Stimulus repudiated

(Updated August 6, '10.)

America had problems, but too little federal spending was not one of them. President Bush spent too much; President Obama is spending much, much more. Obama and his Congress are fixing problems America doesn't have with solutions America can't afford. And it all started with the $787 billion stimulus -- since revised upward to $862 billion.

Obama's stimulus, by his own measures, has failed. Obama promised his stimulus would "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs over the next two years" -- "90 percent...in the private sector"; it's been nearly a year and a half already, and in that time the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net. Obama's advisers projected that unemployment wouldn't hit 8 percent if Obama got his stimulus; Obama got his stimulus, and unemployment went over 10 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Obama promised his stimulus would "immediately creat[e] jobs"; 16 months later, in June alone, 652,000 Americans despaired even of looking for work, which for purposes of government statistics wipes them from the official labour force and conveniently lowers the top-line unemployment rate.
　
The stimulus was sold as the greatest improvement in America's roads since Eisenhower built the Interstate system, but spending for roads and bridges came to just 3 percent of the final bill.　

Forty-three percent of the bill remains unspent nearly a year and a half after it was passed -- $370 billion as of late-July -- and what is the use of a "stimulus" for "immediately creating jobs" if 43 percent of it is still on the shelf after 17 months?

The bill became too much a cheque-book for the preoccupations of the Democratic Party, and bonus spending on institutions favoured of the Democratic Party, from $39.5 billion for public schools, to $2.4 billion for something called "carbon-capture demonstration projects," to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nowhere in the bill was there any bonus spending for some of the most "shovel-ready" of government work in war-time -- defence projects -- and in fact the Obama administration later announced cuts to missile defence and production of the world-beating F-22 stealth fighter, national defence being the solitary area of government spending which Democrats are capable of cutting, never mind that there's a war on.

The bill cost $205 billion more than President Bush spent on the Iraq War in six years.

The bill ran to 1,073 pages, and neither the Congressmen and Senators who passed it nor the president who signed it into law bothered to read the thing.

The usual legislative process was suspended, committee hearings were bypassed, and the Republican minority was shut out. ("I won," President Obama explained. "We won the election. We wrote the bill," House Speaker Pelosi elaborated.)

The bill got exactly 3 of 217 Republican votes in both houses of Congress -- one of which three turned Democrat not long after -- and the final votes were reported by the Associated Press in this newspaper as "a major victory for President Obama."

And that was the least of the press abuses where the stimulus was concerned. The Canadian Press in this newspaper reported in March of last year that if Obama's economics are socialist then "it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks." The CP report didn't cite any of those "countless" polls, and at least three major national polls in the days and weeks previous were pointing in quite the opposite direction.

The Rasmussen poll found "just 27 percent of voters nationwide favour passage of a second economic stimulus." The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 61 percent were more concerned the government would spend too much than too little in aid of stimulating the economy -- even if spending less would mean a longer recession. And the Gallup/USA Today poll found all of 14 percent saying it would have been better to spend more on the stimulus.

And never mind any "additional stimulus spending": it was only 44 percent who were calling the first stimulus a "good idea" in the Journal/NBC poll even when the bill was passed in February of '09. Five months later, that number was down to 34. And a year after passage, the New York Times/CBS News poll could find only 6 percent to say the stimulus had actually created jobs.

There was ample warning it wouldn't work. Dominic Lawson in the London Times had it right even before the stimulus was law. "Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus."

And it turned out Obama's crudified Keynesianism was his Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C for the American and global economies. So far from discreetly retiring the stimulus and taking a new direction, Obama mystifyingly claimed "every economist" had concluded the stimulus "did its job," proclaimed this "Recovery Summer," called for $266 billion more stimulus spending, pushed the $26 billion "state aid" bill to supplement the stimulus, and lectured the G-20 nations on following his example and spending their way to prosperity with bottomless boondoggles.　

The best thing at this point would be to cancel as much as is workable of the unspent provisions of the stimulus, and cut the losses. But Obama's Congress has refused to redirect even a fraction of the stimulus allocations to cover an unfunded unemployment benefits extension, so any change of course is going to take a very different government in Washington.

The stimulus was an act of faith in government, and in Barack Obama, and in the end its greatest effect has been on the national debt.

Less a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one

President Obama and his Democratic Congress have made history, only not the kind they have in mind. They have become the only president and Congress to enact a leviathan social program altering the life of every American -- against the wishes of those American people, over the threatened opposition of three-fourths of the state legislatures, with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition, and by arcane parliamentary maneuver.
　
When it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform."
　
A month after the Massachusetts comeuppance, the CNN poll found just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether. And yet within a month of that, House Democrats voted to make the 2,700-page Senate bill the law of the land, and passed a "reconciliation" bill which actually builds on the Senate monstrosity and annexes the entirety of the student loan system to the federal government while they're at it.
　
Three days before the House vote, Obama's job approval rating went net negative in the Gallup poll for the first time, and Congress' approval hit 16 percent, just two points up from the lowest recorded in 36 years of Gallup polling on the question. The day before the vote, the Rasmussen poll of likely voters put Obama's job approval rating at 43 percent; it took five years for George W. Bush to fall so low.

By the time the House vote was called, 38 of the 50 state legislatures had indicated an intent to challenge the new law. And on the day of the vote, the only bipartisanship was in opposition to the new law: 34 House Democrats joined every Republican in voting "nay."

That looks less like a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one.
　
The undeniable good that is done by this "reform" could have been written up in a relative few pages and passed with wide margins and popular support the best part of a year ago, and the legitimate, hard-case uninsured could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the 80 percent who call themselves satisfied with their health-care as-is. This "comprehensive health-care reform" is something quite apart from help for folks who've fallen through the cracks and a curbing of the odd insurance industry abuse.
　
Obama's own chief actuary for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."
　
The Congressional Budget Office ruled the Senate bill would drive the cost of health-insurance premiums "10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than...under current law," that it would lead employers to dump 5 million Americans net from their current coverage, and that even a decade after passage, it would leave 16 million Americans uninsured still, plus 8 million uninsured illegals.
　
The new law includes something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy federally-approved, comprehensive health-insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.
　
The new law establishes 159 new bureaucracies of all sorts, and hires 16,500 new IRS agents to police the new regime of taxes, regulations, and mandates.
　
The new law is supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.
　
And nowhere in those thousands of pages is there any attempt at the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health-insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

House Democrats passed the Senate bill only on the understanding that their "reconciliation" bill would then be passed in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold, which is without precedent for legislation of this nature and scale, and which is the sort of thing Obama and his party denounced as affront to American democracy until they came to see it as a neat trick for getting their way.
　
It's not until 2014 and later that the new law goes fully into effect; there will be national elections this November and in November of 2012. By having it all their own way, against the national will and around the legislative rules, Obama and his Congress have only hastened the day when a very different government sits in Washington. The Left in America may never be entrusted with such unchecked power again for a generation.

--A slightly earlier version of this published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau

It's been a while since anybody at Canada's newswire monopoly has tried to call the law down on me, wipe my little website from the internet in whole or part, or otherwise try to stifle some nobody who presumed to call them out on their abuses for once, so I thought I'd update my documentation of the abuses of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (In this installment: "Selectivity and Sarah Palin", "Junk reporting and Tea Parties", "Sneering and Scott Brown", and "Incompetence and the filibuster")

Selectivity and Sarah Palin.
So. The Washington bureau of the Canadian Press can cite American polling after all. In just this past couple weeks it's reported on polls showing the unfitness for office of a conservative Republican, Sarah Palin, and the apparent wild popularity of a liberal Democrat government policy, to allow open homosexuality in the fighting forces. Judging by the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the American people must be repudiating conservatives and champing at the bit for their leftist government to "remake the nation", and this Age of Obama must be going swimmingly.

I almost thought, from the past half year or so, that it might be CP policy to never cite American polls. American polls have been unrelentingly bad news for the president and Congress of the United States, their governing party and nearly everything they hold dear, since sometime in the summer of '09, which might be the sort of thing a person would mention if she were, say, the sole American correspondent for the sole Canadian newswire service. And yet that half-year's worth of dismal news for the actual president and Congress, and their project to "remake the nation", seems scarcely to have made it into the dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (I surveyed some of those poll findings as of August in a Chronicle-Herald Opinions piece that was a better predictor of the following half-year of American politics than anything that appeared in the Canadian Press or the Herald World News section in that time.)

The February 13 dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau was built entirely around a poll: "Poll: Palin not viable 2012 contender." I could have told you as much, without the aid of any poll and long before February of 2010. In fact, I did, here. But if Sarah Palin is a complete no-hoper for president, and considering that she's never held national public office, then how does the Canadian Press Washington bureau justify devoting such an extraordinary, prolific body of reportage to scrutinizing her, even unto the point of abusing its position with an entire report scorning her powerless 18 year-old daughter? (I wrote on that piece here; it ought never have been published in the news sections of the newspapers of Canada, and might even have been grounds for reassignment at a more serious news agency than the Canadian Press under Scott White.)

