Heritage Foundation

AP on Friday: Mich. Right to Work Law an Exercise in 'Raw Power,' With No 'Political Niceties'
By Tom Blumer | December 11, 2012 | 6:25 PM EST

There will be plenty of time later to look at how the Associated Press and other wires more than likely fail to report the violence that took place in connection with right-to-work legislative actions in Michigan's legislature today. For now, let's look at the reactions of Associated Press reporters John Flesher and Jeff Karoub on Friday in an item which is no longer at the AP's main national site.

Their dispatch's headline ("Michigan Republicans end part of union tradition") was from all appearances an attempt to make it seem uninteresting. The story itself didn't describe the law involved as "right to work" until its fourth paragraph. Both before and after that, the pair, who are more than likely members of the Occupy Movement-supporting News Media Guild, got bitter (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Politico Disparages Heritage as 'Uninspiring' & Discredits DeMint as a 'Fighter, Not a Thinker'
By Ryan Robertson | December 7, 2012 | 3:58 PM EST

Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) announced Thursday that he will be trading his Senate seat in January to assume the helm of the Heritage Foundation. Covering the surprising development in its Friday edition, Politico dismissed DeMint as a mediocre politician with an undistinguished record who is moving on to captain a conservative think tank that has become "predictable, uninspiring, and often lacking in influence."

Manu Raju and Scott Wong mocked DeMint's lack of credentials in their front-page story titled, "DeMint Departure Fallout." They described him as a popular senator who has actually "accomplished very little" in Congress because he "wasn't a legislator" and having "no signature laws to his name." Of course, this betrays an inside-the-Beltway way of thinking about success in Congress. Conservatives dedicated to shrinking the size and scope of the federal government are not going to be be known for legislative accomplishments, which more often than not are about expanding the federal government's size and scope, not dismantling old bureaucracies.

US News & World Report Cites Record Number Food Stamp Recipients: Wonders if They're Getting Enough for Survival
By Ryan Robertson | November 21, 2012 | 12:41 PM EST

This Thanksgiving, a record high of 42.2 million Americans will use food stamps to curtail the cost of a big meal. At a whopping expense of $72 billion to the taxpayer per year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has grown by 70 percent since 2007, an increase of over 15 million more people.

Despite acknowledging all of this, Elizabeth Flock of US News & World Report declared "More Americans will use food stamps to buy their Thanksgiving dinner this year than ever before," and implied these government handouts aren't as sufficient as they could be.

AP Pair Lets Obama 'Distance Himself' From Soptic Ad, Despite Known Contrary Evidence
By Tom Blumer | August 22, 2012 | 4:21 PM EDT

Yesterday, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web had this to say about the title of an Associated Press report ("Obama Defends Tenor of His Campaign, Slams Romney") covering President Obama's four-question "press conference" -- "The writer of this Associated Press headline is either witty or clueless."

The underlying writeup by Jim Kuhnhenn and Charles Babington wasn't witty, and was at least as clueless, especially in letting the howler about how Obama was supposedly able to "distance himself" from the "Mitt Romney caused my wife to die of cancer" meme his own campaign associated itself with earlier this year (verbiage relating to the Todd Akin situation in Missouri is also in the report; I'll defer to others in that matter; bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Why Did AP Do a 1,500-Word Expected Poverty Rate Writeup Months Before Census Bureau's Report?
By Tom Blumer | July 22, 2012 | 10:31 AM EDT

In September 2010, the Associated Press prepared an advance report on the expected surge in the Census Bureau's official poverty rate, which rose from 13.2% to a 15-year high of 14.3%. Their stated preoccupation was not with the associated pain, but with "the unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when Congress is at stake."

Well, this year's official poverty rate will very likely be the highest seen since the mid-1960s, and there's a presidential election coming up. What's the AP, aka the Administration's Press, to do? It looks like the strategy is to get a comprehensive report out on how bad things are in July when few are paying attention, and then to give the official report short shrift when it arrives in mid-September. Here are excerpts from Hope Yen's nearly 1,500-word writeup:

AP Calls HHS's Gutting of Welfare Reform a 'Proposal'
By Tom Blumer | July 18, 2012 | 8:22 AM EDT

On July 12, the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children & Families, the group which administers the entitlement program known to most as "welfare" or "traditional welfare, issued an "Information Memorandum" entitled "Guidance concerning waiver and expenditure authority under Section 1115" (i.e., not "proposed guidance"). After navigating the thicket of bureaucratic babble contained therein, Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley at the Heritage Foundation asserted, with agreement from several other quarters and no meaningful dissent I have detected, that the memo's effect "is the end of welfare reform."

