Either Nicholas Riccardi at the Associated Press is woefully ignorant, or he set out to deliberately mislead readers about the impact of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush's tax plan. I'll report the details; readers here can decide for themselves.

Riccardi's "analysis," contained in his Sunday morning writeup covering the tax proposals of Bush, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, contained the following paragraph summarizing the Bush plan's impact (HT to longtime emailer Alfred Lemire):

Shortly after its release this morning, Josh Boak at the Associated Press posted his coverage of the Census Bureau's August retail sales report. On a seasonally adjusted basis, August's sales came in a very mediocre 0.2 percent greater than July.

It's almost too kind to say that Boak's writeup was delusional. The AP reporter celebrated "surges" in spending, "fed ... by solid and steady job gains" that will "sustain U.S. economic growth." He missed an important clue, downplaying the significance of "a possible pullback in the housing sector's momentum" — not that there has been all that much momentum anyway.

What is the result when Hollywood combines oil prospecting, a young couple chasing the American dream, family feuds and crooked officials?

This fall television season, the result is Blood & Oil, ABC’s wannabe-Dallas set in the fictional oil boom town of Rock Springs, North Dakota. The show stars Don Johnson, Chace Crawford and Rebecca Rittenhouse. The trailer even resembled TNT’s Dallas commercials and included plenty of sex.

Judging by the first episode, which will premiere on ABC Sept. 27, viewers can expect many of the same old anti-oil attacks that have been done by TV and movies before including an oil “baron” who is hated by many people in town and has done unethical things to become rich. Oilmen are called “oil thieves” by another character and there’s gambling, swindling, theft and betrayal.

Democrats' current and potential candidates for their party's 2016 presidential nomination continue to complain about various aspects of the economy. They continue to make no connection between their complaints and the fact that Democrat Barack Obama has been in the White House for over six years. Obama has for the most part operated either under the conditions created by the 2009-2010 Congress or, when resisted, by unilaterally ruling through executive orders and arbitrary regulatory actions.

Establishment press outlets, likely recognizing the candidates' hypocrisy, mostly fail to carry their complaints — and when they do, they make no attempt to note that the candidates are citing areas the Obama administration has either failed to address, or has attempted to address counterproductively. This pattern of behavior became so obvious yesterday as a result of Vice President Joe Biden's appearance in Pittsburgh that National Review and IJ Review contributor Stephen Miller tweeted the following:

Here's a little parlor exercise readers can conduct with their friends who think that high-tech CEOs are the innovative saints of the universe.

The game would be to take the first three paragraphs of Michael Liedtke's Associated Press report on the collusion settlement to which that industry's major players just acquiesced, and revise it to reflect a different industry far less favored by the press. Then accurately point out the following: "There is no way this industry would gotten as much sympathy from the press as the AP gave these high-tech titans." After the jump, readers will see how I revised the AP's original first three paragraphs as if the settlement occurred in the oil industry, followed by what the AP's Liedtke actually wrote Thursday afternoon: