Economy

Talk about talking down the economy! No fewer than three times today, Matt Lauer invited Barack Obama to declare that the U.S. economy is headed into recession. At the end of a "Today" interview that focused largely on Hillary-related issues and Iran, Lauer turned to the economy and pressed Obama to predict the worst.View video here.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review recently published a story about Citgo gas stations in Pittsburgh finding a dip in gasoline sales. The piece sympathetically portrays Hugo Chavez, the America hating dictator of Venezuela, as a victim attacked by mean American boycotters even as they then claim at the end of the story that it isn't boycotters, but a down economy causing the dip (or maybe it isn't,…

Back in the days of our MediaWatch newsletter, we used to have a feature called "Revolving Door" to note reporters swapping their jobs for political appointments or political appointees swapping their jobs for reporting gigs. (See the NB Revolving Door topic for more recent updates.) The Minneapolis Star Tribune announced that its editorial writer Dave Hage is leaving "to become communications…

A billionaire and a receptionist walk into an IRS bar. They each order a beer. The IRS bartender charges the receptionist $2.50 and the billionaire $2,260. Who got undercharged? If you're Warren Buffett or Tom Brokaw, the answer is . . . the billionaire.As NB Editor Brent Baker has noted, the NBC Nightly News "decided Monday night to base a story on a four-year-old contention by a professor…

A big individual income tax hike is being pushed by Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, but New York Times economics reporter Edmund Andrews failed to capture the import in a slanted front-page business section story Thursday.The Times manages not to spell out precisely where Rangel's tax-hike proposal would begin to bite on "the wealthy." "The House'…

For many months, NewsBusters has been warning readers that the hysteria being generated by the media and the Global Warmingist-in-Chief Al Gore concerning climate change would eventually begin to impact energy and economic policies. Following last Thursday's landmark decision in Kansas to not give an electricity producer a construction license for a coal-fired power plant due to global warming…

The genius of Rush Limbaugh is his ability to distill wisdom into kernels that make sense to millions of Americans. He gave good examples of that talent in the course of his appearance on today's "Morning Joe."Rush began by praising CNBC's Erin Burnett, a frequent "Morning Joe" contributor.View video here.

NewsBusters readers are well aware of the recent controversy involving Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” A few weeks ago, a British judge cited nine errors in the film. Team Gore responded Thursday in a rebuttal published at the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog. Now, famed climate change skeptic Christopher Monckton, in a detailed report published by the Science and…

On Thursday, for the first time in American history, a state denied an electricity producer a construction license for a coal-fired power plant due to manmade global warming fears. As ominously reported by the New York Times Saturday (emphasis added): The Kansas Department of Health and Environment on Thursday turned down a permit for twin 700-megawatt coal-fired generators that a group of…

A voguish Dem theme is that America's reputation in the world has been eroded and that the next Dem president will restore it. Hillary Clinton has gone so far as to propose appointing Bill as a "roving" [I'll say] ambassador for such purposes. We can safely ignore such fluff as so much presidential-season silliness. A great nation's reputation is forged not by its goodwill ambassadors, but by…