Al Hunt

Now That GDP Is Contracting, Bloomberg's Editors Decide That It's 'An Imperfect Measure of Progress'
By Tom Blumer | January 31, 2013 | 10:17 AM EST

This is so pathetic and predictable, you could almost set your watch to it.

Just ten hours after a government report showed that the economy went into contraction for the first time in three years during 2012's fourth quarter, an item penned "by the editors" at Bloomberg News appeared which scolded us that the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is an "imperfect measure of progress," and that we really should be looking at indicators of "social progress or human happiness." As usual, when things go bad in Leftyland, the problem is the yardstick, not what's being measured. The first four paragraphs from the editorial, which reads like -- no, make that "really is" -- the text of a leftist political stump speech, follow the jump:

MTP’s Gregory Frames Election Through Liberal Prism: ‘The Year of Birth Control Moms’
By Brent Baker | February 19, 2012 | 4:46 PM EST

“GOP says HHS mandate is about liberty, not contraception. Dems say it’s about contraception, not liberty. Media accept and amplify Democratic framing.” So the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes adroitly tweeted noontime Sunday in an accurate observation demonstrated by Meet the Press where host David Gregory opened the roundtable: “I want to start with...a big theme in this race so far. And Politico, I thought, captured the headline here with this theme, ‘2012: The year of birth control moms?’”

Later, Gregory touted how “I see this bumper sticker,” which, he insisted, “we’ve heard everybody talk about,” that proclaims “GM’s back on top, and Osama bin Laden is dead.” Cuing up New York Times White House correspondent Helene Cooper, Gregory noted the obvious: “That’s the record that this President wants to run on.” Cooper affirmed: “That’s absolutely the record that he wants to run on.”

Al Hunt and Mark Shields Repeat Disputed Story of Gingrich Divorcing Cancer Stricken Wife
By Brad Wilmouth | January 23, 2012 | 3:04 AM EST

Last Friday saw two high-profile liberal pundits - one on Bloomberg News's Political Capital and the other on PBS's Inside Washington - repeating the story that Newt Gingrich divorced his first wife while she was being treated for cancer, without either of them noting that one of Gingrich's daughters - Jackie Gingrich Cushman -  last May specifically disputed the account that her mother, who is still alive, ever had cancer, or that her father initiated the divorce during a hospital visit.

On Bloomberg News's Political Capital show, host Al Hunt only vaguely noted that Gingrich's daughter had disputed some of the commonly believed details of her parents' divorce as he dismissed her account as "demonstrably false." After Bloomberg News columnist Margaret Carlson called the former House Speaker a "lout," Hunt asserted:

Jonathan Alter's Blinders: 'White House Free of Scandal'; Obama Asset Is That 'He's Honest'
By Tom Blumer | October 29, 2011 | 11:10 PM EDT

Jonathan Alter, who spent 28 years at Newsweek, has been a columnist at Bloomberg News since early this year. Just this year, the reliably and insufferably liberal Alter, among many other things, called the Republican House's passage of Paul Ryan's budget plan in April an attempt "to throw Granny in the snow," and coldly calculated that in the wake of her shooting, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was more valuable to Barack Obama's reelection efforts alive than dead.

In early January, Alter, appearing on an MSNBC program, took great offense at Rep. Darrell Issa's suggestion that the Obama White House is "one of the most corrupt administrations ever," claiming that "there is zero evidence" of it. The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney proceeded to identify seven such examples. Alter must have been saying "la-la I can't hear you" during Carney's chronicle, as his October 27 column was an exercise in sheer fantasy from beginning to end (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Bloomberg Predictably Drops 'Unexpectedly' From Consumer Confidence Report
By Tom Blumer | June 28, 2011 | 7:06 PM EDT

It looks like someone in the establishment business press might be getting a little touchy about the razzing they continually receive for delivering "unexpectedly" bad economic news.

As captured by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and corroborated in this Google News description, Bloomberg's 10:16 a.m. report on consumer sentiment told readers that "Consumer confidence unexpectedly fell in June to a seven-month low, indicating that slowing employment gains are weighing on Americans' outlooks."

At 11:31 a.m. -- to be clear, not influenced by Reynolds's post, which went up shortly after noon -- a sanitized version of the report by Alex Kowalski and Jillian Berman read as follows:

Margaret Carlson: Gingrich Plays ‘Skinhead Politics,’ Paul Ryan Would ‘Destroy Medicare as We Know It’
By Brad Wilmouth | May 22, 2011 | 4:35 AM EDT

On Friday’s Political Capital show on Bloomberg News, as host Al Hunt turned the discussion to Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson attacked Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan for Medicare reform as she voiced supposed agreement with Gingrich that "it is right-wing social engineering to destroy Medicare as we know it."

She then went on to suggest that Gingrich plays "skinhead politics."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Friday, May 20, Political Capital on Bloomberg News:

Amanpour on One-Sided This Week: ‘Profound Questions About Religious Tolerance and Prejudice in the U.S.’
By Brent Baker | August 22, 2010 | 2:29 PM EDT
Not even feigning the pretense of balance, a week after her roundtable hailed President Obama’s initial endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque (GZM), on this Sunday’s This Week host Christiane Amanpour featured an “exclusive” with two GZM proponents as she declared “the controversy has raised profound questions about religious tolerance and prejudice in the United States. And the backlash against Islam has been seen across the country...”

