Josh Barro Is Doing Something Pathetic With His Life

The other day I read a story at Bloomberg News that was an assemblage of complete gibberish on which taxes should be raised (answer: many of them.  the column is here if you must).  My eyes caught a glimpse of the author, "Barro," and I was dumbfounded that the prominent economist Robert Barro could be spouting such inanities.  The stunned state lasted a minute or so until I realized the article was written by a Josh Barro.  After a big "whew!" I dismissed it as the "Journolist" tripe that Al Hunt's minions at Bloomberg News consistently churn out.  Not blogworthy, not even for my ongoing chronicling of Bloomberg News as the new Journolist.

Well, it turns out that Mr. Josh Barro, the not-at-all-prominent anything, factors smallishly into the "Other Race Speech" coverage by the MSM.

@JBarro: I don’t get how you can work somewhere like Breitbart or Drudge and not feel like you’re doing something pathetic with your life.

Hinderaker nails it.  Just another faux-objective Journolist hack.  Hardly a surprise from Al Hunt's Bloomberg "We Invented "Unexectedly'" News.

"Journolist" Has New Name

It can now be unveiled..."Journolist" is now called...Bloomberg News!

You would think that organizing an overtly partisan cabal of journalists and academics for the sole purpose of trying to get candidate Barack Obama elected would taint one's standing in the journalism profession - maybe not enough to get you fired in this day and age, but at least enough to keep you from getting additional career opportunities. You would think, but you would be wrong. Not with Al Hunt running Bloomberg News. As if Al didn't have enough lefty yo-yos on the roster, he's launched something called Bloomberg View to jam more lefty drivel down the throats of his captive financial professional audience; and Ezra Klein - of Journolist infamy - appears to be one of the marquee hires (along with a host of Al Gore acolytes and a castoff from that magazine that sold for $1).

I almost couldn't bring myself to read Klein's first column, wot with permanent scarring from the Thomas Frank/WSJ episode. But one has to try new things, even if one is 99.99% sure it's the same old thing. Well, I didn't get three short, taut sentences into it before I was hit with "He’s worried that [government] doesn’t fail often enough." What?!?!??! Government doesn't fail enough!? Off the top of my head, in 2.76 nanoseconds...from NYC's disgustingly botched, corrupt whizbang employee payment system, to Fannie Mae, to the DOJ's Mexican gun-running scandal, to Amtrak, to the British healthcare system, to everything goddamm thing that government touches - it doesn't fail enough!?!?!??!?!? Government fails at the small stuff, the medium stuff, the big stuff, and the super-sized jumbo stuff. What is this yahoo talking about?? Anyway, after I picked myself up off the floor, I completed reading the article and it is a mostly forgettable soup of ignorance of healthcare economics and naive cheerleading for ObamaCare, which I guess is the mission. Al Hunt has his eyes on the 2012 election and is looking to flood the zone with this drivel as he is wont to do.

Welcome to the Party, Powerline!

Some of the bigger and more prominent conservative blogs are noticing something that we've been noting and chronicling for some here at NBfPB - that Bloomberg News, under the auspices of Al Hunt, is a carnival of leftist hackery. Just search on "Hunt" or "Bloomberg News" (or even "unexpectedly") on this blog and you will get copious examples of the "journolist"-style tripe that emanates from that putative "news" source.

Here are the guys at Powerline expressing amazement at a typical instance:

I know Michael Bloomberg is a clown and an aspiring tyrant. I didn’t realize his news service had decided to compete with MSNBC for the title as the most ludicrous news organization on the planet (after Al Jazeera, of course). Check out this headline from yesterday:

House Republicans Set to Defy Obama Are Mostly White Men The core group of Republicans who are pushing the House toward a showdown with the White House over the debt ceiling and government spending is made up of 41 members — all white men except for two.

Except for two? I’m sure if Bloomberg tries hard enough, they’ll find those two are white African-Americans, just as George Zimmerman was a heretofore unknown category of “white Hispanic.” And then there’s this graph:

And about half of them, 19 of 41, have already received campaign donations this year from the political action committee of Wichita-based Koch Industries Inc., controlled by billionaire energy executives Charles Koch and David Koch, who spent millions trying to defeat Obama in 2012.

