I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Obama’s Phony ‘Job’ Claims
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William McGurn wrote a great opinion piece for today’s Wall Street Journal Online, discussing Obama’s phony ‘job’ claims and how he gets a free pass on making such outlandish claims from the media.
The crux of it is that Obama is careful to use the newly-minted phrase “jobs saved or created”, a phrase which holds about as much water as a sieve. Any economist with half a brain will tell you that while it’s possible to measure the number of jobs created (which itself doesn’t tell you much, as Milton Friedman would argue), there is absolutely no way at all to quantify the number of jobs “saved”. McGurn explains:
“The expression ‘create or save,’ which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius,” writes [Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg] Mankiw. “You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus.”
Mr. Obama’s comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and — presto! — you have the president claiming he has “saved or created” 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.
And so, Obama continues to go around unchallenged pulling numbers out of his ass for “jobs saved or created” because, hey, no one can ever prove him wrong. If he promises 5 million jobs and we see only 2 million created, he’ll tell you that 3 million were saved. If, on the other hand, we see a loss of a million jobs, he’ll justify himself by telling you that we would otherwise have lost 6 million jobs. Clever, eh?
Actually, it’s only as clever of him as it is stupid of the media for swallowing it whole. And, as McGurn points out,
don’t expect much to change. So long as the news continues to repeat the administration’s line that the stimulus has already “saved or created” 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.
Yep, this is pure politics.