Bailouts

If banks and credit card companies are willing to lend you money, does that mean you're not broke?

According to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, America is doing just fine financially because we're having no problem borrowing money:

Does a sycophantic devotion to the President make liberal media members lose all connection to reality?

Before you answer, consider that on Friday, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift and liberal radio host Bill Press actually said on PBS's "McLaughlin Group" the U.S. auto industry is stronger than it ever was (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Something rather shocking happened on MSNBC Wednesday.

Not only was a compliment given to a Republican, but on the "Dylan Ratigan Show," it was said by a Washington Post columnist about a GOPer that is actually admired by conservatives (video follows with transcript and commentary):

President Obama and the Democrats have spent trillions of dollars in the past two years without successfully growing the economy enough to produce jobs.

Despite this immutable fact, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Tuesday's "Hardball" said government spending is a far better stimulus than cutting taxes (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Monday, President Obama announced that 2011's budget deficit is going to be an all-time high $1.65 trillion.

In an interview with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly later in the day, ABC's George Stephanopoulos predictably blamed the red ink on former President George W. Bush (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In his lifetime, Princeton economics professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has published 20 books, over 200 papers, and since the year 2000 two columns a week at the New York Times.

Clearly without understanding the irony of his question, the man once accused by the Gray Lady's ombudsman of possessing a "disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers" asked his readers Monday, "How can voters be so ill informed [sic]?":

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey said Monday that MSNBC's Chris Matthews is slipping out of touch with reality.

After reading New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's idiotic piece Friday, I think the same can be said of him:

Reporting on President Obama's speech to the Chamber of Commerce Monday, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer sloppily labeled the Chamber as "conservative" in narrating the conflict between the business federation and the President. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, though it may have enjoyed the "conservative" label in the past, has supported major liberal legislation over the past few years in the name of being "pro-business."

"Two years, big business and President Obama were at odds," Brewer introduced the segment. "The boiling point – when Obama accused the conservative Chamber of Commerce of refusing to disclose the millions it spent on campaign ads to defeat Democrats."

The Chamber sent a letter to the U.S. Senate in February of 2009 imploring it to pass the Stimulus bill, H.R. 1. "The legislation is not perfect," the Chamber confessed, adding that "parts of the bill should be modified or eliminated. However, the Chamber urges the Senate to approve H.R. 1, and encourages Congress and the Administration to work on a conference report that provides timely, targeted, and temporary economic stimulus."
 

The search for ways to rehabilitate the Obama administration in the eyes of the public is seemingly a never-ending enterprise at the Associated Press.

Oh, they slip up occasionally. Late last week (covered yesterday at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), in an item primarily about how Congress really, really can't stop planned stimulus spending (uh-huh), the wire service's Brett J. Blackledge let slip that President Obama's stimulus program is "politically unpopular." In noting that the government wasn't able to spend the funds as fast as intended, Blackledge also indirectly confirmed an obvious truth the President admitted to the New York Times that he needed almost two years to learn: "there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects."

So what do you do if you're "The Essential Global News Network" and need to recover? Why, you find something that appears to be working (sort of), and rename it "stimulus." Voila! See how easy that is?

The AP's Jeannine Aversa, with the help of her item's headline, performed the sleight-of-hand today:

The President that expanded the role, scope, and size of the federal government more than all that came before him or since is unquestionably Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yet on Tuesday, moments after calling Congresswoman Michele Bachmann a "balloon head," MSNBC's Chris Matthews actually said FDR "bailed out capitalism in the '30s" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In a Monday Associated Press dispatch, reporter Tom Krisher virtually celebrated the idea that Government/General Motors "may be Number 1 again," with happy talk of "dethroning" and "overtaking" Toyota.

Nowhere did Krisher mention the inconvenient fact that Toyota's revenues dwarf GM's to the point where comparing unit sales is an absurd waste of time. Specifically:

Trick? Or "tweak"?

On Friday, a Reuters report at CNBC noted the Federal Reserve's journey into the accounting and reporting twilight zone earlier this month. In doing so, it conducted a clinic in how to make unreality look acceptable and make a dangerous situation appear palatable.

In the el bizzarro world at Reuters and those the wire service interviewed for its article:

• A change in how one accounts for things can magically make a functionally insolvent entity solvent again.
• Such a change can also mean that an entity which has run out of cash and has to beg for funds no longer has to.
• Calling a genuine erosion of capital something other than an erosion of capital means that it's no longer an erosion of capital.

Gee, why didn't they just do this at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers 2-1/2 years ago and let things go on as usual?

Here's most of the Reuters report (bolds supporting the bullet points above are mine):

Man, it is getting really deep around here -- and no, I'm not talking about the snow, though there is no shortage of it here in Southwestern Ohio.

What's really deep is the claim by current Government/General Motors Chairman and CEO Daniel Akerson that because of the company's government-engineered, unsecured bondholder-shortchanging trip through bankruptcy, "we lost roughly a year in terms of development."

