Fox's Malkin Invents Conspiracy Theory That Forever 21 Was Intimidated Into Silence On Obamacare

MIKE BURNS/Media Matters For America:

Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin invented a conspiracy theory that the clothing chain Forever 21 was intimidated by the Obama administration into claiming that its decision to cut worker hours was not a result of the health care law.

Media outlets are reporting that Forever 21 is cutting the hours of some full-time employees and reclassifying them as part-time. In a statement on Facebook, the company said that the cuts affect "less than 1% of all U.S. store employees" and have nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act:

Forever 21, like all retailers, staffs its stores based on projected store sales, completely independent of the Affordable Care Act. After a recent evaluation, Forever 21 realigned its staffing needs to better reflect sales expectations. This realignment impacted less than 1% of all U.S. store employees. Forever 21 values all of its employees and made every effort to affect as few employees as possible in this realignment.

Despite the company's explicit refutation and a lack of evidence to support her conspiracy, Malkin argued that Forever 21 was cowed into denying that the Affordable Care Act played a role in its decision to reduce worker hours.

On America Live, Malkin said that Forever 21's statement on its decision was evidence that "the intimidation campaign of this White House has worked rather effectively." Malkin added that companies that have "had the audacity to talk about the connection between Obamacare and cutting benefits and cutting full-time employees to part-time" were "punished," so "of course a company is going to deny that it had anything to do with Obamacare."

Alex Jones Explains How Government "Weather Weapon" Could Have Been Behind Oklahoma Tornado

BEN DIMIERO & OLIVER WILLIS/Media Matters For America

Conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones explained to his audience today how the government could have been behind the devastating May 20 tornado in Oklahoma.

On the May 21 edition of The Alex Jones Show, a caller asked Jones whether he was planning to cover how government technology may be behind a recent spate of sinkholes. After laying out how insurance companies use weather modification to avoid having to pay ski resorts for lack of snow, Jones said that "of course there's weather weapon stuff going on -- we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force."   

Following a long tangent, Jones returned to the caller's subject. While he explained that "natural tornadoes" do exist and that he's not sure if a government "weather weapon" was involved in the Oklahoma disaster, Jones warned nonetheless that the government "can create and steer groups of tornadoes."

According to Jones, this possibility hinges on whether people spotted helicopters and small aircraft "in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things." He added, "if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that's the thing, we don't know."

In April, Jones garnered attention for labeling the Boston Marathon bombings a "false flag" event staged by the U.S. government. Over the years, Jones has endorsed a wide array of paranoid conspiracies, including alleging that the U.S. government carried out or was somehow involved in the 9-11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, and recent mass shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary school and the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

Despite his well-publicized career of pushing conspiracies, Jones is regularly validated by media figures and conservative politicians. Jones' biggest ally has been Matt Drudge, whose heavily trafficked Drudge Report website has linked to at least 244 different articles at Jones' Infowars website since April 2011.

In the midst of the controversy over Jones' comments about the Boston bombings, Drudge announced that he had "privately told friends" that 2013 would be the "year of Alex Jones." 

GOP Lawmaker Pushes Legislation Based On Debunked Gun Conspiracy Theory

By Aviva Shen/Think Progress

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) seized the opportunity presented by the Senate’s water development bill to revive a soundly debunked conspiracy theory that the government is plotting to seize guns and wage war on the populace. In two amendments to the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), Coburn wants to require all government agencies to report the number and types of firearms owned, purchased or lost each year, while repealing the gun ban on roughly 12 million acres managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Senate will vote at 2 pm on Wednesday to pass the measures.

Judging by these amendments, Coburn has not yet let go of his months-long crusade against the Department of Homeland Security, which he believed was stockpiling ammunition in a deliberate attempt to restrict access to the public. Conspiracy sites like Alex Jones’ InfoWars and WND warned that the purchases meant the DHS was “gearing up for huge wars” in an “arms race against the American people.” The agency responded to Coburn’s letter laying out exactly how unexceptional the purchase was, forcing the senator to admit that the amount of ammo was actually lower than in previous years. Even Breitbart.com dismissed the theory as “based more on panic than fact.”

Coburn’s amendment also seems to target the botched “Operation Fast and Furious” gun stings, which conservatives have tried to tie to Attorney General Eric Holder even though an independent investigation cleared him.

