Economy

The Daily Beast is ramping up the attacks on conservatives who don’t believe a catastrophe would result if the United States reaches its debt limit. On Monday, the Beast churned out a story ripping debt-ceiling “denialists,” and on Tuesday, another article slammed debt-ceiling “truthers.” Patricia Murphy’s Monday article, titled “The GOP’s Top 10 Debt Ceiling Denialists,” was a sort of…

 One way to know if a journalist is asking a softball question is when the President of the United States compliments the reporter after he or she asks it. That happened twice on Tuesday as Barack Obama talked to reporters about the government shutdown. The President called on Sam Stein of the liberal Huffington Post website. Stein dutifully wondered, "With Speaker Boehner so far unwilling to…

In case you haven’t noticed, the government shutdown is all the GOP’s fault.  Today’s Chicago Tribune wanted to make sure readers knew that with a front-page headline titled “Hard-right bloc sticks to its guns: Shutdown stalemate continues as lawmakers in safe seats hold sway.” The article reports that some House Republicans “have chosen to defy Washington’s traditional norms of conversation and…

Poor Carl Bernstein: he's suffering a bad bout of MSM nostalgia. He longs for the good old media days when the news was dominated by the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the then three broadcast networks. They could slam Republicans with impunity, without any conservative media counterweight. In covering the shutdown, today's media culture, kvetches Carl, is just too darn…

Evidence of testiness on the Democratic side of the 17% government shutdown continues to accumulate. Today, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney had a tense exchange with ABC's Jonathan Karl, who was apparently so taken aback by Carney's answer to another reporter that he interjected himself into the dialog — to correct Carney about what House Speaker John Boehner said earlier today about his…

In a story published early this morning by Manu Raju at the Politico which is primarily about Senate Majority Harry Reid's plans to aggressively pursue reelection in 2016, the Nevada senator took shots at the establishment press for "trying so hard to be fair that you are unfair." Proving Reid wrong in real time, Raju failed to mention Reid's response last week to a question by Dana Bash at CNN…

Hard-left MSNBC host Ed Schultz on Monday took his assault on the Republican Party to a new level, declaring that John Boehner is a "traitor" to America for not giving in to Barack Obama on the government shutdown. After railing about how congressional GOP members are trying to destroy the country, the Ed Show anchor delivered his verdict: "And they will shut down the government and they will not…

 Who does George Stephanopoulos work for? ABC News or the Democratic Party? In a This Week Interview on Sunday, the former operative to Bill Clinton foisted the blame for the government shutdown on John Boehner and House Republicans. During the 13 minute interview, Stephanopoulos repeatedly started questions this way: "The Democrats say...The Democrats, including Senate Democrat Harry Reid, have…

Dontcha love it when liberals accuse people they don't agree with of not loving their country? It's especially delicious watching the perilously liberal Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday point her holier than thou finger at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.), a man who just two weeks ago stood for 21 hours on the floor of the Senate demonstrating for the entire world how much he loves his…

(UPDATE, 11:40 a.m.: AmberAlert.gov is working again.) In yet another news story which has bubbled up through social media and the blogosphere and which will test the establishment press's willingness to ignore obvious news, the Obama adminstration's Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has taken AmberAlert.gov offline. To the extent that it interrupts what DOJ has…

Is it really the place for a game show to take sides in a political debate? The folks at Family Feud certainly think so, for some genius actually decided to send a tweet to the show's Twitter followers Saturday which read "@SpeakerBoehner, stop letting extremists sabotage our economy. End the #TeaPartyShutdown now. Speaker Boehner don't let Cruz run the US":

Syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan and the Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift got into quite a heated debate about the government shutdown on PBS’s McLaughlin Group Friday. At one point, Buchanan said Obama “wants to maximize the pain in order to maximize his political gain…It is a sinister and sadistic tactic” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

White House staff aren’t the only ones looking for sob stories about folks affected by the government shutdown.  The media are doing what they can to assist. Columnist Phil Kadner of the Southtown Star, a publication of the Chicago Sun-Times, lends a hand with “Shutdown becomes real for local residents.” The article begins: Edgar Mullins, of Richton Park, and Justin Jones, of Chicago Heights…

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, George Will has joined Fox News. In his first comments on the network, Will said on Friday's Special Report, "The President’s rather enjoying this [shutdown], and if the emblematic statement of the first Obama term was 'A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,' this term defined after just nine months is 'A crisis is a beautiful thing to create'” (video follows…