Wall Street Journal

Incomplete WSJ Report Notes That 'Policy Advisers' Were Overruled by 'Political Aides' on Obama's 'Keep Your Plan' Promise
By Tom Blumer | November 3, 2013 | 4:28 PM EST

On Saturday morning, three Wall Street Journal reporters told readers that as President Obama was promoting Obamacare, there was internal debate between "policy advisers" and "political aides" as to whether the President's obviously unqualified and unconditional "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" statement, made roughly 20 times between his inauguration and the law's March 2010 passage, "was a promise they could keep."

"Policy advisers" didn't like it, but "political aides" prevailed, concluding that Obama's promise should remain dishonestly unconditional because "salability" and "simplification" were more "practical" and important than the truth. One particularly weak paragraph in the Journal report ends up reading like Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" riff (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Peggy Noonan: ‘ObamaCare Has Just Been a Disaster. I’ve Never Seen a Story Quite Like This’
By Noel Sheppard | November 3, 2013 | 12:13 PM EST

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan had some more harsh words for the pathetic rollout of ObamaCare Sunday.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Noonan said, “It has just been a disaster. I’ve never seen a story quite like this” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Hurricane Sandy Relief: Networks Attack GOP, But Mention Pork Only 1.5% of the Time
By Sean Long | October 29, 2013 | 2:10 PM EDT

Striking the Northeast on Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy tragically devastated communities causing an estimated $50 billion in damages. By the end of January 2013, a relief bill was passed for Sandy aid, after the bill was delayed because of wasteful spending.

House Republicans opposed a pork-ridden $60 billion Senate bill ($10 billion higher than damage estimates) and chose not to vote on it. Politicians, including some Republicans, and the media criticized them for delaying this legislation. A $51 billion bill was passed by both houses of Congress by the end of January, after a $9.7 billion flood insurance bill passed in early January.

Peggy Noonan on ObamaCare: ‘Stop the Whole Thing, Go Back to Point One’
By Noel Sheppard | October 27, 2013 | 3:18 PM EDT

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said something about ObamaCare Sunday that the majority of Americans clearly agree with.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Noonan said, “I wish we could stop the whole thing, go back to point one and say, ‘Let's try this again’” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Noonan and Senor School Krugman on the ObamaCare Train Wreck
By Noel Sheppard | October 13, 2013 | 12:35 PM EDT

Despite all the trouble ObamaCare has been having since health insurance exchanges opened about two weeks ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on ABC’s This Week Sunday predictably had nothing but praise for the law.

Fortunately the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan and former Mitt Romney advisor Dan Senor were present to set the record straight (video follows with transcript and commentary):

WSJ Notes Benefit of Shutdown: New Federal Regulations Slow to a Trickle
By Ken Shepherd | October 10, 2013 | 12:57 PM EDT

So here's an angle on the federal government shutdown that you're not getting from the liberal broadcast media.

With non-essential personnel furloughed, federal regulators have not been at work, which is a huge blessing to an overregulated American economy, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board noted today. Indeed, new regulations published in the Federal Register have slowed to a trickle since the work stoppage began on October 1:

Miss America More Important to Media than Fed Nominee
By Sean Long | October 9, 2013 | 2:22 PM EDT

The next Federal Reserve Chairman will be Janet Yellen. President Barack Obama plans to nominate her on Oct. 9. Ahead of the announcement, Yellen, the liberal Fed vice chairman, was considered the most likely candidate to replace Ben Bernanke ever since Larry Summers, her chief rival for the nomination, bowed out of the race on Sept. 16.

She was a frontrunner even before Summers’ withdrawal. But between July 12 and Oct. 8, the networks paid very little attention to Yellen and the Fed candidacy. In fact, they spent more time covering Miss America in one day, than in three months of coverage of the future Fed chairman.

