Unemployment

Ahead of the Sept. 2 release of the August jobs report, surveys had indicated the economy had added anywhere from 75,000 to 100,000 jobs that month. But those estimates turned out to be very wrong. Just minutes ahead of the release, CNBC’s Rick Santelli went out on a limb predicting that no jobs had been added in August. Santelli was right about that number. As CNBC reported just minutes…

Somebody better tell incoming MSNBC host Chris Hayes the network giving him his own show later this month doesn't cotton to commentators disrespecting President Obama. On Thursday's "The Last Word," Hayes told host Lawrence O'Donnell the current White House resident can't run his reelection campaign like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1936 because FDR actually had a strong economic record…

CBS's Bill Plante hyped the supposedly "testy confrontation" between President Obama and Speaker Boehner on Thursday's Early Show over scheduling a presidential address to Congress: "This may prove that there is no argument too petty in today's Washington." By contrast, on Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Norah O'Donnell placed more blame on Obama for giving Boehner only a "15-minute heads-up…

Using a time-honored establishment press technique, an unbylined Associated Press report out of Indianapolis this evening ("Ind. lawmaker's lynching reference riles tea party;" saved here at my web host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) twisted the real news about Congressman Andre Carson's inexcusable, hateful comments at a Congressional Black Caucus-sponsored event in…

Two weeks ago (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), yours truly pointed out how establishment press coverage of the bankruptcy of Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar had emphasized its Bay State assistance, and only rarely brought up how it benefitted by being able to sell solar panels it otherwise would probably not have bothered to produce to projects benefitting from American Recovery and…

Poor President Obama. There's only so much he can do to lift the economy. He's tried so much already, yet somehow it just hasn't worked. Now his options are limited by those darned Republican demands for "fiscal austerity" and a "tight debt ceiling" (of "only" $2.4 trillion) which was only raised by enough to get him through his reelection effort (in 14-1/2 months). This is the utter garbage…

In "Ben Bernanke Embraces Obama's Reality-Based Presidency," Time's Michael Grunwald posited that Republican presidential contender Rick Perry is divorced from reality, especially when it comes to the best policies to fix the economy. Grunwald opened with snark...

George Will and Donna Brazile had a telling exchange on ABC's "This Week" Sunday. After Will listed all the excuses President Obama makes for the poor economy, Brazile said, "I thought you were going to mention media" leading Will to smartly retort, "They're not his problem" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

When I first saw a brief Associated Press report asserting that Rick Perry, at an event in Des Moines, Iowa today claimed, in AP's words, that "he's created 1 million jobs while governor of Texas," I thought to myself, "Wow, that's a pretty egotistical thing to say -- as if he did it all by himself." Then I remembered that I was reading an AP report. Of course Perry didn't say that, and,…

Naturally, most liberal Democrats are stifling their disappointment with President Obama in order to preserve any electability he still holds. That's not true of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who absolutely denounced Barack Obama's America on Friday on radical (yet taxpayer-supported) Pacifica Radio. This is a little ironic, since Pacifica griped a bit to Jackson in 2008 that he was being sidelined by…

Republican presidential candidates are meeting too many businessmen in their travels and too few unemployed folks or working-class wage earners, at least in the eyes of the Washington Post. Post staffer Philip Rucker lamented in his 23-paragraph August 25 story that in a recent "50-minute session" with voters in New Hampshire that former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) -- who "is campaigning to be…

It often amazes that liberals in this country revere New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as being an expert economist. Take for example Friday's intellectually challenged piece entitled "Bernanke's Perry Problem" in which the Nobel laureate accused prominent Republicans such as the Texas governor and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan of preventing the Federal Reserve chairman from enacting…

In his coverage of the Department of Labor's weekly report on unemployment claims this morning, the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber, after noting how initial claims filed by Communications Workers of America members who are on strike against Verizon (more on that later) inflated this week's and last week's results, wrote that "excluding the work stoppage, layoffs appear to be stabilizing…

It's got to be the hat . . . In an entertaining interview with Tamron Hall on MSNBC this afternoon, Dem congresswoman Frederica Wilson of Florida cited "racism" first among causes of high black unemployment.  She also: called for a second stimulus; said now is not the time to criticize President Obama; took a sideways swipe at Maxine Waters; and asserted President Obama would be defeated for…