From Newsbusters:
NPR aired yet another attack on the Christian right on Thursday’s Tell Me More. Michel Martin interviewed Democrat activist and author Michael Sean Winters about his new book “God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the Religious Right.” The headline for this interview on NPR.org was “Party Of Reagan? No, Party Of Falwell, Writer Says.”
Martin drew out the harshest criticisms of Jerry Falwell, that he turned moderate Republicans into “Judas figures” and forced less conservative Christians to abandon Christianity altogether because they didn’t want to be associated with Falwell’s “fundamentalist cast of mind.” At NPR, left-wing secular fundamentalists are never questioned as coarseners of American politics, but conservative Christians are accused:
MICHEL MARTIN: I think fair-minded people would praise his accomplishments in terms of, you know, creating a viable conservative base for the Republican Party, energizing of voting block, encouraging more people to be engaged in the civic life of their country. But you also note, at the end of the day you think Falwell’s efforts were ultimately bad for politics and bad for religion. And that’s a pretty harsh assessment. I’d like to ask why you arrived there.
MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS: I think it was bad for politics because he still brought that fundamentalist cast of mind with him. Twenty, 30 years ago, if those of us in the progressive community were arguing to raise the minimum wage, we had on the opposite side the National Association of Manufacturers, and they were opposed to raising the minimum wage because it meant more money out of their pockets. It was simply about interest. Today, it’s about ideology that really has coarsened the debate and may compromise less likely. The reason…
MARTIN: Make compromise undesirable, or make compromise almost a dirty word, some would argue.
WINTERS: Oh, absolutely. And so if you are a moderate Republican now, you’re not just a, you know, you’re a Judas figure.
MARTIN: You say that the fastest growing religion in the U.S. is the religion of none. And you argue that the public image that he created and promoted has contributed a great deal to the growing numbers of people in this country who don’t want anything to do with organized religion. Again, that’s a very damning assessment. Why do you arrive there?
WINTERS: Well, I think – you know, when you conflate religion which has, you know, deals with the ultimate life questions into this kind of, you know, handy political card of how you should vote. When people that have questions about the politics and decide they don’t like your politics, they’re going to throw the political baby out with the baptismal water. You know, you need to have some mediating philosophies and mediating institutions between religion and politics, to make sure that they’re kept separate.
The whole purpose of the Moral Majority was to conflate those in ways, and again, because of this fundamentalist mindset, often in very simplistic ways. And so when people said, you know, well, I just don’t want to have anything to do with his politics, they almost felt they then had to abandon Christianity, because this is what Christianity had become in their mind. And I think he’s very much responsible for that.
Posted in Defund PBS & NPR Featured by .
Originally posted the Center for Security Policy by By David Reaboi, Travis Korson
Yesterday’s poorly reported National Public Radio Morning Edition story, “Terrorism Training Casts Pall Over Muslim Employee,” demands a fact-check critique. The NPR report alleged that the head of Ohio’s Muslim outreach program Omar al-Omari was wrongly terminated due to a law enforcement briefing on political Islam. We needed to issue several corrections:
NPR Claim #1: “Federal officials familiar with the case say Omari was singled out because he distinguished between extremist Muslims and mainstream Muslims in his outreach and training programs.”
Fact Check #1: Many of the materials Omari had written, including his Guide to Arabic and Islamic Culture, and a brochure titled ‘Agents of Radicalization‘ were slanted towards a pro-radical Islamic view and support a revisionist history which blames America for many of the Middle East’s problems. In the Guide, Omari defines jihad as:
Jihad doesn’t mean holy war, as many people are led to believe. It actually means a struggle to achieve excellence. It’s the struggle Muslims face in life which varies from the Greater Jihad where a person is obliged to struggle within him/herself to overcome evil and establish good, to the Lesser Jihad which is the struggle in daily life. As Muslims are obliged to maximize their potential in order to be the best citizens they can be, jihad is the vehicle that lifts them to the challenge. The term holy war is a European concept that began with the Crusades and was extended to Islam by the West.
In an interview with The Investigative Project on Terrorism, Zuhdi Jasser, Muslim President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy was highly critical of Omari’s publications:
Jasser describes the two publications as “full of factual inaccuracies” including the assertion that 66 percent of American Arabs are Muslim (close to three-fourths are Christian). Alomari also “misses the core problem: political Islam.” Instead, he indulges in “bizarre revisionist history” which “seeks to portray Muslims as victims.”
The United States is engaged in “a war of ideas” with radical Islam. Regarding jihadists, “you would hope that [Alomari] would say that these are corrupt thugs who have hijacked our faith,” Jasser told the Investigative Project on Terrorism. But instead he “describes [terrorism] as a response to what the West has done.”
The material Alomari’s agency is putting out is “classic Islamist propaganda” which suggests that “these thugs who kill people in restaurants and shopping malls will stop if we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Jasser said. “In fact, they’ll find another grievance in a year or two.”
The brochure “Agents of Radicalization,” was printed but then copies were destroyed because Omari had listed as “organizations we are working with” a list that included numerous unindicted co-conspirators from the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial: “Some of the organizations we are working with,” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA) Muslim American Society (MAS) Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) Muslim Student Association (MSA).” Many of these groups were listed as unindicted coconspirators in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history, US vs Holy Land Foundation.
Omari’s brochure on radicalization was never distributed, according to a source within the Department:
Thousands of copies were printed up by the department (at taxpayer expense, of course). Some copies had been provided to some of our partner agencies. As boxes of these things were getting ready to be shipped out, our director was contacted by some counter-terrorism officials and told that the brochure was promoting groups that the FBI and other agencies were trying to distance themselves from (like CAIR).
According to a report by counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole, Ten Failures of the U.S. Government on the Domestic Islamist Threat,
“When [Omari] organized a forum on “interfaith dialogue” for the department in August 2009, the two lone Muslim representatives included a local imam, Hany Saqr, who was identified in the Holy Land Foundation trial as one of the top Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the nation; and CAIR-Ohio president Asma Mobin-Uddin.”
NPR Claim #2: “Omari lost his job with the state of Ohio, though not because of claims that he had ties to terrorism…his employment application was incomplete. He hadn’t listed all of the schools where he had worked before taking the job with the state of Ohio.”
Fact Check #2: Omari was fired not only for failing to list his prior employment at Columbus State Community College, “where he was fired after an improper consensual sexual affair with a student,” according to the Columbus Dispatch newspaper but also for failing to disclose his prior work for the Jordanian Minister of Labor and for lying to investigators, also reported by FOX News and first published at the online investigative journalism website My Pet Jawa.
According to reports, Omari sued the female student who had reported his illicit activities as sexual harassment to higher-ups, claiming the woman had defamed him. He lost.
Omari is now currently suing the state of Ohio for wrongful termination, as well as other alleged discriminations he suffered while working as the Multicultural Relations Officer for the Ohio Department of Public Safety.
NPR Claim #3: According to the NPR story on the mid-April 2010 training session, “Deputy Chief Jeffrey Blackwell of the Columbus Division of Police stated about Omari that “I knew him really well … And I thought he was a great professional, so that was part of the reason why I was so surprised when his picture popped up in the presentation.”
Fact Check #3: Omari’s highly Islamist-influenced brochure (the one that had to be destroyed) and guide had been widely publicized after he testified to Congress on March 17 and was widely criticized – one month PRIOR to the mid-April law enforcement training session, where the trainers discussed the content of the Omari publications with the attendees. The facts raised by the trainers about Omari’s publications were not in dispute when published in March or presented by trainers in April. According to participants the trainers had been invited to brief by the Columbus Police Department, and far from being “suspended,” the training continued through to the end of the planned session. The entire course of instruction was completed.
This information was available to National Public Radio by simply googling Omari’s name, but NPR’s story was not an exercise in journalism. They’re in the whitewashing business for Islamist supporters like Omari.
Congress, on the other hand, is in the spending reduction business these days. Exactly one year after the public exposure of Omari began, on March 17, 2011, the House of Representatives voted to stop federal funding for National Public Radio. The vote was 228 to 192. Not even close.
Posted in Defund PBS & NPR by .
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields said Friday that today’s low income tax rates are “fundamentally un-American.”
Such happened on PBS’s “Inside Washington”
Posted in Defund PBS & NPR News by .
