In all the hoopla over the Federal Reserve's Wednesday's signals over its intentions to raise interest rates, its significant downgrades to expected growth of the U.S. economy during the next several years have mostly been ignored.

The Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has played a part in that. Both of the wire service's reports following the Fed's actions and predictions on Wednesday saved its downwardly revised growth projections for very late paragraphs, even though reporter Christopher Rugaber described them as indicators of a "much slower" economy than was anticipated just a few months ago. Further, the Fed's revised projections indicate that what is by far the longest streak of economic mediocrity since World War II will likely continue unchecked.

On February 12, in a report on inventories, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger referred to an economist who believed, in Crutsinger's words, "that the economy expanded at a 2 percent annual rate in the final three months of the year (2014)." That result would be a fairly significant downward revision to the 2.6 percent rate the government estimated in late January.

The next day, Macroeconomic Advisers, a leading economic research firm which describes itself as "independent with no loyalty to any political ideology," estimated that the economy, as measured in its Gross Domesitic Product, "declined by 0.6% in December, and growth for November was revised down by three-tenths." Since then, though they may be out there somewhere, I haven't seen AP or other major news outlets make any reference to analysts' revised fourth-quarter estimates.

On Friday, the government reported that the nation's economy, as measured in its real gross domestic product, grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent during last year's final quarter, sharply trailing analysts' consensus predictions ranging from 3.0 percent to 3.6 percent.

As is the case after the first version of every GDP report, economy watchers have been trying to estimate the effect other subsequently released fourth quarter-related government and other data might have on GDP revisions to be reported in late February and late March. Predictably, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, seems to have decided that it will tell its readers about the ones which seem to point to upward revisions, and that it will ignore those which go in the opposite direction.

Old habits die hard at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press — especially when those old habits help Dear Leader's regime look better, or less awful, than it deserves.

It's been eight days, but it's still worth a look. On November 13, the government released its Monthly Treasury Statement for October, showing that Uncle Sam ran a $122 billion deficit. In his coverage of that statement's release, the AP's Martin Crutsinger, in the wire service's monthly effort at miseducating the masses, wrote the following:

The federal government reported a $94.6 blllion deficit in July, only marginally better than the $97.6 figure posted in July 2013.

As has become its habit, the Associated Press's coverage of that result contained omissions, spin and half-truths about government tax collections, spending and the origins of the Obama administration's first four years of consecutive trillion-dollar deficits. Particularly annoying is the wire service's insistence on ignoring the large tax increase in two decades as a factor — in the interest, of course, of supporting the Obama administration's call for more of the same. Veteran Martin Crutsinger was responsible for this month's rendition. Excerpts follow the jump: