Daily Beast correspondent Eleanor Clift has decided the law of supply and demand makes no sense, at least not when it comes to economics. It's difficult to avoid concluding that Eleanor Clift makes no sense, economically or otherwise.

A weekly panelist on The McLaughlin Show, Clift was a lonely voice for irrationality on the program this weekend, arguing in favor of an anachronistic ban on US oil exports imposed during the mid-'70s.

You wouldn't know it from reading the national coverage by the Associated Press or stories at the Los Angeles Times, but California Governor Jerry Brown and his fellow far-left Democratic Party environmentalists suffered significant setbacks last week.

How bad? So bad that the Times editorial board accused "a new crop of moderate Democratic legislators" of succumbing to "oil industry propaganda." What really happened is that enough Democrats to make a difference looked at the impact of Brown's pet pieces of legislation on the state's economy and job market and said, "No mas."

Tonight's report at the Associated Press in the wake of Wall Street's disastrous day isn't quite an Animal House moment — "Remain Calm! All Is Well!" — but it's more than fair to say that the wire service's Matthew Craft and Bernard Condon allowed quite a bit of wishful thinking into their writeup.

In late June, I noted that the AP's Ken Sweet asked a very important question about China ("IS THERE A POINT WHERE I SHOULD GET WORRIED?"), and failed to answer it. He also claimed that "The biggest concern is whether the drop in China's stock market will cause the country's economy to slow." The headline and opening sentence in tonight's AP dispatch attempted to maintain that false appearance (bolds are mine):

In a Wednesday column, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman extended his odd obsession with raising the gas tax into the 2016 Republican presidential debate. But Friedman will have a hard time convincing Republicans to listen if he keeps throwing around insults, like describing the party's donors and supporters as embracing the "angry anti-science, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-minorities, anti-gay rights and anti-immigration views of the Tea Party and its media enforcer, Fox News."

After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft report on Thursday declaring that, in his own words, "The government has no public safety justification to ban" hyrdraulic fracturing, or fracking, Houston Chronicle business writer Chris Tomlinson falsely claimed that the industry believes it "needs no regulation."

Tomlinson formerly toiled at the Associated Press, and it shows. One of his low points there was hypocritically taking James O'Keefe to task for "editing" his videos, even though the Project Veritas founder routinely posts accompanying raw footage, something those in the far more heavily-edited mainstream press where Tomlinson works rarely do. In the current instance, he accused the American Petroleum Institute of making an argument that anyone who read the first sentence of its press release would know it didn't make.