The federal government kicked off fiscal 2016 yesterday by reporting that its October deficit was $136.5 billion, 12 percent higher than the $121.7 billion shortfall seen in October 2014.

Single-month comparisons can be tricky because of timing differences, but the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger noted that analyzing the results from this October and last October is an apples-to-apples proposition when he wrote that "In both years, Nov. 1 fell on a weekend, which required the government to mail out November benefit checks in October." But instead of diving into and comparing the two Octobers, the AP reporter devoted the vast majority of his writeup to virtual cut-and-paste regurgitations of previously published news about the 2015 fiscal year and projections for the next two years. He wrote just one sentence directly comparing any of the details in two October statements, and buried it at the end of his report.

Today's "I'm just making stuff up on the fly" award nominee is Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press.

The AP reporter, named by National Review's Kevin Williamson as America's "Worst Economics Writer" in 2013, lived down to his designation in a Tuesday report on the Census Bureau's September Monthly Trade Inventories and Sales release. He described a sales increase which didn't come close to offsetting the previous month's decline as "robust," failed to note that the reported increase in inventories will likely increase third-quarter GDP while perhaps depressing the fourth quarter, and described a "major effort to work down an overhang" in inventories not found in the report he was covering. His most important miss, though, was failing to note that trade inventories remain dangerously bloated.

The political definition of Cronyism is: government policy that favors one or more specific beneficiaries - at the expense of everyone else.  To wit: $80 billion of the 2009 “Stimulus” was wasted on “green energy” companies - 80% of whom were Barack Obama donors.  Amongst the parade of horribles contained therein: the government took money from energy companies - to fund competitors to their energy companies.  

Sadly, a $3.5-trillion-a-year federal government budget is filled to the rafters with nigh-endless Cronyism.  There’s so much to undo - one must triage and prioritize.  And while we work to reduce and eliminate, we most certainly should not create a whole new Cronyism - that will dwarf all the others combined. 

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) late last week gave us a quintessential example of aiming at the tiny - while they have for years championed the huge.  Behold:

Add Arizona's Meritus Health Partners to the growing list of Affordable Care Act co-op failures. The Daily Signal reports that this makes 11 of 23 such state Obamacare co-ops which will have closed their doors by the end of 2015 after three or fewer years in operation.

The Associated Press, which, along with most of the rest of the establishment press, has been playing aggressive defense on behalf of Obamacare since its passage and especially since Barack Obama's reelection in 2012, has no coverage of Meritus's crackup at its main national or "Big Story" site. Beyond that, readers will see after the jump that the AP's local stories about Meritus highlighted its association with ACA/Obamacare when things appeared to be going well, and buried it when they went south.

On June 30, the Washington Post announced that it would be "compiling a database of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty in 2015." The Post has been "tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, and whether the person was armed."

The paper's work thus far has been a revealing exercise which should be getting far more attention than it is. I believe would be getting the needed attention if the revelations were different. You see, the analysis of fatal shootings thus far shows that, in layman's terms, the overwhelming majority of them were wholly justified (HT to an Investor's Business Daily editorial).