Today seems to be a good day to invoke a blogger’s privilege to just rant. I haven’t been this angry about core spin since James Pethokoukis’ pathetic attempt last January to suggest retail sales were "surprisingly strong" (if you only ignored autos, gasoline, and building materials). The Mother of All Core Spins [1] got so out of control today that Bloomberg editors had to remove the key information from their headline — the bare fact was just too hot. Still, the MSM is swallowing the spin worldwide.[2]
Meanwhile, and this is where I really lost it, BusinessWeek’s Maya Roney asserted [3] that US foreclosures don’t really look so bad if California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio are excluded from the dataset! Sorry, Twist, looks like Phoenix doesn’t count for America’s New Core Foreclosure Rate Index. Jeesh. More blood pressure boost is available from Peter Coy’s aptly titled new blog post.[4]
But looking on the bright side, and according to my back-of-the-envelope calculation, those states represent 145 electoral votes, a whopping 27%. Win in America’s 7 non-core foreclosure states, and you’re more than halfway home in the 2008 election.
Come on now, MSM. So you can stop with the core spin already. Just report the actual numbers — we can deal with the truth.
