In support of President Nice Job Browine’s Surgeon General nominee, the religious right web site Lifewatch (Your Life, Family and Culture Outpost), tells half a truth, and carefully hides the whole, so they and their readers can feel righteous…

Bush’s Choice for Surgeon Gen. Said Homosexual Practices “Unnatural and Unhealthy” 

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 8, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A doctor tapped by President George Bush for the position of Surgeon General has been attacked by homosexual activist groups for saying homosexual activity is unnatural and unhealthy.

…

Homosexual activists and their supporters have expressed outrage that a doctor who has warned of the physical dangers associated with homosexual activity would be considered for the position of Surgeon General. Holsinger’s article has been condemned as a scientifically outdated piece of political ideology expressing a “very narrow view” of homosexuality, according to an ABC News report.

Studies continue to emerge, however, showing the grave health risks of engaging in homosexual activity. A report in the February issue of the International Journal of STD & AIDS found that “HIV-positive men who have sex with men are up to 90 times more likely than the general population to develop anal cancer.”

A study released in 2005 in Psychological Reports confirmed earlier findings that homosexual men have on average a 20-year shortened life span.  “[U]nder even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men…are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871,” said the authors of the Canadian research team. The team was supportive of the homosexual lifestyle and conducted the study in order to assist health planners with estimating the impact of HIV infection on homosexual men.

(Emphasis mine)  Note that alarmist quote "[U]nder even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men…are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871…"  Psychological Reports, some of you may recall, is the outfit that uncritically published a bit of Paul Cameron’s razzle-dazzle and have yet to admit that they were bamboozled.  But this time the religious right is using another study by a different group to demonize homosexuals. 

In fact, they began bending this particular study to their own ends earlier in the year.  In an article that seems to have first surfaced on the right wing site World Net Daily, David N. Bass, a self-described 20 year old homeschool graduate, wrote:

A 1997 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that even under “the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban center are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.” The same study estimated that homosexual behavior reduces the lifespan of males by eight to 20 years. Comparatively, the CDC has found that male and female smokers lose an average of 13.2 to 14.5 years of life, respectively. 

As Jonathan Rowe over at Positive Liberty notes the article reads like a textbook example of how certain “pro-family” groups use false, unreliable, or misleading statistics to bash gays…

The problem with the IJE study is that while the researchers (unlike Cameron) may have been credible and while the number may have had some kind of original validity, it is no longer valid and citing as if it were is akin to lying.

The IJE figure was derived from one study, never replicated, taken from one Canadian urban enclave (so it probably never had a representative sample of gays, but rather disproportionately drew from sub-culture oriented urban gays). More importantly, the study was done during the worst of the AIDS crisis, just before the newer, groundbreaking meds were introduced. And those meds greatly impacted and reduced mortality rates within the gay community. In 2006, whatever validity the statistic originally may have had, it has not been valid for many years and the authors of the study attest to this. They wrote in 2001:

In our paper, we demonstrated that in a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality continued, we estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years would not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British Columbia.

(emphasis mine)  So these righteous, upstanding, so very very Moral men of God are deliberately citing a study whose own authors know was only representative of a single moment in the history of a single population of gay men, at a time when AIDS was claiming its greatest number of victims in that one particular population.  The quote they’re waving in everyone’s faces now, no longer applies, and never did in fact apply to all gay men in Canada, let alone all gay men everywhere. 

The authors of the study have protested the misuse of their work, but of course to no avail.  The operators of Lifewatch know that whatever their sins, God forgives them.

Via Atrios…  Ever notice how the mainstream news media’s ostentatious sense of "balance" always seems to favor the right…?

LEFT BEHIND: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media

It would surprise few people, conservative or progressive, to learn that coverage of the intersection of religion and politics tends to oversimplify both. If this oversimplification occurred to the benefit or detriment of neither side of the political divide, then the weaknesses in coverage of religion would be of only academic interest. But as this study documents, coverage of religion not only overrepresents some voices and underrepresents others, it does so in a way that is consistently advantageous to conservatives.

Ya Think?

Among the study’s key findings:

• Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.
• On television news — the three major television networks, the three major cable new channels, and PBS — conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.
• In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.

Despite the fact most religious Americans are moderate or progressive, in the news media it is overwhelmingly conservative leaders who are presented as the voice of religion. This represents a particularly meaningful distortion since progressive religious leaders tend to focus on different issues and offer an entirely different perspective than their conservative counterparts.

I’m shocked…shocked.  Well…actually not.  When was the last time you saw an actual liberal on any of the Sunday morning talk shows…?

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first;
nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
-Charles De Gaulle

The American Legion is busting an artery over John Edwards’ suggestion that Americans celebrate this coming Memorial Day by speaking out against the war.  Heaven forfend we should take an interest in the welfare of our troops during memorial day.  But the Legion is yap, yap, yapping that Edwards is violating a sacred day by injecting politics into it.

But the national commander of the American Legion isn’t happy about a solemn holiday being used for political purposes. In a posting on the legion’s Web site, Commander Paul A. Morin blasts Edwards’ suggestion that Americans bring anti-war signs to local Memorial Day parades, saying that Edwards "has blatantly violated the sanctity of this most special day."

"Revolting is a kind word for it," Morin writes. "It’s as inappropriate as a political bumper sticker on an Arlington headstone."

And you just know the mainstream news media is going to treat the American Legion like it’s some sort of hallowed representative of America’s war veterans, and not the republican party attack dog that it’s always been.

Digby and Jonathan over at A Tiny Revolution are exploring the history of the American Legion in the wake of their sanctimonious outburst.  But Rick Perlstein over at Common Sense.Org, author of the forthcoming book Nixonland, remembers the American Legion I once knew…back in the days of Vietnam and good old Tricky Dick…

Historian Tom Wells writes about how, in the fall of 1965, as people were beginning to realize that the Vietnam War was insane, and started marching in the streets to stop it, the government, hiding its hand, organized a pro-war march down Fifth Avenue in New York, with the Legion in the front ranks. The Pentagon’s Paul Warnke lamented such efforts were "quite ineffective" in stemming the antiwar tide. Indeed, not all Legionnaires got with the program. Two weeks later the commander of the American Legion post in Jewett City, Connecticut marched in his uniform with a sign, "Withdraw U.S. Troops From Vietnam Now!" He and his fellow protesters were met by the sign, "You Fairies Couldn’t Pass the Physical." Eleven days later, one hundred members of Post 15 showed the Legion’s true, nonpolitical colors by crowding into a room with 36 chairs to vote him out of the organization, as 500 happy townspeople gathered outside to jeer him as he left.

…

My friend Tom Geoghegan tells me the story of attending Boys State, the Legion sponsored public-service camp for high school kids, that year in Ohio. The lads were to supposed vote unanimously on a pro-war resolution. Tom voted against it. He was promptly kicked out of Boys State.

It was hardly just Vietnam. Also in 1966, Congress debated a landmark civil rights bill that would have banned racial discrimination in housing (it failed). In July the chaplain for the Maryland Legion testified against it in subcommittee. This was what he had to say about Martin Luther King’s open housing movement:

The same church leaders who join subversive forces in demonstrations against the established social structure also agree to banning the Bible and prohibiting prayer in public places. They are the same advocates of the new morality of situation ethics, and of liberation of the moral laws governing sex and marriage.

Nice guys.  You’d think this nation’s war dead all gave their lives for the rights of straight white republican males with good incomes to tell everyone else what to think, how to vote and what they could and could not say in public about their government, and not for a land of freedom of speech and liberty and justice for all.  But that’s the American Legion.  The same one that, as Perlstein notes, literally embraced fascism in the 1920s.  No, you won’t see that side of them in the news media reports about John Edwards’ call to protest the war.

I’m copying the whole of this post by Atrios because I think he really hits it as to what has changed fundamentally now about many American’s relationship to the news media…

In the post below I had meant to prominently include the 2000 election recount/selection as a cause of a major online lefty boom. While that was the time when I began to turn to the web for news/perspectives I couldn’t find elsewhere, it wasn’t actually until the inauguration that I finally concluded that something was seriously messed up, and that the problem was the media. I never had any illusions that Supreme Court Justices were noble people above reproach or that politicians could be trusted. I did at some point, however, have the sense that the mainstream media – CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, network news – while imperfect wasn’t completely broken. It was the coverage of the inauguration that did it for me.

You may remember that this was a cold and rainy day, truly miserable. Nonetheless thousands of protesters had gathered. However, most Americans would have no idea this was happening. Switching back and forth between coverage by the television networks, and the somewhat more raw footage carried by C-SPAN, it was apparent just how much effort the networks were expending to hide this fact from their viewing public. They would frequently cut away from the parade, provide odd camera angles, and do anything to maintain the illusion that the coronation was proceeding blissfully. The following day, for its inauguration coverage, the New York Times published a photo of George W. Bush walking the parade route. As discussed in Dennis Loy Jonson’s The Big Chill, this was an entirely staged photo. Bush had been unable to follow in the tradition established by Carter and carried on Ronald Reagan, Bush’s father, and Bill Clinton. The presence of the protesters prevented this, and it wasn’t until after Bush had left the public parade route, and was behind a barrier, that he could briefly hop out of the limousine and wave for the cameras. The Times had established a practice which impacted much of the media’s reporting on the activities of the Bush administration. They signaled a willingness to report things not as they necessarily were but as the administration wished to present them.

