08/8/15

The Real Drama is in the Democratic Primary

While the attention of the world was on the first Republican presidential debates in Cleveland on Thursday night, the drama in the Democratic Party may soon overshadow anything the GOP has to offer. Look at what’s happening on the way to Hillary Clinton’s coronation in 2016. All of a sudden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-identified “democratic socialist,” is within striking distance in some of the key early primary states. But the real action is with Vice President Joe Biden. Will he or won’t he challenge Mrs. Clinton? That is the question.

If we take our cues from The New York Times, Hillary should be worried. First came the story about two inspectors general seeking a criminal referral involving Mrs. Clinton’s use of her email server while she was secretary of state, and the potential mishandling of classified material. Then, after pushback from the Clinton camp, the Times pulled back, to some extent. No, it wasn’t a criminal referral, they determined on second thought. Yet now the FBI has opened an investigation, and they only get involved when crimes are alleged, or there is the possibility that national secrets may have been compromised.

Are we witnessing a situation like 1968, when Eugene McCarthy entered the Democratic primary race against then-President Lyndon Johnson, and when McCarthy did well in New Hampshire, then-New York Senator Bobby Kennedy decided to jump into the race. Will Biden be Bobby Kennedy to Sanders’ Gene McCarthy, in terms of challenging the presumed Democratic Party standard bearer, once it has become clear that the standard bearer is vulnerable? Have the media and their allies in the Democratic Party decided that Hillary is too badly damaged, and ethically challenged to win the election?

The news media are star-struck by The New York Times, which, allegedly, provides “all the news that’s fit to print.” As Accuracy in Media has repeatedly demonstrated, the news that the Times editors actually see fit to print is often full of bias, inaccuracies, and complete spin. And, sometimes, the Times transparently involves itself in promoting or destroying candidates.

Maureen Dowd’s recent Times column, “Joe Biden in 2016: What Would Beau Do?,” begins by comparing scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton with Tom Brady, and then proceeds to promote Vice President Biden’s chances by recounting the emotional words that sons Beau and Hunter apparently used to encourage their father to run for president while Beau laid on his death bed, dying from brain cancer.

“When Beau realized he was not going to make it, he asked his father if he had a minute to sit down and talk,” writes Dowd. “Of course, honey,” said his father, she recounts.

Dowd continues:

At the table, Beau told his dad he was worried about him.

My kid’s dying, an anguished Joe Biden thought to himself, and he’s making sure I’m O.K.

‘Dad, I know you don’t give a damn about money,’ Beau told him, dismissing the idea that his father would take some sort of cushy job after the vice presidency to cash in.

Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.

Hunter also pushed his father, telling him, ‘Dad, it’s who you are.’”

Where, exactly, could Dowd have received that heart-wrenching anecdote? Only from the friends, family, or supporters of the very person who some speculate may jump into the 2016 presidential race.

“And so I completely have faith in that Beau Biden anecdote,” exclaimed Helene Cooper on Meet the Press the next day. “I think it’s really telling.” Cooper believes Dowd’s story because, “Before she was a columnist, she was a fantastic political reporter. She has really good sources.”

“But, you know, when I think about what the Bidens have been through, and I think about that if Maureen’s sources are correct, then that son’s request is very powerful, I would think,” Kathleen Parker sympathetically added on Meet the Press.

No mention was made that The Wall Street Journal reported that both sons were “urging” the vice president to run for president—back in June. “Before his death last month, elder son Beau Biden encouraged his father to get into the race, people familiar with the matter said,” reported the Journal on June 28. “And Hunter Biden told a friend in recent weeks he, too, would like to see the vice president wage one more campaign for the White House.”

“It’s no secret that he’s thinking about this….I’m glad he’s thinking about this. But he hasn’t made up his mind,” said Beau Biden, the Times reported this April.

Beau’s consistent support for his father to become president is clearly nothing new. What’s new was the Times’ coming to the same conclusion as The Wall Street Journal. When the Times reports the story, even through a columnist as opposed to a reporter, it becomes a legitimate story for the rest of the media. We pointed out the likelihood of Biden’s entry into the race a month ago, based on the Journal and other stories out at the time.

Knowing the bitter history between the Clintons and Obama, one has to wonder about the timing of recent events. Did the FBI start their investigation, which isn’t being called a criminal investigation at this time, at the urging of President Obama, who would obviously prefer that Biden carry on his legacy, rather than Hillary? Obama could never trust Hillary to be loyal to his disastrous policies and controversial legacy. But Biden? Yes, he most likely would stay loyal to Obama. This has the potential to make the Republican race seem dull.

01/28/15

Obama’s Economic Shell Game

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Whether in his State of the Union or his recent campaign-like visits to the states, the President has been touting an economic recovery that his policies have supposedly fostered after he inherited a dire recession from George W. Bush. This narrative, repeated over and over through the years, is filled with half truths and exaggerations. Yet a complicit media is more than willing to look the other way from Americans suffering at the hands of a weak recovery with any numbers it can get its hands on.

To add insult to injury, the President’s proposed $320 billion in new tax increases makes it obvious that he’s “not serious about governing,” according to a Washington Post opinion piece by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. But, he argues, this political ploy will only work if the right is distracted by it.

