Barack Obama

On Wednesday, Amber Phillips at the Washington Post's The Fix blog impressively took President Obama to task for his over-the-top bragging about the nation's mediocre (and likely getting worse) economy. She noted that "the biggest knock on the Obama economy ... is that the recovery has been very good for the wealthy and certain sectors and not so much for the middle class and everyone else." Hear…

During the middle years of last decade, the business press, including the Associated Press, worked the word "recession" into its reports on the economy quite regularly. Yesterday, despite a current economy facing far worse fundamentals than were seen during 2007, the AP's Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon gave us a nearly 882-word treatise on "WHY GLOBAL WOES AND SINKING STOCKS DON'T MEAN US…

On Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, Senator Ted Cruz and House Speaker Paul Ryan were the two Republican figures who were most on the receiving end of host Maher's vitriol as he derided Cruz as the "child of Satan and a dog," and asserted that both men have a "punchable face." By contrast, when former Vice President Al Gore appeared as a guest to promote his environmental agenda, the…

The Associated Press's coverage of Friday's deep U.S. stock market dive in two Friday afternoon reports engaged in the reality avoidance longtime readers here have come to expect. An item by Stan Choe ("Get used to it: Big drops for stocks are back again") spent most of its verbiage on "volatility," and only cited "China's sharp economic slowdown ... Tensions in the Middle East ... the plunge in…

On Friday's Erin Burnett OutFront on CNN, during a segment devoted to discrediting President Ronald Reagan's conservative credentials and painting modern Republicans as far right, host Erin Burnett proclaimed that Republicans "would hate that guy," and joined with CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley in suggesting that Democrat Hillary Clinton's views on some issues are closer to Reagan's.

Jay Leno made another cameo appearance on Last Man Standing with Tim Allen, and the two were back to their old hijinks. In the episode “Mike and the Mechanics,” the comedians rip on each other through their characters Mike and Joe, joking about Allen sticking to TV sitcoms and Leno leaving "The Tonight Show," respectively.

The press's fierce determination to avoid blaming any of the steep decline in this nation's stock markets so far this year on horrid U.S. economic data, or on the Obama administration which has given us such a sour economic environment, has gone way beyond annoying. Shortly after noon at Yahoo Finance, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average's Friday dive hit 500 points, Nicole Sinclair, who is also…

New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse and White House scribe Julie Hirschfeld Davis teamed up to paint the president as wringing his hands over the current divided state of U.S. politics. One potential culprit almost wholly exonerated? The president himself. Thursday’s report, “Obama’s Plea to ‘Fix Our Politics’ Has Both Sides Looking Inward,” portrayed Obama as regretful, while…

Broadcast-network comedy-talk programs such as The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon took two weeks off over Christmas and New Year’s. Real Time With Bill Maher got a winter break college students would envy (two months -- remember, it’s not TV, it’s HBO) but the show returns Friday night, and to promote it, Maher gave an interview to The Daily Beast. He and the Beast’s Marlow Stern talked…

The Brookings Institution, the leftist think tank, is wailing and gnashing its teeth over its finding that in many metro areas, "income inequality," their favorite bogeyman, is being "driven by declining incomes" among their poorest residents. The problem isn't so much that the rich are getting richer as it is that the poor are getting poorer. As a result, "Inequality is higher today in most…

One day after President Barack Obama made his final State of the Union address, Paul Ryan -- speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives -- criticized the event by stating that “it was a fairly typical speech” for the Democratic occupant of the White House, who “glossed over the economy” as well as his “foreign-policy failures.”

Don Lemon offered a strange critique of Paul Ryan on Wednesday's CNN Tonight, as he noted the House Speaker's "poker face" during Tuesday's State of the Union address. Lemon spotlighted a Twitter post from Shonda Rhimes, where the Hollywood writer/producer attacked Speaker Ryan for his lack of applause: "She [Rhimes] said, 'Seriously? You cannot clap for curing cancer? You are that much of a…

Despite dramatic video of U.S. sailors with guns near their heads, the journalists at NBC and ABC failed to question the incident's handling by the Obama administration. Only CBS This Morning’s David Martin contrasted, “Although administration officials publicly described it as a rescue at sea, video released by Iran made it look like the American sailors had been captured.”

Bing West was a Marine infantry officer in the Vietnam war and a frequent embedded reporter in Iraq, yet Drum likens him to a tantrum-throwing kid and lectures him, “It's time to grow up, Bing.” (West is 75 years old.) After West commented, “The lesson of Iraq is that after American troops achieved stability, Mr. Obama quit, leading to a larger war and more American deaths,” Drum vented, “Jesus…