Joseph Farah

• Shepard Smith condemns Pat Robertson.
• Sarah Palin: Woman of Joy.
• Joseph Farah continues his war against Wikipedia.
• The judge in Scott Roeder's trial is allowing him use the defense that he believed the slaying of George Tiller was justified in order to save unborn children.
• Phyllis Schlafly is heading to Utah to hold a fundraiser for U.S. Senate candidate Cherilyn Eagar.
• Finally, despite that fact that the ant-choice "personhood" effort has been rejected everywhere it has been put on the ballot, "personhood" is going to be the theme of the 2010 March for Life.

We already knew that Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann were going to be joining right-wing activists like Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough at the First National Tea Party Convention next month.

But now organizers have added another new and exciting guest - Joseph Farah:

The First National Tea Party Convention hosted by Tea Party Nation is happy to announce updates to the convention itinerary.

World Net Daily's Joseph Farah and Fox News Contributor Angela McGlowan will be attending the convention and both will be speaking at the Friday evening dinner.

If the fact that Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, will be sharing the stage with Farah, a full-fledged conspiracy theorist/Birther, doesn't perfectly sum up the current state of the conservative movement, I don't know what does.

• Joseph Farah thanks Sarah Palin for taking the Birther issue mainstream.
• Rick Santorum says he is "absolutely" considering a 2012 presidential run.
• Republican Party of Texas voted overwhelmingly to place resolution on the March 2010 Primary reading "Sonograms: The Texas Legislature should enact legislation requiring a sonogram be performed and shown to each mother about to undergo a medically unnecessary, elective abortion."
• The Christian Coalition hails the Manhattan Declaration ... but wonders if the signers really have the commitment to follow through on their pledges.
• The AFA's Bryan Fischer says it is time to "man up" in the "war against Christmas" because it just may be the "most important" battle of them all.
• Finally, I have no idea what on earth this ad is supposed to mean:

For the last several week, Janet Porter and Joseph Farah have been urging activists to spend $30 to send members of Congress a "pink slip" warning them that if they vote to support "government health care, cap and trade, 'hate crimes,' or any more spending" they'll be voted out of office in their next election.

They've recently been highlighting their "success" in all sorts of ways ... some more realistic than others:

If you stacked the 7.8 million pink slips Congress has received warning members away from support of the health-care bill, big spending, hate-crimes legislation and energy taxes, the pile would tower over the tallest buildings in the world.

Laying them end to end would result in a trail that would stretch across two-thirds of the United States from East to West.

And there's no sign the "Send Congress a Pink Slip" campaign is tailing off after two months.

In fact, says Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND, who organized the campaign with WND columnist Janet Porter, it seems to be picking up since a half-dozen members of Congress held a press conference last week to announce their support of the effort – an event that was covered widely by television and print reporters.

Farah said over the weekend the total of pink slips sent to Congress has reached 7.8 million.

Now, 7.8 million pink slips sounds like a lot, but remember that one order through WND sends 535 individual pink slips to Congress.

As such, the 7.8 million individual pink slips represent less than 15,000 individual people.

15,000 people is not insignificant ... but it certainly isn't enough to toss too many members out of Congress for ignoring the campaign's demands.

• Joseph Farah says the Conservapedia Bible project is an "incredibly stupid and misguided initiative."
• NOM has endorsed Doug Hoffman.
• Mitt Romney says "the Iranian leadership is the greatest immediate threat to the world since the fall of the Soviet Union, and before that, Nazi Germany."
• Peter Marshall explains that he is not calling for for the "teaching the biblical foundations of a 'Christian America,' but merely the "biblical foundations of America."
• Finally, Rep. Michele Bachmann says that hate crimes legislation is the reason people hate Congress.

The Los Angeles Times reports that organizers of next year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) have rejected a request by WorldNetDaily to host a panel on the Birther issue:

In one symbolic development, organizers of next year's Conservative Political Action Conference -- the country's biggest annual meeting of activists on the right -- said last week that they had rejected a request to schedule a panel on whether Obama was a native-born U.S. citizen.

"It would fill a room," said event director Lisa De Pasquale. "But so would a two-headed monkey. There really are so many more important issues, and it's only a three-day conference."

CPAC officials said WorldNetDaily's [Joseph] Farah asked the group to hold the panel.

Yeah, CPAC certainly wouldn't want to associate with the lunacy spouted by the likes of Farah or WND now would it?

Joseph Farah addressing CPAC in 2008.

WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah continues to fight back against Jon Henke's efforts to get conservatives to boycott his right-wing rag and takes the battle to the pages of the Washington Times:

Joseph Farah, editor of World Net Daily, questioned Mr. Henke's motives and standing in an interview with The Washington Times.

"In the little bit of time I've had to figure out who Jon Henke is and what the Next Right is, I see it's pretty much a Republican establishment group who has worked for the RNC and the Republican Party and I can certainly understand why a group like that would have problems with World Net Daily," he said. "We are not in anybody's pocket and we don't have to take our cues from them. We never have and never will and that will probably bother some people."

He added about the Next Right: "Just looking at their biographies I see these are not journalists, they are political activists who have their own agendas."

