It seems that every time I see something possibly redeeming put forth by the Associated Press, they figure out a way to ruin it.

Take Larry Margasak’s report this afternoon on John Boehner’s attempts at persuading House Republican members to support his various attempts at debt-ceiling legislation during the few two weeks. (I’ve made my general unhappiness with the ultimate result pretty plain here, and that is not the topic of this post.)

Maragasak notes Boehner’s refusal to engage in “carrot-and-stick” persuasion, observes that it’s “a major transformation from the not too distant past,” and spends the rest of the report comparing the Republicans under Boehner to the Denny Hastert-Tom Delay regime. It’s as if the years from 2007 through 2010, featuring the Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid regime’s Louisiana Purchase of Mary Landrieu, the Cornhusker Kickback to Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, the $3.5 billion “clean energy” boondoggle to Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, and so many, many others, never happened and don’t exist. What a journalistic disgrace.

Here are several paragraphs from Margasak’s misguided missive:

Debt ceiling votes herded without carrots, sticks

Speaker John Boehner was desperate in his search for votes from his party to prevent a first-ever government default. But despite what a GOP freshman called “hour by hour by hour” pressure from the Ohio Republican leader and his lieutenants, rank-and-file holdouts said they were neither offered carrots nor threatened with sticks to change their minds. That’s a major transformation from the not too distant past.

There were no promises of new bridges or campaign help. No threats to boot members off coveted committees. And, if some of those tactics had been tried, it’s unlikely that many House Republican tea party supporters would have been swayed. They came to Washington disdainful of such wheeling and dealing and promising to fix what members of both parties had come to describe as a culture of corruption.

Boehner, who has risen, fallen and risen again in the House GOP hierarchy, has long shunned earmarked “pet projects” and had no objection when more conservative deficit hawks succeeded in getting them banned.

One GOP holdout on the debt bill, Rep. Connie Mack of Florida, recalled a time early in his career when he was withholding his vote from the Republican leadership and saw “The Hammer” – then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay – walking toward him in the House chamber.

“He came over with a finger pointing at my chest,” the four-term lawmaker said. “He was telling me what I’m going to do and why. He said, `You won’t make it long in this town’” by defying the party leadership.

Mack doesn’t remember what the issue was, but he remembers not budging.

… That doesn’t mean there wasn’t pressure, especially when Boehner had to postpone a vote on his legislation last week for lack of Republican support, and faced questions about his hold on the speakership.

… “I didn’t see or hear any of that,” he said. “I thought they would break my knuckles and twist my arm. I saw the speaker in the cloakroom. He raised his eyebrows, to say Where are you at?’ I said, ‘I support you, I just don’t like your bill.’ He said, ‘That’s what I thought. I’ll leave you alone.’ There was no ‘I got a deal for you.’”

I guess in Margasak’s mind, referring to “the not too distant past” gave him journalistic permission to skip over the four years Nancy Pelosi was House Speaker and Harry Reid was Majority Leader. That’s not what less-informed readers will infer. They’ll instead infer that corruption was only a problem the last time Republicans controlled Congress. It sure looks like that’s what the AP reporter wants people to think — or he would have covered the tactics of Pelosi lieutenants like Steny Hoyer and not simply skipped back to Tom Delay.

One other bias note while I’m thinking of it: Last week, Columbus Dispatch reporter Joe Hallett, using completely unnamed sources, tried to claim that Boehner was punishing fellow Buckeye State Congressman Jim Jordan for his intransigence on voting for anything short of the “Cut, Cap and Balance” legislation which originally passed the House, even alleging that Republicans were figuring out a way to carve up Jordan’s district in the redistricting process.

Hallett’s piece as originally filed is no longer available at the Columbus Dispatch (the link in the previous paragraph is from Google’s cache). In a later version (also not available, but quoted here at the Hill), the Dispatch reporter added a response from Boehner which says a lot about the man (Boehner, not Hallett, the supposed dean of Ohio political journalists, who from this vantage point is about as weaselly as they come), even if you don’t think he did a particularly good job in the debt-ceiling debate:

“Jim Jordan and I may not always agree on strategy, but we are friends and allies, and the word retribution is not in my vocabulary,” Boehner said in a statement. “I look forward to continuing to serve with him in the U.S. House after the redistricting process in Ohio is complete, and for many years to come.”

