Somehow New York Times columnist Paul Krugman seems a terrible subject for a song.

Yet, Loudon Wainwright III, who admits to being a Times fan, performed "The Krugman Blues" in New York's Madison Square Park a few weeks ago:

I read the New York Times, that's where I get the news. Paul Krugman's on the Op Ed page, that's where I get the blues.  

In Wainwright's view, given the current state of the economy, "I guess that I identify with that pissed off look on [Krugman's] face" (video embedded below the fold):

At the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web today, Jim Taranto noted that it took the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa until the 15th paragraph of her expanded dispatch on today's Employment Situation Report to find something mildly positive to write.

Aversa, who has been one of the wire service's chief silver lining make-up artists during the Obama presidency's disastrous economic stewardship offered up this contention:

Even with higher pace of job cuts in June, the report indicates that the worst of the layoffs have passed.

The charts from Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics that follow show that the evidence for her claim is scant to non-existent.

NBC's Meredith Vieira on Thursday conducted a defensive interview with Fox News contributor Dick Morris, at one point skeptically wondering if "the Republican tactic from this point on" would be "to sit and watch Obama fail." Later, when Morris pointed out the problems with the Canadian health care system, the Today host retorted, "But, the President clearly has said that's not the road he's headed down."

On one level, NBC should be commended for actually featuring Morris to talk about "Catastrophe," his new anti-Obama book. But, the interview didn't air until 8:51am, long after many Americans had left for work. Co-host Matt Lauer dominated most of the program's first two hours, reporting live from the late Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch.

This led Morris to make a dig at the show's excessive coverage. Speaking of Canada's government-run health care, he quipped, "So in Canada, there's a 16 percent higher death rate from cancer than in the United States. And that's not Neverland, that's U.S."

Either "CNBC Reports" anchor Dennis Kneale has a flair for the dramatic or he upset a lot of people in the blogosphere with his biting critique of the blogosphere's negativity on the economy.

On the July 1 broadcast of "CNBC Reports," Kneale responded to harsh, angry criticism from bloggers - even pointing out blogs like the Huffington Post, with an openly left-of-center perspective.

"Last night on this show, I stirred up an angry hornet's nest in the blogs, you know, when I criticized their mean-spirited negativity, bashed them for hiding behind their cowardly cloak of anonymity," Kneale said. "And, I called them dickweeds, a form of pond scum. Well, they have howled with outrage throughout the blogosphere. Blog sites like Dealbreaker, Gawker, Huffington Post, the Business Insider, Zero Hedge and more have incited an online mob to rush to their defense."

Fox News's Stuart Varney had a heated debate Wednesday with Air America's Mike Papantonio about the state of the economy and the effectiveness of the $787 billion stimulus package.

Subbing for Neil Cavuto on Wednesday's "Your World," Varney tried repeatedly to get his liberal guest to admit that porkulus hasn't worked and that the economy is getting worse.

Papantonio wasn't having any of that hypocritically and amnesiacly claiming, "We have to get behind this President and be more positive" adding "You cannot be ankle-biting every day this man says something, you can't be attacking"  (video embedded below the fold, h/t NBer Dan Scott):

As NewsBusters has been reporting, Obama-loving media have been very quick to point out how recent unemployment reports from the Labor Department, though showing HUGE job losses, have been better than analysts expected.

The most absurd example was two months ago when a 539,000 decrease in nonfarm payrolls was applauded by many media outlets as being good news.

With that in mind, the Labor Department announced Thursday that job losses in June were far greater than analysts had forecast, making one wonder how the Obama-loving media will spin this positively.

Consider that as you read Bloomberg's early take:

Got this e-mail earlier this afternoon, which pretty much says it all about ABC's news priorities:

The links in the e-mail are after the jump.

As we near the end of June, which is supposed to be one of the four biggest months for federal tax collections (January, April, and September are the others), it is clear that the serious receipts shortfalls are not only continuing, but have caused the March 20 projections of the administration and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to be outdated.

