Continuing to come unhinged and flash his liberal colors in the first CNBC Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, co-moderator John Harwood pontificated that President Obama has made the United States economy “the strongest in the world.”
Economy
By Seton Motley | October 28, 2015 | 12:48 PM EDT
The media are, of course, almost uniformly Leftist - which means they just about always toe the Party line. Including the belief that in order to help the poor - government must perpetually grow. Of course we conservatives also want to help the poor - we just think shrinking government is the way to actually do it.
When things get more expensive - the poor get hammered hardest. But the media misses the obvious - the more government there is, the more things cost. It is axiomatic - in (at least) two ways.
By Tom Blumer | October 28, 2015 | 12:59 AM EDT
To err is human, but some errors are more obvious than others.
One pretty obvious error occurred Tuesday at the Associated Press. It involved veteran economics reporter Christopher Rugaber, who somehow assumed that the August increase in home prices recorded in a well-known index published on Tuesday primarily occurred because of "solid sales." The problem is that seasonally adjusted existing home sales declined sharply in August.
By Tom Blumer | October 27, 2015 | 3:08 PM EDT
If you're a few hours late catching up on reports on economic data at the Associated Press, one of the best ways to determine whether the news was good or disappointing is to see whether the story's headline and opening blurb are still present about four hours later among the wire service's "Top (usually 10) Business News" items. The good-news items will usually still be there; the disappointing ones will usually be gone.
Sure enough, as of about 12:30, Martin Crutsinger's dispatch in the wake of the 8:30 a.m. Durable Goods report from the Census Bureau was no longer a Top Story. That's because, even though Crutsinger did his level best to ignore pertinent facts and try to pin the blame elsewhere, the news was awful.
By Tom Blumer | October 26, 2015 | 11:31 PM EDT
Today saw yet another "unexpected" disappointing development in the U.S. economy. The Census Bureau reported that seasonally adjusted sales of new homes, an area thought to be a bright spot, declined sharply in September to an annual rate 468,000 from 529,000 in August. The bureau also revised July and August significantly downward.
As bad as the as the adjusted numbers were, the raw data was even worse. Despite all of this, and despite the fact that the pace of new-home sales is still only about two-thirds of what it used to tell readers would be a "normal" or "healthy" level, the Associated Press's Josh Boak, apparently taking a double shot from today's good-news koolaid delivery, tried to pawn off today's result as a one-off interruption of what has otherwise been a year where "zeal for newly built homes took off."
By Tom Blumer | October 26, 2015 | 11:28 AM EDT
Late Sunday evening, the United Auto Workers and General Motors reached a tentative four-year agreement shortly before the union's 11:59 p.m. strike deadline.
The agreement was expected, simply because the financial and political blowback of a strike at a company bailed out by taxpayers at a cost running into tens of billion of dollars back in 2009 would have been severe. Also expected: the press buying into and perpetuating the myth that the union made significant concessions to GM and Chrysler during the course of those two companies' respective corrupt bankruptcies.
By Brad Wilmouth | October 25, 2015 | 11:47 AM EDT
Appearing as a guest on Friday's Tavis Smiley show on PBS, actor Dick Van Dyke spoke of his support for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and oddly complained that it is "incendiary" for his critics to call him a "socialist," even though Sanders labels himself a "democratic socialist." Van Dyke then declared that "we're a fairly socialist government already."
The veteran actor, who is currently promoting his book, Keep Moving: And Other Tips and Truths About Aging, had previously appeared on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell and pronounced Sanders the winner of the Democratic presidential debate.
By Tom Blumer | October 24, 2015 | 10:30 PM EDT
The news coming out of Detroit about near-deadline negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors has been pretty quiet. As the Sunday 11:59 p.m. deadline approaches, the Associated Press only has a four-paragraph blurb indicating that the union wants to get a richer package than it just garnered in negotiations with Fiat Chrysler. A Reuters report goes into detail about GM's cost structure still being higher than that seen at Toyota's and Nissan's U.S. plants by about 15 percent and 31 percent, respectively. The New York Times is only carrying reports from the wires.
One note of substance about the UAW's strategy covered at Bloomberg News — surely known to others following the industry who are filing bland reports — is that it plans to milk the unemployment insurance system in the event of a protracted strike.
Amanda Marcotte: Paul Ryan Thinks Family Life Should Be ‘Reserved For the Elite and the Rest of Us Can Go Hang’
By Tom Johnson | October 24, 2015 | 9:49 PM EDT After Paul Ryan vowed that he wouldn’t reduce time spent with his family even if he became Speaker of the House, quite a few liberals accused the Wisconsin congressman of hypocrisy given that he has, in the words of one feminist site, “spent much of his political career fighting laws that promote realistic work-life balance for parents.”
Lefty pundit Marcotte believes that Ryan is even worse than a hypocrite. In a Thursday column for Salon, Marcotte asserted that Ryan’s “family time” stand “is a perfect distillation of the Ayn Rand-constructed worldview he has, where all the goodies are reserved for the elite and the rest of us can go hang…Increasingly, the Republican worldview is one where even basic things like love, connection, and other basic human needs are being reclassified as privileges that should only be available to the wealthy.”
By Mark Finkelstein | October 23, 2015 | 8:40 AM EDT
Talk about politics making strange bedfellows . . . Joe Scarborough has said that when he goes back to Washington, DC, his "best friends" are "liberal Democrats." The one person Scarborough singled out to illustrate this was Maxine Waters, mentioning that he hugs her on the House floor.
Scarborough's statement came during a pre-recorded New Hampshire town hall with John Kasich that aired on today's Morning Joe. I wish Scarborough had explained why his best friends are liberal Democrats rather than any of the 247 Republicans in the House. Maxine Waters, really? The woman who called George W. a "liar" and Dick Cheney a "liar" and "thief?" Who refused to call the Rodney King riots by that name, labelling them a "rebellion" instead?
By Tom Blumer | October 23, 2015 | 1:02 AM EDT
The folks at the Associated Press aren't even trying to disguise how pleased they are after Canada's most recent elections swept the Liberal Party into power after almost a decade in the wilderness.
They're claiming that victorious Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems destined to ignite the second installment of "Trudeaumania," the late-1960s press anointing which accompanied his father Pierre into that same position. It's quite clear that the AP is uninterested in informing readers about how awful Pierre Trudeau's actual record was. They instead want readers to believe that happy, reality-avoiding leftist days are here again.
By Tom Blumer | October 22, 2015 | 4:13 PM EDT
If a Republican or conservative was in the White House, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger would have found a reason to be unimpressed in his dispatch today about how low initial unemployment claims continue to be, even as hiring has been slowing down. (Ideally, reporters should just relay the facts and leave the theorizing out of their stories, but that ship has sadly long since sailed.)
Crutsinger exhibited no real curiosity because a Democrat is in the White House. Therefore, it's left to New Media to at least get the alternative ideas out there; a contributor at the contrarian blog Zero Hedge did that several days ago. After the jump, readers will find most of Crutsinger's report covering the Department of Labor's initial claims release today, and a healthly chunk of the just-mentioned Zero Hedge analysis.