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 13, 2010: "New polls suggest the majority of Americans -- including conservatives -- have no confidence she's got what it takes to make it to the Oval Office. A Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests only 37 per cent of Americans have a favorable impression of Palin -- an all-time low. Fifty-five per cent view her unfavourably -- an all-time high."

The lowest ever! The highest ever! The chapter-and-verse on the poor Palin numbers went on for several paragraphs. Incidentally, "all-time" may not be the best usage for polling history covering only the 18 months since Sarah Palin has been known beyond Alaska. And a low approval rating will often correspond with a high disapproval rating, so it's not some confluence of especially bad luck that an "all-time low" positive impression would coincide with an "all-time high" unfavorable one, as if those are two completely independent findings. In any case, all the Palin-polling in the world counts for nothing, because Sarah Palin holds no public office, has never held national office, and was never going to be Republican nominee for president anytime soon.

(UPDATE, Feb. 16: Now here's a poll on electability -- not for some office-less punching bag, but the actual, sitting president and Congress of the United States. CNN, February 16: "44 percent of registered voters say Obama deserves re-election, with 52 percent saying the president does not deserve a second term. ... 34 percent feel that current federal lawmakers deserve re-election. ... That's the lowest number ever recorded for that question in a CNN survey. ... 51 percent feel their member of Congress should be re-elected -- also an all-time low in CNN polling." And that usage of "all-time low" refers to a period of longer than 18 months, including the last two midterm election years when control of both houses of Congress changed hands. But that's not the sort of thing that qualifies for news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which reported in January that Diane Sawyer's questioning Obama on the prospect of a one-term presidency "seems a premature topic of conversation".)


The Canadian Press Washington bureau had only just invoked a Gallup poll a week and a half earlier, in aid of a report claiming, "U.S. military wants to lift ban on gay serving openly."

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 3, 2010: "A Gallup poll taken last spring suggest the vast majority of Americans are opposed to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even conservatives and weekly church-goers."

Now, that same Gallup poll in July of '09 found that Obama's job approval rating ranked "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures," and he's been stuck at or near the bottom in the Gallup poll archives for the most part since. Considering that the Canadian Press Washington bureau could barely type "Bush" without gratuitously appending "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" (as it happens, Bush worked out to be 7th in overall job approval of the 11 completed presidencies so far in the the Gallup poll), anyone might have thought that half a year's worth of bottom-of-the-heap presidential polling would rate a mention at the Canadian Press Washington bureau. But no. Indeed, when the CP Washington bureau brought up the subject of Obama's polls in September, it was to report -- twice in the same article -- that he was still a hit in Canada, without a hint of how he was faring in the one country where a president's public approval actually counts for anything.

But the Canadian Press Washington bureau got around to that. As in a passing reference, developed no further, to Obama's "sagging approval ratings" -- in late January, after Obama's gal had already lost "Ted Kennedy's seat" in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, two-and-a-half months after Obama's men had lost gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which Obama had carried exactly a year before, and six months after Gallup first reported that Obama was down to 10th of the 12 presidencies since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating. And Obama's approval rating wasn't "sagging"; that's just more aping of hackneyed newswire cliches, and too euphemistic to be descriptive. Obama's approval was scraping the basement floor, and had been for half a year before that glancing admission in the direction of reality.

The CP took the same line as the AP had taken a day or two earlier, explaining away Obama's troubles as public upset over high unemployment and so on, don't you know. Then the Canadian Press Washington bureau added a specious claim that part of Obama's difficulty was his "escalation" of the Afghan War. But Afghanistan is at this time one of the few issues where Obama scores a net-positive approval rating, but you see, the CP Washington bureau reported back in its heady days of covering the ascension of Obama that he had "pledged to peacefully end America's two unpopular wars." Of course, by that point the Iraq War had been won and the American withdrawal agreed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and as for Afghanistan, what Obama had pledged was precisely to escalate the war. It may be Obama's lone kept promise. For now, anyway. (Incidentally, how on earth can a war be "peacefully ended"? Wars are won or lost, or very occasionally stalemated; there is no painless alternative of "peacefully ended".) So when the CP Washington bureau blames Afghanistan for Obama's troubles, it says much more about the CP Washington bureau and the leftist elite than about American public opinion. The day may come when Obama falls down on Afghanistan, but at this point it's one of the few areas where he's still above water. Anyway, the jobs line does make a good start on explaining Obama's troubles, but it's more excuse-making than reporting.

