Poverty

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, PBS host Tavis Smiley claimed that GOP candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are "running segregated campaigns" as he asserted that they are "not campaigning to my community." After repeating his claim that Trump has been a "racial arsonist," he declared that the Republican Party has been "self-sabotaging," and additionally…

Conservatives have objected in droves to a remark President Obama made this past week during his visit to Argentina. Addressing a gathering of young adults, Obama said, “In the past there’s been a sharp division…between capitalist and communist or socialist…but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works.” The right’s hostile response, contended The…

These days, one of the biggest meta-debates in politics concerns apportioning blame for the staying power of the Donald Trump circus. How much of Trump’s popularity is attributable to, say, the mainstream media? To conservative talk radio? In a Sunday post, The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman pointed the finger at Republicans and absolved President Obama. Apropos of Trump’s economically…

Since the economy finally began consistently regaining jobs in early 2010, the establishment press has had a consistent, predictable and annoying reporting (and non-reporting) pattern. It starts with the Friday morning jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at or near the beginning of the month. Virtually without fail, it has spit out positive and sometimes even very positive seasonally…

It appears that there's an effort underway to expand the definition of "deniers" beyond the realm of climate change/"global warming." Ideally, in leftists' minds, a "denier" would be "anyone who doesn't accept leftist dogma without reservations." That definition would apparently extend to anything relating to the economy, if Associated Press White House reporter and dedicated Barack Obama…

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's CNN Tonight, liberal CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill provided a glimpse at the caricature of Democrats having over the top expectations of what government can accomplish in improving their lives as he recommended that black voters in South Carolina, when deciding between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, should "think beyond a limited sort of…

Ronald Reagan’s admirers called him the Great Communicator, but to his detractors he was more like the Great Demonizer, crystallizing hostility toward groups ranging from the poor to left-wing protesters at UC Berkeley. In a Sunday post, Esquire's Pierce argued that Donald Trump has a similar talent for focusing outrage, and because of it, he’s attracting the same kind of supporters that Reagan…

On Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, correspondent Randi Kaye filed a report recounting her discussions with mostly young evangelical Christians in South Carolina as she asserted that the group she spoke with think GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz is "against the teachings of Jesus" on the issues of "poverty, war, and how to treat strangers." Implying that Cruz is not "compassionate," she…

On Thursday, Venezuela's Supreme Court decided to grant Bolivarian socialist "President" Nicolas Maduro what an unbylined Associated Press report described as "broad decree powers" to deal with the economic crisis and humanitarian nightmare he and his predecessor Hugo Chavez created. Maduro's government now for all practical purposes has total control of that nation's economy, which in the…

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello, liberal CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill advised that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders needs to show a "vision to combat white supremacy" and "talk to our racial pain" if  he wishes to win black voters. The Morehouse College professor also hit Hillary Clinton from the far left as he declared that "the…

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

Observers can be excused for thinking that the politicial establishment is preparing the battlespace to convince us plebes that progress and economic growth are overrated. (That's sort of odd for people who call themselves "progressives," but making sense is not their strong suit.) How interesting, for example, that Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon's book, The Rise and Fall of…

When the Associated Press issues a brief unbylined report on an obviously important matter, one's first instinct should always be to ask: "What are they deciding not to tell us?" More often than not, the answer is "Plenty." An example justifying the need to look further appeared this morning when the wire service published a five-paragraph report on inflation in Venezuela's economy:

When it comes to raising the minimum wage, networks minimize balance and maximize bias. After a year of protests clamoring for a $15 minimum wage, Christian Science Monitor reported that 14 states and several cities increased minimum wages or planned to in 2016. Several more cities and states are expected to consider a $15 minimum wage with ballot or legislative initiatives, according to USA…