Accuracy in Media

Glenn Beck has produced a documentary on the “cancer” of “progressivism.” It would behoove him to take a look at libertarianism. The latter is a disease that Beck himself featured on April 15, when analysts from the libertarian Cato Institute were on his show to argue for drastic cuts to the U.S. defense budget, acceptance of a nuclear-armed Iran, and an American military withdrawal from the rest of the world. America’s allies, especially Israel, would just have to fend for themselves. This view mirrors the Obama policy.

Beck is not the only one attracted to and subsequently infected by libertarianism. So is the one-time “conservative” Hot Air blog, which has been promoting homosexuality and dope smoking.

Libertarianism has some appeal, based mainly on its anti-government attitude on economic issues. In general, however, libertarianism is known for an isolationist view in foreign policy, which benefits America’s enemies and adversaries. But the worst aspects of libertarianism are evident in social policy. Here, libertarianism is compatible with the “progressivism” that people like Glenn Beck rightly abhor.

Left & Right

The seeds of this strange collaboration of interests were planted decades ago, when the pro-Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) held a seminar under the title of “Left and Right,” featuring Marcus Raskin of IPS and Karl Hess, then an IPS fellow. The speakers at this 1969 event included economist Murray Rothbard and Jeff Liebling, the latter identified as “former Youth for Goldwater” and “SDS member.” Hess, a former Barry Goldwater speechwriter who died in 1994, traveled easily between left and right.

A September 1970 IPS seminar on “U.S. Strategy in Asia” was organized by Earl C. Ravenal, then an IPS Associate Fellow, who would later join the Cato Institute as a distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy studies. The proceedings of the event reveal the participation of Morton Halperin, then with the liberal Brookings Institution and now a top employee of George Soros.

The left-right collaboration is most apparent in the field of “drug policy reform,” as they call it.

On April 19, on the eve of national Pot Smokers Day, when marijuana activists smoked a joint in public, Hot Air posted a video from Reason TV calling for legalization of the drug. The video was introduced by Ed Morrissey, who said that “marijuana intake is a personal decision in the same sense as alcohol” and proclaimed that the drug was safer than alcohol.

The Reason TV clip was narrated by Reason magazine’s editor-in-chief, Nick Gillespie, who is quoted in a bio on his own website as saying that he believes that drugs from marijuana to heroin should not only be legalized, but that using them occasionally is just fine. It also says he is comfortable with gay marriage.

When the blog was purchased from the well-known and respected author and columnist Michelle Malkin, the new owners at Salem Communications, a Christian firm, said that the site would be part of “the battle for conservative values.”

But it hasn’t turned out that way. First, Hot Air attacked Ryan Sorba for speaking on behalf of traditional values at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and against the inclusion of a homosexual rights group in the event. Then, Morrissey was quoted as saying that Republicans should “get over their issues with homosexuality.” Taking note of this and other posts on the site, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said that Hot Air had “suddenly become an advocate for all things gay” and asked, “What in the world is up with that?”

The answer is libertarianism, which was strongly in evidence at CPAC and has been personified by such figures as Andrew Napolitano and John Stossel of the Fox News Channel, who have conservative views on most economic matters but promote libertarianism on such matters as legalizing dangerous drugs. Only “culture warrior” Bill O’Reilly takes the old-fashioned view that illegal drugs are bad for you and should stay illegal, but he doesn’t talk about the issue as much as he should.

Stossel Stumbles

Back in 2002, when he was with ABC News, Stossel did a one-hour program raising the white flag in the war on drugs and urging the legalization of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and LSD. He has continued this advocacy journalism on Fox News. His rationale has been that we can’t eliminate the use of illegal drugs and that it’s better to legalize and somehow “control” these substances.

Stosssel’s alternative to the drug war was the Netherlands, where heroin addicts shoot up in churches and dopers buy marijuana in coffee shops. But Stossel himself seemed shocked by heroin addicts shooting up in a church. He interviewed a junkie who said she gets her fix and goes to work. The Netherland is now starting to pull back from its legalization experiment because the situation has gotten out of hand.

