Poverty

Esquire’s Pierce deems Ryan “the single biggest fake in American public life” and declares that he “should have no more credibility on [fiscal] issues than does Sarah Palin, his predecessor in the second spot on the [Republican] ticket. Any Democratic congresscritter who seeks to make a deal with him should be drummed out of Washington. Any reporter or pundit who takes his plans for the economy…

At the Lafayette, Indiana Courier Journal, reporter Mikel Livingston, that paper's social policiy reporter, set out to try to pass the Food Stamp Challenge. The idea, in his words, was to "survive for one week on $29.69," because, he says, that is "what the average recipient of SNAP benefits, commonly called food stamps, receives each week in Indiana." By Day 6, he claimed, "faced with the…

The latest report out of Venezuela by the Associated Press's Hannah Dreier has a time stamp of 1:15 p.m. today. This means that the wire service has had plenty of time to report, and has chosen not to report, a powerful pastoral letter issued yesterday by that country's Catholic bishops (original in Spanish; full Google Translation) denouncing that country's descent into a system they described…

Two guests on this evening's Ed Show on MSNBC revealed what lies just below the surface for many in the current protest movement: opposition to capitalism. First up was Rosa Clemente, a "hip hop activist" and 2008 Green Party VP candidate: "Capitalism, I think that is the institution all over this country. It is really the oppressive force." Next, Georgetown Prof. Marcia Chatelain, who said that…

It's amazing how any reporter can cover the deepening economic crisis in Venezuela without saying a word about how the country got there. But Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier was up to the task. In a bizarre, sickening November 20 report on how its people are having to get "creative" in the face of chronic shortages of basic goods to get by, she acted as if those shortages — and the over…

Two CNN anchors channeled the supporters of Michael Brown's family on Tuesday's Early Start, as they played up how St. Louis County, Missouri Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch presented the Brown case to a grand jury, instead of pursuing charges himself. Chris Cuomo pointed out that "the prosecutor could still bring charges even after the grand jury." Deborah Feyerick later forwarded her…

Rudy Giuliani fired back at Michael Eric Dyson on CNN's New Day on Tuesday for the MSNBC analyst's "white supremacy" attack on the former New York City mayor. When anchor Alisyn Camerota raised Giuliani's supposedly "controversial comments" from Sunday's Meet the Press on NBC, the former Republican politician underlined that he had "said the same thing the President of the United States said, and…

As of 5:30 p.m. ET today, a search on "Koningstein" at the Associated Press's national web site returned no results. That's an indication that the wire service's globaloney-believing pseudo-science reporters are still trying to figure out how to respond to a November 18 article in the IEEE Spectrum by Ross Koningstein & David Fork, a pair of Google engineers tasked by the company in 2007 to…

Far be it from me to talk a leftist columnist out of an ignorant, self-satisfied position which might, if anything, cause his fellow travelers to hit the accelerator a little less aggressively in future political campaigns. At the Atlantic on Monday afternoon, Richard Reeves, policy director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, claimed that the left shouldn't be …

On Thursday, President Barack Obama did something Republicans have inexplicably been reluctant to do. He nationalized the impending midterm elections by telling a friendly audience at Northwestern University that "I am not on the ballot this fall ... But make no mistake: These policies (of my administration) are on the ballot -- every single one of them." That evening on Fox News's Special…

Brian Palmer revealed what many secularists feel about Christian missionaries in Africa in a Thursday piece on Slate, especially the role on the front lines of the ongoing fight against Ebola. Palmer acknowledged how "missionary doctors and nurses...have undertaken long-term commitments to address the health problems of poor Africans," but added that "for secular Americans...it may be difficult…

As been its habit since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the Associated Press has, whenever possible, considered the impact of news developments on the President and his party as far more important than what's actually happening in the lives of real people. The latest example is the wire service's coverage of Tuesday's Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in the…

The press is good at putting the most positive spin possible on the monthly job-market news. But at the same time, many of its members still claim that food stamp enrollment remains as high as it is because of the lingering effects of the (Bush did it) recession. On Friday, following the release of August's employment numbers, Obama administration Labor Secretary Tom Perez celebrated how "…

Time magazine used one of the biggest basketball stars of all time to fan the flames of Ferguson. It posted an op-ed titled “The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race: Ferguson is not just about systemic racism — it's about class warfare and how America's poor are held back, says Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” “Race war”? Is Time borrowing from conspiratorial ranters like Alex Jones? Abdul-Jabbar began…