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Helen Thomas Blasts White House Control Of Press

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this
presidency.”

-U.S. President Barack Obama, January 21, 2009, upon signing executive orders relating to ethics guidelines for staff members of his administration

It appears the Obama administration is having a hard time convincing legendary journalist and prominent symbol of the liberal media Helen Thomas, who has been a correspondent for 57 years and has covered every president since JFK, that this is indeed the case these days.

From MyFOX Dallas/Fort Worth yesterday:

During the daily press briefing on Wednesday, some reporters asked whether the White House staged questions at President Obama’s Wednesday Town Hall meeting on health care.

On its Web site, the White House had asked Americans to submit questions to the president via social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The White House says hundreds of entries were received.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the White House would “screen” submissions — and pick some for the president to answer at his town hall in Virginia. But at least two reporters told Gibbs this amounted to choosing questions, which would just make Obama look good.

“This is an open forum for the public to ask question,” said Chip Reid of CBS News. “But it’s not really open?”

“Based on what?” responded Gibbs.

“Based on the information … on how the audience and the questions are being selected,” said Reid.

“How about this: I promise we will interrupt the AP’s tradition of asking the first question. I’ll let you ask me a question tomorrow on whether you thought the questions at the town hall meeting that the President conducted at Annandale….”

“That’s not his point,” interrupted Helen Thomas, correspondent for Hearst Newspapers. “That’s, that’s not his point. His point is the control from here. We have never had that in the White House. I’m amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency and control.

“You have left open the suggestion that you are pumping the answers,” Thomas continued. “It’s shocking. It’s really shocking.”

“Let’s have this discussion at the conclusion of the town hall meeting,” Gibbs said.

“No, no, no. We are having it now.” claimed Thomas. “It’s a pattern. It’s a pattern. It isn’t the question. It’s a pattern of controlling the press.”

CNS News’ Fred Lucas and Penny Starr added the following:

Following a testy exchange during Wednesday’s briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try.”

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

What’s next? A fake press conference?

Thomas/White House Exchange
MyFOX Dallas/Fort Worth Video Link

Sources:

“Helen Thomas, Reporter Grill Gibbs”
MyFOX Dallas/Fort Worth, July 2, 2009

“Helen Thomas: Not Even Nixon Tried to Control the Media Like Obama”
Fred Lucas, Penny Starr
CNSNews.com, July 1, 2009

Bank Failures Surpass 50 For The Year

Bad week for bank failures, particularly here in the “Land of Lincoln.” From MarketWatch’s Alistair Barr and John Letzing last night:

Seven banks were closed by regulators on Thursday, including six in Illinois, bringing the total for 2009 to 52 as the U.S. banking system remains under pressure from rising unemployment and record foreclosures.

The John Warner Bank, in Clinton, Ill., was closed by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver. The FDIC then sold the bank’s deposits and most of its assets to State Bank of Lincoln, in Lincoln, Ill.

The same Illinois regulator also shut the First State Bank of Winchester, in Winchester, Ill., and appointed the FDIC receiver. The federal agency said it then sold the bank’s deposits and most of its assets to the First National Bank of Beardstown, in Beardstown, Ill.

Rock River Bank, in Oregon, Ill., was also closed and the FDIC appointed receiver. The regulator sold the bank’s deposits and most of its assets to the Harvard State Bank, in Harvard, Ill.

Elizabeth, Ill.-based Elizabeth State Bank was also later closed, with Galena, Ill.-based Galena State Bank and Trust assuming the failed bank’s deposits, the FDIC said. Rounding out the list of Illinois bank failures on Thursday were Danville-based First National Bank, and Worth-based Founders Bank.

The lone bank failure for the day not located in Illinois was Dallas-based Millennium State Bank, the federal regulator said. Irving, Tex.-based State Bank of Texas has agreed to assume the failed bank’s deposits…

On Thursday, the FDIC estimated that the seven bank failures will cost its deposit-insurance fund a total of roughly $314.3 million.

Source:

“Seven banks bring 2009 U.S. failures total to 52”
Alistair Barr, John Letzing
MarketWatch, July 2, 2009

CNBC Broadcast: Financial Markets Manipulated By Washington?

(Hat tip, Signs Of The Times):

From CNBC feed out of Chicago this past Monday (2 minutes in):

SecretsOfTraders.com’s Larry Levin: This market continues to be propped-up by government intervention, and manipulation, and, unfortunately, as that continues to happen, I think this market can go higher. The government’s been doing a good job of keeping it that way no matter what the real underlying current is, unfortunately…

You’re gonna have to… right on Obama and his staff as basically trying to prop this market up on a daily basis. They’re doing a good job…

But it really is a situation where, every single day, we have some kind of backstop from the government. I mean, these markets are not free markets anymore. You know, this whole year has been absolutely ridiculous…

CNBC’s Rick Santelli: Well, I think Larry’s doing a darn good job. I tend to agree with most of what he’s saying…

A Question Of Journalistic Integrity

“There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians – they stay bought.”