The next day at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, the headline at Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar's related story was: "Administration proposes welfare-to-work waivers."

Ex-Democrat Artur Davis Defends GOP on Fast & Furious Probe, Voter ID
By John Bates | June 20, 2012 | 4:07 PM EDT

Yesterday former Rep. Artur Davis -- who served in Congress as a Democrat but recently became a Republican out of frustration with the Obama administration -- was a featured guest of the Heritage Foundation's weekly blogger briefing.

Davis briefly discussed the similarities between the upcoming election and the election of 1980. He claimed that Ronald Reagan had to make the American people realize that what the Carter administration was doing was ruining the economy and that Mitt Romney will have to make a similar case regarding President Obama.

CNN, at OWS 'Office' in New York, Interviews 'Volunteers' Heritage Outs As Seasoned Leftists
By Tom Blumer | December 6, 2011 | 8:36 PM EST

Last week, CNN's Steve Kastenbaum (podcast is also at link) visited what he characterized as Occupy Wall Street's "nerve center" (but don't call it a "headquarters," Occupiers insisted) in space provided by an anonymous donor. No, it wasn't at Zuccotti Park or any other open-air location. It was, and presumably still is, in Lower Manhattan, one block south of the New York Stock Exchange.

Along the way, Kastenbaum interviewed several people who portrayed themselves as "volunteer staff" for a supposedly leaderless movement, but as is par for the course in the establishment press when leftists are involved, didn't reveal anyone's previous background. At Heritage, Lachlan Markay reports at Robert Bluey's blog that the prior affiliations and involvements of at least a few of those interviewed belies their starry-eyed self-portrayal:

AP's Taylor Relays Tired 'Extending Unemployment Benefits Stimulates the Economy' Fiction
By Tom Blumer | November 20, 2011 | 11:17 AM EST

The dictionary definition of "stimulate" relevant to a nation's economy is "to rouse to action or effort."

We still have journalists who gullibly relay the notion that extending unemployment benefits and increasing entitlement programs will "rouse" the economy "to action of effort," despite almost three years of evidence that such is not the case. One of them is Andrew Taylor, a writer for the Associated Press, who, in his unprofessionally titled ("Deficit deal failure would pose crummy choice") and painfully long writeup about the supercommittee's lack of action or effort in Washington, wrote the following:

AP Laughably Argues Regulations Aren't Job-Killers, Because Companies Almost Never Blame Them for Layoffs
By Tom Blumer | October 12, 2011 | 1:55 AM EDT

Somebody needed to give Calvin Woodward and Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press Five-Hour Energy drinks or some other boost before Tuesday night's GOP debate. Their brains must have totally turned off late in the  afternoon without re-engaging before they filed their late-evening post-debate report.

Behold how the AP pair "proved" that excessive government regulation doesn't kill jobs (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Early AM Engine-Starter: Guess the Costs of Milwaukee School District's Legal Defense Over an 'Equal Rights' Drug
By Tom Blumer | March 9, 2011 | 4:22 AM EST

On Monday, in a story I will link after the jump, the Associated Press reported that on March 1 the  Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA) dropped a lawsuit it initiated last year over the school district's refusal five years earlier to cover a prescription drug the union described as "an issue of discrimination, of equal rights for all our members” (that link will also appear after the jump).

So the questions submitted for our readers to ponder are these:

1) What drug was involved?

2) How much has the district spent defending itself against the lawsuit?

No fair Googling. Answers follow.

Norah O'Donnell Misses Wisconsin Governor's Motives for Budget Cuts
By Matt Hadro | February 18, 2011 | 6:08 PM EST

In the midst of outcry that Wisconsin teachers were skipping school to protest the governor's new budget bill and demand collective bargaining rights, NBC's Norah O'Donnell provided the teachers' motives as an argument for their side. She failed to mention why Wisconsin Gov. Walker cut into their benefits in the first place.

Covering the story on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports," O'Donnell remarked that "I know there are some that think this is a travesty for the schoolchildren of that state." She added, however, "But these teachers are talking about their pensions, and they're worried about having to pay more for their health care costs, right?"

The explosive debate has featured voices from the left and right crying about the compensation Wisconsin public employees receive and what they pay in, compared with that of private sector workers. The conservative Heritage Foundation explains that Wisconsin's budget was already in the red, and that state employees enjoy generous benefits that many other citizens don't.