Since the background checks deal failed in the Senate, Coburn’s amendments, if passed, would represent the Senate’s second successful gun-related legislation after the Newtown elementary school shooting. Though the background checks proposal, with nearly 90 percent of public support, was considered politically impossible, Coburn’s plan to put more guns on federal lands and legislate based on conspiracy theories may well pass.

Aurora Truther arrested for harassing families

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD/Salon

Police in Portland, Oregon arrested a native of the state yesterday on charges that he has been harassing family members of some of those killed in the Aurora, Colorado shooting. “In the beginning it was this conspiracy theory stuff,” Aurora police spokesman Frank Fania said, “then it went away from the conspiracy theory into personally attacking the families, calling them names and hoping bad things would happen to them.”

As with the Sandy Hook shooting, the Aurora massacare has attracted a host of conspiracy theories, and harassment of victims has gotten so bad that prosecutors there asked the judge toredact the names of victims in court documents to spare them the “relentless contacts by proponents of purported ‘conspiracies.’”

Kevin Michael Purfield, the 45-year-old man arrested in Portland, also posted messages on his Facebook page and blog that seemed to endorse conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the Sandy Hook shooting. Purfield was jailed in lieu of $10,000 bond and will be arraigned in court today.

Jordan Ghawi, whose sister was killed in the Aurora shooting, told Salon last month that he hadreceived death threats and constant harassment from conspiracy theorists. “Some of these people are incessant. They don’t stop,” he said.

Even some presumably credible people, like Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt, have given credence to Aurora conspiracy theories. “We have to admit that this is something that maybe our government is capable of,” Pratt told conspiracy journalist Alex Jones of the notion that government agents carried out the shooting as part of a “false flag” operation. “This was only 12 people murdered [in Colorado], they were good for 400 in Fast and Furious.”

In Newtown, theorists have stalked the town and visited the homes of those who helped victims of the shooting.

A Brief History Of Obama Photoshop Conspiracies

BEN DIMIERO/Media Matters for America

After the White House released a picture of President Obama skeet shooting at Camp David, conservative bloggers were quick to claim that the photo had been altered or created with Adobe Photoshop or a similar graphics editing program. This follows a long, bizarre tradition of conservative media labeling a wide range of pictures and documents related to the president as fraudulent. 

In the past few years, conservatives have accused President Obama and his staff of Photoshopping the short and long-form versions of the president's birth certificate, two separate photos of the president with his family, two Situation Room photos from the day of the bin Laden raid, a photo of Obama throwing a football, and now a photo of the president shooting skeet.

During an interview last month with The New Republic, President Obama was asked if he has ever fired a gun. After the president told the magazine that he goes skeet shooting with guests at Camp David, conservatives -- as well as reporters from more mainstream outlets -- sought proof. In order to quiet the skeptics, on Saturday the White House released a photo of the president shooting clay targets at Camp David in 2012:

Linking to the picture on Twitter, White House senior adviser David Plouffe joked, "let the photoshop conspiracies begin!" While Plouffe was mocking the penchant of some conservatives to turn everything related to President Obama into a conspiracy, some conservative outlets quickly proved his point by doing just that (New York Magazine has produced a comprehensive roundup of the skeet shooting conspiracies).

In an article posted Sunday at conservative website American Thinker -- an outlet frequently touted and cited by Rush Limbaugh --  titled "Seven Reasons Why it's a Photoshop," blogger Michael Harlin concluded, "if he's shooting skeet, then I'm Daffy Duck." (While the headline calls it a Photoshop, Harlin seems to waver on whether the picture was manipulated or merely "staged like everything else in President Obama's life.")

To give you some idea of the level of analysis in the piece, among Harlin's evidence that something is off about the Obama picture is his observation that unlike Obama, "most shooters wear baseball style caps" to help "block unwanted sun in your eyes." 

Obama is wearing sunglasses (or tinted protective eyewear) in the photo.

It's easy to point and laugh at analyses like these, but conservatives' obsession with these Photoshop conspiracies shows the type of paranoid nonsense that has passed for journalism at many prominent conservative outlets during the Obama era. 

