Journalists conspired to spike the Jeremiah Wright story

Story here in the Daily Caller. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

The mainstream news media is not objective. They’re Democrats. They vote Democrat. They give money to Democrats.

Undercover video of Planned Parenthood selling abortion with misinformation

A new undercover video has been released by Live Action. (H/T The BlogProf)

Details:

The youth-led pro-life group Live Action released a new undercover video today showing staff at an Indianapolis Planned Parenthood clinic using manipulative and medically inaccurate counseling to convince a young woman to have an abortion. This is the third undercover video Live Action has released showing abusive counseling practices at Planned Parenthood of Indiana.

When the woman, purportedly 10-weeks pregnant, asks the clinician, named “Sarah,” when her baby’s heart begins to beat, Sarah replies, “It’s around I think the 8th or the 9th week that you can hear the heartbeat.” The heart actually begins beating 3 weeks and 1 day after conception, according to Moore and Persaud’s well-known textbook The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology. The Planned Parenthood clinician also insists, “It’s not a baby, it’s a fetus,” which, she claims, is “not like a person.”

In the video, Sarah assures the woman that “having an abortion is safer than carrying to term.” The woman asks, “The abortion won’t hurt me from having more kids in the future, will it?” and the counselor replies, “Nope.” But a 2009 study from the Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey recently found that a previous abortion increased a woman’s risk of pre-term birth by 20%, and a 2003 report from the Shanghai Institute of Planned Parenthood Research notes a 55% increased risk of future miscarriages for women who have abortions.

Lila Rose, UCLA student and president of Live Action, says the new footage places Planned Parenthood well outside the medical mainstream. “Planned Parenthood’s counseling is based on its abortion-first mentality rather than the medical facts that women need,” observes Rose. “Planned Parenthood gives vulnerable women misinformation to sell them the abortion.” Indiana informed consent state law requires that women receive accurate medical information before undergoing an abortion.

And remember, Planned Parenthood is supported by the Democrats. The Democrats make sure that abortion stays legal and that Planned Parenthood is adequately supplied with taxpayer funds. Planned Parenthood even has massive surpluses that they can use for political contributions to Democrats to make sure that their ghoulish business stays legal. Although more than a billion of that taxpayer money has gone “missing”.

You can see the other two videos here.

New peer-reviewed paper endorses irreducible complexity and intelligent design

From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

A peer-reviewed paper, “Information and Entropy — Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?,” by University of Leeds professor Andy McIntosh in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics expressly endorses intelligent design (ID) via an exploration of a key question in ID thinking…

Notice that this journal is NOT related to the intelligent design movement in any way – this is a mainstream peer-reviewed journal.

The author of the paper has two goals:

(1) First, he defines the term “machine” (a device which locally raises the free energy) and observes that the cell is full of machines. Such machines pose a challenge to neo-Darwinian evolution due to their irreducibly complex nature.
(2) Second, he argues that the information in living systems (similar to computer software) uses such machines and in fact requires machines to operate (what good is a program without a computer to run it?). An example is the genome sitting on the DNA molecule. From a thermodynamics perspective, the only way to make sense of this situation is to understand that the information is non-material and constrains the thermodynamics so that the local matter and energy are in a non-equilibrium state.

And a bit later:

…the presence of information is the cause of lowered logical entropy in a given system, rather than the consequence.

…[T]here is a perfectly consistent view which is a top-down approach where biological information already present in the phenotypic creature (and not emergent as claimed in the traditional bottom-up approach) constrains the system of matter and energy constituting the living entity to follow intricate non-equilibrium chemical pathways. These pathways whilst obeying all the laws of thermodynamics are constantly supporting the coded software which is present within … Without the addition of outside intelligence, raw matter and energy will not produce auto organization and machinery. This latter assertion is actually repeatedly borne out by experimental observation – new machinery requires intelligence. And intelligence in biological systems is from the non-material instructions of DNA.

You can read more about the paper here.

I wonder what the fallout will be from this bold act?

Luskin writes:

I have no doubt that the editors of International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics will take much heat for publishing this paper. Even though they make it clear that “[t]he reader should not assume that the Journal or the reviewers agree with the conclusions of the paper,” they should be commended for their courage in publishing it it and calling it a “a valuable contribution that challenges the conventional vision that systems can design and organise themselves.” They write, “The Journal hopes that the paper will promote the exchange of ideas in this important topic” — showing that there is hope for true academic freedom on the debate over ID in some corners of the scientific community.

I think it’s good that some of the more honest journals are starting to post these research papers on ID without endorsing them explicitly. It’s important for people to have a free and open debate about these things. I’m sure that the other side is going to try to come back now with a published response – maybe even with some quality research. And that’s how science is supposed to march forward. We don’t want to get into the situation where there are more of these big “Climategate” scandals in biology. Let all the opposing views be heard.