Budget

MSNBC's faux conservative Joe Scarborough dismissed the conservative credentials of Republican front-runners Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney while promoting Jon Huntsman – the GOP darling of liberals like Jimmy Carter. Scarborough's Politico op-ed ripped Gingrich and Romney for flip-flopping on issues like abortion and global warming. He strangely ignored the time where Huntsman, MSNBC's…

MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Monday perfectly demonstrated that he is willing to contentiously debate issues with conservative guests without regard for the truth. In the middle of a Hardball segment about the Democrat proposal to extend the payroll tax holiday, Matthews ignorantly accused the far more knowledgeable Ron Christie of "complicating" the discussion leading his guest to marvelously…

You knew this was coming. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman - might he finally be realizing that our budget deficits can't possibly be solved by just eliminating the Bush tax cuts? - is now calling for marginal rates even higher than when Bill Clinton was in office:

There was a rather telling moment on ABC's This Week Sunday. When during the Roundtable segment the Washington Post's Michael Gerson criticized Barack Obama for his lack of leadership involving the now failed Super Committee, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts quickly came to the President's defense (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It seems that everyone in Washington believes that there is zero chance of any kind of economic calamity befalling this nation until January 2013, even though the government is on track to stay on self-destructive autopilot until then. I do not understand how or why anyone can be that confident. Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, almost gleefully…

If you had the misfortune of watching Weekends with Alex Witt on MSNBC Saturday morning, you sadly were treated to four minutes of propaganda about how we Americans just don’t pay enough taxes – period! CQ Roll Call’s David Hawkings was invited on to misinform the gullible about Americans’ tax rates being too low, corporations shirking their tax responsibilities, the poor paying more than…

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer and NPR's Nina Totenberg had a humorous exchange on PBS's Inside Washington Friday. After mocking Totenberg for the "surprise" of her giving Democrats on the Super Committee credit, Krauthammer scolded her for constantly interrupting him saying, "I'm in the middle of a sentence, and I am going to get to the end, and I will let you know with punctuation…

On last night's CBS Evening News, correspondent Nancy Cordes listed one and only one sticking point in the failure of the so-called "supercommittee" to reach a deal, and that was, she said, how "Republicans on the supercommittee were pushing to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent for everyone." And only one politician, Democratic Senator and supercommitee member John Kerry, was permitted to…

Was Alina Cho flirting with Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) on CNN Monday? While discussing the Super Committee's failure on American Morning, Cho oddly said to her guest, "Just yesterday on Meet the Press you said there were things you agreed to that you didn't want to talk about public, which sounded very sexy I might add" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CBS's Erica Hill urged "conservative activist" Grover Norquist to influence the members of Congress who have signed his no tax hikes pledge to consider raising taxes during an interview on Monday's Early Show: "There's still not a lot getting done in Washington, even with some of the compromise. So why not push those people to maybe do a little bit more?" Hill pressed the idea of compromise…

When CNN's Carol Costello admitted to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) her inability to convince him that Republicans on the super committee didn't raise enough tax revenue, he simply responded that "your job is not to convince me." In an interview during the bottom of the 8 a.m. hour, the senator had finished explaining how Republicans had proposed to get rid of tax loopholes.  The proposal had come…

While grilling Arizona Senator Jon Kyl on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, host David Gregory tried to bolster the argument for tax increases: "The Bush tax cuts...real deficit hawks, many of them happening to be Republicans....said let them all expire for everybody. For the rich, for the middle class. If you really want to get serious about the deficit, let the Bush tax cuts expire for…

On Thursday's episode of The Office on NBC, character Oscar Martinez, played by actor Oscar Nunez, apologizes to a park ranger at the Gettysburg battlefield for both the ranting of character Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) and for "the Republicans who are cutting your funding." [Audio available here] Despite Dunder Mifflin's accountant taking a gratuitous shot at the GOP, the historic Civil…

The dictionary definition of "stimulate" relevant to a nation's economy is "to rouse to action or effort." We still have journalists who gullibly relay the notion that extending unemployment benefits and increasing entitlement programs will "rouse" the economy "to action of effort," despite almost three years of evidence that such is not the case. One of them is Andrew Taylor, a writer for…