Media coverage of the ongoing receipts dive has been minimal at best. A Google News search on "federal receipts" (typed in quotes) returns on seven items, two of them originating from yours truly.

Here is where things stand as of the last Friday of June in both 2009 and 2008, per Uncle Sam's related Daily Treasury Statements:

At one point during her new MSNBC show today, Dr. Nancy Snyderman proclaimed:

Snyderman would probably say she meant it only in terms of the subject matter the show will cover, not its point of view.  But she was, if unintentionally, revealing a larger truth.  Just in time for the Obama admin's push on health care, MSNBC has rolled out a show that loyally pushes the Obama plan, right down to the call for nationalization via the so-called "public option."

View video here if player not visible. 

The recent midterm election drubbing of leftist legislative allies of Argentinan power couple President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and husband (and former president) Nestor Kirchner is partly thanks to the imperial designs of power-hungry former U.S. President George W. Bush and the consensus-building ethos of Barack Obama.

Or so Time magazine's Tim Padgett asserts without evidence in a June 30 piece, "Kirchner Loss a Lesson for Latin America":

The government of Hungary voted to cut income taxes Monday to pull itself out of recession, and America's media for the most part ignored it.

At the same time, German chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing for lower taxes to help her nation's economy, and our press have similarly been less than enthusiastic about sharing the news.

One of the exceptions in both cases is the Wall Street Journal which reported the following Tuesday:  

ABC's online "The Note" describes itself as "Washington's Original and Most Influential Tipsheet." ABC News's Senior Political Reporter Richard Klein is its current content creator.

We'll see how influential "The Note" really is if what Klein writes about the machinations behind the attempt to make us forget that the Obama stimulus plan was supposedly going to be making some kind of difference at this point gets out anywhere else. Color me skeptical.

No doubt, Klein gets in some pretty strong, accurate, and long-overdue rips (links are in original):

Via Hot Air's Ed Morrissey:

Barack Obama’s energy czar appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to discuss the cap-and-tax bill passed by the House last week on a razor-thin margin. Carol Browner got stumped by Fox’s Steve Doocy while questioning her ability to speak to the subject, which prompted her to declare Doocy “unfair” for blindsiding her. You be the judge — should Doocy have wondered whether Browner had bothered to read the bill she was promoting on national TV, or is that “unfair”?

Those who have followed my posts for a while know that I have a particularly low regard for the work of MarketWatch's Rex Nutting (pictured at right). It goes back to the pre-housing mess days when he tried to tell me that the the drop in housing prices would look like the 75%-plus drop in the NASDAQ from 2000-2002 or the collapse of Dutch tulip prices centuries ago. As of April 2009, according the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA), the successor to the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight, the two-year drop in housing prices since the April 2007 peak has been 11.2% (PDF). Of course, give the Obama administration enough time, and who knows what it might do to housing values?

After the government's "final" GDP report for the first quarter of 2009 on Thursday (future comprehensive revisions during the next two years could still ultimately change the outcome), it occurred to me that the reported annualized contraction of 5.5%, in combination with the annualized 6.3% contraction logged in the fourth quarter of last year, might be some kind of record. I looked at historical info, and found that the most recent two-quarter dive is the worst since the same quarters of 1957-58. Then in seeing who might have written this up, I came across Nutting's related report, which contains two statements that are patently untrue.

What's remarkable is that one of his errors indicates that he or someone else at MarketWatch must have looked for the numbers in question and, along with his editors (if they exist), blown right by them.

Nutting's erroneous statements in his Thursday MarketWatch report are the first two sentences (bolded by me) in the following paragraph:

For Time Magazine, Kevin O'Leary has decided that he's figured out why California is in such a budget mess. Is it because the state indulges over generous social programs, or always has some of the highest taxes in the nation, or because the denizens of its capitol in Sacramento are paragons of waste, fraud and theft? Nope. It's because California has Proposition 13, a measure that prevents state government from too easily raising taxes. Yep, O'Leary thinks California is in a mess because it doesn't have high enough taxes. And it's all Reagan's fault.

