Economy

Here we go again. The State of California's budget is again in crisis, facing a budget deficit of $16 billion, which is $6.8 billion higher than projected mere months ago. Governor Jerry Brown is browbeating residents to pass tax initiatives in November which include "a quarter-cent increase in the state sales tax for four years and a seven-year hike on incomes of $250,000 or more that will…

Searches on "Government Accountability Office" (not in quotes), "shale," and "mittal" at the Associated Press's national site return nothing relevant to the energy-related story which will follow. A Google News search on "Anu Mittal," the person from the GAO who on Thursday testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology`s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, appears…

CNN's Fareed Zakaria asked a question this weekend guaranteed to raise some eyebrows not only on both sides of the aisle but also on both sides of the Atlantic. On the program bearing his name, Zakaria amazingly asked Sunday if the economic problems in Europe are caused by democracy and not austerity (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Let's grant that Associated Press reporter Mitch Weiss, in his dispatch Saturday on the headache Democratic National Convention host state North Carolina has become for the left, acknowledged by quoting someone else that "Nobody can sugarcoat the fact that we got problems here." That said, the AP reporter applied quite a bit of sweetener with generous pinches of distortion in several instances…

As Zero Hedge wrote this morning in response to today's initial unemployment claims report and the related press write-ups: "Same Trick Different Week." As has been so typical in analogous instances for the year or so I have been following the weekly claims numbers closely, the Associated Press (aka the Administration's Press), Reuters, and Bloomberg headlined a "dip," a "fall," and a "drop" in…

In today's Wall Street Journal, top economist Robert Barro has an important essay on why so-called "stimulus" spending really is a drag on economies. It's must-reading for anyone opposed in principle to wasteful liberal spending passed off as some magic Keynesian pill:

The Obama Palace Guard is waging a losing battle to suppress the truth in a new ad from Americans for Prosperity, which explains how more than $2 billion in “stimulus” money went to foreign companies. The “Wasteful Spending” ad, airing in 8 states with a media buy of $6.1 million, has also drawn criticism from the self-styled arbiters of political truth at the Washington Post. You can…

Martin Bashir -- he who slammed Ann Romney as "two-faced," gratuitously ripped fellow Christian Rick Santorum by comparing him to Stalin, and cravenly suggested Santorum's less of a genuine Christian than Barack Obama  judged by the amount of money the men gave to charity respectively -- mounted his moral high horse yet again to thunder hellfire and brimstone upon a conservative Republican.…

In one of a virtually endless stream of such examples, a Monday Associated Press report by Elaine Ganley and Greg Keller on challenges facing newly elected French Prime Minister, Socialist Francois Hollande, described him as "the leftist who has pledged to buck Europe's austerity trend." What a deceptive joke. Europe's attempt at "austerity" can't be a "trend," because it hasn't even started…

Last August, Politico revealed that the Obama campaign intended to make Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney "a sort of political Gordon Gekko" if he won the nomination. Right out of that playbook, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Monday compared Romney to the financial villain of the '80s movie classic "Wall Street" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CNN's Soledad O'Brien once again jumped to the defense of the Obama campaign, as she tried to argue on Monday that the economy is "trending" in the President's favor. She countered Romney aide Andrea Saul who hit Obama's record of net job loss while in office. "When you say 'hasn't created net jobs,' of course you are talking about there was so much job loss that even started to happen…

Monday's CBS This Morning brought on former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich to brush off the effect of French socialist Francois Hollande's election on the world economy, despite the immediate decline in global stock markets: "I don't think there's really much danger." Anchor Erica Hill had asked the pundit if there was "a danger in throwing off the French economy and the ripple effect…

An openly gay adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney resigned last week, and the Obama-loving media interested in discussing anything but the poor economy jumped all over it. NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard discussed this with Don Lemon on CNN Newsroom Saturday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It is more than a little odd that each of the three wire services identified in today's earlier post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), in reporting on yesterday's OMG-awful jobs report, somehow failed to mention something about the data presented. Specifically, at Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Associated Press (here and here), five reporters in four stories somehow avoided using two truly required…