The Associated Press’s seeming effort to go after every candidate except the guy who used to be governor of Massachusetts — and imposed CO2 emission caps when he was — went a different route tonight with a report by the wire service’s Ryan J. Foley that Herman Cain, a believer in liberty and free-market capitalism, “has close ties” with the Koch brothers, who believe in liberty and free-market capitalism.

Knock me over with a feather. Here are several paragraphs from Foley’s report (bolds are mine):

Long ties to Koch brothers key to Cain’s campaign

Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain has cast himself as the outsider, the pizza magnate with real-world experience who will bring fresh ideas to the nation’s capital. But Cain’s economic ideas, support and organization have close ties to two billionaire brothers who bankroll right-leaning causes through their group Americans for Prosperity.

Cain’s campaign manager and a number of aides have worked for Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, the advocacy group founded with support from billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which lobbies for lower taxes and less government regulation and spending. Cain credits a businessman who served on an AFP advisory board with helping devise his “9-9-9″ plan to rewrite the nation’s tax code. And his years of speaking at AFP events have given the businessman and radio host a network of loyal grassroots fans.

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… to this.

Comments are disabled at this post to keep it that way.

On October 9, an unbylined Associated Press story reported that Congressmen Darrell Issa “could send subpoenas to the Obama administration as soon as this week over weapons lost amid the Mexican drug war.” On Wednesday, October 12, Issa did just that.

Mike Vanderboegh’s Sipsey Street Irregulars blog has a succinct summary (HT Ed Driscoll) of the establishment press’s coverage of Issa’s actions since the subpoenas’ issuance:

As evidence, ladies and gentlemen of the jury of history, I present the undisputed fact that on the evening news shows of NBC, ABC and CBS this week not one — NOT ONE — mentioned the unprecedented subpoena by a Congressional committee of information regarding the entire top echelon of the Justice Department in the Gunwalker Scandal.

Had this scandal involved John Ashcroft and the Bush Administration, does anyone doubt that the story would have led the nightly half-hour “puppet theater”? Or, that it wouldn’t have been covered like a blanket by all news departments from the moment the blood of Brian Terry dried in the desert sands of Rio Rico?

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Hank Paulson’s “gun to the head” hijacking of TARP, and the sickening silence which followed.

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

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Almost everyone who believes in the Constitution and free markets properly considers October 3, 2008 one of the darkest days in U.S. history. It was on that day that the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) became law. A day later, I wrote that law’s passage, accompanied by tactics and threats which amounted to orchestrated blackmail, over the strident objections of over 150 economists from across the political spectrum, only days after its initial voter-driven failure, proved that Washington’s politicians and elites “don’t care what we think.”

Abhorrent as it was, the sickening saga of TARP’s enactment was nothing compared to what transpired less than two weeks later.

Everyone’s understanding of the legislation — at least publicly expressed — was that it would, quoting from the bill’s text, authorize the Treasury Department “to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, troubled assets.” Specifically identified “troubled assets” included:

(A) residential or commercial mortgages and any securities, obligations, or other instruments that are based on or related to such mortgages, that in each case was originated or issued on or before March 14, 2008, the purchase of which the Secretary determines promotes financial market stability;

With that Congressional authorization, everyone — again, at least publicly — expected Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to begin buying up “toxic assets.” No one expected that this would be easy, or that settling accounts with affected banks involved would occur quickly.

Ah, but there was a catch in the law which immediately followed. It authorized the purchase of:

(B) any other financial instrument that the Secretary, after consultation with the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, determines the purchase of which is necessary to promote financial market stability, but only upon transmittal of such determination, in writing, to the appropriate committees of Congress.

On October 14, Paulson, with President George W. Bush’s shameful capitalism-betraying acquiescence, morphed the program into a hostile government takeover of the banking system. If there’s one thing the ignoramuses in the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the American people in general need to understand, it’s this: Hank Paulson didn’t ask.

Instead, as the New York Times reported, Treasury’s Godfather called big bank executives into a meeting with no pre-announced agenda, made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, and created the unmistakable impression that every one else below them in the pecking order would have to fall in line:

The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States … were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government … Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left.

… [T]he bankers … felt they had little choice but to go along with the Treasury plan to inject $250 billion of capital into thousands of banks — starting with theirs.

In a chilling exchange on CNBC that day delivered with a smirking, casual arrogance which has to seen to be believed (still available for your viewing horror), Dylan Ratigan and Charles Gasparino described how it went down. Anyone who somehow believes that the banks had a choice should focus on the bolded text:

Ratigan: … [M]any of the banks didn’t want to be tainted with the government bailout funds because they didn’t want to be mistaken for a fool when they actually felt that they were the smart one that didn’t do it.

Well Hank Paulson said: “The heck with that.” He stuck all of them with some of the bailout money. And he said: “Listen, we’re going to reset the clock here and move forward.” Charlie, how are the banks that felt they basically didn’t commit the crime, as it were, of excess or reckless risk, uh, respond to the fact that even they will be stuck with this capital?

Gasparino: Well, y’know, they were all kind of stupid to some extent …..

….. the Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson put all these egos in the room, and basically put guns to their heads, forcing them to take the money to bolster the banking system.

Some of the firms say they didn’t want the cash, but it’s pretty clear that all of them did need to take the cash, given the continued upheaval in the banking system that crushed shares last week of Morgan as well as Goldman Sachs and just about everybody else.

So this is essentially, uh, Dylan, a case where, y’know, you can deny you have any problems. Even the best-capitalized banks have problems. They own this stuff. And Paulson at one point said, “Listen, if you don’t want it, it doesn’t matter, gun to your head, you gotta take it.”

The “gun to the head” was obvious: “You really have a nice bank there. But if you walk out without signing this document, right here, right now, we will bring all of the regulatory and law-enforcement powers of the United States government to bear on your institution. Your depositors and shareholders will suffer immensely. Your bank won’t survive. It would really be a shame if that were to happen. But we promise you, it will.”

Hank Paulson’s defenders will probably claim that provision (B) above gave him authorization to do what he did, and that the preferred shares the banks were forced to issue count as “financial instruments.” The problem with that “logic” is that these weren’t “purchases.” They were extorted ownership interests — and in case you’re wondering, there is no authorization to extort anywhere in the legislation.

The economy as we knew it died that day — and virtually no one objected. As Michelle Malkin wrote: “If you don’t feel like throwing up today, you’re not paying attention.”

That the establishment media had no problem with Paulson’s “purchases” is no surprise. The Associated Press almost admiringly described the meeting as “remarkable.” Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, along with many Democrats and far-leftists (a virtually redundant term) likely and quite privately thought they had died and gone to heaven with the sudden progress just achieved towards completing the fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto — on a Republican president’s watch.

So where was Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who only weeks earlier had infamously and suicidally suspended his presidential run to help pass the TARP we didn’t get? Was there some kind of gag rule against saying anything harsh during the final weeks of the campaign? Where were GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner when the reputation-damaging bailout program they pushed through to passage was unilaterally altered by fiat? Their near if not total silence, and that of so many others, was deafening — and sickening.

Hank Paulson’s bloodless banking coup demonstrated that a nearly all-powerful government which believes it is untouchable can and will do anything once it gins up enough of a crisis atmosphere. Paulson’s putsch gave cover to the long list of heavy-handed actions which have followed during the Obama administration, from arbitrarily changing the pecking order in bankruptcy, to preventing nonunion manufacturing plants from opening, to defying direct court orders, to Dodd-Frank’s attempt to permanently keep the government in banks’ boardrooms — and much, much more.

Even beyond what we can see with regulations gone wild, failed stimulus, and outright corruption, our government’s authoritarian overhang and its destructive psychological effect on business and investor behavior largely explain why the economy won’t acceptably grow. Meaningful, generalized prosperity won’t return until we permanently shame and where possible prosecute those involved, and cast each and every one of them from the powerful perches they currently occupy.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder will follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

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From Rome:

Rome, Italy, Oct 13, 2011 / 03:08 pm

As thunder, lightning and wind whipped through the World Youth Day prayer vigil this past August, Pope Benedict XVI was advised to leave the event three times. But he insisted that if the young people stayed, then he would too.

The revelation comes from a young Honduran woman was who stood next to the Pope throughout the event.

“The masters of ceremony were asking him if the wanted to leave because it was raining, it was pouring and the wind was really strong and he kept on saying that he would not leave. In fact, he twice waved his finger saying ‘no, no, no’,” 27-year-old Erika Rivera told CNA.

The advisers then asked a third time if the Pope wanted to leave. But this time he responded even more firmly, pointing to the 2 million drenched young pilgrims and saying, “If they are staying, then I am staying too.”

