On the July 30 edition of FOX News Channel's weekday business show Your World w/ Neil Cavuto, host Neil Cavuto introduced a panel that included Tom Adkins, who was introduced simply as “Tom Adkins of Remax Services.” In fact, Adkins -- whose appearance on Your World was his fourth in as many weeks -- is a RE/MAX real estate agent from Pennsylvania who has made a career of attacking Democrats for numerous conservative media outlets. Adkins's columns have appeared on right-wing websites AmericanDaily.com and David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com, as well as on CommonConservative.com, of which he is publisher.
Attacking the Democrats is a hallmark of Adkins's columns -- which he has variously used to compare Senator John Kerry and former President Bill Clinton to Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin; to call the United Nations “hostile to American survival”; and to propose, “The Left is vulnerable. The America [sic] Right can crush their socialist Utopian dreams by mounting a take-no-prisoners assault. Terms like 'Treasonous,' 'Un-American,' and 'Traitor' should be used in every sentence.” A statement on the CommonConservative.com home page reads: “Conservatives: Always knew Bush would be great? Think Gephart [sic], Daschle and Clinton are screaming commies? Common Conservative.com is for you.”
Adkins has used each of his regular appearances on Your World to launch vitriolic attacks against Democrats under the guise of economic analysis. FOX News Channel offers no information about Adkins to indicate why the network thinks he is qualified to provide such analysis.
On the July 30 edition of Your World w/ Neil Cavuto, Adkins appeared as a member of a panel that purported to “take the market's temperature” and included FOX News business contributor Stuart Varney, ChangeWave research chairman Tobin Smith, and Parkway Advisors CEO Clay Peterson. Following are some of Adkins's contributions to their discussion:
ADKINS: I thought he [Senator John Kerry] was -- I was listening to Jimmy Carter. Not only was he [Kerry] weak, and foolish, and plain old stupid on economic policy, he was frighteningly scary on international policy. This guy, he essentially said 'I want to add 40,000 troops and then run like hell.' Now, how's that going to inspire the stock market when you can't ensure our national security?
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ADKINS: The market has no confidence right now. This market is undervalued, I think, and the reason why it is is because this market is scared to death of a John Kerry presidency.
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ADKINS: Something else here that I think just has to be said. I think the Democrats have done a fabulous job of essentially just lying to America about the state of the economy. This was not an awful recession where like, you know, half the nation was out of jobs.
CAVUTO: I'm just saying, why is the market doing squat?
ADKINS: Because -- two things. One, people are listening to Democrats, because Democrats once again are successfully lying about the state of the economy.