Economy

The Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber was in mischaracterization mode again today in his coverage of the Business Roundtable's quarterly economic outlook release. After duly noting that the percentage of big company CEOs planning to add workers and purchase additional capital equipment over the next six months had declined (from 42% to 36% and from 48% to 43%, respectively), Rugaber…

On CNN Newsroom this morning, anchor Carol Costello reported on "Nuns on the Bus:" "Normally, you see nuns working in their closely knit communities and religious orders. But a group of nuns in the United States, they are hitting the road," she reported. "They are taking a bus on nine-state tour.  They are protesting the Ryan budget cuts they say will hurt the poor the most. The nuns are in…

Let me preface this by saying that I really appreciate everybody's response on the soapbox every week, whether they be pro or con. I certainly don't expect everybody to agree with my opinion. I rarely respond to the comments made unless I have, what I feel, is a very important and specific reason for doing so.

Financial reporter Nathaniel Popper made the front of the New York Times Sunday Business section using the language of Occupy Wall Street, in a populist crusade against high chief executive pay disguised as a news story: "C.E.O. Pay, Rising Despite the Din." Popper talked in familiar terms of "revolution," "the 99 percent," and the "nation’s have-a-lots" versus "the have-lesses," and the term…

The Hope and Change that media shamelessly sold to the nation in 2008 is starting to reach a point of solemn desperation. Perfectly exemplifying this Tuesday was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni who minutes after President Obama finished his press conference at the G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, told CNN's Piers Morgan, "He doesn’t seem in command” (video follows with transcript and…

It wouldn't quite be fair to say that the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber sugarcoated his dispatch on today's release of the April Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it would be more than fair to say he missed several chances to tell readers how significant the setbacks BLS relayed really were (openings fell 8.7% from a…

On Sunday's Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, as host Harris-Perry led a discussion of what the presidential candidates will need to do to appeal to white voters, panel member and CNBC contributor Keith Boykin asserted that Republicans have "carefully caricatured" the Democratic Party as the "party of black people," and suggested that Americans have been duped into believing that most federal…

At the rate things are going, it may be that the list of leading West Virginia Democrats attending the party's convention in Charlotte is going to be shorter than the list of those who aren't. The Associated Press reported the following in an unbylined item this evening in a terse three-paragraph squib with some pretty amusing attempts at impact-minimizing verbiage (bolds and numbered tags…

On Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin pleaded with President Obama to tell voters: "'I am doubling down on what I did.' He didn't do enough on the stimulus. He didn't do enough investing in the future. The things he believes in, he has to say we need more of it. And that's our future." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Goodwin implored…

The new Federal Reserve report showing that household net worth collapsed between 2007 and 2010 quickly became campaign fodder for both sides. Republicans seized on the data to claim that the current administration is out of touch. President Obama helped the GOP with his comments that the private sector is doing fine and that small businesses will not be affected by his health care plan.

During the 1980s, despite data which even then was telling them they were wrong, it became a mantra of a desperate establishment press that the booming economy under Ronald Reagan really wasn't that impressive because so many of the new jobs created were part-time or temporary. The data was not then readily available for temps, but it certainly was for part-time vs. full-time employment. It…

Less than two weeks after Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker won his recall election, you wouldn't expect a prominent liberal media member to be coming down on public employee benefits. Yet there was Time magazine's editor-at-large Fareed Zakaria publishing a rather shocking article Friday with the equally shocking headline "Why We Need Pension Reform":

U.S. News and World Report's Mort Zuckerman deliciously smacked down the perilously liberal and unwarrantedly arrogant Newsweek columnist Eleanor Clift on this weekend's edition of PBS's The McLaughlin Group. When Clift ignorantly said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney didn't create jobs at Bain Capital, Zuckerman quickly dismissed her saying, "I’m not going to argue. I know about…

CAUTION: Remove all food, fluids, and flammables from proximity of your computer before proceeding. You've been warned. HBO's Bill Maher and Nobel Prize-winning liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz on Friday actually couldn't calculate between the two of them how much 87 times 5 is (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):