-Bill Moyers, American journalist, public commentator, and former White House Press Secretary in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration. 1934- )

Say it ain’t so, WaPo!

From Mike Allen and Michael Calderone of the political news site POLITICO this morning:

Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive “salon” at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

With the Post newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Weymouth said in an email to the staff that “a flier went out that was prepared by the Marketing department and was never vetted by me or by the newsroom. Had it been, the flier would have been immediately killed, because it completely misrepresented what we were trying to do.”

Weymouth said the paper had planned a series of dinners with participation from the newsroom “but with parameters such that we did not in any way compromise our integrity. Sponsorship of events, like advertising in the newspaper, must be at arm’s length and cannot imply control over the content or access to our journalists. At this juncture, we will not be holding the planned July dinner and we will not hold salon dinners involving the newsroom…”

$250,000? I wonder how much a trip to the salon’s VIP Room would have cost?

Source:

“WaPo cancels lobbyist event amid uproar”
Mike Allen, Michael Calderone
POLITICO, July 2, 2009

Luck Be A Lady In This Labor Market?

Back on May 22, I wrote the following:

America’s labor force has been hit hard by this recession. Especially the guys. From Reuters’ Ed Stoddard earlier in the week:

One statistic that stands out in America’s recession-stung economy is the unemployment rate for adult men: in April for the second month in a row it surged ahead of the national average to 9.4 percent versus 8.9 percent for all workers. The jobless rate for adult women was 7.1 percent.

The latest numbers don’t show much improvement in the unemployment rate gap between men and women. From MarketWatch’s Andrea Coombes today:

The current recession is hitting workers in just about every industry, but men are taking a much bigger hit than women.

The 2.3 percentage-point gap between men’s June unemployment rate of 10.6% and women’s 8.3% rate is near the highest it’s ever been since records started being kept in 1948. The gap first hit 2 percentage points in March this year and the 2.5 percentage-point gap in May was the highest ever.

The overall unemployment rate rose to 9.5% in June, from 9.4% in May. The economy lost a higher-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June.

“The gap between female and male unemployment has never been as large as it is now,” said Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist with Moody’s Economy.com.

It’s not hard to see why. Two male-dominated industries — construction and manufacturing — account for about half of the some 6 million jobs lost since the recession started in December 2007 and both industries started shedding jobs before that.

“Every industry is contracting, but these industries have taken the brunt,” Koropeckyj said. Given that men account for 87% of workers in manufacturing and 71% in construction, it’s not surprising that men’s unemployment rate is rocketing past women’s rate.

The only two private-sector industries to show a net increase in jobs from the start of the recession through May are health care and education — and women workers are highly concentrated in both.

Health care logged a net gain of about 542,000 jobs from December 2007 through May, and private education showed a net gain of about 102,000 jobs in that period.

Eighty-one percent of health-care workers are women, and 61% of workers in private education are women, Koropeckyj said. Also, government has shown a net job gain of 259,000 in that period, and 57% of government workers are women.

Frank Sinatra, “Luck Be A Lady” (1966)
YouTube Video Link

Source:

“Recession hits men harder”
Andrea Coombes
MarketWatch, July 2, 2009

Obamageddon 2012

“In 2012 as we push forward, it IS Obamageddon. He’s bankrupting the nation, with these rescue plans, these buyout schemes, cap-and-trade, paying cash for clunkers, you name it…”

-Gerald Celente, trend strategist and founder of the Trends Research Institute, on the FOX Business Network’s “Happy Hour” program last Friday.

“Gerald Celente Obamageddon 2012”
YouTube Video Link

So Long, Bald Eagle

Time to make sure the kids can’t read the screen.

One of Boom2Bust’s regular readers e-mailed the following to me.

Somewhat raunchy… yet eerily appropriate.

Barney Frank: Lower Lending Standards For Condo Buyers?

“There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you”

-Will Rogers (American entertainer. 1879-1935)

Some people never learn. From the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday:

Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “roll the dice” in the name of affordable housing. That didn’t turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity — with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers.

You read that right. After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development.

Fannie and Freddie have restricted loans to condo buyers in these situations because they represent a red flag that the developments — many of which were planned and built at the height of the housing bubble — may face financial trouble down the road. But never mind all that. Messrs. Frank and Weiner think, in all their wisdom and years of experience underwriting mortgages, that the new rules “may be too onerous.”

