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NYT Tries To Fact Check Trump’s Tweet on Abortion, Immediately Ends Up Backfiring on Twitter


Reported By Ben Marquis | Published March 1, 2019 at 1:21am

In light of the recent fierce discussion over late-term and even post-birth abortions, Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse introduced a bill called the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would require doctors and medical personnel to make all efforts to save the life of a baby that survived an attempted abortion, rather than kill it or stand idly by while it died naturally.

Incredibly, that bill failed to achieve the necessary votes for passage on Monday, according to The Daily Wire, after only three Democrats joined with Republicans to vote in favor of saving an abortion survivor’s life, while 44 other Senate Democrats heartlessly voted against the measure.

In response to that grotesque and disheartening outcome, President Donald Trump excoriated Democrats in a pair of fiery tweets Monday evening, calling the left “extreme” for being in favor of “executing babies” after they had been born.

Trump tweeted, “Senate Democrats just voted against legislation to prevent the killing of newborn infant children. The Democrat position on abortion is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth.”

He added, “This will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress. If there is one thing we should all agree on, it’s protecting the lives of innocent babies.”

As if on cue, The New York Times set about the next day with an attempt to “fact check” the president’s outraged tweets, but that effort failed in rather stunning fashion — at least on social media.

Just scroll down through the overwhelmingly negative comments on the tweet from The Times.

The article from The Times glossed over what the bill would actually do — “require doctors to use all means available to save the life of a child born alive after an attempted abortion” — while highlighting criticism from opponents who falsely claimed the measure was “aimed at discouraging doctors from performing legal abortions.”

The article also argued that the bill was redundant due to a 2002 law known as the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, though they failed to mention that prior law had no teeth for enforcement.

The Times article then quoted a couple doctors who insisted that babies surviving attempted abortions “hardly ever happens,” and provided various facts and figures about the age of infant viability to support the notion that late-term abortions are exceedingly rare — around 1 percent of all abortions — without mentioning that the 1 percent is still in the ballpark of around 10,000 such deadly procedures per year.

Yet, the Times admitted near the end of the article that aborted babies sometimes are born alive, and that doctors and patients will allow the baby to die naturally, all while being kept “comfortable” — echoing what Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said in early February.

The article also admitted in the eighth paragraph, “The bill would force doctors to resuscitate such an infant, even if the parents did not want those measures.”

The tweet-trackers at Twitchy compiled a couple dozen of the brutal responses they received from Twitter users to highlight just how enormously the “fact check” of Trump’s tweets had backfired on The Times.

Countless users wondered why Democrats would vote against the bill if the issue the bill addressed was truly so “rare” and uncommon, as if that were indeed the case, a vote in favor of it really wouldn’t matter.

One user referenced Gov. Northam’s despicable commentary, and tweeted, “How can you work for the NYTimes and not know what Northam said, which kicked all this off? He specifically talked about newborns being born and then a discussion on what to do with them. This is why you’re fake news.”

Still another user hinted at Northam’s remarks and noted, “‘rarely born alive’ I guess that’s okay then! As long as they’re just rarely murdered after they’re already born and alive! Hopefully they’re kept comfortable!”

There isn’t near enough room here to include all of the saddened or snarky replies to The Times, but suffice it to say, the effort to “fact check” the president’s righteous and justified anger while defending Democrats voting against saving the life of newborn infants did not go over well, at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ben Marquis
Contributor, Commentary
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Ben Marquis is a writer who identifies as a constitutional conservative/libertarian. His focus is on protecting the First and Second Amendments. He has covered current events and politics for Conservative Tribune since 2014.

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Transgenders in Turmoil as Trump Admin Moves for Huge Change to Definition of the Sexes



Reported By Benjamin Arie October 21, 2018 at 4:53pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/transgenders-turmoil-trump-admin-moves-huge-change-definition-sexes/

A sign on a transgender bathroom

A report citing a government memo suggests the Trump administration is considering strict definitions of what gender a person can claim. (John Arehart / Shutterstock)

The best policies are based on reality, common sense and evidence — a notion that even liberals used to agree with.

Take the global warming debate, for instance. One of the main arguments of the left has been that there’s scientific evidence pointing to man-made climate change, and we would be “science deniers” if we ignored it. It turns out that the global warming proof is more flimsy than they claimed, but at least they wanted leaders to make decisions based on evidence and science, imperfect as it is.

Now, it seems liberals have even thrown science out the window. Rejecting both evidence and common sense in favor of politically motivated pseudoscience, the left has been working overtime to push a different agenda.

No, not in favor of global warming, but rather transgenderism.

This push was especially strong during the last presidency. Even Newsweek recently admitted that President Barack Obama and his administration “worked to loosen the definition of gender,” and adopted an anything-goes approach that encouraged people to self-identify as whatever sex they wanted.

“A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth,” explained The New York Times.

The result? Gender debates became almost comical, with impossible-to-remember abbreviations like “LGBTTTIQ+” and nonsensical gender options such as “pansexual genderfluid nonbinary” being pushed as the new normal.

But the Trump administration may be pushing back.

According to a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services that was obtained by The Times, the administration is seriously considering defining gender in a much more traditional — and common sense — way.

“The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth,” the newspaper reported.

In simple terms, HHS is saying something that conservatives have long insisted: “Transgender” isn’t a definable gender, and you can’t magically switch your sex between male and female, no matter how many pills you take or invasive surgeries you undergo. One of the big problems with the Obama-era guidelines was that definitions were left vague.

“The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined ‘on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable,’” The Times noted.

Biology? Objective? Grounded in science? Gasp — how dare they!

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the HHS memo states, according to The New York Times, which has not made the full memo public.

“The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence,” the cited memo reportedly says.

In other words, you can’t just change your birth certificate to say whatever you want, or constantly invent new sexual identity terms. Call it common sense.

“The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with,” wrote The Times.

Unsurprisingly, mainstream media outlets rushed to paint the memo — which is still an unapproved proposal — as ominous and terrible for the estimated 0.6 percent of Americans who identify as “transgender.”

“‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration,” the scary-sounding title of The Times piece declared. Left out of that headline was the fact that the people themselves are fine; it’s the definition that is being looked it.

“Trump mulls narrowing transgender rights,” declared another purposely frightening headline from The Washington Examiner.

Further, the ability of a person to personally identify or act a certain way doesn’t disappear. If you go around referring to yourself as “transgender” or “Queen Amidala” or a “trans-species Velociraptor” that’s your own business. You still have rights. Just don’t expect official records — or medical experts — to back you up.

A 20-year-old can go around telling people that he’s 1,000 years old; he just can’t modify his legal birth certificate to say this or use it to go apply for senior citizen benefits. Regardless, he still has the same rights any other 20-year-old has.

The reality is that we don’t need ever-increasing special check boxes to define people if we actually apply legal rights evenhandedly. Your rights as an American citizen and a human being don’t suddenly disappear just because of a memo.

Liberals may be obsessed with special rights, but here’s an idea: Let’s try equal rights instead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Benjamin Arie
Contributor, Commentary
Benjamin Arie has been a political junkie since the hotly contested 2000 election. Ben settled on journalism after realizing he could get paid to rant. He cut his teeth on car accidents and house fires as a small-town reporter in Michigan before becoming a full-time political writer.

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Reports: Kavanaugh Has Found 1982 Calendar, Detailed Entries Help Clear His Name


Reported By Benjamin Arie | September 23, 2018 at

5:26pm

The last-minute attempt to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as the next Supreme Court justice has just hit a serious snag. Facing damaging but almost completely unsubstantiated claims that he acted improperly with a girl back when he was a teenager, the conservative nominee has dug into his personal archives to defend himself.

Up until now, the vague accusations made by Christine Blasey Ford had only resulted in a “he said, she said” stalemate. Liberals insisted that Blasey Ford’s story of a bad encounter at a drunken party be believed, while conservatives have pointed out that the nearly 40-year-old claim is impossible to verify.

Finally, Kavanaugh has presented tangible evidence that the accusation doesn’t hold up.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the judge has found old calendars from the period when the unproven groping allegedly took place — and they appear to support his claim that the incident didn’t happen.

“Kavanaugh has calendars from the summer of 1982 that he plans to hand over to the Senate Judiciary Committee that do not show a party consistent with the description of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford,” explained The Times.

“The calendar pages from June, July and August 1982, which were examined by The New York Times, show that Judge Kavanaugh was out of town much of the summer at the beach or away with his parents,” the newspaper continued.

“When he was at home, the calendars list his basketball games, movie outings, football workouts and college interviews. A few parties are mentioned but include names of friends other than those identified by Dr. Blasey.”

Here is perhaps the biggest nail in the coffin for Blasey Ford’s already-flimsy story: The calendar contains entries for parties, but none of the names included in those entries match the names Blasey Ford listed.

That any names were included in his calendar entries for parties shows Kavanaugh was remarkably thorough about recording his social schedule.

That fact is yet another point in favor of Kavanaugh and against his accuser. The woman behind the claim has admitted that she can recall almost nothing specific about the incident, including its location, time, or other people involved.

The few names brought up by Blasey Ford have refuted her story and indicated that they don’t remember a party with both her and Kavanaugh.

“Mr. (Mike) Judge has told the Judiciary Committee that he remembered no such incident and had never seen Judge Kavanaugh behave in such a way,” explained The Times, referring to one alleged witness of the drunken party.

“The only other two people identified as being in the house at the time, but not the bedroom, have also said in recent days that they did not recall the incident. Patrick J. Smyth said he did not remember such a party or see any improper conduct by Judge Kavanaugh.”

“Leland Keyser, a former classmate of Dr. Blasey’s at Holton-Arms, said she did not know Judge Kavanugh or remember being at a party with him,” stated the newspaper.

