Economy

On her eponymous MSNBC program on Wednesday, host Andrea Mitchell slammed congressional Republicans for voting down reauthorization and funding of the U.S. Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank: "If I'm sitting out there and watching this program, I would, you know, likely say right now these people in Congress are idiots." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Mitchell interviewed…

Here's some good advice from Rush Limbaugh's opening monologue today: "If I were you, I would regard every AP story, particularly this year, as nothing more than a propaganda piece for the reelection of Barack Obama." What occasioned Rush's rant is the thinly disguised propaganda today from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, concerning President Obama's visit to Cushing,…

Claims that Obamacare includes “death panels” sparked the ire of supporters of the law, who called the claim outrageous, but now - as Obamacare turns 2 years old -- the Congressional Budget Office admits the law itself is going to kill the jobs of 800,000 Americans. At a recent House Budget Committee hearing, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed as much, saying that indeed indeed “there…

In his latest "Economic Scene" column for Wednesday's New York Times, "Inequality Undermines Democracy," Eduardo Porter seemed puzzled by why Americans aren't into class warfare. Porter, a former economics reporter for the Times, fretted America was turning into a "hereditary plutocracy" and put in another plug for the lefties of Occupy Wall Street.

You've got to admire the determination of Derek Kravitz at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to find lemonade among the lemons known as the monthly new-home construction statistics from the Census Bureau. Why, he was even able to find a guy who said that "housing permits-not the starts" are more relevant in gauging the health of the market. Did it ever occur to these guys…

"I appreciate that you are correctly fact-checking the Republican claims." MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell actually said this to Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Wednesday in a discussion about oil and gas prices (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters has been reporting for weeks, the Obama-loving media - quite contrary to what they did when George W. Bush was in office - are doing their darnedest to downplay the seriousness of the exploding prices people are paying at the pump. Doing its part Wednesday was CNN Money which actually published a piece with the laughable headline, "Rising Gas Prices Aren't as Bad as You Think."

There may be no more pompous and conceited person on the airwaves today than CNN contributor Paul Begala. Appearing on Erin Burnett OutFront Tuesday, the former Clinton adviser actually said, "I put together a federal budget that was balanced, and it created the greatest boom in American history and global history" (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo):

Once again, CNN's Piers Morgan is pouting that corporations like Apple should bring jobs back to the U.S. simply because they should. Morgan was rebutted by Chris Christie the last time he made that reasoning at the expense of shareholders' profits, but he was at it again on Monday night. He has a "constant nagging problem" with Apple making money overseas. "So they are making squillions of…

Charlie Rose surprised Rep. Paul Ryan on Tuesday's CBS This Morning by promoting the latest smear from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Rose displayed their fake horror-movie poster with Ryan's face beside House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Speaker John Boehner. It included the caption, "Just when you thought Medicare was safe, THEY'RE BACK. This time, they want to finish it…

When President Barack Obama recently pontificated on gas prices, the broadcast networks listened, and parroted his explanations of why gas prices have more than doubled since he took office. But the networks had a much different take on gas prices when a Republican president was in office. On March 7, 2012, Obama declared: “We've got 2 percent of the world oil reserves; we use 20 percent.…

Apparently, Grover Norquist and the Republican Party are to blame for the rising debt, according to CNN's Fareed Zakaria. In his Sunday interview with Norquist, Zakaria argued that the GOP tax-cutting agenda failed to also cut spending, which led to the country's increase in borrowing. Zakaria's sloppy logic also revealed itself later when he posed to Norquist that tax cuts didn't…

On Friday, Darren Samuelsohn at the Politico (HT Hot Air), the place where it seems that inconvenient stories go so the Associated Press, the New York Times and the rest of the establishment press can claim they have an excuse not to cover them (respective proofs as of about 3:30 p.m. in the current instance are here and here), covering -- or I should say attempting to cover -- the latest of…

The exercise of watching the press report on the current week's unemployment claims figure as if it's etched in stone and assessing it as if it's the last word -- only to see the figure get upwardly revised the next week virtually without media comment -- is getting extraordinarily tedious and predictable (but of course watching what they do remains necessary).  At the Associated Press,…