Economy

Just one paragraph tucked toward the end of a column.  But Judith Warner's words offer a revealing insight into how liberals view economics and the world at large. In the lefty mindset, making it isn't a matter of doing or making something of value.  It comes down instead to contriving to get a piece of the action, a share of the wealth that some undefined other has created in some undescribed…

How do you make the foreclosure crisis seem even scarier? Add in a potentially deadly virus. CBS's "The Early Show," reported August 7 that a new stronger strain of the West Nile virus could spread across the country with help from the neglected pools found in foreclosed homes in California. "Apparently ... as more and more homes are passing into foreclosure and there are many, and many of…

If you believe that there's a 50-50 chance that your take-home pay will be cut by almost one-fifth beginning in as little as five months from now, would that belief affect your current spending habits? Of course it would. But that idea apparently never occurred to the Associated Press's Mark Jewell. In the course of a 950-word article Monday about how the rich are getting more stingy, he focused…

Hat tip bigtimer.Joe Scarborough has estimated that 95% of the elite media will pull the lever for Barack Obama.  Even so, evidence continues to mount that the MSM is beginning to view the Dem candidate with a more discerning eye.  The latest example comes from an unexpected corner, that occupied by NBC correspondent Martin Savidge.  As NewsBusters has reported, on everything from climate change…

ABC’s “Good Morning America” hosted Fox Business anchor/managing editor Neil Cavuto on Wednesday morning — by himself with no liberal counterpart! While co-host Diane Sawyer peppered Cavuto with questions based on the idea that the economy was a disaster and Barack Obama was being unfairly attacked by John McCain, Cavuto offered a healthy alternative not typically seen on ABC. Sawyer suggested…

Forget Hardball. Dodgeball's more amusing . . . As we'll detail below, David Shuster literally laughed in the face of a senior Republican today, and earlier on MSNBC Andrea Mitchell blithely dismissed the McCain energy plan as unrealistic. But there was one point of light, you might say, during the network's afternoon coverage.  When Shuster briefly held a Dem congresswoman's feet to the fire on…

UPDATE, Aug. 6 -- The media fact-checker overview begins here, and continues below the fold:"..... all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling" Obama refers to is NOT just the 200,000 additional barrels obtainable from the "Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf regions." Republican proposals also include Alaska, shale oil, and tar sands.Just including Alaska coastal at very…

Now that the government has signed off on a $25-billion bailout of home mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the obvious question is: What next?Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, thinks breaking up is hard to do, but necessary. "The Bush Administration should vigorously push to have Fannie and Freddie recapitalized and broken up into 10 to 12 companies, with their ties to…

Is reporter Michael Powell at the New York Times auditioning for Comic Relief? At next year's event, Powell's headline at his August 2 story (HT Weapons of Mass Discussion) about Obama's repeated hypocritical invocations and charges relating to race (of course, that's not how he sees it), along with his report's first 10 words, would bring the house down: With Genie Out of Bottle, Obama Is…

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, on Friday contended “it is not the protectionists of the AFL-CIO or CNN who are primarily to blame for the erosion of public support” for free trade, instead:The blame lies squarely with a business community that continues to support Republican politicians who refuse to raise the taxes and spend…

A night after ABC's World News and the NBC Nightly News didn't air a word about the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) doubling to 1.9 percent in the second quarter, up from 0.9 percent in the first, the two evening newscasts found newsworthy a rise in the unemployment rate, with NBC using the increase to segue to a story on how “a growing number of Americans are...being downsized from full-time work…

As an attempt to find a new and innovative way to spread the doom-and-gloom news associated with the economic downturn, BusinessWeek magazine launched a recession blog on its Web site back in May to give a personalized glimpse into "recession" hardships. "This blog is one of the places we'll tell these stories," BusinessWeek.com reporter Tim Catts wrote on the blog's first post on May 2. "Here…

Just heard Mark Levin mention this point on his show tonight. The item he referred to is from Mark Perry at istockanalyst.com, who commented on CNNMoney.com's coverage of Exxon Mobil's profit report today: According to CNN, Exxon Mobil once again reported the largest quarterly profit in U.S. history Thursday, posting net income of $11.68 billion on revenue of $138 billion in the second quarter.…

Second quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) doubled to 1.9 percent, up from 0.9 percent in the first quarter, the Commerce Department announced Thursday morning as consumer spending rose 1.5 percent in the quarter ending June 30, up from 0.9 percent in the first quarter, and U.S. exports soared 9.2 percent, way up from 5.1 percent in the first three months of 2008. Yet the CBS Evening News…