WSJ's Bravin Attempts to Work the Refs in Story on SCOTUS Taking Up Campaign Finance Case
By Ken Shepherd | October 7, 2013 | 4:52 PM EDT

Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments on a campaign-finance case that will "test the justices' willingness to buck public opinion," Wall Street Journal Supreme Court correspondent Jess Bravin noted in his page A4 article about the open of the high court's October 2013 term. Bravin devoted the first several paragraphs of his October 7 story, "Campaign Giving Tops High Court's Docket," to painting the Court as highly unpopular when it comes to campaign finance case law following Citizens United.

It wasn't until the 8th paragraph that Bravin actually explained to readers what the new case before the court, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, was all about:

AP's Daly Hides Foiled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Nominee's Radicalism
By Tom Blumer | October 1, 2013 | 11:26 PM EDT

On Tuesday, Ron Binz, nominated by President Obama to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, withdrew his name from consideration. Those who want to see the economy prosper should be relieved that the position described by Matthew Daly at the Associated Press as that of "the nation's top energy regulator" won't be occupied by a died-in-the-wool "renewable" energy radical.

The AP's Daly somehow kept the word "carbon" out of his coverage of Binz's withdrawal, even though, as the Wall Street Journal noted in a September 15 editorial which appropriately used the word 11 times, the man is obsessed with it to the point of wanting to establish, in the Journal's words, a "carbon-free paradise." Excerpts from Daly's dodging, followed by additional ones from the Journal's editorial, follow the jump.

WSJ's Paletta Blames Tea Party for Broken Congress, Omits Reid's Unwillingness to Pass Budget
By Ken Shepherd | October 1, 2013 | 6:55 PM EDT

Corrected from earlier | "After three years of last-minute deals, delayed decisions, and acrimonious finger pointing, the process for one of Congress's most basic functions—spending money—finally buckled and broke down Monday night," the Wall Street Journal's Damian Paletta sighed in the opening paragraph of his October 1 story, "Breakdown Is New Norm in Spending Fights."

"Since passage of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the House and Senate have been directed to pass annual budget resolutions setting targets for government spending levels and then work out the differences," but "Congress in recent years has abandoned its traditional budget and appropriations process," Paletta noted. Yet nowhere in his 21-paragraph story did the Journal scribe lay any blame at the feet of Senate Democrats and their leader, Harry Reid (D-Nev.), even though the upper chamber failed to pass a budget in nearly four years, only doing so in March.* 

As IPCC Report Looms, AP Frames 'Scientific Consensus': 'Humans Are Cooking the Planet by Burning Coal, Oil and Natural Gas'
By Tom Blumer | September 24, 2013 | 5:01 PM EDT

It's amusing to see how the left reacts when things don't work out as predicted. Earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted how USA Today's Kelly Kennedy described a major malfunction in Obamacare which will cause hundreds of thousands of children to go without health insurance next year as a "glitch."

On the "climate change" front, those darned "glitches" abound. In an item today about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Karl Ritter at the Associated Press attempted to report on how the IPCC plans to address the fact that there hasn't been any global warming, human-caused or otherwise, since the late 1990s. A hilarious headline spewed forth, followed by eruptions of ridiculous and hysterical words (HT James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web; bolds and numbered tags are mine throughout this post):

Naked Bias at the New York Times, Which Wins the Bury-Lois-Lerner-Retirement Contest
By Tim Graham | September 24, 2013 | 11:06 AM EDT

The New York Times won this morning’s athletic effort to bury the story of Lois Lerner retiring over “gross mismangement” of the IRS tax-exempt organizations branch. At the very bottom of page A-14, in the second item under a “National Briefing” header, the Times ran a 77-word AP snippet, because who really cares when Tea Party groups are harassed by the Obama administration?

The 1379-word lead item in the National section explored “An Effort to Punish Posting of Nude Images After Breakups.” (First idea: don't send nude electronic images.) The caption under a large picture explained "Marianna Taschinger, 23, in Groves, Tex., is suing her ex-boyfriend and a Web site known for 'revenge porn' where nude photographs of her were posted." The other papers were competitive in burying this item: