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Let’s you and him fight

Ann Coulter

I’ll try to play this straight, and resist the sarcastic remarks that are gushing from my mind like a certain ruptured oil pipe in the Gulf of Mexico last month.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has unleashed some pretty severe invective against WorldNetDaily publisher Joseph Farah. (Coulter is/was a columnist for WorldNetDaily, but is better known as a Constitutional Attorney, best-selling author and syndicated columnist .) According to Newser.com:

Coulter via Tweets and emails said that Farah “could give less than two shits about the conservative movement as demonstrated by his promotion of the birther nonsense. He’s the only allegedly serious conservative pushing the birther thing and for one reason- to get hits on his website.”

What’s it about? Coulter is scheduled to give a speech Homocon, a gathering of Gay Republicans, and in retaliation Farah canceled Coulter’s talk at his “Taking America Back National Conference.” Reportedly Coulter also called Farah a “publicity whore.”

In the mean time, Farah went on the offensive today with an article on WorldNetDaily attacking Glenn Beck for not being sufficiently homophobic. WND says:

By becoming the latest conservative to capitulate to same-sex “marriage,” Glenn Beck is knuckling under to a movement with Marxist roots that’s intent on sabotaging traditional morality and religion, Joseph Farah and David Kupelian warn.

The spat is being covered by the mainstream media such as the Huffington Post, and being given special attention by Gay/Lesbian sites.

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Doctor Conspiracy predicts the end of the world

Sometimes there are things so terrifying and so threatening that it becomes difficult to imagine how the world can survive. Such an event has happened.

WorldNetDaily has entered the elite realm of the top 500 web sites in the United States according to web traffic analysis web site Alexa.com. This compares to a paltry 2,732 for the National Enquirer and 147,254 for us.

Here are Alexa ratings for a few other well known web sites:

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Ron Polarik vanishes in puff of smoke

Back in July of 2009, I wrote an article here titled: Clearing the smoke, or blowing more smoke? The article was a piece by piece demolition of a faux investigative report commissioned by an alleged anonymous former intelligence officer that in reality was nothing but lies and half lies. That “report” was hosted on Joseph (WND) Farah’s blog called WesternJournalism.com under the title: “Clearing the Smoke on Obama’s Eligibility: An Intelligence Investigator’s June 10 Report”.

Now the “report” has been updated, again at WesternJournalism.com, as Clearing the Smoke on Obama’s Eligibility Updated. The original version of the article is just as stupid as the new one, with gems like:

Most people think of an original birth certificate as a state or hospital document containing a statement by a doctor or midwife.  The hospital document usually is accompanied by a footprint.

Then the article presents what it describes as an example of an authentic original birth certificate without footprints. :roll:

What has changed in the updated version is not notable, but what has disappeared is. The original version said:

Ron Polarik has made what several experts claim to be a cogent case that it is a forgery. There have been a couple of attempts to refute his argument and Polarik has replied to the most extensive of them. I do not claim expertise in this area, but I think it would be best for journalists and politicians to familiarize themselves with the arguments on both sides before they casually dismiss Polarik’s position without taking the trouble to understand it.

I guess now that Polarik has been identified, exposed and shown to have no special image analysis expertise, he is persona non grata at Farah’s place. So Polarik vanishes. (more…)

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Joseph Farah demands a retraction from Newsweek

Joseph Farah

Newsweek, a major American print magazine has called Farah a “birther”. In a special web edition article titled Know Your Conspiracies, Newsweek’s David A. Graham wrote:

1. Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
It’s not clear where he must have been born instead: some say Indonesia; some say Kenya (initial suggestions that Hawaiian natives weren’t citizens when he was born in Honolulu in 1961 were quickly dismissed). The point, so-called birthers say, is that he wasn’t born in the good old US of A, hence isn’t a natural-born citizen and therefore cannot legally be president.
Proponents: Chief birther and Beverly Hills dentist and attorney Orly Taitz, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), former presidential and Senate candidate Alan Keyes, assorted tea partiers.
Kernel of Truth? It’s fully debunked. Forged Kenyan birth certificates have been exposed, and—despite protestations to the contrary—Obama’s birth certificate has been certified by the state of Hawaii, and images have been shown on national television. And that’s leaving aside plenty of circumstantial proof, like birth announcements in both major Hawaiian papers from August 1961.

It would be hard to look at the pages of Farah’s web site, WorldNetDaily.com or his front web site WesternJournalism.com and not conclude that Joesph Farah was the biggest birther of them all. But wait! Farah says “no.” (more…)

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Obama Conspiracy Theories blog calls for WND to correct the public record (UPDATED AGAIN)

In an email sent today by Doctor Conspiracy (not a real doctor) to Joseph Farah, publisher of the WorldNetDaily web site, documentation was provided that WorldNetDaily publishes a story claiming that there was a travel ban for US Citizens to Pakistan in 1981, and documentation was provided that this claim is completely false. Dr. Conspiracy called on Farah to correct the public record by publishing a retraction.

The Obama Conspiracy Theories blog is dedicated to the proposition that a well-informed public is essential to democracy. Its purpose is to correct misinformation and faulty reasoning wherever it is found on the subject of conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama. Many rumors and false claims have been debunked by the site, including the widely-repeated travel ban to Pakistan. In fact, American citizens could travel freely to the tourist-friendly country of Pakistan in 1981.

Joseph Farah, in an e-mail replied that the article in question is commentary and not reporting. [The text of Farah's reply has been removed because I discovered after scrolling down that it had a boiler plate statement on it that the sender intended the message to be private and confidential.]

I understand the difference between reporting and commentary. This blog has comments of all kinds from all points of view, and they are often factually false. However, this blog’s format would never leave anyone for a moment confused between the site’s edited content and visitor comments. WorldNetDaily does label its commentary as such, and Janet Folger Porter’s piece where she makes several false statements including the fake travel ban to Pakistan is labeled commentary; however, one has to look for it and I think it likely that many readers of WorldNetDaily readers lack the critical thinking skills to make the distinction.

Indeed WND not only published the commentary containing Porter’s lies, but its reporter, Bob Unruh, later quoted the lie in a news article and it also appears quoted on another unattributed page not labeled as commentary. [Thanks Rickey for pointing these out.]  I think that puts to rest any question as to the integrity of WND reporting.

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WND Joseph Farah and Andrew Breitbart tangle over birtherism

Andrew Breitbart

It was a a “Tea Party” convention last Friday night in Nashville. WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah gave a 40-minute talk, 10 minutes of which revolved around Obama’s birth certificate.

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative publisher and former editor for the Drudge Report, clashed with Farah in the hall with some harsh words that are reported by David Weigel of the Washington Independent. The basic disagreement was whether the “birther” questions are a winning or losing issue.

The various exchanges are fascinating, and I won’t take thunder from the Washington Independent (who also have an audio clip) by pasting them in here. I do want to mention one comment Farah made to Weigel afterwards:

Joseph Farah

The citizenship issue had stuck around and taken off, he said, “because of us.” [said Farah]

I think this may be largely true. Even though the stories WorldNetDaily are quickly debunked (like the nonexistent travel ban to Pakistan in 1981), and they are more innuendo than fact, they persist and WND has a large readership.

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