Budget

Former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu on Monday had a heated debate with MSNBC's Chris Matthews.

Toward the end of the incursion predictably about Paul Ryan's budget, Sununu accused the Hardball host of being "dumb enough" to think Ryan is "going to call the shots" in this matter instead of Mitt Romney who's "at the top of the ticket" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CNN's Gloria Borger dug deep for disgusting liberal smears of Paul Ryan's budget proposals and aired them without any criticism or outrage on Monday. In her report on the new Vice Presidential nominee, she unearthed past footage of liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman saying the Ryan budget would "kill people."

That smear was so egregious that it won the Media Research Center's "Grim Reaper Award" for 2011. Yet Borger featured it as valid liberal criticism of Ryan. And she kicked off her report by quoting other liberals saying his budget would drive America "over the cliff" and "destroy our government," before Ryan even introduced himself. [Video below the break.]

On Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer actually used the President's own past statements about Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to grill deputy Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter: "President Obama said this of Paul Ryan, that he was 'absolutely sincere about wanting to reduce the deficit'...gave him 'credit for at least being willing to put out there some very tough choices.' Does he still feel that way?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Cutter attempted to rely on the usual Democratic fearmongering, accusing Ryan of a plan "that balances the budget on the backs of the middle class." Lauer called her out for that tactic, again citing Obama's own words: "...he said this, quote, 'We're not going to be able to do anything about these entitlements if what we do characterize whatever proposal's are put out there as well, you know, that's the other party being irresponsible...the other party trying to hurt our senior citizens.' Which sounds exactly what – like what you just said."

On Monday's CBS This Morning, Bob Schieffer again forwarded the liberal talking point that GOP vice presidential apparent Paul Ryan's budget plan would drastically cut federal spending. Schieffer claimed, "There's some really tough stuff in there. I mean, he really slashes into social programs...it's across the board – in order to try to get this budget back into balance." Ryan's proposal actually increases spending, but at a lower rate than President Obama's plan.

The Face the Nation host also touted what former Democratic Rep. David Obey said about Rep. Ryan: "I just can't imagine why a guy that nice could have the views that he has."

Hoping to define vice presidential pick Paul Ryan early with liberal talking points, on Monday's NBC Today, correspondent Peter Alexander painted the Wisconsin congressman as "the architect of a politically polarizing budget plan to slash trillions in federal funding, including cuts to Medicare..." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Alexander began his report by offering this description of Ryan: "To Republicans, Ryan is viewed as a conservative, a courageous and visionary conservative. To Democrats, his views are seen as extreme." At the top of the show, co-host Matt Lauer only saw problems for Republicans and advantages for Democrats with the Ryan pick: "Will Ryan's budget plan hurt the ticket? And how is President Obama using the choice to his own advantage?"

In an apparent attempt to pin blame anywhere but on the Obama administration for the rising unemployment rate, a USA Today item currently carried at Newsmax's MoneyNews.com web site opens by claiming that "Companies across the country are cutting training programs for new employees, broadening the divide between workers with skills needed to compete in today's economy and those left out, pushing up unemployment rates in the process."

The incoherence is stunning, and it continues after the jump:

You would expect that as a contributor to Barack Obama's Super PAC, HBO's Bill Maher wouldn't have kind things to say about Paul Ryan being named Mitt Romney's running mate.

True to form, Maher took to Twitter on Saturday to make vulgar comments about Ryan's budget despite likely not knowing one single word that's in it (serious vulgarity warning):

On a special Saturday edition of Hardball, MSNBC host Chris Matthews twice claimed that Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's budget "screws" needy people. During a segment with Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen, as he asked what it was like to work with Rep. Ryan as his colleague, the MSNBC host asserted that the plan "really screws the people who desperately need Medicare and programs like that."

Previewing the choice of Paul Ryan as the GOP vice presidential candidate, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning shows all used Democratic framing to describe the House GOP budget plan that Ryan championed as a plan to, as CBS’s Bob Schieffer put it, “cut more than $5 trillion over the next ten years.” ABC’s Bianna Golodryga passed along the demagogic rhetoric of liberals: “Democrats, meantime, contest that it will destroy Medicare and Social Security.”

But Ryan’s plan would actually increase federal spending over the next ten years, from about $3.6 trillion this year to just under $4.9 trillion in 2022. The $5 trillion in “cuts” are merely reductions from the much-higher spending anticipated by President Obama’s budget. (See tables starting on page 88.)