Posted with permission by Penny Young Nance
At some point you have to grow up, and being a grown-up means accepting responsibility. Such is the main point of the movie “Arthur,” the remake of which opens this week.
Hollywood’s compulsion to capture past box office glory leaves many of us wishing they’d just leave well enough alone. The chemistry between Dudley Moore and Sir John Gielgud — who won an Oscar for his role in the original — can’t be duplicated, but the lesson they so cleverly delivered in “Arthur” is relevant to today’s hot budget debate and the delusion of liberals like New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Miss Dowd and her fellow liberals are stuck in their own personal edition of “The Twilight Zone,” where social issues such as abortion and homosexual “rights” have no place in the public square and certainly no relation to fiscal issues.
In a recent column “Mad Men and Mad Women” she writes, “Republicans hate social engineering unless they’re doing it.” What planet is she from? Even in the days of $1.6 trillion deficits and a $14 trillion national debt, pet liberal initiatives such as funneling taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood have attained third-rail entitlement status.
By attempting to reframe a tired liberal tack as conservative “social engineering,” Dowd encapsulates the refusal by liberals to grow up and enter the real world.
One can almost hear the tough-love admonition from Gielgud in his legendary British schoolmaster tone: given the fiscal realities, it is patently irresponsible for Congress to fund an enterprise in Planned Parenthood which a) turned a $63 million profit according to its last report, b) pathologically lies to Congress by continuing to suggest fungible hundreds of millions don’t finance abortions — which is against federal law, and c) has been caught red-handed willing to aid and abet sex traffickers who exploit young women and girls.
Writing earlier this week for The Hill’s Congress Blog, former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson confronted Congress with the ugly, undeniable truth of how social and fiscal issues are linked:
“Planned Parenthood gets one-third of its entire budget from taxpayer funding and performed more than 650,000 abortions between 2008 and 2009. An abortion is expensive. Its cost includes pay for the doctor, supporting medical staff, their health benefits packages, and malpractice insurance. As clinic director, I saw how money affiliate clinics receive from several sources is combined into one pot, not set aside for specific services.”
Johnson’s modesty — or embarrassment — kept her from mentioning she was Planned Parenthood’s “employee of the year” in Texas for 2008. If she had been blowing the whistle on Enron, Halliburton, or Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, Dowd likely would’ve devoted an entire column to her.
What is even worse is that Dowd, a champion of radical feminism, in the same column only adds to the fallacy that women cannot handle matters of higher math and finance when she attempts to equate long overdue budget cuts to government meddling in our personal lives.
In truth, defunding Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, Public Broadcasting, and NPR actually removes government interference from our lives. Forcing taxpayers to fund these pet liberal entitlements, when alternatives abound and the government is mired in debt, is fiscal insanity.
Likewise, Dowd’s focus on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) is just another smokescreen to mask the coming agenda. In off-the-record conversations, officers say they are convinced this is just an attempt to put the U.S. military’s stamp of approval on same-sex “marriage,” complete with financial benefits guaranteed by American taxpayers. With DADT’s repeal, an enlisted man can now knock on the ship captain’s door, announce he is “gay” and has a spouse in Massachusetts with whom he’d like to a) live in military-provided housing once he gets back to port and b) have covered under his health benefits package. There’s that link between social and fiscal issues again.
All this, despite the fact that those same American taxpayers who would pay for these benefits have already voted in 31 out of 31 state elections to preserve marriage as the union of a man and a woman, states that include the liberal bastions of Maine, Oregon, Hawaii, and California (twice).
In the movie, Arthur eventually abandoned adolescent denial for adult responsibility; it would be helpful if the Maureen Dowds of the world would do the same.
(Penny Young Nance is CEO of Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.)
Posted in Defund PBS & NPR by .
YouTube user afortasse posted this video in an attempt to show a reason to spare PBS & NPR but only ended up making the case for defunding both!
This was my reply:
Perfect – if taxpayer funding is so insignificant they won’t miss it and we should defund PBS and NPR immediately. Thanks for making the case for defunding so clear!
PBS and NPR don’t need public funding to produce the shows they produce now – if these shows are indeed viable (and we know they are… look at all of the kids channels that showcase PBS shows and the success cable networks like History, TLC, Discovery and others that have made entire channels around similar programming on PBS) they will have no problem competing and thriving in the market place!
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Klavan on the Culture’s Project Klavitas performs a courageous video sting. Using a hidden camera to record a secret meeting between Big Bird and his Sesame Street crony Elmo.
Posted in Defund PBS & NPR by .
Mar 11
20
We've Updated Our Website
Well we’ve finally got around to fixing our site design theme…
The old one was not updated to the new version of Word Press so we had a devil of a time trying to get it to work, finally, we had to chuck-it and find a new one.
Although it’s not as fancy this theme looks good and functions correctly so We hope you all enjoy it, sign up for the newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and come back often for updates.
Thanks for your patience 
Posted in Defund PBS & NPR by .
Mar 11
19
NPR: Blinded By Bias
From Big Journalism by Lee Stranahan
Human beings are amazingly adaptive. We live all over the globe, in every climate and environment from parched deserts to tropical forests to frozen tundra to wide open plains. We have thousands of different speech dialects, a huge variety of approaches to written language and a staggering array of different foods, music or clothing that are the cultural norm.
One of the ways our brains adapt to their circumstances is by subconscious acceptance of our condition as ‘normal.’ If you grew up eating cow tongue, ordering a lengua burrito doesn’t seem gross at all. If you read right to left, trying to wrap your head around a language that reads left-to-right or top-to-bottom is tricky. The world you grew up in is home and everything else is a bit odd, a sense that’s especially true for children or people who live in closed, isolated cultures.
That’s one reason that conservative criticism of the ‘media elite’ sounds just plain weird to those inside the media. It’s not an act in many cases; it really DOES sound weird, like Tuvan Throat Singing suddenly being played on a Honky-tonk jukebox. “What’s that? We’re … biased? What? No, no, no … we’re the fair, educated ones!” The statistics about the voting trends of journalists is clear and widely reported. But the paradox Is that there are so many liberals in the media that it doesn’t feel liberal – it just feels normal. It’s home.
And that’s why you’re seeing some of the Rorschach Test reaction that the James O’Keefe sting on NPR – not just that it shows the difference between the worldviews of liberals and conservatives but that it shows how blasé and normal it is to talk the way Ron Schiller did about the racist Tea Party. He didn’t think he was saying anything controversial.
Read the whole thing @ Big Journalism
Posted in Featured by .
Mar 11
19
De-Funding NPR and PBS
Image via Wikipedia
From The Constitution Club by Cultural Limits
For the past couple days members of my circle on facebook who are known to be not-so-conservatives have been whining and nashing their new crowns on the House of Representatives “de-funding” NPR and PBS.Any viable enterprise should be able to survive without government support. In the case of NPR spinning out on their own would not be a far stretch. NPR has its own programming and news bureau which is followed by a core of listeners. That’s the traditional business model for radio and if the powers that be at NPR can make it work as a non-profit, more power to them. Federal dollars supporting NPR amount to 10% of operating costs according to most sources. If they can raise 90% in a stressed fundraising environment, they should be able to raise the rest.
PBS, on the other hand, is a different story. PBS’s business model is for a series of non-profits to buy third party programming and rebroadcast it with no advertising revenue. Prime time slots are programmed with the same material nationwide so as to market it more effectively. That’s not the way to make a profit in the entertainment world. Which, of course, is the point. PBS has big-dollar corporate sponsorships, membership dues from it’s affiliates, public fundraising drives for much of its costs, but not the same large percentage going toward operations that NPR does. Federal dollars make up the rest.
Read the rest @ The Constitution Club
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From Ed Morrissey @ Hot Air:
Do you ever wonder if Democrats might want to ask Harry Reid to stop defending federal spending, at least where cameras can catch his arguments? Last week, Reid tried salvaging money for the National Endowment for the Humanities by pointing out the danger from “mean-spirited” Republican spending reductions to, er, cowboy poetry. Yesterday, Reid teams up with Republican Lisa Murkowski to defend federal spending on NPR. Why, without that, Reid might never have known the true origins of dog-sled races in Alaska! Greg Hengler brings us the video:
Read more at Hot Air
Posted in Defund PBS & NPR by .
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