The war on drugs has been a struggle because of the open borders policy of both major political parties. That has permitted drug traffickers, in addition to millions of illegal aliens, to enter the U.S. and even grow drugs like marijuana on public lands in California. But the war on drugs has been somewhat successful, as demonstrated by the “Just Say No” campaign of former First Lady Nancy Reagan. At the time we wrote our critique of Stossel’s ABC News program, illegal drug use among young people had been on the decline for many years.   However, the latest figures from the “Monitoring the Future” study at the end of 2009 show marijuana use increasing – a development that experts attribute to the growing acceptance of marijuana use for “medicinal purposes” and the perception, therefore, that the drug appears less dangerous. Stossel has bought into the “medical marijuana” scam, as has his colleague, “The Judge” Andrew Napolitano.

In the U.S. military, however, the war on drugs has been almost a complete success. In 1980 it was estimated that 28 percent of the force used drugs. That came down to less than 3 percent because of a zero tolerance drug policy that utilized drug prevention, education and random drug testing. There is no reason why these policies cannot be pursued in the civilian sector.

But will Fox News Channel, with its growing stable of libertarian commentators, including Tucker Carlson, also affiliated with Cato, start campaigning for passage of the California initiative on the November ballot that would legalize marijuana statewide? Beck himself is already on record in favor of legalizing dope. “Look, I’m a libertarian,” Beck declared on his February 25, 2009, show. “You want to legalize marijuana; you want to legalize drugs–that’s fine.”

Hot Air Smells

For its part, Hot Air is providing fresh evidence that being “libertarian” provides cover for doing such things as smoking dope and having gay sex and making common cause with the “progressive” left. This presents a dilemma for its new Christian owners.

In order to put some sanity back into the discussion about illegal drugs, however, the Save Our Society From Drugs organization issued a statement noting that, “Pardon the pun, but it’s high time we take back the day [national Pot Smokers Day, April 20^th] and put an end to their misguided attempts to glamorize a drug that, contrary to their claims is a harmful addictive substance. Recent studies have linked marijuana use to birth defects, respiratory system damage, cancer, mental illness, violence, infertility, and immune system damage. The latest information from the U.S. Treatment Episode Data Set reports that 16.1% of drug treatment admissions were for marijuana as the primary drug of abuse, compared to 6% in 1992.”

The group went on, “Enabled by a few extremely wealthy individuals, the pro-drug lobby continues to misrepresent the interests of the majority of Americans and have persuaded legislators in 28 states to introduce no less than 121 pieces of pro-drug legislation.”

These individuals include billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis. They are not libertarians, however. They are hard-core “progressives.”

Reason magazine, associated with the same crowd behind Reason TV, ran an article in 2003 by Jacob Sullum on why heroin is supposedly less dangerous than alcohol and how people can use the drug without harmful effects. He compared heroin to nicotine. “Even daily opiate use is not necessarily inconsistent with a productive life,” he wrote. Sullum also wrote the 2004 book, Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, featuring a marijuana joint on the cover.

Bringing the subject up to date, Reason magazine on April 20 ran an on-the-scene report from the 2010 International Cannabis and Hemp Expo. Writer Greg Beato was excited about the on-site pot-smoking at the event and the Proposition 215 Tent, “where attendees equipped with medical marijuana cards could light up, vaporize, consume medibles, or otherwise treat themselves…”

So-called “medibles” are foods loaded with pot. Proposition 215 was the initiative that legalized the scam known as “medical marijuana” in California.

John Patrick Bedell used “medical marijuana” cards to get legal dope in California, before he drove to Washington, D.C. to murder people at the Pentagon. Bedell, who injured two security guards before getting killed in the crossfire, was a libertarian who thought the government was out to get him.