Emphasis above are mine.  For me, the moment when I finally came to the conclusion that something is seriously messed up and the problem is the media, came at the tail end of a slow steady accumulation of small observations that they were becoming part of the spin.  And that was preceded by many years of watching the quality of the news broadcasts getting thinner and thinner, as the right wing became more and more skilled at intimidating and undermining the press.

For decades, literally, I’d watched the news media cover the gay rights movement with that faux even handedness that demands that gutter crawling bigots be granted equal stature while on camera, even when it meant they could spread one filthy lie after another about gay and lesbian Americans without any of it being challenged as nonfactual, because to do so would be "taking sides" in a "controversial topic."  I’ve been writing here for years now that this behavior, this faux even handedness on the part of the news media was probably more painfully familiar to gay America then to straight.  Even so, my jaw kept dropping again and again during the Bush years, as staringly obvious Bush white house lies were simply passed along without comment by the press. 

I don’t know when exactly I’d finally concluded that the media had embedded themselves in the Bush spin machine, but the ghastly performance during MISSION ACCOMPLISHED day was what finally convinced me that they really were part of the problem.  As a gay man, all the fawning adoration of Bush’s "masculinity" on that carrier deck by the news media and the Washington pundocracy that day, and in the weeks that followed, struck me as…weird.  Very, very weird. 

The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.

Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”

This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003

…… 

MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY: Well, I—in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know—and I’ve worn those because I parachute—and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count—they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

…..

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

It was only later I heard from other pilots that the usual thing is to take off your parachute harness once you’re out of the airplane.  But you knew he was deliberately calling attention to his genitals the moment you saw it.  Bush kept the parachute harness on and swaggered around that carrier deck in pure frat boy jock sneerage, like some alpha ape wagging his dong around looking for a fight after he’s just beaten the crap out of another poor ape half his size.  It was amazing.  Another time, it seemed long long ago, I might have been appalled.  But the longer its gone on, the more desensitized I’ve become to it.  There is a sizable portion of America that a man like that really does adequately represent.  And they really do enjoy making the rest of us flinch at the sight of that open sewer they call a conscience.

We are sexual beings, yes.  And brazen male sexuality can be an awesomely thrilling thing to behold.  This gay boy has beheld lots of defiantly brazen sexual posturing among human males.  But there is a difference when it’s meant to get you all hot and bothered and when it’s sneering and disdainful and meant only to intimidate and threaten.  And even then, even in the old human struggle for status and power and glory, the sexual posturing of the more recently evolved alpha males among us is more a subtext then a crude locker room joke.  But for those males among us with small frontal lobes, the sexual component of aggression takes center stage the minute the chest thumping begins.

"Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out."

It was always obvious what kind of man Bush was.  It was clear to me after November 2000 that there were enough people in this country just like him to take the nation straight into the gutter if the rest of us didn’t start fighting back hard, and quickly.  What really bothered me that day, and in the weeks that followed, was watching how many people in the mainstream news media were actually turned on by the sight of Bush swaggering around that carrier deck all but flashing his dick at the world…

I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking–how to put it?–really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly "hot," as in virile, sexy and powerful.

-Lisa Schiffren, The Wall Street Journal 5/9/2003

So I’m watching all this gushing and fawning, all these media big shots getting the vapors over Junior’s Manly Characteristic, along with thugs like G. Gordon Liddy and I’m getting that same smarmy feeling I’ve had a time or two, stumbling onto something going on in the bathroom stalls at the back of some really seedy gay bar I’d been dragged into.  When sex gets dragged into the toilet you don’t know whether to cry or puke.  You just want to look away and get the hell out of there.  Except the shadowy figures in the toilet stalls have more dignity then these goddamned news media talking heads.  At least there is honest desire going on in there.  I watched the American news media having hot flashes over Bush all but wagging his dick at the world after he’d just started a war and I think that was when I knew that far too many media big shots nowadays were part of the same open sewer that Bush had risen from, and that was why they were cheering him on, why they thumped their chests for war too, why they hate democrats, why they treat all that bleeding heart liberal peace love and understanding stuff with sneering contempt.  It wasn’t that they were stupid.  It wasn’t that they’d been co-opted.  It was that the smirking boob really was their kind of guy. 

It’s not just the news media either.  Ever notice how, on the prime time TV cop shows, the good guys can threaten suspects and witnesses with prison rape unless they cooperate, and still remain good guys?

Digby, riffing off Glen Greenwald, smacks around the cutlure of High Broderism.

