Budget

ANOTHER Gruber 'Stupid Voters' Video Appears; Fox's Megyn Kelly Goes Off
By Tom Blumer | November 12, 2014 | 12:42 AM EST

If Jonathan Gruber, the Obama administration and the establishment press thought that Gruber's faux mea culpa appearance on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon would get them off the hook and avoid the need to deal with and cover the Obamacare architect's exposure of the left's mendacity, they were sadly mistaken.

There's yet another damning "stupid voters" video. Megyn Kelly was all over it Tuesday night, exposing the defiantly silent White House's and others' former financial and emotional love for and dependence on the MIT economist's work.

Atlantic Columnist: Progressives 'Have Every Reason to Be Celebrating'
By Tom Blumer | November 11, 2014 | 8:50 PM EST

Far be it from me to talk a leftist columnist out of an ignorant, self-satisfied position which might, if anything, cause his fellow travelers to hit the accelerator a little less aggressively in future political campaigns.

At the Atlantic on Monday afternoon, Richard Reeves, policy director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, claimed that the left shouldn't be so glum after Tuesday's election results, because "progressive policies are working." His very first graph makes a mockery of his claim:

Conceding GOP Takeover, NYT Works to Strangle Conservative Principles at Birth
By Clay Waters | October 23, 2014 | 11:53 PM EDT

Having pretty much conceded big Republican gains of the U.S. Senate, the New York Times is working to strangle any ideological gains the GOP might make, whether the issue be immigration or economics. The latest example: Jackie Calmes' front-page story Thursday, "Economists See Limited Gains in G.O.P. Plan."

Late Night Funny: Jimmy Kimmel Mocks Government Waste
By Jeffrey Meyer | October 23, 2014 | 3:01 PM EDT

On Wednesday night, comedian Jimmy Kimmel used Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) annual Wastebook as an opportunity to mock the federal government’s continued waste of taxpayer dollars. The ABC late night host hilariously asked his audience if they could “tell the difference between a real government expenditure from Wastebook and an idea a stoner came up with on his own.” 

Will Press Note White House Deletion of Obama's 'Unpaid Bills' Joke in Illinois Speech?
By Tom Blumer | October 21, 2014 | 1:24 PM EDT

Josh Lederman's report this morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, treats President Barack Obama's return to Chicago as a trip down memory lane: "Obama got glimpses of a simpler time when his life was for the most part, normal: the unpaid bills on his desk, the volunteers who pitched in on his first Senate campaign, the day he marched in seven Fourth of July parades."

The reference to "unpaid bills" is from the President's remarks at a DNC event at a private home in Chicago. But the speech transcript now posted at the White House web site has scrubbed the related passage, as Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard noted early this morning. There may have been an additional development since that post appeared.

AP Relays WH Howler: $483B Deficit Is 'Return to Fiscal Normalcy'
By Tom Blumer | October 19, 2014 | 12:27 PM EDT

The White House is apparently feeling pretty full of itself over the fiscal 2014 federal budget result it has just reported.

Reacting to the news that this year's deficit was "only" $483.4 billion, White House budget director Shaun Donovan crowed that "This is a return to fiscal normalcy." The press, of course including Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press, has accepted all of this with little challenge, including the administration's misleading "percentage of GDP" assertions, which completely ignore how much more the national debt has grown than the reported budget deficits. Taylor went one step further, blatanty deceiving readers as to how much money the federal government borrows for every dollar it spends.

In Oct. 2008, AP Said Obama Would Inherit A Deficit of $700 Billion
By Tom Blumer | October 18, 2014 | 11:04 PM EDT

On October 8, Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press wrote that "(President Barack) Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." In a NewsBusters post later that day, I pegged Obama's true inheritance at roughly $245 billion as of when he was first sworn into office, and at about $600 billion if projected over the full fiscal year. The actual deficit for fiscal 2009 came in at just over $1.4 trillion due to deficit-increasing actions by Obama and the Democrat-dominated Congress.

I guess we're supposed to forget about Taylor's egregious falsehood, because AP's national site has since replaced his story, perhaps more than one time. That's not happening.

As CDC, NIH Cry Over Money, Press Ignores Their Waste
By Tom Blumer | October 15, 2014 | 11:58 PM EDT

For years, government watchdog groups have chronicled numerous instances of waste and abuse — at the very least — at the Centers for Disease Control and its National Institutes for Health.

An establishment press corps doing its job, upon hearing the director of the National Institutes for Health claim that "if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine" for Ebola by now, and especially upon hearing leftist poltiticians then claim that it's all Republicans' fault, would look into whether part of the problem might be poor bureacratic stewardship. But they're not doing their job.

Charles Pierce: Wendy Davis Wheelchair Ad Shows ‘The Basic Principles of Modern Conservatism’ Are a ‘Lie’
By Tom Johnson | October 15, 2014 | 9:52 PM EDT

The Esquire blogger claims that right-wingers don’t believe in small government, but rather in grabbing all the publicly funded goodies they can.

WaPo's Kessler Gives 'GOP Cut CDC Funding' Four Pinocchios, Effectively 'Cutting' AP's Disinformation to Ribbons
By Tom Blumer | October 15, 2014 | 12:36 PM EDT

Early this morning, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's designated fact-checker gave the left's claims that Republicans alone were responsible for alleged "cuts" to Ebola research four Pinocchios (i.e., a "whopper").

That's nice, but it hardly undoes the damage news outlets like the Associated Press have inflicted on the truth in the apparent name of ginning up resentment among low-information voters. I'll get to that, but first, here are the key passages from Kessler's critique, which essentially gets down to who's responsible for sequestration (the correct answer is that it was President Obama and the White House; bolds are mine throughout this post):

Expect the Press to Ignore the Large Difference Between Deficits and Growth of National Debt
By Tom Blumer | October 11, 2014 | 4:07 PM EDT

The federal government's latest fiscal year ended on September 30. The final Monthly Treasury Statement for the fiscal year, will likely be published during the coming week or possibly a few days later.

From time to time, commenters at NewsBusters have pointed that Uncle Sam's reported deficits don't represent the whole story. They are certainly right. While the press is all excited over this week's Monthly Budget Review released by the Congressional Budget Office, which contain an unofficial but probably accurate estimate that the fiscal 2014 budget deficit was "only" $486 billion, the national debt has grown by far more than that.

AP's Andrew Taylor: Obama 'Inherited a $1 Trillion-Plus Deficit'
By Tom Blumer | October 8, 2014 | 2:44 PM EDT

In a sign that the historical revisionists and Barack Obama legacy builders at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, may have shifted their operation into high gear for the final weeks of the midterm election campaign, Andrew Taylor has written that "Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis."

The occasion for Taylor's tripe is the Congressional Budget Office's release of its final Monthly Budget Review for fiscal year 2014. In the report, which the AP has almost always ignored in every other month in favor of waiting for the official Monthly Treasury Statement issued shortly thereafter, the CBO estimates that the year's budget deficit will come in at "only" $486 billion. A grab of Taylor's original full five-paragraph blurb, which has since been revised while still containing the "inherited" claim, follows the jump: