You rubes. Don't you understand that the entire problem Hillary Clinton is facing over her use of a private server to process government communications is the fault of thousands upon thousands of people who don't know how to classify documents?
That's essentially the argument Hillary Clinton's spinmeisters are now employing. This evening, Josh Gerstein at the Politico was all too ready to relay such arguments, even to the point of cleaning up what one of her defenders said to advance the cause.
The Associated Press works very hard to ensure that its subscribing outlets and low-information voters who rely solely on its work — knowingly or unknowingly — never learn about Hillary Clinton's smart-aleck, sarcastic, condescending, reality-avoiding behavior.
Tuesday night, four AP reporters (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) — Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun in Washington, with the help of Ken Thomas and Eric Tucker in North Las Vegas — failed to report that Mrs. Clinton cut her press conference short after getting a genuine question from Fox News's Ed Henry, and that part of her answer to Henry's query about whether her hard drive was wiped was "With a cloth?"
Yesterday, CNN.com published a attempted defense of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State by Eleni Kounalakis. An "Editor's Note" before the piece begins describes Ms. Kounalakis as the "United States ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013," the author of a book on her time there, and "a senior adviser to the Albright Stonebridge Group" (as in "Madeline Albright").
The "editor" at CNN "forgot" to mention one "little" thing, noted by John Hinderaker at Powerline: "... she was one of Hillary’s top (2008) fundraisers, a fundraiser who was paid off with an ambassadorship, and therefore hardly an objective observer of Hillary’s successes (or lack thereof) as Secretary of State."
Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage.
One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, on how "Home ownership ... is increasingly on hold for younger Americans." While he identified several symptoms which could easily be traced to Obama administration and Federal Reserve policies, Boak never tagged anyone who might be responsible, instead acting as if all these adverse conditions just sort of happened and ... oh well, here we are.
Japan, once a feared world economic powerhouse already at "two decades of little or no real economic growth," just reported that its economy contracted during the second quarter at an annual rate of 1.6 percent.
The common thread throughout the two-decade slump has been the alleged need for ever-increasing levels of Keynesian "stimulus." Apparently refusing to believe there are any other viable alternatives to what hasn't worked for 20 years, the world's press is expecting — and creating pressure for — even more "stimulus."
Today on ABC's This Week, Jonathan Karl reported that "Platte River Networks, the Colorado company which set up (Hillary) Clinton's servers, told ABC News that it's highly likely that a full backup of the server was made, meaning those thousands of emails she deleted may still exist."
This from all appearances huge development has only drawn the interest of several center-right blogs and outlets, a few of which include Twitchy, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller. The establishment press to this point appears determined to ignore it. Can anyone imagine a similar level of disinterest in a highly significant story affecting a Republican or conservative presidential candidate — or, for that matter, the press standing by without pushback if the candidate exhibited the level of mocking, defiant arrogance Mrs. Clinton has consistently shown?
All you need to know about the Associated Press's interest in accurately reporting current developments in the investigations into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server is this: A search at its national site on "Hillary crime" (not in quotes) returns nothing.
Ken Thomas's coverage of the former Secretary of State's "forceful defense" last night in "a speech before influential Iowa Democrats" is all too typical: Mrs. Clinton gets to say that all of this is "partisan games" involving "playing politics." All I see is substance-free whining. "My opponents don't like me" is not a defense. Several paragraphs from Ken's calamity follow the jump:
As Spencer Raley at NewsBusters noted earlier this evening, StemExpress, "the now infamous biomedical company which allegedly bought fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood for profit, is breaking off its relationship with the nation’s leading abortion provider." Raley referenced a Politico item by Jennifer Haberkorn with a mid-afternoon Friday time stamp. As far as I can tell, it is the only establishment press outlet to note this development.
No establishment press outlet has noted a key courtroom development yesterday which may have been what really drove StemExpress to make its move — a move which, by the way, has not been announced in the "news" section at the company's web site, even though it has posted five other items during the past month relating to the Planned Parenthood fetal tissue outrages.
Carrying water for the left as their pet programs implode while pretending to be an objective reporter is a daunting task. The Associated Press's Stephen Ohlemacher was not up to that task Thursday afternoon. Twice, in relatively early paragraphs of his 31-paragraph writeup, the AP reporter claimed that the Social Security system has "money." He then separately quoted a Democratic congressperson who insisted that it has money, and that the mere act of correctly asserting that it doesn't "manufactures a crisis."
It "seems" that a bit of doubt seeped into an economy-related Associated Press report today. An hour later, it was gone.
An early report by Josh Boak with a 10:22 a.m. time stamp found at a subscribing outlet's site described job growth in the past 12 months as "seemingly robust." An hour later, in an expansion of that early report primarily covering today's government release on July retail sales, Boak, in collaboration with Anne D'Innocenzio, described it as "solid."
Records are made to be broken, but apparently government spending records are not meant to be reported. The Monthly Treasury Statement released today showed that the federal government spent a mind-boggling $374.86 billion in July. That's an all-time single-month record, surpassing the previous high of $369.39 billion "achieved" in August 2012. Yes, there was a calendar "quirk" which caused this month's report to include five Fridays of disbursements; but that happens four times a year, and a record is a record.
My, the news about Barvetta Singletary's domestic violence arrest involving gunfire has been kept mighty quiet.
