Economy

Trick? Or "tweak"? On Friday, a Reuters report at CNBC noted the Federal Reserve's journey into the accounting and reporting twilight zone earlier this month. In doing so, it conducted a clinic in how to make unreality look acceptable and make a dangerous situation appear palatable. In the el bizzarro world at Reuters and those the wire service interviewed for its article: A change in…

I was reading Associated Press reporter Sam Hananel's coverage ("Unions see sharp membership declines again") of Uncle Sam's latest report on union membership, and I came to this paragraph about what happened with private-sector union representation in 2010: Union membership in the private sector fell from 7.2 percent to 6.9 percent, a low point not seen since the infancy of the labor…

At several points in 2010 (just one example: at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog; graphic), I pointed out that despite the federal government's continued insistence that its budget deficit for fiscal 2010 was on track to come in lower than fiscal 2009, the deficit based on real spending would be, and turned out to be, higher in fiscal 2010. That's important to know, as clever year-crossing accounting…

The folks in the establishment press are looking for any sign of upward movement in the housing market, especially in new home construction, that they can portray positively as the beginning of a general recovery. That desperate search explains the content of the following e-mail alert from CNN which arrived in my inbox this morning:

Tamron Hall was joined by her MSNBC colleague Dylan Ratigan on Wednesday's edition of "News Nation" in condemning some members of corporate America for the way they have "demonized" the Obama administration. That slight of American businesses came during a dicussion of President Hu Jintao's U.S visit, in which Ratigan remarked that President Obama's greatest challenge will not be dealing with…

Apparently the folks at WalMartFreeDC.org didn't get the memo from the liberal media about crosshairs being verboten in political speech. [Related story at TheBlaze.com has more information] The website for Wal-Mart Free DC prominently features the Wal-Mart smiley-face icon at the center of crosshairs in an advertisement for a "March on the Developer's House" in Northwest D.C. tomorrow at 7…

- Since Obama took office, only 16 percent of health care stories mentioning the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) included any criticism of their accounting, despite criticism from many conservative and libertarian experts as well as the former head of CBO. - Networks reporters and guests emphasized the CBO's integrity calling them "non-partisan," "independent" and the "referee" or "…

Two paragraphs don't seem to belong together in Martin Crutsinger's Associated Press dispatch on the government's Monthly Treasury Statement for December. But there they are. Here's the first paragraph of interest in Martin's missive ("Federal budget deficit narrows to $80B in December"): Government spending during this period totaled $902.6 billion, an increase of 3.1 percent over the same…

(See the Update within the post.) It's not too difficult to determine where the sympathy of the Associated Press's Christopher Wills resides in the aftermath of the Democrat-controlled legislature's passage in Illinois of steep, "temporary" four-year income and corporate tax increases. Wills cited neighboring states as "gleefully plot(ting)" to take business away from Illinois, claimed that…

Man, it is getting really deep around here -- and no, I'm not talking about the snow, though there is no shortage of it here in Southwestern Ohio. What's really deep is the claim by current Government/General Motors Chairman and CEO Daniel Akerson that because of the company's government-engineered, unsecured bondholder-shortchanging trip through bankruptcy, "we lost roughly a year in terms…

Despite the complete and thorough debunking of the media’s attempt to link common political discourse with the actions of a deranged lunatic in Tucson, one Congresswoman is taking politically correct rhetoric to ridiculous lows (h/t Michelle Malkin).  Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) took to the Huffington Post to voice her opinion on the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt.  She starts…

Okay, who slipped truth serum into Evan Thomas's coffee? On Friday, Newsweek's "Editor at Large" (according to his bio here) appeared on "Inside Washington" (link to entire show is here; transcript not yet available). After being cued up with a softball from host Gordon Peterson about how supposedly great Friday's news about the drop in the national unemployment rate was (uh, not exactly,…

You don’t find many “gems” on a Saturday morning. It’s a lazy day, getting ready for football and a late breakfast---then Cokie Roberts, speaking on ABC’s Good Morning America, dropped the bomb. Roberts has apparently bought into the far-left's conspiracy theory that Republicans simply do not want to see Americans get jobs. Yep. Republicans are more interested in defeating old media’s Dear…

Despite virtually all economists and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve finding Friday's unemployment report disappointing, MSNBC's Ed Schultz parroted President Obama's take that the numbers released by the Labor Department were good news. The "Ed Show" host crowed so gleefully about the much-maligned data that he even said it was evidence the 2009 stimulus package worked (video follows…