Economy

New host, same loopy logic. Ed Schultz is gone from his weekday MSNBC slot, but the show's name lives on until Chris Hayes comes on board next month. Sitting in for Schultz tonight was the never-at-a-loss-for-words Michael Eric Dyson.   Discussing Elizabeth Warren's latest Senate hearing stunt, on the minimum wage, Dyson gushed "wouldn't that be great" if the minimum wage were raised to $22…

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said Tuesday that America is "headed the way of Cyprus." Such was said on Fox News's Special Report near the end of a discussion about the state of California retroactively collecting taxes and interest after a court struck down a pro-business initiative established years ago.

As NewsBusters previously reported, HBO's Bill Maher said Friday that liberals could lose him because of the combined federal and state income taxes he now pays as a California resident. Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had some fun with this Tuesday saying, "It's amazing the things liberals do not know" (transcript follows with commentary):

The scare tactics that Democrats from President Obama on down have employed to wring political benefit out of the sequester have apparently hit a despicable new low.  In comments made about the deaths overnight of seven U.S. Marines in a training incident in Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Dem from Nevada, reportedly suggested that we may see more such incidents because the sequester…

At the Washington Post's Post Politics blog on Monday, Juliet Eilperin revealed that the White House has notified participants invited to the April 1 Easter Egg Roll that the event "is subject to cancellation due to funding uncertainty surrounding the Executive Office of the President and other federal agencies." Eilperin only considered the White House's latest obvious example of "no petty…

"If ever the mainstream media reaches a point where they recognize that if we destroy this nation and destroy the economy, they, too, will be destroyed, I think at that point they will start asking the tough questions and helping to move the population in the right direction." So predicted Dr. Benjamin Carson on Fox News's Hannity Monday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There's a reason why Media Research Center sister site CNS News had to put out a story about how much the government has spent so far this year -- $1.505 tillion -- after Wednesday's release of the February Monthly Treasury Statement: Two of the three major wire services failed to report that obviously important number, and the third saved it for their writeup's final sentence. What follows…

The official Monthly Treasury Statement for February came out Wednesday showing a deficit for the month of $204 billion, basically the same as the Congressional Budget Office predicted several days earlier. The reported deficit through five months of the fiscal year is $494 billion, down from $580 billion a year earlier. That February result was an "improvement" of $28 billion over the $232…

New York Times economics reporter Annie Lowrey's "news analysis" on Wednesday downplayed the gargantuan national debt: "Dispute Over a Balanced Budget Is Philosophical as Much as Fiscal." Lowrey, who on March 2 called the hard-to-detect budget cuts of sequestration "painful and stupid," gave the game away in her lead sentence, signaling that she doesn't really think that enormous debt is much…

In an interview with former Bill Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos at ABC (transcript here), President Barack Obama claimed that “We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt." Despite his claim, no one can know that for sure, but it's at least consistent with what he said during the 2012 presidential campaign ("we don't have to worry about it short term"). Obama's elaboration on…

Back in February, I noted the Washington Post’s egregious omission of Senate Democrats as a category in a poll gauging the blame game if sequestration went into effect.  Sequestration was an initiative spearheaded by the Obama White House, which is part of the story that has many on the left ripping liberal journalism icon Bob Woodward for reporting.  Well, what do you know, in a new poll, the…

In Monday's New York Times, in a report which appeared online late Sunday, reporters Richard W. Stevenson and John Harwood devoted considerable space to the idea that President Obama's latest "outreach" effort is primarily an attempt to "salvage a big deficit-reduction deal," and not a political ploy to show voters in the 2014 congressional elections that he's really interested in achieving a…

When liberals and their media allies have an agenda to push, they’ll use any tool at hand. The left often rails against the presence of religion in civic life, mocking conservative Christians as “Taliban” agitating for theocracy. But other times, they find faith to be a handy weapon to bludgeon conservatives. And they’ll go so far as to reinterpret and rewrite the Bible to justify any liberal…

Despite billing his interview with Barack Obama as "no holds barred," Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday skipped several tough questions and only gently quizzed the President on others. On the issue of the closing of White House tours due to sequester cuts, the former Democratic operative delicately wondered, "Was canceling them really necessary?...So, no reconsideration…