Press reports have typically opened by describing Ms. Singletary as "a White House staffer." Several paragraphs later, readers learn that she is — or perhaps "was," as she has for now "has been placed on temporary unpaid leave and is banned from White House grounds" — the "special assistant to the president and House legislative affairs liaison." Though it's impossible to be certain given bureaucratic bloat, this would seem to be a position which reports directly to Barack Obama. Even if it isn't, can anyone imagine a similar circumstance generating so little notice during a Republican or conservative presidential administration?
Two wire service dispatches covering the government's June Wholesale Sales and Inventories release either glossed over or completely ignored what others are saying about the report's impact on near-term economic growth.
The final sentence of an unbylined Reuters report vaguely referred to future impact by indicating that current inventory balances, which are bloated by historical standards, "would weigh on manufacturing and economic growth" (i.e., have a negative impact). Both Reuters and the AP's Josh Boak completely ignored a leading GDP forecaster's estimate that inventory buildups seen during the second quarter will cause a significant third-quarter pullback which will also knock down third-quarter economic growth considerably — and that was before today's news that the June buildup was even greater than expected. Boak's report also contained an utterly unsupportable "things are getting better" statement.
The Associated Press has been in Ferguson covering the anniversary of Michael Brown's death and the George Soros-funded out-of-towners leading the "festivities."
I'll leave it to others to dissect the wire service's on-the-street reporting during the past several days. What also concerns me is how AP's reports continue to bitterly cling to half-truths and distortions about how Brown died and the nature of the evidence evaluated by the grand jury which refused to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson in his death. Five paragraphs containing such distortions were included in at least three different AP reports this weekend.
Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935.
In anticipation of the New Deal-era program's 80th anniversary, the Associated Press's Stephen Ohlemacher presented as facts several unfortunately widely believed distortions. His worst offense against common sense was an item in his list of "modest changes" which could "save" the actuarially bankrupt (to the tune of at least $10.6 trillion) program. The AP reporter included in his list of what he claimed would be "modest changes" the idea of applying the 12.4 percent payroll tax to absolutely all earned income. Modest, schmodest.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency committed an act which would have likely become instant national news if a private entity had done the same thing.
On Friday, John Merline at Investors' Business Daily succinctly noted that the EPA "dumped a million gallons of mine waste into Animas River in Colorado, turning it into what looked like Tang, forcing the sheriff's office to close the river to recreational users." Oh, and it "also failed to warn officials in downstream New Mexico about the spill." Yet here we are four days later, and the story has gotten very little visibility outside of center-right blogs and outlets. That's largely explained by how the wire services have handled the story. After the jump, readers will see headlines and descriptions of the stories which have appeared thus far at the web site of the New York Times:
The Associated Press has demonstrated a double standard in covering developments in various states in the wake of the gruesome Planned Parenthood videos posted by the Center for Medical Progress. Bad news for Planned Parenthood gets only local coverage. Exculpatory news, even if artificially concocted, gets national exposure.
In Florida, a statewide review of the state’s 16 Planned Parenthood facilities ordered by Governor Rick Scott led to four citations, as reported at Townhall: "[T]hree were conducting procedures that were outside of their licenses (a.k.a late-term abortions) and the last one was improperly logging the disposal of infant remains." The AP treated this news as a local story. Meanwhile, news that there have been no transfers of fetal tissue from the three abortion facilities in Kansas has been posted at both the wire service's main national site and at its "Big Story" site.
Arthur Chu is "the fourth highest-earning Jeopardy! champion in non-tournament gameplay, with a grand total of $298,200."
That achievement, and a supposedly high-end education at Swarthmore College (2013-2014 tuition - $44,368), supposedly qualify him to be columnist at Salon.com. Apparently, you have to be a really smart guy like Chu to figure out that any American who says that "All lives matter" is a flaming hypocrite. After the jump, ignoring Chu's tired criticisms of the U.S. atomic bombings in World War II — PJTV's Bill Whittle has, excuse the expression, completely nuked those arguments for all time — watch how Chu proves that there is indeed an especially odious level of hypocrisy at work — and he's the one exemplifying it (bolds are mine throughout this post):
On Friday, in his desire to help his employer outdo Politifact as the last place to go for accurate fact-checking, the Associated Press's Josh Lederman "fact-checked" Jeb Bush's belief that the U.S. economy can grow annually at an average rate of 4 percent.
As seen in my Friday NewsBusters post, when the AP reporter "fact-checked" assertions that really are facts, specifically Bush's claim that during his two terms as Florida's governor the state added 1.3 million payroll jobs (actually, it was 1.5 million according to the federal government's more comprehensive Household Survey), he brought up irrelevant points that did nothing to change the absolute truth of what Bush said. But in reviewing Bush's 4 percent potential growth assertion, Lederman wasn't even evaluating a fact; he was instead "fact checking" a goal — one which has frequently been met in the past — and acted as if its future achievement is virtually impossible.
The Associated Press seems determined to become even worse at "fact-checking" politicians' statements than Politifact, the current cellar-dwellar in that regard. At the rate things are going, the wire service, in addition to richly earning its nickname "the Administration's Press" since January 2009, appears to be in line for yet another: "Associated Politifact."
In his "fact check" following last night's Republican debates, the AP's Josh Lederman outrageously argued that Jeb Bush's indisputably true statement about job creation while he was Florida's governor needed to be qualified because of what happened during the next three years under successor Charlie Crist.
