One of the best spin stories of 2010 aired just this past week during our “local” radio station’s hourly newscast. So you don't accuse me of picking on some liberal media outlet, this station runs Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Michael Savage with breaks only for Fox and local news, sports, weather and traffic updates from 9AM until 10PM.
Prior to playing a hilarious political sound bite the newscaster read this copy:
“The City of Albany [NY] has released the total number of vehicles they towed this year – and it's a new record! Police say that in addition to Monday night's tow total of 151, an additional 117 were ticketed and towed away Tuesday night during and after the blizzard. That brings the number of vehicles in violation to 268 – the lowest number police have reported since the Snow Emergency Street Parking Plan was developed 10 years ago.”
To paraphrase the sound bite spoken by a representative of Albany's mayor:
“All these years of educating the public about how important it is to park on the correct side of the street during snow emergencies seems, finally, to betaking hold.”
Perhaps you're asking:
What’s so funny, let alone spintastic, about what the spokesman said?
Obviously it is not
“education”
that has people doing the right thing with their vehicles during snow emergencies. It’s the simple fact that everyone from university students to blue collar workers to the state and municipal workers who park their cars on Albany’s streets
– any city's streets
– are in no position during these precarious times to pony up nearly $300
in fines, towing and storage charges merely to avoid going outside during a blizzard.
Similarly, it's fairly easy to predict that local and state police spokespersons will be sound-bited next week regarding the record low number of DUI arrests over New Year’s weekend. You don't need a crystal ball either to predict lower turn-out at the standard New Year's Eve celebration centers – including Albany’s annual First Night gala.
The second funniest political spin story was also aired during this past week. This snow job was launched by Obama’s best friends – the guys who got him elected and who continue to slobber over him and call him a genius in spite of the reversal of his popularity, his ineptitude in all things non-socialist and the November 2010 mandate that the majority of Americans meant to stifle his unchecked spending, borrowing and his arrogance – the mainstream media. Their Dear Leader continues to be a genius, this time for doing a triple-flip off the high perch from which he formerly hurled petty insults at those who have
inherited
the mess that he created since they enabled his victory.
Now they're telling us that Christmas spending – of course it would be referred to in PC-speak as “seasonal spending” if the news wasn’t so easy to spin into an 
Obama Dr. Feelgood story – increased by more than 5%. Forget which year or year’s they may be comparing the stats with, the part of the story that they’re not telling you (as was pointed out in a New York Post column by John Crudele on Thursday) is that all spending, including purchases of automobile and home heating fuels and everything else you can think of from groceries to snow shovels are lumped-in to the total spending figures for the pre-Christmas period.
Therefore, as a result of the Obama/Democrat Congress-weakened US Dollar, Americans are actually being forced to spend more whenever and wherever they “go shopping”. Coincidental with the Christmas season spending increase the unemployment rate also ticked up a bit. Meanwhile, organizations hoping to feed and clothe the greatly increased number of needy Americans suffered a serious downturn – far more than 5% – in charitable Christmas giving.
Should there be some positive sustained change as a result of the restoration of the system of checks and balances we can only wonder how the MSM’s slobberers will spin it to look as though it was all Obama’s doing. Or will future reports merely continue to stress the genius of his morphing himself into a Clintonian Compromiser during the very same week in which he re-reminded us all that “children can’t drive” and that their proper place, as "the enemy" is “in the back” of the bus.
In reality, the increase in Christmas spending was also coincidental to the angry “shellacking” that occurred just prior to Thanksgiving. But that’s another inconvenient truth that the slobberers want you to forget. Now that you’re allowed to drive again, don’t forget to move the car to the right side of the street when those media blizzards hit.