To that end, and lest anyone imagine that there might not have been anything else worth mentioning in the Gallup poll, I offer these shock findings from Gallup, released five days after the open-homosexuality-in-the-military story invoking the Gallup poll, and a week and a half after Obama's State of the Union address, with its attendant "bump" in presidential approval. Gallup, February 8, 2010:
-more Americans disapprove than approve of Obama on six issues out of nine
-approval on the deficit down to 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproving
-approval on the economy at 36 percent to 61 percent
-approval on health-care at 36 percent to 60 percent
-approval among independents down to 24 percent on the deficit, 29 percent on the economy, and 24 percent on health-care

And Gallup's sample is "all adults", which is typically the most sympathetic to the Left. So Obama was underwater on six issues of nine, just a year in, with every elite on earth sheltering and flattering him, in the most friendly polling sample, and just after his first official SOTU address commandeering American primetime television for an hour and a half. The high unemployment is just the start of it; Obama's bigger problem is that the American people don't much agree with him, though you'd never guess it from reading the Canadian Press Washington bureau.

But back to this latest entry in the isn't-Sarah-Palin-just-the-worst series of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. When I made the case last May that the CP Washington bureau was excessively and obsessively scrutinizing Sarah Palin, the very "Editor-in-Chief" of the national newswire monopoly involved himself and justified every bit of the coverage on the grounds that Palin had been "touted" as a presidential nominee. As I wrote at the time, I do not accept that being "touted" as a putative nominee for president of the United States in 2012 or 2016 or 2020 warrants regular and uniformly-critical coverage in the newpapers of Canada in 2009, but that is the publicly-stated Canadian Press rationale for its excessive and obsessive scrutiny of Sarah Palin, and now the very headline on a dispatch of the Canadian Press itself informs us that Palin is not a "viable contender". The Canadian Press has defeated its own only stated justification for its Sarah Palin vendetta.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau devotes exquisite detail to those poor poll findings for Sarah Palin, but the Palin numbers are the irrelevant consolation of a leftist elite existing in denial of the historic collapse of Obama and his project to "remake the nation". Those Gallup numbers I sketched summarily above actually bear on the state and direction of American politics and government and on actual policies actually being pursued by the actual government of the United States, and they are positively calamitous for Obama and his agenda. They are also not even intimated anywhere in the dispatches of the lone Washington correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. How is anyone better off for their newspaper being turned upside down into an escape from reality? -- and worse, a denial of reality?

What do you call it when a writer cites those polls that affirm her own prejudices, and conspicuously ignores more than half a year of relentlessly contrary polling? Opinion journalism? Delusional? The Canadian Press calls it "the news".

Junk reporting and Tea Parties.

It was the same with the Tea Parties, which became the defining political movement of 2009. They began in February but when the Canadian Press Washington bureau treated them in May, it was only to sneer and to demonize, even declining to call them by their obvious and proper name, preferring instead to repeat the pornographic leftist taunt "teabagging protests".

To the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the defining movement of American politics in 2009 was just another clump of rednecks, only "ostensibly" concerned with policy, and in fact crypto-racist enemies of the state, to be demonized in the CP Washington bureau series on the theme. One of the early entries in the series was actually headlined "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama". (I documented some of this at the time, here and here.) A single, serious report on the Tea Parties would have painted the most descriptive and predictive picture of American current events in 2009 and beyond, but the Canadian Press Washington bureau deals too much in the crudest caricatures of the average American to have been capable of understanding the Tea Partiers as anything other than latter-day lynch mobs, which is bad enough in any Canadian elite, but considerably more problematic in the sole Canadian newswire correspondent in America.

One of the reports in that Canadian Press Washington bureau series, supposedly uncovering murderous racism behind the opposition to Obama, repeated the claim -- found in a single book -- that death threats to the president had risen some "400 per cent" since Obama took office. What was that they taught in J-school about needing at least two sources for a claim? It turned out the claim was bogus. That "400 percent" was off by just about 400 percent.

The very Director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, testified to Congress in December that "the threats right now ... is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point in their administrations. ... I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 percent. ... I'm not sure where that number came from."

I know where it ended up, among other places: in my newspaper's World News, from the Canadian Press in Washington. Just more junk reporting from the Canadian Press Washington bureau, reproduced in the newspapers of Canada as fact, in aid of a storyline putting Obama up on the cross and turning the protesting American citizen into a suspect, and the record never corrected.

Earlier in its "Obama opposition nothing more than vicious, murderous racism" (not an actual headline, but it might as well have been) series, the Canadian Press Washington bureau reported on an imaginary death threat against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally -- seven months after it had been debunked by the Secret Service. (I documented the case at the time here.) Crap CP Washington bureau reporting, never corrected, repeated and amplified across Canada through the CP's monopoly network.

The implication in those Canadian Press Washington bureau reports was that the opposition to Barack Obama was illegitimate, and indeed, that is precisely the assumption of a 21st Century leftist elite. The assumption is that conservatism must necessarily be the result of ignorance, "intolerance" (in the political sense, not the dictionary sense), racial hatred, greed, stupidity, etc., while leftism in the same assumption isn't so much an ideology as the obvious conclusions of educated, intelligent people of good will. That is the worldview of a 21st Century leftist elite, and it is the worldview of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which is a problem, because the worldview is bollocks, and because it precludes any possibility of impartiality, particularly in reporting on the Western world's most profoundly conservative and anti-elitist nation.

Sneering and Scott Brown.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau also reduced newly-elected Republican Senator Scott Brown to the sneer "onetime pin-up boy". Apropos of nothing. I suppose it wasn't absolutely necessary to mention Brown's 30 years' service in the National Guard or rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his three terms as a state senator or three terms as state rep, his law practice, etc., etc., and another CP Washington bureau report on the same general subject did at least acknowledge he'd been a state senator. But "pin-up boy" alludes to Brown's posing for an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine 28 years earlier -- at age 22. That's the sort of thing you get when you send a gossip columnist to cover Washington.

The gratuitous "pin-up boy" slight was common on the bitter Left, as in "pin-up boy for the teabaggers" (Huffington Post), and among the kind of people who write things like, "GOP Nazi Pin-Up Boy Exploits Voters' Frustration." The only instance of "pin-up boy" or "pinup boy" I could find anywhere in the Associated Press was in a quote from a bitter leftist who said she voted for the Democrat Coakley "to make sure the pinup boy doesn't get into office." At the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the bitter leftist is the one writing the newswire copy.

Incompetence and the filibuster.

And apart from the gross bias of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, there's the question of basic competence. Following is the CP Washington bureau's definition of the filibuster. I repeat, this is the definition of filibuster by the Washington bureau for Canada's newswire monopoly, and not a junior high social studies presentation: "The filibuster, a Senate rule that is a peculiarity of American politics, essentially gives the minority party the power to stop any legislation dead in its tracks".

That looks to me very much like a political science definition by someone with absolutely no aptitude for political science:
1. The filibuster is not peculiar to the United States. The U.S. Senate filibuster may be an extreme form of the phenomenon, but the filibuster is found in the Westminster systems including even the Ontario Legislative Assembly, which I was given to believe the Canadian Press Washington bureau was supposed to know something about.
2. The filibuster is not a "rule". It is pursuant to a Senate rule, and we even refer to the "filibuster rule", but the filibuster is a procedure or mechanism, or maneuver or tactic, not a "rule". Calling the filibuster a "rule" is subliterate.
3. It is not "the minority party" that is empowered by the filibuster, but any combination of senators totaling at least 41 percent. A couple weeks after that CP report ran, Senators Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson -- Democrats both -- joined Republicans in filibustering the confirmation of Obama's radical nominee for National Labor Relations Board.
4. And this business of "stopping any legislation dead in its tracks" could hardly be more crude. The filibuster blocks bills from being put to a vote. Before a bill can be voted on in the Senate, it must pass a cloture motion with at least 60 percent -- "cloture" referring to the closing of debate -- and that's where the filibuster comes in.

So if the Canadian Press wanted a one-line definition for the U.S. Senate filibuster which didn't look like it was written by an uninterested junior high schooler, it might have gone something like, "a parliamentary procedure whereby a minority of at least 41 percent can block legislation from coming to a vote." The CP's definition of filibuster is like defining a tank as "essentially a metal thingy that army men ride in", only not as accurate. That definition is an embarrassment, or it ought to be. Shouldn't a firm grounding in political science, not to mention war and economics, be a job requirement for anyone posted as the lone Washington correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service? The average concerned citizen or letter-to-the-editor-writer could do at least as well, and very probably a sight better. Whatever credentials and cirricula vitae and contacts can these elites have that count for more than knowledge and accuracy and the capacity to present a complete story?

