The Blue State

Conservative newspapers revolt against Coulter

Ann Coulter's appearance on the Today Show, where she viciously attacked the 9/11 widows for standing up to President Bush, helped her book sales a lot.  We all know that.  But that does not mean every conservative supports her.  A number of objective newspapers on the right side of the political spectrum are rejecting her reactionary fringe rhetoric.

Jay Cooper of the Houston Chronicle newspaper, who is a Republican, wrote last week that Ann Coulter does not speak for him:

"To me, Ann Coulter's exercise of her right to free speech is the political equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater."

Also, The Gazette, a conservative newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has decided to drop Ann Coulter's syndicated weekly column.  That decision was made by its editorial staff.

The Shreveport Times of Louisiana is also considering the idea of dropping her column.  According to the newspaper news site Editor and Publisher, that newspaper will leave the decision up to its readers.  Craig Durrett of the Shreveport Times editorial board explained why she might be dropped:

"My opinion: She is more about entertainment andself-promotion, understanding that shock and outrage translate intopublicity that feeds into her quest for media airtime and columnspace," he wrote. "Her comments about several women who were madewidows on Sept. 11, 2001, is a prime example."

As far as I am concerned, every time Coulter or any other crazy conservative pundit, such as Michael Savage for example, says something stupid like that, the Democratic Party receives a spike in donations.  She's an excellent spokesperson for the Republican Party, mostly because she says what many conservatives think but are too afraid to say.
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Other blogs writing about Ann Coulter: Prawn Blog, There Oughta Be a Song, University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog, Grouchy's Liberaltopia, Media Matters, Renegade of Junk, La Shawn Barber's Corner, News Hounds, Left in the Heartland, Loaded Mouth, Tod Goldberg.

Audio: The hang-up on Ann Coulter

Some things just make your day.  The Crooks and Liars blog has the audio of Ann Coulter being hung up on after she was an hour and a half late calling into the Adam Carolla radio show yesterday.

Here is the audio

-------- Partial Transcript ------

CAROLLA: "Ann, you're late baby-doll."

COULTER: "Uh, somebody gave me the wrong number."

CAROLLA: "Mmm.  How did you get the right number -- just dial randomly, eventually got through to our show?"

COULTER: "Um, no.  My publicist e-mailed it to me, I guess after checking with you."

CAROLLA: "Oh, I see."

COULTER: "But I am really tight on time now because I already hadn't --"

CAROLLA: "Alright, well get lost."

CO-HOST: "Did you really just hang up on Ann Coulter?"

CAROLLA: "Yes."

Ann Coulter is the kind of person who would have posters of herself up on her wall.  So it's nice to hear that Adam Carolla couldn't care less about her.  Adam you rock!

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Other blogs writing about this issue: Crooks and Liars, Hip Lad Blog of Eric's, Blah.

Video: Fox and Coulter blame Clinton for North Korea

Today on the Fox News show "Your World," a panel of self-proclaimed experts, including Ann Coulter, spent the entire time blaming former president Bill Clinton for George W. Bush's North Korea mess.  This comes despite the fact that it has been almost six years since Clinton left office.  Here we go again: inept foreign policy minds blaming a mistake that was their own onto someone else:

Click to watch video clip

---------- Partial Transcript --------

COULTER: "That's right.  And they (liberals) also think we shouldn't worry about Iran; and they thought we shouldn't worry about Saddam; and they definitely thought that we shouldn't worry about the Soviet Union.  No, they're just a paranoid little regime, and don't upset the little darlings.  This is always their approach.  There is a bully in the world threatening America -- the liberal response is let's be nice because otherwise he might hit us.  The Republican response is we'll hit him."

Actually, if John F. Kennedy had followed this advice in October 1962, then Ann Coulter would not have been born.  Kennedy was just hours away from caving into the demands of the hawkish ideologues at the Pentagon who wanted to risk a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union by attacking Cuba.  But instead, Kennedy decided to stick to geopolitical realism by being objective.  Nuclear standoffs are too important for leaders to base their policy decisions on knee-jerk reactions.  Too many lives are at stake.

Coulter offered no solutions of her own regarding how to deal with Kim Jong IL's North Korean regime except for attacking them, which would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousand lives in Seoul, South Korea.  All that she did offer was her subjective opinion that Bill Clinton is to blame for everything that is wrong with the world today.  Ann, how about being objective for a change?

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Other blogs writing about Ann Coulter: Gawker, Things that just Piss me Off, The Barking Dingo, Starspangledhaggis, Explore for Truth, Zigzagger, Poetic Justice, Rising Hegemon, The Reaction, Parkdale Pictures, News Coma, Random Thoughts 101, The Moderate Voice, Jabba's Hut, The Carpetbagger Report, The Bully Pulpit.

Coulter's book filled with "textbook plagiarism"

Ann Coulter may have engaged in plagiarism when writing her controversial new book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism."  Expert John Barrie said on three occasions Coulter's book had textbook plagiarism:

John Barrie, the creator of a leadingplagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least threeinstances of what he calls "textbook plagiarism" in the leggy blondpundit's "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book'stext through the company's digital iThenticate program.

Healso says he discovered verbatim lifts in Coulter's weekly column,which is syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, including the FortLauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel and Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.

Barrie, CEO of iParadigms, told The Post that one 25-word passage fromthe "Godless" chapter titled "The Holiest Sacrament: Abortion" appearsto have been lifted nearly word for word from Planned Parenthoodliterature published at least 18 months before Coulter's 281-page bookwas released.

A separate, 24-word string from the chapter "TheCreation Myth" appeared about a year earlier in the San FranciscoChronicle with just one word change - "stacked" was changed to "piled."

Another 33-word passage that appears five pages into "Godless"allegedly comes from a 1999 article in the Portland (Maine) PressHerald.

Meanwhile, many of the 344 citations Coulter includesin "Godless" "are very misleading," said Barrie, who holds a Ph.D. fromthe University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized inpattern recognition.

"They're used purely to try and give thebook a higher level of credibility - as if it's an academic work. Buther sloppiness in failing to properly attribute many other passagesstrips it of nearly all its academic merits," he told The Post.

And as the media web site Editor and Publisher explains, Coulter may have plagiarized a few of her weekly columns last year:

"Her Aug. 3, 2005, column, 'Read My Lips: No NewLiberals,' about U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, includes sixpassages, ranging from 10 to 48 words each, that appeared 15 yearsearlier in the same order in an L.A. Times article, headlined 'LiberalsLeery as New Clues Surface on Souter's Views.' But nowhere in thatcolumn does she mention the L.A. Times or the story's writer, David G.Savage.

"Her June 29, 2005, column, 'Thou Shalt Not CommitReligion,' incorporates 10 facts on National Endowment for theArts-funded work that originally appeared in the same order in a 1991Heritage Foundation report, 'The National Endowment for the Arts:Misusing Taxpayers' Money.' But again, the Heritage Foundation isn'tcredited."

One of two things occurred here.  Either Coulter did engage in plagiarism, which was probably the case.  Or, quite possible, she was just regurgitating GOP talking points -- adding evidence to the fact that the conservative movement is running out of new ideas, and Ms. Coulter lacks originality.

From a personal standpoint, after going to a private high school where you were guilty before proving yourself innocent when it came to plagiarism, and after studying for a few years at one of the top social science schools in the country, most people would be suspended for what Ann Coulter did.
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Other blogs writing about this issue: Copeland Institute for Lower Learning, Media Orchard, Library of Babel, Free Democracy, Liberty Street, News Coma, Orthomom, Neoliberal Agenda, Cephasworld, Pam's House Blend, The Pennsylvania Progressive, Points of View, Americablog, Rising Hegemon, Stalin the Shark, The Rude Pundit, Shakespeare's Sister.

Democratic presidents tougher on companies that hire illegal workers

When a Republican friend of yours claims that Clinton was weak on border enforcement, maybe you should cite the following statistics:

Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaledback 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whichsubsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. Thenumber of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrantsdropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declinedfrom $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.

In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.

Of course, do not expect Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter to admit this anytime soon.

Video: Olbermann confronts Coulter's excerpt about 9/11 widows

The blogosphere has been buzzing about Ann Coulter's smear against 9/11 widows in her latest book, as well as her stubbornness not to apologies on Tuesday's edition of NBC's The Today Show.  Here is a clip of Keith Olbermann responding to Coulter:

I don't even know where to begin.  I do find it ironic though that Coulter is trashing 9/11 families, while still making a fortune off of her own books that invoke 9/11 in just about every chance that she gets as a way of defending her stances.  Talk about ethical inconsistency!

Coulter smears 9/11 widows

Yesterday on the Today Show, host Matt Lauer interviewed conservative personality Ann Coulter about her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism.  Coulter turned what was supposed to be a discussion with Matt Lauer about the issues facing the country into a vicious smear attack against 9/11 widows just because they oppose President Bush.

Watch the video

Limbaugh and Coulter blame illegal immigration on Democrats

Here is Rush Limbaugh unfiltered from a few days ago on the issue of immigration:

"Hey, and while I'm at it, if you're Al Qaeda, come on in over the Southern border. The Democrats will take your votes as well."

In her latest column, Ann Coulter also blamed immigration problems on the Democrats:

"As hardworking as illegal immigrants are when they come here, they areimmediately demagogued by liberals into adopting the victimhood pose sopopular on college campuses. Everybody wants to act like his ancestorswere brought here on slave ships."

It's nice to know that the Dems are so loved.