Economy

We have entered a new phase of the endless Occupy Wall Street sleepover. Not working is hard work. After a month of tying up the police, generating mounds of trash, railing against Jews while holding up "Nazi Bankers" signs, grappling with pervs, rapists and thieves in their ranks, communing with avowed communists, and hobnobbing with 1 percenter celebrities donning 99 percenter costumes (phew…

If you didn't know any better (actually, I think I do), you would think that perhaps Cristina Silva at the Associated Press is doing all she can to minimize the tourism-damaging things President Barack Obama has said about Las Vegas while tasked with reporting on his upcoming visit there. Three times in her short afternoon report -- once in the item's headline and twice in the item's first…

MSNBC congressional correspondent Luke Russert today refused to parrot MSNBC host Martin Bashir's left-wing talking points about House Republicans and their proposal to boost the economy and spur job creation. "This week, Eric Cantor will introduce a jobs bill of his own, so what exactly should we expect?" Bashir rhetorically asked viewers as he introduced his "Divided We Fall" segment,…

A notable moment on Morning Joe today, as Joe Scarborough called out Mika Brzezinski on her double standard when it comes to criticizing politicians for their over-the-top remarks. Setting Scarborough off was Brzezinski's defense of Joe Biden's allegation that crime, including rape, would increase if Republicans don't vote for President Obama's latest tax-raising stimulus plan.  Joe claimed…

At the top of Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer touted a new plan to address the housing crisis: "After a series of foreign policy victories, President Obama is hitting the road to sell his plan to help turn around the struggling economy and today the focus is on the housing market." Lauer later wondered to chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd if the plan would, "help politically…

If Herman Cain has been harshly criticized for his 9-9-9 plan, which includes a 9% national sales tax, should we expect Robert Frank to come under fire? After all, on Morning Joe today, the Cornell University professor proposed a progressive consumption tax that could go to . . . 100% on the rich. Frank's notion is that the very high rates would discourage the rich from building "mansions" […

Yesterday, in what appears to have been a not particularly sweat-breaking research enterprise, blogger Don Surber at the Charleston Daily Mail demonstrated that the Richard Muller, a Berkley scientist who the Washington Post's Brad Plumer declared to be a "cliimate skeptic," has been a believer in human-caused global warming -- since the 1980s. Muller convinced Plumer that as a result of…

During the roundtable segment on Sunday's Meet the Press, NBC's Andrea Mitchell typically acted as Barack Obama's press secretary defending the President from any and all criticism lodged by other panelists. Apparently having witnessed enough shameless advocacy from a so-called journalist, when Mitchell used the Occupy Wall Street movement to defend Obama's economic policies, former…

Academy Award-winning actress Kathy Bates wants President Obama "to stand up on his hind legs and fight these rat bastards." When asked by the host of CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight to elaborate, Bates said Friday, "I think he has got to indict these guys from Wall Street. Somebody's got pay for that mess" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There was a truly marvelous exchange between syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer and NPR's Nina Totenberg on Friday's "Inside Washington." When Krauthammer pressed her on why President Obama didn't embrace the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the budget deficit, Totenberg replied, "Don’t make me the spokesman for the White House," leading him to deliciously ask, "What would be new about…

The easy catch in former Obama administration economic adviser Austan Goolsbee's Thursday interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," as reported by the Politico's Tim Mak, is that he believes that "if given a second chance he would not have backed the Cash for Clunkers program or the home buyer tax credit." Goolsbee's excuse for his changed position -- that the administration didn't think the recovery…

In June, when yours truly last blogged on a Glenn Kessler piece (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" was calling Barack Obama's claims about the accomplishments of the auto-company bailouts "one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech." He gave Obama's claims three Pinocchios ("Significant factual error and/or…

The Occupy Wall Street protests marked off a full month of occupation Oct. 17, and the network news media continue to gloss over protesters calls for "revolution" as well as the socialistic mentality espoused by many of the protesters. One protest speaker was videotaped saying, "Long live the revolution! Long live socialism!" Others in Chicago and Philadelphia marched with Communist flags.…

The rising cost of college has put a damper on many students' educational plans, but in an effort to continue attracting students, many schools have begun turning their campuses into miniature resorts. From upscale dining facilities to rock climbing walls, it turns out that some of the costs of college have nothing to do with learning, and much of the bill is still left for the taxpayers to…