Associated Press

Shortly after its release this morning, Josh Boak at the Associated Press posted his coverage of the Census Bureau's August retail sales report. On a seasonally adjusted basis, August's sales came in a very mediocre 0.2 percent greater than July. It's almost too kind to say that Boak's writeup was delusional. The AP reporter celebrated "surges" in spending, "fed ... by solid and steady job gains…

You wouldn't know it from reading the national coverage by the Associated Press or stories at the Los Angeles Times, but California Governor Jerry Brown and his fellow far-left Democratic Party environmentalists suffered significant setbacks last week. How bad? So bad that the Times editorial board accused "a new crop of moderate Democratic legislators" of succumbing to "oil industry propaganda…

Paraphrasing the title of a song Linda Ronstadt made famous, the tune the Associated Press's Juliet Linderman sang Saturday morning in the wake of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's decision to not to seek reelection was: "Poor, Poor, Pitiful She." That's right. Rawlings-Blake is a victim who is being "dogged by critics who questioned whether she was fit to lead." Linderman made that…

Friday's report on the federal government's budget deficit through August told us that with one month remaining in the fiscal year, Uncle Sam will certainly "achieve" an all-time single-year record in tax collections accompanied by all-time record spending. The Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger apparently didn't consider either item newsworthy. Instead, he decided that the real news is this…

Though it's not exactly a secret that supporting John Kasich is hardly an indicator of genuine conservatism, Buckeye State liberals frequently whine that the Columbus Dispatch is a right-wing rag which gets behind Ohio's Republican Governor at every turn. If the Dispatch is so instinctively conservative, how does one explain reporter Darrel Rowland's apparent original exercise in cheerleading as…

Today's Monthly Wholesale Trade report from the Census Bureau covering July was the latest in a wave of disappointing reports on business activity this year. Wholesale inventories remained very high, while sales turned in a seventh consecutive month of year-over-year declines. Much of that sales decline is due to the fall in oil prices during the past year. But even after factoring that out,…

On Megyn Kelly's Fox News show on Wednesday, Andrew Napolitano sharply criticized the city of Baltimore's agreement to pay $6.4 million to the family of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who died in police custody there in April. The Associated Press and most of the rest of the establishment press are describing the city's payout, which was approved on Thursday, as a "settlement" — an odd…

The folks at the New York Times must believe not only that their reporters are entitled to inject their opinions into hard-news stories, but that they can also inject their own "facts." Oh, and they can change those facts at will over time to fit the circumstances. Sheryl Gay Stolberg's Wednesday story about the city's $6.4 million settlement with the family of Freddie Gray appearing in Thursday…

It would be easy to conclude, based on its treatment of a story about Illinois lottery winners suing to force the state to disburse their payouts, that the Associated Press really doesn't want readers and its subscribing outlets to learn about it. This "keep them in the dark" approach is consistent with a previous AP story on the state's failure to pay lottery winners. Let's start with that…

Democrats' current and potential candidates for their party's 2016 presidential nomination continue to complain about various aspects of the economy. They continue to make no connection between their complaints and the fact that Democrat Barack Obama has been in the White House for over six years. Obama has for the most part operated either under the conditions created by the 2009-2010 Congress…

A popular meme in the wake of Friday's jobs report seen at many media outlets is that August's reported job growth of 173,000 seasonally adjusted jobs is a virtual lock to be revised up by 50,000, or 78,000, or perhaps even more, since such revisions during the past three years have been unusually large. Well, since they opened that can of worms, let me make clear to everyone that even if those…

At the New York Times, a Thursday report by Alan Blinder and Tamar Lewin, with assistance credited to two others, originally identified Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, the center of national attention who has been jailed over her refusal to issue marriage licenses containing her name to homosexual couples, as a Republican. (The press has been mighty quiet about acknowledging that Ms. Davis would be…

Here's a little parlor exercise readers can conduct with their friends who think that high-tech CEOs are the innovative saints of the universe. The game would be to take the first three paragraphs of Michael Liedtke's Associated Press report on the collusion settlement to which that industry's major players just acquiesced, and revise it to reflect a different industry far less favored by the…