Joseph Kraft defined "Middle America" as a blue collar or rural white male, "traditional in his values and defensive against innovation." Ever since then, the denizens of the beltway have deluded themselves into thinking they speak for that "silent majority." (And what a serendipitous coincidence it was that this happened at the moment of a right wing political ascension that also made a fetish out of the same blue collar white male.) The converse of this, of course, is that they also assume that the "fringe" liberals from the coasts are way out of the mainstream, even to the extent that editors of Time simply make up data to conform to Kraft’s outdated observations.

It reached the zenith of synergistic absurdity during the Lewinsky scandal when the cosmopolitan beltway courtiers finally went all in and portrayed themselves as as the salt-of-the-earth provincial town folk who were appalled by the misbehavior ‘o them out-a-towners from thuh big city:

When Establishment Washingtonians of all persuasions gather to support their own, they are not unlike any other small community in the country.

On this evening, the roster included Cabinet members Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala, Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Bob Livingston, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, PBS’s Jim Lehrer and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, all behaving like the pals that they are. On display was a side of Washington that most people in this country never see. For all their apparent public differences, the people in the room that night were coming together with genuine affection and emotion to support their friends — the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt and his wife, CNN’s Judy Woodruff, whose son Jeffrey has spina bifida.

But this particular community happens to be in the nation’s capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders — the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.

They call the capital city their "town."

And their town has been turned upside down.

Here you had the most powerful people in the world identifying themselves with Bedford Falls from "It’s A Wonderful Life" when the court of Versailles or Augustan Rome would be far more more apt. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Thirty years after Kraft’s epiphany, this decadent world capital that had recently seen the likes of Richard Nixon’s crimes and John F. Kennedy’s philandering (and corruption of all types, both moral and legal at the highest levels for years), were now telling the nation that they themselves were small town burghers and factory workers upholding traditional American values. And even more amazing, the rest of America was now morally suspect and needed to be led by these purveyors of Real American values:

This has been another edition of What Digby Said.  Go read the whole thing.

In case you were wondering why the quality of journalism coming out of Washington is so Piss poor, David Broder explains here…

Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove. In the days when he was operating from Austin, we had many long and rewarding conversations. I have eaten quail at his table and admired the splendid Hill Country landscape from the porch of the historic cabin Karl and his wife Darby found miles away and had carted to its present site on their land.

It isn’t simply that they’re mindlessly parroting the talking points of whoever occupies the White House, as even a faint recollection of the unmitigated hostility Bill Clinton got from them recalls.  No.  They’re see themselves as part of that republican ruling elite now.  There’s David Broder, the man they call the "dean" of Washington journalism, happily recalling his times eating quail…Quail, mind you…with Karl Rove in his historic cabin.  And no…I strongly doubt they went out hunting quail beforehand.  Not with Cheney anyway.

Sorta puts Broder’s crack about how the Clinton’s came in and "trashed the place" into perspective doesn’t it?  Read that Sally Quinn column…it’s one big long inside the beltway bellyache about Clinton and Monica…and ask yourself where the puffed up moral outrage is over…oh say, Guantanamo Bay, the shredding of the Geneva Convention, torture, the destruction of New Orleans, the use of the Department of Justice as a weapon against political opponents and against dissent, being lied into a war that’s killed thousands of young Americans who had their whole lives ahead of them, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of the people we allegedly went to war to liberate.  Don’t see it?  Well there’s a reason for that.  The Washington news establishment all regarded the Clinton team as nothing more then poor southern white trash in Their Town and that’s why they hated them.  That’s all that mattered to them then, and it’s all that matters to them now.

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon details the step-by-step process of how the right wing smear machine gets its message into our feckless mainstream news media.  From the right wing gutter, to Drudge, to more mainstream right wing columnists, to the wire services, and then to the Wise Old Men Of Washington, and the mainstream news media at large.  Greenwald details recent case in point. 

One should note here that Step 5, the Final Stage, is almost always sponsored by those who endlessly proclaim how irresponsible and substance-free and unserious political bloggers are, and who thereafter write pieces which do nothing other than repeat the latest Drudge gossip.

You should go read it, because we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing when the 2008 presidential campaign really gets going.

I caught a reference to a 2005 article in the Boston Globe about the propaganda machines of the religious right.  It was one I’d read before, but I don’t think I’d managed to blog about it then.  It’s a good one…well worth reading still.  These are religious right front organizations that take on the trappings of legitimate science and then inject themselves into the news stream as opposing viewpoints to well established institutions.  They’re completely fake, but the mainstream news media, and in particular the TV networks, all give them a platform to spread their lies under a bogus effort at "balance", and because it suits the money at the top of the media corporations to keep republicans in power…

Beliefs drive research agenda of new think tanks

President Bush had a ready answer when asked in January for his view of adoption by same-sex couples: ”Studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman," the president said.

