Mickey Kaus

New York Times White House correspondent Jackie Calmes’s 1,300-word story for the Saturday Business section, with the online headline “G.O.P. on Defensive as Analysts Question Party’s Fiscal Policy,” was so blatantly biased it caught the attention of neo-liberal Mickey Kaus, who posted a withering, entertaining analysis at The Daily Caller, revisiting his old theme of liberal cocooning among the Times and its readership.

 

Kaus wrote that the emphasis on nonexistent “defensiveness” “must be heartening to Times readers. It’s also the stuff of which delusions are made – the familiar process of cocooning, in which Times-addicted Democrats wake up election day expecting President Kerry to have been swept into office only to discover that the paper of record has mistaken the views of its editorial board for the views of voters.” Kaus concluded “The NYT gets more like MSNBC every day.”

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:

On this the 24th and final day of his Election Road Trip, Time's Joe Klein availed himself of the opportunity to attack center-left blogger Mickey Kaus and conservative writer Jonah Goldberg for "distort[ing] a striking point" made by a liberal Democrat vineyard owner from California that Klein quoted in a September 27 Swampland blog post.

Klein vented most of his spleen at Kaus, a blogger for rival magazine Newsweek.

Wealthy attorney and Iron Horse Vineyards founding partner Barry Sterling had simply argued that "the current, post-Reagan tax fetishism of the Republican party is foolish," Klein insisted.  "He made the point with a creative overstatement of the case--that he'd survived 70% marginal tax rates; indeed, the high rates caused him to work harder to make more money. I am absolutely certain that Sterling was not advocating a return to 70% rates, as Mickey well knows," Klein protested.  The Time reporter went on a few sentences later to label Kaus as a "feckless, puerile jerk at times."

Isn't it odd to see one blogger declaring another blogger irrelevant when he tries to run for office? Daily Kos founder Markous Moulitsas mocked fellow blogger Mickey Kaus in a New York Times story by Janelle Brown. The reporter quoted Kaus friend Nicholas Lemann explaining Kaus: “Mickey sees himself as a liberal whose mission in life is to correct the flaws of liberalism.” This spurred the Kos claws:  

Not everyone sees it quite that way. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, for one, calls Mr. Kaus’s campaign the desperate act of an irrelevant blogger. “Suddenly, he decides to run for Senate, and lots of people think it’s absolutely hilarious,” he says. “I mean, it’s as if Emmanuel Lewis suddenly announced he was running for Senate. First of all, you’d be like, ‘Whoa, I forgot that guy existed!,’ then you’d wonder, ‘What the heck is he thinking!,’ and then you’d laugh.”

Is this some sort of knock at the brief Gary Coleman for Governor campaign in California in 2003? If so, it's not a very savvy move as the country still mourns the former child star.

A turnaround on Obama-Care at the New York Times? Not quite, but health reporter Robert Pear's corrective story Friday, "A Basis Is Seen for Some Health Plan Fears Among the Elderly," did make some surprising concessions to conservative concerns about rationing of health care for the elderly under an Obama plan. Might those horror stories about "death panels," declared "false" by the Times just a week before, actually have some credence?

A week previous, the Times had dismissing such concerns about rationing on its front page as fringe conservative conspiracy akin to campaign rumors Obama was a Muslim. But Pear found the questioning of one of the central premises of Obama-care -- rationing -- more widespread:

White House officials and Democrats in Congress say the fears of older Americans about possible rationing of health care are based on myths and falsehoods. But Medicare beneficiaries and insurance counselors say the concerns are not entirely irrational.

To the extent the MSM has been willing to report on the disadvantage under which the Big Three automakers operate compared to their non-union competitors, the focus has been on the huge wage differential.

On this evening's Fox News Watch, conservative columnist Jim Pinkerton highlighted another issue which has gone largely unreported in the liberal media: the onerous union work rules that add literally thousands of positions to the job rolls compared to those of the foreign transplants.

View video here.