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.
Government Agencies
By Randy Hall | August 12, 2015 | 5:25 PM EDT
A coalition of 53 press and open government organizations has “once again” urged President Barack Obama and the people in his administration “to stop practices in federal agencies that prevent important information from getting to the public.”
According to an open letter sent to the Democratic occupant of the White House on Monday and released to the public the following day, groups ranging from the American Copy Editors Society to the Virginia Professional Communicators criticized Obama for not following through on a promise he made during his presidential campaign in 2008.
By Tom Blumer | August 11, 2015 | 3:31 PM EDT
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.
By Tom Blumer | August 10, 2015 | 7:01 PM EDT
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.
By Tom Blumer | August 9, 2015 | 10:25 AM EDT
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:
By Tom Blumer | August 8, 2015 | 11:56 PM EDT
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.
By Tom Blumer | July 31, 2015 | 11:11 PM EDT
On Thursday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three networks and the two leading Spanish-language networks ignored the latest developments in the now 813 day-old IRS targeting scandal. As usual, only Fox News covered a congressional hearing on, in Fox's words, "the lack of accountability following the IRS targeting of tea party and other groups" as well as a federal judge's threat "to hold (IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court for failing to produce status reports and Lois Lerner e-mails."
Not that this excuses the non-coverage, but if these outfits were relying as subscribers on the Associated Press to make sure that the contempt threat made by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan got the visibility it deserved so they would be aware of it and use it, the wire service's Stephen Ohlemacher let them down — and, I would argue, deliberately so.
By Tom Blumer | July 31, 2015 | 11:22 AM EDT
Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press and the "expert" he quoted in his writeup on the government's awful Employment Cost Index report seemed to be taking their cues from Steven Wright's deadpan comedy act. The problem, of course, is that they were writing and saying isn't funny at all.
Rugaber, with his "expert" help, assembled an impressive array of understatements and misstatements in the wake of the smallest reported quarterly increase in U.S. worker pay on record. His worst characterization: "[T]he job market is not yet back to full health."
By Tom Blumer | July 30, 2015 | 5:45 PM EDT
The bar-lowering in the business press continues.
In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":
By Tom Blumer | July 29, 2015 | 6:23 PM EDT
The news out of Venezuela has apparently become so grim that the arguably Chavista-sympathetic press barely bothers to report it in any kind of sutstantive fashion. Inflation has gone wild, the level of violent crime has become frightening, and the government has taken to jailing citizens who dare to tweet their dissatisfaction with the regime of Nicolas Makuro (note that the linked report was prepared by a freelance journalist and not one of the worldwide wires; where have they been while this has been going on?).
One telling Associated Press dispatch from Venezuela last week concerned what's left of the nation's food distribution system. The item revealed that the press refuses to get over its classist obsessions, even as an entire country falls apart. A video seen after the jump will show that the government's "solution" has no realistic chance of fixing the problem.
By Tom Blumer | July 29, 2015 | 3:46 PM EDT
Yet another important economic statistic confidently predicted to rise has fallen — hard.
This time it was June's pending sales of existing homes. Just in time for summer, they were predicted to increase by a seasonally adjusted 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. Instead they fell by 1.8 percent, the steepest drop since December 2013. Additionally, May's original 0.9 percent increase was revised down to 0.6 percent. This brought out yet another appearance of the dreaded "U-Word" ("unexpectedly") — accompanied, as usual, by excuses delivered by Victoria Stilwell at Bloomberg News (bolds are mine):
By Tom Blumer | July 27, 2015 | 11:52 PM EDT
I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver."
The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago. The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U.S. cities. To those who have been unaware of the issue up until now and are thinking that all of this must be a joke — it's not. It's just that the press, which not coincidentally has a higher percentage of union members than the private sector as a whole, has barely noted it.