Have you ever wondered how the geniuses who report business news know why the stock market opens or closes up or down on any given day — especially when they venture into political explanations?

I received this e-mail from CNN just after the markets opened:

Gosh, those e-mail drafters at CNN are smart. Who knew that the markets want the stimulus package so bad?

Can’t you hear, senators? The markets want their stimulus and they want it now!

Give me a break. There is no hard evidence of CNN’s assertion. Others commenting on the opening, including CNN itself, aren’t buying all of what the e-mail was selling. Here’s what CNNMoney.com had to say at 9:42 a.m.:

Financial stocks rallied Friday morning, pushing the broader market higher as investors accepted massive January job losses, and tried to look ahead to the government’s stimulus plan and new version of the bank bailout.

That’s in the neighborhood, but still far from “rais(ing) hopes that stimulus will pass quickly.”

But RTT News doesn’t even mention the stimulus at all in its commentary on the first half-hour of trading:

Major Averages Posting Strong Gains In Early trading

(RTTNews) – After seeing some initial strength, stocks have continued to perform well over the course of the first half-hour of trading on Friday. The major averages have all moved firmly into positive territory, adding to the gains posted in the previous session.

With traders expressing optimism ahead of a speech from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Monday, banking stocks are turning in some of the best performances. Most other sectors are also moving higher, with steel, semiconductor, and real estate stocks posting notable gains.

This didn’t stop other wire services from engaging in de facto stimulus package lobbying. Although this Reuters report ahead of the opening didn’t mention the stimulus package, this one shortly after the opening did. The Associated Press’s Madlyn Read wrote just before the opening that “Wall Street was set for a moderately higher open Friday as investors hung their hopes on the government’s stimulus plan even as they awaited another bleak jobs report.”

Zheesh. It’s just as likely that investors know how little real stimulus is in the bill, and have already discounted its relevance, whether it passes or fails. It may also be that the markets have had a bad few weeks recently as the reality of what Congress and President Obama are on the verge of doing to the economy has set in.

The overriding point is that the business press is pretending to know something concerning which it really has no idea. For them, that’s business as usual.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

_________________________________________________

UPDATE, 1:15 p.m.: You can’t make this stuff up — CNNMoney.com home page has the text of its latest e-mail I received minutes ago at its home page, with a Fortune article that contradicts it right there as well:

This AP link, despite its writers’ game efforts, makes it clear that the markets are far more interested in Tax Cheat Tim Geithner’s modification of TARP than anything related to the stimulus.

The wire service did find someone to say the stimulus plan’s passage is important to the markets. But they framed another analyst’s quote in the context of support, when I doubt it really was:

Scott Fullman, director of derivatives investment strategy for WJB Capital Group in New York, said investors now are wondering “will government stimulus stop this virus that’s spreading throughout the country?”

Well if they’re “wondering,” they must not be “wildly supporting.” Zheesh.

The highlight of the Fortune article is this:

The proposed stimulus, as it’s currently being debated in the Senate, would allot about $40 billion for transportation, construction and repair; $20 billion for building schools; and $60 billion for updating the electric grid and “greening” homes. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about a quarter of the funding will be spent in 2009.

That’s $30 billion (one-fourth of 20+60+40). No one can really think that the markets are all excited about $30 billion, which is less than 1% of what the government spends in a year.

_________________________________________________________

UPDATE: The CNN folks must have gotten a DNC memo to change the terminology. Now it’s an “economic rescue plan” in this after-close e-mail –

A complete POS (pile of stink) by any other name ….

Run-up:

• ADP’s National Employment Report on the nonfarm private sector came in Wednesday at 522,000 seasonally adjusted jobs lost.
• CNBC says that “On average, economists expect that more than 500,000 jobs were lost in January, which would bring the total drop in payrolls to more than 1 million in the last two months,” and that the unemployment rate will jump to 7.5%.
• Mean Jeannine Aversa of the Associated Press reports that “the unemployment rate is expected to jump to 7.5 percent in January from 7.2 percent in December, according to economists’ forecasts,” and that ” after suffering heavy job losses last year, the country probably lost another 524,000 jobs month, getting the new year off to a rotten start. Some think the number of jobs reductions in January will be higher – 600,000 or 700,000.” For the record, the “heavy job losses” didn’t start occurring until the POR Economy of Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid, which began sometime in June of last year, had been in place for a while:

  

  You’ll note that the underperformance in 2008 compared to 2007 has accelerated since the election of The One who is playing the No-Confidence Game.

There may be a surprise in today’s numbers, but I ran out of time to explain it ahead of the report. (Update, 10:30 p.m.: The surprise has a twist, so the presentation will have to wait either until Monday here or later in the week at Pajamas Media.)

The report:

It will be here at 8:30 a.m.

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply in January (-598,000) and the unemployment rate rose from 7.2 to 7.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Payroll employment has declined by 3.6 million since the start of the recession in December 2007; about one-half of this decline occurred in the past 3 months. In January, job losses were large and widespread across nearly all major industry sectors.

Barack Obama should be happy. It’s worse than expected.

I’ll have more later this morning.

Tax Cheat Tim Geithner has looked at Japan’s zombie economy (HT Instapundit) of the 1990s, and concluded that their problem was that the country didn’t spend enough.

He would be in this camp (keep in mind that this is in the New York Times):
After years of heavy spending in the first half of the 1990s, economists say, Japan’s leaders grew concerned about growing budget deficits and cut back too soon, snuffing out the recovery in its infancy, much as Roosevelt did to the American economy in 1936.

Since the Times only quoted one economist, Jacob Weinstein, who buys into this blather, I’m concluding that the term “economists” refers to “Weinstein, Paul Krugman, and Paul Krugman.” While these guys talk of three- to five- to ten-year plans, the US economy recovered lickety-split from the 2000-2001 downturn and 2002′s relatively mediocre growth in 2003 once the investment-related Bush tax cuts passed.

___________________________________________

Related — Tax Cheat Tim holds himself as some kind of financial expert.

Trouble is …. (brace yourself) …. he apparently …. (I warned you) …. doesn’t like math. Additionally, echoing unnamed financial execs in a November New York Times article (unnamed because they fear what Geithner might do to them once in charge if they went on the record), “Some question his technical skills.”

___________________________________________

And the band plays on — “Obama names ‘most fined’ Washington State bureaucrat to (second in command at) HUD.”

___________________________________________

And the band plays on II — “Hilda Solis, Labor nominee, faces tax questions.”

They have to do with her husband’s business:

Public records show that since 1993, two state and 14 Los Angeles County tax liens totaling about $11,640 have been lodged against Sayyad and his business, Sam’s Foreign and Domestic Auto Center.

The documents indicate that $6,468 in county liens remained unresolved until Wednesday, when Sayyad paid off the balance, according to the Los Angeles County treasurer and tax collector’s office.

The supposedly awesome Obama vetting team “conceded it had not discovered (these public-record liens) on its own.”

___________________________________________

Troubling thought of the day: Is it possible that for every Obama administration problem being found, several are slipping by unnoticed?

Voinovich’s full list of contact numbers, including his Ohio offices, is here. He seems to be in need of hearing from his constituents about the mislabeled “stimulus” package. I’m sure his DC office (202-224-3353) will be glaaaaaad to hear from Ohioans in the morning.

The contact numbers for Sherrod Brown, who also needs to know that he doesn’t deserve and surely won’t receive a party-line pass from Buckeye State voters for supporting this monstrosity, are at the very bottom right of this page (click on the office location desired to see the phone number). His Washington number is 202-224-2315.

From our president’s opinion piece today in the Washington Post (covered at Yahoo by AP):

“This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse,” Obama wrote in the newspaper piece titled, “The Action Americans Need.”

….. unless we pass his party’s mislabeled “stimulus.”

He has put the no-confidence game he has been playing on steroids. He has no belief that the American economy can recover without Washington doing the spending. And even that will take years.

The evidence against this bill being anything but a pork-laden monstrosity is overwhelming.

Sixteen days into this administration, broken promises litter the floor. Just a few:
- There will by no earmarks.
- There will be no lobbyists.
- Transparency.
- Ethics.

Victor Davis Hanson is right:

(subheadline at home page) Anyone who cares about the U.S., at home and overseas, must be worried, very worried, about the disastrous last two weeks.

(at Page 3 of his “Work and Days” column) Let us hope that the world doesn’t try to test us this month. And if the outlaws do, let the sober and judicious people (and there are many) in Obama’s foreign policy team be allowed to react. In week three, we are light years from ‘hope and change’; now it is let us “hope he can change.”

He needs to, because he’s at malaise already. It took Jimmy Carter 2-1/2 years in office to get there. In fact, Carter’s mostly misguided speech at least had a shred of optimism in it:

Little by little we can and we must rebuild our confidence. We can spend until we empty our treasuries, and we may summon all the wonders of science. But we can succeed only if we tap our greatest resources — America’s people, America’s values, and America’s confidence.

Since his electoral victory, Barack Obama and his party have been all about destroying our confidence and sewing uncertainty. Either it stops, or, for their sanity, the American people had better start ignoring his speeches, and watching his actions like hawks.

_____________________________________________

UPDATE: This is what he thinks his win in November meant –

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis — the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.

Horse manure. The American people did no such thing — not even 52% of them. Mandate, schmandate.

On January 25, as noted by yours truly, (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Jonathan Martin at Politico.com reported that President Obama “is moving to create perhaps the most powerful staff in modern history – a sort of West Wing on steroids that places no less than a half-dozen of his top initiatives into the hands of advisers outside the Cabinet.” (The picture on the right is at that report.)

I’m not aware that any Old Media outlet besides Politico itself, which is largely a collection of Old Media alums, has covered this development.

The power grab continues. My bet is that Old Media will also maintain its studied ignorance of this development, despite years of whining about alleged Executive Branch excesses during the Bush administration.

Now it looks like Barack Obama’s inner circle is going to teach the Census Bureau how to count in 2010. CQpolitics.com this morning reported that the White House is taking the next decennial census away from the Commerce Department, and keeping it for itself.

The reason given why Commerce is supposedly not up to the job is that nominee Judd Gregg of New Hampshire fought Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s over “emergency funding” for the 2000 census that was really an attempt by the Clinton administration to cook the books.

Here’s the meat of what CQpolitics.com reported:

The director of the Census Bureau will report directly to the White House and not the secretary of Commerce, according to a senior White House official.

The decision came after black and Hispanic leaders raised questions about Commerce Secretary nominee Judd Gregg ’s commitment to funding the census.

Gregg, New Hampshire’s senior senator, voted in committee and on the floor for a 1995 Republican budget that envisioned the elimination of the Commerce Department. Of even more concern to black and Hispanic leaders, Gregg battled President Clinton over a request for “emergency” funding for the 2000 census.

The back story that this report did not pick up is this, as taken from an itself heavily-biased June 3, 1998 story at the Los Angeles Times (bolds are mine):

Commenting on a dispute that has become highly partisan, President Clinton on Tuesday argued for the use of statistical sampling techniques for the next U.S. census, promising that the method would avoid the 1990 undercounting of minorities and children.

“It’s not about politics. It’s about people,” Clinton declared to applause at a community center in a Latino neighborhood of Houston. “It’s about making sure that every American–literally and really–counts.”

Against a backdrop of one of the most undercounted cities in the nation, he added: “Nobody’s got an ax to grind.”

Actually, the once-a-decade exercise of counting America’s heads has turned into a fiercely partisan matter. The Democratic White House wants to introduce statistical projections into the year 2000 census and not depend solely on counting individuals one by one. Republicans generally have assailed the proposal as a violation of the Constitution, which calls for “actual enumeration,” and a ploy by Democrats to bolster their standing when districts are redrawn after the census.

“This just opens the door to tremendous political corruption,” said Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who is part of a coalition, Citizens for an Honest Count, that wants the census to stick to traditional methods of counting people.

This excerpt from a 2001 PBS report confirms my memory that the courts threw out stat sampling for the constitutional reason cited above. But of course, book-cooking — err, stat sampling — fans weren’t done (bolds are mine; paragraph breaks added by me for readability):

In 1999, the Supreme Court had settled one part of the issue, ruling that sampling adjusted figures could not be used to apportion seats in Congress. But it left the door open for other uses, like redrawing congressional districts within a state and allocating federal funds.

Late last year, then President Clinton ordered that the Census Bureau director, a nonpartisan civil servant, should decide whether to adjust the 2000 census figures through sampling. But the Bush administration reversed that order, saying the census… census director’s boss, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans. Today the Census Bureau in a written statement, they recommended to Evans that he not use sampling to adjust the Bureau’s official figures for the purpose of redistricting.

In a memo to Evans, acting Census Director William Barons, said the Bureau “was unable, based on the data and other information currently available, to conclude that the adjusted data are more accurate for use in redistricting.”

It’s hard to predict without a lot of legal research, but Team Obama may argue that its usurpation of the census-taking function makes it an area of executive branch decision-making that is outside the purview of court review. There may be other, more “creative” arguments in the works. At a minimum, it would appear that the White House will attempt to stretch the use of stat sampling into as many areas as it possibly can.

There is an honest way to do this: Amend the Constitution to allow it. That would force a debate on the appropriate uses of stat sampling; but of course that’s way too much work for those who simply want to grab power and see if anyone dares to do anything about it.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with stat sampling in certain applications as long as those engaging in it use it validly and under strict controls. But short of a constitutional amendment, any move beyond “enumeration” for any purpose, despite what the courts said a decade ago, looks obviously unconstitutional to me.

Which brings us to a variation of an old accounting joke — When asked by his boss how much 2+2 is, the accountant replies with his own question: “What do you want it to be?”

With the next Census, the question will be “How many people were there in the US in 2010?” It appears that the answer will also be another question, and a very long one, “Do you want the enumerated count, or the apportionment count, or the welfare count, or the Food Stamps count, or the …..?”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:

• I’m not a big rumor fan, but I can’t let three of them go without comment. First, there’s the one about Mitt Romney as Obama’s health care czar. Well at least we wouldn’t have to put up with his seemingly daily appearances on Hannity’s radio and TV programs. You would also hope that it would put an end to the idea that the person whose handiwork is ruining health care in Massachusetts could run for president in 2012 — at least as a Republican.
• The second rumor is that Ted Strickland will be nominated as Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary now that Tom Daschle has withdrawn. The bright side: Strickland’s Turnaround Ohio school reforms promised during the 2006 campaign didn’t show up until 2009, and he was very outspoken about how unreasonable it was that we should have expected something sooner. If that form holds, Ted will wait over two years before proposing a national health care plan. The longer the better, Ted.
• The third primarily affects Greater Cincinnati — University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher is apparently on her way to becoming the chancellor of the SUNY (State University of New York) system. The New York Times says it’s more than rumor and that “an announcement could come within days.” What’s most snortworthy is the way the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Cliff “Pitiful Puff Piece” Peale is covering for her to the apparent end — once again without disclosing that Enquirer publisher Margaret Buchanan is a member of UC’s Board of Trustees. He writes that “Her departure would leave UC without its most visible advocate in the face of several ambitious programs. The university still is struggling to repay hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid debts by departments from athletics to campus services, debts that were built up before Zimpher arrived.” (Sigh) Cliff, Nancy didn’t do anything about them during her first THREE YEARS.
• Thank you, Tom Coburn (HT Michelle Malkin) — “The other 90% of the (stimulus) bill represents one of the most egregious acts of generational theft in our nation’s history.”
• Famous last words — We now know that Hugh Hewitt’s upper limit on tolerable presidential nominee tax evasion is north of Tom Daschle’s $128,000 (ignoring interest and inexplicably unassessed penalties). On Monday, apparently minutes before Daschle threw in the towel (10:17 a.m. PT, 1:17 p.m. ET), Hewitt wrote, “Errors on tax returns related to unusual circumstances and nanny issues are simply not the sort of character issues for which confirmation should be denied.  Fixing the ‘confirmation mess’ requires some restraint when presented with targets. The GOP should stay fixed on the stimulus bill, and not go chasing Daschle.” The jaw drops.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Saturday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout lifts.

Wrap-up question in the column:

If we’re supposed to believe that Team Obama doesn’t want to keep the economy down — at least long enough to get its mislabeled “stimulus” passed — this question remains: what would they be doing differently if they did?

The three reports of the past three days have been these:

• The Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM’s) Manufacturing Index — It came in at 35.6% on Monday, up from 32.9% in December. That handily beat expectations of 33.0%, but is still solidly in contraction mode, which is any reading below 50%.
• ADP’s employment report on the nonfarm private job situtation earlier today showed that a seasonally adjusted 522,000 jobs were lost in January. December’s -693,000 was revised to -659,000.
• ISM’s Non Manufacturing Index (NMI – referred to as the Services Report by some) — It came in at 42.9%, up from 40.1% in December, beating expectations that it would decline to 39.0%. That’s obviously still in contraction mode, but a pretty decent move in the right direction. The Forex link starts with a statement that you will likely not see in Old Media stories: “A key index of the U.S. non-manufacturing sector surprised with an increase today, marking its second straight jump and perhaps signaling that the worst could be over for the world’s largest economy.” If that’s the case, explain to me why the stimulus package, which anyone with a brain knows isn’t going to influence the economy for many months after its passage, is necessary.