Rep. Barney Frank, June 27, 2005: No Housing Bubble
YouTube Video Link

Source:

“Barney the Underwriter”
Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2009

Federal Bailout Application

Almost funny… if it didn’t hit so close to home.

From Bruce Feirstein at VanityFair.com (click on image).

CBO Warns U.S. Long-Term Fiscal Health In Danger

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has come out with a new report warning that the nation’s long-term financial health is in jeopardy. From the Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery this morning:

The nation’s long-term budget outlook has darkened considerably over the past six months, and President Obama’s plan to extend an array of tax cuts and other policies adopted during the Bush administration has the potential to “create an explosive fiscal situation,” congressional budget analysts reported yesterday.

In a new report, the Congressional Budget Office found that extending the Bush administration tax cuts, reining in the alternative minimum tax and canceling a scheduled reduction in payments to Medicare doctors would dramatically slash tax collections at a time when federal spending would be “sharply rising.” The resulting budget gap would drive the nation’s debt over 100 percent of gross domestic product by 2023, the report says, and past 200 percent of GDP by the late 2030s.

Obama has not proposed to extend all of the Bush tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire in December 2010. But he would keep all cuts benefiting the middle class — a substantial portion of the total — and has advocated additional borrowing to cover the costs of that and other policy changes analyzed by the CBO…

Democratic lawmakers generally agree, and the budget resolution they adopted earlier this year assumes that many of the Bush tax cuts will be extended and future deficits will rise. Yesterday’s CBO report highlights the cost of that trade-off.

Montgomery pointed out that even if the extra funds were collected, the situation might be little improved. She wrote:

The news is not particularly good even if the government were to collect the extra money, primarily because of the rapidly rising cost of Social Security and federal health programs for the elderly and the poor. According to the CBO, the annual gap between spending and revenue would briefly drop below 2 percent of GDP in the next decade before rising to 5.6 percent in 2035, 8.3 percent in 2050, and nearly 18 percent in 2080. But the outlook is much worse if the tax cuts and other policies are extended, the CBO found: Annual deficits would never drop below 4 percent of GDP; they would approach 15 percent by 2035 and surpass 42 percent by 2080.

Already heavily in debt, the nation would be forced to borrow ever more massive sums to keep the government afloat, the CBO warns, with the national debt nearly 200 percent of the overall economy by 2035.

Source:

“CBO Paints Dire Portrait of Long-Term Revenue, Spending”
Lori Montgomery
Washington Post, June 26, 2009

Obama’s Doctor Questions Effectiveness Of ObamaCare

While I was in the Burlington, Wisconsin, area a few weeks ago, I brought my dad into town to get a haircut. At the shop, we struck up a conversation with the barber/hair stylist, who shared with us a funny story about a recent telephone marketing call. She received a phone call inquiring about her health insurance. The barber/stylist told the person on the other end of the line that she wasn’t interested as she was waiting for the “Obama plan” to take effect. Caught off guard, the telemarketer re-grouped and explained that “ObamaCare” wasn’t a sure thing, and even if it did happen, would take time to implement. The shop owner repeated that she intended to wait for the Obama plan, at which point the “courtesy” caller gave up.

While our amusing friend was just messing with the telemarketer in this case, I wonder how many others are placing their faith in ObamaCare to solve theirs, and the nation’s, health care woes? Lots of people are asking questions about the proposed overhaul. Including the President’s former doctor. From Forbes’ David Whelan on June 19:

David Scheiner, an internist based in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, has a diverse practice of lower-income adults from the nearby housing projects mixed with famous patients like U.S. Sen. Carol Mosely Braun, the late writer Studs Terkel and, most notably, President Barack Obama.

Scheiner, 71, was Obama’s doctor from 1987 until he entered the White House; he vouched for the then-candidate’s “excellent health” in a letter last year. He’s still an enthusiastic Obama supporter, but he worries about whether the health care legislation currently making its way through Congress will actually do any good, particularly for doctors like himself who practice general medicine. “I’m not sure he really understands what we face in primary care,” Scheiner says.

Scheiner takes a few other shots too. Looking at Obama’s team of health advisors, Scheiner doesn’t see anyone who’s actually in the trenches.

“I have a suspicion they pick people from the top echelon of medicine, people who write about it but haven’t been struggling in it,” he says.

Scheiner is critical of Obama’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary–Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who used to work as the chief lobbyist for her state’s trial lawyers association.

“He doesn’t see all the pain, it’s so tragic out here,” he says. “Obama’s wonderful, but on this one I’m not sure if he’s getting the right input.”

How very reassuring…

Source:

“Obama’s Doctor Knocks ObamaCare”
David Whelan
Forbes, June 19, 2009

World’s Highest-Paid Investment Adviser Suspects Coming Bank Holiday

Yesterday, MarketWatch’s Peter Brimelow talked about the latest from Harry Schultz, the highest paid investment consultant in the world and publisher of the International Harry Schultz Letter.

What Brimelow wrote was, well, quite disturbing.

From the piece:

In its current issue, HSL reports rumors that “Some U.S. embassies worldwide are being advised to purchase massive amounts of local currencies; enough to last them a year. Some embassies are being sent enormous amounts of U.S. cash to purchase currencies from those governments, quietly. But not pound sterling. Inside the State Dept., there is a sense of sadness and foreboding that ’something’ is about to happen … within 180 days, but could be 120-150 days.”

Yes, yes, it’s paranoid. But paranoids have enemies — and the Crash of 2008 really did happen.

HSL’s suspicion: “Another FDR-style ‘bank holiday’ of indefinite length, perhaps soon, to let the insiders sort out the bank mess, which (despite their rosy propaganda campaign) is getting more out of their control every day. Insiders want to impose new bank rules. Widespread nationalization could result, already underway. It could also lead to a formal U.S. dollar devaluation, as FDR did by revaluing gold (and then confiscating it).”

Gulp.

Brimelow noted that Schultz’s investment letter was up 81.7% year-to-date through May, compared to 4.1% for the dividend-reinvested Wilshire 5000 Total Stock Market Index.

Source:

“Latest Schultz Shock: a ‘bank holiday’”
Peter Brimelow
MarketWatch, June 24, 2009

Bike-Riding Bailout Protestor Killed In Illinois

From the Associated Press this past Tuesday:

A Chula Vista man riding his bicycle across the country to protest government bailouts has been struck and killed by a suspected drunken driver in Illinois.

Sixty-five-year-old Jim Gafney left San Diego County on April 27 and had completed about 2,000 miles of his 3,000-mile ride he called his “Mad As Hell Bike Ride Across U.S.”

The San Diego Union-Tribune says Gafney had become fed up with the bailouts and was worried about how it would affect future generations.

Illinois State Police Master Sgt. Chris Trame says Gafney was on U.S. Route 50 about 60 miles east of St. Louis just before 1 a.m. Sunday when he was struck from behind by a Nissan Altima driven by a 27-year-old man.

The driver was arrested.

Jim Gafney’s Last Video Diary Entry
YouTube Video Link

Source:

“Protesting bicyclist killed on cross-country ride”
Associated Press, June 23, 2009

Quote For The Week

Marc Faber, managing director of Marc Faber Ltd. and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, appeared on the Alex Jones Show this past Tuesday. Dr. Faber, also known as “Dr. Doom” by the press, is famous for advising his clients to get out of the U.S. stock market one week before the October 1987 crash and for predicting the current financial crisis. The Swiss-born investment adviser told Jones and his listeners:

Basically, we had two systems until the end of the 1970s in the world. Essentially, free market capitalism— the market economy— and the planning economy. And, as you know, under communism and socialism, central planners totally failed with their policies to create sustainable economic growth. And if you traveled to Russia in 1980 or to China in 1980, these countries were really impoverished. And, the U.S., in particular, today is moving towards an interventionist policy of the government moving into the economy and trying to fix the economy left, right, and center. In the extreme case, you would go essentially to the planning economy. But it’s not going to happen right away. But, basically, the more the government has an influence in the economy, and intervenes in the economy, the current crisis is not the failure of free markets, it’s the failure of government intervention. One of the big interventions was obviously Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which essentially had cheaper access to funds and the banking system. These were the big bankruptcies in America, in terms of size, and also other regulatory— the intervention into the money market and the supplies of money by the Federal Reserve post 2001, also, as I had just mentioned, created a problem. It’s not that the free market had failed, it’s the interventions by the government that failed. And now, these failed policies are even enlarged, and that is where I have a problem with the current economic policy makers…

So, I think we will have high inflation, and at the same time, I think what we will eventually have, is some kind of social unrest, because I can’t believe that people will be fooled forever, by what you call crony capitalism…

It can go on for quite some time, and make things much worse. But, my view would be that within the next 5 to 10 years, when the public realizes that the economy does not improve, and possibly, in my opinion, actually deteriorate, and be faced with higher taxes, which may not be obvious but they will happen because of the large deficits, then at that stage I think there will be a social revolution, or some kind of social revolution, or the next thing the government will do to distract, or distract the attention of the people from bad economic conditions, they’ll start a war somewhere…