Beato has also written Reason magazine articles under such titles as, “In Defense of Extreme Pornography,” and “Drop Barbies, Not Bombs, on Iran.”

Dopey Thinking

Reason claims to be a monthly magazine of “free minds and free markets.” But the minds have been clouded by dope and the concept of “free markets” has been expanded to include practically any and all forms of destructive human behavior. This is not conservative in any sense, and may not even be, strictly speaking, libertarian. It is more like libertinism or hedonism. Soros, who proposes to transform America into an “open society,” has the same vision.

“Reason and Reason Online are editorially independent publications of the Reason Foundation, a national, non-profit research and educational organization.” So says the “About Reason” section of Reason.com. However, this disclaimer is contradicted by the Reason Foundation itself. There is a Reason Foundation board member in charge of the magazine.

When you examine the board of the Reason Foundation, you find an interesting mix of characters, ranging from David H. Koch of Koch Industries to Richard J. Dennis of the Dennis Trading Group in Chicago.

Here is where left meets right. It turns out that Dennis is a former chairman of the board of the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and that a “Drug Peace Award” has been named after him, in recognition of his efforts to legalize dope. The concept of “drug peace” will supposedly occur when America surrenders to the menace of illegal drugs. Other DPA board members include Jodie Evans of Code Pink, former ACLU official Ira Glasser, and Arianna Huffington.

Dennis is also on the board of the Cato Institute, which, not surprisingly, takes money from Soros to fight the “drug war.”

It’s hard to believe that the respectable businessmen on the boards of Cato and Reason understand how their “libertarian” organizations are promoting the “progressive” views of George Soros on such matters as drug policy.

But it’s even stranger that this phenomenon is tainting the once-respected and now Christian-owned Hot Air blog.

The Mystery of Obama’s Birth Records

By Margaret Calhoun Hemenway

Most people consider a birth certificate as a state or hospital document containing a statement by a hospital and physician, or midwife, with a footprint or other unique identifiers.  But the Obama campaign and today, the White House, refuses to allow Hawaii’s Department of Health to release his original birth certificate.

Yet another military officer, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin, has publicly questioned whether the Commander-in-Chief is legal or not, and faces imminent court-martial for refusing to obey military orders until assured of the President’s Constitutional eligibility.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, “mainstream” media confused the public over whether Obama ever released any real proof of his claim to being born in Hawaii. The confusion continues. Jonathan Alter, senior editor at Newsweek magazine, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on February 20, 2009 that “The Obama campaign actually posted his birth certificate from a Hawaii hospital online.”

But Alter lied, since “the Obama campaign” never “actually posted his birth certificate from a Hawaii hospital online.”  Remarkably, no hospital in Hawaii yet lays definitive claim to be the birthplace of the sitting President.

On July 17, 2009 CNN’s Kitty Pilgrim dissembled when she stated that the Obama campaign had produced “the original birth certificate” on the internet and that FactCheck.org had examined the original birth certificate. The computer-generated Certification of Live Birth (COLB) posted by the campaign and FactCheck.org is not, and by definition, cannot be the original birth certificate or a copy of the original birth certificate. It contains no statement by a doctor or midwife and no reference to any hospital. There is no probative evidence on this Certification that can be verified to see whether it is valid. There were no computer-generated COLBs in 1961, Obama’s birth year.

Obama’s original birth certificate (whether filed in 1961 or later) was a very different document from this COLB on FactCheck.org. that Pilgrim, Chris Matthews, Alter, and Olbermann waved around to try to quash the discussion.  On the FactCheck.org website, the claim is made that “FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate.” They only saw and touched the COLB. So FactCheck.org lied about this as well.

Why would Factcheck.org tell so obvious a lie and endanger the site’s reputation?  In August 21, 2008, when questions about the COLB began to reach critical mass and threatened to enter the public discourse, the mostly pro-Obama TV and newspaper/magazine media needed cover for their collective decision to ignore questions about whether Obama met qualifications for the Presidency set forth in Article II Section I of the Constitution. After Labor Day, swing voters would begin to pay attention to the campaign. With its lie about “how it examined and photographed the original birth certificate,” FactCheck.org helped stifle the birth certificate debate.

