Economy

What's a little Justice Department spying between friends? Or, more accurately, between a master and his lapdogs? In May, Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder admitted to obtaining phone records involving 20 business, residential, and personal lines used by over 100 reporters and editors at the Associated Press during April and May 2012. After some lawyerly whining for…

George W. Bush should’ve waited to have a heart attack, hints Daily Beast contributor Kent Sepkowitz, in a story exploiting the 43rd president's emergency procedure yesterday to insert a stent in his coronary artery. After a few paragraphs replete with medical jargon, Sepkowitz argued that Bush probably should’ve waited a while before having the procedure, and held out the quick treatment for…

Joe Scarborough has yet again scaled his soap box to mock those of us in the conservative blogosphere.  He described us today as a bunch of "very stupid people" living in their mama's basement who write "really stupid things" about him. The thin-skinned Scarborough has often derided his show's critics as Cheetos-chewing cellar-dwellers.  He was at it again this morning, depicting them as…

This past July’s dismal jobs report was no outlier. Job gains during the Obama recovery have been slow at best. If monthly job gains going back to 1946 are ranked in order of best to worst, the difference between job growth during the first four years of economic recovery under President Ronald Reagan and Obama is astounding. Total job growth during the first four years of the Obama recovery…

Ed Schultz has spent weeks blaming Detroit’s recent bankruptcy filing on Republican policies, even though the city has been firmly in Democratic hands for decades. The bombastic MSNBC host has called the city a “conservative utopia,” arguing that Republican anti-union policies have “gutted Detroit.” Schultz’s latest tirade came on Saturday’s The Ed Show, when the left-wing host bizarrely…

If ever a story had the earmarks of being agenda-driven from the get-go, Mackenzie Weinger's writeup at the Politico on Glenn Beck published Saturday morning fits the bill. Weinger's premise is that Beck will never be as influential as he once was as long as he doesn't have a cable news program and continues to branch into entertainment-related ventures consistent with his beliefs. Excerpts,…

Is there anything a liberal won't blame conservatives for? Take the case of liberal talk radio host Thom Hartmann who on Saturday actually wrote an article wherein he claimed that conservative economic policies are driving people to suicide:

In this case, the old saying, "Better late than never" really shouldn't apply. In June, when the government's Household Survey used to determine the unemployment rate reported that there were 240,000 fewer full-time workers and 360,000 more part-time workers than there were in May, the establishment press, particularly the Associated Press, largely ignored or downplayed the result. The AP's…

MSNBC contributors Jonathan Alter and Joy Reid sound much like a good metronome: their commentary never changes, marching on at an endless, fixed pace. Alter and Reid have made a career at the Lean Forward network out of comparing Republicans to slave owners, terrorists, and drunks. Their latest assault on the GOP came on Friday’s Now, with Reid serving as guest host in place of Alex Wagner…

MSNBC anchor Alex Witt continued the tradition of liberal media hand-wringing over congressional Republicans on last Sunday’s edition of her eponymous show Weekends with Alex Witt. At the end of a discussion about President Obama’s renewed focus on the economy, Witt erupted against the GOP in a question to Ana Marie Cox of The Guardian: [Video below. MP3 audio here.] "What do you think, Ana…

On Tuesday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, host Al Sharpton complained that a "war on the poor" has been "launched" by the right, prompting  Washington Post political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson to complain of a "dangerous tone" from conservatives and "antipathy towards Americans." Setting up clips from Rush Limbaugh and FBN's Charles Payne, Sharpton fretted:

"It took the networks 13 days to run a single story" on the fact that Obama-appointed IRS chief counsel William Wilkins was "getting direct reports" on the IRS's review of conservative/Tea Party applications for 501(c)(3) status, NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center (MRC) founder Brent Bozell told Blaze TV's Andrew Wilkow on the Tuesday edition of his Wilkow! program. Likewise, it…

It was announced Wednesday that Barack Obama will appear on NBC's Tonight Show next Tuesday for the fourth time since he's been President. Jobs and the economy are to be the focus. As NewsBusters has been reporting, despite host Jay Leno having been very hard on the White House resident in recent months, particularly on the economy, he has offered nothing but softballs to the Commander-in-…

As I argued yesterday, the unanimous state court ruling in New York blocking Mayor Mike Bloomberg's ban on fountain soda cups larger than 16 ounces in capacity would be portrayed in the liberal media as a setback to a well-meaning public health effort and a boon to big business. True to form, taxpayer-subsidized NPR is peddling this spin to readers of its website while completely ignoring how…