The Obama administration continues to push its "jobs created and saved" theme, taking credit for up to a million jobs on account of its $787 billion economic stimulus package (roughly a quarter of which has been spent). But some in the media remain skeptical. 

Politico.com announced on Oct. 30 that White House officials planned a Friday afternoon announcement for the same day claiming "at least 1 million jobs" had been saved or created.

Other news outlets, including NPR and CNN, focused on a lower White House claim the same day saying that "more than 650,000 jobs have been saved or created" under the stimulus.

The higher claim of 1 million was based on extrapolation - the White House report examined the first $150 billion of $339 billion stimulus funds spent so far.

The White House recently "fired back" at Associated Press (AP) for saying that the number of jobs created or saved was "overstated by thousands." AP reviewed data from the first progress report of the stimulus and found huge discrepancies.

Mark Preston at CNN's Political Ticker reports there's a major Hollywood contingent judging a Health Reform Video Challenge contest for the Democratic Party's Organizing for American campaign. (See today's Open Thread for one flag-mangling contestant.)

Stars on the judging panel for the final 20 TV ads include John Cho ("Flash Forward"), Rosario Dawson ("Men in Black"), Dule Hill ("The West Wing"), Brandon Routh (who played Superman), Kate Walsh ("Private Practice"), Olivia Wilde ("House") and musician Will I. Am of the Black Eyed Peas.

But the most risky name is Seth MacFarlane, the abrasive atheist creator of the Fox cartoons "Family Guy," "American Dad," and "The Cleveland Show."

The harshest ad in the contest features grade-school kids talking about how they'll suffer (and even die) because health care is denied:

BOY: A year from now, I’ll break my leg and my parents will have to sell our house because we couldn’t afford health care

GIRL: Three months from now, I’ll need surgery, and my parents will go bankrupt because they couldn’t afford health care.

Remember the Cash for Clunkers (CARS) program the network media liked so much? Well, according to analysis from Edmunds.com the government spent $24,000 per car when you subtract cars that would have been sold even without the program.

CNNMoney.com reported Oct. 29 that only 125,000 vehicles sold under the program (out of 690,000) "would not have been sold anyway," according to Edmunds.

The government allotted $3 billion for the CARS program, but Edmunds' said that more than 80 percent of those cars would have been purchased anyway.

Jeremy Anwyl, Edmunds' CEO, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal Aug. 3 pointed out that in any month there are 60,000 to 70,000 "clunker-like" sales. "We have crammed three to four months of normal activity into just a few days," Anwyl concluded.

Despite misgivings from Anwyl and others, the network news media embraced the government giveaway. All three networks described it as a "victim of its own success" AFTER it ran out of taxpayer funding in its first week.

Violence against women has increased on TV programs, according to a new study by the Parents Television Council.

"Women in Peril: A Look at TV's Disturbing New Storyline Trend" found that incidents of violence against women and teenage girls increased 120 percent on television in the in the past five years, while overall violence on primetime broadcast entertainment programs increased only 2 percent in the same time period. Violent incidents against teen girls on television programs increased 400 percent since 2004.

Joy Behar, HLN's conservative-basher of record, today derided conservatives as immature bullies who smell bad and pick their noses. Obama, by Behar's account is the smart kid in class who knows all the answers but keeps letting the bullies push him around.

Her bully characterization is astoundingly hypocritical, given that she goes on to suggest that Obama bully Glenn Beck and other conservative commentators into silence. And the President hardly seems like the kid on the playground "least likely to fight back." He certainly has the means, and has been using his pulpit to deride Fox News for the past two weeks for saying things that he doesn't like.

In the schoolyard of American politics, President Obama is the big, smart kid with all of the test answers who's being bullied by a bunch of Neanderthal ankle-biters from all sides.

As if the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Fan and Fred) crackups weren't bad enough, IBDeditorials.com noted on Thursday evening that another bad-mortgage shoe is about to drop. This time it's at the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).

First, let's revisit Fan and Fred to remind readers just how complete the disaster has been at these decades in the making Democratic crony-controlled entities.

A little-noticed CNNMoney.com item by Chris Isidore in late July told us what the original announced loss estimate had been a year earlier (bolds are mine throughout this post):

When Congress was debating the bailout of Fannie and Freddie last July (of 2008), the official estimate from the Congressional Budget Office was that a bailout would most likely cost taxpayers $25 billion, with only a 5% chance of the price tag reaching $100 billion between them.

Isidiore then noted that just one year later the loss estimate had doubled:

Update (NB Staff): MRC/NB's Brent Bozell reacts to CNN poll (posted below page break).

CNN/Opinion Research Corporation’s poll on President Obama’s health care speech to Congress on Wednesday significantly oversampled Democrats. The pollsters interviewed 427 Americans before and after their speech- only 18% were Republicans, while 45% were Democrats. Due to this skewing, CNN didn’t really play up the poll’s results on air, but they tried to do that on their CNN.com website.

The joint poll asked two questions before and after the speech. The polled were asked, “Do you think the policies being proposed by Barack Obama will move the country in the right direction or the wrong direction?” During the pre-speech period between September 5 and 8, 60% answered “right direction,” and 35% answered “wrong direction.” Immediately after the speech, the pollsters found that the “right direction” statistic went up to 70%, while the “wrong direction” number went down to 27%.

The Obama administration and its car-czar group appear to be intent on teaching someone who got in their way a brutal lesson.

If there's another way to interpret what is going on involving the "Old Chrysler," the company's first-lien secured lenders, and the US Treasury, I want to know what it is.

A CNN.com article on Monday emphasized how Laura Bush “praised the performance” of President Obama during a recent interview and “criticized Washington’s sharp political divide.” Mrs. Bush also complimented Dick Cheney for defending the Bush administration during the interview with correspondent Zain Verjee, but the article didn’t mention this until 15 paragraphs later.

The article, titled “Laura Bush praises Obama, bemoans excessive partisanship,” summarized Verjee’s interview with the former first lady. The lead paragraph highlighted Mrs. Bush’s positive words for Mr. Obama: “Former first lady Laura Bush praised the performance of her husband’s successor Monday, breaking with many Republicans in telling CNN that she thinks President Obama is doing a good job under tough circumstances.”

After mentioning Cheney in passing in listing the topics of discussion during the interview, the CNN.com article returned to emphasizing how the former resident of the White House parted ways with her husband’s political allies: “The typically reserved former first lady defended Obama’s decision to deliver a back-to-school speech to students, putting her at odds with many conservatives afraid that the president will use the opportunity to advance his political agenda.”

Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ has a great "name that party" catch today. Malor noted that at least three major news outlets all failed to note the high-powered Democratic Party ties of one Hassan Nemazee, a businessman arrested this morning on a charge of bank fraud against Citigroup:

Do you know what's not in the CNN article?* Or this Reuters one? Or this AP one?

A crucial detail from Nemazee's bio:

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Someone forgot to send the CNN health care kool-aid over to the office of Fortune editor at large Shawn Tully in the days leading up to July 24. Tully in turn forgot to toot his own horn, and ObamaCare opponents forgot to take a peek inside what is normally enemy lines to find it.

In a must-read special report at affiliate CNNMoney.com, Tully lays bare Barack Obama's core claim, while identifying five freedoms many Americans will lose if ObamaCare passes in its current form. In fact, Tully's piece is so good, it should be the equivalent of Betsy McCaughey's 1994 broadside that helped torpedo HillaryCare -- if only people knew about it.

Anyone who knows the e-mail address of CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, who, as Matthew Balan of NewsBusters noted earlier today, is an ardent ObamaCare defender, should forward Tully's column to her. Copies to Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Howard Kurtz, and many others at CNN wouldn't hurt either.

Here are the introductory paragraphs and key points Tully made (bolds in text are mine):

The Senate stepped in to save Cash for Clunkers Aug. 6, giving it a $2 billion extension. But on Aug. 7, CNN.com found a big difference between independent analysis and government claims of which cars were most popular buys.

Peter Valdes-Dapena explored the difference between government data on the clunkers program (claiming small cars were most popular) and Edmunds.com analysis which showed that "two full-size trucks and a small crossover SUV were actually among the top-ten buys."

"The discrepancy is a result of the methods used. Edmunds.com uses traditional sales measurements, tallying sales by make and model. The government uses a more arcane measurement method that subdivides models according to engine and transmission types, counting them as separate models," Valdes-Dapena wrote.

Darlene Haynes was only 23 years old when another woman brutally slashed her open and removed her eight-month-old baby girl from her womb. Her decomposing body was found on July 27, wrapped in a blanket and dumped in a closet inside her apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts. The body was so mutilated that when they found it, the police said they couldn't immediately determine its gender.

The suspected murderer, 35-year-old Julie Corey, lived in the same apartment building and was found soon after the crime in Plymouth, New Hampshire, claiming the baby was her own.

This heart-rending story is also notorious for how the "pro-choice" media sputter and struggle to deny the humanity of a baby, even as the child is slashed away and stolen by a psychopath. I would highly doubt Corey said to bewildered onlookers, "Look at my new fetus."

And yet journalists insult this motherless baby as merely a "fetus," this their dismissive blob-of-tissue word suggesting an unborn baby is subhuman until birth, no matter how many months along in the pregnancy, and no matter how physically able it is to survive outside the womb.

CNN’s Drew Griffin accused GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx on Wednesday’s Newsroom program of using a “a calculated distortion” that is “gaining credence in certain back alleys of the blogosphere” about the Democrats’ health care “reform” plan, specifically about the issue of end-of-life care for seniors. But all he did to try to disprove it was provide a link to the specific part of the legislation in question.

