Stimulus

On Thursday, I wrote a piece exposing several factual errors in Andrew Sullivan's recent love letter to President Obama. Sullivan responded hours later:

In his weekly radio address on July 3, 2010, President Barack Obama announced that "the Department of Energy is awarding nearly $2 billion in conditional commitments from the Recovery Act to two solar companies." Neither of them was named Solyndra. One of the two companies Obama did name was Fort Collins, Colorado-based Abound Solar, which Obama touted as a company which would create "more…

After three so-called “recovery summers,” the economy has yet to recover under President Barack Obama. Unemployment stands at 7.8 percent, but would be far higher if more people were looking for jobs. GDP was downgraded to 1.3 percent and the national debt is $16 trillion. Looking back, the broadcast networks have consistently depicted past summers as times of economic renewal, despite an…

In their third Presidential debate analysis, the Jurassic Press Media last night and thus far this morning have failed utterly in their role as fact checker and record-corrector - at least when it comes to what President Barack Obama had to say.  As but one glaring example, there were the President’s absurd assertions regarding the auto bailout and China.

In an op-ed at "Bloomberg View" on Wednesday evening, editor and columnist Michael Kinsley's headline teased that "Maybe President Romney Wouldn’t Be So Bad," before twice urging readers to vote to reelect President Obama, including in the final paragraph after an alleged parenthetical (and obviously mythical) "Pause for reflection." Ha ha. What came in between wasn't very funny at all -- and…

Time's assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar could have been mistaken as an Obama campaign flack during CBS's post-presidential debate coverage on Wednesday night, with her claim that "the key issue is, really, taxes, and I think that you have to wonder whether Romney's math adds up." She asserted, "There's a bigger math issue here, and that's whether or not lowering tax rates actually…

In the wake of Romney’s “47 percent” comments and less than positive polling from key swing states, every squishy Republican in the liberal media's stable of acceptable Republicans went into full panic mode.  But just yesterday, President Obama made a huge admission when he admitted that his biggest miscalculation was that he thought he could change Washington from the inside. Republican…

New York Times reporter turned editorial writer David Firestone showed extreme sensitivity to the tender feelings of Democrats in his Wednesday afternoon post, "The ‘Redistribution’ of Wealth." In an editorial Sunday he dubiously claimed "Don't Tell Anyone, But the Stimulus Worked." Guided by pollsters like Frank Luntz, the Republican party upgraded all rich people into “job creators,” and…

Liberal Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward appeared on the September 17 C-SPAN program Washington Journal to hawk his new book The Price of Politics. In the process, Woodward promoted the same stale narrative that compromise is dead in Washington mostly because of those rascally, conservative Republicans, but sought to import a fair measure of melodrama to the stalemate in…

CNBC's Joe Kernen on Monday called New York Times columnist Paul Krugman a communist. Kernen expressed the same sentiments for economist and Huffington Post contributor Dean Baker (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Friday's NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams touted the stimulus spending that went to renovating the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC: "Tourists in Washington this holiday weekend will find water in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool for the first time in two years. It was actually stimulus funding that paid for the major renovation…

CNN's Soledad O'Brien defended the stimulus bill on Monday's Starting Point, calling it a "big thing" that President Obama accomplished and adding that police officers and firefighters kept their jobs because of it. "[I]f the stimulus hadn't been passed, then what would have happened to the economy?" she threw a Democratic talking point at Rep. Mike Burgess (R-Tex.). "Didn't that to a large…

There are so many holes in Paul Wiseman's Wednesday report at the Associated Press on the weakness of the current "recovery" that it would take a term paper to cover all of them. I'll just concentrate on a repeat error Wiseman made. It is one which AP colleagues Christopher Rugaber (with Wiseman, as demonstrated here) and Martin Crutsinger (as shown here) have also committed. All three…

Clay Waters at NewsBusters addressed this item earlier today, but I want to emphasize one particular quote in the related New York Times piece which also caught the (possibly gullible) attention of Chris Ariens at Media Bistro's TV Newser: "In private meetings with columnists, he has talked about the concept of 'false balance' — that reporters should not give equal weight to both sides of an…