With some of the highest taxes in America, California is a hard place to make a living. According to the Tax Foundation, on average it takes a citizen 110 working days to earn enough money to pay his yearly tax bill. That is the fourth worst in the country. California consistently ranks in or near the top 10 worst states for its tax burdens from property taxes, to corporate taxes, to individual taxes and fees of all sorts. So, how can O'Leary imagine that taxes aren't high enough in California?

(Photo is of the martyred "Neda")

In a passionate Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning ("Silence Has Consequences for Iran"), former Spanish Prime Minister José Aznar who, in case anyone cares, serves on the board of WSJ parent News Corp., says that "It would be a shame .... if our passivity gave carte blanche to a tyrannical regime to finish off the dissidents and persist with its revolutionary plans."

Shaking off passivity requires visibility. America's media establishment almost across the board is providing very little. The Associated Press and the New York Times reports exist, but their distribution is dwarfed by the death of a pop star and a governor's infidelity.

Here are useful comparisons (all searches were done at Google News at about 8:45 a.m. for June 23-27, limited to USA sources):

Clearly, the most important takeaway from ABC's low-rated White House forum on health care was President Barack Obama's admission that he would go outside the constraints of a nationalized system to get the "very best care" if necessary for his own family.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey noted that Obama's response should properly be seen as "a Michael Dukakis moment that exposed him as a hypocrite."

A video of the exchange is at YouTube. To the extent possible, see if you think Diane Sawyer, standing next to the inquiring doctor, looks a bit peeved as the nature of his question becomes clear.

ABC's Jake Tapper and Karen Travers understood the newsworthiness of what Obama said, and led with it in their post-forum coverage:

While much of the country has been captivated by the passing of pop star Michael Jackson, the scandal of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and turmoil in Iran and Iraq, business news has fallen off the front pages. 

That was the observation CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer made on the June 26 broadcast of "Street Signs." Cramer noted that the front page of the June 26 New York Times was entirely devoid of business news.

"Remember when business was on the front page?" Cramer said. "We were on the front page for awhile. It was really frightening. It's still off - our whole, our whole - the whole stock market, the economy, we're all off the front page. We're no longer important because lovers, this guy Sanford - I'm not that familiar with his story. Those two people in Pennsylvania that were on the ‘Today' show and all those others."

I am wondering when the euthanasia folks are going to start touting this one? I mean, it sure seemed to me as if the most caring, most civil, most intelligent president evah just said that healthcare could be cheaper if we don't give old folks and the infirm the full measure of care they now get. It appeared that Obama said we should just let them die or suffer because they aren't worth the effort. Imagine if Bush had said something like this? The left wouldn't have hesitated to call him any manner of names. Oddly, though, the Old Media have not had so much as a raised eyebrow over his statements on Wednesday.

Obama said during the ABC Special on Wednesday night that a way to save healthcare costs is to abandon the sort of care that "evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve" the patient's health. He went on to say that he had personal familiarity with such a situation when his grandmother broke her hip after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Obama offered a question on the efficacy of further care for his grandmother saying, "and the question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?"

But who is it that will present the "evidence" that will "show" that further care is futile? Are we to believe that Obama expects individual doctors will make that decision in his bold new government controlled healthcare future? If he is trying to make that claim it is a flat out untruth and he knows it.

Call this a teachable moment, but even with ABC's best-laid plans to kickstart the debate about health care reform and not allow the "Prescription for America" special to become an "infomercial," as many have complained - the president spent more than twice as much time as his questioners vaguely answering or not answering the questions asked of him. But the network consistently presented the event as part of the need to fix a "broken system." When asked, every one of the 164 hand-picked audience members said they felt that health care needed to be changed.