Bush’s assertion raised eyebrows among specialists. The American Academy of Pediatrics, composed of leaders in the field, had found no meaningful difference between children raised by same-sex and heterosexual couples, based on a 2002 report written largely by a Boston pediatrician, Dr. Ellen C. Perrin.

But Bush’s statement was celebrated at a tiny think tank called the Family Research Institute, where the founder, Dr. Paul Cameron, believes Bush was referring to studies he has published in academic journals that are critical of gays and lesbians as parents. Cameron has published numerous studies with titles such as ”Gay Foster Parents More Apt to Molest" — a conclusion disputed by many other researchers.

The president’s statement was also welcomed at a small organization with an august-sounding name, the American College of Pediatricians. The college, which has a small membership, says on its website that it would be ”dangerously irresponsible" to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The college was formed just three years ago, after the 75-year-old American Academy of Pediatrics issued its paper.

That pediatric study asserted a ”considerable body of professional evidence" that there is no difference between children of same-sex and heterosexual parents.

The Family Research Institute and the American College of Pediatrics are part of a rapidly growing trend in which small think tanks, researchers, and publicists who are open about their personal beliefs are providing what they portray as medical information on some of the most controversial issues of the day.

Created as counterpoints to large, well-established medical organizations whose work is subject to rigorous review and who assert no political agenda, the tiny think tanks with names often mimicking those of established medical authorities have sought to dispute the notion of a medical consensus on social issues such as gay rights, the right to die, abortion, and birth control.

For example, Cameron’s Family Research Institute, with an annual budget of less than $200,000, tries to counter the views of the 150,000-member American Psychological Association, which has an annual budget of $98 million. The tiny American College of Pediatricians has a single employee, yet it has been quoted as a counterpoint to the 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics.

(emphasis mine)  The quickest way to deflate the propaganda of these religious right front groups is to shine a light on them.  More often then not you find their bogus studies and stats getting injected into the political conversation without acknowledgment of where it came from.  That’s because these outfits are well understood to be propaganda mills and not real scientific institutions, whatever their names make them sound like.  So whenever politicians like president Nice Job Brownie start quoting their numbers, reporters need to ask where those numbers came from.  

Senior Bush aides, asked for the basis of the comment about adoption, now say they are unaware of any studies comparing heterosexual and same-sex adoptions — by Cameron or by any pediatric association. The president, they say, was probably referring to studies that show children are better off living with both biological parents — though those studies have nothing to do with adoption by same-sex couples.

Duck and weave, duck and weave.   You may remember the time Mr. Book Of Virtue Bill Bennett got caught on ABC’s This Week quoting Paul Cameron’s  bogus figure for the average lifespan of homosexuals.  He first denied he got it from Cameron, then he said there were other researchers who got the same figures.  And so there were.  The other researcher Bennett pointed to, Jeffrey Satinover, had in fact, gotten his figures from Cameron too.  When that was pointed out to him, Bennett retracted the claim, only to make it again some years later.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which identifies Cameron’s organization as an active hate group, in it’s intelligence report on Cameron, The Fabulist, wrote about how Cameron’s propaganda filters into religious right talking points on homosexuality…

In June, the Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the New York chapter of the Christian Coalition, said in a speech protesting Gay Pride Day that gays should be legally required to wear warning labels, not unlike Jewish stars under the Nazis.

"We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one or two years off the average life span, yet we celebrate a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span, according to the 2005 issue of the revered [sic] scientific journal Psychological Reports."

One month later, Dr. John Whiffen, chairman of the board of the National Physicians Center for Family Resources, a faith-basped advocacy group that was contracted by Bush Administration federal health officials to develop an abstinence education curriculum, said that, "There are obvious effects for male homosexuals from a health standpoint. Parents should discuss those with their child." Then he added: "It’s fairly well-accepted that smoking is not a good idea. It takes seven years off your life. It appears that male homosexuality takes more than that off your life. Naturally you should warn them about that."

You notice that none of these people said anything about where they got their information about homosexuality.  That’s because they know full well that it comes from a completely untrustworthy source.  And yet even knowing that, they continue to cite it, and all those other bogus groups with names that mimick actual institutions of science.  All the while posturing as defenders of virtue and morality and godliness…that pesky ninth commandment exempted.

Via Talking Points Memo …  Today’s Washington Post is not the Washington Post that once brought down a crooked president.  Today’s Washington posts runs propaganda pieces on behalf of one…

Okay, this is pretty interesting. I think I’ve found something which reasonably suggests that Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt may have broken his own stated Op-ed policies by publishing a piece yesterday by Liz Cheney attacking Nancy Pelosi without identifying Ms. Cheney as Veep Cheney’s daughter.

