Budget

Someone must have told New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that he had opened up a can of worms with his call on Sunday's "This Week" to create "death panels" to help balance the budget. Shortly after the ABC program aired on the East Coast, Krugman published the following explanation at his blog:

As a Monday morning treat for NewsBusters readers, here is a sampling of the quotes from the latest edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter, a compilation of the most outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media. All of the quotes, plus past issues going back to 1988, can be found at www.MRC.org. Forget What Voters Said, It’s Time for Higher Taxes Host Christiane…

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Krugman tries to clarify what he said. Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget. In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit…

Glenn Beck has been a favorite punching bag for liberal media members since he moved from HLN to Fox News and started getting huge ratings. The folks at NBC's "Saturday Night Live" have also been on this Beck bashing bandwagon, which made the following sequence during Saturday's opening sketch rather surprising (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Time Magazine is having some problems with very basic issues of logic. First, it doesn't seem to understand the difference between correlation and causation. The notion that debt is equal to income minus expenditures also eludes the folks at Time. A blog post on the magazine's website on Wednesday alleged that the Tea Party will cause hyperinflation. If that seems counterintuitive, take…

According to Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos, a deficit commission suggesting deep cuts will call the "bluff" of voters who want to severely restrict government spending. The ABC host on Thursday dismissed the plausibility of the panel's recommendations. Stephanopoulos condescendingly began, "A week after voters seemed to say that they wanted more aggressive action against the…

Despite 9.6 percent unemployment nationally, with some areas of the country suffering far worse than that, the New York Times editorial board believes state governments must raise taxes to balance their budgets:

Bill Press this weekend said Barack Obama has created more jobs in the past 20 months than George W. Bush did in his entire eight years in office. As readers will see from the actual data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Press's comments made on the "McLaughlin Group" were so false it's laughable (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Christine Amanpour spent much of Sunday’s This Week arguing with her guests about how taxes must be raised -- a theme also echoed on Face the Nation and Meet the Press -- as she brought aboard the media’s newest hero, tax-hike advocate David Stockman, and also touted Warren Buffett’s quest to hike taxes and how even conservatives in Britain have agreed to do so: “They’re saying there for every…

Darn. If only the midterm elections had been held after Friday's Employment Situation Report instead of before, the results might have been very different. Apparently that's what the Associated Press's Liz Sidoti (pictured at the top right at this post's home page tease) wants us to believe, as she ended her borderline bitter take on the origins of Congressional Republicans' successful…

On Thursday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith saw Republican goals to limit government spending as antithetical to improving the economy: "How do you unleash the economy and not spend any money, oh, by the way, because that's the other mandate, is don't increase the deficit and don't – don't – 'I don't want one more cent of tax on me.'" Smith put the question to Time magazine Washington…

Buckeye State residents are supposed to be impressed with media reports like this one from WXIX in Cincinnati telling us that passenger rail ridership increased 14% last year to almost 147,000. That's just over 400 people a day. In the whole state. Spread over seven station stops in multiple cities. You've got to be kidding me. Context, people.

On Thursday's Newsroom, CNN's Fareed Zakaria endorsed a predictably liberal solution to get the American economy moving again: enact more taxes and implement new government programs. Zakaria called for a national sales tax and advocated new government spending on "research and technology" and "upgrading the infrastructure." The CNN host also labeled tax cuts "bad stuff." Anchor Ali Velshi…

There is an axiom that is adhered to by conservative journalists that explains at least some of what for liberals is this inexplicable election. It is the Taranto Principle. Coined by the inimitable James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, the Taranto Principle encourages the worst in liberals by reporting politics with a slavish bias. The conservatives can do nothing right. The liberals can…