President Barack Obama appeared on the ABC network in a town hall format broadcasted from the White House on two separate programs on June 24 - an hour-long primetime special during the 10 p.m. Eastern Time hour and later on the "Nightline" program that aired during the 11:30 p.m. Eastern Time hour.

With the very first question of its prime time special, Questions for the President: Prescription for America, ABC set the tone that essentially confirmed for viewers that the president was right in his desire to radically remake America's healthcare system. As the infomercial began, "moderator" Charles Gibson asked a seminal question of the doctors and other participants that were about to hear the president speak: "How many of you agree with the president that we need to change our healthcare system?" Naturally they all raised their hands.

Imagine that? This handpicked crowd all agreed with ABC and Obama that "change" was paramount. Surprised? Hardly.

So, as the viewer is introduced to the infomercial, they start off with the unanimous affirmation that the president is right, radical changes have to be made. The premise is set and even the sharp questions to the president later in the show are blunted by the assumption that some major change is needed. And since the president is the only person allowed to offer any plan during this ABC special, the further assumption promulgated is that he is the one that must affect that change.

For viewers of this healthcare infomercial, Obama wins thanks to an assist by ABC. The viewer is deftly led to the desired conclusion.

Just last year the government claimed bailouts of major banks like CitiGroup were necessary to prevent economic collapse. But now that banks are turning a profit NBC is returning to attacks on pay.

A June 24 segment of “Today” attacked CitiGroup’s “internal discussions” to raise salaries (by 50 percent in some cases) and other major banks with footage from the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” AIG protest footage and an unemployed Michigan woman.

Meredith Vieira began by stoking class envy saying the story “might make some people hot under the collar.” Citigroup “wants to move away from paying big bonuses by instead giving nearly 300,000 workers large pay increases and it is not alone,” Vieira said.

Froma Harrop may have once been called Heartland Institute's "favorite lefty" journalist, but lefty she is and her use of a lopsided New York Times poll to urge President Obama to "act fast" on a government healthcare policy is a perfect example of that.

With her June 23 article, Harrop was frustrated that Obama was not "stepping on the gas" to institute publicly funded healthcare and she wondered why he is dragging his feet when "85 percent of Americans want 'fundamental changes' in American healthcare." This factoid she gleans from a very flawed NYT poll that is so badly skewed to the left that it is amazing anyone takes it seriously.

Harrop makes no bones about the fact that she wants a nationalized healthcare policy to be forced on the nation and she also doesn't think that anyone needs to listen to Republicans, effectively disenfranchising the roughly half of the American electorate that votes that way. Amazingly, Harrop is supposed to be a "financial reporter," yet she still wants this disastrously expensive, jobs killing, cost spiraling sort of plan anyway. This doesn't say much about her grasp of economics.

On the Wednesday, June 10, Beck show on FNC, during an interview with host Glenn Beck, actor John Voight informed viewers that he decided to abandon his left-wing past partly because he blamed the "Marxist" anti-war movement of the Vietnam War era for causing the "slaughter" in South Vietnam and Cambodia after America pulled out of the region. After recounting that "I was surrounded by people who were very heavily programmed Marxist, and I didn't even realize it at the time that this was communist-based stuff, you know, that the communists were behind organizing all of these rallies and things," Voight continued:

And then I saw the end of the war. I saw us pull out, and then I saw the communists move in and slaughter 2 1/2 million people in South Vietnam and Cambodia. And I saw the left that had precipitated this turn away, just walk away from it. ... They didn't take seriously the blood that they had been directly causing. And it didn't – but I must say programming is very, very deep. And I didn't really pull out of it for quite a while afterward. But that's where the dime dropped and things started to happen. And then I , you know, then 9/11, of course.

Below is a complete transcript of the interview from the Wednesday, June 10, Beck show on FNC:

If the recession was the only reason why the welfare rolls are what they are in the various states, you would expect the percentage of the population utilizing the entitlement program, now known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Need Families), in the various states to have some sort of relationship to their respective unemployment rates.