In this report we examine right-wing claims that the president's allies have altered:

• President Obama's Birth Certificate(s)
• Pictures Of Obama With Various Family Members
• Situation Room Photos
• Obama Throwing A Football

President Obama's Birth Certificate(s)

In June 2008, responding to widespread chain email conspiracies about nefarious secrets -- including that his middle name was "Muhammed" -- supposedly embedded in then-Senator Obama's birth certificate, his campaign posted a copy of the document on their website. Rather than move on to their next fact-free conspiracy, conservative writers set to work attempting to discredit the document. 

Among the more popular posts about the birth certificate was an extensive "report" by an anonymous writer named "techdude" that conservative blogger Pamela Geller reprinted at her Atlas Shrugs website in July 2008. The report took "techdude" far enough down the rabbit hole that he focused on things like supposedly suspicious border patterns and a nonsensical "heat map" analysis of the document:

By the time conspiracy theorist and WorldNetDaily columnist Jerome Corsi went on Fox & Friends in August of 2008, he was confident enough to declare that the document posted by the Obama campaign was a "false, fake birth certificate." According to Corsi, there had at that point been "good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop."

After the inane birth certificate conspiracies refused to abate for another several years -- which eventually focused on alleging that the short-form certificate posted by the Obama campaign in 2008 was either phony or insufficient proof of the president's birth in Hawaii -- the president released the "long-form" version of his birth certificate in April 2011. Once again, conservatives set to work attempting to discredit the document.

A few hours after President Obama released the long-form, Eric Bolling invited Geller on his now-defunct Fox Business program to assess a poster-sized version of the document with the help of a laser-pointer. During the conversation, Geller announced that the document was "actually not a birth certificate," and Bolling declared that the "green border" on the certificate "had to be Photoshopped in":

Attempting to label the long-form certificate a forgery has since become one of the conservative blogosphere's favorite hobbies. Jerome Corsi has posted numerous articles on the subject at WorldNetDaily, apparently convinced that whoever the Obama administration supposedly hired to conduct the forgery left a series of Da Vinci Code­­-style clues (which Corsi has dubbed "The Obama Code") behind in the document.

Among the anomalies in the long-form certificate highlighted by Corsi were the "distinct form of a smiley face" allegedly present in the signature of the Hawaii Registrar of Vital Statistics as well as a misspelling (clearly just smudged stamp ink) of the word "The" on the registrar stamp:

Pictures Of Obama With Various Family Members

A few weeks before Obama released the long-form version of his birth certificate, conservative writer Jack Cashill posted a column at WorldNetDaily claiming President Obama had been "conspicuously photoshopped" into this picture of his grandparents sitting on a park bench in New York City:

Cashill embedded a YouTube video that purported to have found the "real" version of the photo. In the "real" version, most of the young President Obama is absent, save for his disembodied right leg:

And that might not even rank as the most bizarre instance of conservative writers claiming pictures of a younger Obama with various family members were manipulated.

In one of several articles he wrote promoting a "documentary" positing President Obama is actually the lovechild of communist writer Frank Marshall Davis, Jerome Corsi highlighted the movie's conclusion that President Obama's mother was Photoshopped into this picture posted on the president's Facebook page:

According to the article, "The black hand under Obama's right armpit doesn't match Ann Dunham's right arm... The hand appears to be a remnant from a black male before it was airbrushed." As explained by Corsi and the filmmaker, Joel Gilbert, this black male could very well have been Frank Marshall Davis, a conclusion reached thanks to the following "comparison":

Situation Room Photos

In May 2012, graphic artist Mara Zebest -- who was reportedly "working closely" with Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's quest to prove Obama's birth certificate a forgery -- posted articles at American Thinker claiming that two famous photographs taken in the Situation Room on the day of the Bin Laden raid had been Photoshopped in order to create "The Illusion of Obama's Bin Laden Situation Room Leadership."

Some of Zebest's analysis confusingly hinged on President Obama wearing a jacket featuring fabric panels that looked suspiciously like pants, even though Zebest herself eventually concludes that they are part of his jacket:

Zebest also wondered why Obama had "an abrupt chunk" missing from his ear, as well as a "transparent neck edge":

Most embarrassingly, Zebest wondered why a document in one of the Situation Room photos had been blurred, while a separate document featuring the phrase "Codeword: NOFORN" on a binder in front of Secretary Clinton was left untouched. 

According to Zebest, since the codename for the Bin Laden mission was "Geronimo," leaving this additional detail uncovered possibly represented "another disturbing attempt to casually release confidential information to our enemies."