“And when he said that, we, the young people who were there next to him, were just so happy to have him as the Holy Father. So it was a fantastic, unique experience,” Rivera said.
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Sometimes it’s really hard to understand why certain events get heavy national press coverage while others which are arguably at least as significant and serious get little if any notice. This is one of them. Scott Walker, who solved a $3 billion projected deficit in Wisconsin, is a media and leftist (but I repeat myself) arch-villain because much of the balancing was done by adjusting public-sector employee contributions towards health and pension benefits to more closely but still more generously resemble what’s seen in the private sector, and by reducing public-sector employees’ ability to restore them to their formerly out-of-control levels through collective bargaining. Ditto for John Kasich in Ohio, where the projected deficit was $8 billion.

Meanwhile, the state of Illinois defers billions of dollars of payments to vendors by four or more months because, despite 67% and 46% increases in personal and business income taxes, respectively, it still doesn’t have the money to come even close to staying current. Yet virtually all we’ve see from the national press on the problem is one Associated Press story conveniently filed on a Saturday. Here are key paragraphs from the report by Christopher Wills (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Deadbeat state: Ill. owes billions in unpaid bills

Drowning in deficits, Illinois has turned to a deliberate policy of not paying billions of dollars in bills for months at a time, creating a cycle of hardship and sacrifice for residents and businesses helping the state carry out some of the most important government tasks.

Once intended as a stop-gap, the months-long delay in paying bills has now become a regular part of the state’s budget management, forcing businesses and charity groups to borrow money, cut jobs and services and take on personal debt. Getting paid can be such a confusing process that it requires begging the state for money and sometimes has more to do with knowing the right people than being next in line.

As of early last month, the state owed on 166,000 unpaid bills worth a breathtaking $5 billion, with nearly half of that amount more than a month overdue and hundreds of bills dating back to 2010, according to an Associated Press analysis of state documents.

The true backlog is even higher because some bills have not yet been approved for payment and officially added to the tally. This includes the Illinois health care agency, which says it is sitting on about $1.9 billion in bills from Medicaid providers because there’s no money to pay it.

… The unpaid bills range from a few pennies to nearly $25 million. In early September, for example, Illinois owed $55,000 to a small-town farm supply business for gasoline, $1,000 to a charity that provides used clothing to the poor, $810,000 to a child-nutrition program.

… Illinois leaders join in bemoaning the crisis but haven’t been able to find a solution.

“God, how much more can our people take?” said Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, a veteran politician responsible for trying to pay a seemingly infinite stack of bills with the finite amount of money approved by legislators and the governor.

(Former Governor Rod) Blagojevich’s replacement, Democrat Pat Quinn, raised income taxes and trimmed spending, but that money was gobbled up by other needs, primarily rising pension costs. Under budget agreements with legislative leaders, all Democrats, bills continued to go unpaid.

As noted above, the tax increases were incredibly steep — yet nothing changed with vendor payments. Ohio and Wisconsin balanced their budgets without raising taxes — and their governors are really, really, really bad guys.

As a reminder, the people of Illinois were specifically told that the vendor payment problem would be solved by the latest round of tax increases:

“We have just come through the worst economic crisis in our lifetime…and we have not paid our bills,” Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, told lawmakers shortly before the vote. “We are going to have to cut…even with this tax. We’re going to have to spend less money then we have in the last two years. And it’s going to be tough. But we are going to have our bills paid.”

Obviously, that hasn’t happened, and there is no realistic prospect that it will happen. Givebacks subsequent to the tax increases by the state’s public-sector unions were almost non-existent. At the time of the tax increases, Governor Quinn thought he could prove that his state’s way of “fixing” things would be as effective as Wisconsin and Ohio and would cause less pain for everyone. How’s that workin’ out for you now, buddy?

Demonstrating its usual lack of class, the wire service which so often fails to identify a person’s political party affiliation in circumstances involving Democrats involved in crime or scandal chose to run an accompanying photo not of Quinn but of Ms. Topinka, and made sure to tag her as a Republican — as if the state’s comptroller has power to do anything about the decrepit situation the state’s Democratic governor and legislature have handed her.