Breaking the news this morning that Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan as his running mate, ABC’s Good Morning America in a single hour employed no fewer than seven “conservative” labels to label Ryan and his supporters. But four years ago as Barack Obama tapped Joe Biden, there wasn’t a single “liberal” label to be found on GMA’s coverage that Saturday morning.

Ryan, ABC’s team accurately pointed out, is as fill-in co-host David Muir put it, “a favorite among conservatives;” a candidate who “rallies the conservative base,” as George Stephanopoulos later opined. According to the American Conservative Union, Ryan has a solid 91.69 conservative rating (100% being a perfect conservative score).

A year ago, Standard & Poor's cut its rating of U.S. government debt from AAA to AA+.

Very early Monday morning, in what read more like an Obama administration press release than a wire service news report, Paul Wiseman at the Associated Press claimed that subsequent events and other agencies' decisions not to deliver similar downgrades represent a "decisive repudiation" of S&P's call. Gee, I think an element of other agencies' holdbacks had quite a bit to do with the Obama administration's almost immediate move to launch an investigation into how S&P handled the ratings of mortgage-backed securities leading up to the housing and mortgage lending mess in 2008. The others didn't want to become the Department of Justice's next targets. But of course Wiseman didn't bring up that inconvenient point. Excerpts follow:

The modern equivalent of a broken record, which used to be a common saying about someone who says the same thing over and over, is the "infinite loop" -- "a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops (i.e., repeats) endlessly."

On Social Security, the establishment press has played a false infinite loop for decades, namely that its "trust fund" contains lots of real assets. Here is Stephen Ohlemacher's replay of the loop found in his coverage at the Associated Press on early Monday:

In his column at the Los Angeles Times today (HT to a NewsBusters tipster), Michael Hiltzik engages in predictable whining about discussions on how to bring the federal deficit under control seem "increasingly to be driven by the wealthy." In the instance he cites, one could substitute "big bank and big company CEOs," who seem to have recently decided that President Obama's Simpson Bowles debt commission had a good roadmap in late 2010 after being as far as I can recall pretty much AWOL on the matter when it was first presented.

That's fine. Hiltzik entitled to his take. But he's not entitled to his facts, particularly his assertions on Social Security (bold is mine):

For the past two weeks Barack Obama's media minions have been working overtime trying to convince the American people the President was taken out of context during his now infamous "You Didn't Build That" speech in Roanoke, Virginia.

CNN's Donna Brazile and the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus tried making that pathetic claim on ABC's This Week Sunday only to receive a much-needed education from George Will and Breitbart.com's Dana Loesch (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman made a statement Sunday about the looming end of the year tax hikes and spending cuts that is likely to raise some eyebrows on both sides of the aisle.

Appearing on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Krugman said, "If Obama’s reelected, I think that there’s a quite good chance that for a month or two we actually will go off the cliff" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It's becoming increasingly clear that the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, believes there are two primary kinds of users of its output: those who only read headlines and those who read on or click through. It often dresses up the headlines with inaccuracies, omissions, and occasional downright falsehoods, which more often than not are respectively rendered properly, included, and stated truthfully (or at least sort of close) in the actual content.

It's hard to find a more stark example of a contradiction between an AP headline and its underlying content than Martin Crutsinger's late afternoon report Friday following that morning's Gross Domestic Product report:

Here’s a really scary thought: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wants to replace Ben Bernanke as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The perilously liberal economist actually said this in a segment of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to be aired Sunday (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Give credit to CNN Money's Annalyn Chensky for intuitively recognizing the ridiculousness of the economic projections included in the White House's Mid-Session Review released today. That especially goes for the assumption that full-year economic growth in 2012, with the first and second quarters coming in at an annualized 2.0% and 1.5%, respectively (the latter subject to revisions which probably won't be significant), will somehow still come in at 2.6%.

Chensky gets demerits, however, for understating how fast growth will really have to be during the second half of the year to get that 2.6% (bolds are mine):

Charlie Rose omitted mentioning the continuing high unemployment rate as he interviewed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Tuesday's CBS This Morning. Rose also forwarded a criticism Geithner from the left, that the Cabinet official was "too friendly to the banks, because he knew them from his years at the New York Fed."

The anchor also didn't challenge the Obama administration official's assertion that keeping all of the current tax rates would be a "deeply irresponsible thing to do fiscally and economically now. If you do it, it costs a trillion dollars over ten years - a trillion dollars over ten years, which we don't have and we're not going to go out and borrow from other countries to support in that context."

In a post-Occupy Wall Street/Buffett Rule world, I bet you'd never expect a liberal news organization to admit that you can't solve all the country's problems by just raising taxes on the rich.

The Washington Post did exactly that in an editorial Monday:

If the idea of tax increases is so darned popular, why do journalists "creatively" avoid using the term?

Here's an example from a lengthy Saturday report on Democrat Bob Kerrey's U.S. Senate comeback effort in Nebraska by Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post, wherein she describes the 1993 Clinton tax hikes as a "deficit-reduction plan" (bolds are mine):

On July 12, the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children & Families, the group which administers the entitlement program known to most as "welfare" or "traditional welfare, issued an "Information Memorandum" entitled "Guidance concerning waiver and expenditure authority under Section 1115" (i.e., not "proposed guidance"). After navigating the thicket of bureaucratic babble contained therein, Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley at the Heritage Foundation asserted, with agreement from several other quarters and no meaningful dissent I have detected, that the memo's effect "is the end of welfare reform."

The next day at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, the headline at Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar's related story was: "Administration proposes welfare-to-work waivers."

The Jurassic Press is missing much in their reporting on the $50 billion bailout of General Motors (GM).  The Press is open channeling for President Barack Obama - allowing him to frame the bailout exactly as he wishes in the 2012 Presidential election. 

The President is running in large part on the bailout’s $30+ billion loss, uber-failed “success.”  And the Press is acting as his stenographers.  An epitome of this bailout nightmare mess is the electric absurdity that is the Chevrolet Volt.  The Press is at every turn covering up - rather than covering - the serial failures of President Obama’s signature vehicle.

One useful interpretation of a journalist's use of "some people say that" or "some argue that" without an accompanying reference to or quote from a subject matters expert is that such phrases really mean "in my opinion."

This is the very likely case in a disingenuously headlined Associated Press story yesterday by Andrew Taylor concerning the standoff between the Republicans, who want the current income tax structure continued for at least another year, and Democrats, including President Obama, who want to raise taxes (they describe it as "ending the Bush tax cuts," which fully went into effect over nine years ago) on "the rich," currently defined as people making $200,000 or more per year. Taylor put the following statement out there without identifying any economist or political analyst who might agree with it (because I doubt there are many, or even any):

Democrats are at it again, claiming that Republicans, particularly House Republicans, are sabotaging the economy, while ignoring the quite effective job President Barack Obama has done to ruin the economy both on his own (regulatory and anti-fossil fuel hostility, wasteful green "investments," etc.) and with the help of Congressional Democrats when they controlled both Houses of Congress (stimulus, ObamaCare, trillion-dollar deficits, etc.).

The best argument against this nonsense is that if Republicans were really interested in hurting the economy, GOP governors wouldn't be doing good to even great jobs with their own states' economies. At the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Josh Lederman, reporting from the National Governors Association meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, attempted to frame a response to GOP governors' contentions (in bold after the jump) which qualifies as the howler of the day:

Anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist had himself quite a day on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday dispelling liberal media myths.

In the course of about five minutes, Norquist gave a much-needed education to CNN political contributor Hilary Rosen and the Washington Post's Bob Woodward on which political party in Washington is obstructionist (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Uncle Sam's June Treasury Statement released today told us that with three months remaining in the 2012 fiscal year the government has already run up a deficit of over $900 billion. According to the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger, Americans should see that as a "positive sign," because "deficit is growing more slowly than last year."

During the final three months of fiscal 2011, the government ran a deficit of $326 billion, which is why the following statement found in Crutsinger's Thursday afternoon report is such a howler:

It seems that Matt Drudge is a better headline writer than whoever at the Associated Press performed the same task at its story about California lawmakers' passage of "building the nation's first dedicated high-speed rail line, a multibillion dollar project that will eventually link Los Angeles and San Francisco" -- if sanity doesn't prevail in the meantime.

Since late yesterday, Drudge's home-page headline linking to the AP's story is "Broke California OKs funding for high-speed rail line..." That's a lot more complete than the wire service's "California high-speed rail gets green light." Then again, if the headline writer didn't already know about the state's serious budget situation, he or she wouldn't have learned from reporter Judy Lin, who stayed conveniently vague, as seen in the following excerpt:

Liberal media's love for higher taxes is a thing of legends.

On Inside Washington Friday, PBS's perpetually pandering pundit Mark Shields told viewers that since 1991, "21 years, Republicans have not voted for a single broad-based tax increase, and that’s become the theology of the party, the ideology of the party, the definition of the party, and that is irresponsible" (video follows with transcript and commentary):