Economy

When in doubt, blame Reagan -- all-purpose ethos of liberal radio host Thom Hartmann. Anyone listening to Hartmann's program, among the most popular in that increasingly desolate landscape known as liberal radio, won't wait long before he slams Ronald Reagan for all manner of economic sin.  

Disabled, divorced, with a degree, working several jobs yet making less than $10,000 a year. Struggling to pay bills. Unable to buy presents for her children. Waiting for her disability to come through. Dependent on her parents. That was the sad story that a woman told Bernie Sanders at an event in Iowa yesterday. On today's Morning Joe, after airing that clip, a visibly moved Mika Brzezinski…

Over the past several months, economics reporters at the Associated Press have told us time and time and time again that the U.S. economy is "largely insulated" from adverse economic developments overseas. So why is the AP's Martin Crutsinger going along with the now-shifting conventional "wisdom" that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve may have to defer implementing additional interest-rate…

Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, author and former Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham made a crack suggesting he would prefer dog excrement for President over GOP candidates Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, as host Maher asked panel members which of the two Republican frontrunners they would pick if they had no other choice. Meacham also tied former President…

When the Associated Press issues a brief unbylined report on an obviously important matter, one's first instinct should always be to ask: "What are they deciding not to tell us?" More often than not, the answer is "Plenty." An example justifying the need to look further appeared this morning when the wire service published a five-paragraph report on inflation in Venezuela's economy:

You could have set your watch to it. When a leftist local, gubernatorial or presidential regime enters its final year after demonstrating its corruption, incompetence and inexcusable disrespect for law and procedure to that point, someone in the press will directly or indirectly excuse them by saying that the entity that person is running is "ungovernable," or that "its best days are behind it…

On December 28, the headline at a conveniently unbylined report at the Associated Press screamed: "HOLIDAY SPENDING UP 8 PERCENT; ONLINE SALES SURGE." As I noted in a post later that day, this was odd, to say the least, given that even the incurably optimistic National Retail Federation had predicted an increase of only 3.7 percent. It turned out that the reported growth rate was based on the…

Poor President Barack Obama. Juan Williams, in a Monday column at The Hill, insists that "the president is not to blame for the rancor and polarization that have characterized his presidency," and "is not responsible for the unprecedented obstructionism employed by (Mitch) McConnell’s Senate Republicans." Why, In Williams's world, Obama has apparently been the very model of civility, while…

Hillary's in hot water. Needs Fauxcohantas. That, in a nutshell, was Mika Brzezinski's argument on today's Morning Joe. At the end of a segment highlighting the way Bernie Sanders has gone after Clinton for the massive "speaking fees" she's received from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, Mika concluded: "the only person that can help her now is Elizabeth Warren, and she's going to have…

On Wednesday, Amber Phillips at the Washington Post's The Fix blog impressively took President Obama to task for his over-the-top bragging about the nation's mediocre (and likely getting worse) economy. She noted that "the biggest knock on the Obama economy ... is that the recovery has been very good for the wealthy and certain sectors and not so much for the middle class and everyone else." Hear…

During the middle years of last decade, the business press, including the Associated Press, worked the word "recession" into its reports on the economy quite regularly. Yesterday, despite a current economy facing far worse fundamentals than were seen during 2007, the AP's Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon gave us a nearly 882-word treatise on "WHY GLOBAL WOES AND SINKING STOCKS DON'T MEAN US…

Hillary Clinton conducted interviews on four of the five major Sunday morning talk shows (the lone omission being Fox News Sunday) and while CNN’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s Chuck Todd, and even CBS’s John Dickerson asked questions of substance, the fourth interview offered a stark contrast with former Clinton official and Clinton Foundation donor George Stephanopoulos giving her a measly three questions…

The Associated Press's coverage of Friday's deep U.S. stock market dive in two Friday afternoon reports engaged in the reality avoidance longtime readers here have come to expect. An item by Stan Choe ("Get used to it: Big drops for stocks are back again") spent most of its verbiage on "volatility," and only cited "China's sharp economic slowdown ... Tensions in the Middle East ... the plunge in…

The press's fierce determination to avoid blaming any of the steep decline in this nation's stock markets so far this year on horrid U.S. economic data, or on the Obama administration which has given us such a sour economic environment, has gone way beyond annoying. Shortly after noon at Yahoo Finance, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average's Friday dive hit 500 points, Nicole Sinclair, who is also…