All of which is why Fox News -- which the Canadian Press Washington bureau has referred to as the "notoriously right-wing Fox News" -- recently became briefly the highest rated channel of any kind in all American cable television. Fox News is the antidote to the elite press that holds the American people in contempt, refuses to scrutinize the president and Congress so long as they are Democrats, and shuts out at least half the story. Fox News now has more viewers at 3 AM than CNN has in primetime. FNC's 3 AM ET comedy Red Eye -- which the press and government of Canada pathetically waged war against a year ago -- is now beating each of CNN's primetime heavyweights in the 25-54 demographic.

But that's just another telling snapshot of the nation that you'll never read in the Canadian Press Washington bureau, incapable as it is of reflecting reality in a conservative nation, and presenting instead a kind of delusional alternative universe of "the world as it ought to be" according to Canadian leftist elites. Anyone would be further ahead knowing nothing at all than reading the coverage of the Canadian Press Washington bureau and imagining it to bear any resemblance to reality. For over a year in this Age of Obama, the Canadian Press has been silent on the scandals of the Obama administration, the abuses of the Democratic Congress, the historic collapse of Obama and his Congress, and the tectonic shifts of the American people. Anyone depending for their coverage of American current events on the Canadian Press would have been oblivious to the great, relentless rightward realignment of the nation over the past year, and would have been nonplussed by the unthinkable Democratic defeats, which would have appeared to them to be quite without explanation. The Canadian Press Washington bureau belongs on the opinions pages or else not in the newspapers at all.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, and here.)

Another problem with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

Here's the latest entry, reproduced in The Chronicle-Herald "World News" section under the subheadline, "Frank talk skewers town hall nonsense." Such is the license of a Herald "World News" editor, that they may insert their elite prejudices into the very newswire copy headlines.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The ever-outspoken Barney Franks, the chairman of the House financial services committee, minced no words Tuesday night at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts when someone likened Obama’s health care plans to 'Nazi policy.'
'On what planet do you spend most of your time?' Franks replied to the woman as constituents cheered and applauded.
Franks assailed her for carrying a photograph of the president defaced to look like Adolf Hitler — the type of sign that’s been seen among Obama opponents since the so-called tea bag protests in April."

Might as well start with the name. It's "Frank", not "Franks".

"So-called tea bag protests." Yes, "so called" by leftists who hold the protestors in contempt. The protests are more officially called "tea parties", as in the Boston Tea Party protesting King George III's taxation. "Tea bag" refers to a pornographic leftist taunt against the protestors. And the tea parties started in February, not April, and for that matter they've never really let up yet.

And that gal at the townhall with the sacrilegious "defaced" Obama photo is known to have been from the LaRouche Youth. Even the Washington Post saw fit to report it. LaRouche-ites are avowedly not conservative, much less Republican. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau is evidently content to let its readers assume this was just another dastardly doing of those beastly Republicans.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Franks’s 'mad as hell' moment, captured by CNN cameras, went viral on Wednesday, showing up on countless websites, blogs and Facebook walls and met largely with celebration."

No doubt that was cause for "celebration" among the CP Washington bureau's kind of people. A big committee chairman in a government with practically unchecked power, berating a law-abiding citizen who's completely shut out of power. Prop up the powerful, tear down the powerless. It's the Canadian Press way in the Age of Obama.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau is getting to be a regular watchdog against American citizens exercising their free speech to compare their government to Naziism, which in any event is one of the more hackneyed and less effective lines of argument in public affairs. But there was a time when the Fourth Estate was more wary of unchecked government than of law-abiding citizens saying their piece in the town squares and town halls.

The Senate Majority Leader has called the protestors "evil-mongers". The Speaker of the House claimed they were "carrying swastikas", then she and her House Majority Leader added that the protestors' actions were "simply un-American". An Arkansas Democrat Senator had already called the protestors "un-American", before recanting for fear of her political skin. And a Washington state Democrat Congressman accused the protestors of "brownshirt tactics".

It ought to be a little discomfiting to appreciate that those are the public pronouncements of people holding all the power, about people who are completely shut out of power. A Fourth Estate would be alarmed at such a prospect; it certainly wouldn't throw in with the government in lording over the people. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau finds "celebration" that the big-government bigwig has denounced the insufferable peasant, and put her right back down in her place.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "But there’s another potential option, something called budget reconciliation. That would allow Democrats to push the bill through with only 51 votes."

