dailycall 2

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Marco Rubio gets pilloried for spreading a vicious and bogus smear about Ilhan Omar

Written by Cody Fenwick July 25, 2019

Once again, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has become the focus of a vicious right-wing smear, this time based on a deceptively edited video.

The video comes from a February 2018 interview Omar gave to Al Jazeera. In its new form, it was resurfaced by Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which found its way to the Daily Caller report Molly Prince’s twitter feed, as Vox reported. From there, other right-wing figures picked it up, including, most prominently, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Omar’s comments went viral because, in the video, she seemed to be saying people should be afraid of “white men” and said the government should be “profiling, monitoring” them. Rubio indicated that the statement was “racist,” and suggested that the media should “hound ever Democrat to denounce” it, apparently expressing frustration that Republicans were pressed to respond to Trump’s recent racist attacks.

But the video Rubio shared was highly deceptive, and it seems clear it was intentionally edited to mislead viewers about what Omar was saying.

When Prince shared the video, in a tweet picked up by Rubio, she included the caption: “Ilhan Omar contends that Americans ‘should be more fearful of white men.'” While the quoted words are accurate, they’re missing essential context. Omar was having a discussion with reporter Mehdi Hasan about Islamophobia, and Hasan had asked the then-candidate to respond to the idea that Americans might “legitimately” be afraid of Muslims because of “Jihadist terrorism.” So when Omar said Americans should be “more fearful of white men,” she wasn’t speaking in the absolute sense of trying to encourage prejudice against white men. She was correctly pointing out that white men have been more likely to be the perpetrators of terrorism in the United States in recent years.

I am sure the media will now hound every Democrat to denounce this statement as racist. Right? https://t.co/UewkblF8Oo

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 25, 2019

And indeed, as Hasan said on Twitter, none other than current FBI Director Christopher Wray made a similar point recently when he said: “A majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call ‘white supremacist violence.'”

The second part of Omar’s comments was even more gratuitously distorted. Here’s the full exchange in question:

HASAN: A lot of conservatives in particular would say that the rise in Islamophobia is the result not of hate, but of fear. And legitimate fear, they say, of quote-unquote “jihadist terrorism” — whether it’s Fort Hood, or San Bernardino, or the recent truck attack in New York. What do you say to them?

OMAR: I would say — our country should be more fearful of white men across our country, because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country, we should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.

The CBN video cut out the phrase “And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country,” making it seem as though she was seriously suggesting that the U.S. should be “profiling” and “monitoring” white men.

Of course, that’s not what she meant. She meant to illustrate the absurdity of trying to use “fear” to justify policy and how it often leads to discriminatory actions against minorities.

And in fact, the uproar over the deceptively edited video actually proves her point. She was using the example of targeting white men as an example of why these policies would be treated with outrage when the subjects are a majority group, even though the policies are often embraced by the right wing when Muslims face scrutiny.

And that’s exactly what happened with the conservative outrage over the video. Conservatives perceived a threatening position coming from a Muslim woman based on a misinterpretation of the facts — and they overreacted. And yet when Trump makes obviously racist attacks, most of the right bends over backward to give him the benefit of the doubt. Omar is continually facing this racist double standard that makes her a perpetual target of suspicion.

Hasan demanded that Rubio apologize for spreading the smear:

Senator @marcorubio will you delete this tweet and apologize? You’re sharing a selectively-edited video from my show @AJUpFront to make @IlhanMN look bad and increase the number of death threats she already gets. Shame on you. Here’s the un-edited clip:https://t.co/1xX5KMns8N https://t.co/9lOAr67iCX

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 25, 2019

Parker Malloy of Media Matters for America noted that the smear against Omar was a case of history repeating.

This happened with the outrage over Omar saying that American Muslims shouldn’t lose their rights just because some people who share their religion carried out 9/11,” she said. “It was clear what she was saying, but a bad-faith reading got amplified into the public consciousness.”

In a reply to Rubio, she wrote:

Hey, genius, this clip has been selectively edited.

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) July 25, 2019

Others echoed the sentiment:

I am sure you will apologize for falling for a deceptively edited video. Right? https://t.co/Xc8RrbOJva

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) July 25, 2019

A good idea would be for the media to hound every Republican senator who’s circulating a deceptively edited video tweet and ask why they are doing that? https://t.co/GblWB5TAmg

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 25, 2019

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/03/13/who-bankrolls-tucker-carlsons-hateful-propaganda-why-the-kochs-of-course/

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is under fire this week for racist, sexist, and homophobic comments he made while chatting on “Bubba the Love Sponge” a shock jock radio show between 2006-2011. Groups are scrutinizing Fox’s advertisers and demanding that they drop the show.

But Carlson also publishes The Daily Caller, a controversial online media outlet with ties to white nationalists that has infamously peddled everything from climate denial and anti-Islamic tropes to false prostitution charges and violence against protesters.

Carlson’s moonlighting as an extremist at The Daily Caller is heavily bankrolled by — you guessed it — the Koch brothers. An investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) finds that the Charles Koch Foundation has poured more than $2.7 million into the Daily Caller’s non-profit “charity” since 2012, which generates the lion’s share of the “news” that the Caller publishes.

Indeed, in 2016, Koch cash accounted for 83 percent of the The Daily Caller News Foundation’s $1.1 million in revenues.

Carlson Under Fire

As if catering to white supremacists was not bad enough, Media Matters published an inventory of hateful comments made by Carlson as a guest on the show between 2006-2011.

The radio host discusses Warren Jeffs, the religious leader who was investigated in 2007 for marrying off underage girls to older men and was eventually jailed for sexual assault of minors in 2011. When the radio host condemned Jeffs for being an “accessory to the rape of children,” Carlson said “whatever the hell that means,” and going on to suggest that forcible underage marriage is not as serious as forcible child rape. Listen to the tape here.

In other interviews, Carlson called Iraqis “semi-literate primitive monkeys,” who “don’t use toilet paper or forks.” They should just “shut the fuck up and obey.” Carlson spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the “lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals.” That candidate would be “elected king” if they vowed to “kill as many of them as [they] can.” Carlson also said Afghanistan is “never going to be a civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.” Listen to the tape here.

The release of the older audio tapes gives “context and insight” on his nightly programming today, on MSNBC.

So far, Carlson has failed to apologize. As Fox News scrambles to control the damage, at least three advertisers — Allergan, letgo, and GreatCall — have had enough.

But with the focus on advertisers, it’s important to remember who else bankrolls Carlson’s mini media empire.

The Koch Caller?

The Kochs have long underwritten The Daily Caller. Previously, CMD reported that the Kochs gave $805,512 to The Daily Caller News Foundation between 2012 and 2015, predominantly from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Since then, the numbers have continued to grow.

The Koch foundation gave another $946,000 in 2016 and $960,000 in 2017, the last year publicly available — for a total of $2.7 million.

In 2017, CMD analyzed emails sent by the Trump campaign to The Daily Caller subscribers and estimated that the outlet also received at least $150,000 from the Trump campaign in the months right before the November election, based on the fee charged for mailings to its list. The funding was never disclosed by Carlson or The Daily Caller as they reported on the Trump campaign.

In addition, CMD also examined the relationship between the non-profit and for-profit arms of Tucker Carlson’s operation. The mechanics of how they operate together raise serious concerns about whether Carlson’s tax-free nonprofit is operating primarily for the private benefit of his for-profit media outlet, which would be a violation of tax law.

CMD’s story was picked up by numerous media outlets including the Washington Post, which interviewed tax experts on the legality of the scheme.

“It really does look like the reason for the existence of this 501(c)(3) organization is to provide benefits to the for-profit company, and that should be a private benefit that is not acceptable,” Linda Sugin, a law professor at Fordham University, told the *Post* and other media outlets. “You can’t have money going into the foundation being used for purposes that are really to support the for-profit organization.”

mma eric h

Before he organized the recent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, Jason Kessler wrote for The Daily Caller and the white nationalist site VDare and appeared as a purported expert on Alex Jones’ Infowars network.

Kessler was the organizer for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that featured white supremacists and neo-Nazis. President Donald Trump responded to the violence by issuing a generic condemnation of problems “on many sides” and declining to specifically call out white supremacists — behavior that fits his history of emboldening the white nationalist movement.

Right-wing media outlets like The Daily Caller have also played a role in cultivating white supremacist organizers like Kessler.

The Daily Caller contracted with Kessler “to contribute reportage to” the right-wing site this spring. He wrote two pieces in April with the headlines “Trump Supporters Vow To Rally In Berkeley Without Ann Coulter” and “Uncle: MS-13 Gangsters Mutilated Va. Teenager’s Body In Grisly Murder.” Both pieces promoted Kessler’s organization Unity and Security for America and his Twitter account.

Kessler then wrote a May 14 piece about white supremacists Richard Spencer and Sam Dickson rallying in front of Confederate monuments. ProPublica subsequently reported that the Caller failed to disclose that Kessler “is supportive of white supremacist groups, and on the day of the march had himself made a speech to the protesters in which he praised fascist and racist organizations, thanked a prominent Holocaust denier, and declared the beginnings of a cultural ‘civil war.’” While the Caller suspended its relationship with Kessler, Executive Editor Paul Conner defended Kessler’s work:

“The story is factually accurate and plainly states what happened at the event,” said Paul Conner, executive editor of The Daily Caller. “But in light of his activism on the issue, we have mutually agreed to suspend our freelance relationship with him.”

Asked about the substance of Kessler’s speech in Charlottesville, Conner offered no comment on Kessler’s statements. In an email, he said only, “We pay writers for journalism, not their opinions.”

An editor’s note was appended to Kessler’s article after ProPublica reached out to the Caller about the piece, stating: “The author notified The Daily Caller after publication that he spoke at a luncheon May 14 on behalf of an effort to preserve the monument.”

Media Matters contacted Daily Caller editors this morning about the outlet’s relationship with Kessler, whether the editors regretted publishing him, and if they would consider publishing him in the future. Shortly afterward, the publication removed Kessler’s author page and all his pieces on the site. Media Matters followed up by asking for a clarification about why the site deleted those pieces. The Caller did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

[Screenshots of Kessler’s Daily Caller work]

Infowars has also had a role in promoting Kessler and his racist work.

Editor Paul Joseph Watson, who himself has a history of racism, aired a with Kessler in January to “discuss the insanity of the left and how they have lost all grip on reality.” The interview is featured on Alex Jones’ Youtube channel with the headline “Jason Kessler: Anti-White Racism Must End.” Infowars also a roughly 20-minute April interview with Kessler during which he Infowars viewers that there’s a “very pressing danger with these people” who are trying to take down Confederate statues. Both interviews promoted Kessler’s nonprofit and Twitter account.

Alex Jones aired a roughly 15-minute interview with, the day after the Saturday rally. During the segment, Jones that the media is “penalizing this guy because he’s saying one-third of the racist stuff that I disagree with against the [George] Soros group that’s a total cutout, just make us fight with each other. So how does media say he caused all the violence when clearly antifa was the ones attacking?” (Infowars has been claiming that philanthropist and one-time Media Matters donor George Soros has been purposely funding the Charlottesville violence.) Jones later said during the interview that Kessler into a “trap” set by Kessler’s enemies by being at the Charlottesville rally this past weekend.

Kessler wrote three pieces for the “alt-right” affiliated outlet GotNews from January through March. Trump has reportedly received news from that outlet, which is headed by racist troll Charles C. Johnson.

Kessler has also written several posts for the anti-immigrant white nationalist site VDare. A June 19 post (his most recent) concludes that the “governments of the West are waging a campaign of slow extermination against their own core populations. It is white genocide.”

VDare recently announced that it will host a conference next year at Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs, CO. The 2018 event will feature VDare Editor Peter Brimelow, Breitbart.com columnist and former Republican Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, and writer John Derbyshire, who describes himself as a “mild and tolerant” “homophobe” and “racist.”

Brimelow has also contributed op-eds for The Daily Caller. His website posted a defense of the rally on August 12 by “Charlottesville Survivor,” which concluded that “it’s not Unite The Right that is ‘dividing’ America. Whites who aren’t comfortable with being dispossessed in every single Western country, or with seeing the symbols of their heritage wiped out, gathered to protest peacefully. … Why should Unite The Right apologize for anything? Indeed, how can the ‘Far Right’ be regarded as anything other than an incredibly moderate protest movement against a deliberate campaign of genocide?” (The white supremacists did not actually “protest peacefully.”)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvTSsMKfL2c

prns bs

NEW

Veteran War Reporter, Alex Quade Wins Prestigious Edward R. Morrow Journalism Award For Horse Soldiers of 9/11

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Alex Quade

Jun 15, 2012, 06:00 ET

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WASHINGTON, June 15, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Organizers for the 2012 National Edward R. Murrow Awards have announced that veteran war reporter, Alex Quade's Horse Soldiers of 9/11 has won the award in the category of National Online for Writing.

Horse Soldiers of 9/11 was an original, groundbreaking story for The Daily Caller. The story was later expanded into a short film of the same name, narrated by actor Gary Sinise, and is now being screened at film festivals across the country.

War reporter, Alex Quade has made a career out of "going to bad places" as an embedded reporter. In body armor, helmet and anti-ballistic eyewear protection, she has covered U.S. soldiers in war zones around the globe including Iraq and Afghanistan. Extreme storytelling and silent risk-taking lie at the heart of what she does.