Also, the ISM’s manufacturing report begins with a statement that I’ve been meaning to comment on for several months:

Economic activity in the manufacturing sector failed to grow in January for the 12th consecutive month, and the overall economy contracted for the fourth consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.

Seriously, all you people who worship at the altar of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, which would include virtually everyone in Old Media: Why are the economy-participating folks who report to ISM every month presumptively wrong when they say that a contraction has only been happening for four months (it needs to be six months before it’s a recession as normal people define it)? And why are the academic (and in my opinion Democratic Party-biased) pinheads at NBER, who say that we’ve been in recession since December 2007 — even though the first and second quarters of 2008 had GDP growth of 0.9% and 2.8%, respectively — presumptively right?

If ADP’s announcement reflects the employment news coming from Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Economic Analysis on Friday, seasonally adjusted job losses during the past five months, which would include four months of the ISM-recognized contraction, plus the preceding month of September, will be about 2.5 million (thankfully, we aren’t losing 500 million jobs a month as Nancy Pelosi apparently believes).

Job losses during the nine other months NBER wants us to believe we spent in recession were about 600,000 (less than 70,000 a month). That’s clearly unacceptable, but given that economic growth was occurring, it fails to convincingly tip the balance towards recession.

The “bad news” that people don’t get is that because of ongoing productivity improvements, an economy generally has to grow at an annual rate of 1.5% or more to keep up with population growth and to avoid having employment suffer. 1.5% growth is not acceptable, but it’s not recessionary either. First- and second-quarter 2008 growth averaged 1.85%. The burden of proof is on NBER to prove that this period was still somehow recessionary. In my opinion, it has not met that burden.

The ISMers are much closer to being right than NBER, and the recession didn’t really begin until June or July of last year, when the architects of the POR Economy — Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and their party — started working their “magic” and sent third-quarter GDP growth into negative territory. Then things went really sour when the Democratic Party-driven decades-in-the-making CRA-, Fred-, and Fan-driven mortgage lending chickens came home to roost.

__________________________________________________________

UPDATE: Sure the Pelosi gaffe is mostly trivial (but why don’t these people catch themselves when they say these things?). But Instapundit’s point is dead-on — “….. if Sarah Palin had said this, it would be taken as proof that she was unsuited for national politics.”

UPDATE 2: The closely followed BizzyBlog Blogads Index is at its highest level (3 in the top frame) since it began a couple of years ago. (That must mean that recovery is just around the corner – ha). Thanks to the Blogads folks for soldiering on through difficult times to achieve this level of placement. I strongly encourage clickthroughs to see what the advertisers have to offer.

UPDATE 3: Perhaps the nascent recovery indicated in the NMI is why Barack Obama is ramping up the rhetoric (“Obama: Catastrophe coming if Congress doesn’t act”). He doesn’t want people to realize that things might be getting better, because the already false “urgency” of the so-called “stimulus” bill will be further unmasked.

The newspaper that appears to be on a mission to become Manhattan’s quaint little alternative daily is considering a move that would cheer those who prefer fair and balanced reporting accompanied by intellectually honest editorials and op-eds.

That publication, the New York Times, is considering a return to fee-based content — and this time, it might go for the whole enchilada.

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller dangled the possibility yesterday in an online Q&A.

Bloomberg’s Greg Bensinger reported the following (bolds are mine):

New York Times Co. may charge for access to its flagship newspaper’s Web site less than two years after terminating an earlier online-subscription service.

The company is studying whether to start charging for all or some of the content on nytimes.com, as well as other options, Executive Editor Bill Keller said ….. Most of the site is free.

“A lively, deadly serious discussion continues within the Times about ways to get consumers to pay for what we make,” he said. “Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for.”

The third-largest U.S. newspaper publisher, which posted a 48 percent decline in fourth-quarter profit, is cutting jobs and selling assets as advertising and circulation dwindle. …..

