Economy

Somebody should tell President Obama to forget the folksy metaphors. The prez sounds phony mouthing them, and since they are unfamiliar to him, he's apt to get them wrong. As was the case at today's townhall at Binghamton University, when Obama claimed that reducing spending on government programs would be "like eating your corn seed."   You might have thought the man from Illinois would…

NewsBusters has regularly reported actor Kevin Spacey's liberal views. Yet at the annual Edinburgh International Television Festival Friday, Spacey said his hit TV series House of Cards was filmed in Baltimore, Maryland, because of the "fantastic tax breaks."

At 10 a.m. this morning, the Census Bureau essentially declared the much-ballyhooed "housing recovery" an illusion. Only 35,000 homes were actually sold in July. That translates to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 394,000, miles below the expected 487,000 and 12% below June's 455,000, which was itself revised down from 497,000. After the jump, I'll reveal what supposedly leading personal…

After a two-year hiatus, the Associated Press has apparently decided that Americans need a weekly reminder of how bad weekly layoffs were during the recession. In June 2011, possibly as a result of some hectoring by yours truly, the wire service totally or almost totally stopped reminding readers that "(unemployment) claims applications peaked at 659,000 during the recession." That tired…

President Obama made some proposals Thursday about how we can reduce college costs around the country. Speaking about this on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir show hours later, Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) actually said, and I quote, “There is no reason why a young person should have to pay for college.”

Maybe we should cue up the old classic "High Hopes," especially given its ironic title, every time one of these "unintended consequence of Obamacare" stories comes along. Instead of singing "Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant," we can all sing, "Oops, there goes another Obamacare 'quirk.'" One of the latest "quirks," also described as a "weird" result of the progressive movement's…

It really is astonishing the limited intellectual capacity possessed by many liberal media members. On Wednesday, MSNBC's Toure Neblett actually said on Twitter that slavery is partly to blame for the high unemployment rate in the black community:

Maybe because it's a UFO, we're not supposed to be able to explain it. No, I'm not talking about unidentified flying objects at the recently acknowledged Area 51. I'm talking about an unexplained financial observation, the one made by the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber on Monday after the release of the July Regional and State Employment and Unemployment report Monday morning. Rugaber…

At the end of Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, moderator David Gregory excitedly announced to his panel of guests: "We're coming up on an anniversary that is going to give the President an opportunity to highlight some – a presidential leadership moment." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Gregory was referring to the upcoming 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have…

Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos on Sunday parroted Barack Obama's talking points, insisting that a shutdown of the government would wound a "weak" Republican Party for a "generation." On Good Morning America, Stephanopoulos touted the President for "cutting his vacation short" due to unrest in Egypt. After allowing that Obama has "little leverage" over House…

A November 15, 2010 blog post by Michael S. Derby at the Wall Street Journal ("San Francisco Fed Official Says QE2 Is Working") told us that "The Federal Reserve‘s recently announced plan to buy $600 billion in Treasury securities to improve economic growth is having a positive effect on growth." The Fed official involved also predicted "the U.S. gross domestic product to come in at 2.5% this…

Politico's current front-page headline characterizes Detroit as "The Right's Perfect Piñata." In the actual story, one expects at least a feeble attempt by writer Hadas Gold to come up with a tangible reason as to why Detroit doesn't deserve its status as an perfect-storm exemplar of the failures of liberalism, public-sector unions, a race-based political model the elites once praised, and…

What do you do when you're the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, and you're trying to do your level best to described a floundering economy without incurring the wrath of the Obama administration? You search for positive-sounding words to describe what is in reality a marginal situation. The AP seems to have settled on "steady" and "steadily."

One thing which is arguably worse for one's health than Obamacare is the act of reading a Paul Krugman column at the New York Times. In his latest equivalent of a DNC press release on Thursday published in Friday's print edition, Krugman lambasted GOP Senator Rand Paul and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as "politicians who gleefully add to the misinformation" the general public allegedly…