When I asked Hiatt about this yesterday, he justified it with an email to me (again, I appreciate his willingness to answer) saying that she’d been selected to write the piece based on her professional qualifications alone and that there was thus no need to disclose her relationship with dad.

Knowing that they were reading a hit piece written by the Vice President’s daughter would only have confused their readers. 

Via Brad DeLong…  Here’s one another black female target of Imus’ good ‘ol boy humor has to say…

Trash Talk Radio – New York Times: LET’S say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather. The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before. I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton. Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program. It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me. It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well. So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field. Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

I’m old enough to remember when it was merely taken for granted that white males had the right to piss on everyone who wasn’t white and male.  That was in addition to having the right to piss on everyone who Was white and male and below them on the economic ladder.  Ever wonder why poor whites consistently vote republican against their better economic interests, especially in certain parts of this country?  It’s because racism gives them status, even over well-off people of color.  Without racism they’re just another face on the bottom of the pile.  The resentment these people feel, and have felt ever since the black civil rights movement began tearing down the walls of race segregation in America, are enormous and run very, very deep.  They feel as though they’ve lost their place, their status, Their Manhood, in a country that was once theirs…them and the rich white men holding them and everyone else down on the economic ladder.  Rich white men like Don Imus…but more to the point, his producers…the people that make his radio and TV platform possible with their money, and their radio and TV networks.

They give Imus his platform to play his Good ‘Ol Boy shtick, knowing full well who it plays to, knowing full well it allows that audience to imagine itself as part of the same privileged class as the rich white guys who own the airwaves.  They’d be escorted quickly to the door by well dressed butlers wearing gloves so as not to get their hands dirty if they ever showed up in any of the exclusive clubs and playgrounds the people who pay for Imus’ broadcasts enjoy.  But for a few moments listening to him going through his crude, racist, bigoted Good ‘Ol Boy patter routine, they can imagine that they’re all comrades in arms, all sharing the same bitter resentments toward the uppity darkies, women, and faggots who used to know their place.

So it’s spectacularly unsurprising to see the simple, straightforward reflex of Imus and his crew to spit in the faces of a group of young black girls who had succeeded where nobody thought they would.  That’s What They’re On The Radio For.  This gutter crawling racism on Imus’ part isn’t anything new…nor is it anything particularly out of place on Talk Radio.  That’s why talk radio has the large audience it does.

And that large audience, is why Talk Radio’s big names are held in high regard by the guardians of mainstream media opinion…why Rush Limbaugh and Imus and others of their kind can command the respect of the mainstream news media and its pundocracy, even as that pundocracy wags, wags, wags its finger at bloggers…well…progressive bloggers anyway…for being such an uncouth, uncivilized rabble.  There’s no double standard here.  No hypocrisy.  The moral standard is, as always, money.  How many of copies of our books can you sell? 

Thus we have the squeaky clean mild mannered Wally Cox of the pundocracy, Tom Oliphant, rising his fist in solidarity with comrade Imus…

OLIPHANT: What I thought would be instructive for people is to go back on the tape to a minute or so before this happens and see if you can see it developing. Now, believe me, as you well know, I don’t know beans about hip-hop culture or trash-talking, or what do you call those things where you run on forever? Riffs, or whatever.

But even I could see the beginning of what appeared to me to be a riff. And the train went off the tracks, which, you know, can happen to anybody. And, of course, what counts when the train goes off the tracks is what you then do. And that’s why I, you know, didn’t have a moment’s hesitation talking to this guy from The New York Times yesterday. Of course I didn’t think about reacting like that because I saw the whole episode in context, including your statements about it.

No Tom…the train didn’t go off the tracks.  It arrived at it’s destination on time, and on schedule.  And…oh look…you’re heading for that same destination too, aren’t you..?  

IMUS: A lot of friends of mine called, but I didn’t want to put up — put anybody on this morning who wasn’t scheduled, because I can make my own case, and it is what it is.

OLIPHANT: But to me, that only means that those of us who, through an accident, were scheduled, who know better, have a moral obligation to stand up and say to you, "Solidarity forever, pal."

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: So, I watched the basketball game last night between — a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women’s final.

ROSENBERG: Yeah, Tennessee won last night — seventh championship for [Tennessee coach] Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.

IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and —

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.

McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.

IMUS: Yeah.

Solidarity Forever…

McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie that he had.

IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough —

McCORD: Do The Right Thing.

McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Solidarity Forever…

IMUS: I don’t know if I’d have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?

ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.

IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.

RUFFINO: Only tougher.

McGUIRK: The [Memphis] Grizzlies would be more appropriate.

Solidarity Forever…

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

Welcome to the gutter Tom.  I hear book sales are pretty brisk once you get that initial sale of your soul taken care of…

Okay…I’m riffing on the title of Jim Burroway’s latest expose of Paul Cameron’s latest anti-gay propaganda missive.  Read that as either I’m calling Cameron a devil or that I’m calling him a jackass.  Or that I’m calling his audience devil worshipers, or jackass kissers…

Another “homosexual lifespan" study has hit the news. According to a flurry of press releases making rounds, married gays in Scandinavia die 24 years younger than everyone else:

Once more, Burroway completely destroys Cameron’s propaganda (even calling it junk science ennobles it, really) by way of the simple trick of actually looking at the data.  This is Cameron’s essential technique…one he has perfected over the decades he’s been generating bogus statistics on homosexuality for the religious right: first gerrymander the data, then analyze it as though you hadn’t.  His classic study which is still being used today as proof that the lifespan of gay people is significantly shorter then that of heterosexuals, was conducted on data Cameron pulled from the obituary pages of two gay newspapers.  At the height of the first wave of AIDS deaths.  He averaged the age of death in those obituaries and compared it with that of the average lifespan of the population as a whole.  His supporters have argued since that you can compare the average age at death in mainstream news papers and even in small ethnic ones and get a figure that is comparable to the average lifespan figures of the population as a whole.  But this still makes the same essential mistake of assuming that the social and cultural context gay community papers exist in isn’t different enough that it would skew the data you’re pulling out of the obituary notices.  In fact it is.  Staringly obviously so.

The local gay paper was then, and is now, a fairly new phenomena in a nation that only until the latter part of the twentieth century was even disposed to admit that homosexuals existed, much less allow them to print their own newspapers.  In fact, until the hated Warren Court decided that homosexuals could in fact, distribute their own magazines and newspapers through the mail in 1958 in One v Olesen, it was pretty much impossible.  So you have the fact that local gay papers are a recent phenomena.  You have the fact that older gay people grew up in a climate of repression that marked most of them for life.  You have the fact that even by the time Cameron started collecting gay obituaries the out and proud part of the gay community was decidedly skewed toward younger generations.  You have the fact that obituaries are generally not placed in newspapers by the person who died but by their families, many of whom even today are reluctant to acknowledge the homosexuality of a dead relative (a number of obituaries in the mainstream press back then were written so as to conceal the fact that the deceased had succumbed to an AIDS related illness).  They would be unlikely then to even consider placing an obit in a gay paper.  You have the fact that the readership of gay papers then, as now, played to a largely urban and younger and more sexually active slice of the community as a whole.   And on top of that you have the fact that Cameron was collecting his data while the death toll from AIDS was just coming off its peak.  This is what Cameron was comparing to the average lifespan in the nation as a whole.

That’s his trademark: not so much falsifying the data, although he won’t shrink from doing that either whenever he thinks he can get away with it…but skewing the initial dataset, so right from the get-go any conclusions drawn from it will break in the direction he wants them to.

And his latest artwork may be his masterpiece:

Statistics Denmark and Statistics Norway publish official population cross-tabulations of marital status by age for each sex in their annual statistical yearbooks. Since 1994 in Denmark and 1995 in Norway, these tables have included separate categories for homosexual-partnered individuals…

Cameron is comparing the ages at death of married heterosexuals with same sex couples in registered partnerships.  At first glance it seems shocking that the average age at death is so much lower for the same sex couples.  But in reality it’s nothing more then a brilliant slight-of-hand…maybe his best yet.  The problem, as Burroway notes, is that the statistics for married couples have been gathering for an entire century, but for the same sex couples, only for as long as there had been domestic partnerships in Denmark…just since 1989.  There was no rush of older gay couples to register.  So as Burroway put’s it…

Why is this important? The heterosexual sample has been accumulating under-forties for an entire century.(In 2005, the average age of the groom was 37.4 years; for the bride, 34.7 years) But registered same-sex partnerships have only been available in Denmark since 1989, which means the gay sample got a late start. And if the typical age of someone entering into a same-sex partnership is around forty, then it stands to reason that the typical age at death of someone who has died so far would be similarly young.

If I have a flock of mostly young sheep, and in one year five are eaten by wolves and two more die of disease I can’t look at that and say what the average lifespan of a sheep is.  The age of my flock is skewed young to start with.  I’d need to keep collecting lifespan data on my flock for a period of many years before I could assume I was getting a handle on the average lifespan of my sheep.  What Cameron does is use data that only amounts to snapshots, and he is very careful to get just the right snapshots he wants, to end up with the results he wants:

Cameron’s Danish and Norwegian statistics show an average age at death in the fifties for registered partners simply because there aren’t many older partners in those samples to begin with. And the reason they aren’t in that sample is because for whatever reason, they haven’t registered their partnerships.

Now what might the reason for that be?  Once again, you have the generational differences between those of us who grew up before Stonewall, and those of us who grew up after…

Cameron dismisses the idea that homophobia is a major factor in Scandinavia because “Canada, Norway, and Denmark are far more accepting of homosexual practitioners than the United States (where homosexuals are still barred from the military and ‘gay rights’ laws do not exist in most states).” But saying that homophobia is lower in Scandinavia isn’t the same as saying it doesn’t exist. For example, it is still illegal in Denmark for gay couples to adopt children except for the children of their registered partners. And homosexuality is still not acceptable among many Danes and Norwegians, particularly among those living in rural areas and among the older generations — precisely the populations that haven’t availed themselves of registered partnerships.

This generational difference in the willingness of people to be open about their homosexuality, or that of their family members, is something every honest scientific investigation of the gay community must acknowledge and deal with somehow.  But for Paul Cameron its a handy way to filter out the old people, when he wants to prove that there aren’t any.  Cameron’s trademark is to pull from pools of data that are intrinsically skewed strongly towards a young, urban, and sexually active slice of the gay community and then analyze that data as if it were a random sample that was representative of the whole.  Wherever possible, he finds snapshots of those data pools…timeframes…that he knows will skew the results even further in the direction he wants them skewed.

We software engineers have long had a saying for it: Garbage In – Garbage Out.   Give the man his due…Paul Cameron is a master at selecting just the right garbage to put in, to get the garbage he wants back out.  And he’s getting better at it.  In this latest propaganda missive of his he displays an impressively deft hand.  Thank goodness for people like Jim Barroway.

Go read the rest of his report: Paul Cameron’s Footprint.  And if you haven’t already, go read some of his other magnificent takedowns of this man’s propaganda.  If you are someone who is gay, or knows someone who is, you will likely have some of Paul Cameron’s claptrap waved in your face at one time or another.  He is, as he likes to call himself, the wellspring of all the anti-gay statistics religious right groups use to demonize homosexual people.  He gets away with it because so few people bother to actually look closely at his work and see where he’s pulling his numbers from.  Do the one thing they’re counting on you not to do: look behind the curtain.

Via Atrios…  ABC News is now peddling the claim that Iran will have nuclear weapons by 2009.  Perhaps that’s true.  But your gay and lesbian neighbors have watched ABC whitewash the murder of a gay kid for the sake of validating republican party talking points.  And as Glenn Greenwald reminds us, it isn’t the first time the American Bullshit Corporation has looked its trusting audience in the face and fed them…bullshit…

At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross’ new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross — back in October and November 2001 — were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.

Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross — here and here — but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that — and these are all quotes:

(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";

(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";

(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";

(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program"; and,

(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."

At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources." All of those factual claims — each and every one of them, separately — were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports — reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq…

The fact is, nobody can trust a damn thing ABC News says.  That’s a problem not only because Iran may indeed be a real threat to the world, but because any grave threat to worldwide peace and stability now has to be judged through the understanding gleaned now from the past six years of George Bush and his crony’s, that they govern by way of lies.  Who do we trust?  Well…not ABC News.  We all saw it in the course of their bogus anthrax reporting.  Your gay and lesbian neighbors saw it also, on November 26, 2004, when ABC News cynically gave a dead gay kid’s killers a public forum to spit on his grave a few times, so that the republicans could later argue that hate crime laws are unnecessary.

The claim that the anthrax was laced with bentonite, and that government tests detected the presence of bentonite, was simply false — a complete invention from Ross’s sources, eager to link Saddam and anthrax attacks. And separately, it was a complete fiction that "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope." That just never happened.

Equally false, really completely frivolous, was the conclusion Ross’s sources fed to him from this false premise — namely, that even if bentonite — which ABC referred to as a "troubling chemical additive" — had been found in the anthrax, that would be some sort of compelling proof linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks.

The very idea that bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive," let alone that it is some sort of unique Iraqi hallmark, is inane. Bentonite is merely a common clay that is produced all over the world, including from volcanic eruptions. Over the weekend, I spoke via e-mail with M.A. Holmes, a Geologist in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who wrote:

Bentonite is mined and used for drilling mud (getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water) and now is mined for the clumping-type kitty litter ("swells when wet"). It’s also used to draw cactus spines put of the skin (sold as a product called "Denver Mud"). It has lots of other uses, like lining pits for waste disposal (because it "swells when wet" it forms a pretty good seal).

Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and oh, yes, SOUTH DAKOTA. It is not "a chemical additive" and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, and readily available wherever you can get "drilling mud."

Go read the whole thing.  The drumbeat to war is happening again.  Just remember whenever you hear something from ABC News about Iran, that this is the news organization that stooped to smearing a dead gay kid’s memory for the sake of republican party talking points.  Nothing is beneath them.  Nothing.