Ouch.

Ten pages into “The Rogue” he has already blown his cover, printing a map to the Palins’ isolated house. He describes having gone to the Palin door with a signed copy of his book about Alaska, “Going to Extremes,” and exploiting this encounter to engage the family’s older son, Track, in conversation. But had Mr. McGinniss been a good neighbor, he would have delivered that book without showing up unannounced.

[...]

Although most of “The Rogue” is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, Mr. McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident” and “a friend.”

And these stories need not be consistent.

And they’re not. The Miami Herald’s newsroom erupted into a civil war over whether or not to print the yellow claims made in McGinniss’s tawdry book.

McGinniss moved in next door to the Palins and could spy on them from his deck.

The McGinniss pile on continues.

Brad Hanson, a former business partner of Todd Palin’s, refuted a claim in The Rogue that he had an extramarital affair with Sarah Palin.

Hanson said in a statement:

This is the same old story that went around in 2008. It is a complete and outright lie. Todd and Sarah Palin have been good friends for many years, and in fact we still own property together. We sold a former joint business venture for business reasons, nothing more. These attacks are shameful and those making them seem to be out only to destroy good people and make money doing so.

Politico's Molly Ball

The NYT’s The Caucus calls McGinniss’ credibility into question. When an accused murderer questions your character, that’s a problem:

Mr. McGinniss won wide acclaim for writing about politics with his first book, “The Selling of the President 1968.” But his later career as an author of mostly true-crime books has featured a series of controversies. Jeffrey MacDonald, an army doctor accused of murder who had cooperated with Mr. McGinniss for a book about the trial, accused him of dishonestly coercing him and later betraying him in the book. He was accused of plagiarism after his 1993 book about Senator Edward M. Kennedy, “The Last Brother.”

The NYT also previously accused McGinniss of making up quotes for his biography on Edward Kennedy:

Mr. McGinniss — a best-selling author who has been involved in controversy before — interviewed neither Senator Kennedy nor Mrs. Shriver. Although “The Last Brother” is called nonfiction, much of the dialogue and internal monologues are compelling enough to be fictional — and they are.

The proprietor of Say Anything calls McGinniss a “slimeball” after he attempted to bully him into giving dirt (which didn’t exist) on the Palin/Heath family. It’s a disgusting account of how McGinniss attempted to victimize a family — who were already dealing with their daughter’s victimization at the hands of a pedophile — to further his smears on Palin.

The Atlantic's Scott Stossel

Even more: Stream of Jim reports that McGinniss not only has a problem with writing things that are true, but also struggles with actually writing his own words. He takes down Business Insider on their asinine Palin-had-an-affair smear:

McGinniss has been accused of plagiarism by author William Manchester and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and his publisher settled a dispute over his book Fatal Vision rather than continuing in court. For a writer that William F. Buckley said used ‘elaborate deception’ – these things can help the reader to understand some sense of the how people have viewed his work in the past.

In light of these damning details on McGinniss’ character, NY Daily News (known for their classy covers) reported on the matter as though it were based in any real fact. No mention was made in their article of McGinniss’s reputation — in fact, the irony is that a book on McGinniss’s legitimately sketchy reputation would prove a far more interesting read than the drummed-up Palin falsehoods. An ego-manicial author who can’t author his own thoughts, who plays Peeping Tom next to her daughter’s bedroom window in his obsessive quest to publish the equivalent of bathroom gossip material and get his name in the headlines.

Another man attempting to siphon off Palin’s fame to make a name for himself. Manly.

That any media outlet would give this failed writer more print than it takes to ridicule his unintentionally comical existence says more about the publication than it does him — which is why there are so few media outlets doing so. They don’t want to look silly for taking falsified bait.

“I hope he [Weiner] comes after me. Look up my IP. Nothing to hide here. I’d voluntarily hand anything they want over. Check me and my IP. Anything. I did not post that tweet.”

Twitter user Dan Wolfe (known as @patriotusa76) has clarified several details concerning his involvement in the “Weinergate” scandal, insisting that a thorough investigation of the tweets in question will prove he did not compromise the verified Twitter account of Congressman Anthony Weiner (D, NY-9). In a series of direct messages on Twitter, Wolfe explains how he found the offensive image sent from Weiner’s Twitter account, his previous tweets about accounts followed by the Congressman, and his desire for law enforcement to investigate his online activity that night.

Asked whether he followed Congressman Weiner or the recipient of the controversial tweet, Wolfe states he “wasn’t following either of them ever.” He named several other twitter uses who he regularly communicates with, explaining, “Our twitter group mentions him a lot because he appears in media a lot and says things we hate a lot. If he wasn’t saying anything, we wouldn’t comment.” Wolfe claims that on May 27th, the date the tweet went public, he navigated to the @RepWeiner account by clicking on Weiner’s username on a retweet in his Twitter stream. The tweet in question was the much-discussed one where Weiner announced the time of his upcoming appearance on the Rachel Maddow show with the hashtag #Thats545InSeattleIThink. “I found the 5:45 tweet weird,” Wolfe says.

