Unemployment

Imagine if a Republican or conservative U.S. president told an audience — on foreign soil, no less — that he didn't properly warn Americans about how long it would take for the economy to recover from a recession. "So-and-so Admits He Lied About the Economy" would be headlined everywhere. At the University of the West Indies in Jamaica on Thursday, President Barack Obama essentially admitted…

The business press and the financial analysts and economists they consult continue to mostly blindly rely on the seasonally adjusted figures the government and other economic report generators hand them on a silver platter. If these de facto stenographers had dug just a little deeper a month ago, they might have avoided the serious embarassment of predicting a level of seasonally adjusted March…

Chickens came home to roost yesterday at the Associated Press. The AP, the economy's most consistent cheerleader when a Democrat is in office, has not only been ignoring and downplaying the significance of disappointing and negative reports for several months, pinning its claim that all is well on the streak of seasonally adjusted 200,000-plus job gains seen during the past 12 months. It has…

In Chicago, incumbent Mayor and longtime Democrat fixture Rahm Emanuel floated the idea of renaming one of its airports after President Obama. After all, according to Emanuel, both of Chicago's major airports, O'Hare and Midway, are "named after battleships." No they're not, as will be seen after the jump. The Chicago Tribune's Bill Ruthhart failed to recognize Emanuel's startling gaffe until…

During his Thursday monologue, Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon turned to the Obama administration for the source of his current events jokes as President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and even the scandal-ridden Secret Service each saw a few jests sent their respective ways.

Although the Associated Press recently claimed the jobs situation in the U.S was looking “robust” and “healthy,” one South Carolina woman called that a “slap in the face.” The woman, Alice Lang from Spartanburg County, South Carolina, wrote to Forbes contributor John Zogby to share her story. She also condemned the practice of not counting long-term unemployed as unemployed.

Apparently, the sheer number of weak to awful economic reports seen during the past month or so finally led Josh Boak at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to acknowledge that "critical pieces of the economy remain troubled almost six years into the recovery." Boak's belated timing is interesting, to say the least, given that the Federal Reserve is weighing whether or not to…

The business press's ability to keep up the appearances of "recovery is just around the corner" for over 5-1/2 years has been simultaneously amazing and disgusting. One of their strategies has been to define a "new normal" which is only presented that way because everyone knows deep-down that as long as the left controls economic policy, the nation's economy won't ever really get any better than…

Less than five hours after its release, the government's news that retail sales fell by 0.6 percent in February — compared to a 0.3 percent increase expected by economists and analysts — is buried way down (about 6-8 screens, depending on your computer) on the home page of Bloomberg News, where the focus is supposed to be on developments in business and the economy. Instead, the web site's main…

Stocks took a beating yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 279 points. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ each declined by over one percent. The subject line of a USA Today email I received shortly after the closing bell crystallized the establishment press "wisdom": "Dow plunges nearly 280 points as strong jobs data raises Fed rate hike fears." The problem is that even though the…

The Fiscal Times is a generally strong and informative online publication. That said, it has occasionally exhibits symptoms of what could be seen as either serious leftist bias, quite disappointing ignorance, or both. One such example arrived in my email box early this morning. It contained the following headline and opening tease for a story about the food stamp program:

Yesterday, in a column at his organization's web site, the head of the nation's leading polling organization called the government's official unemployment rate, currently at 5.6 percent, a "big lie." Rest assured that if Gallup Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton had written this column during a Republican or conservative administration, his words would have been picked up by the Associated Press…

The Seattle Seahawks yesterday - in a moment of profound foolishness - forsook Beast Mode for Least Mode.  And it cost them the Super Bowl.   But they can take ever so slight solace - the Media has been in Least Mode for decades.  This has been on prominent display throughout the Barack Obama Administration - and certainly when it comes to the Administration’s many, MANY unilateral power grabs…

This post follows up on Friday morning's entry (at BizzyBlog; at NewsBusters) showing that "Fewer Than 0.5% of Americans Live in Fully Recovered Counties." This is the kind of news which would be front and center with the nation's establishment press if such a report came out during a Republican or conservative presidential administration. With Team Obama in place, NACo's work has been virtually…