Economy

Millions of Americans are out of work, some of them for several years. Yet the Washington Post's Bob Woodward said on the Chris Matthews Show this weekend that Barack Obama's top priority is getting reelected (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Jonathan Alter, who spent 28 years at Newsweek, has been a columnist at Bloomberg News since early this year. Just this year, the reliably and insufferably liberal Alter, among many other things, called the Republican House's passage of Paul Ryan's budget plan in April an attempt "to throw Granny in the snow," and coldly calculated that in the wake of her shooting, Arizona Congresswoman…

The hyperventilation of media members concerning income inequality in America reaches a new high with each passing day. Case in point, on Inside Washington Friday, PBS's Mark Shields, with a straight face no less, said this disparity is a "national security issue" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Nation magazine writer Ari Berman carped on today's Martin Bashir program on MSNBC that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) wants to take America back into "a new Gilded Age,"  an "era of the robber barons where the top one percent" would control the nation's wealth. Immediately after that segment, Bashir turned to CNBC's Brian Sullivan for the day's "CNBC Market Wrap," a look looking at how the nation's…

MSNBC's Martin Bashir on Friday called for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to resign if they won't raise taxes on the rich (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The news item I will cite goes back over a week, but the problem surely remains. In light of the ongoing battles over public-sector wages and benefits as well as the taxes which pay for them, it deserves far more attention than it is currently receiving. It follows up on an October 15 post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) where I noted, in reviewing an Associates Press story which originally…

If not an unmitigated frozen-flying-pig-in-Hades moment, then certainly something noteworthy for its rarity, coming from the lips of David Gregory . . . On today's Morning Joe, the Meet The Press moderator, in one surprising swoop, managed to praise a statement from Mitch McConnell while simultaneously seeming to acknowledge that President Obama's economic program has failed. Video after the…

Last week, the New York Post reported on the irony of wealth redistribution at Occupy Wall Street protests. While many of the protestors have gathered to protest the ideas of free markets and capitalism and promote the ideas of wealth redistribution and socialism, when wealth redistribution personally affected them, they were outraged. Protestors were complaining that their expensive computers…

Update : More analysis and full transcript added. In an interview with former White House press secretary and Obama campaign advisor Robert Gibbs on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer fretted over a report showing "the rich are getting richer" and pleaded: "So what responsibility does President Obama have in terms of dealing with income distribution in this country?" [Audio available…

On Wednesday's Early Show, CBS's Erica Hill downplayed the instances of violence and bigotry found at Occupy Wall Street protests as simply "the actions of a few," after GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich denounced the "frightening level of anti-Semitism in some of these gatherings." Hill questioned Gingrich over his supposedly "pretty outspoken words" about the left-leaning movement […

MSNBC's Martin Bashir tag-teamed with liberal pundit Jared Bernstein to slam Herman Cain and Rick Perry's tax plans today, insisting that both are a sop to the "rich" and an act of "class warfare" against the middle class. An onscreen bio graphic noted that Bernstein used to work for Vice President Biden, but that fact would go unnoted for any listeners to the program via MSNBC's SiriusXM…

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding "people before profits" — as if profit motivation were the source of mankind's troubles — when it's often the absence of profit motivation that's the true villain. First, let's get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by entrepreneurs. They're what are left after other…

The next time Joe Scarborough mocks the intellectual capacity of a Republican presidential candidate, he should recall the truly atrocious arithmetic skills he demonstrated on national television October 26, 2011. Discussing an anti-poverty program with guest Christie Hefner, the co-host of Morning Joe actually said half of one sixth is one third (video follows with partial transcript and…

The morning shows of ABC, CBS, and NBC on Tuesday devoted just 19 seconds to the arrests of 75 people in northern California, after police evicted Occupy Oakland from their encampment in front of city hall there.  The Early Show devoted a news brief to the story during its last half hour, noting the violent reaction from some of the protesters. Good Morning America and the Today show both…