It was in her capacity as a war reporter that Alex tracked down the elite commandos who first rode horses into Afghanistan after 9/11. Those secretive teams of U.S. Special Operations Forces, including Green Berets, Air Force Special Operations Combat Controllers and CIA Operatives, shared their stories with Alex.

It was the news the world breathlessly waited for immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks: a report of the first American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. All at once the world's attention focused on an iconic photo of small teams of U.S. Special Operations Forces doing something no American military had done in nearly a century: ride horses into combat. That photo would go on to inspire an artist to sculpt an 18 ft. tall monument at Ground Zero ten years later.

The courage of the first into battle is what guarantees the courage of those that follow: Horse Soldiers of 9/11 by war reporter, Alex Quade.

For more information about the 2012 National Edward R. Murrow Awards, please go to www.rtnda.org.

WHO: War reporter, Alex Quade, Edward R. Murrow Award winner for Horse Soldiers of 9/11, Producer & Director of the short film, Horse Soldiers of 9/11.

WHAT: Winner of the 2012 National Edward R. Murrow Award in the category for National Online writing.

SOURCE Alex Quade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Caller 1218

Daily Caller is a conservative American news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by political pundit Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel in 2010.

History

The Daily Caller was founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. After raising $3 million in funding from businessman Foster Friess, the website was launched on January 11, 2010. The organization started with a reporting staff of 21 in its Washington office. It was launched as an alternative to the liberal The Huffington Post, similarly featuring sections in broad range of subjects beyond politics.

By late 2012, The New York Times reported that the site had quadrupled its page view and total audience and had become profitable without ever buying an advertisement for itself.^[3]

By 2013, the site was receiving over 35 million views a month according to Quantcast, surpassing rival sites such as The Washington Times, Politico, and Forbes.^[4] The site has an active community, with over 200,000 comments made each month.

Notable figures have commented on The Daily Caller. Karl Rove has said that "The Daily Caller is necessary reading for anyone who wants to be up to speed with what's going on with politics in America." Larry Kudlow referred to the site as "one of [his] faves."^[4]

Staff and contributors

The Daily Caller is in the White House rotating press pool and has full-time reporters on Capitol Hill.^[5] Notable contributors include Ann Coulter.^[6]

Contributors to The Daily Caller include economist Larry Kudlow, Congressman Mark Sanford, sculptor Robert Mihaly, and diplomat Alan Keyes.^[7][8][9]

The Daily Caller also hosts The Mirror, a blog written by former FishbowlDC editor and The Hill columnist Betsy Rothstein. The Mirror covers media in Washington D.C., news related to journalism organizations, as well as political and media related gossip. The tagline is, "Reflections of a self-obsessed city."^[10][11]

Political stance

When it first launched in January 2010, Mercedes Bunz, writing for The Guardian, said The Daily Caller was "setting itself up to be the conservative answer to The Huffington Post". According to Bunz, a year before the website launched, Carlson promoted it as "a new political website leaning more to the right than Politico and TalkingPointsMemo". However, at launch, he wrote a letter to readers that said it was not going to be a right-wing site.^[12]

During a January 2010 interview with Politico, Carlson said The Daily Caller was not going to be tied to his personal political ideologies and that he wanted it to be "breaking stories of importance".^[13] In a Washington Post article about The Caller's launch, Howard Kurtz wrote, "[Carlson's] partner is Neil Patel, a former Dick Cheney aide. His opinion editor is Moira Bagley, who spent 2008 as the Republican National Committee's press secretary. And his $3 million in funding comes from Wyoming financier Foster Friess, a big-time GOP donor. But Carlson insists this won't be a right-wing site". Kurtz quoted Carlson as saying, "We're not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone".^[14] In an interview with The New York Times, Carlson said that the vast majority of traditional reporting comes from a liberal point of view and called The Daily Caller's reporting "the balance against the rest of the conventional press".^[3]

In a 2012 Washingtonian article, Tom Bartlett said Carlson and Patel developed The Daily Caller as "a conservative news site in the mold of the liberal Huffington Post but with more firearms coverage and fewer nipple-slip slide shows".^[15]

Controversies

Climate change denial

The Daily Caller has published a number of articles that dispute the scientific consensus on climate change.^[16] In 2017, The Daily Caller published a story saying that a "peer-reviewed study" by "two scientists and a veteran statistician" found that recent years have not been the warmest ever.^[17][18] The alleged "study" was a PDF file on a WordPress blog, and was not peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.^[17] Also in 2017, The Daily Caller uncritically published a bogus Daily Mail story which claimed that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) manipulated data to make climate change appear worse; at the same time, legitimate news outlets debunked the Daily Mail story.^[19][20][21] Also in 2017, The Daily Caller published a story claiming that a study found no evidence of accelerating temperatures over a 23-year period, which climate scientists described as a misleading story.^[16] In 2016, The Daily Caller published a story claiming that climate scientist Michael Mann (director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University) had asserted that data was unnecessary to measure climate change; Mann described the story as "egregiously false".^[22] In 2015, The Daily Caller wrote that NOAA "fiddle[d]" with data when the agency published a report concluding that there was no global warming hiatus.^[23][24]

Misleading video about NPR

In 2011, The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to disseminate a video by conservative provocateur James O'Keefe which purportedly showed an NPR fundraiser deriding Republicans. The video was later proven to have been misleadingly edited.^[25]

False prostitution allegations

In March 2013 The Daily Caller posted interviews with two women claiming that New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez had paid them for sex while he was a guest of a campaign donor.^[26] The allegation came five days before the 2012 New Jersey senate election. News organizations such as ABC News, which had also interviewed the women, the New York Times, and the New York Post declined to publish the allegations, viewing them as unsubstantiated and lacking credibility.^[27][28][29] Subsequently, one of the women who accused Menendez stated that she had been paidto falsely implicate the senator and had never met him.^[27][30]Menendez's office described the allegations as "manufactured" by a right-wing blog as a politically motivated smear.^[31]

A few weeks later, police in the Dominican Republic announced that three women had claimed they were paid $300–425 each to lie about having had sex with Menendez.^[32] Dominican law enforcement also alleged that the women had been paid to lie about Menendez by an individual claiming to work for The Daily Caller. The Daily Caller denied this allegation, stating: "At no point did any money change hands between The Daily Callerand any sources or individuals connected with this investigation".^[33] Describing what it saw as the unraveling of The Daily Caller's "scoop", the Poynter Institute wrote: The Daily Caller stands by its reports, though apparently doesn't feel the need to prove its allegations right".^[34]

Fox News controversy

In March 2015 The Daily Caller columnist Mickey Kaus quit after editor Tucker Carlson refused to run a column critical of Fox News coverage of the immigration policy debate.^[35] Carlson, who also works for Fox, reportedly did not want The Daily Caller publishing criticism of a firm that employed him.^[36] Journalist Neil Munro quit two weeks later and Carlson said he was not going to go to work for Breitbart. However, He started writing for Breitbard four months later and has remained there, as of November 2018.^[37]

2016 presidential election

According to a study by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, The Daily Caller was among the most popular sites on the right during the 2016 presidential election. The study also found that The Daily Caller provided "amplification and legitimation" for "the most extreme conspiracy sites", such as Truthfeed, Infowars, Gateway Pundit and Conservative Treehouse during the 2016 presidential election.^[38][39][40]The Daily Caller also "employed anti-immigrant narratives that echoed sentiments from the alt-right and white nationalists but without the explicitly racist and pro-segregation language."^[39]

The Daily Calleralso played a significant role in creating and disseminating stories that had little purchase outside the right-wing media ecosystem but that stoked the belief among core Trump followers that what Clinton did was not merely questionable but criminal and treasonous. In a campaign that expressed deep anti-Muslim sentiment, a repeated theme was that Hillary Clinton was seriously in hock to Muslim nations.^[39] In one of its most frequently shared stories, The Daily Caller falsely asserted that Morocco's King Mohammed VI flew Bill Clinton on a private jet, and that this had been omitted from the Clinton Foundation's tax disclosures.^[39] The Daily Caller also made the "utterly unsubstantiated and unsourced claim" that Hillary Clinton got Environmental Protection Agency "head Lisa Jackson to try to shut down Mosaic Fertilizer, described as America’s largest phosphate mining company, in exchange for a $15 million donation to the Clinton Foundation from King Mohammed VI of Morocco, ostensibly to benefit Morocco’s state-owned phosphate company."^[39]

Encouragement of violence against protesters

In January 2017, The Daily Caller posted a video which encouraged violence against protesters.^{[41][42][43][44]} The video in question showed a car plowing through protesters, with the headline "Here's A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road" and set to a cover of Ludacris' "Move Bitch."^[41] The video drew attention in August 2017 when a white supremacist plowed his car through a group of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.^[41] After the video attracted attention, The Daily Caller deleted it from its website.^[41][44]

TheSouthern Poverty Law Center subsequently criticized The Daily Caller, saying that it had a "white nationalist problem".^[45] SPLC also said that two other contributors to The Daily Caller had ties to white nationalist groups.^[45] It later retracted its claim that Richard Pollock, a devout Jew, was a white nationalist, saying "Pollock was initially included in this story" but "there is no evidence to suggest Mr. Pollock is otherwise a white nationalist."^{[45] [MIRROR?]}

Ties to white supremacists

In August 2018, The Atlantic reported that Scott Greer, then deputy editor of The Daily Caller, had written pieces under a pseudonym in the white supremacist publication Radix Journal from 2014 to 2015. In articles for Radix Journal, Greer expressed white nationalist views, as well as racist anti-black and antisemitic views. While in his emails and messages, he expressed anti-Christian and antisemitic theories, as well his relationship with Richard Spencer.^[46] Upon being confronted with his past white supremacist writings, Greer resigned from any affiliation with The Daily Caller.^[47] In 2017, it had been revealed, Scott Greer had ties to members of the white nationalist movement, including friendships with Devin Saucier, assistant to Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, and anti-immigrant activist Marcus Epstein, who pled guilty to assaulting an African American woman two years prior to the relationship with Scott Greer.^[48] Greer had later deleted parts of his Facebook page, but is seen photographed with nationalists such as Tim Dionisopoulos and Richard Spencer, Wolves of Vinland and appears wearing clothes belonging to the group Youth for Western Civilization.^[48] The Daily Caller itself subsequently stated, about why he had not been fired in 2017: “We had two choices: Fire a young man because of some photos taken of him at metal shows in college, or take his word. We chose to trust him. Now, if what you allege is accurate, we know that trust was a mistake, we know he lied to us. We won’t publish him, anyone in these circles, or anyone who thinks like them. People who associate with these losers have no business writing for our company.” ^[49]

The Daily Caller has posted articles by Jason Kessler,^[50] a white supremacist who organized a rally of hundreds of white nationalists in Charlottesville.^[51][52] Before Kessler posted his article, he had spoken at white supremacist gatherings.^[53] After Kessler received attention for his organizing of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, the Daily Caller removed his articles from its website,^[54] but The Daily Caller executive editor defended Kessler's articles.^[55]

The website has also published pieces by Peter Brimelow, founder of the white supremacist website VDARE.^[48]

Heckling of Obama

In 2012, Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro interrupted Barack Obama during one of the President's press conferences, while Obama was giving remarks. Obama said, "The next time I prefer you let me finish my statements before you ask a question." Cutting off Munro's reply, Obama said, "I didn't ask for an argument."^[56] Munro's interruption of remarks by the president was widely considered a startling breach of etiquette. Editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson defended Munro's hectoring, saying "As a general matter, reporters are there to ask [questions]" and that he was "proud" of Munro.^{[57][58][59][60][61]}

Munro later said in a statent that his intention was to ask questions after the president made his remarks but misjudged when the president was closing. "I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States. I know he rarely takes questions before walking away from the podium. When I asked the question as he finished his speech, he turned his back on the many reporters, and walked away while I and at least one other reporter asked questions."^[62][63]

Stefan Halper

The Daily Caller was the first news outlet to report on Stefan Halper, a confidential FBI source, and his interactions with Trump campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about campaign matters.^[64] Page became the subject of surveillance warrants issued by the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding his alleged contacts with Russian intelligence officials.^[65] Other news outlets confirmed Halper's identity but did not report his identity because US intelligence officials warned that it would endanger him and his contacts.^[66][67][68]

Allegation of non-profit abuse

According to Callum Borchers of the Washington Post, the Daily Caller has "a peculiar business structure that enables it to increase revenue while reducing its tax obligation."^[69] The organization, a for-profit company, does this by relying on its charity arm, the Daily Caller News Foundation, to create the majority of its news content.^[70]

According to Lisa Graves, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration, the situation is “a huge rip-off for taxpayers if the Daily Caller News Foundation is receiving revenue that it doesn't pay taxes on, to produce stories that are used by the for-profit enterprise, which then makes money on the stories through ads.”^[71]

Imran Awan

The Daily Caller kept conspiracy theories surrounding Imran Awan alive with aggressive coverage.^[72][73] Imran Awan was an IT worker for Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Daily Caller sought to tie Awan to a wide range of alleged criminal activity, including unauthorized access to government servers.^[74] The reporter behind the aggressive coverage of Awan told Fox News that the affair was "straight out of James Bond."^[74] An 18-month investigation by federal prosecutors found no evidence of wrongdoing in Awan's work in the House and no support for the conspiracy theories about Awan. In the announcement of the conclusion of the investigation, investigators rebuked a litany of right-wing conspiracy theories about Awan.^[72][73]

Chinese email hacking

In August 2018, The Daily Caller ran a story alleging that a Chinese-owned company hacked then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and successfully obtained nearly all of her emails. The Daily Caller cited “two sources briefed on the matter.” After publishing the story, President Trump tweeted the allegations made in Daily Caller's reporting. The FBI rebutted the allegations.^[75] According to The Washington Post, the claims are without evidence.^[76]

Awards

2012 Edward R. Murrow Award for "Horse Soldiers of 9-11" by Alex Quade^[77]
2012 American Legion Fourth Estate Award for "The Horse Soldiers of 9-11" by Alex Quade^[78]
2012 Telly Award for "The Horse Soldiers of 9-11" by Alex Quade^[79]

References

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dailycaller1218

no lnx

CAPT 12/18

huge # tags, not all implemented

see jrnl fail escalator

Fact-Checking the Attacks

The administration and its allies appear to be repeating one main talking point in their effort to discredit the National Climate Assessment: They claim, inaccurately, that the report represents only a worst-case scenario. It actually reflects a broad range of possible future outcomes—along with an enormity of direct, present-day observations of the impacts of global warming.

The naysayers are trying to build that falsehood on a number of misleading assertions:

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "even Obama's undersecretary for science didn't believe the radical conclusions of the report that was released." This appears to be a reference to Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP, who spent 18 months as an undersecretary in the Obama administration's energy department. Koonin has long maintained climate science is not "settled," and has argued the government should have a red-team/blue-team debate—an idea championed unsuccessfully by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

Sanders also said that the National Climate Assessment "is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long-established trends." But in fact the report considered the full range of climate scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, looking at what will happen if carbon emissions decline, if they stabilize, and if they continue to grow unabated. As Hayhoe noted in her Twitter thread, "the observed increase in global carbon emissions over the past 15–20 years has been consistent with higher scenarios."

The Trump EPA put out a news release it called a "fact check" on Wednesday, citing an article on the conservative website The Daily Caller to try to bolster an assertion by Wheeler that Obama administration's science adviser John Holdren instructed the report's authors in 2015 to look at worst-case scenarios. "Mr. Wheeler's insinuation is absolutely false," Holdren, now at Harvard, responded in a statement. "Assertions by high officials of the Trump administration that these are 'worst case' reports are nothing more than a flimsy attempt to discredit the careful and comprehensive work of some of the best climate scientists in the country, inside and outside of government," Holdren said.

Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, said the administration might intervene in future climate reports. "Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that's used for the next assessment," Wheeler said. But the report underwent several rounds of technical and policy review by the 13 federal agencies involved. There was a series of regional engagement workshops that reached more than 1,000 people in over 40 cities, with listening sessions, webinars and public comment. An expert external peer review of the whole report was performed by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, took issue with the report for including a figure that was widely quoted in the media: that U.S. GDP could take a 10 percent hit by 2100 due to climate change. The estimate was derived from an innovative, cutting-edge modeling of climate impacts on the U.S. economy published in the journal Science. Pielke, who often says he agrees with the core science on global warming but disputes how it is applied, argued this headline-grabbing data point should not have been included, since it reflected a scenario of more global warming than is commonly reckoned in modeling. Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and co-author of the Science paper, said the team purposefully took into account the unlikely—though not impossible—scenario at the end of the charted curve because of its potentially large consequences. "We were deliberately trying to include tail risks, not just 'most likely' outcomes, because consideration of tail risks is crucial to sound risk management," Kopp said in an email.

The arguments of the Trump administration have been amplified in media coverage in the aftermath of the report's release.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute prefacing her remarks with the caveat, "I'm not a scientist," before delivering a blizzard of inaccuracies on Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC aimed at undermining the report's credibility. Pletka said the last two years have been the coldest on record, when in fact they have been among the warmest. She said the U.S. "is not using dirty coal anymore," when in fact about 30 percent of U.S. power is still generated by coal and only one U.S. coal plant has technology in place to capture some of its carbon emissions.

Hayhoe pre-taped an appearance on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show to talk about the National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, but her appearance—though posted online—was bumped from the TV broadcast. CNN instead aired a segment with paid contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, who accused climate scientists of stoking alarm to make money.

rww

...The Clark brothers would stand alongside Posobiec again at a rally he led alongside white nationalist Richard Spencer, of whom the brothers and Posobiec were both seeming fans. Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book “Against the Fascist Creep,” tweeted that the Clark brothers had infiltrated a book talk he gave last year. According to Ross, a Daily Caller reporter was filming the incident. Later that night, Posobiec published the PDF of Ross’ book.

(((Alexander Reid Ross)))

@areidross

Nov 13, 2018

Whoa, these are the guys who tried to bust up my book talk in DC. There was a Daily Caller journo waiting in a cab outside livestreaming in case something went down. Instead, dozens of antifascists came and ensured the security of the space. Fash couldn't even catch a ride home.

(((Alexander Reid Ross)))

@areidross

That evening, Jack Posobiec posted a pirated copy of the PDF of my book online -- total coincidence, i know. Here's an article that was published about the evening's affairs...https://itsgoingdown.org/nazis-fail-attempt-shut-fascist-creep-author-talk-potters-house/ … pic.twitter.com/ww7RrDO09K

Twitter Ads info and privacy

In a video interview recorded by One People’s Project, Spencer detailed his relationship with Posobiec going back to the Republican National Convention in 2016.

[pix]

“He introduced himself as, ‘Oh, I work for Roger Stone, I’m Roger Stone’s man, kind of thing.’ He definitely introduced himself as really tightly connected with the campaign—the Trump campaign—and he was maybe two degrees of separation from Trump himself, that kind of thing,” Spencer says in the video, adding that Posobiec expressed gratitude to the alt-right for joining a pro-Trump “coalition” in a tone Spencer described as “a smoke-blown-up-ass kind of way.”

Spencer alleged that while Posobiec was at The Rebel, the outlet had edited him out of rally footage while feeding his talking points to Posobiec to reiterate as if they were Posobiec’s opinions.

“It was highly dishonest, to put it mildly,” Spencer said.

Spencer said he had an “ongoing connection” with Posobiec over the years, but that the relationship was “not intimate.” Spencer described Posobiec as being “highly complimentary” to him “in a way that no conservative would be.”

Posobiec has documented ties to the alt-right dating back to his formative years at Rebel Media. In the most public example, he was fired for plagiarizing a video published by the organizer of the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Posobiec was also spotted sitting with Marcus Epstein, who was once charged with assault after karate-chopping a black woman and calling her a racial slur, during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. He’s also tweeted anti-Semitic tropes (and since deleted those tweets).

Posobiec’s tie-ins to the alt-right are not entirely severed. In September, Posobiec released a book that Theodore Beale, an “alt-right” writer using the pseudonym “Vox Day,” edited and published. Beale has been openly identified as “alt-right” as recently as August 9, 2018.

mma

Right-wing media outlets The Daily Caller and the Washington Free Beacon have often acted as de facto press offices for Scott Pruitt's Environmental Protection Agency. Media Matters has documented how the two publications have defended Pruitt in the face of his many scandals and tried to discredit sources of information about his misdeeds. Now we learn from Washington Examiner reporter John Siciliano, who covers energy and environment for the conservative-leaning newspaper, that the EPA's press office tried to strong-arm him into writing flattering pieces about the agency and complained to his editors when he refused.

Speaking on June 11 on a panel about media coverage at a conference organized by Citizens' Climate Lobby, a nonpartisan climate activist group, Siciliano recounted the EPA’s attempts to coerce him and his paper to print favorable stories, which he described as “a really bizarre pressure play on their part that I’ve never experienced from an agency, a cabinet-level agency, to enforce an agenda on a journalist.” Siciliano also discussed how the agency referred to him in pejorative terms and pitted him against other journalists -- practices the agency has used against other environmental journalists.

From the June 11 panel titled “Covering Climate Change in the Current Political Landscape”:

....

Stefan Halper was identified this week as the alleged “informant” who Donald Trump accused of spying on his 2016 presidential campaign and kicking off an FBI investigation into possible collusion with Russia.

But several weeks ago, a news outlet with deep ties to Trump himself had already identified Halper as the likely information. The Daily Caller, a right-leaning news outlet founded by Trump supporter and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, had actually reported back on March 25 that Halper had reached out to members of Trump’s campaign in an effort to learn about their communications with Russia.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-media-explodes-over-new-fbi-texts-misrepresents-facts

rare corrections?

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/one-right-wing-pundit-almost-singularly-responsible-taking-white-nationalism

ref

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/16/daily-caller-has-white-nationalist-problem

no lnx img

The Daily Caller has a White Nationalist Problem

August 16, 2017

Stephen Piggott and Alex Amend

On Monday, August 14, the Daily Caller very quietly removed white nationalist Jason Kessler’s contributions to the publication after the violence and chaos in Charlottesville. The white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally was organized by Kessler.

But the white nationalist problem at Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, a conservative political outlet launched in 2010 as a “response” to the Huffington Post, is bigger than just Kessler. Throughout the 2016 election and since, the Daily Caller has not only published the work of white nationalists, but some of its writers have routinely whitewashed the Alt-Right, while one editor there is an associate of key Alt-Right figures. Two Daily Caller contributors, including a senior investigative reporter, were recently announced as speakers at the upcoming white nationalist H.L. Mencken Club conference organized by Paul Gottfried, a godfather of the Alt-Right.

Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief in November to start his own show on FOX News. In the top image, Carlson dedicated a segment on the anti-Muslim conspiracy of "creeping Sharia" on Tuesday, August 15, the day President Trump made another statement regarding the violence in Charlottesville, garnering criticism for ignoring the story. In the bottom image, Carlson aired an inflammatory anti-immigrant segment in July about a small Gypsy population in Pennsylvania.

As for recent Daily Caller contributors, take Peter Brimelow; the English white nationalist is the founder of the website VDARE, named after Virginia Dare, the supposed first white child born in the new world. VDARE is a major hub for white nationalists and anti-Semites. Brimelow is a leading figure on the Alt-Right and has been published three times in the Daily Caller in recent months, with his first piece coming in March defending Rep. Steve King, a hero to white nationalists, who recently tweeted, “Geert Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

A few years ago, the Daily Caller publishing the work of an established white nationalist would be unthinkable. Take the response from Washington, D.C., senior contributor Matt K. Lewis following the firing of white nationalist John Derbyshire from National Review in 2012 for writing a racist screed regarding the Trayvon Martin shooting titled, “The Talk: Nonblack Version.” The article, presented as conversation between a white parent and their child included lines like, “A small cohort of blacks — in my experience, around five percent — is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us.” It also included tips like, “If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date.” Lewis’ response in the Daily Caller to Derbyshire’s 2012 firing was, “Some people aren’t worth the [sic] fighting for. Some things are indefensible. This is one of those cases.”

Following his firing, Derbyshire joined VDARE as a regular contributor, and now his boss, Brimelow, is contributing articles to the Daily Caller.

But Brimelow is only a contributor. Despite his attempts to hide it, Daily Caller deputy editor Scott Greer has questionable ties to many younger members of the white nationalist movement. The activist website OverthrowDotCom published multiple photographs of Greer in late 2016 documenting his extensive relationships with other white nationalists. In the expose, mostly taken from Facebook, Greer is photographed with hardcore white nationalists such as Devin Saucier, a man who works as an assistant to Jared Taylor of American Renaissance. One of the most prominent white nationalists of the past quarter century, Taylor once wrote, "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears."

From right to left: Scott Greer, Ben Zapp, Devin Saucier, and Tim Dionisopoulos.

Saucier is a regular attendee at white nationalist gatherings, including Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute (NPI) conferences. Greer is also pictured with another white nationalist, Marcus Epstein, another friend of Spencer’s who pled guilty in 2009 to drunkenly assaulting an African American woman in Washington, D.C., which occurred two years prior.

Scott Greer in the middle in plaid facing the camera. Marcus Epstein is in the pink shirt.

Scott Greer in the red circle wearing a Youth For Western Civilization (YWC) shirt at a Wolves of Vinland gathering.

In these photos, Greer is seen wearing a Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) t-shirt. YWC is a now defunct white nationalist student group founded by Epstein and another white nationalist, Kevin DeAnna. DeAnna has been involved with the neo-volkisch collective called the Wolves of Vinland, and Greer has been photographed at a Wolves gathering with Saucier and others.

An active member of the Wolves is Maurice Michaely, a man who was sent to prison for burning down the black historical Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Haymarket, Virginia. According to the “Fools of Vinland” blog, Greer liked a picture of Michaely that was posted on Facebook in 2014, showing him in prison with the letters 666 scrawled onto his hand.

While Greer has scrubbed his Facebook page, his Twitter account still shows that he “follows” a number of white nationalists, including Tim Dionisopoulos of YWC who Greer is sometimes photographed with, as well as Richard Spencer and Steve Sailer of VDARE.

Scott Greer's Facebook profile featuring a photograph of him at the Daily Caller. Marcus Epstein left a comment as did Patrick Sharp, another white nationalist.

Greer’s writings also indicate his white nationalist views, though calibrated for a more mainstream conservative audience. He recently published a book, No Campus for White Men — an attack piece focused on the evergreen right-wing grievance of “political correctness” on college campuses — which received glowing reviews from white nationalist websites including VDARE, American Renaissance and Counter Currents. Greer, originally from Tennessee, published a staunch defense of the Confederate battle flag for the Daily Caller in July of 2016, writing that a National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples leader’s call to remove Confederate soldiers from a carving on Stone Mountain in Georgia was “remarkably similar to the tactics of jihadis like ISIS and the Taliban.” Other stories written by Greer for the Daily Caller include tropes that are often peddled by white nationalists including black-on-white crime, and that immigrants are bringing disease to the country.

In a 2014 piece, Greer dismissed an article in Time magazine on the threat right wing anti-government groups and individuals pose to law enforcement. “A thorough search of Time’s archive produced no stories about the threat that communists, black nationalists or prison gangs pose to police,” he claimed. In a May 2015 opinion piece, Greer heaped praise on St. Louis County district attorney Bob McCulloch for his handling of the Michael Brown case, despite McCulloch’s history of bias and the widespread criticism he received for his actions during the aftermath of the shooting.

One of Greer’s fixations is on downplaying the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. In a July 2015 opinion piece, Greer defended then-candidate Donald Trump who called Mexicans “criminals and rapists,” writing, ”Except that it’s still Hispanic men who are raping these women, and the countries where illegal immigrants primarily come from countries [sic] have sexual assault rates that dwarf the phony numbers for American universities. The eight-in-ten figure for migrant women proves that there is a very real rape culture among illegal immigrants, contrary to what some fact checkers might want you to believe.”

In a June 2015 piece, Greer again whitewashed sexual assault on campuses, writing, “[I]t’s the perverse fantasy that thousands of women will be raped at some point during their college years,” before making a statement that is often heard from Alt-Right misogynists. “On top of that,” Greer opines, “more innocent men will find themselves accused of these crimes and see their lives ruined by a culture that nurses and refuses to punish false rape accusations.”

The day after the 2016 election, Greer tweeted, “Now as a white man, I can finally feel safe in America.” Richard Spencer is clearly a fan of Greer’s, retweeting him a number of times....

Each year, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller marks “Equal Pay Day” by publishing a piece attacking the idea that women are paid less than men or trying to rationalize the pay gap.

This year, The Daily Caller criticized Google for highlighting the pay gap through Cheryl Sandburg’s Lean In initiative and a Funny or Die video about women being paid 20% less than men.

The piece, attributed to Carlson’s non-profit charity, the Daily Caller News Foundation, was illustrated with a photo of a woman “showered with money.”

The author, a recent college grad who is a Breitbart alum and former Koch intern, noted without irony that “the so-called wage gap only makes sense if hours worked, years of experience, and education of male and female laborers are considered.” It might help to read that “critique” again.

For good measure, the Daily Caller ran a second piece that day, a reprint of a blog claiming Elizabeth Warren paid women less than men. That spin bounced through the rightwing echo chamber from the Washington Free Beacon to the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox, before it was refuted by Warren’s payroll data. No correction was issued by any of the outlets that spread the attack on Warren. (The Beacon has described itself as an “aerial hunting operation” and it has attacked watchdogs like the Center for Media and Democracy.)

But that’s par for the course for The Daily Caller. Though its website has more than 16 million visitors and a huge staff of writers who produce content for it through its non-profit the Daily Caller News Foundation, the site routinely relies on rightwing bloggers and groups to provide many of the “facts” it asserts as true in its news stories.

During the presidential election season, The Daily Caller was rife with articles attacking Hillary Clinton, including a piece by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF)that reinforced Trump’s nicknaming Clinton as “crooked,” which some might consider projection given his documented history of cheating contractors out of their full pay or the Trump University scam or more.

IWF’s smear piece published in The Daily Caller in the run-up to the presidential election could have been written this year about the policymaker-in-chief: “The bigger problem is that she doesn’t think the rules should apply to her in the first place. HRC – or Her Royal Crookness – sees herself as a Queen, existing in a realm above the minions who work for her, and even higher above her lowly subjects. Queens don’t have to bother with the system meant for ordinary schlubs. She doesn’t have to accept facts or findings; we peons are expected to accept her version of events, rather than trust our own lyin’ eyes.”

IWF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity that is theoretically barred from intervening in an election by criticizing the character of a candidate. That story by the head of IWF concludes with: “Americans recall that we are supposed to be a nation of laws, after all, and those laws are meant to apply to everyone, even those with titles like Secretary or Senator. That’s bad news for Her Royal Crookness, Hillary Clinton, who epitomizes the elitism that Americans resoundingly reject.” IWF has not issued, and The Daily Caller has not published, a follow-up on that take in light of Trump’s acts as president.

Last summer, CMD released a major report detailing IWF’s history and role in the War on Women, a story that was broken by Joan Walsh in The Nation. CMD also documented that almost all of the publicly known funders of the IWF”s affiliated (c)(4), the “Independent Women’s Voice,” were men. CMD also filed an FEC complaint against IWV last November contending that the group violated election laws, which IWV denies.

CMD also documented how as IWF was claiming there was no “war on women,” IWV was running ads and doing calls to aid politicians like Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that IWF has sponsored a forum where its panelists contended that “rape culture statistics have been blown out of proportion in the United States, and that this is largely a product of the media’s focus on rape and sexual assault.” That’s the description from The Daily Caller’s coverage of the event. Another piece, titled “Restraining Orders Hurt Women” also credited IWF’s analysis.

IWF, by the way, has opposed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) for years and its renewal, despite the strong support for its protections by groups that represent women’s interests in not getting killed by a violent partner. VAWA helps fund a coordinated community response to help women who are beaten, raped, or stalked–and it helps ensure that those restraining orders are enforced across jurisdictions to help protect women where ever they may flee for safety.

IWF’s out-of-step assertions as a mainstream “women’s voice” have found a ready distribution channel in The Daily Caller. Take, for example, an article headlined “Stay vertical a bit longer, ladies: Study claims men as winning the game of love,” which featured IWF’s claims about marriage and sex. IWF’s rep expressed concerns about women engaging in “commitment-less sex” because “when it comes to marriage there is certainly a marketplace and many factors have changed that marketplace.”

That Daily Caller story also cited the controversial academic Mark Regnerus, who as CMD recently noted, has “claimed, for example, that ‘liberal’ and ‘very liberal’ women want to have much more sex than other women [and to] speculate that liberal women want more sex than other women because they’re not religious enough. Specifically, Regnerus theorizes that sex provides the “transcendent” feeling others achieve through faith – that these liberal women are getting in bed, as it were, what they’re not getting in church. ‘Basically,’ Regnerus writes, ‘liberal women substitute sex for religion.’ (Insert obligatory ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ joke here.)”

It’s not just sex on the brain of The Daily Caller, which regularly features swimsuit models to peddle its spin, like its “story” minimizing the effects of climate change on the day Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris agreement: “These 14 Models Prepared for Trump to Drop the Climate Deal.” The text accompanying the slideshow stated: “As we approach President Trump’s decision on the Paris climate accord, we decided to turn our attention to the models out there who have been hoping for warmer temperatures.”

The Daily Caller’s news presentation has sought to undermine grassroots efforts to secure paid leave and increase the minimum wage. One example is their story “Social Justice Activists Want Olive Garden To Be Nicer to Cows Before Serving Them As Meatballs.” That story emphasized that “Thus far, the coalitions’ campaign is not going well. The group’s attempt to set up meetings with Darden in the fall was an abysmal failure. The company responded with a letter rebuffing meetings and generally rejecting the demands set forth.” Other pieces pushed the rightwing narrative that requiring paid sick leave and increasing the minimum wage would lead to higher unemployment rates.

The Daily Caller has even written against maternity leave pay. One such piece was written by the Independence Institute, which is part of the State Policy Network: “Mandated Paid Maternity Leave: A Bad Idea for Women.” That’s not the view of most women or even of most CEOs, as CMD revealed last year after it was given a detailed survey by Frank Luntz’s group showing overwhelming support for maternity leave, paid sick leave, raising the minimum wage.

That survey of 1,000 executives was commissioned to help the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its global corporate funders and its state affiliates in their efforts to defeat popular paid sick leave policies and efforts to increase the minimum wage. Luntz’s team said the problem was business leaders have too much “empathy.”

Another Daily Caller piece amplified the assertions of the controversial PR flack Rick Berman–who 60 Minutes helped dub “Dr. Evil”–that “The $15 Minimum Wage Could Lead to More Youth Crime.” Like IWF, the claims of Berman’s front groups get plenty of play in The Daily Caller. CMD recently detailed how Berman’s front groups are funded not just by corporations but also with millions from the rightwing Bradley Foundation, which also funds IWF’s promo of “free market” alternatives to paid sick leave and raises in the minimum wage. CMD also published the audio of Berman bragging about his tactics: “I get up every morning and I try and figure out how to screw with the labor unions” and “marginalize the people on the other side….”

CMD has previously refuted to The Daily Caller’s claims about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and its assertions on climate change and fracking, but has not responded to every erroneous claim the outlet has made about CMD. Among other things, like other rightwing outfits, the Daily Caller has repeated the claim that CMD is “Soros-funded,” even though CMD has pointed out that it is not funded by George Soros and was awarded a grant from the Open Society Institute several years ago as part of a set of grants to examine national security surveillance of Americans, along with a grant to the Kochs’ Cato Institute–which the Daily Caller has never called “Soros-funded.”

During CMD’s investigation of IWF, its researchers noted the way The Daily Caller was readily echoing IWF claims on numerous issues. That led CMD to take a closer look at The Daily Caller’s operations, which resulted in the investigation reported by the Washington Post on June 2, 2017. More details about that research, which showed that Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller had received a six-figure sum from the Trump Campaign in the weeks before the election, are available here.

As Callum Borchers noted in the Washington Post story, tax experts have expressed concerns about how Tucker Carlson’s charity benefits his for-profit media outlet, The Daily Caller, which profits from the web traffic and list-building resulting from its content, a substantial portion of which is provided by the non-profit. CMD has also noted that Carlson did not tell FOX News viewers that he had financially benefited from the Trump Campaign cash, as he critiqued other outlets for their purported bias against Trump or when he interviewed Trump for a primetime show on FOX this spring.

How much Carlson received in pay or bonuses from The Daily Caller last year after it received the money from the Trump Campaign is not known.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/23/hundreds-scientists-urge-trump-withdraw-un-climate/

batasch daily caller;

Hundreds of scientists and policy experts sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to withdraw from a major United Nations environmental treaty ratified during the Bush administration.

More than 300 eminent scientists signed the letter to Trump, delivered Thursday, arguing he should pull out of the UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) because it targets carbon dioxide — a gas essential for life.

CO2 “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth,” reads the petition, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Observations since the UNFCCC was written 25 years ago show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign — much less than initial model predictions.”

Trump promised to pull out of the Paris agreement on global warming, which went into effect in November 2016. President Barack Obama signed the U.S. up to cut greenhouse gases 26 to 28 percent.

The hundreds of scientists who signed the letter, however, argue that’s not far enough. Trump should pull out of the foundational treaty the Paris agreement is based on — the UNFCCC.

The UNFCCC’s focus on global warming is misguided because it targets CO2, which isn’t a pollutant, with the idea reducing it can stop global warming. Their plans aren’t supported by science, one petitioner argued in a letter.

“Since 2009, the US and other governments have undertaken actions with respect to global climate that are not scientifically justified and that already have, and will continue to cause serious social and economic harm—with no environmental benefits,” reads a separate letter written by Richard Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“While we support effective, affordable, reasonable and direct controls on conventional environmental pollutants, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” Lindzen wrote in his letter, supplementing the petition.

“To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison,” Lindzen wrote.

Increasingly, scientists are finding the world has actually greened in the past few decades largely due to increased CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. CO2 fertilization is even greening some of the world’s most arid regions.

It’s not clear when Trump plans on withdrawing from the Paris agreement, but some sources say executive orders on the matter could be coming in the next few weeks.

Obama never brought the Paris agreement before the Senate for ratification, so Trump can treat it as an executive agreement, rather than a treaty, and pull out without congressional consent.

Pulling out of the UNFCCC may be trickier. The Senate ratified the UNFCCC in 1992, and there’s not a ton of legal precedent on what the procedure would be for withdrawing from such a treaty.

The petition from Lindzen and others comes just two months after a group of 800 scientists called on Trump to stay party to the Paris agreement. Those scientists claim pulling out of Paris would “undermine our best chance to avoid dangerous climate change.”

“The United States will lose its seat of influence at the international negotiating table, and will cede to China, the EU, and other countries its authority as a political, technological, and moral leader,” scientist wrote to Trump in Decembe

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/23/hundreds-of-scientists-urge-trump-to-pull-out-of-a-25-year-old-un-environmental-treaty/#ixzz4ZdaDaPVq

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/10/20/report-daily-caller-employees-were-embarrassed/183946

Last month, Daily Caller reporter Matthew Boyle published a story that was basically catnip for the anti-regulation crowd. Citing a court brief from the Environmental Protection Agency, Boyle wrote that the EPA was "asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats -- at a cost of $21 billion -- to attempt to implement" new climate change regulations. Boyle also took to Twitter to broadcast how EPA administrator "LISA JACKSON wants an ARMY OF 230k BUREAUCRATS."

Predictably, the story got picked up by Fox News, the office of Sen. James Inhofe, and the usual climate-change-denial suspects. Unfortunately for them, Boyle's story was 100% false. Boyle completely misread the court brief, which detailed how the EPA had avoided the scenario he described.

