Economy

The Esquire blogger Charles Pierce says Elizabeth Warren’s economic message is popular, but, for reasons that include a Republican “campaign of vandalism” and Democratic ineptitude, she doesn’t get the credit she deserves for it.

An unbylined "Q&A" column at the Associated Press yesterday began with the following false declaration: "The $4 trillion experiment is over." That just isn't so. Maybe the Federal Reserve is done building up its debt holdings — that is by no means certain — but the "experiment" known as "quantitative easing," or "QE," won't be over until the Fed fully unwinds those balances. In the meantime…

On Saturday, Erika Rawes at USA Today's Wall Street Cheat Sheet engaged in some impressive gymnastics as she discussed the middle class and identified seven things its members "can't afford anymore" (the headline) or that "a larger percentage of people have trouble paying for" (the content). It's a sloppy list. One of the items — debt — isn't a "thing" at all, but rather the result of buying too…

Carol Costello's liberal bias emerged yet again on Tuesday's CNN Newsroom, as she covered the catastrophic failure of the Antares rocket during a launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Costello wondered, "Can NASA really trust private companies to do its business?" The anchor later pressed on with her skepticism of private business: "Well, you know, it's a concern, because NASA also plans to…

A blogger tells DKos readers that even if they’re disappointed that Democrats aren’t farther to the left, it’s vital for them to vote in the midterms against racist ultra-right-wing GOPers.

Last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at a campaign rally for Democrat Martha Coakley and told her liberal audience “don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” On Monday night, the entire panel on Fox News’ Special Report w/ Bret Baier eagerly mocked Ms. Clinton's comments with Chuck Lane of the Washington Post joking that he “thought NBC…

As of Monday night, the major English and Spanish broadcast networks have blacked out all mention of remarks made by Hillary Clinton on Friday at a campaign event for Massachusetts Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley that businesses and corporations do not create jobs. Speaking at the campaign event, Clinton told the audience that: “Don't let anybody tell you that, you know – it's…

Did you hear about Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott in Texas saying of opponent Wendy Davis, "We need to keep the whore away from the door"? Of course you didn't. We know that if Abbott had said anything like that, it would become national news story more important than even Ebola within minutes. So why is it only news at about a dozen web-based center-right outlets that Democrat…

On Wednesday night, comedian Jimmy Kimmel used Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) annual Wastebook as an opportunity to mock the federal government’s continued waste of taxpayer dollars. The ABC late night host hilariously asked his audience if they could “tell the difference between a real government expenditure from Wastebook and an idea a stoner came up with on his own.” 

At their debate Tuesday night, former Florida governor (2007-2010), former Republican (1974-2010), former independent (2010-2012) and current Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist got out the crying towel over why the Sunshine State's economy was so bad on his watch. He also refused to acknowledge that incumbent Republican Governor Rick Scott deserves any credit for the state economy's…

Josh Lederman's report this morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, treats President Barack Obama's return to Chicago as a trip down memory lane: "Obama got glimpses of a simpler time when his life was for the most part, normal: the unpaid bills on his desk, the volunteers who pitched in on his first Senate campaign, the day he marched in seven Fourth of July parades."…

The White House is apparently feeling pretty full of itself over the fiscal 2014 federal budget result it has just reported. Reacting to the news that this year's deficit was "only" $483.4 billion, White House budget director Shaun Donovan crowed that "This is a return to fiscal normalcy." The press, of course including Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press, has accepted all of this with little…

On October 8, Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press wrote that "(President Barack) Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." In a NewsBusters post later that day, I pegged Obama's true inheritance at roughly $245 billion as of when he was first sworn into office, and at about $600 billion if projected over the full fiscal year. The actual deficit for fiscal…

In an all too typical unskeptical report, Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, allowed President Barack Obama to claim, in Kuhnhenn's words, that "health and security experts continue to tell him that the screening measures already in place for travelers are more effective" than "restricting travel to the U.S. from the three Ebola-stricken West African nations."…