Accusations of this type are of course serious, and conducting due diligence is part of the vetting process for anyone nominated for a powerful position. There comes a point, however, when weak and impossible to prove allegations need to be put to rest. Blasey Ford may genuinely believe that something like the incident she described did happen; she may be telling the truth about a teenage trauma affecting her for decades, too.

The problem is that there is zero evidence it was Brett Kavanaugh who did what she claims, and no way short of a time machine to prove her accusations.

By all accounts, Kavanaugh has been a responsible and thoughtful family man and legal scholar for the entirety of his adult life — and that record needs to stand far above one person’s increasingly shaky claim.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly claimed that Judge Kavanaugh’s 1982 calendar does not contain any names identified in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim against Kavanaugh. The calendar does reference Mike Judge, a friend of Kavanaugh and, according to Blasey Ford, a witness to the alleged assault. Judge’s name, however, is not mentioned in reference to any parties, while other names are — none of which have been identified by Blasey Ford. We apologize for the mistake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Benjamin Arie
Contributor, Commentary
Benjamin Arie has been a political junkie since the hotly contested 2000 election. Ben settled on journalism after realizing he could get paid to rant. He cut his teeth on car accidents and house fires as a small-town reporter in Michigan before becoming a full-time political writer.

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OPINION COMMENTARY: NYT Credibility Shot: Senior Official Turned Out To Be Intern in Past Hit Piece


Commentary By Ben Marquis | September 6, 2018 at 3:05pm

The New York Times published an opinionated hit piece against President Donald Trump on Wednesday, but what else is new?

The anonymously written op-ed article, titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” was purportedly penned by a “senior official” in Trump’s administration. It asserted that a collection of other “senior officials” are part of a broader, right-leaning “resistance” inside the administration that is “thwarting” the president’s “misguided impulses” to save the country from Trump’s petty recklessness.

This, even as the supposed “senior official” author admitted that many of Trump’s policies “have already made America safer and more prosperous,” though the author insisted that was the case in spite of, and not because of, Trump himself.

Unsurprisingly, the op-ed sparked plenty of controversy and outrage on all sides and provoked conspiratorial conversations about exactly who this anonymous “senior official” is.

Using clues such as linguistic mannerisms and specific words contained within the article, guesses have ranged from Vice President Mike Pence to a number of different cabinet-level officials to other truly “senior” officials in the top tier of the administration’s several agencies and departments.

But if Trump’s White House has engaged in a “witch hunt” of its own to identify the anonymous author of The Times’ hit piece, an op-ed in Townhall suggested the hunters avert their gaze from the cabinet and top tier of the administration and search a little bit lower on the totem pole to find the potentially seditious insider.

That Townhall piece noted that The Times has a history of inflating and over-exaggerating the stature or seniority of its anonymous sources from within the government, and pointed to a rather glaring example of the practice that occurred in 2011.

At that time, the explosive growth in natural gas energy production was gaining steam in large part because of technological progress in a new method of drilling known as hydraulic fracturing. Better known as “fracking,” it was widely opposed by the left, to include the Obama administration and its liberal mouthpieces at The Times.

A writer for The Times published a series of anti-fracking articles in the paper, one of which anonymously cited emails from three “senior” insiders — an energy industry analyst, a federal analyst and a senior administration official — who were all opposed to the shale energy boom and the industry’s methods used to extract it.

A Senate investigation into the matter determined that the emails had all originated in the federal government’s Energy Information Agency, and even better than that, all the emails from the three “different” sources had actually come from just one person employed by the EIA.

On top of that, the one EIA employee was nowhere close to truly being a “senior” official of any sort. At the time he wrote the first email quoted by The Times, he was actually an intern with the EIA. He had been promoted one rung on the ladder to be an entry-level analyst when he wrote the others.

A deeper dive into that particular scandal was well documented in a 2011 article published by Energy In Depth, including a look at how harshly The Times’ own ombudsman judged the newspaper’s product.

There’s no way of knowing who The Times’ source is in this case, but history suggests the possibility that The Times has similarly exaggerated or inflated the seniority of this anti-Trump “senior official” who is part of a resistance movement inside Trump’s own administration.

The Times editors — who stated in an introduction to the op-ed that they know who the author is — have refused to reveal that individual’s identity, ostensibly to protect the writer from potential blowback or career-ending punishment.

Perhaps just as likely is that they are protecting that person’s identity because it will be quite embarrassing for them if it is revealed that the “senior” official is in actuality some Trump-hating mid-level bureaucrat or low-level intern.

That’s if the op-ed was even written by a member of the administration at all, and wasn’t just some piece of fiction cooked up by The Times itself to smear Trump. (Hard as that might be to believe, it can’t be completely ruled out, given how fake some of the media’s “fake news” stories have been proven to be.)

Keep this in mind the next time somebody tries to assert how credible The New York Times is, when in reality it’s staffed by narrative-driven, leftist hacks who care more about pushing an agenda than actually reporting the news.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ben Marquis
Contributor, Commentary
Writer and researcher. Constitutional conservatarian with a strong focus on protecting the Second and First Amendments.

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