All is Well??

Remember this, from Animal House?

Well, you’re gonna hear the Liberal/Democrat version of that for the next 5 months.

Gird your loins:

NEW YORK (Associated Press) — Here we go again.

Americans’ confidence in the economy suffered the biggest drop in eight months as worries about the weak jobs, housing and stock markets rattled them again. The decline comes after a few months of optimism amid some positive economic news.

The Conference Board, a private research group, said on Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index now stands at 64.9, down from a revised 68.7 in April. With gas prices falling, Americans were expected to push the measure to 70, according to analysts polled by FactSet.

But the May figure, which represents the biggest drop since October 2011 when the measure fell about 6 points, shows that consumers need more encouraging economic signs before their concerns start to dissipate.

Sort of like a kid learning to eat their peas, the American consumer just needs the right ‘encouragement’ and then their irrational economic fears will be all better.

Nice spin, AP!

Compare that headline with this headline from the NY Times:

“Consumer Sentiment Rises to Highest Level in Four Years”

Doing the Associated Press one better, the Times ignores the report AP used and quotes from a different report which totally contradicts the AP’s, and says that Consumer Sentiment (sentiment…?) “rose to its highest level in more than four years in May as Americans stayed positive about the job market”.

Curiously, when you review the same report that the Times uses for its headline you find THIS fact, which actually appears prior to their data point:

“Confidence in the government’s economic policies remained relatively low, with 41% holding negative views.”

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But remember: “All is Well“.

President Profligate

I remembered him saying it, but I just wanted to hear it again:

Yeah, those were good times.

Now, of course, our debt is soaring towards the heavens, and to heck with those flowery speeches of yesteryear. That doesn’t seem to faze President Profligate, who just had his third budget voted down unanimously, this time by a tally of 99-0.

For the record, his previous budgets lost in the Senate 97-0 (May, 2011), & in the House 414-0 (March of this year).

Hold on; let me count here. That makes the final total tally for all three Obama budgets about…..hold on….that would …be…

…..610? To NOTHING? No one? Not even a single Democrat vote? Heck, if you’ve proposed something so crazy that even Hank “Tipper” Johnson or Max “Last Call” Baucus wouldn’t vote for it, you’ve really flown the coop.

Of course, some folks complained about the vote itself. Guess who?

Democrats disputed that it was actually the president’s plan, arguing that the slim amendment didn’t actually match Mr. Obama’s budget document, which ran thousands of pages. But Republicans said they used all of the president’s numbers in the proposal, so it faithfully represented his plan.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, even challenged Democrats to point out any errors in the numbers and he would correct them — a challenge no Democrat took up.

Senator Mitch McConnell then summed it up well:

“The President wants to be able to take his budget around the country to talk about the parts of it he thinks people will like. And Democrats in Congress want to be able to avoid a vote on it because it’s so damaging for job creation, seniors, and the economy.
“Well, if anybody wants to know what a failure of leadership looks like, this is it.”

I guess the fact that absolutely no one, not a single person, from either party, voted for it won’t matter to the folks at NBC, PBS, or the Boston Globes of the world. The media will either:

• (a) ignore the story completely (“budget vote? WHAT budget vote?”), or
• (b) spin this complete & utter failure by Obama as: Republican Intransigence!

Anyone doubt me?

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Sponsored by: The Obama Campaign 2012

Agendas

Time to play a little game, shall we?

What if I told you that there was a major, non-profit news site which espoused in its charter that its intended razón para vivir was to combat a “liberal and/or Muslim-influenced ideology in news and commentary”?

Do you think that would make headlines? Generate boycotts? Gin up all sorts of outrageously outrageous outrage?

Yeah, …so do I.

So when I say that this actually exists, you may be wondering just why you haven’t read about it in the Boston Globe, USA Today, or the NY Times. And why you haven’t heard ANY of the talking heads on network TV overwrought that this must be the result of Rick Santorum or G. W. Bush (*shudder*), trying to turn our country into a theocracy.

You haven’t heard about it in any of those places because the company to which I’m referring is Media Matters, and what their IRS application for non-profit status actually said was:

“It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote…a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology“.

I must be watching all the wrong channels.

As far as I can see, each of the three big networks (plus PBS, CNN, MSNBC and most major newspapers) have a distinct bias, but it most certainly is not “to overly promote…a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology”.

So, I’m just gonna wonder aloud here: if this mythical bias really DID exist, and since this “news” has now come to light, wouldn’t we have heard something about it from all of those very same news and commentary outlets? Wouldn’t they be covering the story that they are basically being targeted by Media Matters? Wouldn’t that just make sense? Heck, even on just a couple? The Globe? CBS? Someone?

The very fact that we haven’t heard any such thing puts the lie to the very premise.

One other point: if Media Matters was REALLY so concerned about this “Christian” bias (…actually, that just makes me laugh…), wouldn’t it be nice to actually spell out their focus in their Public Mission Statement?

At least that way, we’d know what truly MATTERS to them.

Truly Remarkable

I never watch the Sunday talk shows unless they have something to do with hockey or football, so I missed this until last night. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, he of the unpaid taxes, was on and made the following statement:

This president’s policies were extremely successful. If you measure what we did relative to the record of the United States in past crises and the record of other countries, history will judge what he did as remarkably effective crisis management at a deeply dark time for the world economy.

There’s colorful rhetoric, there’s political ‘spin’, …and then there’s that.

Did he actually say “remarkably effective”? Wow. We are three years into this presidency and our true unemployment is in the teens, for Pete’s sake. From the Congressional Budget Office:

The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent.

Well, maybe so, but with all of the stimulus spending (despite our runaway debt), at least the people who ARE working are doing better, …..right?

Ummm, not so much. US poverty levels have now reached all-time highs.  In the year after the stimulus passed, 2.6 million Americans fell into poverty.  Overall, 6.3 million more Americans are living in poverty today than when Obama took office.

Add in the inexplicable veto of the Keystone Pipeline, a busload of failed ‘investments’ in green energy, and the fact that our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) only grew 1.7% last year, or basically half of what it was in 2010….and you have something that is indeed remarkable.

Just not remarkably successful.