Economy

Yesterday, Politico reported that in a Wall Street speech, Hillary sounded more like "a Goldman Sachs managing director." Today, Bloomberg's Josh Green quoted a financial CEO who attended another Clinton speech as saying Hillary "lavished praise on Wall Street, said you guys are the pillar of our economy."  Ruh-roh: how will the increasingly left-wing Dem electorate react to that? GOP strategist…

On Friday, in its January Employment Situation Summary, the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics served up a stack of lemons disguised as lemonade. President Barack Obama declared in a tweet that "We've recovered from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s," and the press dutifully fell in line. The BLS reported that the economy added seasonally adjusted 151,000 payroll jobs and that the…

Daily Kos writer Mark E Andersen makes political correctness sound healthy and utterly bland -- the ideological equivalent of plain oatmeal. “Political correctness is nothing evil,” declared Andersen in a Sunday post. “It is not a liberal plot…It is about being a decent human being—period.” Andersen hinted that some non-decent, anti-PC human beings (i.e., conservatives) are concealing racist and…

MSNBC host and Thursday’s Presidential Candidates Debate co-moderator Rachel Maddow wondered aloud to Hillary Clinton whether some of the positions she’s held at various points warrant concern for the Democratic Party that she’s “too far to the right...to be the party's standard bearer” in the 2016 general election.

On Wednesday, Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press was tasked with covering ADP's morning report on January private-sector payrolls. At 8:15 a.m., the payroll and benefits giant estimated that the economy added 205,000 seasonally adjusted private-sector jobs last month. Rugaber also attended the 8:30 a.m. conference call which followed the report's release. It's clear that he was on it…

One of the economy's more important bellwethers has been on a steep year-long decline which shows no signs of abating this year. It's barely news, and much of the sparse reporting seen has been incomplete and sloppy. Truckinginfo.com reported today that "January was a tough month for truck manufacturers as Class 8 truck orders were down 35% compared to the previous month, according to a…

Liberal propaganda ruins everything, even comic books.   The January edition of Captain America featured a reptilian supervillain named Viper who sounded a lot like Republican presidential candidates. Viper ranted about American exceptionalism and said, “Someone has to make America marvelous again.” He also complained about “overreaching government” oppressing businesses and asked, “Where in the…

On Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, GOP presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were both on the receiving end of HBO comedian Bill Maher's latest anti-conservative vitriol as he called Cruz a "creep" and a "practiced liar" while comparing Rubio's religious beliefs to those of the terrorist group ISIS.

A Sunday morning report by Associated Press political writer John O'Connor acts as if the the sordid history of fiscal irresponsibility in the State of Illinois is a new development brought on by a stubborn Republican governor in just the past seven months. What hogwash. The state has had a large backlog of delinquent unpaid bills for a decade, if not longer. Five years ago, a Democratic…

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

Observers can be excused for thinking that the politicial establishment is preparing the battlespace to convince us plebes that progress and economic growth are overrated. (That's sort of odd for people who call themselves "progressives," but making sense is not their strong suit.) How interesting, for example, that Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon's book, The Rise and Fall of…

As has been its habit during the Obama administration when the economy turns in a poor performance, the press's coverage of yesterday's report on U.S. economic growth focused on how much better next quarter's news will supposedly be. Especially in this instance, the beat reporters and pundits should have looked at whether or not yesterday's initial result will hold up, or whether it's likely to…

Friday morning, the government reported that the economy grew at a pathetic annual rate of 0.7 percent in last year's final quarter. As it did in covering the disappointing Christmas shopping season, the business press partially blamed yesterday's awful result on the weather, i.e., warm weather.

The Associated Press may be down to one person in the whole wide world who will tell its economics reporters what they want to hear when the federal government releases economic data. That's what you almost have to conclude after reading the wire service's reports on two of Thursday's major releases, namely last week's initial unemployment claims and December's durable goods orders and shipments…