(more…)

The New York Daily News published a column Tuesday on the fabricated cartoon controversy – except they saw no reason to hyperventilate as Lawrence O’Donnell did last night, and bring race into a situation where it clearly doesn’t belong.

In the cartoon, posted over the weekend, the First Lady is sitting at a dinner table with President Obama.

“I’ve stepped up my efforts to control America’s eating habits by telling restaurants to lower portion sizes and fat content,” a double-chinned Michelle Obama says, referring to her anti-obesity campaign, which celebrated its one-year anniversary last week.

The President, pictured with huge ears and sitting next to her in front of a tiny plate of vegetables, responds, “Michelle, I want to get reelected. What you’re doing is only going to annoy a lot of people.”

The First Lady responds, “Shut up and pass the bacon!”

[...]

“Michelle Obama’s work on nutrition issues has gone beyond the normal First Lady advocacy into the realm of shaping national policy, so, on this issue, I think she is fair game for criticism,” Flynn [Mike Flynn, Editor, BigGovernment.com]  added.

A local news station in Cleveland also reported on the story:

Controversy over a new conservative slam against the white house. A cartoon features an overweight Michelle Obama eating burgers while promoting healthier eating to the President. The creators say nothing racist here, just a jab at what they call the hypocrisy in the first lady’s campaign against obesity, telling people how and what to eat.

(more…)

Too busy praising the non-virtue of “tolerance,” decrying American “racism,” and writing puff pieces like this one. In the meantime, the New York Daily News is eating their lunch:

Years before his latest real-estate project ignited an uproar, Sharif El-Gamal racked up at least seven run-ins with the law, including a bust for patronizing a prostitute.

“I regret many things that I did in my youth. I have not always led a perfect life,” El-Gamal, 37, said in a statement to the Daily News.

His most recent arrest was for a Sept. 10, 2005, assault on a barber who sublet a Manhattan apartment from El-Gamal’s brother, Sammy.

The brothers and another man went to the apartment that afternoon to retrieve back rent from Mark Vassiliev, criminal and civil court records show.

El-Gamal allegedly cursed at Vassiliev, called him the Arabic curse word “sharmouta” and punched him in the face, breaking his nose and cheekbones.

When he was arrested, El-Gamal denied he socked Vassiliev, but conceded, “[Vassiliev's] face could have run into my hand,” court papers say.

Fox News piled on: (more…)

Thirty little buses in New York City…my, how they roll. Through our organization Stop Islamization of America, Robert Spencer and I have placed ads on New York City buses, offering help to Muslims wishing to leave Islam. Our ads ran previously on buses in Miami, but in New York they’ve received international notice. The religious liberty bus ad campaign was covered in the last few days by every major network: ABC, NBC, CBS (New York), CNN and FOX, as well by Associated Press, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Britain’s Daily Mail, Russian television, and many more–too many news outlets to list here.

It’s no surprise that most mainstream media outlets that have covered the story have just repeated talking points from the unindicted co-conspirator, Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). AP said: “some Muslims are calling the ads a smoke screen for an anti-Muslim agenda.” Which Muslims are saying that? Farther down in the article we find out: (more…)

Newspapers and their online cousins are the new science textbooks. At least that’s where the students in my introductory geology class at Brooklyn College appear to be learning about global warming, pollution, and other science issues of general interest.

The students do, however, have strong views on which news sources are reliable. Semester after semester the majority of the students in my class tell me that they trust The New York Times as a source of information far more than they do The New York Post or Daily News, primarily based on their belief that the latter two are overly sensationalistic. But can their belief withstand closer scrutiny?

The Quiz

As a means of challenging my students’ views, I present them with two newspaper excerpts, without identifying their origins, that paint starkly different pictures of the same issue, the safety of tube wells in Bangladesh. (These shallow wells are used to obtain water for drinking and irrigation.) One excerpt, referring to the wells, reads: (more…)

Some among the heaviest of Obama Kool-Aid drinkers are awakening to the performance gap between the campaign myth of Obama versus the reality of his inability to govern. America’s Fourth Great Awakening has begun.

Historians widely recognize three Great Awakenings. The First Great Awakening (1730’s-1740’s) spread across the United Kingdom and the Colonies with a religious fervor among what became the mainline Protestant denominations: Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc. The Second (1790-1840’s) witnessed Christian conversions, camp meetings, and evangelical excitement giving birth to the Holiness movement and, indirectly, the spread of a new sect – the Mormons. The Third (1840’s-1900’s), interrupted by the Civil War, was a period of religious enthusiasm that fostered social activism, as illustrated by the Social Gospel Movement.

Today, we’re entering the Fourth Great Awakening. It’s the revival of the Obama Kool-Aid drinkers from their stupor of infatuation with candidate Barack Obama. Mort Zuckerman is their new poster boy, and his newfound sobriety is clearly painful for him. (more…)