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"Coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable — and has become more so over time," says a Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism study that looked at newspapers and cable news shows from the end of the conventions to the last presidential debate. Coverage of Obama, naturally, was much more positive than negative or neutral. His ratio of favorable stories to overall stories was more than 2 1/2 times as large as McCain's.

The second most unfavorable coverage went not to McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, but to Obama's, Joe Biden. "Limited coverage" of the Delaware senator "was far more negative than Palin's, and nearly as negative as McCain's." The small sample size makes any conclusion irrelevant, though.

The study called Biden "nearly the invisible man" because he's been largely ignored. In our view, his frequent gaffes should earn him extended negative coverage, but he's gotten a pass. Scornful reporting is reserved for Republicans such as Palin, who got bad press in 39% of the stories about her. Only 28% were positive, a third neutral.

Despite the one-sided coverage in favor of their party, some Democrats won't be happy until they have shut down any opposition and shredded the First Amendment. Among them is Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, who shares his party's eagerness to reinstate the clearly unconstitutional Fairness Doctrine. This is the Federal Communications Commission rule that once required broadcasters to give equal time to all sides on public issues.

"My thought is that radio and media generally should have a higher calling than just to reflect a particular point of view," Bingaman recently told an Albuquerque radio station, apparently forgetting that the rule of law and America's foundational documents are our guiding principles, not what he thinks.

Should Obama be elected and the Democrats gain large majorities in both congressional chambers, we expect the Fairness Doctrine, scrapped in 1987, to be resurrected.

To paraphrase a note from one of our contributors: Who knew the Democrats were closet totalitarians? We'll all know, however, when constitutionally guaranteed free speech is snuffed out.

Can one imagine "Saturday Night Live" doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her "I've never been proud" of my country, this "just downright mean" America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?

"Saturday Night Live" would be facing hate-crime charges.

As usual, Biskupic relies almost entirely on political labels—“moving the Supreme Court to the right”, “liberal wing” and “conservative wing”, “ultraconservative”, “split on social policy issues”—that obscure from the reader the grand divide between those justices on the “liberal wing” who seek to recast their preferred policies in the guise of constitutional rights and those on the “conservative wing” who recognize that the Constitution largely leaves issues to the democratic processes to be decided by the people’s representatives in the state legislatures and in Congress.

Moreover, Biskupic misuses her political labels.  She tells us that “conservative justices have a slight edge”   and that Justice Kennedy is “conservative but sometimes forms a majority with the liberals.”  “Sometimes”?  Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Lawrence v. Texas, Boumediene, Rasul, Hamdan, Lee v. Weisman, the various Eighth Amendment/death penalty cases, to name just a few off the top of my head. 

Biskupic also risibly states that if “Democrats make significant headway in the Senate,” Obama “might have the leeway to push through a relatively liberal nominee.”  I doubt very much that anyone whom Obama nominates will be only “relatively liberal” (except to those who consider Justice Kennedy a conservative).  More importantly, it will likely be very easy for Obama to get a hard-left nominee confirmed.

527 ad: “America”

We haven’t heard as much about judicial appointments in this election as we did in 2004. Perhaps the financial crisis has removed that from the front of most voters’ minds, but the Judicial Confirmation Network wants to remind people that the next President will choose more than just an approach to fixing the financial meltdown:

America: land of opportunity — and prosperity. But what made America great is what we stand for: liberty — equality — inalienable rights.

Fixing the economy is crucial. But America’s principles and Constitution are threatened by one more liberal activist vote on the Supreme Court.

Please join Judicial Confirmation Network. Help spread the word: “It takes just one vote.”

The question hasn’t arisen to a top-shelf issue for a couple of reasons. Most people believe the most likely retirements in the next four years will be from two or three of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, with John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg first and perhaps also Stephen Breyer or David Souter. That makes the issue of SCOTUS appointments a little less acute than in 2004, when we anticipated the departures of conservative William Rehnquist and swing vote Sandra Day O’Connor. If we miss this opportunity, some may figure, it won’t hurt us as it will just maintain the court balance as is.

However, that misses two important points. First, SCOTUS appointments affect court decisions for decades. Missing an opportunity now may mean losing ground to judicial activism for the next 30 years. The issue of judicial activism doesn’t just apply to SCOTUS, either, but also to the district and appellate judges that the next President will select. If Barack Obama stacks these levels with activist jurists, especially younger appointees, a friendly Supreme Court may never happen with or without a Republican in the White House.

Pethokoukis on 401(k) Demolition: Socialism

US News columnist James Pethokoukis has one word for the nationalization of tax-deferred retirement plans: socialism.  He can’t quite believe Democrats would be this foolish in an election year, but Pethokoukis forgets that this is the Age of Obama.  The Audacity to Hope for Socialism Change has arrived:

I hate to use the “S” word, but the American government would never do something as, well, socialist as seize private pension funds, right? This is exactly what cash-strapped Argentina just did in the name of protecting workers’ retirement accounts (Efharisto, Fausta’s Blog). Now, even Uncle Sam isn’t that stupid, but some Democrats might try something almost as loopy: kill 401(k) plans.

House Democrats recently invited Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor at the New School of Social Research, to testify before a subcommittee on her idea to eliminate the preferential tax treatment of the popular retirement plans. In place of 401(k) plans, she would have workers transfer their dough into government-created “guaranteed retirement accounts” for every worker. The government would deposit $600 (inflation indexed) every year into the GRAs. Each worker would also have to save 5 percent of pay into the accounts, to which the government would pay a measly 3 percent return. Rep. Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, said that since “the savings rate isn’t going up for the investment of $80 billion [in 401(k) tax breaks], we have to start to think about whether or not we want to continue to invest that $80 billion for a policy that’s not generating what we now say it should.”

Pethokoukis also asks a question that I neglected in my earlier post:

What effect would this plan have on an already battered stock market? Well, I would imagine it would send it even lower, sticking a shiv into the portfolios of everyone who didn’t jump aboard. But I am sure the Chinese would love to jump in and buy all our cheap stocks to fund the retirement of their citizens.

I’d suggest that Pethokoukis vastly underestimates the effect this change will have on the stock market.  The advent of private tax-deferred retirement accounts created a huge investor class in the US.  By some estimations, more than 70% of American adults have money in the stock market in long-term investments for their eventual retirement.  That’s a revolutionary change in the relationship between labor and ownership, one that capitalism succeeded in creating where Marx and his followers only fantasized.

What happens when the tax deferral on this investment ends?  Most people won’t want to take the risks of the market without it, certainly not on the scale they do today (about $5 trillion in capital) and likely not after the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac collapse.  They’ll start moving to savings accounts or gold and removing their money from the markets.  The flight of capital will eliminate the necessary engine for recovery, but that’s a minor point.  The price of stock will utterly collapse as everyone looks to liquidate their holdings, crashing Wall Street and throwing tens of millions out of work as publicly-held companies disintegrate.

Want to see the Dow at its status before tax-deferred private investment accounts got approved?  We’ll look at 8500 with wistful nostalgia.  Get ready for 1500.

Was Biden talking about Obama’s plan for unilateral disarmament?

A alot of people have been scratching their heads over Joe Biden’s warning to voters that electing Barack Obama would precipitate an international crisis to “test his mettle”. Investors Business Daily agrees with Biden, and notes that this wasn’t an off-the-cuff gaffe; Biden repeated the warning in two different venues. IBD points to this early Obama campaign video, in which Obama pledges unilateral disarmament on several fronts, as evidence supporting Biden’s hypothesis:

But there’s another angle to this, based on what Biden the senator knows — that Obama’s defense policies, once it’s obvious how they’ll undermine us, are likely to be very, very unpopular. In this case, Biden may be calling on his party’s hard, pacifist core — Moveon.org, Code Pink and the like — to stand by their man.

He’ll need their support. Like Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, Obama’s policies often sound good on the surface, but will in fact materially weaken America’s ability to defend herself. That’s not just our opinion, mind you; it’s straight from the horse’s mouth. …

Such policies will create a vacuum that our foes will be only too happy to exploit.

In response to seeing a weakling in the White House, will Russia do something rash in Eastern Europe, like invade Ukraine? Will South Korea develop a bomb, knowing the U.S. won’t stop it? Will Iran attack Israel, as it has promised, thinking America has become a paper tiger? We don’t know, but maybe Joe Biden does.

