Wednesday night, an Associated Press reporter told us that it's the press's job to ask "tough, impertinent" questions like the ones moderators at Wednesday night's CNBC-hosted Republican debate were asking.
Ken Dilanian, who is apparently the AP's Intelligence Writer — seriously — really needs to consult a dictionary before he makes such a complete fool of himself. Here is what Dilanian tweeted at 10:32 p.m.:
The competition for the worst moderator moment of Wednesday night's GOP debate is fierce. John Harwood's rephrasing of an old and discredited charge that Marco Rubio's tax plan disproportionately benefits the top 1 percent has to be in the running.
That's especially true because Harwood himself had to back away from a simialr contention two weeks ago, yet still brought up the same issue with a similar dishonest assumption Wednesday night. After Rubio refuted Harwood and pointed out that the CNBC hack previously had to correct himself about the substance of the Rubio-Lee plan, a finger-wagging Harwood still insisted he was correct (bolds are mine throughout this post):
During Wednesday's Republican presidential debate on CNBC, Senator Marco Rubio (Fl.) shellacked the news media as “the ultimate super PAC” for Democrats and Hillary Clinton. "Last week, Hillary Clinton...admitted she had sent e-mails to her family saying hey, this attack in Benghazi was caused by al-Qaeda-like elements. She spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video and yet, the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton's campaign."
Preparing the battlespace for tomorrow's report from the government on third-quarter Gross Domestic Product growth, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger early this afternoon told readers that we're likely to see "a subpar pace by any standard."
But we shouldn't worry, because the AP reporter contends that tomorrow's news will just be a temporary trough in this year's "dizzying roller coaster ride," and that the fourth quarter will once again bring the economy up to acceptable heights. To make his claim, Crutsinger naturally ignored myriad warning signs that a serious slowdown may be on the horizon. A decade ago, he was hyping other far less serious factors as evidence that the economy would be lucky to avoid a recession.
Whatever Nicolle Wallace had for breakfast this morning, Jeb should down a double order . . . On today's Morning Joe, former Bush communications chief Wallace slammed a Politico story in which former McCain staffers rejected parallels between Jeb's campaign and that of McCain, who came back from the political wilderness to win the nomination in 2008.
Calling the story a "cheap shot," "low blow" and "irrelevant clackery of the clacking class," Wallace repeatedly pointed out that the sources for the story were McCain staffers now working for other candidates in the current GOP race. Such folks would obviously have a vested interest in scotching the notion of a Jeb comeback.
Earlier today, Katie Yoder at NewsBusters posted and described the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress on Planned Parenthood's late-term abortion business and its related ghoulish work in harvesting fetal tissue from abortions for research.
Yoder's work and that CMP video caused me to remember how the Associated Press wrote up Planned Parenthood's announcement that it would cease taking compensation for fetal tissue harvesting on October 13.
David Corn claims that there are "serious issues" about Ben Carson's Seventh Day Adventism faith. Great point, David. After all, for twenty years, Carson sat in the pews of a preacher who spewed "God damn America" hatred, a pastor that Carson chose to officiate his marriage and baptize his children.
Oh, wait: that wasn't Carson. It was Barack Obama, who chose Jeremiah "Chickens Coming Home to Roost" Wright as his personal pastor and faith guide. Never mind. On this evening's Hardball, Corn--an MSNBC analyst and head of the DC office of Mother Jones--claimed that Carson's religion needs to be investigated because it professes an end time. Guess what, David? All the Abrahamic religions do: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It's not a question of if, only when. So take your religious bigotry elsewhere, Corn.
Late Sunday evening, the United Auto Workers and General Motors reached a tentative four-year agreement shortly before the union's 11:59 p.m. strike deadline.
The agreement was expected, simply because the financial and political blowback of a strike at a company bailed out by taxpayers at a cost running into tens of billion of dollars back in 2009 would have been severe. Also expected: the press buying into and perpetuating the myth that the union made significant concessions to GM and Chrysler during the course of those two companies' respective corrupt bankruptcies.
Those folks at the Associated Press sure are "clever."
Those looking for information about Hillary Clinton's damning email to her daughter Chelsea indicating that Mrs. Clinton knew that a planned operation by Al Qaeda — and not an Internet video — was behind the Benghazi attacks which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others trying to save him will find nothing at all at the AP's national site in a search (not in quotes) on "Hillary Chelsea":
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.
The press has consumed many barrels of ink and gigs of bandwidth providing free promotion for the eminently misnamed movie Truth, thus far virtually for naught.
On Thursday, the Associated Press's David Bauder did his part to generate interest by pretending, despite obviously forged documents and a virtually complete lack of anything resembling corroborating evidence, that what Dan Rather and Mary Mapes reported in 2004 about George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service might, as those two miscreants formerly employed by CBS still insist, be accurate.
A mini-war broke out yesterday between the Washington Post's Philip Bump, who would apparently prefer to keep discussions of Hillary Clinton's health off the table, and Matt Drudge. As would be expected, Drudge won in a rout, while Bump continues to pretend that he didn't.
Bump, in his disingenuous Friday morning entry at the Post's all too appropriately named "The Fix" blog, told readers that his own doctor's opinion concerning Mrs. Clinton's health should trump Drudge's. Bump should have known better — maybe he did, and didn't care, rolling the dice on Drudge ignoring him. The issue isn't Bump's doctor, who has never examined Mrs. Clinton, versus Drudge. It's Bump's doctor versus a media-published statement made by Mrs. Clinton's own doctor.