In 2007, the newspaper scrapped an online-subscription service called Times Select that generated about $10 million in revenue annually. The service limited the number of readers available to advertisers, said Keller.

“The lesson of that experiment, however, was not that readers won’t pay for content,” he said, pointing out that News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have paid- subscription Web sites.

Earth to Bill Keller — That’s because the Journal and the Financial Times have “really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained.” In case you haven’t noticed, your publication often doesn’t.

Additionally, as chronicled for years at the Media Research Center’s timeswatch.org unit, the Times frequently ignores important stories or critical aspects of those stories if they are inconvenient to core liberal beliefs; flouts the law if it will embarrass Republican administrations, even if doing so negatively affects national security; and commits journalistic and factual errors with stunning frequency.

In 2005-2007, the market told you that less than a quarter-million people would pay $50 a year to have access to Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Nick Kristof, and their ilk. The $10 million in revenues TimeSelect earned was a nearly irrelevant pittance at a $3 billion company.

But if you want to go to the well again, Mr. Keller, by all means jump right in, and with all of your content. Internet users searching for quality journalism will be cheered to know that you have limited your publication’s pollution in the public marketplace of ideas. For the most part, we won’t have your paper to kick around online any more. Could you please, please allow us to experience such good fortune?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

______________________________________________

UPDATE, 12:15 p.m.: A bit of humble pie is being served up.

Here’s a prediction that didn’t exactly work out –

I suppose the Times walled-off columnists believe they believe they’ll have more influence on the upcoming presidential election attempt to coronate Hillary Clinton once the TimeSelect firewall is gone. They’re probably right, but it may backfire: I’d say it’s just as likely that the more ordinary readers are re-exposed to the dreck emanating from the likes of Dowd, Krugman, Frank Rich, et al, the more turned off they’ll be towards anyone they (the columnists) have favorable opinions of.

At the time, of course, Hillary had the lead for the Democrats’ nomination. But to the extent a firewall-free Times had influence, it was indeed hopelessly in the tank for Barack Obama.

But it begs this question: If the Times thought both then and now that the paid model is the way to go (and again, I don’t), did it not put its liberal agenda ahead of its shareholders’ financial well-being by doing without it for 17 months? The stock price’s answer would be “yes.”

….. But I don’t Have Any Time For:

• Victor Davis Hanson (“Let’s Hope He Can Change“) — “Anyone who cares about the U.S., at home and overseas, must be worried, very worried, about the disastrous last two weeks.” Here’s a hopeful sign.
• From USA Today, on Obama’s first two weeks — “‘At first, I thought this was a vetting problem, but now I think it’s hubris — that they somehow think they’re so powerful and so popular that the normal rules don’t apply,‘ said Paul Light, an expert on presidential transitions and a professor at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.” There’s a term for this: The Punk Presidency. “Someone” called it on Election NIght.
• Larry Kudlow (“Time for Tim Geithner to Step Down, Too”) — “Geithner never answered the question put to him by senators Kyl and Bunning: Would he have paid his back taxes if he were not nominated to run the Treasury? His issue has never been resolved. He will never have the full trust of the country.” Update: National Review’s editors agree (“We must not have a two-tiered tax code. Obama should make a clean sweep of it and dismiss Geithner”). That would be a very smooth move.
• Judea Pearl, father of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, who was decapitated by jihadists on video seven years ago, had a must-read op-ed (HT The Tygrrr Express) in yesterday’s WSJ. Mr. Pearl’s key paragraph: “But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of ‘resistance,’ has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words ‘war on terror’ cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.” One Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, even called the War on Terror a “bumper sticker.” I don’t recall our current president, who ran against Edwards until February of last year, criticizing the former South Carolina senator for that statement.
• A NewsBusters post I put up last night criticized the Associated Press’s Ben Feller for over-the-top pity on our poor president after two stressful weeks on the job (“On a tough day, Obama escapes for a while”). Wait til you see what the first Michael Moore/Media Matters-inspired commenter had to say. Wait til you see how other commenters shredded him. I’m afraid Andrew Ian Dodge at Pajamas Media is right: “Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) will continue for a least a decade and probably more like two or three.” He observes that Brits are still going after Margaret Thatcher 20 years after she left the world stage; some loony lefties are trying to blame her for the country’s current credit crunch(!). That’s what you get for being involved with and winning a war for the good guys. In her case, it was the Cold War (the comment string at the linked 2006 post has the Cliff’s notes). In Bush’s case, it’s Iraq.