Quite right. Only, there is that niggling point that reconciliation is to be used for budgetary matters, not a governmentalization of American health-care opposed by majorities of the American people. From no less an authority than the inventor of the reconciliation mechanism, Sen. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia: "I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation. ... As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "It could have been the Nazi comparisons. Perhaps it was recent remarks from top Republicans that they’d support no health care reform bill. Or it could just be spent reserves of patience following weeks of misinformation about death panels and health insurance for illegal aliens."

Take just that very last point. "Misinformation about ... health insurance for illegal aliens." When Obama and his lot talk about covering the "46 million uninsured" (or "as many as 50 million uninsured Americans," in the preferred formulation of the CP Washington bureau), they're necessarily including 9-10 million legal immigrants and illegal aliens who are counted in that figure. The National Institute for Health Care Management reckons that 5.6 million of the 46 million uninsured are illegal aliens. So insuring those "46 million uninsured" necessarily involves covering millions of illegal aliens included in the figure. It's no "misinformation"; it's Census Bureau statistics and NIHCM estimates.

And since that CP dispatch was published, it's come out that no less an authority than the Congressional Research Service has determined that "H.R. 3200 [the House health-care bill] does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently.”

Of course Obama and his party must claim their health-care "reform" won't cover illegal aliens -- they know even their own side would never swallow such a thing. But there was a time when those people who fancy themselves reporters would have had some skepticism and scrutiny for a president's political tricks and fibs, and not just credulously ape his self-serving rhetoric like some party-organ stenographers.

As for those "top Republicans" saying "they'd support no health care reform bill," that's a neat way of blaming the Democrat crack-up on a Republican minority so small it's in no position to influence much of anything, one way or another.

The Left lost any credibility in blaming Republicans for their failings as of June 30, 2009, when Democrats officially hit the magic 60-vote threshold in the Senate. If the Democrats -- by themselves, without a single Republican vote -- were agreed on this health-care "reform", it'd be passed already. They have the supermajorities in both houses of Congress to do anything they please -- short of overriding a presidential veto, amending the Constitution, or removing a president -- all by themselves, without a single Republican vote.

As of June 30, any Congressional obstruction of Obama's agenda must by definition be the result of balking by Democrats. To imply that Republicans are the obstructionists in this is purest partisan ax-grinding, dependent on ignorance of the numbers and workings of the United States Congress.

And those "top Republicans", whoever they are, are with the people. An August Rasmussen poll found 54% would prefer no health-care reform at all, to anything this president and Congress are likely to come up with. That number shot up to 66% among independent voters. But polls aren't making it into the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau like they used to, now that they've become relentlessly bad news for Obama and his project to "remake the nation."

The Canadian Press Washington bureau was happy to report after just a couple months of the Obama presidency that "Americans are still giving President Barack Obama high marks"; where are the CP Washington bureau dispatches on Obama's marks now that his job approval rating ranks "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures"?

The CP Washington bureau has referred matter-of-factly to the Bush era as "eight years of unpopular Republican rule under President George W. Bush" -- undaunted by the facts that there had been "Republican rule" for just four of Bush's eight years, or that Bush was quite popular enough to be re-elected president and to see his party gain seats in a midterm election for only the third time in the century and a half since the Civil War.

Indeed, it was practically de rigeur in the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau to append any reference to President Bush with "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" -- undaunted by the facts that what was being referred to was not "U.S. history" so much as "polling history", or that even within the history of polling, Bush ranked overall 7th of the 11 presidents since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating in the 1940s.

Well, that "unpopular" Bush was scoring higher job approval ratings than Obama at the same points in their presidencies by late July -- even before Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks had his approval rating hitting 90%. This latest CP Washington dispatch was published on August 20; on that day, Obama's job approval was just about 5 points lower than Bush's had been on the same date in 2001, in the average of all the polls at Real Clear Politics. And Bush had a contested election and a hostile press and popular culture working against him. As to Obama's Democratic supermajorities in Congress, the Real Clear Politics average had the Congressional job approval rating on August 20 at 30%. So when will we read in the Canadian Press about this "unpopular Democratic rule under President Barack Obama"?

And that's the real story in all this, whether the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress -- and the press that shelters and flatters them -- face up to it, or just carry on whistling past the graveyard. They've got their presidency and Congressional supermajorities still, but they've lost the people. All they've got are Democrats, and on a bad day they don't have all of those. The ground has shifted under their feet, and in record time. They've abused what the people granted them, and the people have turned. Now all that's left is a naked push to get their way until their hourglass runs out.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here and here.)

