AP – Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for California governor, has surpassed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for the highest personal contribution in American campaign history. Read more: Meg Whitman breaks US campaign spending records (AP)
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Meg Whitman breaks US campaign spending records
(AP)
What if reporters hunting and pecking for happy economic news are playing up incomplete government reports? Take this AP story by Jeannine Aversa on hopes rising over jobless claims: The number of people signing up for unemployment benefits dropped to the lowest level in two months, an encouraging sign that companies aren’t resorting to deeper layoffs even as the economy has lost momentum. The Labor Department reported Thursday that new claims for unemployment aid plunged last week by a seasonally adjusted 27,000 to 451,000. Economists had predicted a much smaller decline of just 2,000. But wait, we have an asterisk alert: did the Labor Department really get data from all 50 states? Bloomberg News explained, ahem, that nine states did not report actual numbers: For the latest reporting week, nine states didn’t file claims data to the Labor Department in Washington because of the federal holiday earlier this week, a Labor Department official told reporters. As a result, California and Virginia estimated their figures and the U.S. government estimated the other seven, the official said. There’s nothing wrong with reporting the Labor Department estimates — but every story ought to include the missing-states paragraph in their stories, and reporters ought to restrain their “hopes rise” talk considering the incompleteness of the reporting. This Aversa story (or at least this version) doesn’t have that information. If this was a GOP Labor Department, isn’t it possible reporters would be more skeptical that the government estimates might have some administration spin in them?
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Asterisk Alert: AP Story on Jobless Claims Doesn’t Note Labor Dept. Report Missing Data of Nine States
“This is the answer.” Via Newsbusters. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but Mike Bloomberg and “communications pizazz” both figure prominently. Is Bob Gates, of all people, really one of the weak links in this administration? Bob Gates? Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy View the video
In recent days, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has become a beloved press figure as a result of his unshaking support for the Ground Zero mosque. Isn’t it fascinating how in this environment where rich people are being demonized at every turn all you need to do is a support a popular liberal cause and your financial sins are instantly forgiven? With this in mind, the good folks at Big Journalism have uncovered some rather startling financial connections between this media mogul and the Arab world that haven’t raised any eyebrows from journalists that love to follow the money when there’s a conservative at the other end of the smoking wallet. Consider the uproar last week surrounding News Corporation’s contribution to the Republican Governors Association. As you read Mondo Frazier’s marvelous piece ”Follow the Money: Could Mayor Bloomberg’s Media Business Interests in the Middle East Have Anything to Do with His Support of the Ground Zero Mosque?” ask yourself why the seemingly always curious press have ignored any examination of this billionaire’s motives: On October 2, 2009, The Dubai Chronicle reported Chairman and President of Bloomberg LP Peter T. Grauer met with UAE Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum at Maktoum’s Emirate office. According to the Dubai Chronicle, Grauer gave a presentation of Bloomberg future expansion plans in the ‘area of business information’ in the United Emirates, North Africa, and India. Grauer stated the UAE was a great place to expand, the UAE’s “logistic facilities” the ‘biggest incentive for investors and companies to expand their businesses in the country and the region beyond’. “Particularly since the meltdown of the western capitalist system, there has been an increasingly large focus on the virtues of Islamic finance. Today, there is no one single provider of information that caters to the Islamic finance market. So by Bloomberg being here, we are in the process of building out an Islamic finance product. We are very confident that we can build a product that meets the needs of the market right now.” -Max Linnington, Regional Head of Bloomberg Middle East and South Asia on the company’s plan to build a Bloomberg hub in Dubai at the Dubai International Financial Centre(DIFC), October 29, 2009 But there’s more: On March 10, 2010, the Khaleej Times reported Bloomberg Set for Dubai expansion in bid to double revenues by 2014 . “Bloomberg, a leading global provider for financial data and news services, plans to “significantly boost regional operations from its Dubai hub as it is bullish about growth prospects of the emirate as a global financial center, a top executive said.” The coincidences continue: the Mayor’s company is banking on “doubling revenues by 2014″ in a region that just happens to be largely populated by Muslims. As I said at the top, this is the kind of smoking gun the press would normally attack like a pack of hungry wolves. Couldn’t all the international publicity Bloomberg is now getting for being America’s foremost supporter of this mosque be doing wonders for his position in the Arab world? Mightn’t that dramatically help his media company’s push into this region? Why hasn’t this gotten the kind of coverage News Corp’s contribution to the RGA got last week? After all, the point made by folks on the Left was that News Corp’s reporting can’t possibly be taken seriously if it’s making such a large donation to one political Party. Shouldn’t the same be true for Bloomberg? If his media company has recently invested time and money in the Muslim world, and could benefit tremendously from the favorable publicity he’s getting concerning his advocacy of this mosque, shouldn’t his veracity be similarly questioned? This seems especially the case given further revelations about News Corp’s connections to Saudi billionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal. For those that missed it, former Bush administration official Dan Senor was on Fox & Friends Monday, and he made a comment about Al-Waleed’s financing of the Ground Zero mosque. This led liberal media members – including Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart – to point out that Al-Waleed is the biggest shareholder in News Corp. Missing in this newest Fox News gotcha was that it actually demonstrated FNC’s ability to separate the interests of its largest investor from its reporting. Think about it: if Fox was doing Al-Waleed’s bidding, its hosts and contributors wouldn’t be attacking a mosque their largest investor was funding. That would quite literally be biting the hand that feeds them. Quite the contrary, as the news outlet that has been the most outspoken against the location of this Islamic center, Fox has taken a position that can’t be at all popular with its largest shareholder. Maybe someone should inform Stewart and all the other Fox haters in the media of this delicious dichotomy. Which brings us back to New York’s mayor: if the press think FNC is incapable of separating its reporting from its political contributions, shouldn’t they have similar concerns that Bloomberg can’t separate his business interests from his mayoral decisions? Or do such conflicts of interest only arise for conservatives?
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Is Bloomberg Supporting Ground Zero Mosque for Business Reasons?
This guy puts the fruit in fruitcake. Michael Bloomberg shamed those who oppose the Ground Zero Victory Mosque and told a Ramadan audience this week, “We are all Muslims.” CNN reported: We are now in the Islamic holy month of fasting called Ramadan, and Bloomberg hosted last night an annual iftar, or fast-breaking dinner, at Gracie Mansion. In his his remarks , Bloomberg, who has previously supported the Park51 project in the name of both property rights and religious freedom , once again spoke truth to fear and hatred. He admitted that “there are people of good will on both sides of the debate.” He acknowledged that the World Trade Center site is “hallowed ground.” And he observed that “there are people of every faith–including, perhaps, some in this room–who are hoping that a compromise will end the debate.” “But it won’t,” he said. The community center can and must be built at the Park51 site , he said. Anything less would “compromise our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.” During his remarks, Bloomberg welcomed Talat Hamdani, whose son, Salman Hamdani, a paramedic and Ne York City Police Department cadet, died on 9/11. He also welcomed Sakibeh and Asaad Mustafa, whose children, he said, “have served our country overseas.” Bloomberg brought home the point that the propaganda war now being waged on Islam in America threatens to undercut our counterinsurgency battle for “hearts and minds” in Iraq and Afghanistan. “If we do not practice here at home what we preach abroad–if we do not lead by example–we undermine our soldiers,” he said. “We undermine our foreign policy objectives. And we undermine our national security.” Bloomberg ended his talk by quoting some words from the embattled Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: At an interfaith memorial service for the martyred journalist Daniel Pearl, Imam Rauf said, ‘If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind, and soul: Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ehad; Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one. If to be a Christian is to love the Lord our God with all of my heart, mind and soul, and to love for my fellow human being what I love for myself, then not only am I a Christian, but I have always been one.’ “In that spirit,” Bloomberg concluded, in words that echoed John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech , “let me declare that we in New York are Jews and Christians and Muslims, and we always have been. Allahu Akbar. Well, 22% of Americans agree with his blathering anyway.
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Allahu Akbar… Michael Bloomberg Tells Ramadan Audience: “We Are All Muslims”
New York City’s independent mayor is weighing in on Pennsylvania’s Senate race, endorsing Rep. Joe Sestak (D) over former Rep. Pat Toomey (R). Mayor Michael Bloomberg will appear with Sestak at an event in Philadelphia on Tuesday, but the timing is also likely to inject the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque into the event. The mayor has been one of the project’s most forceful defenders, while Sestak declined to endorse the project Monday. A spokesman for Sestak said the congressman “believes there is a Constitutional right to religious freedom and separation of church and state that applies equally to all Americans,” but he declined to clearly back the plan. Spokesman Jonathon Dworkin said Sestak “is not looking to say what’s best for New York as long as that right is respected — he is focused on Pennsylvania.” Bloomberg hasn’t exactly been a hot commodity on the midterm campaign trail, but he did host a fundraiser for the Senate campaign of Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) last month. The Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent Bloomberg can also be a political lightening rod at times. While Sestak has taken some lumps in central and western Pennsylvania over his support of gun control, Bloomberg is one of the country’s most ardent proponents of stricter gun-control laws. He founded the group “Mayors against illegal guns,” which spent millions in independent expenditure dollars against anti-gun-control congressional candidates during the 2008 cycle.