Do you think the mess in Illinois would remain so relatively invisible if the state decided to wait 90 days or so to pay its employees so that vendors and employee alike would be on an equal footing? How is seriously delaying payments to independent contractors, consultants, small and large businesses, and small or large not-for-profits any different? It’s really not. So why is it getting so little attention? Why should I not believe that the reason has a lot to do with Quinn’s and the legislative majority’s political party, and the fact that tax-and-spend is really working out to be tax-and-bankrupt?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Yesterday, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider reacted to the mixed economic news of the day by observing: “Lots of folks are scratching their head about today’s dismal UMich/Reuters consumer sentiment number coming in so ugly, just as retail sales for September came in so strong.”

It seems that the folks at the Associated Press were not among the head-scratchers. From all appearances, the self-described Essential Global News Network, whose acronym might as well stand for “The Administration’s Press,” didn’t cover the consumer sentiment story at all. What follows are several paragraphs from Alex Kowalski at Bloomberg News describing just how ugly it was, complete with the “U-word” we’ve all come to know and laugh at (bolds are mine throughout this post):

U.S. Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index Unexpectedly Falls

Confidence among U.S. consumers unexpectedly dropped in October as Americans’ outlooks for the economy and their finances slumped to the lowest level since 1980.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment decreased to 57.5 this month from 59.4 in September. The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for a reading of 60.2. The gauge of consumer expectations for six months from now, which more closely projects the direction of consumer spending, dropped to 47, the lowest since May 1980.

Consumers may be questioning the recovery’s durability as incomes stagnate, home prices fall and policy makers debate ways to strengthen the recovery. Faster job growth may hold the key to bigger gains in consumer spending that accounts for about 70 percent of the economy.

… The difference between the median projection and the actual figure was the biggest in percentage terms since November 2010.

Searches on “Michigan consumer” and “Thomson consumer” (not in quotes) at the AP’s main site return nothing relevant and nothing at all, respectively.

A different search: A Google News search for the last 24 hours on [consumer thomson "associated Press"] (input exactly as indicated between brackets, sorted by date) returns only one item. Again, there is no evidence that AP covered the consumer sentiment story.

In a brief cruise through the Google News archive, I was able to find that the wire service mentioned the Thomson/U of M survey in July, October 2010, and September 2010.

About two hours after the consumer sentiment news was released, AP Business Writer David McHugh did find time to write up the relatively good news about retail sales:

Stocks pushed higher Friday as better than expected U.S. retail sales data and positive corporate news overshadowed fears from Europe’s debt crisis.

U.S. retail sales for September rose 1.1 percent, ahead of 0.7 percent market expectations. That indicated to some that the world’s largest economy might not be in as much trouble as feared earlier.

The consumer sentiment news says otherwise. It’s hard not to conclude that McHugh and his employer didn’t want to pass on anything that might dilute the positive retail news.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder MAY follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

From Rio de Janeiro:

Oct 12, 2011 / 08:00 pm

On the same day that Brazilian Catholics honor their patroness, Our Lady of Aparecida, the country is celebrating Oct. 12, 2011 as the 80th anniversary of Rio’s famous “Christ the Redeemer” statue.

“The monument is an icon of Rio de Janeiro,” said Rio’s Archbishop Orani João Tempesta.

He said the statue “represents the Brazilian citizen: as a person who follows Jesus Christ, and welcomes others, as the monument does with its open arms.”

Rio de Janeiro’s inhabitants are not the only ones celebrating the statue’s 80th year. Believers throughout Brazil feel blessed by the presence of the Redeemer atop Mount Corcovado.
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Earlier today, Matthew Balan at NewsBusters noted how the “Big Three Nets Trumpet Wall Street Protesters ‘Proclaiming Victory.’” HIs report concentrated on the morning shows, but a Media Research Center Reality Check showed the that the fawning has also been present in evening news coverage.

Evening show network executives, however, may be less than thrilled about the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd coverage, and secretly hoping for the whole thing to wind down. That’s because their shows, which have generally seen their ratings rise during the past twelve months, saw their combined audience fall below 21 million during the week of October 3, with CBS suffering a particularly sharp drop (comparisons are to previous week):

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Okay, it’s Friday afternoon, and I’ve had it with news and politics.

Let me instead introduce readers and viewers to what AdAge calls five good excuses to quit Facebook (or in my case, never use it effectively, if using it effectively is even possible) — Chad, Pete, Brayden, Nico and KX:

To me, it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s serious or someone’s idea of camp. Blech.