On Wednesday, The New York Times posted an article by reporter Robert Pear calling out Marco Rubio for taking the pen to Obamacare in the budget legislation from last year. On Thursday, it appeared on the front page with the headline “Rubio Measure Delivered a Blow to Healthy Law.”
Bailouts
By Seton Motley | November 9, 2015 | 1:04 PM EST
The political definition of Cronyism is: government policy that favors one or more specific beneficiaries - at the expense of everyone else. To wit: $80 billion of the 2009 “Stimulus” was wasted on “green energy” companies - 80% of whom were Barack Obama donors. Amongst the parade of horribles contained therein: the government took money from energy companies - to fund competitors to their energy companies.
Sadly, a $3.5-trillion-a-year federal government budget is filled to the rafters with nigh-endless Cronyism. There’s so much to undo - one must triage and prioritize. And while we work to reduce and eliminate, we most certainly should not create a whole new Cronyism - that will dwarf all the others combined.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) late last week gave us a quintessential example of aiming at the tiny - while they have for years championed the huge. Behold:
By Seton Motley | October 28, 2015 | 12:48 PM EDT
The media are, of course, almost uniformly Leftist - which means they just about always toe the Party line. Including the belief that in order to help the poor - government must perpetually grow. Of course we conservatives also want to help the poor - we just think shrinking government is the way to actually do it.
When things get more expensive - the poor get hammered hardest. But the media misses the obvious - the more government there is, the more things cost. It is axiomatic - in (at least) two ways.
By Tom Blumer | October 24, 2015 | 10:30 PM EDT
The news coming out of Detroit about near-deadline negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors has been pretty quiet. As the Sunday 11:59 p.m. deadline approaches, the Associated Press only has a four-paragraph blurb indicating that the union wants to get a richer package than it just garnered in negotiations with Fiat Chrysler. A Reuters report goes into detail about GM's cost structure still being higher than that seen at Toyota's and Nissan's U.S. plants by about 15 percent and 31 percent, respectively. The New York Times is only carrying reports from the wires.
One note of substance about the UAW's strategy covered at Bloomberg News — surely known to others following the industry who are filing bland reports — is that it plans to milk the unemployment insurance system in the event of a protracted strike.
By Tom Blumer | August 26, 2015 | 5:39 PM EDT
Almost four years ago, solar energy manufacturer Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, leaving the federal government with a loan guarantee-related loss of up to $535 million.
The Energy Department's inspector general released a report on the debacle today. At the Associated Press, reporter Kevin Freking made sure readers knew that the loan guarantee program began under President George W. Bush, but somehow "forgot" to note, as the Weekly Standard did at the time, that the Energy Department under Bush made a "unanimous decision to shelve Solyndra's application two weeks before Obama took office."
By Spencer Raley | August 12, 2015 | 12:14 PM EDT
In his MSNBC show The Last Word Tuesday evening, Lawrence O’Donnell dedicated a segment to describing his opinion of what “good and bad socialism” looks like. Naturally his example of “good” socialism included the man and policies Bernie Sanders. It also included a 6 year old cover from Newsweek magazine that proclaimed “We Are All Socialists now,” which detailed how it's becoming normal (and good) for America to fund massive socialist policies like Social Security and Medicaid. Bad socialism is, of course, allowing the government to “socialize” the sports industry by subsidizing the construction of new stadiums for rich and greedy team owners and the millionaire athletes they employ.
August 9, 2015 | 11:59 AM EDT
Mientras Puerto Rico, bajo el liderazgo del socio del Presidente Obama, el gobernador Alejandro García-Padilla (D) ponía en mora los pagos a los acreedores, Univisión transmitió un informe completamente parcializado sobre manifestaciones contra la "austeridad" en frente de una firma de inversiones con sede en Nueva York.
August 9, 2015 | 11:16 AM EDT
As Puerto Rico, under the leadership of President Obama’s pal, Governor Alejandro García- Padilla (D) defaults on its debt payments to bondholders, Univision aired an entirely one-sided report about an “anti-austerity” demonstration in front of a New York-based investment firm.
By Tom Blumer | June 30, 2015 | 11:47 AM EDT
The current headline at a June 29 New York Times story by Peter Eavis, also appearing on the front page of today's print edition, is "Loads of Debt: A Global Ailment With Few Cures."
But the last portion of the story's web address is "... trillions-spent-but-crises-like-greeces-persist.html." That's because the original headline, the one used at the Times's Twitter account — was "Trillions Spent But Crises Like Greece Persist." Of course without admitting it, Eavis's writeup is an ode to the worldwide failure of Keynesian economics — a term which naturally never appears in any form — and the closed minds of those who don't understand why shoveling vast sums of money created out of thin air into the financial system is only marginally helpful in the short-term, and serious harmful, over the long-term.
By Curtis Houck | June 29, 2015 | 11:25 PM EDT
In their coverage Monday night of the debt crisis in Greece, ABC and NBC refused to label the current Greek government as socialist, far-left, or even left-wing with ABC neglecting to even explain why Greece has found itself in such a precarious position as they stand to possibly default on their billions of dollars in debt and/or leave the Eurozone. In contrast to both networks, the CBS Evening News offered both the most comprehensive coverage and the only label for the Greek government.
Baltimore Sun Reporter, in Covering City's Request for Riot 'Disaster' Assistance, 'Forgets' That Mayor Condoned Looting, Held Back Police
By Tom Blumer | May 31, 2015 | 8:06 PM EDT In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right.
Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that applying for FEMA assistance after a riot is something that is routinely done. (Perhaps, given the quality of today's journalists, she really believes that herself.) More critically, she forgot to remind readers that the city arguably deserves no help at all from any outside source, because the vast majority of the rioting's damage would have been prevented if Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had done her job.
By Tom Blumer | May 22, 2015 | 10:12 PM EDT
Given how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there was in the press when the old Hostess liquidated in 2012, a mid-April story at Forbes on the company's has gotten surprisingly little attention. Well, maybe it's not that much of a surprise, for reasons which will be indentified here.
Readers may recall that the final straw in that drama occurred late that year when the the AFL-CIO-affiliated Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers union called a strike after rejecting management clearly communicated final offer. The company, already in bankruptcy, was through negotiating, and chose to liquidate. The press moaned about how all of this meant the end of an era. Steven Bertoni's Forbes writeup shows how wrong they were, and what a business can accomplish when it's not saddled with legacy costs and constraints.