Of course.  As the propaganda wing of the DemocRAT party, they'd be derelict in their duty if they didn't constantly paint the economy as doom and gloom when a Republican is president.

BTW - Isn't it supposed to be "ARE the media..."  ?

Over the last 50 years or so, regarding the ABSOLUTE and UNAPOLOGETIC liberal/democrat agenda of the MSM, it is absolutely miraculous that ANY Republican has EVER been elected to ANY office; from dog-catcher to POTUS.

The media is more eager to ring the bell of doom when a Republican is president during a slowing phase of the worldwide economy. The ringing of that bell can exacerbate the slow-down. So I would have voted yes and no.

They've been on the "down" economy since the middle of last year, and since in macroeconomics, perception becomes reality they've almost succeeded. So we get headlines like “30% of Economists think we’re heading into a Recession”, instead of “70% of Economist think we are not heading into a Recession”. It’s not difficult to see why:  Since post-surge Iraq was not doing as poorly as they had hoped for, an economic downturn was their best bet at damaging what was left of the Bush legacy in an election year.  This, combined with their true belief in that the government would be better at managing the economy that the economy itself makes this a no-brainer. 

It’s the reverse of what they did in before the elections in 2000 after the dot-com crash.  Everything was sunshine and roses until after November 15th.

The liberals in this country have been seeking to sabotage the economy in this country since Lenin was imagining a world with no private property dominated by the Bolshevik party. One piece of the puzzle of why liberals are degrading the economy can be found in a line from a manual for communists in the twilight years of communism:

"We would no doubt find that communism is particularly likely to be successful in situations where a severe crisis strikes a people already beset by long-standing deep-seated social antagonisms and presided over by shallow-rooted ineffectual governments" (Smith, How to Think Like a Communist, 1987).

The next piece of the puzzle we must find in Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist and father figure of 1960s radicals like Sal Alinsky, an ideological mentor to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Gramsci theorized that cultural hegemony was perpetuated by the bourgeoise through the channels of popular culture: the media, the church, the family, the university, and the legal system. The key to bringing about socialist revolution would effectively lie in destroying the bases of consumerism and reinvestment, thus the winged attack on "consumer confidence" and perceptions of economic stability. To say that the media, the universities and the courts have been captured by leftists may be an obvious point, but it must be emphasized what leftists actually want. They want the destruction of those remaining institutions that make the proletariat cling to capitalism, the family and the church; they want socialist revolution. And it must be stressed that we cannot rely on the good-natured volunteers in the military, our own weapons, or our government to protect us from this incremental revolution. The leftist intelligentsia has no desire, or ability, to bring about their designs using traditional weapons of warfare. They must cause us to implode from within - they must use our democracy against us.

It is a somewhat banal additional point, but a socialist revolution cannot, as Robert Michels convincingly illustrates in his "Iron Law of Oligarchy," bring about a condition of equality - the leadership to communism and the mandated conformity to perpetual equality require, necessarily, an "intelligentsia" and a Draconian police apparatus. Thus the inexorable drive for social equality using Marxist, Lenininst, Stalinist, Gramscian, Maoist, or Fidelistian theory leads inevitably to oppression over the individual - which is the only type of oppression that exists in reality.

The third piece of the puzzle is the post-war order. Many socialist academics attempt to ascribe a "classical liberal" epithets onto the Bretton Woods institutions and applaud the UN, which arose from the Yalta and Malta conferences. It needs be stressed that these institutions were largely crafted by socialists and communists, including Stalin and FDR himself. FDR's advisors, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Hopkins, and Alger Hiss, amongst others, are known from the Venona transcripts to be Soviet agents or communist sympathizers. Lavrentia Beria from the Soviets and Daladier, a French communist, also played significant roles. The construction of a new world order required the erosion of U.S. sovereignty, and a mechanism for worldwide income redistribution. The global warming scam can quite clearly be seen within this context as a worldwide neo-Marxist propaganda campaign in the spirit of Gramscian theory.

So when I see the headline today that the U.S. economy grew 0.6% in the first quarter, despite the tactics on the left to decrease consumer confidence, to spread wide perceptions of economic instability, and to pin a recesssion on Bush before the election, I was infuriated. Of course, I knew all along that the leftist media had been lying. Even so, the means of crashing the economy are there for the Democrats, and it lies in printing money to fuel inflation, sabotaging the U.S. in terms of global reputation to injure the dollar and boost economies like China and the EU, and allowing unimpeded immigration to provide a large victim underclass that will decrease wages alongside inflation, increase relative deprivation, and foster ethnic tensions that will fracture and paralyze American societies. I hope we stop giving the left credit for meaning well and start seeking to destroy them at every opportunity. No more compromise, which leads inevitably to moving the U.S. further to the left. The time has come to mount a serious counter-attack.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. - Marcus Aurelius

The unchecked oil prices will continue to have a negative impact on the economy.

Usually, I do not support this, but, the oil prices seem to be climbing artificially. I have not seen or heard any reports of demand exceeding supply, present or future.

If conservatives are RIGHT, then liberals must be WRONG.