the recent British elections has demonstrated that the term “conservative” has lost much of its meaning. It’s time to take a hard look at what the term has come to mean in Britain and how it is being distorted and transformed here.

In addition to the Conservative Party’s embrace of socialist programs, the Cameron government, which has ruled Britain for five years, has embraced Islamic immigration to Britain, going so far as to pay more deference to global Islam than traditional Christianity. Demonstrating this bias, the supposedly “conservative” government in Britain banned American anti-Jihad activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from the country. Geller and Spencer had intended to rally opposition to the Islamization of the West. Spencer called Cameron, who has labeled Islam “a religion of peace,” as the “dhimmi appeaser.” The term means a non-Muslim who accepts Muslim dominance.

Cameron and his Conservative Party have also embraced the legalization of homosexual marriage. The Conservatives’ 2015 manifesto says: “Our historic introduction of gay marriage has helped drive forward equality and strengthened the institution of marriage. But there is still more to do, and we will continue to champion equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people.”

We can easily anticipate the Republican Party going down this road in the United States. In fact, the publication Politico notes that GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush is among those trying to “have it both ways” on homosexual marriage. “While he publicly maintains his opposition to same-sex marriage, reaffirmed over the weekend by a surrogate he sent to Iowa, Bush is sending signals that he may be more accepting of ‘marriage equality’—the strongest signal, perhaps, coming when he referred to the issue using that term favored by LGBT advocates—than he’s able to let on,” the publication reported.

It noted that Bush has hired a communications director, Tim Miller, who is openly gay, and his inner circle of staffers “have all expressed strong support for marriage equality, including Mike Murphy, hired to run his messaging shop, who wrote about the GOP’s need to evolve on policy following Romney’s defeat in 2012.”

Jeb Bush is shaping up as the David Cameron of the Republican Party.

In Britain the changes keep coming, now at an astounding rate. Andrea Williams of the British group Christian Concern says the Cameron government has not only “destroyed marriage” by redefining it to include homosexual couples, but it is also pursuing liberal policies in other areas. For example, she says the government has liberalized abortion and refused to outlaw abortions on the basis of the sex of the fetus. She says that in Britain nurses and teachers have been suspended for wearing Christian crosses, judges have been replaced for refusing to place children in homosexual relationships with two fathers or two mothers, and Christian street preachers are being jailed for “offensive” comments. “We have no leader at the helm of any of our main parties, whether it’s the Liberal Democrats, the Labor Party or the Conservative Party, who are speaking a moral vision,” she says.

Another British group, the Christian Institute, confirms these ominous trends and warns that “…here in the UK religious liberty is being increasingly challenged…Street preachers have been arrested. Christians have lost their jobs for answering questions about their faith or for taking an ethical stand. Christians in business have come into conflict with equality laws and faced fines for holding to the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

Commentator Charles Moore had warned in March 2015: “Socially conservative moral views are now teetering on the edge of criminality, and are over the edge of disapproval by those who run modern Britain.”

In arguing that “Britain is at heart still a conservative country,” Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation was talking about a country that no longer exists. His only reference to Britain’s cultural collapse came in his observation that Cameron had “alienated many grassroots supporters with highly controversial ‘modernizing’ policies such as backing gay marriage and increasing spending on foreign aid, both deeply unpopular with the Conservative base.” In fact, as we have seen in the statements quoted above, the conservative base has been betrayed on a host of issues. Today, even free speech is at risk in Britain.

In the U.S., it appears that big money is driving the Republican Party to the left, along the same path taken by Britain. The Politico article quoted earlier noted the influence of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who has decided that since his own son is gay, the Republican Party should embrace the homosexual lifestyle and homosexual marriage. The publication said that Bush is determined to win Singer’s personal support, and added that “other billionaire bundlers like Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb, another hedge funder known for asking any candidate who enters his office where they stand on gay rights,” are also looking for Republicans to finance and push their pet causes.

As these developments unfold, it will be up to conservatives in the media and the think tanks to shine a light on the attempted takeover of the Republican Party. That will be much harder to do if the conservative media become part of the problem and go AWOL on the need for a moral vision to save the country.

In this context, Guy Benson, the political editor of its conservative Townhall.com website, has announced that he is a practicing homosexual. Benson, a supporter of homosexual marriage, is a Fox News contributor who appeared on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show to discuss coming out of the closet through a footnote in his new book. “I think it’s very brave,” Kelly told him.

Fox News has been a major financial backer of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, a group that featured a male stripper at its recent New York City fundraiser. However, Townhall.com’s parent company is a Christian firm, Salem Media Group, which has refused comment on whether Benson will retain his influential position within the company. The company describes its mission as “targeting audiences interested in Christian and family-themed content and conservative values.”

04/22/15

Obama and the Media Still Hiding Immigration Agenda

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Once again, the Obama administration is deceiving the courts, and the American people, about its plans for amnesty for millions of current and future illegal aliens. And to make things worse, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty, for which President Obama is seeking fast-track authority, would, according to Dick Morris, writing in The Hill, “override national immigration restrictions in the name of facilitating the free flow of labor.” And in this instance, whether wittingly or otherwise, Republicans are lining up to support the President in the name of free trade.