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Bloomberg backs Sestak in Pennsylvania
File the news in this report filed late yesterday afternoon by Michael Calderone and John Cook at Yahoo’s Upshot Blog under “D” for Double Standards: White House reporters mum on Obama lunch, even as papers back transparency White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who’ve advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors. But the identities of the lunch’s attendees won’t remain secret forever: Their names will eventually appear on the White House’s periodically updated public database of visitor logs. … The Obama White House began posting the logs in order to settle a lawsuit, begun under the Bush administration, from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which sought the Secret Service’s White House visitor logs under the Freedom of Information Act. … And guess who filed briefs supporting that argument? Virtually every newspaper that covers the White House. The Washington Post filed an amicus brief in in February 2008 arguing that the names of White House visitors should be released, and it was joined by the Associated Press, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones, USA Today, the Hearst Corporation, the New York Daily News, the Newspaper Guild, the Society of Professional Journalists, and a host of other news outlets. It’s unclear, of course, whether reporters for any of those newspapers attended the lunch — because none of them will say. Calderone found out anyway, and in a post early this afternoon , told us who was there: Ben Feller (Associated Press), Jonathan Weisman and Laura Meckler (Wall Street Journal), Michael Shear and Scott Wilson (Washington Post), Caren Bohan (Reuters), David Jackson (USA Today), Carol Lee (Politico), Peter Nicholas (Tribune Co.), Margaret Talev (McClatchy) and Julianna Goldman (Bloomberg). Several reporters on this list gave “no comments” to The Upshot on Thursday. The New York Times was invited but did not attend. White House reporter Peter Baker told The Upshot that the paper “politely declined because we’d like very much to talk on the record.” Readers here likely have memories of certain of the above reporters going out of their way to protect Barack Obama or to bash Bush 43. The appearance of Weisman’s name reminded me of an absolutely pathetic massage job he did when he was at the Washington Post . In August 2005, as seen here , Weisman turned what had been an upbeat item about July’s unemployment report by another Post reporter (“Job Growth Strongest in 3 Months”) into a co-written hit piece on Bush (“Economic News Isn’t Helping Bush; Job Growth Up Sharply in July, but Polls Show Dissatisfaction”). Here were most of the report’s three opening paragraphs: U.S. job growth jumped last month and the unemployment rate held steady … the government reported yesterday, the latest economic data to show the economy picking up steam. Yet President Bush’s economic approval ratings remain low, weighed down by anger over Iraq and concerns about lackluster wage increases and stubbornly high gasoline prices. “I feel the economy is just not as good as it should be,” said Adam Judis, 40, a Pasadena, Calif., computer consultant and political independent. “We’re spending too many lives, resources and money on Iraq. There has to be a point where we say we can’t help everybody. We need to help ourselves.” My reax at the time : The Post feels it’s their duty to massage the news for their print subscribers. They just couldn’t let the story go to print without throwing cold water on it, so they found one guy to change the subject to Iraq, and then presented poll results to “prove” that Bush really isn’t handling the economy well (even though the objective evidence says his administration is). This is a clearly conscious, obvious, and disgraceful effort to turn good news into bad news. You may be wondering what the economic news was that left Weisman unimpressed because of Iraq, gas prices, and supposedly flat wages: In July 2005 , the economy added 207,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate was 5%. Yeah, that bad (/sarc). Watch what Weisman writes at the WSJ warily. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep an special eye on each of the lunch’s attendees for the next few months. One other thought: Things are pretty bad in journalism when the security-leak sieve known as the New York Times leads the way in ethics by choosing not to participate in the off-the-record luncheon. Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com .
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch weighed in on the contested primary in Manhattan’s 14th district Thursday, announcing he’s backing Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.). “She’s the kind of responsive, independent and tenacious representative New Yorkers need,” Koch said in a letter released by Maloney’s camp. “She has my complete support.” Maloney, a nine-term incumbent, is embroiled in a primary fight with attorney Reshma Saujani (D). The public backing of the well-known former mayor can’t hurt. Moreover, it’s noteworthy because Koch is a Democrat but no die-hard partisan. He backed George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 and is a strong supporter of current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent.
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Rep. Maloney gets Koch’s blessing
President Obama heads to Michigan to tout stimulus spending amid rising concern among voters and lawmakers about the deficit. A new Bloomberg National Poll illustrates the difficult line Obama is trying to walk — with Americans ranking the deficit as second only to unemployment among their top economic concerns. The White…
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Obama finds stimulus, deficit line hard to straddle
President Obama heads to Michigan to tout stimulus spending amid rising concern among voters and lawmakers about the deficit. A new Bloomberg National Poll illustrates the difficult line Obama is trying to walk — with Americans ranking the deficit as second only to unemployment among their top economic concerns. The White…
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Obama finds stimulus, deficit line hard to straddle