As we explained at the time, "NOFORN," is not actually a secret codeword: it means the document in question is "Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals."

Six months before Zebest parsed the Situation Room photos, prominent conservative blogger Jim Hoft posted a story at his website headlined, "Swedish Paper: Obama Photoshopped into Famous Situation Room Photo."

Citing a comment thread at Free Republic, Hoft embedded a picture from Swedish tabloid Afton Bladet featuring a caption asking readers "Do you see what is wrong with this picture?" In Hoft's telling, the tabloid concluded that the picture "must be a fake." In reality, the video segment from the Swedish tabloid appeared to be about the internet meme of Photoshopping various people and things into the iconic photo:

"What is wrong with this picture" is that Sad Keanu Reeves was not actually in the Situation Room during the Bin Laden raid. 

Obama Throwing A Football

Around the same time Zebest was picking apart the Situation Room photos for insidious pants-like jackets, a separate Photoshop conspiracy emerged among conservative bloggers revolving around this photo of President Obama throwing a football:

In a post promoted by people like Breitbart.com writer Dan Riehl, a blogger at conservative website Pundit Press explained that while they are "not one for conspiracies," they had serious doubts that the football photo was real. In the blogger's analysis, it was suspicious that Obama was "inexplicably looking upwards" in the picture. Other things held out as evidence were the mysterious "pixels that surround his head and arms." 

After the writer stumbled upon a higher quality version of the photograph, they conceded that  "the photo was probably not doctored, but simply staged (poorly)."

Gun Advocates Resort To Lies About Hitler To Push Their Agenda

By Nathaniel Downes/Addicting Info

There is an old law on the internet. It was coined by Mike Godwin in 1990:

In short, in a heated argument, eventually someone will bring up the Nazi’s, Hitler, etc, and the moment they do, the argument is over because the side that does it has just lost it. This is because, no matter how bad the other side is, nothing can compare to the systematic, methodical and calculated genocide perpetrated by the Nazi’s in their goals for racial purity.
Absolutely nothing.

So, it was amusing when the Drudge Report posted this headline earlier this week:

Andrew Kaczynski@BuzzFeedAndrew

You know who else got a splash on the Drudge Report? pic.twitter.com/dTUNia9y

9 Jan 13

• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

Note the not-so-subtle attempt to compare firearm regulation with Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin. In addition, there is a quote going around the right-wing blogosphere being attributed to Hitler:

This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

This is of course complete bunk. Hitler never said such a thing. Germany had enacted tough gun control laws in 1928, years before the Nazi rise to power. Instead of banning guns, Hitler insteadexpanded gun ownership for German citizens (he’d stripped the citizenship of undesirables already) to levels which one cannot even get inside of the United States. The 1938 German Weapons Act actually relaxed all gun ownership restrictions save on pistols. A German citizen could own a fully automatic weapon complete with grenade launcher, legally, under Nazi control.

Why was Hitler comfortable doing this, when all common wisdom is that dictators eliminate gun ownership? Because Hitler ruled from a popular standpoint. He had little to fear from German Citizens, and for those who would stand against him, he made sure to strip away their citizenship, therefore their rights to firearms. This left him with a well armed nation who worshiped the ground he walked on. This is one of the reasons why the closing days of World War II were so bloody. The majority of German citizens, however, were untrained, so ineffective on the battlefield against the well trained Allied forces.
Hitler did discuss gun confiscation in 1942, but not against his own citizens, but against the people who he had conquered:

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.
Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order.

Everything in it has to do with the fact he conquered them, and they were subject races, little better than slaves.
As for the gun control discussion in the United States, Obama has not discussed eliminating gun ownership. To the contrary, his policies so far have expanded gun ownership opportunities for law abiding US citizens. What is being discussed instead are restrictions on gun manufacturers and importers. The Assault Weapons Ban passed under President Clinton was just that, a regulation on the manufacture of weapons, not on ownership. The problem is, the gun manufacturers lobby, through their front group, the National Rifle Association, the gun manufacturers paint any form of restriction of the manufacture of weapons, any form of weapon, as something unpatriotic, an attempt to eliminate freedom, to enact a police state, and, as Drudge here did, the first step before the rounding up of people into FEMA camps and wholesale extermination of “pure blooded Americans” as one commentator put it.

Godwin’s law is still in effect, and by throwing the Nazi argument, gun advocates have lost the fight.