So Henke is a Republican lapdog just doing the bidding of the RNC? That is interesting seeing that Henke is currently targeting the RNC for its dealings with WND and trying, unsuccessfully, to get them to explain:

After I argued that credible organizations on the Right should not support the conspiracy peddling of WorldNetDaily, it was pointed out that the RNC appears to have rented access to the WND email list. So I emailed the RNC to inquire about it and encourage them to stop.

My question was: "Is the RNC really renting the World Net Daily email list?" This was the response from the RNC Press Secretary:

Nice to meet you. Pls note that we have already weighed in on the birther issue -- weeks ago. Thanks.

The Press Secretary then appended a NYT story in which this was their response:

“Chairman Steele believes this is an unnecessary distraction and that the president is a U.S. citizen,” said Gail Gitcho, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. “He wants to move on and continue talking about real and immediate issues that are facing our nation, like health care and the economy. Chairman Steele has other issues to take up with the president having to do with policy, not a birth certificate.”

So, the sum total of the RNC's response was (a) Obama is "a U.S. citizen", but (b) we want to ignore this Birther story, (c) we're not saying whether or not we're working with the Birthers, and (d) we're just going to completely ignore the actual question you asked.

Also, it takes an amazing amount of gall, or a complete lack of self-awareness, for someone like Farah to claim that his critics are "not journalists [but just] political activists who have their own agendas."

Yesterday I wrote a post about Jon Henke's call for a boycott for any conservatives that "choose to support [WorldNetDaily] through advertising and email list rental or other collaboration."

In response to this call, I pointed out that WND founder Joseph Farah has been a staple at right-wing events and that if you plan on boycotting anyone who "collaborates" with WND, you'd have to boycott pretty much the entire conservative movement.

Today, Farah shot back at Henke and those who have taken up his call, as well as Media Matters and yours truly:

Last, but not least – because more will surely be coming on this epic journalistic scandal committed by WND – the always thoughtful folks at People for the American Way got their two cents in by suggesting the out-of-context quote picked up by the Boston Herald should require an all-out boycott of any organization that "will not renounce any further support of WorldNetDaily."

Am I scared?

No, folks. I'm not.

I didn't found WorldNetDaily to be esteemed by my colleagues.

I didn't found it to make People for the American Way or Media Matters happy.

I didn't found it because I wanted to be part of the "conservative" movement.

I founded it because there was a crying need for an independent brand of journalism beholden only to the truth.

And we will continue to pursue the truth no matter where it leads.

I hope you appreciate that WorldNetDaily difference.

First of all, we did not suggest a boycott of "any organization that 'will not renounce any further support of WorldNetDaily'," Henke did:

I think it's time to find out what conservative/libertarian organizations support WND through advertising, list rental or other commercial collaboration (email me if you know of any), and boycott any of those organizations that will not renounce any further support for WorldNetDaily.

Secondly, Farah blames the call for a boycott on this recent article:

Is the federal government building secret camps to lock up people who criticize President Barack Obama?

Will it truck off young people to camps to brainwash them into liking Obama’s agenda? Are government officials planning to replicate the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, using the guillotine to silence their domestic enemies?

...

In a second warning, the Web site Worldnetdaily.com says that the government is considering Nazi-like concentration camps for dissidents.

Jerome Corsi, the author of "The Obama Nation," an anti-Obama book, says that a proposal in Congress "appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany."

Farah insists that the article took Corsi's quote out of context:

Notice the partial quote. What's left out are some key words. Let's look at the full, unexpurgated sentence in Corsi's original story: "The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany."

Apparently, Farah thinks that the words "the proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention" somehow make Corsi's assertion about government concentration camps less crazy.

And, it should be noted, it is not just Corsi who is making these sorts of outlandish claims in the pages of WND - Janet Porter is making them as well. Heck, just a few weeks ago, Porter's entire WND column was dedicated to furthering her belief that there is some conspiracy afoot to kill millions of Americans via a flu vaccine.

Farah says he founded founded WND "because there was a crying need for an independent brand of journalism beholden only to the truth."

And it is thanks to Farah's deep commitment to the truth that we have been graced with some of WND's most amazing revelations ... like the fact that soy makes you gay.

Would you expect anything else? 

I know there's an old adage that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead.

But I don't subscribe to the idea that when evil and foolish people die we should pretend they were something other than evil and foolish.

And Ted Kennedy was evil and foolish.

He wasn't just a politician with whom I disagreed.

He was a rotten man – a wicked man.

...

Over four decades he has served as a kind of "enemy within" the American political system – attempting to elicit the support of the Soviet Union against President Reagan's policies in the 1980s, ignoring the tax-cutting prescription of his elder brother, failing to learn the real lessons of Vietnam, failing even to learn the lessons of his own brother's errors of appeasement in the Bay of Pigs, practicing his own unique brand of plantation racism and blaming America for all the problems of the world. That's Ted Kennedy.

That even one of the 50 states would deem him worthy of serving in the U.S. Senate for most of his life is something of a national disgrace.

Have I mentioned that, next month, Mike Huckabee will be headlining an event that Farah is co-hosting?