Similarly, John Podhoretz writes for the New York Post that Obama gleefully “trolls,” or enrages his political opponents, to elicit ad hominem, spittle-filled disgust regardless of policy merits and the Democratic Party’s health. So when Americans hear the President proposing new taxes and claiming the country boasts a healthy, recovering economy, they may assume he’s tone deaf. However, he’s deliberately “trolling” for political effect.

The President is also fond of touting that the federal deficit has fallen from 10 percent of GDP to three percent of GDP, but such a claim couldn’t even fool Politifact, which rated the assertion as “half true.” “Obama is laying the blame for the high deficit-to-GDP ratio entirely on Bush, when the figure covers time in office for both presidents,” they say. “The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True.”

From where I come from a “half truth” is really a lie. Add to the list of false assertions the evergreen claims by President Obama that a) he has made the best of a terrible recession, and b) that our economy is now going strong because the unemployment rate is now below six percent.

“The widely publicized unemployment rate, eagerly awaited each month by pundits and policy wonks, has become little more than a shell game in which officials keep the public guessing about the real state of the economy,” pointedly wrote Jay Schalin of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy back in 2012.

Reporting by The New York Times exposed that where once someone would have qualified as officially unemployed, they may now remain uncounted as “out of the labor force.” “In particular, there seems to have been an increase in the number of people who once would have qualified as officially unemployed and today are considered out of the labor force, neither working nor looking for work,” reported David Leonhardt last August.

Yet the Times, after the State of the Union last week, congratulated the President for his efforts to “cement an economic legacy that seemed improbable early in his first term, when the country was in near-economic collapse.” What then, is the President’s economic legacy of recovery to date?

Millions of people are not being counted in the most recent official unemployment rate of 5.6 percent. Schalin pointed his readers to a more accurate barometer—the labor participation rate. It currently sits at a 36-year low.

The falling labor participation rate, reports Jeffrey Scott Shapiro for The Washington Times, “translates to more than 7 million fewer workers in the workforce.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that a “U.S. economy that suddenly looks healthy” isn’t “luring back many of the millions who dropped out of the labor market during the down times.”

The outlook for America’s jobless and uncounted is dismal. “Over the past three months, an average of 6.8% of those outside the labor force either found a job or began looking for one,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “That means people are entering the labor force at the lowest pace in records kept since 1990, down from more than 8% in 2010.”

But the media instead carefully misinform the public to boost presidential credibility. The Washington Post, after the State of the Union address, called our President “cautious over the past two years not to gloat over news of fitful economic growth, mindful that the economy remained tenuous and public confidence uneasy.” Now, however, “with the jobless rate well below 6 percent, the stock market nearing record highs and his job-approval ratings rebounding, Obama on Tuesday night dropped his veneer of reserve and appeared to delight in having proved his critics wrong.”

What exactly is the proof?

“Jobs are up, but wages are down,” noted Politico’s Timothy Noah about December’s job numbers. “In five-and-a-half years of economic recovery, the median income should have increased. Instead, it is lower. … Stagnating wages have displaced unemployment as the nation’s chief economic concern, and wages are becoming a central political concern too.”

Ironically, the Post’s own fact-checkers, after taking apart the President’s speech, found that “it is too early to say that this positive response from small businesses means ‘wages are finally starting to rise again.’” In other words, our President lied—again.

“Politicians can lower the U-3 [unemployment] rate—and make things seem better than they are—by making it easier for people to leave the workforce,” noted Schalin.

At a national level, welfare dependency is at higher levels now than under George W. Bush, millions of Americans are signing up for Obamacare subsidies, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, and median income is now comparable to 1995 levels. “Today median income is on par with where it was in 1995, which is one of the reasons many Americans still don’t feel the economy has truly improved,” reported CNN Money in December in the last line of its article.

The first line touted more positive Obama-centric news: “The Obama recovery was looking a lot better on Friday after a particularly strong jobs report made 2014 the best year for hiring since 1999.” CNN must have thought it could put some positive spin on this official numbers game.

In the last year of Bush’s presidency, 17.1 percent of Americans received welfare assistance. That figure now stands at nearly one in four—23 percent—according to Shapiro.

“A 2013 Pew Research study of U.S. Census Bureau data found simply that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer during the Obama economic recovery,” reports Shapiro. The study stated that our recovery boosted the incomes of the upper 7 percent by over a quarter, while the “mean net worth” of households in the remaining 93 percent “dropped by 4%.”

Chuck Todd of NBC News’ deserves a veritable medal for media bias. He opened his co-authored article, “Telling the Recovery Story: Obama Hits the Road to Tout Economy,” by pointing to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s (D) criticism of the President that “one problem I think that the president has is that he doesn’t tell that story [the “explosive growth in corporate profits, in stock market returns, employment that’s come back strong”] very well or very regularly.”

“Well, Obama is now trying to tell that story a bit better,” comment Todd and his co-authors.

“One reason why the White House feels more confident in touting the economy is that the country has seen its longest stretch of good economic news during Obama’s presidency,” he and his co-authors wrote. “And that’s been reflected in a media that usually emphasizes bad news over good news.”

Todd has said in the past that he found his off-the-record conversations with President Obama “very nourishing.”

Simply put, a lot of Americans can’t—and won’t—swallow economic spin of such mammoth proportions, either from the media or from our President.