There was never any substance to Joe Hallett’s story. Don’t look for an apology or retraction any time soon.

One thing you can say: “Retribution” is in Nancy Pelosi’s vocabulary.

Another thing you can say: If fairness and balance are present at the AP, it would appear to only be in its sports coverage — maybe.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

I was interviewed yesterday by Lowman Henry of American Radio Journal (yeah, that’s me on the front page) and Pennsylvania’s Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion. I appreciate getting the opportunity, and the PR folks at Pajamas Media for booking it.

The interview, which covered the economy’s current situation, particularly relating to jobs, is below (for me, it went to a different web page; your mileage may vary, depending on the browser).

Lowman Henry Interviews Tom Blumer 080311

Louis Magazzu, whom I shall nickname “Louis the Lewd,” was a Democratic County Freeholder in Cumberland County, New Jersey. A “freeholder” is the Garden State equivalent of a county commissioner.

His position is in the past tense because Louis the Lewd resigned on Tuesday after nude pictures of himself sent to a woman with whom he had online correspondence for several years were published.

Let’s compare how the Aliyah Shahid at the New York Daily News and Beth DeFalco at the Associated Press covered Magazzu’s resignation. First, from the Daily News, which isn’t exactly considered strongly conservative or particularly anti-Democrat:

(more…)

From the Department of Labor:

In the week ending July 30, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 400,000, a decrease of 1,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 401,000. The 4-week moving average was 407,750, a decrease of 6,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 414,500.

… The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 339,348 in the week ending July 30, a decrease of 29,939 from the previous week. There were 402,140 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

So the 400K+ streak, which was “broken” last week is now intact again at 17:

After it more than likely gets revised upwards next week, the streak will go back to being “over 400K” instead of being “400K+”.

The not seasonally adjusted number is about 16% lower than last year’s NSA number for the same week. It would be nice to see that continue.

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UPDATE: My Business Insider email said that economists expected 403K. If form holds, they’ll get their wish when the number gets revised.

Washington assumes we can withstand at least 18 more months of business as usual. Prognosis: Doubtful.

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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Tuesday.

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If the debt-ceiling drama which just transpired had occurred in 1995, I would be probably be applauding the deal just made. But this wasn’t an ordinary political tug of war. It wasn’t about what the country will look like ten or twenty years from now. It was about the near-term chances of America surviving as we know it. We’ve just lowered that likelihood.

Because of that, I find no solace in the fact that much of the left is apoplectic. The New York Times is screaming about “hostages.” The paper’s Paul Krugman is railing about President Barack Obama’s “abject surrender.” Joe Biden and Democratic Party congressmen are calling Tea Party patriots “terrorists.” Illinois stateocrat Dick Durbin frets that the deal is the death knell for Keynesian economics.

I find no encouragement in the claims of outfits like the Wall Street Journal and alleged center-right commentators that the deal is a “Tea Party Triumph“ representing the biggest “cut” in spending since 1996 – and besides, “it’s the best we can do.” I remember July 27, when the Journal condescendingly referred to people who have given up their personal lives to save the country as “tea-party Hobbits,” while the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol snidely called those who objected to the House GOP’s growing timidity as “the pro-Obama right.” Yeah, these are our “friends.”

We’ve been heading for the mother of all crackups for nearly a decade.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush made a calculated decision to run up deficits then considered massive to avoid touching domestic programs and entitlements — even creating a new one in the case of prescription drugs — to buy time against leftist objections to the absolutely necessary war on terror. The Republican Congress took Bush’s posture as permission to open the earmark floodgates and totally surrendered the fiscal high ground. Largely as a result, Democrats took control of Congress. Bush’s post-9/11 decision may have temporarily saved the country from a terrorist scourge, and to be fair he was one good year away from balancing the budget when the Democrats took over. But it, along with congressional Republicans’ profligacy, also left an opening for a hardened radical posing as a fiscal moderate to siphon away enough relatively disengaged voters to take the White House.

