Did you know that the "The Gun Lobby Rewrote the Second Amendment"?
No, really. Even though not a single word contained in that amendment has changed in over 220 years, you should believe it because former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein said so at Bloomberg View on Wednesday.
Over at the Associated Press, Andrew Taylor, contrary to the wire service's usual practice, referenced a pre-official Congressional Budget Office report to tout the federal government's "improved" budget deficit. The CBO estimates that the deficit, which won't become official until the Treasury Department releases its final Monthly Treasury Statement of the fiscal year in the next week or two, will come in at $435 billion.
Predictably, Taylor didn't disclose three facts he could easily have relayed in his brief report's available space, instead choosing to create artificial drama over deadlines which are three weeks and two months away, respectively:
On Saturday, conservative Australian columnist Miranda Devine revealed that an Australian engineer claims to have "fixed two errors" in "the basic climate model which underpins all climate science."
The person making this claim was a "climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office," and has "six degrees in applied mathematics." What he found is that "the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought." While some U.S. blogs have begun to relay the news (examples here, here and here), the nation's establishment press is ignoring it.
A story by Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press ("AP ANALYSIS: VW EVASION LIKELY LED TO DOZENS OF DEATHS"), originally published on Saturday but currently carrying a Monday morning time stamp, claimed that "Volkswagen's pollution-control chicanery" has been responsible for "killing between five and 20 people in the United States annually in recent years." Those results, based on an AP "statistical and computer analysis," "cleverly" recast the effort's raw results of "somewhere between 16 and 94 deaths over seven years."
Given how poorly supposedly sacrosanct computer models have done in predicting "global warming" trends, and how gullible journalists, especially Borenstein, have been all these years about them, it seemed quite wise to treat his VW "analysis" with caution. In an op-ed at Investor's Business Daily yesterday, Michael Fumento demonstrated that such skepticism was warranted.
In their coverage of government and other economic reports, the business press routinely tells readers that the figures they are relaying are "seasonally adjusted." That is, raw results are smoothed out to supposedly "remove normal, recurring variations" in data.
There's one notable exception: The government's monthly employment report.
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations. As described by George Jahn at the Associated Press, it was "an impassioned speech interspersed with bouts of dramatic silence."
Jahn failed to report the absence of U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and Secretary of State John Kerry. So did Rick Gladstone and Judi Rudoren at the New York Times. An unbylined Reuters report drily noted that U.S. representation at Netanyahu's speech consisted of "Ambassador Samantha Power's deputy, David Pressman, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro." Breitbart also noted the presence of "Richard Erdman, Alternate Representative to the UN General Assembly." Reuters uniquely explained why Power and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was in town, did not attend (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Although it was very disappointing, the September Employment Situation Summary, which told us that the economy added only 142,000 seasonally adjusted jobs as hundreds of thousands of Americans withdrew from the labor force, was not the worst economy-related news of the day.
That dubious honor belongs to the Census Bureau's Factory Orders report. At least the employment report showed more people holding payroll jobs and overall August payroll employment 2 percent greater than a year ago. By contrast the Census report continued a nearly year-long pattern of declining year-over-year orders and shipments accompanied by still-bloated inventories. As anyone could have predicted, Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press completely ignored these alarming trends.
Apparently, the establishment press is waiting for its marching orders on how to handle what an Investor's Business Daily editorial has already called a "scandal."
This one's a joint effort involving Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, a recently deceased former CIA operative named Tyler Drumheller who worked with Blumenthal — and CBS News. As Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard reported Tuesday afternoon (i.e., now approaching two overnight news cycles ago), "Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who was working directly with Blumenthal as a member of Clinton’s spy network, was concurrently working as a consultant to CBS News and its venerable news program 60 Minutes." IBD's question, reacting to Hemingway's report: "Who is more corrupt, Clinton or the mainstream media?"
In three previous posts yesterday and today, I have noted obvious distortions and untruths in Cecile Richards' testimony this week before a House committee.
I didn't mean to save the best (really the worst) for a fourth post, but I came across an jaw-dropping item at LifeNews.com this afternoon. It covers an assertion Richards made during the House hearing that is either one of the biggest lies of the 21st century thus far or its most glaring example of hermetically sealed ignorance. Either way, the fact that it hasn't made its way into the establishment press virtually proves that their mission is to protect Richards and her organization, not to tell its readers, listeners and viewers what is really happening.
Tuesday afternoon, Alan Fram laughably headlined his coverage of Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards' appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at the Associated Press as follows: "FACING CONGRESS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD CHIEF REBUTS VIDEOS."
She did no such thing. Most notably, Fram quoted Richards making the following statement to the committee: "The outrageous accusations leveled against Planned Parenthood, based on heavily doctored videos, are offensive and categorically untrue." Not merely "heavily edited," but "doctored," which according to the dictionary in this context means "to tamper with; falsify." Unfortunately for Richards and her group's supporters, in a report released yesterday, forensic experts have concluded that the Center for Medical Progress videos she criticized are "authentic" (bolds are mine throughout this post):
In Congressional testimony on Monday and Tuesday, Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards twisted or failed to tell the truth in several instances.
As shown last night, one of them related to how many of its facilities are involved in the provision of fetal tissue for compensation. Her claim that it's "less than 1 percent" is only plausible if the organization has recently terminated such involvement at many facilities known to have participated in the practice in the recent past. A second more obviously untrue claim, whose falsehood has been completely ignored by the national establishment press, is her contention that "we've never stated" that Planned Parenthood performs mammograms at any of its facilities. Well, yes she has — and as will be seen later, an awful lot of people who you might think would know better still believe the lie.
In Congressional testimony Monday and Tuesday, Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards twisted the truth in several instances.
One of them had to to with how many of its facilities are involved in the provision of fetal tissue for compensation. She may be technically telling the truth about how many are involved at this moment, but it's clear that far more have been — at least until recently.