Boyle's misfire was widely ridiculed, but rather than admit fault and correct the error, the Daily Caller stuck to their guns. Executive editor David Martosko compounded the damage to the publication's credibility by issuing a snide comment to Politico and following that with a misleading editor's note on the Caller website.

Apparently outside observers weren't the only ones aghast at Daily Caller's complete lack of standards. According to a report this morning by FishbowlDC's Betsy Rothstein, "newsroom sources" at the Caller were dismayed by Martosko's defense of Boyle's "pointedly bogus" story and "feared their reputations would be sullied by the widespread negative attention":

Martosko has undoubtedly been a controversial figure from the start. Newsroom sources say his profound defense of reporter Matthew Boyle and his recent EPA piece troubled reporters who believed the story was false and feared their reputations would be sullied by the widespread negative attention the ordeal received in publications such as Politico and parts of the right-wing media. They couldn't conceive why their editor was defending a story many considered pointedly bogus.

I suppose it's slightly reassuring that at least some people at the Caller are capable of acknowledging facts and reality -- too bad their executive editor doesn't seem to be one of them.

UPDATE (11/18): Politico reports that the EPA debacle "has raised larger questions" about the "rigor" of Daily Caller's reporting:

Five months after Martosko's hiring, that spur-of-the-moment decision is looking less inspired. Martosko's background and approach to the job - particularly his decision to run, and then double down on, an erroneous report that the Environmental Protection Agency was proposing to hire 230,000 new employees - has embarrassed some Daily Caller staffers and contributed to their departures. And it has raised larger questions about whether Carlson is serious about his promise of a publication that may approach stories with a conservative point of view, but is dedicated to reporting them out with the same rigor as the New York Times.

The EPA story was published in September and ended up as a Drudge-linked and Fox-fueled viral hit cited by members of Congress.

[...]

[A]s the Daily Caller took round after round of fire in the left-leaning blogosphere over the story and Martosko defiantly stood by the story in a subsequent editor's note, some staffers cringed.

"People were just really embarrassed, and a lot of us were upset with how it was being handled," one former staffer told POLITICO.

DC is an aggregator? so i don't tend to report their stuff much; promoted to primary, as it has eclipsed drudge and breitbart?

eg judicial watch ~ HC

front page horowtiz republished arctic ice bs

calls itself Daily Caller NEWS FOUNDATION

and yet behold the commerce:

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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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ou may decide, for instance, what many people on the left and the right think—that I'm a sociopath and blah blah blah," says Charles C. Johnson. Peter Duke

Update, 5/26/2015: On Monday, Twitter permanently suspended Chuck Johnson’s Twitter account, as well as another account, @citizentrolling, he set up in response to the initial suspension. The suspension came in response to a tweet Johnson sent out asking for help “taking out” activist civil rights activist DeRay McKesson. (Johnson has said he was merely referring to his reporting and was not making a physical threat.) You can read his lawyer’s letter to Twitter demanding immediate reinstatement here. Read the original piece below:

Hours before I was due to hop in a rental car to drive to his home last week, Charles C. Johnson laid down a new ground rule: He would talk only if I promised not to mention he lived in Fresno. The internet was full of crazy people, after all.

We'd originally arranged to meet weeks before he launched a one-man crusade to out "Jackie," the woman at the heart of Rolling Stone's flawed investigation into campus rape at the University of Virginia. There were already many other examples of his antagonistic brand of online dirt-flinging to discuss. Johnson, a tireless self-promoter, seemed eager to speak—or spar—face-to-face; he even offered to let me stay at his place in California. Now he was asking for privacy.

It was an odd request, considering that the Washington Post had just reported where Johnson lived? and his location was posted on his Twitter page at the time. Not to mention that he had recently published the home addresses of two New York Times reporters? and he'd just spent two days gleefully airing personal information about a woman he'd never met. ("I'm giving Jackie until later tonight to tell the truth and then I'm going to start revealing everything about her past," he'd taunted her on Twitter.) Johnson was asking for a degree of respect that he relishes in denying others.

I didn't agree to Johnson's ground rule, but he agreed to see me anyway. After five hours in the car, I arrived at my motel to find a fresh set of emails. We could talk, but only if we didn't go anywhere near his house. On second thought, we couldn't meet in person at all—he'd traipsed off to LA for some meetings and was planning on staying for another day to do a TV interview. I'd already rearranged my flights after he had forgotten I was coming. Now I'd been snubbed for Larry King.

"I suppose there's some people who think it's ironic or whatever," Johnson said about his desire to conceal his whereabouts when we finally spoke by phone. "I'm just trying not to make it easy on people. There's a reason I own several guns."

Johnson had almost immediately called BS on Rolling Stone's investigation after it was published in late November. ("That UVA story about that gang rape never happened. We all know it. Why can't we say it?" he tweeted.) Like most of the story's skeptics, Johnson zeroed in on its central anecdote, in which a student named Jackie described a brutal gang rape at a fraternity. Johnson hammered the article's author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, searching for holes in her previous reporting and wondering whether she was friends with her former University of Pennsylvania classmate, journalistic fabricator Stephen Glass.? After RS conceded that it had found "discrepancies" in Erdely's reporting, Johnson offered a cash reward to anyone who could tell him who Jackie really was.

Two days later, Johnson published what he claimed was Jackie's full name at his website, GotNews.com. Then he published photos from her "rape obsessed" Pinterest page. He told me that he paid $200 for the information that led to her.

"It'd be very easy to write a 'Fuck Charles Johnson' piece, and in many respects, however you write the story, it doesn't hurt me either way."

It was a characteristic performance from the 26-year-old provocateur, who is impatient with journalistic ethics and possessed with an insatiable appetite for personal destruction. He is a subject of mockery on the left and the right due to his blustery self-promotion ("I'm making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who is naughty…"), baseless speculation (he thinks Barack Obama may be secretly gay), and regular face plants. Last week, he mistakenly claimed to have found a photo of Jackie at an anti-rape rally; it was someone else. Still, he defended his "batting average." (The woman in the photo says she will sue Johnson.) But he is adept at digging up dirt on public and private figures, and even when he's at his most egregious, he's hard to ignore.

His other recent antics have included suing for access to Mike Brown's juvenile records, making the unproven claim that the Ferguson police shooting victim had once been charged in a second-degree murder.? Citing police sources, he accused "street thug" Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died after being put in a chokehold by a New York City police officer, of domestic abuse. He incorrectly reported that New Jersey had an Ebola case; he then reported that a nurse quarantined in the state was a "left-wing Democrat." He hijacked the Mississippi Republican primary by offering $1,000 for photos of Sen. Thad Cochran's wife, who was in a nursing home. And he's trained his sights on other journalists, such as Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post, whom Johnson said was "obsessed with race" and had shown "overt friendliness in his reporting about Michael Brown." Johnson revealed that Lowery had once received a speeding ticket. "We are going to use auctions to set the price on the head of each journalist we take down," he tweeted.

Besides Twitter, Johnson's primary platform is GotNews, a crowd-funded startup he launched in early 2014 after denouncing the "stenography" of traditional insider media. "I don't do the 'being a bitch for the establishment' thing which a lot of Republicans do," he told me. "I go where the story leads." While he claims to be an "equal opportunity debunker," Johnson's stories often lead back to familiar targets—lefty activists, "lying women and thuggish black men," elitist journalists, and the mainstream conservatives he believes have screwed him over.

"It'd be very easy to write a 'Fuck Charles Johnson' piece, and in many respects, however you write the story, it doesn't hurt me either way," Johnson told me. "You may decide, for instance, what many people on the left and the right think—that I'm a sociopath and blah blah blah. Or, on the other hand, that I'm 'working on some new entity that's going to be controversial.' There's a degree to which, however you turn the lens, both things will be true."

The Rolling Stone-UVA debacle is the perfect scandal for Johnson, he explained on Twitter, because it combines his "three favorite types of frauds: college administrators, campus feminists, & fake journalists."? It was a clue to Johnson's evolution: His current role stems directly from his days as a campus gadfly, the conservative kid who was obsessed with tweaking political correctness and fixated on grudges and gossip.

The chip on his shoulder dates back to at least high school, when Johnson, the son of two teachers from a working-class part of Boston, attended prestigious Milton Academy on a scholarship. He gravitated toward politics, and when someone on a Young Republicans online forum posted a quote from former Education Secretary Bill Bennett positing that aborting black babies would drive down the crime rate, Johnson sprang to his friend's defense. "Despite being called a Nazi repeatedly, I defended free speech and said that given what I had read about the African subcontinent and the successes of black Americans (despite their high crimes [sic] rates), I found myself rather privileged to be living in America," he later wrote.

In the ensuing controversy, which drew the attention of the Boston Globe, minority students took a vow of silence, classes were canceled, and the school held a special assembly to screen the movie Crash. It had all the trappings of a Johnson controversy—an inflammatory comment involving race, his own sense of persecution, and an empty threat of legal action (he believed the school had not treated him fairly, but opted not to sue).

Johnson came into his own as a right-wing enfant terrible at Claremont McKenna College, a Southern California liberal-arts school, which he attended between 2007 and 2011. He wrote a blog called the Claremont Conservative, where he pilloried campus figures in increasingly hostile fashion, getting himself named "Most likely to take over the world" by the student newspaper and becoming infamous enough to inspire a Twitter account? dedicated to ending his "reign of terror."

"On Twitter, like, I have a certain kind of personality, a pugnaciousness, like an alter ego… like when Spider-Man puts on the costume."

I spoke with several former classmates who knew Johnson but were afraid to go on the record for fear of becoming his next target. Those concerns were probably not misplaced. Last week, Johnson posted an open letter on Facebook to his fellow Claremont alums, telling them to bug off: "Now that I have some measure of notoriety and success, I do not owe you phone calls or responses to your condescending 'concern' for me. Please know that most of these emails will be deleted or archived. Some will be openly mocked. Others may be retweeted or written about in future things."

In one typical dustup, the editor of the student newspaper, Ross Boomer, deleted a comment Johnson had left on a pro-gay-marriage article. In a subsequent comment, he said he'd been censored because Boomer was gay. At the time, Boomer had come out to his college friends but not to his family, and he believed that Johnson was trying to out him. Johnson told me the incident has been "exaggerated," and that he didn't realize Boomer's sexuality was private because he had been "like running around being gay on campus."

Another student newspaper editor named Michael Wilner got it even worse. Johnson published a series of posts rehashing Wilner's run-ins with the law over a couple of misdemeanors. (His record has since been expunged.) Even after they had both graduated, Johnson wouldn't let it go: In 2013, Johnson wrote an article for the Daily Caller? in which he reprised his claims against Wilner, who had since become the Washington, DC, bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post. In March, he tweeted that Wilner should be banned from Saudi Arabia due to his past. Wilner declined to comment for this article.

Johnson's biggest target at Claremont was Bassam Frangieh, a professor of Arabic best known for teaching poetry. Johnson accused him of supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, based on a trove of writings and petitions that Johnson had "translated by three different translators at considerable personal expense.?" He added that all of his allegations had been reviewed before publication by his mentor, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, for whom he had worked as a researcher when he was in high school. Asked about Johnson, Dershowitz responded in an email, "We disagree about many issues but I admire his principled opposition to all things politically correct and his determination to be heard and to make a difference." Frangieh, who is still at Claremont, declined to comment for this story.

The lesson from Johnson's college years was a valuable one: Vendettas go viral. His stories, which fit neatly into the conservative narrative that diversity and political correctness are concealing the truth about campus leftists run amok, got him noticed. He wrote about Frangieh for National Review? and Breitbart, and landed an internship at the Wall Street Journal on the strength of his Claremont Conservative scoops.

Johnson's post-graduation freelance pieces for Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Glenn Beck's the Blaze were united by a promise that somewhere out there existed some piece of dirt—a video, a thesis, a long-lost gay roommate—that, if revealed, would knock down the facade of lies created by the liberal establishment and its media allies. His biggest scoop was a report suggesting that then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker didn't actually live in Newark. Booker knocked the story down by releasing corroborating documents, and the Caller took a hit for not disclosing that Johnson had been a paid opposition researcher for a PAC supporting Booker's opponent in the New Jersey Senate race.

Johnson's investigations often hinged on race. He reported that Obama had told his law school students there is "institutional racism" in American society. He dug up an essay that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro wrote about his mother, Rosie, a Chicano activist. Johnson discovered that United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice had once argued at Stanford that white people should have to study black history. He uncovered that Mo Cowan, an African American lawyer who had been temporarily appointed to Sen. John Kerry's vacant Senate seat in 2013, had once helped organize "takeovers" in which black people would go to Boston bars and restaurants and…buy drinks.

Johnson boasts that he wants to do for conservatives what Romney's "47 percent" comments did for the left in 2012.

He also continued to take on other journalists. He penned a report for the Daily Caller on David Kirkpatrick, after the New York Times reporter published a lengthy investigation into the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. According to Johnson, Kirkpatrick had been busted for public nudity while he was a student at Princeton. That was true, but much of the rest of the piece, which detailed Kirkpatrick's collegiate hijinks and an appearance in Playgirl, was cribbed from a satirical Daily Princetonian story. Johnson told me that he has trouble recognizing satire because he is mildly autistic. Though he personally wasn't worked up about Benghazi, he was smart enough to know, as a contractor getting paid by the click, that the Caller's audience was.

"I was with Charles when he was right (which was usually) and with him when he was wrong (which was more frequently than is optimal)," writes Tim Cavanaugh, Johnson's former story editor at the Caller, in an email. Cavanaugh, now at National Review Online, does not hesitate to praise Johnson: "He is a constantly interesting journalist who is worth paying attention to more often than not. He was well worth the effort and cash the Caller put in for his work." In an email, Daily Caller founder and Editor in Chief Tucker Carlson confirmed that Johnson had a freelancing arrangement and was not a full-time employee, but otherwise declined to comment.

But Johnson increasingly felt like he was being constrained by his editors at the Caller and other sites, who encouraged him to tone down his tweets. In early 2014, after the Caller stopped publishing him, he devoted himself to working full time on GotNews. His first big project was in Mississippi, where Republican Sen. Thad Cochran was facing a tough primary against a tea party challenger in the summer. Johnson paid a black pastor to allege that Cochran had illegally relied on black Democratic voters in the Republican primary. The pastor later recanted; Cochran was reelected in November. Johnson's still pissed off about it; he told me he'd like GotNews to "curb-stomp" mainstream Republicans like former party chair Haley Barbour, with whom he'd clashed with in Mississippi.

Those attitudes and tactics have alienated Johnson from his conservative colleagues. A Washington Examiner story last Wednesday featured a half-dozen conservative writers venting about the damage Johnson is doing to right-wing journalism. The Daily Caller's Matt K. Lewis has argued that writing about Johnson would only encourage "more bloggers threatening to expose the identities of an alleged rape victims [sic]." Yet perhaps no outlet has done more to encourage Johnson's habits than the Caller, which recently published a rambling speculation about Lowery's racial identity that was inspired by the GotNews report on his speeding ticket.

It's a mistake to think that Charles Johnson came out of nowhere. He honed his style as a regular contributor for the Caller and Andrew Breitbart's website. His first book, an ode to President Calvin Coolidge, was blurbed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Fox News pundit Michelle Malkin, and torture-memo author and University of California-Berkeley law professor John Yoo. His stuff was featured on Fox News, and he spoke at the Heritage Foundation. At first, when he started scoring Drudge links and embarrassing Democrats, Johnson's escapades were very useful to a lot of people in conservative circles. Now no one knows how to make him go away.

In a series of phone conversations, Johnson was civil, trying, perhaps a little too hard, to frame his work as a nonpartisan quest to "disrupt" the powers that be. This was not the unhinged Johnson of Twitter, who had justified doxing Jackie by noting that a friend of his had called her a "lying bitch." He had a ready explanation for this—it's performance art. "On Twitter, like, I have a certain kind of personality, a pugnaciousness, like an alter ego," he said. "You know, like when Spider-Man puts on the costume, for instance, he's no longer a mild-mannered photographer. He has an attitude. I do that because I want my content to really go viral."

But even a put-on online persona can have real-life consequences for the people sucked into its maw. Twitter's policies state that users who "engage in targeted abuse or harassment" are subject to permanent suspension. Johnson's Rolling Stone-UVA tweets and the stories they link to have prompted a calls for his account to be suspended. It's happened three times already, if only temporarily. His most recent suspension came after GotNews published the home addresses of Campbell Robertson and Julie Bosman, New York Times reporters who had sinned in Johnson's eyes by publishing the name of the street on which Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson lived. After the GotNews story went up, both reporters received threats and had to leave their homes. (An Illinois woman named Julie Bosma also received threats.) Johnson's defense was that he didn't directly post the reporters' information on Twitter, but only linked to it on GotNews. The stunt prompted New York Times media columnist David Carr to dub Johnson a "troll on steroids."

"I'm just trying not to make it easy on people. There's a reason I own several guns."

While Johnson's rise was made possible by new and old conservative institutions, he now exists in the no-man's-land occupied by Gamergate trolls and fellow troublemaker James O'Keefe. That's fine with him. GotNews functions as a mash-up of Reddit and TaskRabbit, with Johnson offering his network of "independent researchers" cash bounties for solving "puzzles" he throws at them—like taking down Jackie. "You get all these hobbyists and amateurs and people out there who have a lot of time on their hands, many of whom are retired, or they're a mother, their kids are sleeping while they're researching, they're stay-at-home moms, or they're college students, or they're unemployed, or this is their moonlighting thing," he explained. "All those people are starting to find one another, and many of those people are starting to find one another through me." (He runs a side business, CCJ Strategies, which does oppo research for companies and campaigns. He hopes to integrate it with GotNews in the future.)

When we spoke, Johnson was thinking about how to turn his current momentum into something more sustainable. He was in Southern California for a series of meetings with potential investors. He sounded almost drunk on success, boasting that he wanted to do for conservatives what Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments had done for the left in 2012. "The day Jeb Bush announces for president is the day I publish his mistress's name," he promised on Twitter. (He considers Cruz the "least dirty" of the 2016 field.)

With his site's traffic spiking and the Rolling Stone story crumbling more every day, Johnson's head was spinning with possibilities. "I wanna do a Kickstarter for leaks," he told me. "Right now there's essentially no mechanism to financially reward whistleblowers…Basically there's no mechanism to reward those people for giving up the information. And I want to kind of fix that." It sounded almost altruistic. But Johnson's vision would essentially monetize the kinds of privacy invasion and harassment that mark the dark side of citizen muckraking and have made the internet such an unwelcoming place for many people—particularly young women.

And the kind of petty score-settling Johnson specializes in goes both ways. On Tuesday, Deadspin floated an old college rumor that Johnson had once defecated on a dormitory floor at Claremont. When Johnson tweeted on Friday that he's considering a run for Congress, the first reply suggested his campaign slogan could be "Outing rape victims and pooping on the floor since 2014. Vote for me." Of course, I had to ask him about the allegations. "For the record, I did not shit on the seventh floor, but I wish I did," he told me.

And sometime after he revealed Jackie's name, he began to worry about the deranged critics who had begun doxing his family and sending him threatening messages. For a moment, Charles Johnson had gotten a taste of what it's like to feel the wrath of Charles Johnson.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/sorry-daily-caller-sea-level-rise-is-real-and-miami-isnt-just-sinking-because-of-too-many-condos-8594225

Sorry, Daily Caller, Sea-Level Rise Is Real and Miami Isn't Just "Sinking" Because of Too Many Condos

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016 AT 10 A.M. BY JERRY IANNELLI

Sorry, Daily Caller, Sea-Level Rise Is Real and Miami Isn't Just "Sinking" Because of Too Many Condos

This past Sunday, the Daily Caller, the right-wing news site run by former CNN talking bow tie Tucker Carlson, did Miami a huge favor: The site fixed our long-term issues with sea-level-rise in a single article. Huzzah!

According to the Caller, man is not melting the polar ice caps, and Miami is not actually getting swallowed by the world's ever-rising seas. Instead, the entire South Florida landmass is apparently "sinking" into the ocean because we've actually just built way too much stuff and put too many people on top of the land.

Unfortunately, Miami Beach officials tell New Times the Daily Caller's "Miami Beach is sinking" conspiracy theory is completely inaccurate.

OK, so we need to address some very basic factual inaccuracies in the Caller piece upfront: The writer, Craig Boudreau from Alexandria, Virginia (who refers to himself online as a "musically illiterate musician"), begins by confusing the separate cities of Miami and Miami Beach in paragraph three.

In a cruel twist of irony, Boudreau opens the piece by criticizing a Grist article that — wait for it — accurately quoted from New Times' own reporting on sea-level rise. Boudreau claims Miami Beach Public Relations Manager Melissa Berthier — whom he inaccurately lists as working for the City of Miami and/or Miami-Dade County — told him the streets of Miami Beach flood only twice a year, during "king tides."

This is wrong, because (A) anyone who's ever lived in Miami Beach can tell you the streets flood more often than that, and (B) because we actually spoke to Berthier, who says, in no uncertain terms, that the Daily Caller misquoted her but refuses to correct the story.

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NEW YORK -– The Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, denied Friday that his news site paid Dominican lawyer Melanio Figueroa to find women who would lie about having sex with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), an allegation that had surfaced in a Washington Post article.

“It seems clear to me Figueroa is under pressure to change his story,” Carlson said in a statement provided to The Huffington Post. “What I know for certain is this claim is a lie. The Daily Caller never paid anyone, was never asked to pay anyone and of course never would pay anyone for this story.”

On Nov. 1, The Daily Caller reported the claims of two women from the Dominican Republic on video that Menendez had paid them for sex. But the unsubstantiated allegations against Menendez had initially been pushed more than six months earlier, beginning with an anonymous tipster contacting the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and later operatives approaching several news organizations.

HuffPost has reported that both The New York Post and New Jersey’s Star-Ledgerinvestigated the claims last summer but did not find enough information to warrant writing stories. CREW, which lacked the resources to adequately investigate the claims, reached out to ABC News, which then tried confirming them to no avail.

On the same day that The Daily Caller — a conservative site co-founded by Carlson in 2010 — interviewed two of the alleged prostitutes by Skype, ABC News reporters spoke to all three. HuffPost has reported that ABC News was approached about doing the interviews in mid-October, and ABC has described those arranging the interviews as Republican operatives. ABC News indicated that it was not convinced by the women’s accounts because “none of the women could produce identity cards with their names, and they all provided the same story almost word for word, as if they had been coached.”

The Daily Caller was supposed to interview a third woman that day, but said it could not because a laptop battery in the Dominican Republic died.

While ABC News didn’t trust the women’s accounts, The Daily Caller quickly completed and published a story. Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart News reporter who wrote the original Menendez piece while at The Daily Caller, began reaching out to the senator’s staff for comment around 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 31, the day of the interviews. The Drudge Report began teasing a supposed “scandal” that evening, with The Daily Caller publishing its Menendez story around 1:40 a.m. on Nov. 1.

Given that the prostitute allegations were never substantiated, many news organizations did not cover them and recent reporting only gives more reason to doubt their veracity.

On Monday, the Associated Press reported that “three women were paid to falsely claim in videotaped interviews that they had sex for money” with Menendez, according to a spokesman for the police conducting an investigation in the Dominican Republic. The AP wrote that authorities were seeking to interrogate Figueroa.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Figueroa said a foreign man identifying himself as “Carlos” had “offered him $5,000 to find and pay women” to make such claims against the senator, according to the district attorney for the La Romana region.

“The accusations made Thursday by Melanio Figueroa about The Daily Caller are categorically false,” The Daily Caller said in its own statement on Friday. “At no point did any money change hands between The Daily Caller and any sources or individuals connected with this investigation, nor did anyone named Carlos travel to the Dominican Republic on behalf of The Daily Caller. As recently as two weeks ago, Figueroa was on record with another news outlet as saying the women he represented were telling the truth about their initial allegations against Senator Mendendez [sic].”

ABC News reported Friday that Figueroa “has given contradictory public statements about the incident over the last several weeks,” while also providing more details about the name “Carlos” coming up in conjunction with the Oct. 31 interviews.

When asked about “Carlos” during the interviews, one of the women said, “He says he works for a newspaper or something like that.”

At the time, “Carlos” was described to ABC News by the lawyer Figueroa as an associate who was in charge of organizing the interviews via a Skype hook-up. There was no mention made of any connection between “Carlos” and The Daily Caller.

The Skype address used by ABC News to make contact in the Dominican Republic included the names Carlos and Martinez. A message sent by ABC News Thursday to the same Skype address seeking comment has not been returned.

A Republican operative who insisted on anonymity made the introduction between ABC News and Figueroa and “Carlos.”

The Daily Caller published its own story Friday on Figueroa, reporting that the lawyer “blamed four news outlet — CNN, The Daily Caller, Telemundo and Univision — for allegedly encouraging him to fabricate false accusations about Menendez.” According to The Daily Caller’s story, Univision reported Thursday night that Figueroa claimed he had been paid $5,000, which he used to find the three women.

The Daily Caller also included a statement from Univision noting that the Spanish-language network characterized “Figueroa’s claims as absolutely ridiculous, utterly false” and that the network has not had contact with the lawyer.

During an interview last month with HuffPost, prior to reports of the women being paid to make claims against Menendez, Carlson explained why The Daily Caller ran a story on the Menendez allegations and responded to criticism for doing so.

“We interviewed a couple of prostitutes on tape who said they, you know, knew Menendez and he was hiring hookers and having sex with them,” Carlson said. “That seemed like a story to me. I don’t know how you wouldn’t run that. And we were attacked for it. ... I actually don’t care that much, because I just assume that people are going to dismiss some of our reporting because they don’t like my politics. There’s nothing I can do about that, so I try not to pay attention.”

huffpo

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for allegedly stacking a scientific advisory panel on air pollution with researchers who had received more than $190 million in grants from the agency.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (EELI) is suing EPA on behalf of the Western States Trucking Association and Dr. James Enstrom, a retired University of California-Los Angeles epidemiologist who was blacklisted for challenging EPA claims about particulate matter.

“The EPA has stacked the panel, which is required by law to be independent and unbiased, with researchers who have received over $190 million in discretionary grants from the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, an attorney with EELI, in a statement.

“This clearly violates the law and makes a mockery of the notion of ‘independent’ scientific review,” he said....

5/16

http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/01/warren-buffett-tells-greenie-crusaders-to-buzz-off-at-berkshire-annual-meeting/

Warren Buffett and shareholders with Berkshire Hathaway overwhelmingly rejected a resolution Saturday asking the holding company to write reports on the risks so-called man-made global warming causes to insurance companies.

The rejection came despite a strong campaign push on behalf of the resolution from NASA climate scientist James Hansen, Illinois State University professor and insurance expert Jim Jones, and activists from environmentalist group Nebraskans for Peace.

Tens of thousands of environmentalists associated with Nebraskans for Peace, as well as many others, spent their Saturday listening to the hours-long annual meeting in Omaha, which was composed mostly of discussions between Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger over business minutia.

Buffett eventually got down to brass tacks on the climate change report, telling activists at the meeting he is standing firm on his decision to nix the climate change report resolution. He said he believes global warming is an important issue but ultimately doesn’t think it poses a threat to Berkshire’s insurance businesses....

Buffett also defended NV Energy, an energy group he founded that won a battle over Elon Musk’s SolarCity following Nevada’s decision to introduce sharp cutbacks to its net metering program in December.

If the billionaire’s decision to nix the climate resolution was a poke in the collective eye of all climate justice warriors, then surely remarks defending earlier decision to reduce solar panel subsidies will be seen as an all out assault on the environment.

Net metering policies force utility companies in Nevada, which Berkshire Hathaway owns, to purchase electricity produced by rooftop solar panels at triple retail rates, which makes it difficult for Nevada’s utility company to the cover the costs of a fixed electrical grid.

Buffett, for his part, said at the annual meeting that people with rooftop solar power systems were allowed to sell power to the utility at exaggerated rates, which, he said, had the effect of forcing other ratepayers to subsidize the niche group of people leasing solar panels.

In a similar move, Berkshire Hathaway-owned PacifiCorp, an Oregon electrical utility company, managed to notch out a victory when it successfully lobbied to change the state’s net metering policies. The company is now able to ratchet down the amount of green electricity it is required to purchase from rooftop solar companies.

Ted Nugent: Wildlife Populations “Actually Increase” Because Of Energy Development. In a column for The Daily Caller, National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent falsely claimed that wildlife populations “actually increase and expand” in areas where pipelines, oil drilling, fracking, coal mining, and other forms of energy production occur. The next day, Nugent posted to Facebook that he wanted to drive “over the rotting corpses” of “algore [sic] & all the pathetic greenies.”

Climate scientists refuse to debate global warming ‘skeptics’ in the media

Posted By Michael Bastasch On 12:54 AM 03/24/2014 In | No Comments

Climate scientists and environmentalists are venting their frustrations debating those who are skeptical of man-made global warming — and some have even gone so far as to refuse debating skeptics.

Dan Weiss, the director of climate strategy at the liberal Center for American Progress, refused to appear on Fox Business to debate climate skeptic Marc Morano last week. Morano runs the blog Climate Depot, where he reports on environment and climate news. (RELATED: ‘Suffocating pressure’: Former Center for American Progress describes White House censorship)

Weiss was set to debate Morano on the show “The Independents” but “refused to debate directly with Morano, and chided [the show] for airing his views,” according to the Fox Business show.

“In what is part of a growing trend, yet another global warming activist ducked a TV debate,” Morano told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Weiss and other activists claim the debate is so settled that granting a skeptic ‘equal time’ does some type of disservice to ‘science.’ Climate activists want to impose everything from carbon taxes, UN treaties, cap-and-trade, EPA regulations, light bulb restrictions, automobile regulations, even our bedtimes — yet they will not debate the basis for these actions.” (RELATED: Scientists: Government agencies use the peer review process to squash dissent)

“I have had many debate cancellations previously,” Morano added. “In 2010, I was set to debate Hollywood producer James Cameron after weeks of negotiations, only to have the debate cancelled at the last moment when my plane landed in Colorado for the debate.”

Weiss isn’t the only proponent of man-made global warming that has refused to debate a climate skeptic. Last year, Fox Business host John Stossel asked about a dozen climate scientists to debate skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist who now teaches at the University of Alabama.

Stossel also asked the environmental group the Union of Concerned Scientists if they would debate Spencer on TV. Stossel said UCS replied that debating Spencer “would be doing the public a disservice because it would give [his] extreme ideas credibility.” NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies climate scientist Gavin Schmidt did go on that episode but only after Spencer was no longer on the set.

As the debate surrounding global warming has intensified this past year, some news outlets have opted not to provide a platform for climate skeptics. Most recently, the BBC Scotland has barred debates between climate scientists and skeptics from being aired.

The Daily Mail reports: “A BBC executive in charge of editorial standards has ordered programme editors not to broadcast debates between climate scientists and global warming sceptics.”

Alasdair MacLeod, who is head of editorial standards and compliance for BBC Scotland, sent an email in February to senior producers and editors, saying that “we should not run debates / discussions directly between scientists and sceptics.”

Last year, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would not be publishing letters to the editor that were critical of the theory of man-made global warming because the evidence provided by scientists suggests that human activity is warming the planet.

“I’m no expert when it comes to our planet’s complex climate processes or any scientific field,” wrote Paul Thornton, the Times’ letter editor. “Consequently, when deciding which letters should run among hundreds on such weighty matters as climate change, I must rely on the experts — in other words, those scientists with advanced degrees who undertake tedious research and rigorous peer review.”

Follow Michael on Twitter and Facebook

The Daily Caller abandoned an attempt to accuse the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer of plagiarism, including in her comprehensive expose of Koch Industries. Tucker Carlson, who runs the Daily Caller, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, which has received over $5.5 million from Koch foundations since 1997. Charles Koch co-founded Cato, and Cato’s directors include David Koch and Kevin Gentry of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

raised 3 mil, cpac?

The Daily Caller

Main article: The Daily Caller

On January 11, 2010, Carlson and former Vice President Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel launched a political news website titled The Daily Caller. Carlson serves as editor-in-chief, and occasionally writes opinion pieces with Patel.[19] Other high-profile bloggers include Jim Treacher (DC Trawler) and Mickey Kaus (Kausfiles.)

The Daily Caller is in the White House rotating press pool.[20] Its reporters have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News Channel, CNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS, and radio stations across the country. Reporters and columnists for The Daily Caller include Matt Lewis, Mickey Kaus, Alex Pappas, Jamie Weinstein, Will Rahn, Caroline May, Nicholas Ballasy, Vince Coglianese, Matt Labash, Jeff Poor, Alexis Levinson and Jim Treacher.[21]

In an interview with The Politico, Carlson said that The Daily Caller will not be tied to ideology but rather will be "breaking stories of importance". In a Washington Post article, Carlson added "We're not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone."

Neil Patel is an American political advisor and publisher. He is the co-founder of The Daily Caller.

Education

He graduated from Worcester Academy and received his B.A. from Trinity College. At Trinity College, Patel was roommates with Tucker Carlson.[1] Patel holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was an associate editor of the Journal of Law and Policy in International Business.[2]

Career

Patel served as Scooter Libby's deputy before becoming chief policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney.[3] In his role as an advisor to Cheney, Patel represented the Vice President at White House economic and domestic policy meetings, interacted with the business community on behalf of the Vice President, and managed the Vice President’s policy staff.[4]

Patel was nominated by the Bush White House to run the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, but he was not confirmed.[1]

After leaving the vice president's office, Patel co-founded The Daily Caller, a web based news company focusing on politics, policy, and current events. Patel is also co-founder and is managing director of Bluebird Asset Management, a hedge fund focused on mortgage backed securities[2]

References

^ a b Kurtz, Howard (2010-01-11). "Media Notes: A look at Tucker Carlson's political Web site, the Daily Caller". Washington Post. Retrieved October 4, 2012.

^ a b "Neil S. Patel Joins AFP as Senior Advisor". The Americans Futures Project. Retrieved 22 June 2011.

^ Schmitt, Eric (2005-10-30). "Indicted aide had been 'Cheney's Dick Cheney'". New York Times. Retrieved October 4, 2012.

^ "Famous 5: Neil Patel". famousdc. Retrieved 22 June 2011.

Climate change hurts women. Wall Street Journal sneers.

By John Upton

Apparently the idea of girls being sold off into early marriage and women being pushed into prostitution is fucking hilarious.

Or so thinks the right-wing media machine, confronted this week with warnings about the negative ways climate change could affect women around the world.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and 11 other House Democrats, both men and women, introduced a resolution that aims to raise awareness about the vulnerability of women and girls to global warming.

From the resolution [PDF], via The Hill:

Whereas climate change exacerbates issues of scarcity and lack of accessibility to primary natural resources, forest resources, and arable land for food production, thereby contributing to increased conflict and instability, as well as the workload and stresses on women farmers, who are estimated to produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in most developing countries; …

Whereas food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health; …

The resolution lists many other threats and goes on to encourage the president to “integrate a gender approach in all policies and programs in the United States that are globally related to climate change” and to “ensure that those policies and programs support women globally to prepare for, build resilience for, and adapt to climate change.”

Heavy stuff, right? And it’s heavy stuff that’s not often talked about. The resolution got some people in politics and the media to consider these issues for the first time.

But conservative commentators decided against spending too much time thinking about it. They jumped right to snickering about the sex references. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the resolution in a mocking piece with the headline, “Baby, It’s Warm Outside,” and the subhed, “The climate is changing. Lock up your daughters.” The first paragraph:

Is “climate change” corrupting the morals of women around the world? That’s a question nobody is asking if ever there was one, yet a dozen left-wing congressmen, led by Rep. Barbara Lee of California, are answering in the affirmative.

The Daily Caller followed right up with “Democrats: Global warming means more hookers.”

Needless to say, Lee has been unimpressed by some of the coverage, particularly by the near singular focus on sex work. She told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s unfortunate that this resolution has been misrepresented as to its goals.”

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

http://grist.org/news/climate-change-hurts-women-wall-street-journal-sneers/

Foster Friess -- Billionaire Republican investor who spent $3 million to help launch the Daily Caller.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/drudge-and-tucker-carlson-arent-only-clowns-circus-8-ridiculous-right-wing

breitbart carlson

The Daily Caller

A conservative/Republican news spin organization founded by conservative reporter Tucker Carlson and former Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel.[1] The Daily Caller's announced objective is to be a "content" response tool to articles on The Huffington Post.

Contents

[hide]

1 Foundation

2 Employees

3 Writers

4 Outlets

5 External

Foundation

Tucker announced a loose idea for it at the 2009 CPAC. He and Patel than officially announced it at a Heritage Foundation gathering in May 2009, after which $3 million in capital from unnamed outside sources was invested.

Employees

It's unclear besides an editorial and accounting staff whether they actually employ any journalists other than Carlson, who's career has been as a talking head as opposed to a reporter. According to Carlson, they intend to use and adapt content from bloggers, possibly under freelance contracts. Per a 2010 article in The Washington Independent, it's reporters are from the conservative Washington Times (Jon Ward) and Government Executive (Gautham Nagesh) along with a humor opinion writer Jim Treacher (real name Sean Medlock).

Writers

Those who have written for it include Andrew Breitbart and Newt Gingrich.

Outlets

They use Youtube to post video/audio.

External

The Daily Caller

Tucker Carlson

Neil Patel

LOVE TRIANGLE: The Daily Caller Inserts Itself Into NRA-Gun Industry Symbiosis

Blog ››› August TIMOTHY JOHNSON

For years a mutually advantageous relationship has existed between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and firearm manufacturers. The gun industry donates huge chunks of cash -- as much as $38.9 million from 2005 to 2011 -- to the NRA, and the gun rights organization in turn engages in hysterical fearmongering to promote gun sales. One hand washes the other. And now the Daily Caller is joining the action by offering its readers discounted NRA memberships.

It was only a matter of time before the gun-loving Daily Caller recognized the benefit of shilling for the gun industry and its unofficial PR wing, the NRA. In recent months the online publication has been heavily promoting the NRA while offering its readers perks in the form of a weekly handgun giveaway.

But as material published this week demonstrates, increasingly unabashed promotion of the NRA and FMK Firearms calls the Daily Caller's credibility as a news source further into question.

On Wednesday Mike Piccione, editor of the Daily Caller's Guns and Gear section -- which features firearms advertisements, NRA press releases, and other pieces of dubious gun "reporting" -- announced that Daily Caller readers were eligible to purchase discounted NRA memberships. Piccione offered a number of childish reasons for signing up, including, "Joining the NRA is the equivalent of giving [New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg the finger."

The ethical implications of a journalism outlet directly helping to fill the coffers of special interest group are certainly weighty. How can one trust the Daily Caller's reporting on the NRA -- which gets itself into the headlines all the time -- when it accepts advertising money from the group and urges its readers to purchase memberships?

The Daily Caller is clearly unconcerned. Nor does it see any problems in publishing columns by Jim Pontillo, who donates the guns for the weekly giveaway from his company FMK Firearms. Pontillo was probably happy for the exposure considering that in previous columns for other online outlets he offered casual racism aimed at the President and defended the Confederacy.

In a Daily Caller column published on Tuesday, Pontillo took umbrage with comments that President Obama made about small business owners (which were taken out of context by Fox News and other right-wing outlets). In his column, Pontillo made clear his feelings about people receiving government assistance:

How much of my success can I attribute to my hard work? Do I owe thanks to the welfare recipients you enrich at my expense? While they sit in government-subsidized housing, talking on their iPhones, viewing Netflix movies on their plasma TVs and eating dinners purchased with government food stamps, I sweat 80 to 100 hours a week trying to make my small business succeed.

Such uninhibited bashing of the needy might (or at least should) embarrass a reputable publication. Other publications might think to avoid mainstreaming a racist crackpot. But the Daily Caller wants to keep giving away guns, so they're sticking with Pontillo for the time being.

Marking the start of July's month-long United Nations conference to negotiate a small arms treaty, National Rifle Association top lobbyist Chris Cox authored an op-ed for The Daily Caller making the hysterical -- and baseless -- claim that the treaty could "seriously restrict your freedom to own, purchase and carry a firearm." In fact the proposed treaty seeks to regulate the international trade of firearms - curtailing the illicit arms trade that keeps weapons flowing to human rights abusers -- and will not change ownership rules domestically.

Cox also made the reality-defying argument, citing conditions in the Sudan, that a treaty to restrict illegal small arms proliferation would harm citizens in countries ruled by human rights abusers. To the contrary, the United Nations has noted that "[m]ore human rights abuses are committed with small arms than with any other weapon."

But according to Cox's theory "the world's socialist, tyrannical and dictatorial regimes" will use the treaty to "implement international gun registration requirements, bans on commonly owned firearms, tracking and registration of ammunition purchases, and create a new U.N. gun control bureaucracy" thus fulfilling "President Barack Obama's vision for America."

This laughable conspiracy has no place in reality. Top officials from the United Nations, the United States, and other high profile supporters have repeatedly and clearly said that the treaty does not aim to restrict anyone's "freedom to own" a gun. Indeed, the U.N. General Assembly's resolution on the treaty makes clear that countries will "exclusively" maintain the right within their borders to "regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through national constitutional protections on private ownerships."

The chair of the Preparatory Committee for the UN Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, Ambassador Roberto García Moritán of Argentina, has stated that the definitive goal of the small arms treaty "is to try to have common standards to be applied by all countries when they export or import weapons."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also said that treaty is "opportunity to promote the same high standards for the entire international community that the United States and other responsible arms exporters already have in place to ensure that weaponry is transferred for legitimate purposes."

A senior policy advisor to the humanitarian organization Oxfam America has also pushed back against claims that the treaty has the nefarious purpose of interfering with domestic law:

same random day: 8/3/12

http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/senior-officials-ignored-solyndra-warning/ they link to Wa Post, to be fair, but distort http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/white-house-budget-analysts-thought-saving-solyndra-could-be-expensive-move/2012/08/01/gJQAf2QGQX_print.html

http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/inhofe-navy-publicity-stunt-squandered-millions-put-sailors-lives-at-risk/ inhofe

p michaels spins muller 180 http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/the-best-global-warming-science-goes-lukewarm/

jim huffman lewis and clark http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/coal-dust-is-the-new-spotted-owl/ also As a bike partisan myself, I think it’s great that my congressman likes to ride his bike and wants to make riding bikes safer and more convenient. But even after teaching constitutional law for 38 years I can’t pinpoint Congress’ constitutional authority to promote bicycle transportation.

~ food stamps http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/03/gao-460-million-food-stamp-benefits-went-to-households-ineligible-under-federal-limits/

jennifer anniston braless

Coulter calls John Kerry a 'gigolo': Where were 10 years of his wife's tax returns?

Michelle Joann Fields (born January 10, 1988)[1] is an American political journalist. Upon graduating from Pepperdine University in 2011, she gained attention after having a confrontation with actor Matt Damon over teacher tenure reform.[2] After the Damon altercation, Fields was hired as a reporter by Tucker Carlson at The Daily Caller.

Contents

1 Early life

2 Journalism career

3 References

4 External links

Early life

Fields was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Fernando Valley.[3] She is Honduran American and is the daughter of television and film writer Greg Fields.[3]

She studied political science at Pepperdine University and served as the president of the Pepperdine chapter of Students For Liberty.[4]

Journalism career

Fields films and edits her videos in a citizen journalism style. She credits the internet for launching her career and believes that the popularity of her videos is due to her style of reporting. In an interview with C-SPAN in 2011 she said that the use of the internet has empowered people so much that now "one voice can be just as powerful as the New York Times."[3]

On December 25, 2011, Fields was interviewed for one-hour by Brian Lamb on the C-SPAN Sunday evening Q&A show about her reporting style.[3] Fields has appeared on Fox News and Fox Business programs including Hannity, The O'Reilly Factor, Your World with Neil Cavuto, America's Newsroom, Fox and Friends, America Live with Megyn Kelly, Stossel, and Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld.[citation needed]

References

^ "California Birth Index, 2012".

^ "Matt Damon's clash with libertarian journalist Michelle Fields on education is a viral hit". Washington Post. 2011-08-03. Retrieved 2012-02-17.

^ a b c d "Q&A With Michelle Fields". C-SPAN. 2011-11-30. Retrieved 2012-02-17.

^ "2011 SFL Awards Finalists". Students For Liberty. Retrieved 2012-06-20.

External links

C-SPAN Q&A interview with Fields, December 25, 20

Categories:

Living people

American journalists

American libertarians

wiki

Students For Liberty (SFL) is an American libertarian non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to provide a unified, student-driven forum of support for students and student organizations dedicated to liberty."[6] Formed after a meeting where students exchanged ideas from their own experiences with liberty advocating student groups, SFL quickly expanded with new programs and a growing network of affiliated student groups.[3][7][8][9] Gene Healy with the Cato Institute includes the organization in the limited-government movement.[10]

The organization hosts an annual international conference as well as various regional conferences.[7][8] The organization has experienced growth since its inception in 2008.[8][9] The 2012 network includes 699 student organizations around the world.[8][11] SFL's expansion is encouraged and supported by current students involved in the Campus Coordinators program.[12]

SFL seeks to raise awareness of the benefits of liberty and civil society with programs that focus on student rights events, lectures, literature, an academic journal for student work, and an alumni network.[9][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][1][25][26][27]

Contents

1 History

1.1 Origin

1.2 In the news

2 Programs

2.1 Conferences

2.2 Free Books Project

2.3 Journal of Liberty and Society

2.4 Student Rights Week

2.5 E-Leadership Series

2.6 Campus Coordinator Program

2.7 Alumni For Liberty

3 Organizational structure

3.1 Europe

4 Finance

5 See also

6 References

7 External links

History

Origin

Students participating in an Institute for Humane Studies Koch Summer Fellowship got together on July 24, 2007 to discuss successes and challenges faced by libertarian student organizations. In 2008, Alexander McCobin and Sloane Frost decided to organize a conference for 40 students who were involved in libertarian student organizations.[7] As more students contacted the planners to participate, more students joined the planning. The first Students for Liberty conference was held at Columbia University from February 22 to 24, 2008, with 100 students participants. The perceived success of the conference encouraged the planners to form Students For Liberty to provide continuing support to student groups.[7][28][29]

In the news

SFL co-founder and executive director Alexander McCobin opened his remarks on the February 19, 2010 panel “2 Minute Activist: Saving Freedom Across America” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) by thanking the American Conservative Union for welcoming GOProud as a co-sponsor of the event. Ryan Sorba, California Young Americans for Freedom's chairman and author of The "Born Gay" Hoax,[30] followed with harsh words for McCobin, SFL, Young Americans for Liberty’s Jeff Frazee, and the American Conservative Union.[10][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]

In 2010, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine wrote an article accusing Koch funded charities, including SFL, of inventing the public outcry over security theater. The article addresses the Transportation Security Administration's purchase and deployment of scanners that cost far more than metal detectors. Ames and Levine argue that patriotism is more important than leaked revealing images and concerns of doctors over possible increased risk of cancer. Critics argue that enhanced pat down searches are used to forcefully encourage travelers to submit to the scanners to justify the purchase when security experts consider them ineffective.[38][39][40]

Programs

Conferences

SFL hosts an annual international conference. The inaugural international conference brought 100 students from 42 schools in three countries to New York City. The second annual international conference brought 153 students from 13 countries to George Washington University.[41] The third annual international conference took place February 13 and 14 at American University in Washington, DC and had more than 300 students in attendance. The fourth annual international conference, covered by ReasonTV, returned to George Washington University on Friday, February 18 and continued until Sunday, February 20, 2011, this time with 500 students participating.[42][43][44] This international conference included a taping of Stossel, which aired March 31, in which John Stossel and Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz spoke to students about the ideas of liberty.[45]

During the fall semester, SFL hosts regional conferences on campuses across the country. In 2008, SFL ran three regional conferences at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. In 2009, SFL held seven regional conferences. They were hosted by libertarian student groups at Drexel University, Harvard University, Arizona State University, University of Texas at Austin, Wake Forest University, University of Chicago, and Columbia University.[2] In 2010, SFL held nine regional conferences at the same schools (except Wake Forest) as the 2009 conferences (listed above), while adding three new schools: Pepperdine University, Kennesaw State University and University of California at Berkeley.[3][8] On November 18 to 20, 2011, SFL hosted the first European conference at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium with over 200 students from 25 different countries attending.[2][11]

Free Books Project

SFL, in association with the Foundation for Economic Education, provides libertarian student groups with select free books. Books available have included works by Frederic Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises.[1]

Journal of Liberty and Society

SFL publishes an annual academic peer-reviewed journal.[25][26] The Prometheus Institute sponsors awards for the top paper and two honorable mentions based on clarity of thought, originality, intellectual skill, and connection of liberty to important social or theoretical issues as well as offers to all award recipients to join the Prometheus Institute staff for a semester.[25][26]

Student Rights Week

To assist student groups in advocating for civil liberties, SFL distributes pocket Constitutions from Cato, copies of the Guide to Free Speech on Campus from the FIRE, and the movies 10 Rules for Dealing with Police, Busted: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters, and Indoctrinate U.[13][14] One Students Right Week project is the establishment of temporary “free speech walls” where community members are encouraged to express their opinions by writing comments that will be left in public for several days.[46][47][48][49][50][51][52]

E-Leadership Series

Since 2009, SFL hosted an E-Leadership Series of seminars that utilizes web conferencing.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] Held weekly during the academic year, the webinars tend to focus on career advice, economics, history, law, leadership, philosophy, public policy, public speaking, and statistics. Past guest speakers include Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University, Bob Ewing of the Institute for Justice, John Hasnas of Georgetown University, Larry Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education, Jim Lark of the University of Virginia, Radley Balko of The Huffington Post, David Friedman of Santa Clara University, LGBTQ activist Zach Wahls, and Tyler Cowen, Bryan Kaplan, and Peter Boettke, and Chris Coyne of George Mason University.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]

Campus Coordinator Program

Campus Coordinators work with campus group leaders within a designated regional area to form and support student groups and to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of programs.[12] The 2010–2011 school year saw the inaugural year of the program.[12] Training is provided by the full time staff as well as executive board members. The 2011–2012 class of coordinators included 60 students from the United States, Canada and Venezuela.[12]

Alumni For Liberty

Alumni For Liberty is a network of working professionals interested in supporting students and student organizations dedicated to libertarianism.[8][53] The program is open to all adults interested in supporting the student movement, whether or not they were a member of a liberty oriented student group.[8][27] The project provides ways to remain involved in supporting the student movement for liberty with monthly updates describing opportunities such as networking events, job openings, training sessions, leadership dinners, options for financial support of alma mater student groups, speaking to student groups, and mentoring of students interested in related careers.[53]

Organizational structure

SFL is a 501(c)(3) organization that supports student groups advocating libertarianism. SFL is run by five full time professionals at its headquarters in Washington, DC.[1] Direction of the organization comes from the executive director, the board of directors, and the executive board (entirely composed of current students). Alexander McCobin serves as executive director. McCobin, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, is currently a graduate student in Georgetown University's Department of Philosophy.[54] In 2009, McCobin was sued by Perspectives Debate Inc., a nonprofit organization he had founded while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, for allegedly breaching his fiduciary duty by misappropriating funds and allegedly withdrawing more than $37,000 from the organization's bank account.[55][56]

Europe

In 2011, SFL established a board to expand their programs into Europe.[57] On November 18–20, 2011 SFL hosted the first European conference at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium.[2]

Finance

Incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization completely funded from private donations from individuals, foundations, and participation fees, SFL does not solicit or accept any government contributions.[58][59]

Matt Lewis is a writer, commentator and blogger, currently with The Daily Caller.

Contents

1 Background and education

2 Career

3 Media appearances

4 See also

5 References

6 External links

Background and education

Lewis was raised in Myersville, Maryland. He is a graduate of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Lewis has also lived in North Dakota and is currently based in Alexandria, Virginia.[1] He has a pet pug named 'Uncle Rico' after a character in the film Napoleon Dynamite.[2]

Career

As a writer, Lewis has contributed to Townhall.com,[3][4] AOL's PoliticsDaily.com,[5] Human Events and The Daily Caller.[6] In his early career, Lewis served as director of grassroots for the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit conservative training organization,[7] for which he organized and led workshops around the United States.[8]

In March 2007, Lewis was one of two bloggers invited on John McCain's campaign tour bus on a visit to New Hampshire for an interview with the candidate.[9] That September, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich acknowledged in an interview with Lewis that he was considering a presidential run.[10] Lewis is the editor of The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words, published in 2011.[11]

Lewis was selected as a "Rising Star of Politics" by Politics Magazine in 2002[12] and by the American Conservative Union as "Blogger of the Year" in 2012.[13]

Media appearances

Lewis is a featured commentator on cable news channels and radio, and is a podcaster. Since February 2009, he has represented the conservative viewpoint on Bloggingheads.tv's weekly discussion of U.S. politics, opposite Bill Sher.[1]