Holding up the current Time magazine with its “Is America Islamophobic?” cover, she forwarded the contention: “Is America Islamophobic? Are you concerned about the long-term relationship between American Muslims and the rest of society here?”

Amanpour’s guests, to “cut through the heated rhetoric” on the only Sunday interview show with a guest segment on the GZM (Fox News Sunday took it up in its panel time): Daisy Khan, wife of imam behind the project, and Rabbi Joy Levitt, from the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, “who's an adviser on the project.”

Amanpour began by undermining the idea the community center with a prayer room inside is all that close to Ground Zero: “Opponents say that it's just too close to the site of the 9/11 attacks, though it cannot be seen from there. It took an ABC News producer two minutes and 45 seconds to walk from Ground Zero to the site of the proposed center.”
National Review’s O’Beirne Corrects Bloomberg’s Carlson on FNC Airing of Sherrod Video
By Brad Wilmouth | July 26, 2010 | 11:09 AM EDT

On Friday’s Political Capital, Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson – formerly of CNN and Time magazine – left the impression that FNC coverage of the Shirley Sherrod video was partially responsible for her firing, prompting the National Review’s Kate O’Beirne to clarify that FNC did not show the video until after the USDA employee’s resignation. After host Al Hunt asked, "did it also say something bad about the so-called right-wing echo chamber or Fox News?"

Carlson responded: "Well, once the tape was on Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hammity, Hannity, it got out there, and, you know, I was shown it on live TV, and I was snookered as the NAACP said they were." After also faulting the NAACP and the Obama administration for acting too quickly, she branded Sherrod a "hero" and "the model of the civil servant."

O’Beirne then informed viewers: "Margaret, let the record show the videos didn’t appear on Fox News till she’d already been fired, so it’s sort of hard to blame them for the incredible overreaction."

Calls to ‘Rein in the Federal Government’ Are ‘Not Very Rational,’ Al Hunt Declares on ABC
By Brent Baker | July 5, 2010 | 1:05 PM EDT

“The side that talks about the need to rein in the federal government” is “not very rational,” yet “is winning” the debate over whether to pass another “stimulus” bill, Al Hunt regretted on Sunday’s This Week on ABC.

The former Washington Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, who’s Washington Editor for Bloomberg where he hosts Bloomberg TV’s Political Capital show, fretted over how “right now, that argument – that we have to rein in because the stimulus didn’t work -- well, I think most economists would say the stimulus did work in the sense it would have been a lot worse if there hadn’t been one.”

Hunt’s assessment came in reaction to an outnumbered Dan Senor, the lone voice on the panel against additional government spending to spur the economy and who warned of a Greece in our future. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman charged the 2009 stimulus bill wasn’t big enough and proposed that in the face of a likely $20 trillion debt in ten years, “whether we borrow another $500 billion now” is “really trivial,” Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Constitution yearned for a new “robust stimulus” and Jorge Ramos of Univision declared: “We need more government intervention.”

Bloomberg Editor Al Hunt Attacks Tea Partiers: 'That's Not America'
By Scott Whitlock | April 20, 2010 | 11:45 AM EDT

Bloomberg Washington Editor Al Hunt appeared on the web-only section of Sunday's This Week and dismissed the idea that the Tea Party movement has broad appeal. He derided, "They love Glenn Beck and they're skeptical of John McCain. That's not America."

Hunt's comments pivoted off of remarks from the conservative George Will, who pointed to a new Rasmussen poll showing Americans more in line with the thinking of the tea partiers than Barack Obama. Hunt scoffed, "They are angry, conservative, little bit more upper-income Republicans...I don't think they're closer to the country, George, than Barack Obama."

PBS Talks of GOP Takeovers -- and Their Eventual Ruin by 'Tea Baggers'
By Tim Graham | January 28, 2010 | 3:05 PM EST

Former Wall Street Journal editor Al Hunt (now with Bloomberg News) expressed grave pessimism about the Democrats on PBS’s Charlie Rose show Wednesday night, to the point where he said they need to jam through a health bill, or lose the House.

AL HUNT: They’re going to have to persuade the House to pass the Senate bill...you have to persuade some liberals to swallow hard. I spoke to Nancy Pelosi today. The votes are not in there in the House today. That`s the job of Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel.

DAVID BROOKS: That`s not the message though I heard from the speech. I heard the "Let's go gently into the good night."

HUNT: If that happens, David, I guarantee the Republicans will win the House of Representatives.

BROOKS: But he didn`t say "We’re close. Let`s just jam it through." He said "Let`s begin again, let`s hear some ideas."

The talk even shifted – on PBS, the supposedly urbane network -- to "tea baggers" ruining the Republican brand:

George Will Says Reid's Obama Remark Wasn't Racist, Liz Cheney Says 'Give Me A Break'
By Noel Sheppard | January 10, 2010 | 5:24 PM EST

A somewhat surprising debate occurred Sunday when conservatives George Will and Liz Cheney took different sides of the Harry Reid racist remark issue.

Appearing on the Roundtable segment of ABC's "This Week," the former Vice President's daughter said, "[O]ne of the things that makes the American people frustrated is when they see time and time again liberals excusing racism from other liberals."

Will, after shaking his head, replied, "I don't think there's a scintilla of racism in what Harry Reid said. At long last, Harry Reid has said something that no one can disagree with, and he gets in trouble for it."

Likely to the surprise of many viewers, Cheney responded, "George, give me a break" (video embedded below the fold with transcript):