Yesterday was Pity the Poor President Day in Old Media.

Early last night, I noted how the Associated Press’s Ben Feller chose to characterize an already-planned visit by Barack and Michelle Obama to a DC elementary school as an “escape” that “surely made him happy for a while.”

A few hours ago, NB’s Brent Baker reported with amazement the absurd attempts by CBS’s Katie Couric and NBC’s Brian Williams to portray Obama — who either allowed poor vetting by his team or was nonchalant about the tax and other irregularities they found — as somehow being a “culture of Washington” victim. Zheesh.

But yesterday’s puff piece prize has to go to the AP’s Charles Babington (“Analysis: Daschle debacle humbles Obama“; stored here for future reference).

Babington stuck with the same Beltway victimization theme (“even a clearly gifted politician cannot escape the gravitational pull of Washington forces”), and took it to new heights — or make that depths.

It’s not even possible to note all of Babington’s errors, omissions, and excesses in a reasonable space. I’ll just go to his fifth and worst paragraph, which is all you’ll need to know how bad it is (bold is mine):

An old story, with new actors, played out Tuesday: A new president’s team imperfectly vetted top nominees. The nominees, it turns out, had not paid taxes for household help or other services when they were private citizens. The news media and political adversaries bored in. And rather than spend more valuable time and political capital defending the appointees, the administration dropped them and moved on.

This is beyond risible. Babington knows full well that Tim Geithner’s and Tom Daschle’s tax problems went way, way beyond “household help or other services.”

Geithner’s nanny tax problems were relatively small, and had long since been addressed. The real biggie was his failure to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on his 2001-2004 income earned when he was at the International Monetary Fund. This failure occurred despite the fact that the IMF did all it could to explain what he was required to do. It gave him money to partially pay his taxes, sent him quarterly reminder updates, and had him sign attestations that he had paid taxes (which he had in fact not actually paid).

Beyond that, Geithner had issues with an unpaid penalty on a retirement-plan withdrawal, non-allowed overnight summer camp expenses, and excessive deductions for in-kind charitable contributions.

Daschle’s tax problems were also multi-faceted. What Babington described in throwaway fashion as “other services” probably dwarfs the nanny tax problems of every presidential nominee since 1990. Those services related to a free car and driver provided him by the private equity firm he worked for during 2005-2007. Daschle failed to pay well over $100,000 in taxes over that three-year period relating to the car and driver, unreported consulting income, and charitable contributions made to non-qualifying charities.

Babington only mentioned the tax amounts involved for Geithner and Daschle (plus Daschle’s interest). In over 900 words, he never informed readers about any of the issues involved, or that both men had “somehow” avoided late-payment penalties that average taxpayers would likely have been forced to cough up. Someone learning of Obama’s nominee problems for the first time in Babington’s report would have to believe that these guys got tripped up by nanny taxes and “other services” alone.

An “Editor’s Note” at the bottom of Babington’s report says that “Charles Babington covers the White House for The Associated Press.”

I suggest a revision: “Charles Babington covers up for the White House for The Associated Press.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

_____________________________________________

UPDATE, Feb. 6: A Media Matters post accuses me of misreading Babington’s worst paragraph.

Imagine that. I thought Babington’s article was largely about Tom Daschle. The title (“Analysis: Daschle debacle humbles Obama”) “somehow” gave that away.

As to the accusation of misreading the fifth paragraph — Nice try, no sale. Of course, “Tuesday’s nominees” in the fifth paragraph weren’t Geithner or Daschle; but the “old story” Babington referred to was all about them. Babington made it look as if Tuesday’s nominees had the same problem as the previous nominees (taxes on “household help and other services). That’s obviously not the case.

This looks to be an effort by Babington to minimize the earlier nominees’ problems. The AP writer might get a pass if he actually described later why Geither and Daschle had to pay $34,000 and over $100,000 in back taxes, respectively. But he didn’t, leaving the reader with no prior knowledge no other choice but to believe that their problems also had to do with “household help and other services.” They obviously didn’t.

This is either deliberately sloppy and incomplete reporting or just a bizarre, deadline-driven oversight. Given AP’s record, it would be hard to criticize anyone for believing it’s the former.

I recommend remedial reading and comprehension courses for MM’s “County Fair.”