The proposed free trade agreement would undermine Congressional oversight over immigration, adding more power to the presidency, Morris argues. Pair this development with President Obama’s push to legalize illegal immigrants as U.S. residents, and this could become a dangerous policy combination.

Immigration reform is often presented by the media in terms of the human cost, and the alleged inhumanity in not allowing these persons to stay in the United States. The liberal media therefore, delight in pointing to any evidence they can find suggesting hypocrisy on the right on this issue and ignore the blatant abuses by the Obama administration in pursuit of his amnesty agenda.

News coverage of the recent hearing before the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ignores the fact that the Obama administration misled a lower court judge, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, about the implementation of the Department of Homeland Security’s, and therefore President Obama’s offer of “temporary legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, along with an indefinite reprieve from deportation.” The administration claims it is acting with prosecutorial discretion, and that it should be able to prioritize the removal of illegal immigrant criminal elements.

The reality is that illegal immigrant rapists and murderers are being released by this administration, and that arrests and deportations of that group have declined, as well.

The administration has acted deceptively. “For three months while the lawsuit was pending and Judge Hanen was reviewing briefs and holding hearings and conference calls with the parties, [Department of Justice] lawyers were telling him that none of the president’s announced new policies were being implemented,” wrote Hans A. Von Spakovsky for National Review on March 20. “However, on March 3, Justice suddenly filed an ‘Advisory’ notifying the court that the administration had, in fact, issued three-year deferrals to more than 100,000 aliens.”

The Department of Justice apparently “knew all along that the administration had started issuing three-year terms of deferred action and work permits” in November 2014, even though “it knew the states’ lawsuit challenged the entirety of the DHS Directive,” he reports.

When Judge Hanen realized what he had been told was false, he told Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kathleen Hartnett: “When I asked you what would happen and you said nothing, I took it to heart. I was made to look like an idiot,” He added, “I believed your word that nothing would happen. . . . Like an idiot, I believed that.”

During the April 17 hearing, Benjamin C. Mizer, Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that “For an employer to employ an individual who does not have work authorization, that employer has engaged in a crime. So giving the deferred action and giving the employment authorization actually reduces crime by reducing the third party employer crime.”

In other words, the administration wants to ignore the alleged illegal acts of one favored group in order to reduce crime by another less favored one.

On April 16, the day before this Fifth Circuit hearing, CNN’s Ariane de Vogue characterized illegal immigrants as the victims of political forces. She reported that President Obama’s unilateral executive policies were “announced with great fanfare” and would “shield” up to “5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.”

Similarly, Politico’s Josh Gerstein, the day of the hearing, expressed his concern that “If the administration can’t get its new moves underway sometime this year it may have difficulty getting them done before Obama leaves office” and called Obama’s plan a “legacy agenda item.”

Clearly, the media are more interested in the success of programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) than holding the administration accountable.

“It will be an uphill climb for the programs’ supporters, made worse by the fact that two of the judges are Republican appointees who may be hostile to their position,” wrote De Vogue in advance of the hearing—revealing her transparent concern for the administration’s success.

Pundits in the Hispanic media community also continue to mislead their audience by running segments which promote a culture of fear.

MSNBC’s biography of Jose Diaz-Balart lists him as “one of the most respected voices in Hispanic journalism in the United States.” During his April 16 show, he brought on two Democratic Congressmen and asked them softball leading questions all about the climate of fear and uncertainty for those “waiting” in “legal limbo.”

Diaz-Balart asked, “What do you tell them when there’s so much uncertainty about these programs?”

“That fear is not going to go anywhere while this legal limbo continues, and really nothing is being done in Washington as far as immigration reform,” he said.

“But you know there are a lot of families that are being separated that do qualify right now under DACA or DAPA and nothing’s being done,” he commented. In other words, President Obama should act more, not less, to shield illegal immigrants from the consequences of breaking U.S. laws.

An El Paso Intelligence Center report using Obama administration data released last year indicated that “Of the 230 total migrants interviewed, 219 cited the primary reason for migrating to the United States was the perception of U.S. immigration laws granting free passes or permisos…”

Diaz-Balart’s Congressional guests spoke about how illegal immigrants can protect themselves and that lawyers will be provided to them, and the show featured pictures of people rallying to the cause.

One must ask, however, whether lawyers, rallies, and endless sympathetic media coverage will also be provided for the potential victims of the dangerous criminals who are currently being released by the administration.

“…both arrests and deportations of criminal aliens are down about 30 percent through the first six months of fiscal year 2015, signaling that agents, who have been told to stop focusing on rank-and-file illegal immigrants, have not been able to refocus on criminal illegal immigrants instead,” wrote Stephen Dinan for The Washington Times on April 14.

A hearing with “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldana, also showed that the 30,558 criminal aliens ICE knowingly released back into the community in 2014 had amassed nearly 80,000 convictions, including 250 homicides, 186 kidnappings and 373 sexual assaults,” reports Dinan.

These predators released back into the American community are very likely to strike again.

But the media are not concerned about reporting on the facts which might sully the administration’s reputation or harm the left’s illegal immigration agenda.

