Economy

You would think that the establishment press and the rest of the opposition to Donald Trump's administration might be able to capitalize substantively (shrieking fundraising letters don't count as "substance") on Kellyanne Conway's shaky reference to "alternative facts" about a week ago. (She should have said, "I have different, more defensible estimates than you do," because she did.) So far…

In what seemed like the ramblings of a 19th century Luddite, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Tom Friedman appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday where he issued a ridiculous warning about the US economy under President Donald Trump. “So what’s going to happen if prices go up? American companies will build those factories here,” he exclaimed, “And you know what they'll do?…

A January 24 item in the East Bay Times, which serves the San Francisco East Bay area, wondered: "What’s behind the spate of recent restaurant closures?" While it didn't ignore the problem, the article made only glancing references to current and planned increases in state and city minimum wages. Preliminary year-end statistics at the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Bay…

From the first words out of anchor Scott Pelley on Thursday’s CBS Evening News, one had to know what kind of newscast it would be. Throughout the newscast’s A-block, every segment involved almost exclusive criticism of the Trump administration on issues ranging from the border to the media to Syrian refugees to trade agreements.

In a Tuesday morning dispatch about President Donald Trump's federal hiring freeze, the Associated Press's Matthew Barakat presented a quote from Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer. He followed it with a statistic which he wants readers to believe refutes Spicer's claim. That statistic does no such thing, but I expect, even though it's remarkably lazy and misleading, that it will become a very…

“The most important development of the last half-century in American politics,” believes New York magazine’s Chait, is “the Republican Party’s embrace of movement conservative ideology.” In a Thursday post, Chait cited six books, none of which was written by a conservative, that “help elucidate” this phenomenon. Among Chait’s choices: E.J. Dionne’s Why the Right Went Wrong; Richard Hofstadter’s…

MRC Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor denounced NBC’s attempt to downplay President-elect Donald Trump’s role in bringing new jobs to the U.S. On Twitter, Trump credited himself for new job creation on Jan. 17. The next day, NBC’s Today ran a “fact check” on Trump’s claim with MSNBC’s Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber, who said Trump had a “very small or non-existent” impact.

Some liberals were disappointed by the result of the presidential election. Others were devastated. Former Fox News Watch panelist Gabler is in the latter group. “The anguish of Nov. 8 has not subsided,” wrote Gabler in a piece that appeared last Thursday on Salon and originally ran at BillMoyers.com. “We think of the election almost as a kind of death -- the death of the America we thought we…

President-elect Donald Trump's threats against American companies looking to relocate in foreign countries have won favorable review from many quarters. Support comes from those alarmed about trade deficits, those who want a "level playing field" and those who call for "free trade but fair trade," whatever that means.

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's New Day on CNN, Georgetown University professor and former MSNBC analyst Michael Eric Dyson likened police actions against black Americans to terrorism as CNN's Chris Cuomo argued that many voters were motivated to vote for Donald Trump by non-race-related issues like terrorism from ISIS.  Dyson griped: "Color-neutral and ISIS? Many African-American people said…

Because he was the "singular 2016 (GOP) presidential contender never to fall in line behind Trump," Ohio Governor and two-time former presidential candidate John Kasich now has the Associated Press's deep respect. This largely explains why the wire service has been all too willing to ignore the fact that Kasich alone owns Ohio's impending budget problems.

There are predictable signs that after eight years of giving the problem inadequate attention and occasional ridicule, the business press has decided that federal budget deficits and the national debt are going to start to matter again. Gosh, I wonder why? The Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber was relatively subtle about it in a report on Uncle Sam's December and year-to-date budget deficits…

The FBI reported that the total number of homicides in 2015 was 15,696. Blacks were about 52 percent of homicide victims. That means about 8,100 black lives were ended violently, and over 90 percent of the time, the perpetrator was another black. Listening to the news media and the Black Lives Matter movement, one would think that black deaths at the hands of police are the major problem. It…

Next Tuesday, three days before the current POTUS becomes an ex-POTUS, Jonathan Chait’s Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail will be published. On Tuesday, New York magazine, where Chait is the chief political pundit, ran an excerpt from the book in which he claimed, “The truth is that Obama enacted careful, deep, and mostly popular solutions to a…