Indeed. This video had been largely forgotten since its appearance early in the primaries, when Obama sought the support of the Kucinich Left in his party. Obama deliberately positioned himself to the left of Hillary Clinton in the hopes that he could wrest support from people like Dennis Kucinich and Chris Dodd and emerge as the alternative to the Restoration. Only after he beat Hillary in the primaries did he move back towards the center on issues like the FISA reform bill, long after he had locked up enough support to gain the nomination.

Since then, though, Obama has tried hard to position himself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat. He has dropped all mention of the missile defense system or of unilaterally cutting back nuclear weapons. Obama worked hard over the summer to project himself as a traditional strong-defense candidate, and it seemed to have worked … until Biden inadvertently undermined him this week. It eliminated any help the Colin Powell endorsement gave him in terms of national security, and gave John McCain and Sarah Palin a gift on the campaign trail in reopening the national-security issue.

But did Biden mean to warn that unilateral disarmament would be unpopular, or that Obama would initially alienate the Left by demonstrating military strength in an international crisis? One could argue it either way, but I don’t think he meant to worry about the Left leaving Obama. I think Biden wanted the Left to remain activist to support a retreat philosophy in the face of aggression from our enemies. Obama has consistently fronted that policy, in Iraq and elsewhere, both as a Senator and as a presidential candidate.

Biden knows Obama will need the Left to support the consequences of its Kucinich vision for American foreign policy. That’s what the warning meant, and this video is ample evidence of the direction Obama will take in national security.

Democrats to kill 401(k)s for … privatized Social Security?

In 2005, George Bush proposed privatizing a portion of Social Security contributions to allow workers to control their own funds and hopefully outperform the woefully inadequate entitlement system.  The partial privatization would eventually have helped postpone or eliminate the insolvency of Social Security, but Democrats screeched that the GOP wanted to steal benefits from Grandma and effectively killed the debate.  To this day, they accuse Republican candidates of supporting Bush’s partial privatization plan as though it were the equivalent of Teapot Dome.

So why are Democrats now looking to partially nationalize existing 401(k) plans into the exact same kind of private/public pension system?

Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-California, and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute.

Hmm …. “a system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute.”  That sounds very, very familiar, doesn’t it?  Don’t we already do this with Social Security?

A plan by Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic-policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, contains elements that are being considered. She testified last week before Miller’s Education and Labor Committee on her proposal.  …

Under Ghilarducci’s plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5 percent of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation.

The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.

That means your employer can no longer write off their contributions to your 401(k), and your capital gains would be taxable year-on-year.  In other words, it becomes just another investment or savings account, with no tax benefit at all, and no employer contribution.  Instead, Uncle Sam would give you your “matching” funds — up to a whopping $600 per year!  Whoopee!

As Michelle Obama says, you could buy a pair of earrings every year … except, of course, you can’t.  It’s in The Lockbox, defined by politicians as Locked Away from You but Accessible to Us.  It goes there along with 5% of your gross earnings, apparently to play with the 7% of your gross earnings that already goes to Social Security.  And what do they do with the money?  They give you government bonds as your only investment option.

Maybe you’ll be lucky, and they’ll have Franklin Raines running the agency issuing those bonds.

IMF: Fuel from food a “very bad idea”

That’s not likely to happen in an Obama administration.  Obama has pledged support for ethanol production, exactly the kind of biofuel that the IMF opposes.  Corn ethanol is one of the least efficient forms in terms of energy consumption, but Obama has lost none of his enthusiasm for it.  Small wonder; he has close advisers like Tom Daschle and Jason Grumet, both of whom work for corn-ethanol producers.

John McCain opposes corn ethanol, but not biofuels entirely.  He is in the same global-warming mindset that has led so many nations towards biofuels as an alternative to gasoline.  Unfortunately, that leads to two critical issues for human habitation: food production and water consumption.  The growth of food for non-food purposes uses a lot of fresh water, which isn’t an unlimited resource.  Normally, people recover some of that hydration in the food they eat, but instead cars burn it and it goes to waste.

Eventually, we will run short of arable land and fresh water to grow the crops that feed our cars instead of our mouths, and food prices will rise astronimically.  We already saw this dynamic in 2008, and the reaction of governments was to pull back exports and keep food within their countries.  This will lead to massive starvation and violent unrest.  If you thought Islamic terrorism was bad, wait until two billion people realize they’ll starve to death because we didn’t want to drill for oil off the coasts or build nuclear plants for electric cars.