America's conservatism not melting for Obama

Conservative nation: Gallup polling as of August 2009 showed "self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the Union," by statistically-significant margins in all states but three. Graphic from Gallup.com.

America is a fundamentally conservative nation, and the most un-conservative of American presidents has thus far not shifted America's conservatism so much as reinforced it. President Obama has run up against D.H. Lawrence's observation on "the essential American soul": "It has never yet melted."

At the six-month mark of Obama's presidency, the USA Today/Gallup poll ranked his job approval rating "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures."

By late July and early August, the average of all the current polling at Real Clear Politics showed Obama's job approval dipping into the 53rd percentile. Obama was down to his baseline of 53 per cent which had voted to make him president nine months earlier.

And it mostly gets worse from the job approval ratings. Disapproval of Obama on health-care hit 52 per cent in the August Quinnipiac poll, with 39 per cent approving.

Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" had become such an anathema by June that the Rasmussen poll found a plurality actually wanted the unspent provisions "canceled," 45-36 per cent. Only 34 per cent in the July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll were calling the stimulus a "good idea."
Even after several days of press enthusing over Obama's "wildly popular" cash-for-clunkers handout, 54 per cent opposed extending the program in an August Rasmussen poll, with just 33 per cent in support. The press was apparently using some alternate definition of "popular."

And 65 per cent opposed Obama's intended closure of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp in the June USA Today/Gallup poll, with only 18 per cent accepting Obama's claim that Guantanamo "has weakened American national security."

So far in this "Age of Obama," the Gallup poll has registered an upswing in even the more controversial conservatism in America. In March, Americans placed economic growth ahead of "environmental protection," 51-42 per cent: a reversal from 42-49 per cent in 2008 and the worst showing for environmentalism in the quarter-century of Gallup polling on the question.

In April, Gallup recorded a new low in support for a handgun ban: 29 per cent. Which is half the 60 per cent that favoured the ban when Gallup began polling the question -- in the late 1950s.

In May, Gallup found pro-lifers outnumbering pro-choicers 51-45 per cent: a reversal from 44-50 per cent in '08 and "the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995."

In June, Gallup's ideology survey showed conservatives unmoved, at 40 per cent "conservative" to 21 per cent "liberal." That breakdown was 40-19 per cent in 2004, when President Bush and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were re-elected.

Then a July Gallup poll made it explicit: Americans reported becoming more conservative in their politics, 39-18 per cent. The nation is actually more conservative in Obama's first year than it was in Bush's last.

Then there are the unforgiving tendencies of American democracy. In the century and a half since the Civil War, the party holding the presidency has lost seats in every mid-term Congressional election but three.

In the past four decades, the very longest any party has held the White House and both houses of Congress is four years. By election day in November of next year, Democrats will have controlled both houses of Congress for four years and the White House for two.

Congress' job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics average recently went below 30 per cent. And the Rasmussen "who do you trust" survey which had Democrats leading Republicans on ten issues out of ten before the election, had been turned upside-down nine months later, with Republicans leading Democrats on eight issues out of ten.

So it's not the wildest guess that Republicans will gain in the midterm elections of November next year. Which doesn't necessarily mean they'll form majorities in one or both houses of Congress: the Democrat advantage in the 435-member House is 78 seats, and it typically takes more than a single election to dislodge so many incumbents. But Republicans should have a stronger hand after the midterms, and should be better able to tie Obama's hands in the second half of his presidency.

Obama and his Congress are up against a clock. They're unlikely to see such supermajorities past November of next year, and the closer to the fall of 2010 they come, the more fearful they'll have to be of pushing the trickier items on their agenda -- like legalizing 11 million illegal aliens while the unemployment rate is around 10 per cent and governments can't cover their liabilities as it is. Not to mention the unforeseeable events that distract and preoccupy a government, or blow it off its intended course altogether.

Polls are not static, of course, and neither are they elections. It's better to hold the power and lose the polls than vice-versa. But there has to be some significance in polling that's this soft, this soon.

Fraudulently campaigning on the likes of "a net spending cut," and proclaiming oneself the "change" when the system has crashed just a month and a half before election day, can go a long way to winning votes -- once. But it did nothing to alter the fact of America's conservatism. America is a fundamentally conservative nation that's got itself a radicalized leftist national government, and that discrepancy will have to be resolved somehow or other, sooner or later.

Andrew W. Smith, published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia