Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler today again criticized his Post colleague and American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen for continuing to promote the debunked claim that President Obama is not sufficiently concerned about U.S. national security.

In a Sept. 10 Washington Post opinion piece, Thiessen — citing a recent “study” finding that Obama has attended about half his personal daily intelligence briefs (PDBs) — claimed that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Obama’s right-wing critics picked up the attack and on Monday, Kessler wrote a scathing article, calling the claim “bogus” and “misleading.” “Obama reads his PDB every day, but he does not always require an in-person briefing every day,” Kessler noted.

This particular practice has precedent with previous commanders-in-chief, including Ronald Reagan, whom Kessler noted chose to forgo the CIA in-person brief 99 percent of the time (Thiessen had compared Obama’s practice to President Bush’s, claiming Bush “almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”)

Instead of accepting the obvious defeat, Thiessen dug in, responding on the Post’s website today saying basically, “Yeah, well. … 9/11!”:

Kessler ignores one giant difference between then and now: Sept. 11, 2001.

Comparing lax presidential briefing habits before and after 9/11 is like comparing lax presidential security habits before and after the Kennedy assassination. After terrorists killed 3,000 people in our midst, everything changed — and the president’s daily intelligence meeting took on dramatically increased importance. President Bush made it a priority to sit down with his senior intelligence advisers every day to discuss overnight intelligence on threats to the country. President Obama has not.

Hopefully putting the matter to rest, Kessler was again forced to debunk his colleague, calling Thiessen’s response “an interesting, if not very factual argument. (Reagan, for instance, suffered the loss of 241 servicemen in Beirut as a result of a terror act.).” But Kessler also noticed something else. In his original piece, Thiessen claimed he received his data on Obama’s PDBs from a “conservative” research organization. But in his response to Kessler, that story changed:

We also find it curious that he now discloses the study was done at his request, by his business partner, and that he now describes the Government Accountability Institute as “nonpartisan” whereas in his earlier column he had called it a “conservative investigative research organization.”

Upon reflection, we now realize that the GAI report had a bit of a math problem. The White House public schedule does not list meetings on weekends, so Obama automatically loses 28 percent of the “meetings” because of that fact. Thiessen had earlier claimed Bush had oral intel briefings six days a week–though no actual schedule is available to confirm that–so at the very least GAI should have subtracted one a day week from Obama’s numbers to make a valid comparison.

“We had nearly given this data Four Pinocchios and in restrospect we were perhaps too generous with Three,” Kessler wrote, adding in a tweet today at Thiessen, “9/11 is not excuse to wipe out history.”

At the U.N. General Assembly this morning, President Obama spoke forcefully in favor of free speech and human rights more broadly, saying “Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views — even views that we disagree with.” The General Assembly was, as it turns out, an appropriate venue for the President’s words: according to a new report, diplomatic engagement with U.N. member states have moved important elements of the organization more in line with universal ideals about human rights.

The study, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, tallies vote counts in the U.N. General Assembly and Human Rights Council and determined how many states voted with the EU bloc, with which the U.S. aligns almost identically (according to the report) on human rights issues like condemnations of atrocities and endorsement of basic legal rights protections. The study found “that there is a genuine shift [since 2008] towards Western human rights positions in UN forums, extending beyond the Syrian case, but that this is built on fragile foundations.”

While some of this shift can be explained by repressive Arab states aligning with the West on Syria votes, this is by no means the entire shift. Indeed, the vote counts in the General Assembly and Human Rights Council suggests a genuine global shift in favor of Western views that splits the influential BRICS — India, Brazil and South Africa backing pro-rights resolutions and Russia and China opposing them:

[T]here have been glimmers of progress in diplomacy on other countries on the General Assembly’s agenda. In recent years, the EU and U.S. have supported annual resolutions tackling the state of human rights in Myanmar, Iran and North Korea. Although the number of countries voting in favor of the Burmese resolution remained roughly level over the last two years, the number backing the Iran resolution jumped from 78 to 89 and that on North Korea from 106 to 123. Most of the Arab countries that supported the Syrian resolutions did not back the West in any of these cases (Gulf Arab countries avoid taking on Iran directly at the UN) although Libya and Tunisia did vote for them. U.S. and European diplomats can take credit for building up human rights coalitions beyond Syria in the General Assembly. The same is true at the Human Rights Council.

One of the report’s authors gives significant credit for the changing vote counts to the Obama administration’s more engaged approach to the U.N., saying “the Bush administration still adopted a semi-detached approach to multilateral institutions. Since 2009, the Obama administration has adopted a much more engaged posture and the U.S. and Europeans have gradually strengthened their position at the UN.” Further, Ted Piccione, an expert on the United Nations at the Brookings Insitute, has written that “human rights is rising on the agenda of the international community and leading to surprising, albeit slow, progress” as a consequence of (in part) “determined leadership from the United States and other democracies.”

Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, by contrast, have publicly embraced extreme anti-U.N. conspiracy theories. Top Romney adviser and potential Romney administration Secretary of State John Bolton was, as Ambassador to the U.N. for President George W. Bush, famously contemptuous of the organization.

After the anti-American protests erupted in the Middle East earlier this month, Pam Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) decided to re-up its anti-Muslim ad campaign in New York’s subway system. The ad, borrowing from an Ayn Rand quote, is meant to imply that Muslims are savages.

New York City transit authorities did not want to display the ads but a federal court said refusing the ads would violate AFDI’s First Amendment rights. But now that the ads are up, New Yorkers are taking matters into their own hands, writing “RACIST” and “HATE SPEECH” over the ads in certain subway stations:

AFDI is trying to run a similar campaign in the Washington DC Metro but authorities there have so far been successful at blocking the campaign “out of a concern for public safety.” (HT: Mondoweiss)