Mitt Romney got pretty specific about unemployment in an interview with Mark Halperin yesterday, arguing that his "policies" will "get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, perhaps a little lower."
It was an odd sort of prediction. For one thing, earlier this month, Romney told voters any unemployment rate above 4 percent is a problem. For another, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget, if existing policies remain in place, the unemployment rate is already on track to reach 6% by 2016. (In other words, Romney is promising to deliver results we're supposed to get anyway.)
This led Rachel to describe this as a "test" for political reporters.
How's the media doing on this test? As it turns out, not too badly -- the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe all published pieces that noted the larger context.
Unfortunately, the test didn't go as well for USA Today, CBS News, and CNN (though the CNN report does offer some worthwhile scrutiny).
It's tough to check every news site, so I thought I'd open this up to some audience participation. How did your local media do? Did they simply pass along Romney's claim, or did they also mention the relevant details? What have you heard on television and radio?
Incidentally, Romney boasted on Fox News this morning, "People all across the country are saying, 'Wow, 6 percent sounds pretty good."
He clearly hopes viewers aren't well informed.
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"Elect me, and winter will arrive on December 21st!"
("It will be a mild winter, but there will be plenty of snow for you snowbirds. Make that plenty of Florida sunshine for you snowbirders. Did I say a 'mild winter'? Global warming is a hoax. However, I stand by whatever I said.")
^Thanks for the laugh!
(: - )
Muckraker missed it.
I link to you yesterday to troll them.
lol
"He clearly hopes viewers aren't well informed."
He knows people aren't well-informed. Because the media that covers him aren't well-informed. And neither is he well-informed.
And in November, we'll be saying "President Romney."
For the sake of people who do educate themselves, I hope you are wrong
test
If Benen is referring to a "Pass-Fail Test" for the Corporately Owned Media, I am confident that it will be a consistent FAIL.
re DisgustedWithItAll...
I am not convinced that the media are uninformed. I continue to believe that they are relatively well informed, but neither asking tough knowledge based questions of repukes nor passing 'truth' about issues to the sheeple is part of what their 'corporately defined' roles are.
Well, some of the media are informed, I'd agree. But I'd say it's a pretty embarrassing percentage. There's a lot of reasons for that; 1) most media are simply technically incompetent/ignorant of the subject material they cover (economics, science, ...) because they were journalism majors, 2) journalism schools TEACH the role of a journalist is to be a stenographer, not to ask and answer the five questions, 3) the unshakable insistence by new organizations that both sides have to be equally at fault, and that must be reflected in the picture they paint of the world, ... (I could yammer on but...).
My guess is that practically none of local media has a clue what's the true picture is at the national level and simply rely on the national news organizations for what to say. (Just watch a local newscast and if you're not appalled, you're local people are much better than mine.) And the national organizations are invested psychologically, professionally, and financially in false equivalency and fake even-handedness, not giving one whit of concern to painting a national picture that reflects the reality.
Hanlon's Razor
Why are we accepting the premise romney will make the employment situation better instead of worse? He has embraced the ryan budget which slows gdp growth, reduces the federal work force and increases deficit.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/02/goldman-sachs-house-spending-cuts-will-hurt-economic-growth/
Goldman Sachs: House Spending Cuts Will Hurt Economic Growth
A confidential new report prepared by Goldman Sachs for its clients says spending cuts passed by the House of Representatives last week would be a drag on the economy, cutting economic growth by about two percent of GDP.
Who is accepting it? I'm not. Republicans in power will be a long-term disaster.
Anybody with half a brain (so that excludes most die-hard GOPers) knows that the Ryan Budget is a disaster.
I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Like the Cameron Government, they have demonstrated their ability to produce short-term disaster.
Gotta get you collegues to stop trying to be on all sides to appear to be fair. There is only one true, so it is not true that the Pres. said that the stimulus will keep unemployment below 8%. It is not true that the Federal Government grew out of control under Obama (1.8% growth). So your test for the media, Alex Wagner and Joe Scarborough both fail. Lets start a truth in reporting campaign. Because if the Press won't hold people to telling the truth, what use are they?
Well, just to take the first one, no, he never said the stimulus bill would hold unemployment to one percent. No matter how many times you guys say it, it is both literally and substantively a lie.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/mitt-romneys-claim-that-obama-said-stimulus-would-keep-unemployment-below-8-percent/2012/02/17/gIQA9A8MKR_blog.html
Literally a lie because there is no recorded instance of Barack Obama promising anyone, anywhere, anytime that the stimulus would hold unemployment to 8%. None, zero, zilch. If such tape existed, Rove would be running it on a continuous loop in every battleground state 24/7 and you people would be linking to it.
Substantively it's also a lie. There was no such promise made by either Obama or anyone who worked for him. Instead, this entire fantasy has been spun out of a private report for Obama--not Congress or the press--drafted by his advisers before he was inaugurated. The report had a chart in it that was based on the best estimate then available about the size of reduction in GDP that the financial sector had already caused showed unemployment would peak at about 8% with the stimulus and would be much higher without it. The report was carefully caveated with all kinds of footnotes and warnings that the specific numbers were based on projections that might be wrong, as people with expertise tend to do when they're working off of projections.
The reason they wrote this report--to Obama, not the public--was to warn Obama that the 600 billion dollar stimulus he was contemplating requesting was to small and something closer to 900 million was going to be necessary.
As it turned out, the caveats in the report were well taken and the assumption about the size of the reduction in GDP that had already occurred that was built into that graph was wrong. In fact, by the time Obama took office, GDP had contracted about twice as much as the worst case scenario of most experts (though not Krugman, it should be noted).
In the bumper-sticker addled right wing propaganda fever swamp, this single chart has transmuted into "Obama sed unemployment wouldn't go no higher than 8%!!!!!!" Being only semi-literate, the people who buy this nonsense are incapable of grasping that the only thing that was wrong with the chart was numbers on the Y axis. The result of the underlying underestimation of the magnitude of the problem Bush was handing off to Obama was that the stimulus Obama requested was still several hundred billion dollars smaller than necessary--but, in any case, there was zero chance that the blue dogs in Congress were ever going to pass a bill for any number close to or over a trillion.
But the underlying truth shown by the chart, that unemployment would have peaked out at a much higher level without the stimulus was, and remains true.
Except, of course, in the bumper-sticker mentality fever swamp of the right wing counterfactual alternate universe where no amount of objectively verifiable empirical evidence is capable of having the slightest effect on what people believe.
Governor Romney (yes, his disastrous time as "chief executive" in Massachusetts will not go away so easily) seems to think that his time as head of Bain's vulture capitalism operations automatically qualify him for the White House. But what Mitt fails to explain to voters is just how that can be, and exactly what during his time making himself piles of money and building elevators for his fleet of pimped out Cadillacs for his wife would make him a better president than Mr. Obama. Romney doesn't understand the job or how the broader economy works if he thinks his time at Bain should cause Americans to drop to their knees and appoint him grand dictator, as he demands of us. http://www.sunstateactivist.org
Like Sarah Palin, he likes being called "Governor." He'd like even more to be called "President." It's the whole, "responsibility" thing that sucks about both of them.
Romney presented what he would do on day 1
Reduce unemployment to 6%. (the same goal as Obama, that many independent observers believe can be accomplish through his programs) Why doesn't any one ask what would Romney do that obama is not doing. Why does Romney feel that just following the Bush program of tax cuts which resulted in a net gain of zero jobs over 8 years will somehow have a different result? Why does he want to cut regulations which protect the people, knowing that this was a major reason we are in this recession now?
Romney wants to pick a fight with the most important economic partner we have China. Has he spoken to almost all major US companies that depend on China for their growth. Is he secretly ant-business? Why would he want to pick a fight with our banker?
He wants to cut Obama's health care program. What will he due to help those who presently can't afford health care, those who can't get health care because of a precondition? Doesn't he realize that the single biggest cause for family bankruptcies is health costs?
Is Romney ready to scrap public education, one of the great parts of America?
Most important, why does the media accept the generalities of Romney and the Republican party with out insisting on specifics? Why doesn't the media show that the Romney ideas are exactly the same as the failed Bush programs? Isn't Romney running as a Republican?
Massachusetts ranked 37th in job creation before Mitt took over and he only mismanaged to reduce it to 47th during prosperous economic times. Not bad for a Republican, I guess.
The commentary on the media was the best feature on the show. This should be an ongoing commentary to prod the rest of the media to do its job. Now Rachel needs to go on the Sunday morning talk shows and say the same things.
Where are Romney and Reverend Worley constructing their extermination camps for LGBT folk? I'm assuming they will be scattered around the south where recruiting guards will be easy.
To me this is key to the election. Every time Romney speaks in public, he lies. Every single time. His claims about the president are so blatantly untrue that I think the Conservative party believes no one will check.
The other key: Romney = Bush. Romney doesn't think for himself, he's being controlled. It's more important to carry the party line than be caught flip-flopping. The result is that we have no idea who he is. He will be a good follower, which makes him the perfect GOP president: he will be controlled by all of the Bush hold-overs like Cheney. (!) He wants to bring back the Bush economy. (please, no...)
Independents need to know this.
Rachel is covering these items regularly. Please continue!
http://dbv5039.newsvine.com/_news/2012/05/24/11855577-gop-nightmare-charts-nytimescom
its only a poll. but we shall see
How long do we have to listen to Republican BS about Republicans being opposed to government handouts! These Republican lawmakers and Democrats, to a lesser degree, have raised handouts to business to an art-form. They are built into our tax code on a grand scale.
If Democrats wanted money to buy bread for America’s hungry, including children and the poor; Some Republican will scream about rampant socialism. Later in the same week they would approve all kinds of federal money in the form of tax credits or grants for someone to build a bakery manufacturing facility. That is an investment in our country’s future, Republicans exclaim. Keeping young Americans alive into the future is not?
Professional sports have spent years trolling around for handouts to build new stadiums from various states, all legal. They pit one state against another all legal as the rich write the laws. If the rich didn’t write the laws, it would be considered extortion. Understand job creation is minimal in a real sense. The Cleveland Browns left Ohio and went to Baltimore. A case could be made that the devastation in one state exceeded the benefit gleaned in the other. Most of the negotiations are done in the dark. The victim in the case I sighted was unaware until it was too late.
This extortion, the rich call it free enterprise, is practiced by all kinds of manufacturers. They pit one state against another. The one that gets their taxpayers to pony up the most (tax payer handouts) get the jobs. Sometimes their new jobs, but more often than not they are the same jobs, legalized extortion.
Our wealthy legislators could stop this handout, voucher capitalism, extortion in a single day. If they wanted to protect the jobs of American workers instead; they would call it extortion. A compromise, the offending company must fund all workers retraining from the extortion gains.
For the scorecard, the Des Moines Register is a Fail:
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012305240067
My fellow citizens.
When are you going to realize that responding to ANYTHING a Rightie sez is a total waste of time.
There are 2 kinds of people I won't argue with. Drunks are the other kind. Any communication with either only encourages them.
My response is simple:
1) You're full of @!$%#.
2) You're an @!$%#.
3) And now ... "Do you Denounce all White Supremacist Organizations?"