Budget

Organizing For Action claims that its mission is to "support President Obama in achieving enactment of the national agenda Americans voted for on Election Day 2012." Presumably, on a day-to-day and month-to-month basis, that means it's able to divine the President's priorities and follow them (you see, OFA is "independent," so there can't pooooossibly be any communication between its officials…

Has Glenn Thrush at the Politico thrown up the white flag on Democrats regaining control of the House until 2022, the first election cycle after the next wave of congressional and statehouse redistricting? If so, he clearly underestimates Republicans' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but I digress. It would appear that Thrush has thrust himself into the throes of despair,…

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews apparently forgot that at the beginning of the year, a variety of tax increases hit virtually every wage earning American. Fortunately for the limited number of Hardball viewers Thursday, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was on the set to offer the truth telling his clueless host, “Everybody’s taxes went up at the beginning of the year, so…

Former Governor Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) drifted a bit too far off MSNBC’s pro-Obama message on Thursday’s Now with Alex Wagner, receiving a strong left-wing rebuke after suggesting that President Obama should be willing to compromise with Republicans on upcoming budgetary battles. MSNBC contributor Joy Reid likened Republicans to terrorists, claiming that the president’s situation is like “when…

One snippet of Obama’s speech in Galesburg, Illinois is getting left out of the TV news packages for perhaps obvious reasons. Obama announced yesterday that reporters are with him in thinking his socialist plans are “good ideas” and “sound great,” but Republicans will never back them. This might also make it sound like there’s zero overlap between “reporters” and “Republicans.” This clip was…

Yesterday, President Obama gave another warmed-over version of the same economic policy speech that’s been given for the past five years at Knox College in Illinois.  He saved the automobile industry.  He’s overseeing an economic recovery.  Republicans are intransigent. And he’s the best person to ever breathe oxygen on this planet. Yada, yada, yada.  Now with polls showing a record number of…

MSNBC has apparently realized that Americans are not concerned about the sequester, so the Lean Forward network has made another attempt to convince us how terrible it really is. In an article published Monday on msnbc.com, writer Timothy Noah sent readers a grim message that was summed up in the article’s title: “The Sequester Isn’t Hurting You? Think Again.” Noah struck a strikingly…

CBS's Bob Schieffer got a much-needed lesson in recent history Sunday. During a Face the Nation discussion with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.), after the host wrongly claimed sequester was "the creation of Congress," Boehner interrupted him saying, "That's wrong. Who insisted on the sequester? The President of the United States" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Melissa Harris-Perry, one of the panel guests on MSNBC's "Now" program on Friday,  managed to tie Detroit's bankruptcy to small government, i.e., "when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub," and to analogize it to "exactly the kind of thing that many Republicans would impose on us." Really. The relevant transcript from RealClearPolitics, followed by comments from Erika Johnsen…

Whatever they're paying Teresa Ghilarducci, who is "the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz chair of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research," it's too much. The bolded sentences seen after the jump which Ms. Ghilarducci included in a Friday New York Times op-ed (HT "Mungowitz" at the "Kids Prefer Cheese" blog via Megan McArdle) makes my contention an open and shut case (…

On Thursday's All In show, as Chris Hayes complained about the vote by House Republicans to separate the food stamp program from the farm bill, the MSNBC host accused GOPers of taking the action "so they could focus solely on the farm stuff and really embrace not caring about the poor." Hayes also charged that Republicans had "jettisoned 47 million hungry Americans." The MSNBC host began the…

How does a multi-millionaire plutocrat earn good press from the New York Times? Apparently, espousing some of the far-Left's most radical economic theories is a good start. This morning's paper (B-1) carries an adoring profile of Warren Mosler, who reporter Annie Lowrey brands as a "card-carrying member of the 1 percent....But his prescriptions for economic policy make him sound like a…

Well, it’s Washington Post official: the sequestration wasn’t all that bad after all.  In fact, you could classify it as a dud, according to none other than Ezra Klein, a favored pet pundit of many a liberal MSNBC panel. In a June 30 item at his Wonkblog, Klein concluded that the experts were “mostly wrong” concerning the impact of the cuts.  At the same time, conservatives saw from the…

Before the government released its first estimate of first-quarter economic growth in late April, the establishment press, particularly Bloomberg News and the Associated Press, salivated at the chance to report the then-predicted "robust" annualized growth of 3 percent and to describe how the economy had "accelerated" from the previous quarter's pathetic 0.4 percent. When that first estimate…