Immediately upon taking office — even before then if you count TARP, which he enthusiastically supported as a candidate — Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress stepped up government spending to levels not seen in human history. TARP and the Democrats’ overreach gave birth to the Tea Party movement, which in November 2010 overturned Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the largest House seat party switch since the late 1930s.

John Boehner may be getting standing ovations and lots of love from his party colleagues in Washington, and he has a boatload of semi-credible defenses — undermining from the Senate’s Gang of Six and Mitch McConnell, serial media misrepresentations about the status of negotiations, and of course, Barack Obama and Harry Reid. But the fact remains that he needed to do more, and didn’t.

Boehner and Republicans erroneously accepted the premise that the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline should be a starting point when considering future spending plans. It’s not, and it became totally useless on Friday with the government’s “revisionomics” announcement that the country’s economy is still smaller than it was before the recession began. At this point, what matters is the answer to one and only one question: Are we going to spend a lot less next year than we are going to spend this year? “No” is not an acceptable answer. As far as I can tell, Boehner has never even tried to keep a core promise contained in his party’s 2010 Pledge to America, namely: “With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels.” Instead, we’re well on our way to establishing Barack Obama’s ever-higher baseline spending levels as the norm, while perhaps even jeopardizing national security.

In agreeing to this deal, Washington’s elites have just made a bet they had no right to make. It’s one thing — a very, very bad thing — to leave mountains of debt and trillions in obligations to future generations, semi-secure in the knowledge that American ingenuity, innovation and effort will nevertheless make their world better than ours. After all, it has worked that way ever since World War II. It’s another much worse thing to literally bet that we can survive with Barack Obama’s breathtakingly irresponsible spending-on-steroids version of business as usual until late January 2013 — or, heaven forbid, 2017. Virtually nobody in Washington or the media elites, including center-right outlets which should know better, is asking whether we can. Either that, or they don’t dare bring it up.

In late April, I contended that America would become “Maxed Out” — i.e., that it would lose its ability to borrow or would only be able to do so at exorbitant interest rates — in about six years. It’s not unreasonable to believe that it’s now more like two or three. Friday’s GDP adjustments alone probably shaved off a year. The debt deal’s near-term savings are little more than a rounding error. Obama’s clear intent to not let anything get in the way of his regime of fear and fright is likely worth another two or three. His posture virtually ensures continued ratings agency skepticism, economic underachievement, anemic growth, lagging tax collections, and an unrelenting job-market nightmare until 2013 — possibly a few months earlier if the businesspeople, entrepreneurs and investors who could be driving the economy but are currently, as Resorts International CEO Steve Wynn recently put it, “sitting on their thumbs” until Obama is gone, conclude that the next president will be a legitimate supporter of capitalism instead of its most diehard opponent.

The debt deal assumes we can spend the next 18 months driving headlong towards the cliff at 74 miles per hour instead of 75, and that we’ll still be able to put on the brakes in time before heading over it.

How can Washington’s establishment be so sure that we have that much time? They can’t be.

From Washington:

August 2, 2011

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) returned to Congress in dramatic fashion for the first time since she was shot in the head in January, appearing almost unannounced in the midst of voting on one of the most contentious issues of the year.

The House erupted in a bipartisan standing ovation as she entered. The congresswoman, 41, who has been out of the public eye and hospitalized much of the year, stood unaided to recognize the thunderous applause.

Wearing cropped brown hair, a turquoise jacket and her distinctive smile, Giffords embraced a stream of colleagues who flocked to her. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-Fla.), who is among her closest friends in Congress, was at her side.

“It was an inspiration, really, to all the members, Democrats and Republicans. We’re very excited about seeing her,” said Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.).

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) dabbed her eyes. Others passed around tissues.

“Her presence here … as well as her entire service to Congress, brings honor to this chamber,” Pelosi said, adding that there “isn’t a name that stirs more admiration” throughout the country than Giffords’. …

Go here for the rest of the story.