Economy

Rand Paul to reporter: "Calm down a bit here, Kelly. Let me answer the question." Joe Scarborough to guest: 'Let me finish my sentence and then you can be a condescending liberal Emanuel." The two responses sound similar, don't they? Two guys getting frustrated by their interlocutors' interruptions.  The irony is that Joe Scarborough devoted a segment on today's Morning Joe to rapping Rand Paul…

On Monday, President Obama released his 2016 budget, which calls for increased spending and raising taxes, and on MSNBC’s The Cycle, so-called conservative co-host Abby Huntsman did her best to scold the GOP for opposing the tax-and-spend Obama budget. Speaking to Lauren Fox of National Journal, Huntsman proclaimed that Republicans’ “big thing is we’ve got to cut spending, this is not something…

The Seattle Seahawks yesterday - in a moment of profound foolishness - forsook Beast Mode for Least Mode.  And it cost them the Super Bowl.   But they can take ever so slight solace - the Media has been in Least Mode for decades.  This has been on prominent display throughout the Barack Obama Administration - and certainly when it comes to the Administration’s many, MANY unilateral power grabs…

At the recent meeting of the world's elites in Davos, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon circulated a proposal to ban cars in all major cities in the world by dense-packing their layouts. The cost, as I noted on Monday: a mere $90 trillion (that's right, trillion). It's telling in a foreboding sense that the pair's idea wasn't laughed off the continent…

Yesterday's government report on the economy's growth, which told us that the nation's gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent during the fourth quarter, sharply underachieved analysts' expectations of an annualized 3.0 percent to 3.6 percent. The stock market clearly reacted negatively to the downside surprise. Bloomberg's take at the end of the day: "U.S. stocks fell Friday…

Even Charles Babington at the Associated Press, for once not the completely beholden Administration's Press, seemed to be having a hard time buying what Democrats at a meeting in Philadelphia were selling. Unfortunately, he decided to let Joe Biden's direct contradiction of his party's congressional delegation's sunnyside-up stance on the economy go unreported. In a video carried at the Weekly…

If someone fools you once, shame on them. If they fool you with the same trick a second time, shame on you. If they "fool" you a third time — well, you must be in on it. That's my take on Bloomberg News's virtually euphoric reaction to yesterday's new-home sales release from the Census Bureau. The wire service's Shobhana Chandra celebrated how seasonally adjusted December sales were at "the…

On MSNBC's PoliticsNation on Tuesday, host Al Sharpton touted liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank making a "bold prediction" about the remainder of Barack Obama's presidency: "...you wrote, quote, 'If the economy continues on its current trajectory, as most expect, he'll leave office a popular president and leave the 2016 Democratic nominee with a relatively easy past to victory.'"

Egberto Willies claims that Obama “gave the traditional mainstream media carte blanche for six years,” but that “they failed to report truthfully, accurately, and in an unbiased manner” on issues including Obamacare and the economy. Therefore, Obama now “is effecting a paradigm shift. He is unshackling us all from a type of slavery to the traditional mainstream media.”

Ever since the publication "Earth in the Balance" in 1992, we've seen the press minimize the public's exposure to the more outrageous ideas and quotes emanating from former Vice President Al Gore. Concerning that original book, Gore's statement that "The internal combustion engine is the greatest enemy of mankind" and his contention that it could and be eliminated in 25 years are hardly known by…

On Friday, Melissa Quinn at the Daily Signal, after the release of the government's "Union Members -- 2014" report, uniquely observed that the unionized percentage of the public- and private-sector nonagricultural wage and salary U.S. workforce had reached "its lowest rate in 100 years." From what I can tell in web and news searches, despite the fact that virtually any 100-year record is…

In a reversal of a key proposal from his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama moved on Tuesday to drop the plan to tax 529 college-savings accounts after outcry from members of both parties and a direct appeal on Air Force One from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). When it came to the networks covering this backtracking by the President on this deeply unpopular idea…

This post follows up on Friday morning's entry (at BizzyBlog; at NewsBusters) showing that "Fewer Than 0.5% of Americans Live in Fully Recovered Counties." This is the kind of news which would be front and center with the nation's establishment press if such a report came out during a Republican or conservative presidential administration. With Team Obama in place, NACo's work has been virtually…

It would seem that the conversation at Politico went something like this: "Hey, we need to hit the Obama administration for the havoc its policies have wreaked on the middle class. But we can't go after them too hard, because that might burn some bridges, and we'll lose our stenographer — er, journalistic — access. So we need to use someone sympathetic to Democrats who will know how not to go…