This revelation should not surprise anyone. Lying is standard operating procedure for the anti-religious fanatics who are pushing same-sex "marriage" on our culture.
A study claiming that gay people advocating same-sex marriage can change voters' minds has been retracted due to fraud.
What's more, the funding agencies credited with supporting the study deny having any involvement.
The study was published last December in Science, and received lots of media attention (including from BuzzFeed News). It found that a 20-minute, one-on-one conversation with a gay political canvasser could steer voters in favor of same-sex marriage. Not only that, but these changed opinions lasted for at least a year and influenced other people in the voter's household, the study found.
Donald Green, the senior author on the study, retracted it on Tuesday shortly after learning that his co-author, UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour, had faked the results. Science posted an official "editorial expression of concern" — a very big deal in the science world — on Wednesday afternoon.
"I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors, reviewers, and readers of Science," Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University, said in his retraction letter to the journal, as posted on the Retraction Watch blog.
This American Life, the hugely popular radio program that featured this study in an episode in April, interviewed Green on Wednesday about the problems with the study.
"There was an incredible mountain of fabrications with the most baroque and ornate ornamentation. There were stories, there were anecdotes, my dropbox is filled with graphs and charts, you'd think no one would do this except to explore a very real data set," Green told the show's host, Ira Glass.
Speaking of anecdotes, Rod Dreher has one that deals with rampant fraud in academic research:
A graduate student friend in medicine told me not long ago that she had decided to take her medical career in a different direction after an internship at a highly prestigious research institution. She said she observed the widespread practice of graduate students fudging data to get desired results - this, with the full knowledge, consent, and even encouragement of their supervisors.
It wasn't major fraud, she said, but it was fraud, and it was done as part of a general ethos of tweaking scientific results to get the outcome needed to guarantee grant money. Nothing political there, but she said the whole experience disillusioned her about the supposed disinterestedness of science.
The method, she said, is supposed to be disinterested, and it is, but science is still carried out by scientists, who are human beings, not robots. She didn't want to be the sort of scientist who got sucked into the maelstrom of ego and competition for grants, fearing that she would start to fudge data because everybody else was doing it.
It makes one wonder what other lies have been told by LGBT fanatics in service to The Narrative...
Also read: Marriage, Marketing, and Intimidation
National Review's Jim Geraghty and Radio America's Greg Corombos discuss current events. Today's topics: Hawaii Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard hammers the Obama administration for obfuscating on radical Islam, Obama preps more tax hikes, and a deflation scandal threatens the New England Patriots.
Surprise: Obama Prepares 'Defiant' State of the Union
At times, one can only sit back and marvel at the fact that this man successfully marketed himself to the electorate as a pragmatist at heart and a would-be healer of sundry societal and political divisions. Barack Obama's background, associations and voting record (such as it existed at the time) clearly demonstrated that he'd lived his adult life as an entrenched ideologue -- the type of person of whom voters are typically suspicious. So he molded his message to elide and disguise his core character. He did so with the complicity of much of the media and has proceeded to allowed the mask to slip further and further as his presidency wears on. As the president prepares to address the nation in his first State of the Union Address since the midterms' landslide Republican victories, White House sources say he'll adopt a "defiant" posture:
President Barack Obama will strike a defiant tone for dealing with the new Republican-led Congress when he addresses Americans next week in his State of the Union speech, laying out areas for potential compromise but ceding little ground to his opponents. Obama's speech at 9 p.m. EST next Tuesday will be the clearest statement yet of his vision for his final two years in office, with both houses of Congress controlled by Republicans for the first time since he took power six years ago...But much like a White House meeting Obama held on Tuesday with congressional leaders, he is not expected to offer major concessions, in keeping with his pledge to act where he can on his own through executive actions and identify areas where the two sides can work together."
The GOP won a sweeping victory in November following a heated campaign in which Obama played a starring role...as the antagonist. The president has reacted to the people's decisive verdict by inaccurately suggesting that the election results don't reflect broader public sentiment, and by telling aides that he finally feels "liberated" to aggressively pursue the liberal agenda explicitly rejected by voters. So a combative national address is par for the course. Obama will reportedly roll out a series of tax increases on "the rich" in order to redistribute their wealth via tax credits and "free" programs for others.
The president has raised taxes throughout his presidency (with Obamacare acting as a key vehicle); in 2013, he exploited the prospect of automatic and massive across-the-board increases to corner Republicans into agreeing to $600 billion in tax hikes on wealthy Americans as part of the fiscal cliff deal. Now he's coming back for more, hyping gimmicks such as the expansion of the death tax on certain families, as well as taxing college savings accounts. Americans for Tax Reform tabulates the total of this round of requested tax increases at $320 billion.
The White House knows full well that these ideas stand zero chance of passage. Republicans didn't just get elected en masse to raise taxes and play along with Obama's cynical class warfare games -- which is precisely what they are:
Also read:
Even Obama's allies in the press are calling his tax hike proposals a political ploy
Obama's New Tax Plan: Destructive Social Engineering
Jim and Greg discuss Mark Pryor's cluelessness on Ebola, how a nurse contracted the deadly virus, and Dem ads falsely blaming GOP spending cuts for Ebola deaths.
Desperate Dems: You know who is responsible for Ebola outbreak in America? The GOP!
Late Sunday night, the Huffington Post's Sam Stein published an interview with National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins who assured the HuffPo scribe that his agency would surely have developed an Ebola vaccine by now if it were not for reductions in his agency's budget after 2004.
"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."
"We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference," he said.
Collins later conceded that experimental vaccines are often not, pardon the expression, a cure-all. An experimental HIV vaccine, he said by way of example, actually made the trial patients sicker due to its suppression effect on the immune system.
Nevertheless, the partisan point that Stein and his cohorts were trying to make was effectively made. The left gleefully jumped at the dubious opportunity to suggest that pro-limited government conservatives are somehow to blame for this deadly Ebola outbreak.
"Gee, thanks, Republicans!" the Democratic strategist Paul Begala exclaimed. "We'd Have Ebola Vaccine if Not for Budget Cuts." He was one of many to proclaim that this witless plea from an agency head for more funding (a not unusual occurrence, to be sure) represented the GOP's Waterloo.
Not all were so impressed with this unsubtle attempt by the allies of expanded government to use the Ebola outbreak as just one more opportunity to demand more government. "This was a really bad strategy," columnist Rich Galen observed. "Oppo researchers find every dumb program CDC/NIH ever funded and make them look silly."
And that is exactly what they did...
Also read:
Can You Honestly Blame Ebola Outbreak on "Republican Cuts" to Health Budgets?
The media is ignoring the whiff of desperation emanating from Democrats