04/11/15

Obama Warns Parents: Your Kids Are Mine

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

President Barack Obama has issued a declaration on human sexuality and what constitutes moral and mental health for the nation. He is warning Christian parents that the federal government wants their kids.

This is not how the story is being reported, however. For example, a story in Politico carries the headline, “Barack Obama denounces ‘conversion therapies’ for gays,” with the words “conversion therapies” in quotes, as if to suggest there’s some doubt that homosexuals can return to being straight. This is all too typical of the mentality that grips the major media and is designed to suggest that homosexuality is somehow natural and cannot be changed. But honest journalism, which is virtually non-existent when covering homosexuality, would take a different approach to the topic.

As Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth notes, there are plenty of former homosexuals. Has the Politico reporter Louis Nelson ever met or reported on them? We can’t find any record of that. So if the magazine doesn’t report on them, they must not exist. This is not journalism but cheerleading for Obama and the gay rights cause. It’s also a disservice to the parents of young people who need help and have a right to information about both sides of the story.

Rich Wyler, founder and director of the group, People Can Change, does not exist in a world where the liberal media and the gay rights movement become one and the same. He says that before he found sexual-orientation change therapy in the 1990s, “I was so conflicted over unwanted same-sex attractions that I was suicidal and self-destructive.” He goes on, “Sexual-reorientation therapy saved my life. I was in my 30s; I only wish I’d found this kind of help as a teenager or young adult. It could have saved me years of heartbreak and confusion.”

The other side of the story would include reporting that Obama’s political proclamation in favor of outlawing sexual-orientation change therapy not only constitutes crass exploitation of the terrible suicide of a mixed-up young person named Joshua Alcorn but serves as an indictment of his Christian parents. Joshua was confused about his sexuality and had begun referring to himself as a girl, Leelah. The parents had tried to get help for the troubled 17-year-old before he committed suicide.

The implication of the Politico-style reporting on this topic is that being “homosexual and transgender” is a fact of life that cannot be changed. That’s false. But the media just can’t bring themselves to report the facts.

Politico says the parents in this case found religious therapists who “attempted to convert her [Leelah] back into a boy.” This, too, is false. The child was a boy. Politico calls him “a transgender girl,” another falsehood.

In essence, Obama is proposing to ban parents, on a national basis, from seeking help for their children when they go through confusing times or have sexual problems. This is the totalitarian mind-set of the gay rights movement and its supporters.

This is not just a discussion about media bias. It’s important we understand what’s happening here. Obama’s statement, delivered by Valerie Jarrett on his behalf, is a declaration of war on parents, especially Christian parents who object to the government sanctioning and promoting homosexuality as another “lifestyle.”

From Obama’s perspective, these parents stand in the way of creating an army of “LGBT” young people who will forever be grateful to the President for standing up for their “rights.” Like the dope smokers in Colorado, participating in what Obama calls an “experiment,” these young people constitute another Democratic Party constituency. Obama doesn’t seem concerned, however, about the consequences of their immoral behavior. After all, he was a heavy dope smoker and look what happened to him and where he ended up.

Although Obama’s statement on human sexuality was “not accompanied by any concrete statements of policy,” as Politico put it, two states, California and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia, have banned parents from having a role in raising their children in this area of human sexuality. Politico seems to be begging the President to introduce national legislation to put parents in their place. Perhaps that’s the next step.

Like the editors at Politico, Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler (NY) also seems to think Obama knows best. Nadler issued a statement declaring, “I believe that licensed mental health professionals should be prohibited from engaging in these deceptive and damaging practices.” So the politicians, including Obama, are going to decide what constitutes “mental health.” This is reminiscent of the approach taken by the USSR’s psychiatric hospitals. Perhaps political dissidents on the issue of homosexuality in the United States will be assigned to the kind of mental hospitals the communists ran in the old Soviet Union.

In other words, a form of “conversion therapy” will be retained, but used on those who resist the homosexual movement’s demands for our children. Believers in the old-fashioned values of one man and one woman marriage will be “re-educated,” or else.

Citing Obama’s declaration on the correct state of mental health, Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center has declared, “Our fight for LGBT equality has just received a major boost.” This well-funded leftist group is using the legal system to terrorize groups like JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing) from helping homosexuals escape the behavior that puts their mental and physical health in danger.

Cohen declared, “While President Obama has done the nation a great service by speaking out, he hasn’t yet introduced any new policy initiatives. That’s why our work is so important. We’re going to trial [against JONAH] in New Jersey this summer, and we’ll continue doing everything we can to stop the destructive use of conversion therapy across the country.”

JONAH, with the help of the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, is fighting back and has affirmed, “We continue our defense of the right of individuals to freely choose the help they believe will allow them to live their lives consistent with their personal and religious beliefs.”

As I noted in a recent column, a legal brief before the Supreme Court in a same-sex marriage case argues that a ruling against traditional values could result in websites offering information about withdrawing from homosexual behavior being outlawed as “hate speech.”

Not only are the rights to freedom of the press and religion now at risk, parental rights are also in jeopardy. We are now seeing Obama and the progressives, including the homosexual movement, making a raw power grab for our kids. The parents are being labeled as the lunatics.

Yet while the Obama administration opposes counseling for young people who may want to change their sexual feelings from homosexual to heterosexual, they have no problem paying for traitor Bradley Manning to physically “change” from being a “he” to a “she.” It is reported that the Army has agreed to pay for hormone treatments, makeup, and female underwear for Manning, who is serving a 35-year sentence for espionage and other charges, so he can become “Chelsea.”

Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America is getting downright weird. It appears to be a one-way street away from our Judeo-Christian values. Like so many other policies pursued by this President, it’s difficult to see how this one can do anything but weaken the United States.

04/10/15

Sharpton Calls for “National Policing”

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Al Sharpton, President Obama’s “go-to man on race” as described by Politico last year, is at it again. After riling up the nation over false narratives about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, Sharpton has found a case he can get behind where there appears to be little doubt this time that a white policeman, Michael Slager, brutally and unnecessarily shot to death an unarmed black man in South Carolina.

But in our justice system, even that cop deserves his day in court. After all, we were reminded of that right when on Wednesday, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty on 30 counts for his role in the Islamic terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon that resulted in four deaths.

Within hours of the release of the cell phone video of Walter Scott being shot dead in North Charleston, South Carolina, Sharpton announced that “It’s time for this country to have national policing,” adding “We can’t go from state to state, we’ve got to have national law to protect people against these continued questions.” Never mind that the cop in question was quickly charged with murder, fired from his job, and is being held in jail without bail. Once again, it appears that Sharpton draws the wrong lessons from such tragedies. No peace, no justice? Or is this what justice should look like? Sharpton announced yesterday that his organization, National Action Network, would stand with Scott’s family.

Jack Cashill, an outstanding journalist, recalls in his latest article just how those false narratives, including the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, take hold. Cashill cites the case of Rolling Stone’s false, and now retracted, story of a gang-rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house. He makes the point that “all right thinking people were of one mind…on the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, a collective misreporting far more consequential than that of the Rolling Stone rape story.”

The mainstream media often treat MSNBC’s Sharpton like royalty, promoting his left-wing agendas while carefully avoiding mention of his conflicts of interest and continuing corruption. The Washington Post recently published a piece that serves as an ideal example of such biased coverage.

The piece, “Sharpton to lead advocacy campaign in advance of 2016 election,” written by Wesley Lowery, acts as a press release for Sharpton’s National Action Network’s radical civil rights agenda. Lowery described this agenda as promoting Loretta Lynch’s nomination to replace Eric Holder as attorney general, and “opposing state-level religious objections bills, seen as discriminatory against gays and lesbians, and pressing Congress to advance reforms of the criminal justice system.”

Accuracy in Media has extensively outlined how the mainstream media have worked first to stoke racial tension in places like Ferguson, Missouri and then called for criminal justice reform throughout the country, with Sharpton as one of the more vocal media mouthpieces.

“Although he is a lightning rod despised by many police groups, especially the New York Police Department, Sharpton is vowing to take a more considerate line,” reported Lowery.

“We demonstrate that we are serious when we say, ‘Let’s take the name-calling down,’ and when we’re willing to hear from everybody as long as they are serious in substance,” said Sharpton, according to Lowery. “We don’t need a season more of screaming. We need some real policy.”

Sharpton has a show, “PoliticsNation,” on MSNBC on weeknights. According to accusations in a $20 billion racial discrimination lawsuit, and public comments by Byron Allen, a black TV executive, Sharpton has his show on MSNBC “Because he endorsed Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal.” Could that have been a factor in NBC getting the first interview with the gentleman who took the video of the shooting in North Charleston?

Sharpton’s MSNBC show wasn’t even mentioned by Lowery. Neither was his failure to pay back taxes, nor allegations of pay for play, nor that Sharpton was found liable for defamation in the Tawana Brawley case. And with Sharpton’s latest call for “national policing,” once again, Sharpton isn’t getting the media scrutiny he deserves.

04/3/15

Left Rejects Idea of Payback as the Motive for Menendez Indictment

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Chris Matthews can nearly always be counted on to come to the defense of President Barack Obama. On Wednesday night’s “Hardball” show on MSNBC, they cut to Senator Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) first public comments following his indictment earlier in the day for corruption charges. He stepped down from his ranking position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and defiantly announced that he was innocent, that he plans to fight the charges, and fully expects vindication.

Then, Matthews brought on correspondent Steve Kornacki, who said “his people” say that Menendez is stepping down because “he didn’t want to put anyone in the Democratic caucus in an uncomfortable position. But beyond that, I have to tell you, talking to the Menendez camp tonight, I would say they feel very confident that this is something they can beat in a court of law.” He said the Menendez camp is accusing the Justice Department of “misconduct,” and having “bungled” the case.

Kornacki then added, “They’re going to allow the suggestion, they’re certainly going to encourage it. I don’t think they’ll say it themselves, but they want the suggestion out there very much that Menendez is being targeted by the DOJ [Department of Justice], right now, the Obama administration’s DOJ because of his opposition to the administration on Iran. And you certainly have a number of Republicans out there like Mark Kirk (IL), Lindsey Graham (SC), who are suggesting that the Menendez people want that out there.”