Griffin began to cast doubt on the Republican’s statement from the very beginning of the 3 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program. After playing a clip of Rep. Foxx, where she touted her party’s alternative proposal wouldn’t “put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government,” the CNN correspondent, filling in for anchor Rick Sanchez, promoted his upcoming segment on the remark, and first hinted that it was a false accusation on the part of the representative: “Um, are people really concerned that a new health care bill will let old people die? We’ll drill down on the facts, the fiction and possible misrepresentations swirling around the debate.”

**Video Below the Fold**

If you want to see how liberals in the media “do” their thing, nothing has been a better example than the analysis by CNN’s Jeffery Toobin. We’ve highlighted some on-air work of his Sotomayor coverage, but he also has a written piece on CNN.com that is a perfect example of how the left spins rhetoric to legitimize leftist precepts.

In his July 13 piece, for instance, Toobin calls Sotomayor a “cautious and careful liberal” like Ginsburg and Breyer. So, it makes one wonder, has Toobin ever called anyone on the right a “cautious and careful conservative”?

It doesn't seem like it would be too much to ask CNNMoney's headline e-mailers to read past the first sentence of a government announcement. But, maybe it is.

Here are the first two sentences of the Employment Situation Report from Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics released this morning:

Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 345,000 in May, about half the average monthly decline for the prior 6 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today.  The unemployment rate continued to rise, increasing from 8.9 to 9.4 percent.

Ahead of the 8:30 a.m. report, according to Reuters, Dow futures were up 54 points, while S&P and NASDAQ futures were up 5 and 5.75 points, respectively (the time-stamp is 9:22, but the narrative is clearly pre-8:30).

Just after the market opened, I received this CNNMoney e-mail:

Today's Employment Situation Report from Uncle Sam (link will be updated for May results at 8:30 a.m.) will almost certainly report hundreds of thousands of seasonally adjusted jobs lost.

According to this AFP report, "Most analysts expect employers to have cut 520,000 jobs, down from 539,000 in April. But the unemployment rate is still expected to have jumped to 9.2 percent, its highest since 1983." (UPDATE: 345,000 seasonally adjusted jobs were lost in May, but the unemployment rate rose sharply to 9.4%.)

"Down from April"? Given the vagaries in the governmnent's estimates, and that the figure will be revised in the following two months, how about "virtually the same as April"?

At least AFP gave us two numbers to compare. An e-mail I received on Wednesday morning from CNNMoney.com about ADP's monthly National Employment Report didn't even do that:

Yesterday fundraiser Norman Hsu was convicted of of illegally funneling tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  The Wall Street Journal reported:

On Tuesday, a jury convicted Mr. Hsu of four counts of campaign-finance fraud after about 2½ hours of deliberations. Each count carries up to five years in prison.

The latest example of political corruption was met by much of the mainstream media with a collective yawn.  CNN mentioned it only twice.  The Situation Room featured CNN anchor T.J. Holmes briefly touching on the story:

Also, a name you might remember making some news again. He gave money to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And he was already found guilty for mail and wire fraud. Well, today, Norman Hsu was convicted of violating campaign finance laws. He was accused of getting donations from people, including from celebrities, who funneled money that exceeded campaign finance rules to Democratic campaigns. His sentencing is scheduled for August.

 On Lou Dobbs Tonight, the host noted:

A top fund-raiser for the Democrats, Norman Hsu, today, convicted of corruption. A New York jury found Hsu guilty of breaking laws that restrict the amount of money an individual or group can donate to a political party. Hsu raised more than $800,000 for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, money that she later returned.

Ever wonder how political "facts" become facts? How does a story go from a mere unsubstantiated report to universal truth? Often, it happens with a catchy headline in a report that states as "fact" a claim made by one person even though no one else has been seen backing up the claim. Such may be the case with a recent story on actor Gary Sinise becoming "the savior of the GOP."

Peter Hamby of CNN has decided to make Gary Sinise the new golden boy of the Republican Party. It has all the elements of a good tale: A handsome actor, politically astute and well known for being active is suddenly the "new" face of the party to which he belongs, a man about to save the whole darn shootin' match with his star power. It's a political success story sure to gain big headlines... except for the fact that it basically isn't true.

Here are the first two paragraphs of Toyota Motor Corporation's press release announcing its financial results for the year ended March 31, 2009 (most Japanese companies end their fiscal years on March 31; bolds are mine):

Tokyo - TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION (TMC) today announced operating results for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009.

On a consolidated basis, net revenues for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009 totaled 20.53 trillion yen, a decrease of 21.9 percent compared to the last fiscal year. Operating income decreased from 2.27 trillion yen to a loss of 461 billion yen, and income before income taxes, minority interest and equity in earnings of affiliated companies was a loss of 560.4 billion yen. Net income decreased from 1.72 trillion yen to a loss of 437 billion yen.

Across the board, the financial press reports I read translated the company's reported losses expressed in yen into dollars ($4.4 billion in $US for the year, and $7.7 billion in the fourth quarter), but not its revenues (about $207 billion and $35 billion, respectively).

Why is that?