That is self-evidently not the case. The failure by Sara Murray of the Wall Street Journal to note that sad fact in her Monday article about the program makes her attempt to communicate what has happened with it during the twelve months that ended in May a major disappointment. As you'll see, she got right to the edge, but didn't look into it. In the process, Ms. Murray also gave all of the credit for welfare reform to then-President Bill Clinton -- a laughably incorrect rendition of what really happened.

Here are Murray's opening four paragraphs (bolds are mine):

The farms that supply much of America's produce are quickly becoming extinct.

On Friday, as I drove back from my southern California office north on I-5, I witnessed it firsthand seeing for myself what many are now calling the Congress-created Dust Bowl.

Of course, global warming obsessed media, when they bother to report this dire situation, typically blame the problem on California's drought.

Fortunately, Fox News viewers know the truth, as on Friday, for the second time in two months (see Brad Wilmouth's "FNC: Drought-Stricken Farmers Lose Fight for Water to Endangered Fish"), Sean Hannity informed the nation what the real cause is -- the Endangered Species Act and a federal judge's decision in August 2007 to save a little-known fish called the Delta smelt (video embedded below the fold):

Imagine, if you can, that George W. Bush made a clearly and deliberately false statement (by the way, what the left claims are his five major lies weren't, and still aren't).

Now further imagine if the Bush administration's response to criticism of the statement, if not true, had been, "Oh, the president's rhetoric shouldn't be taken literally." The press uproar over such a dismissive response would have been justifiably immediate and furious.

In his address to the American Medical Association this past Monday, President Barack Obama promised that:

.... no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.

Well, Richard Alonzo-Zaldivar at the Associated Press at least noticed that Dear Leader's promises can't possibly be kept. But wait until you see his nonchalant reaction to what a conscientious press would immediately decry as a series of obvious falsehoods.

Maybe reporters Brian Faler or Nicholas Johnston at Bloomberg asked Barack Obama some really challenging questions when they had a chance to interview the President at the White House. Maybe they even did some basic fact-checking. If so, there's precious little evidence of either in their June 16 report.

They allowed the president to blame most of the current year's deficit on George W. Bush. They let him speak of "robust" growth when the best guesstimates they quoted for the second half of this calendar year and all of next year are anemic -- at least as the press benchmarked growth during the Bush 43 years.

The Bloomberg pair also ignored the alarming deterioration in federal receipts from economic activity that has continued into June, one of the four biggest collections months of the year.

Here are key paragraphs from Faler and Johnston's failed filing (bolds are mine):

Unnoticed in the recent upheaval surrounding the fallout from the Iranian elections earlier this month has been how it could affect the price of oil, and therefore the price of gas. And according to Fox Business Network "Happy Hour" co-host Eric Bolling, the longer this goes, the more likely you'll see it at the gas pump.

Bolling appeared on the Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" on June 19 and explained how events in Iran, the world's fourth largest oil-producing nation, would have a lagging impact on the price at the pump.

"Now think of this - it takes about 45 days to take a barrel of oil, run it through a refinery and hit the pump, the price at the pump," Bolling said. "So knowing this, for the next two or three weeks, at least, at minimum, pump prices will continue to rise. It may go down a penny or two here, but in general they'll continue to rise."

So, not only is ABC not planning to include opposing voices to President Obama's health care proposals during its special presentation next week -- though ABC does claim "those in the audience" will ask questions of the president -- it is refusing to even allow groups that oppose Obamacare to purchase paid-for advertisements to air during the healthcare special.

Rick Scott, chairman of Conservatives for Patients Rights, contacted ABC and inquired about purchasing some ad time during the Obama infomercial, but was refused the sale. Scott wanted to air his 60-second ad before the healthcare show started. Though it was refused by the national network, apparently it is still possible for Scott the buy time on local affiliates should he desire it.