The Associated Press's Tom Krisher apparently doesn't mind traipsing around in thigh-high boots while he's covering the Detroit Auto Show, as he displayed no skepticism whatsoever at the utter ridiculousness of Akerson's assertion, drily observing near the end of his report that "New products from GM were noticeably absent from the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this year."

For the record:

St. Louis Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch took on CNN's Eliot Spitzer Monday evening in a classic battle between Right and Left.

From the opening bell, Loesch gave Spitzer a much-needed education on how extending existing tax rates isn't a tax cut (video follows with transcript and commentary):  

As one of the liberal media members that have expressed feeling betrayed by the President's recent tax compromise proposal, Ed Schultz on Wednesday said Barack Obama did a better job of selling the Bush tax cuts than George W. Bush ever did.

So dismayed by today's 81 to 19 Senate vote in favor of the measure was the host of MSNBC's "The Ed Show" that he asked Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, "Do you trust President Obama?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Charles Krauthammer on Friday scolded Mark Shields and other liberals for "moaning and bitching" about the President's compromise tax plan after months of demanding the White House implement a second stimulus package.

After Shields on PBS's "Inside Washington" predictably criticized Obama for agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts on the so-called rich, Krauthammer marvelously struck back (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A few weeks ago, just before GM's initial public offering went to the market (at the Washington Examiner; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Multi-Government/General Motors had spent the past several months shipping more cars than its dealers were selling, to the point where dealer stocks represented an unusually high number of days of dealers' sales.

GM's December 1 press release made that trend even more obvious, as month-end dealer inventory rose to 536,000 units, about 30% higher than May's level.

As seen below, the trend was already pretty obvious in October, and a vigilant press should have been alert enough to notice it and attempt to gauge its financial impact:

Here's something about which the environmentalists and car czars planted inside the Obama administration can't be pleased: as a percentage of their U.S. sales, Multi-Government/General Motors and Chrysler are selling more "light trucks," consisting of pickups, SUVS, and "crossover" vehicles than any other major manufacturer. Further, the companies are clearly emphasizing light trucks at the expense of their car models.

I wonder how a government promise to accomplish this would have been received by the fossil-fuels-are-awful media at bankruptcy crunch time last year?

You can pretty much count on this inconvenient product mix not getting a great deal of establishment press attention while it drools over the underpowered, heavily subsidized electric lemon known as the Chevy Volt and whatever toy disguised as a useful vehicle Chrysler/Fiat plans on foisting onto the market.

The detail is at the Wall Street Journal's monthly report on vehicle sales (link will change in one month). Key items include these:

Do a media company's political activities affect the way its subsidiaries report the news? The folks at MSNBC sure think so. That channel's hosts have insisted ad nauseum that Fox News parent company News Corporation's political actives compromise the ability of Fox to report the news fairly and accurately.

But MSNBC has, as I have noted before, shilled for policies that would enrich its parent company, General Electric, under the guise of "environmental awareness." Today the Washington Post exposed yet another such conflict, reporting that GE took $16 billion in loans from the Federal Reserve during 2008 and 2009.

There are times when one has to think the Manhattan building that is the home of the New York Times doesn't have any windows, doesn't have any television sets, and doesn't have any doors that allow employees to venture out and actually see what's happening in America beyond the walls of 620 Eighth Avenue.

Consider that after the impact the Tea Party has had on our nation's politics the past 20 months, and the historic elections that just took place on November 2, Times columnist Tom Friedman actually thinks Americans aren't interested in reducing the federal deficit but are instead yearning for higher taxes and greater government spending:

When I first saw this video at a non-Government/General Motors site, I said, "Wow, that's quite a spoof. Who did that?"

It's not a spoof. It's for real. It's posted in the media section at GM's web site.

Even diehard defenders of the GM and Chrysler bailouts have to wonder what in the world the folks who put together the 60-second ad were thinking.

Here's the hype for the ad found at GM's site (bold is mine):

ABC’s Christiane Amanpour on Sunday again gave national U.S. television exposure to a liberal reporter with the London-based Financial Times as she brought Ed Luce, the newspaper’s Washington Bureau Chief and former Clinton administration operative, aboard her This Week roundtable. Luce declared the world would react “with deep horror, I think, but also some amusement,” to a presidential bid by Sarah Palin and charged Republican opposition to START shows “there's a greater hatred of Obama than there is a love of American national security.” 

Echoing the standard liberal spin about how President Barack Obama just failed to effectively communicate his great achievements, Luce argued that “if GM had gone bankrupt and large portions of it had been closed down, we could have lost several hundred thousand jobs.” He then despaired: “The administration's communications effort on this has been absolutely abysmal. It's quite extraordinary to me how they haven't put this forward more forcefully and how the public still doesn't see just how different a kind of bailout this was than the Wall Street bailouts which remain deservedly unpopular.”