Under Section 57 of the Territorial Public Health Statistics Act in the 1955 Revised Laws of Hawaii (in effect in 1961), a mailed-in form (without mention of a hospital, doctor, or midwife) signed by only one of Obama’s parents (who could have been out of the country or whose signature could have been forged by a grandparent) or grandparents, would be enough to set up a birth record at the Department of Vital Statistics. This meager birth record would then automatically generate newspaper announcements, and also, a computer-generated COLB in 2008. When juxtaposed with statements by Obama’s maternal grandmother, Kenya’s Ambassador to the U.S, and now a Kenyan cabinet minister and Parliamentarian, that Obama was born in Kenya, calls for Obama to release his original birth certificate are wholly justified.

If Obama continues to refuse to release his original birth certificate, a reasonable person might assume he was not born in a Hawaiian hospital or at home with assistance of a doctor or midwife. This is especially true because if Obama was born in a foreign land, his family had a compelling reason to lie about it, given the prestige and benefits of American citizenship.

In 1961, if a 17-year-old American female gave birth in a foreign country to a child whose father was not a U.S. citizen, that child had no right to any American citizenship, let alone the “natural born” citizenship that qualifies someone for the Presidency under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. In 1961, the year of Obama’s birth, under Sec. 301 (a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, Ann Dunham could not transmit citizenship of any kind to her son.

If at birth, Obama was ineligible for American citizenship of any kind, he cannot be “natural-born.” If a person is not at the time of his birth an American citizen, he cannot be a natural-born citizen and is ineligible for the Presidency.

LTC Lakin and other patriotic military officers should not face punishment or retribution for adhering to their oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution and for seeking the truth about the President’s Constitutional eligibility.

*Mrs. Hemenway is a friend of LTC Lakin.  Her father-in-law filed one of the early eligibility lawsuits in federal court.

The Real Story of the Oklahoma City Bombing

By Roger Aronoff

While liberal news outlets such as MSNBC were cynically exploiting the April 19 anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by attempting to tie the terrorist attack to the anti-government sentiments of the modern-day Tea Party movement, investigative reporter Jayna Davis was setting the record straight in an exclusive interview with AIM. The Oklahoma City bombing was an Arab/Muslim terrorist attack on the United States, she says.

Davis, author of a blockbuster book on the attack, The Third Terrorist, has examined and presented the evidence showing that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was in fact a front man for Middle Eastern terrorists. The third terrorist, in addition to the two, McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were convicted, was an Arab. This was the mysterious “John Doe” who was never found. But other members of an Arab terrorist network were involved, she says.

She says the evidence was ignored and dismissed because the Clinton Administration didn’t want to go to war with Iraq, the likely culprit, and wanted to blame the attack on domestic right-wingers for political reasons.

The implications of what Davis has to say are that the case is still unsolved, that the FBI blew it, and that we may still be vulnerable to Arab terrorists infiltrating the U.S. and killing hundreds or thousands of innocent Americans.

Liberal media like MSNBC have peddled the false notion that McVeigh was motivated by domestic hatred of the government, and that the Tea Party movement is motivated by the same. Hence, by extension, the Tea Party movement will probably spawn anti-government fanatics who will kill people. This claim justifies government repression of anti-Obama political dissidents who may in fact be entirely peaceful and simply exercising their constitutional rights.

One of the problems with the MSNBC narrative is that Davis makes a convincing case that in fact McVeigh “was a handpicked dupe, set up to take the fall in order to save his Islamic collaborators from prosecution.” She documents that he had expressed a desire to be a mercenary for Middle Eastern terrorists, and that the trail of evidence that both he and his accomplice Terry Nichols left behind points in the direction of an Arab/Muslim connection to the attack.

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