Seriously? Did a Bloomberg editor really sign off on this?

Welcome to the party Powerline!

BTW, this wasn't the only ridiculous "white people doing it = rank illegitimacy and loathesomeness" theme that Bloomberg News has foisted on us this week. Minor Bloomberg hack Francis Wilkinson picked up a few gun magazines (magazines as in printed publications), saw mostly white people, and declared guns that much more frightening.

Everybody's white. That's the conclusion from a survey of gun magazines I bought the other day. The survey, I admit, was not conducted in accord with the best research practices: I asked the guy at the subway kiosk for as many gun magazines as he could give me before the #4 train pulled in. He handed me three for $17.

All the magazines have ads for, well, guns, and loads of accessories (love the "Sneaky Pete" concealment holster). Naturally, they have stories on guns -- whether "intimidating, big-muzzle looks" or a "Tank-tough Recon Tactical with added strength and reliability for patrol." In addition, there are features on gun life, such as columns in Guns Magazine called "Campfire Tales" and "Odd Angry Shot."

There are pictures of guys with guns, gals with guns, animals with guns, ammo with guns and guns with guns. Curiously absent are pictures of black people with guns, brown people with guns or Asian people with guns. The good guys are white. The bad guys are white. In the Gunworld depicted in these pages, pretty much everyone is white.

 Um, OK.  I guess I could say the same thing about magazines on log cabin homes, woodworking, Irish poetry, quilting, or the wines of France.  So what?  And that about sums up the only logical response to much of the drivel that Al Hunt's minions spew at Bloomberg News's relatively new social commentary apparatus...so what.

Shocker: Bloomberg Distorts Election Non-Issue Issue

This headline annoys the crap out of me. No surprise it comes from Al Hunt & Co. at Bloomberg News, which is the new JournoList focused on re-electing Barack Obama.

Romney Gets Break for Taxes Less Wage-Earner

Romney does NOT get a "tax break." He pays the statutory (meaning passed by Congress) tax rate on investment income. Since he has no job currently, he does not earn any meaningful amount in wages, on which he would pay the statutory tax rate on wages. The man is living off of the investments he has accumulated over a lifetime of working, which is what we all do whether it is from the family home or other properties or stock or bonds. He is, in other words, doing nothing different from what most all retired people do. Furthermore, the taxation of investment income versus the taxation of wage income is different for a number of reasons grounded in sound economic logic. You may disagree for whatever reason - philosophical, economic or otherwise - but your beef is not with Mitt Romney, it is with the law and your elected representatives that passed and maintain current taxation policy.

This is the same dumb argument that Warren Buffett makes - he too makes most of his money from investments and he laments the fairness of his taxation rate versus that of his secretary. He never says why his rate is lower and he never makes a forceful argument against the well-established policy of taxing investment income differently from wage income. If you don't like the situation, fine, make a rational argument for equalizing the two, but don't lie and distort about who is getting breaks and all that garbage.

UPDATE: This is all to say nothing of the fact that Romney's 15% tax rate is too high, as Jimmy P. rightly points out. And John Cochrane puts a little extra meat on the bone.

Bloomberg News Is the New JournoList, Part IXX

I have long chronicled the raging left-wing bias that pervades everything emanating from Bloomberg News, which is an outcome foreordained by the hiring of Al Hunt many moons ago.

I have since welcomed other bloggers to the party, and I am happy to report that they seem to be taking up the cudgel with alacrity.  I like this tidbit particularly:

Hunt is of course a raving liberal and friend of the Obama administration.

Exactly.

400 Economists (incl. 5 Nobelists) Support Romney's Economic Program

Here (h/t Mark Perry).  I case you were wondering, Krugman is not among the 5 Nobelists.  Check it out, pretty powerful stuff.

We enthusiastically endorse Governor Mitt Romney’s economic plan to create jobs and restore economic growth while returning America to its tradition of economic freedom. The plan is based on proven principles: a more contained and less intrusive federal government, a greater reliance on the private sector, a broad expansion of opportunity without government favors for special interests, and respect for the rule of law including the decision-making authority of states and localities.
Applying these principles, Governor Romney would:

• Reduce marginal tax rates on business and wage incomes and broaden the tax base to increase investment, jobs, and living standards.
• End the exploding federal debt by controlling the growth of spending so federal spending does not exceed 20 percent of the economy.
• Restructure regulation to end “too big to fail,” improve credit availability to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and increase regulatory accountability, and ensure that all regulations pass rigorous benefit-cost tests.
• Improve our Social Security and Medicare programs by reducing their growth to sustainable levels, ensuring their viability over the long term, and protecting those in or near retirement.
• Reform our healthcare system to harness market forces and thereby reduce costs and increase quality, empowering patients and doctors, rather than the federal bureaucracy.
• Promote energy policies that increase domestic production, enlarge the use of all western hemisphere resources, encourage the use of new technologies, end wasteful subsidies, and rely more on market forces and less on government planners.

In stark contrast, President Obama has failed to advance policies that promote economic and job growth, focusing instead on increasing the size and scope of the federal government, which increases the debt, requires large tax increases, and burdens business with many new financial and health care regulations. The result is an anemic economic recovery and high unemployment. His future plans are to double down on the failed policies, which will only prolong slow growth and high unemployment.
President Obama has:

• Relied on short-term “stimulus” programs, which provided little sustainable lift to the economy, and enacted and proposed significant tax increases for all Americans.
• Offered no plan to reduce federal spending and stop the growth of the debt-to-GDP ratio.
• Failed to propose Social Security reform and offered a Medicare proposal that relies on a panel of bureaucrats to set prices, quantities, and qualities of healthcare services.
• Favored a large expansion of economic regulation across many sectors, with little regard for proper cost-benefit analysis and with a disturbing degree of favoritism toward special interests.
• Enacted health care legislation that centralizes health care decisions and increases the power of the federal bureaucracy to impose one-size-fits-all solutions on patients and doctors, and creates greater incentives for waste.
• Favored expansion of one-size-fits-all federal rulemaking, with an erosion of the ability of state and local governments to make decisions appropriate for their particular circumstances.

In sum, Governor Romney’s economic plan is far superior for creating economic growth and jobs than the actions and interventions President Obama has taken or plans to take in the future. This November, voters will make a fundamental choice between differing visions of America’s economic future.

And yet MSM doofi like Ezra Journolist Klein will still publish things like "Romney vs. the Economists".  Although I warn you not to go to Klein's Wonkblog, the obsessing over Paul Ryan is a bit nauseating.  Paul Ryan appears to be to Ezra Klein as Sarah/Trig Palin was to Andrew Sullivan.

Galston Scratches His Deep, Pondering, Earnest Brow in Wonder Why There Aren't More Jobs

It's been several months now since William Galston has taken the reins as The Wednesday Token Liberal Columnist at the WSJ (the seat previously occupied by Al Hunt, before he went on to turn Bloomberg News into a Journolist Hackfest, and Thomas Frank before he faded into obscurity).

Galston started off innocuously before getting the confidence to really let fly some lefty intellectual bile.  Here is it worth noting that Galston went after economist Tyler Cowen (inexplicably and unfairly, IMO) and Cowen was recently attacked in his classroom with pepper spray...all I have to say is "Stop Inciting the Hate, Mr. Galston!"

After that parlay, Galston has mostly gone back to anodyne mush, but it is time for another deeper look into how it is going, and yesterday's column is a good opportunity because it is typical of his approach.  The quick and dirty summary is this - corporations are making great profits but not hiring people, which seems dreadful to Galston.  Galston tosses out the stats, laments it all, and (in predictable lefty formulaic order) calls for a "conversation."  (I know what you are thinking, 'Awesome, another one of those productive, open, wide-ranging, tolerant and good faith conversations with lefties!!')

That's it.  There is truly nothing remarkable in this column, but it does showcase a classic Galston aspect - it goes the whole length without mentioning the single most relevant factor to his topic.  As I was reading through, I kept asking myself, 'When is he gonna mention Obamacare?'  Alas, he mentions it once, at the end, only to say that it is a preoccupation of Republicans' tactical approach.  Republicans have been saying that ObamaCare is a job killer for ages now.  The jobs situation is terrible, Galston's very lament.  Wouldn't that be a reasonable tidbit to include in his column, and/or  subject matter for this earnest 'conversation' he yearns for?  If I told you X is going to happen because of Y, and it then X happens and you really don't like X, shouldn't we discuss Y?

