Political Groups

Not News: UAW Considering Plan to Milk the Unemployment System If It Calls a GM Strike
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.

AP's Bauder Enlists As An Accomplice to the Cinematic Fraud of 'Truth'
By Tom Blumer | October 24, 2015 | 6:07 PM EDT

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.

Wash Post's Bump: My Doctor Trumps Hillary's Doctor in Assessing Her Health
By Tom Blumer | October 24, 2015 | 2:32 PM EDT

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.

Scarborough: My Best Friends in Washington are Liberal Dems Like Maxine Waters
By Mark Finkelstein | October 23, 2015 | 8:40 AM EDT

Talk about politics making strange bedfellows . . . Joe Scarborough has said that when he goes back to Washington, DC, his "best friends" are "liberal Democrats."  The one person Scarborough singled out to illustrate this was Maxine Waters, mentioning that he hugs her on the House floor.

Scarborough's statement came during a pre-recorded New Hampshire town hall with John Kasich that aired on today's Morning Joe.  I wish Scarborough had explained why his best friends are liberal Democrats rather than any of the 247 Republicans in the House. Maxine Waters, really? The woman who called George W. a "liar" and Dick Cheney a "liar" and "thief?" Who refused to call the Rodney King riots by that name, labelling them a "rebellion" instead? 

Trudeaumania Part Deux Grips the Associated Press
By Tom Blumer | October 23, 2015 | 1:02 AM EDT

The folks at the Associated Press aren't even trying to disguise how pleased they are after Canada's most recent elections swept the Liberal Party into power after almost a decade in the wilderness.

They're claiming that victorious Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems destined to ignite the second installment of "Trudeaumania," the late-1960s press anointing which accompanied his father Pierre into that same position. It's quite clear that the AP is uninterested in informing readers about how awful Pierre Trudeau's actual record was. They instead want readers to believe that happy, reality-avoiding leftist days are here again.

AP's Crutsinger Fails to Investigate How Jobless Claims Stay Low With Slow Hiring
By Tom Blumer | October 22, 2015 | 4:13 PM EDT

If a Republican or conservative was in the White House, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger would have found a reason to be unimpressed in his dispatch today about how low initial unemployment claims continue to be, even as hiring has been slowing down. (Ideally, reporters should just relay the facts and leave the theorizing out of their stories, but that ship has sadly long since sailed.)

Crutsinger exhibited no real curiosity because a Democrat is in the White House. Therefore, it's left to New Media to at least get the alternative ideas out there; a contributor at the contrarian blog Zero Hedge did that several days ago. After the jump, readers will find most of Crutsinger's report covering the Department of Labor's initial claims release today, and a healthly chunk of the just-mentioned Zero Hedge analysis.

Scarborough Accuses Kristol: 'You're Trying to Cover Your A--' About Trump
By Mark Finkelstein | October 22, 2015 | 8:24 AM EDT

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were among the first in the media, going back months, to take Donald Trump seriously. In contrast, Bill Kristol had repeatedly declared that we had reached "peak Trump," only to find The Donald confoundingly continuing to climb in the polls.  

Things boiled over on today's Morning Joe.  Despite a fresh poll showing Trump with an astounding 48% of GOP voters in Massachusetts, Kristol blithely declared that Trump "is not going to be the nominee." That elicited sarcastic laughter from Scarborough, who shot back "we can show you clip after clip after clip after clip of your incorrect predictions about Donald Trump and his imminent collapse." Later, Kristol seized on a new poll from Iowa showing Ben Carson having overtaken Trump. Claiming that "you guys have been overestimating Trump and underestimating Carson," Kristol said he was "just trying to be helpful."  An exasperated Scarborough exploded: "you're out of your mind. You're not trying to be helpful.  You're trying to cover your a--.  It won't work with us."

Hillary 'Faking a Southern Drawl' Again; Press Won't Question Her Genuineness
By Tom Blumer | October 20, 2015 | 5:56 PM EDT

Hillary Clinton was in Alabama a few days ago. As she has in the past at least two other times when south of the Mason-Dixon line, she decided that she could drop the letter "g" from several of her "i-n-g" words while affecting a sort-of Southern accent.

This time she was in Alabama. Mrs. Clinton cut the "g" from the at least the following words she has no trouble fully pronouncing when she's in other areas of the country: having ("havin'"), saying ("sayin'"), working ("workin'") and saving ("savin'"). She also bizarrely put the accent in the words "recession" and "depression" on the first syllable. No one in the establishment press appears to care about this apparent region-based condescension, though to be fair the video involved (but no related story I could find covering what she said in it) is from the Associated Press.

Heilemann: Wouldn't Believe Biden if He Called to Say He's Getting in at Noon
By Mark Finkelstein | October 20, 2015 | 7:55 AM EDT

Basta: enough already! It's not that John Heilemann thinks Joe Biden is a liar, it's just that he's not convinced that Biden knows his own mind yet.  And so it was that on today's Morning Joe, Heilemann declared "if he called me this morning and said I'm going to get in today at noon, I wouldn't believe him because I think there's a chance that by noon he'd change his mind."

Heilemann used two words with rhyming Middle English endings to describe Biden's charged emotional state: fraught and wrought.

BLM Leader to Harris-Perry: No Need to Apologize for 'Pigs in a Blanket, Fry 'em Like Bacon'
By Mark Finkelstein | October 18, 2015 | 12:02 PM EDT

After tape rolled of Black Lives Matter demonstrators repeatedly chanting "pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon," you might have thought a BLM leader would either apologize, or at least seek to miminize the incident as the excesses of an irresponsible and unrepresenative few.

But no.  On today's Melissa Harris-Perry show, after just such video was played, BLM leader Monica Dennis issued not one word of apology. To the contrary, Dennis said "there is no need to apologize" for what the BLM movement is "putting forth," and touted the group's intention "to resist" the police. The segment began with a clip of Ted Cruz denouncing the "rabid rhetoric" of groups like BLM.  Harris-Perry declared that "when it comes to a rabid movement I'm going to go with the GOP primary over Black Lives Matter."

Press Mostly Ignores Hillary's Praise of Australia's De Facto Gun Confiscation
By Tom Blumer | October 17, 2015 | 11:21 PM EDT

The establishment press is mostly ignoring what Hillary Clinton said about gun control at a New Hampshire town hall meeting on Friday morning. Searches on "Clinton Australia" (not in quotes), attempting to find her statement that a massive, coercive gun "buyback" such as that seen in the Land Down Under almost 20 years ago "would be worth considering doing it on the national level," indicate that the Associated Press has nothing, and that the New York Times web site has nothing. Related Google News results are overwhelmingly from center-right blogs and outlets.

Of the two exceptions I could find as of 10 p.m., one came from CNN. The other was a syndicated story from the New York Times which hadn't yet appeared at the Times's web site. Predictably, both are "conservatives attack" pieces which cherry-picked the NRA's criticism of Mrs. Clinton's remarks.

Salon Writer: To Get a Gun, You Should Have to Take a Bullet
By Tom Blumer | October 17, 2015 | 8:17 PM EDT

D. Watkins has written at Salon.com for about 1-1/2 years.

In his previous columns, he has shown that he fits right in with the "white privilege and oppression of blacks explains everything" crowd. Friday (HT Twitchy), he went into uncharted territory, seriously suggesting that no American should be able to own a gun until they "know the pain of getting hit" (bolds are mine):