Day: 10/5/2012

More Context Mangling By The Romney Camp: Joe Biden Edition

Posted by on October 5, 2012 at 3:30 pm. 2 Comments :

The Romney campaign has made grabbing snippets of President Obama’s speeches and contorting their meaning the central strategy of his campaign. Yesterday they expanded their strategy to include Vice-President Joe Biden.

Fox News on Joe Biden

Fox News and its community web site Fox Nation, leaped on Biden after he delivered a speech saying pretty much the same thing that Obama has been saying for years. The extracted snippet that Fox is blasting as if it were somehow significant is “Yes we do.” Fox then elaborates by placing those three little words next to “want to raise taxes.” But that is not what Biden said. Here is the complete quote in context:

“On top of the trillion dollars in spending we’ve already cut, we’re going to ask, yes, we’re going to ask the wealthy to pay more. My heart breaks. Come on, man. You know the phrase they always use? ‘Obama and Biden want to raise taxes by a trillion dollars.’ Guess what? Yes, we do in one regard: We want to let that trillion dollar tax cut expire so the middle class doesn’t have to bear the burden of all that money going to the super-wealthy.”

Clearly Biden was reiterating Obama’s long held agenda to let Bush’s tax cuts for the rich expire. There is nothing controversial about demonstrating consistency in political ideology, which is what Biden did. Yet Romney, with the help of Fox News, is twisting these comments to imply that Obama is planning to raise everyone’s taxes. They know that isn’t true, which is the definition of a lie. If Romney wants people to stop calling him a liar, all he has to do is stop lying.

Fox News Spinning Furiously On Unemployment Rate

Posted by on October 5, 2012 at 1:57 pm. 4 Comments :

Behaving entirely consistently with a network that harbors politcos who want to see President Obama fail, Fox News is dismissing the latest unemployment report. Heaven forbid anything good happens in this country while a black, socialist, Muslim from Kenya is in charge. So while having the unemployment rate drop from 8.1 to 7.8 will bring the rest of the country some solace, it just creates headaches for the doomsayers at Fox. Here is how Fox first reported the unarguably good news:

Fox News Unemployment Rate

Is the number real? Well, based on the story on Fox News it must be. That’s because they offered no evidence whatsoever that there was anything askew in the data. The whole of their complaint was their “feeling” that the drop didn’t seem right. Of course, that merely reflects their aforementioned hope that Obama, and thus America, fails. They did suggest that the number of new jobs wasn’t enough to result in the unemployment rate dropping to 7.8. However they completely ignored the fact that the numbers for July and August were both revised upward, which would explain away the discrepancy they are trying to manufacture.

Fox has spent the whole morning trying to hatch skeptics. They brought in former General Electric CEO Jack Welch to explain his delusional Tweet: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.” Fox’s Stuart Varney concurred along with a bevy of correspondents and guests. None of them could explain why an independent agency of career economists, without a single Obama appointee, would fudge the numbers for a president to whom they owed nothing.

Republicans just can’t take any good news while they are focused on disparaging America and feverishly trying to create a misperception of the nation as falling into an abyss. They know that the only way they can win is by talking the country down. Very patriotic of them.

Pure Idiocy From Fox News On The Stock Market

Posted by on October 5, 2012 at 4:12 am. 5 Comments :

OK, just about anyone with a functioning brain already knows that Fox News is a biased player working on behalf of the GOP. But their analysis of financial matters and stock market activity is not just biased, but astonishingly stupid. Yesterday on Fox Nation they posted this “news” item: Romney Rally? Stocks Close Higher One Day After Debate.

Fox Nation Romney Rally

Any time someone makes projections based on a single day of activity it is regarded by professionals as naivete and/or ignorance. So it goes without saying that Fox did just that. On the Fox Business Network, Stuart Varney dropped this mind-numbing stupidity: “Some will say this is a Romney Rally.” And Fox’s Lou Dobbs said “This is the beginning of what will be an even bigger Romney rally as the days unfold.”

Of course, any credible economist knows that market activity is based on a variety of financial data. Yesterday there was an abundance of factors to which the market’s movement could be attributed, including better than expected economic data and the European Central Bank’s freeze on interest rates at 0.75 percent.

Fox has a long history of making idiotic assessments of the stock market. In May of 2009, Brenda Buttner gushed, “Call it a tea party rally. Wall Street’s sure partying, up six weeks in a row.” In September of 2011, Fox Nation reported “Stocks Tumble Worldwide After Obama Speech.” Then in June of 2012, they fantasized that “Stock Market Drops After Obamacare Upheld.”

This tendency of the right to misinterpret all market activity as being the result of Obama (if stocks go down) or some conservative (if stocks go up), extends all the way back to Rush Limbaugh’s nutty commentary on February 8,2009, a mere two weeks after Obama’s inauguration, when he said “The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen. Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come.” Since then stocks have died to the tune of doubling from about 6,600 to over 13,500. Nice call, Rush.

Even Mitt Romney got into it a few days ago saying that “If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president’s going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. […] Without actually doing anything, we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.” Romney, who considers himself an expert in finance, thinks the markets will advance by doing nothing. His magical name alone will rescue the economy.

What they commonly miss at Fox is that markets traditionally perform better under Democratic administrations than Republicans. And note that that link is to an article on the Fox Business Channel’s web site.

The one lesson that people can take away from this display of ignorance, is that anyone who relies on Fox News for economic advice deserves the economic ruin they suffer.