Hearing that, Matthews pushed back, suggesting that the timeline for that interpretation didn’t make sense. He said that Menendez had been under investigation for a long time. Matthews was trying to dismiss the idea that this was yet another example of Obama’s vindictiveness. Matthews then added, as he was going to a break, “With the indictment late today of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez on federal corruption charges, wait till you hear the latest right-wing conspiracy theory. It’s that the charges were brought as payback for bucking the White House on Iran.”

Matthews then devoted a panel discussion to piling on Menendez, and virtually finding him guilty. No question, the charges are very serious, and the investigation has been going on for years. But Menendez is innocent until proven guilty of a crime. It’s the timing of the indictment that arouses such suspicion.

Matthews showed a montage of conservative talk-show hosts and politicians who suggested, as did Menendez, that this was political payback. One of the panelists on the “Hardball” segment, April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Network, was confident that President Obama would never have been involved with something like that. She said the timing was “coincidental.” However, “One thing we know for sure,” she said, “the White House is not in collusion with this, because the President is not supposed to know anything about any investigation. So this investigation is independent of anything to do with the White House.”

If that doesn’t assure you, nothing will. I guess Obama found out about the Menendez indictment along with everyone else when it was reported in the media. Just like he did with the IRS scandal, Operation Fast & Furious, the Veterans Affairs scandal, and the fact that Hillary Clinton did all of her State Department email business on a private server.

Again, as Kornacki pointed out, it was Menendez, a liberal Democrat, who is also saying this about the Obama Justice Department. Actually, Menendez has crossed the President on more than just Iran. There are also his criticisms of Obama’s policies toward Cuba, North Korea and Menendez’s strong support for Israel that may have been the final straws for Obama’s Justice Department to decide to indict the senator at this time.

Coincidence? Well, Menendez is a primary sponsor of two bills this year that are waiting in the wings to see how the negotiations in Switzerland work out that would supposedly halt Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. The bills, if they became law, would increase sanctions on Iran if a deal isn’t reached, and demand that Congress approve any deal reached by the parties to the negotiations. One bill is the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2015, with Senator Kirk as the other lead sponsor.

And the other one is with Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). It would, as described by Politico, “allow Congress to approve or reject any nuclear agreement that President Barack Obama reaches with Iran.” Politico added that it “would be a stern rebuke to the president,” and cited a letter released last month in which Obama’s “Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told Corker that moving on his Iran legislation would ‘potentially prevent any deal from succeeding.’”

While apparently the parties to the negotiations have agreed today on a “framework” to keep negotiating to try to work out an actual agreement by the end of June, the timing of this sidelining of the leading Democratic Senate voice skeptical of the President’s apparent pursuit of a deal at any price appears more than coincidental. It appears very purposeful. But don’t tell that to Chris Matthews. Remember, this is the President who urged Latino voters to “punish our enemies and reward our friends.” Maybe that explains Sen. Menendez’s indictment, as well as the decision this week to not prosecute former IRS executive Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress.

01/29/15

Obama ad Nauseum

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

I made a promise to myself that I would not write about President Obama’s State of the Union speech because that would require me to watch him deliver it. Like many others I can barely watch him under any circumstance because, to my mind, that means having to watch a psychopathic liar. The problem with that is that he is the President for two more years.

And then I read an article on Politico.com, “Republicans outfox Democrats on climate votes” subtitled “The GOP accepts the notion of climate change, but not in the way the Democrats wanted them to.”

In a rational world, politicians voting on whether the climate changes or not is an absurdity. Of course the climate changes. It always has and always will. But when Democrats use the term “climate change” they really mean “global warming.” And global warming has been the greatest hoax of the modern era, getting its start in the late 1980s and becoming a huge academic industry generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Global warming put billions in the pockets of “scientists”, universities, and any think tank that would lie about it, telling the nation and the world that carbon dioxide, a gas that is barely 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere was warming it when, in fact, the Earth stopped warming some 19 years ago at the same time the Sun entered a natural cycle of lower solar radiation.

Few of these “scientists” bothered to tell the public that, without carbon dioxide, we and all other life on Earth would die as it is critical to the growth of all vegetation. The fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has actually been increasing at the same time the Earth has been cooling is proof enough that all the warming claims were and are pure hogwash.

It turns out that all the computer models that they and others have generated to predict a catastrophic global warming have been wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Obama didn’t have a word to say about al Qaeda and the other Islamic fascists eager to destroy modernity and drag the world back to the Dark Age, but he did lie about 2014 as “the planet’s warmest year on record.”

That lie was initially put out by NASA and National Oceanic and the Atmospheric Administration, (NOAA) two government agencies that shortly thereafter admitted that they might be wrong, seeing that their assertion of the 0.02 degree Celsius increase wasn’t even outside their own margin of error. They could have taken a look at their own satellite data and saved themselves from looking like idiots.

Obama said, “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what—I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all tell us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, long, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger great migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe.”

This is lying on a galactic scale. The United States doesn’t need to do a single thing to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions”, nor should it bother to do so. Obama’s claims of catastrophic change bears no relationship to the fact that in recent years the planet has had a record low in the numbers of tornadoes and hurricanes, and a record gain in Arctic and Antarctic ice. There has been no change of any significance in the sea levels. Those who study such things note that “Until about 7,000 years ago the rate of rise was about 100 mm/decade. Since then rate of rise has averaged 10 mm/decade.” That’s “mm” as in millimeters.

In late December, the world’s second largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, reported on the losses from natural events in 2014 and, despite predictions that climate change would cause more frequent natural catastrophes due to man-made worsening of the climate, it saw “markedly less damage claims than in previous years” and far less loss of lives.” In terms of the dollars it cost the insurance industry, Swiss Re estimated that costs insurers covered were USD $113 billion in 2014, down from USD $135 billion in 2013. Losses were down 24% from 2013.
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That, of course, doesn’t matter to Obama. It should, however, matter to the rest of us because the Environmental Protection Agency has been using those computer models and abjectly phony “science” to wage Obama’s war on the nation’s providers of the energy on which we all depend. From coal-fired plants to drilling for oil and natural gas, anything that might provide energy is under attack by the EPA.

As Katie Tubb, a research assistant for the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, responded to Obama’s claim saying that “The EPA’s proposed regulations would have almost zero impact on global temperatures, but will certainly impact Americans now and for future generations.”

So, when you read about a bunch of U.S. Senators, only one of whom, Oklahoma’s Sen. James Inhofe (R) has a grasp of the real science, spent time voting back and forth over amendments and their language regarding the climate, you were in fact really reading about the debate leading up to the passage of the bill that would remove Obama’s authority to prevent the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Between a President who lies about global warming and climate change, and a Congress composed mostly of lawyers who are clueless about the actual science, the best we can hope for is a Republican Party determined to rein in the EPA and other government agencies; the reason they were voted into office.

01/27/15

A No-go Zone for Truth

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Accurately reporting on no-go zones dominated by Muslims in Europe is now a no-go zone. Our media have made a mess of the whole issue and are now afraid to dig themselves out. What a disgrace and disservice to news consumers.

Jumping on the pile, the left-wing Politico has published a story accusing Louisiana Republican Governor and possible presidential candidate Bobby Jindal of telling a “lie” about the no-go zones by saying they exist. But the story is itself based on a lie. Things are so twisted that Politico is doing the lying by denying that the no-go zones exist. How did we get in such a mess?

Let’s understand that the method in this madness is to accommodate the radical Muslim lobby and demonize politicians who talk about the jihad problem.

First of all, the evidence shows that the zones or areas do exist. We cited evidence for them, and numerous other outlets have done so as well. The confusion stems from a Fox News apology over the matter that should never have been made.

Steve Emerson made a mistake on one Fox show in saying that “in Britain, it’s not just no-go zones, there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.”

Acknowledging his error, Emerson tells WorldNetDaily that he is nevertheless appalled that the media have now decided that any and all reporting on no-go zones is wrong. “It’s outrageous for media outlets to apologize, saying ‘no-go zones’ don’t exist in Europe, when even the New York Times for years has published articles documenting Muslim ‘no-go zones’ do exist in European countries like France,” he tells WND reporter Jerome Corsi.

Corsi notes that “NBC News, the New York Times, the Associated Press and others were using the term ‘no-go’ zones for Muslim-majority neighborhoods in Paris when Muslim youth gangs were rampaging through the streets and setting cars on fire.”

We made the same point in our treatment of the issue, noting that Fox News suddenly altered its reporting of the Muslim riots in France in 2005, determining them to be “civil riots” instead. We saw then the power of the Islamists to alter Fox’s coverage.

Fox News media reporter Howard Kurtz had a great opportunity on his Sunday show “Media Buzz” to set the record straight. Instead of confronting his own channel over the unnecessary apology, Kurtz praised CNN’s Anderson Cooper for making the same kind of apology. But then he mentioned that other outlets have been reporting on the no-go zones for years. So an apology wasn’t necessary after all! “The subject is complicated,” he said. No it’s not. Just tell the truth.

If all of this is unnecessarily confusing, it’s clearly because of the unnecessary Fox apology. It was a political apology. There is no other explanation. It is this kind of pandering that is becoming a pattern at Fox, which had earlier yanked anchor Bret Baier from a Catholic conference under pressure from the homosexual lobby.

Liberal special interest groups should not have this kind of influence on a news organization, especially one claiming “fair and balanced” coverage that is also supposed to be accurate.

Journalism 101 teaches that corrections or apologies are called for when errors are made. Since no-go areas do in fact exist, according to numerous sources, no apology was necessary. Yet, Fox News offered the view that since the no-go zones are not “specific” or “formal” entities, they really don’t exist. Fox was wrong. This is complete nonsense and a gross distortion of the concept.

Robert Spencer makes the observation, “The Fox apology is all the more curious in light of the fact that others, even on the Left, have noticed the no-go zones in France before some Fox commentators began talking about them in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.”

Citing just one example of many, he notes that David Ignatius had written in The New York Times back in 2002, “Yet Arab gangs regularly vandalize synagogues here, the North African suburbs have become no-go zones at night, and the French continue to shrug their shoulders.”

Spencer notes that Fox’s apology “only plays into the hands of leftists and Islamic supremacists who have a vested interest in rendering people ignorant and complacent about the reality of what is going on in these areas.”

He suggests that Fox “apologize for its apology.” That would perhaps further confuse matters, but it is the right thing to do.

Without an apology for the apology, those who apologize for the Islamization of Europe like Arif Rafiq will continue to claim, as he did in Politico, that Jindal, by even discussing the no-go zones, “has been repeating a lie that even Fox News was forced to apologize for.” The Fox News correction, or apology, though unwarranted, is now being cited as the media standard.

Politico headlined the piece, “Bobby Jindal’s Muslim Problem,” as if the governor has a bias against Muslims. So a Fox News apology has now been transformed into an indictment of a conservative political figure. Soon, Jindal will be denounced as an “Islamophobe,” another smear term used by the radical Islam lobby.

The liberal media won’t believe any of Fox’s normal day-to-day reports. But when the channel claims to have made an error that makes the rest of the media look good by comparison, that suddenly becomes the truth and the channel has to be believed. This is how reality is turned upside down.

The real story is why Fox made this unnecessary correction. The clout of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Council on American-Islamic Relations is the most likely explanation. Fox has undermined its own credibility by apologizing for something that was true. It is bizarre and was absolutely unnecessary.

Pamela Geller is correct that the major media are “failing us.” It’s terribly tragic that at a time when we were depending on one channel, Fox, to tell the truth, it has failed us, too.

01/3/15

John McCain’s Progressive Hand Is Behind The Purge Of Tea Party Detractors From The Arizona GOP

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

AP Photo/Jim Cole

John McCain is the quintessential enemy from within on the right. I am long past the argument of honoring his service to this country. He served his country long ago with distinction, now he’s serving it on a platter to the Communists. At every turn he has betrayed America in recent years. Just two words describe the good he has done this country: Sarah Palin and she is Tea Party. Now, in an act of political cleansing, McCain has set about to gut the Arizona GOP of Tea Party riff-raff using an Obama San Francisco donor. How richly appropriate for a man who is a Marxist Progressive and much more of a friend to the Leftist policies of Barack Obama than to the Constitutional Conservative premise of Ronald Reagan.

Behold the machinations of the troll that is McCain:

As the longtime Republican senator lays the groundwork for a likely 2016 reelection bid, his political team is engaging in an aggressive and systematic campaign to reshape the state GOP apparatus by ridding it of conservative firebrands and replacing them with steadfast allies…

The ambitious effort — detailed to POLITICO by nearly a dozen McCain operatives, donors, and friends — has stretched from office buildings in Alexandria, Virginia, where strategists plotted and fundraisers collected cash for a super PAC, to Vietnamese-American communities across Arizona, where recruiters sought out supporters eager to help the incumbent defeat the tea party.

McCain is much more likely to be besties with the likes of Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema. You remember her… she endorsed a Communist Party May Day appeal back in 2002. She did it again in 2003. He probably also hearts Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva who penned an article for the Communist Party paper back in 1993. Don’t forget the fascist moves of La Raza either in the Red State of Arizona. Arizona has big problems on the Left and the Right.

I don’t believe McCain ever really intended to win his last run for President. I think he wanted to enable Obama and taint Palin. If he had employed even a fraction of his time fighting for conservatives that he spent fighting against them, he might have occupied the Oval Office:

Until this year, however, McCain aides had never seriously considered a concerted effort to remake the state GOP apparatus, which has traditionally been dominated by his conservative antagonists. That changed after the January censure, which rapped the senator for having an insufficiently conservative record that was “harmful” to Arizona.

“He was very unhappy with the censure and wanted to make sure it never happened again,” said Mike Hellon, McCain’s deputy campaign manager in 2010.

In the days after the state party’s rebuke, a group of top McCain political hands, including Jon Seaton and Christian Ferry — who worked for McCain in his 2008 campaign and have remained with him since — hatched a plan to form a super PAC that would spend money to elect a more friendly slate of precinct committeemen.

The super PAC, which was based out of offices in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and Phoenix and given the generic name “Arizona Grassroots Action PAC,” raised nearly $300,000. The largest checks, according to contribution reports, came from Gregory Maffei, a Colorado businessman, and Gregory Wendt, a San Francisco-based financial adviser, both longtime McCain donors.

But the most stunning part of a story linked to Politico’s puff piece: McCain’s big purge, has to be the money behind McCain’s move:

Greg Wendt and Lisa Wendt of San Francisco, CA (generous benefactors of the Democrat Party and its candidates) gave over 40% of the funds for Grassroots Arizona; a PAC set up to target the Republican chairman of legislative district 11.

Greg and Lisa have been very generous to Democrats. Greg has donated to such people as Ron Wyden, Max Cleland, Barack Obama, Diane Feinstein, and Claire McCaskill, among many other Democrats.

Though some of these links go back to 2006, Wendt is still giving large amounts to Arizona Grassroots Action PAC who is funding McCain.

The other donor you should note here is Greg Maffei from Colorado. He’s a bud of Colorado gun control Governor Hickenlooper. He gave 100k to the anti-Tea Party war chest for McCain.

This is nothing new for McCain. He’s been doing it for as long as I can remember. He is roundly despised by true conservatives in Arizona and with good reason. If you are an out-spoken critic of him, he destroys you, or at least he tries to. Ethics be damned. McCain is for McCain and the wealthy elites in Arizona and those he pals around with. He’s despicable and has no morals or sense of decorum. He has stood for Amnesty and for just about every Progressive platform out there. The only one left in the State of Arizona that hearts McCain is freshman Senator Jeff Flake, who I have serious issues with. He is a Progressive as well and is the only Republican to travel with Democrats to Cuba on junkets and profess his admiration for a Communist regime. ‘Nough said there for now.

And what brought on the ire of this corrupt politician who counts himself as a good friend to Barack Obama? He’s out for payback for the those that backed his embarrassing censure earlier this year. He’s paving the way for a possible 2016 run.

McCain’s team has been busy tolling away to reform the state party by forcibly removing hostile Tea Party-aligned members from local GOP offices and replacing them with allies ahead of the senator’s 2016 re-election bid. He’s at war with the Tea Party and McCain is taking no hostages.

Obama: The Politician Without a Church

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

POLITICO has run a piece citing various claims that President Obama is a practicing Christian of some sort. Nice try. But the article is entirely unconvincing.

Obama isn’t prevented from going to a Christian church and doesn’t cite security reasons for not attending. Instead, he “worries that his presence detracts from other worshippers’ experience,” the publication said. We are told he reads scripture and prays in private.

In 2008, when he first ran for president, the Obama campaign insisted he was a “committed Christian.” Glenn Greenwald, who later became NSA defector Edward Snowden’s mouthpiece, found Obama’s claim so alarming that he wrote an article for Salon about it. Greenwald, whose anti-American outlook includes Muslim sympathies, was apparently deeply concerned that Obama could, in fact, be a committed Christian.

We now understand that Obama’s Christian claim was as phony as his promise, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

POLITICO reports that Obama has “attended Sunday services only occasionally, visiting a patchwork of congregations 19 times in all since taking office, according to a POLITICO analysis of White House pool reports.” Further down in the story we learn that “In all, Obama has gone to services on about 6 percent of the Sundays of his presidency and just once on Christmas Day, in 2011, which also happened to be a Sunday.”

Another insight into Obama’s religiosity is when he tries to quote from the Bible or make religious references. He once compared Mary and Joseph to illegal aliens. Even The Washington Post admitted that was false. On another occasion, he said, “The good book says, don’t throw stones in glass houses.” But the Bible has no such quote.

It appears that this man of deep faith, as described by POLITICO, doesn’t even read the “good book” he likes to quote from. So what has he been doing in those private prayer and Bible study sessions?

But the story goes beyond mere hypocrisy.

When questions emerged about Obama’s religious affiliation, in view of his Muslim background, his aides flatly asserted that he was a “practicing Christian” and was “baptized” in the Trinity United Church of Christ. We examined that claim and found it wanting. As we noted at the time, “People see him [Obama] playing golf on Sunday; they don’t see him going to church.”

Obama’s claim to being baptized in the Christian faith is found in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006. Obama wrote on page 208, “I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.” We argued that what Obama described sounds like a religious experience, but not what Christians regard as baptism.

Obama’s pastor for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, gave a speech in which he praised Marxism and faulted the media for claiming that communism and Christianity were somehow opposed to one another.

It also turns out that Wright’s church accepted Muslims as members. Wright told author Edward Klein that he “made it comfortable” for Obama to accept Christianity “without having to renounce his Islamic background.”

Obama is now on vacation in Hawaii, and the White House is releasing details about his daily activities. “Like most Americans,” the White House proclaims, “President Obama is a creature of habit.” But church or Bible study doesn’t appear to be on his list of priorities. His activities are said to include:

Daily morning workout at the Semper Fit Center at MCBH [Marine Corps Base Hawaii]
Golf at the Kaneohe Klipper golf course
Golf at the Mid-Pacific Country Club
Golf at the Ko’olau Golf Club
Golf at the Royal Hawaiian Golf Club
Dinner at Alan Wong’s Restaurant
Dinner at Nobu Waikiki
Dinner at Morimoto Waikiki
Visit Punchbowl Cemetery
Snorkeling at Hanauma Bay
Christmas Day: Visit service members at Anderson Hall
New Year’s Eve: Traditional talent show at home
Bowling at K-Bay Lanes at MCBH
Basketball at MCBH
Swim at Pyramid Rock Beach
Swim at Bellows Beach
Shave Ice at Island Snow in Kailua
Hike the Maunawili Falls trail

One writer, Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a self-described heathen, didn’t like the POLITICO story for another reason. He doesn’t even like the topic of Obama’s religiosity being discussed. “It doesn’t matter if Obama goes to church or not,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter if he is even a Christian, or, as conservatives often charge, a Muslim. In a word, it is nobody’s concern but that of Barack Obama himself.”

Of course, if Obama claims to be a Christian, and the evidence suggests otherwise, it is a significant story. That’s because his alleged Christianity was a factor in his 2008 and 2012 victories.

In 2008, for example, Catholics voted for Obama by a margin of 54-45. In 2012, the margin was 50-48.

Now, with his recognition and bailout of the Castro regime, he can count on Pope Francis being in his corner. It’s quite an achievement for a politician without a church.