For Galston and his ilk, the answer is "Nope."  At least with Galston, it's "Nope, not right now, I am too busy thinking REALLY hard."  With others on the left, it's more like "Nope, the debate is over."

UPDATE:  Oh, I totally forgot to mention that I predicted and explained (many times) exactly the situation Galston decries a loooonnngggggggggg time ago.  But keep scratching that brow Bill...

Is the MSM Still Flogging "Unexpectedly"? Really?

It's usually Al Hunt's JournoList hack-shop  aka Bloomberg News with this, but today CNBC is getting in on the "unexpectedly" action.

Yes, nearly six years into the dismal and embarrassing economic policy morass of the Obama administration and crappy economic data is still unexpected.

An Old Friend Makes It Big!!!

Check it out! Our old friend Ryan Donmoyer, the clueless-yet-arrogant Al Hunt minion, has made a cameo in Journolistgate. (I'm not going to call it a scandal, is it really a scandal to undercover yet more evidence that the media is a teeming hive of liberal deceitfulness?). He seems to think that a bunch of senior citizens who've read alot of David McCullough are akin to Nazi brownshirts. Did I say clueless and arrogant? (I bet he sees in Sarah Palin's bus tour similarities to Soviet tanks rolling into the capitals of Eastern Europe! Yes the dark night of fascism is always hoving over America in the form of ... those damned people...with their talk of The Constitution!)

Anyway, I am consoled by the knowledge that Mr. Donmoyer is almost completely irrelevant - a) he works at Bloomberg News, which is known by most of its readers as Al Hunt's hive of ridiculous NY Times wannabes (just a teensy sampling here), b) Mr. Donmoyer himself is a minor and anonymous cog on that ship...to the small extent that Bloomberg readers recognize or even seek out the scribblings of a particular writer, it is safe to say that Mr Donmoyer is not one of them. David Leonhardt he is not.

UPDATE: Little Ryan hits the jackpot with a mention by a blogger who probably has more loyal readers than all of Bloomberg News, although the mention is not a very flattering one. Still, publicity is publicity!

UPPDATE: Wow, Ryan D. was all over this Journolist deal...opining that choosing not to have an abortion is...heartwarming. Truly. I've encountered this weird reaction before, many if not all of my liberal New York friends think that having Trig was prima facie evidence of Sarah Palin's crackpottery, nuttiness and all around loathesomeness. "I guess they actually have those kind of babies out there. Ick!" After all, in NYC you're only likely to have one or two kids, so it just wouldn't do to not have a pristinely healthy child.

What DID You Expect Pelosi To Say

Of course she is. "Shut Up!" is the liberal answer to just about everything.

Campus Speech Codes = Hey Anybody Not Towing the Campus Lefty Line, Shut Up
Fairness Doctrine = Hey Talk Radio, Shut Up
McCain-Feingold = Hey Self-Funded Candidates, Shut Up
Disclose Act = Hey Corporations, Shut Up
Suing Arizona = Hey Border States, Shut Up
Gulf Drilling Moratorium = Hey Oil Industry, Shut Up
Journolist Pushes Tagging Barnes, Limbaugh et al. as racists = Hey Obama Opponents, Shut Up
Obama Saying "I Won." = Hey Republicans, Shut Up
"We have to pass this bill to see what's in it." = Hey, You People Interested In Deliberating Over Major Legislation, Shut Up

and now we have Hey Ground Zero Mosque Opponents, Shut Up!
So, what is new and/or shocking about this??

Looking Back in Laughter: In 2010, Al Hunt Is Lovin' Obama's Foreign Policy Team

Hey, I just unearthed this from the NBfPB archives.  What a find.

In 2010, Al Hunt, an in the tank Obama sycophant Journolist if there ever was one, admitted that Obama's economic policy team was performing badly.  But not to worry, his foreign policy team was crackerjack awesome.  That was a perfectly fine-tuned message because as Obama's domestic agenda sputtered and failed the press needed to turn elsewhere to chronicle "wins" and undergird the narrative of competency.  So as Obama turned to foreign policy, the press turned with him.  Well, here we are in 2014 and it is universally understood that the Lightworker's foreign policy lies in tatters.  In fact, it is so disastrous that his undistinguished economic record is starting to look good again by comparison.   That is not a high bar, but it is what it is.

What's my point?  Easy, it is this.  Don't listen to Al Hunt.

Urgent Alert from MSM Central Directorate: More Cowbell

Attention ALL Journolist Authoritative, Non-Biased Professional Journalists at America's Highly-Respected News Organizations:

We need more "rape-culture", "patriarchal oppression", "because vagina" memes STAT.  See here.

Note:  Probably illegitimate due to source (clearly bias, unprofessional, tool of moneyed interests) but NEVER hurts to take precautions.

Over.

Constitution? Didn't Stop Obama, Why Should It Stop Trump...

Team Journolist (aka Bloomberg News):  "The Constitution Won't Stop President Trump"

It didn't stop President Obama, why should we now assume that future POTUSi would go back to the status quo ante?

Conservatives have been warning about the dangerous Constitution-weakening precedents that Obama has unleashed for seven plus years, and suddenly now lefties are all starry-eyed about our founding document?  Whatever comes, you can choke on it Feldman.

Bloomberg News Sausage-Making + A Great Free-Market Healthcare Idea

Bloomberg News has published one of its more atrocious, atrociously biased, articles in quite some time.  I've chronicled how they make the lefty sausage over there at Al Hunt's Haven for "Journolist" Minions.  This one is a classic of the genre.

It is still making my head reel, but it goes something like this.  Steve Scalise, having been shot in a clear political assassination attempt by a crazed left-wing nutjob, is exactly like a poor black man.  Why?  Because poor black men get shot alot (although mostly by gang rivals or other contemporaries within their urban milieu).  That commonality means he shouldn't support the Republican attempts at reforming healthcare because it aims to reduce benefits for pre-existing conditions, one of which is having previously been shot.

All this comes from a report by...wait for it...the Brady Center.  Yes, that long-standing, stalwart, mono-maniacal gun control advocacy organization is opining on healthcare, and Bloomberg News is there to report it.

It's got all the classic elements of lefty sausage manufacture - left-wing advocacy group, current topic needing a boost via some racial angle...oh, and misleading numbers.  For instance, the author says that 34,000 people die from gun shots each year.  Yes, but roughly 20,000 of those gunshots are fired by a finger attached to the body of the person dying...they're suicides, but hey, the larger the numbers in the article the better.

There is so much to pick apart, but perhaps this will be a final thought...a true, free-market healthcare reform will enable insurance companies to market policies tailored to the needs of consumers.  What's to stop, say, Aetna from marketing the "Gangbanger's Medical Plus" policy that covers all post gunshot healthcare?  It'd be a hot seller in Chicago, where gun control has worked so well.

More Media Crap About Hedge Funds

Good God.  The MSM's ongoing antipathy towards hedge funds is ... ongoing.

Every few months or so, the highly underpaid geniuses in the media business feel the need to tell you that the people in the hedge fund business are highly overpaid mediocrities.  Reductive Freudian penis imagery is quite useful in this regard.

OK, we get it.  A predominantly white-male group is scamming the public and garnering unto themselves undue influence and power that is both unearned and pernicious.

(Incidentally, I could say the same about the media.  It's mostly a bunch of weaselly white guys too.  They talk a big game about 'speaking truth to power' yadayadayada, but it's mostly a sham, they're just propaganda artists with bylines.  Same dichotomy - big honkin' Johnson in terms of their view of themselves versus flaccid Irishness in reality...Ezra Klein, I talking about YOU!)

Anyway, it never stops.  Here is the latest from The Journolist Crew at Bloomberg View.  There are all the usual things wrong with this as the umpteen previous version of this EXACT SAME article, which have been addressed over and over.  But the fatal flaw is right there, blaring in the title.

"Hedge Funds Won't Make You Rich"

I'm not sure who makes that claim.  In fact, when I started my hedge fund many years ago, my principal financial backer took me aside and gave me, in his words, the one piece of advice I'd need to run my hedge fund.  "Remember," he said, "you are not in the get rich business, you are in the stay rich business."  In other words, the type of clients I'd have were more interested in preservation of capital than return on capital. There may be some that quibble, but in over a decade I have found that those with staying power and a rock-solid reputation in this industry hue to that view of their role.  I have NEVER heard of a hedge fund marketing pitch by anyone other than a scamming scheister that says, "you will get rich investing in my fund."  So, we are talking about a straw man here.

Then there is the classic lefty argument for things that they don't like and can't come to terms with - the players don't understand their own interests.  This is the Thomas Frank/What's Wrong with Kansas argument.  We have to ignore the fact that people choose over and over again a certain alternative, because, well, they're stupid.  Even though ALOT of very rich and putatively savvy people and institutions invest alot of money in hedge funds, they clearly don't understand what is in their best interests and must be wrong.  Ugh.  Just Ugh.

UPDATE:  Here is an intelligent rebuttal by Matt Levine of Bloomberg News that says many of the same things that I said, citing a recent Citibank survey of the hedge fund industry.

WSJ Op-Ed Page Revives Liberal Wednesday

For the longest time, Wednesday used to be Token Liberal Day on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.  The barely palatable Al Hunt held this post down for years before leaving to build Bloomberg News into the "Journolist" Hackfest that it is today.  Hunt ceded the Wednesday slot to the godawful Thomas Frank, who mercifully didn't last very long.  The slot seemed to go dormant for awhile with Gordon Crovitz filling in with no apparent ideological bent or real purpose.

So today I was surprised to see a new occupant of the Wednesday slot that appears to return the WSJ long tradition of subjecting giving its readers a liberal viewpoint in the middle of the week.  The New Republic's and The Brookings Institution's William A. Galston kicks off his ostensible new role with a fairly anodyne and harmless musing about the plight of the middle class.  The column opens up with what might have been a howler if it was not passed over so quickly and ends with a point worthy of much discussion that Galston fails to give it, and in between we get alot of economist-type on-the-one-hand-while-on-the-other-hand musing about the plight of the middle class.

The not quite howler is this.

President Obama is working hard to refocus attention on the middle class, and rightly so.

You will have a hard time convincing me that Obama is working hard on anything except maybe getting more Democrats elected in 2014 by poisoning the well of electoral politics with the most despicable brand of scorched Earth politics.  It is amazing to me that liberals still harbor the fantasy that Obama is hunkered down thinking of ways to advance policies that help people, when what he is doing is mostly just occupying the office and trying to make whatever part of government he can conform to hoary faculty lounge wet dreams.

Then we get four full columns of middle class yadayadayada, and then Galston ends with this.

If we cannot restore a vigorously growing economy whose fruits are widely shared, the struggles of the middle class will persist, and our democratic distemper will deepen.

In this little nugget is a truth that needs to be talked about as liberals are desperately purveying gibberish regarding income inequality.  What Galston's concluding sentence hints at is that income inequality is a political problem, it is not an economic problem.  Too large and too persistent gaps between rich and poor can destabilize society politically, but income inequality is not a brake on economic activity as liberals on down the line, including the President keep telling us.  There is no accepted economic theory that states that reducing income inequality spurs economic well-being.  A relatively free economy characterized by innovation grows and results in income mobility and reduces income inequality.  It is not the other way around.  If income inequality is your beef, then you should be advocating all manner of growth policies focused on experimentation, innovation, and deregulation rather than the typical liberal playbook of unionism, regulation and crony-laden central planning.  But I digress.

Galston's first effort in the revered Wednesday Token Liberal seat...?  Safe, uninspiring, competent.

Gotta Be Coming...Bloomberg News Is Easy Touch for Media Matters

The Daily Caller says they have alot more on Media Matters jamming propaganda into the MSM. Here is a pretty easy speculation - they will finger several names at the Obama Re-election Satellite Office otherwise known as Bloomberg News (the King Daddy of "Unexpectedly"!). After all, we know Ryan Donmoyer was a proud member of JournoList and, of course, propaganda guru in chief Ezra Klein is now at...wait for it...Bloomberg News. Wait for it.