2008 Presidential

On Thursday, shortly after the government estimated that the economy only grew at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in this year's first quarter, Jeffry Bartash at Marketwatch.com commented on the especially weak performance in nonresidential business investment. That category subtracted 0.76 points from GDP, the worst result since the second quarter of 2009, during the recession. Bartash,…

Just three months after Arch, the nation's Number 2 coal mining company, filed for bankruptcy, Number 1, Peabody Energy, has followed suit. Five of the industry's largest firms have now gone bankrupt in the past 12 months. Two Associated Press stories on Peabody this week managed to avoid mentioning the name of President Barack Obama, whose hostility toward the industry has been obvious since…

In early 2008, Barack Obama annoyed many liberals when he said that President Reagan (but not President Clinton) had “changed the trajectory of America.” New York magazine’s Chait no doubt will irritate many conservatives by suggesting Obama has done the same over the past seven-plus years. In a piece for the March 21 issue, Chait commented, “Obama hasn’t so much moved from the center to the left…

As CNN Newsroom host Poppy Harlow on Saturday tried to suggest Republicans like John Kasich deserve blame for not speaking out against Donald Trump when he was pushing birtherism against President Barack Obama several years ago, she was taken aback when her guest, Ohio GOP chairman Matt Borges, turned the tables by implicating Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign in dabbling in similar…

In August 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged, as paraphrased in a New York Times story, "not to use signing statements to undermine legislation passed by Congress," and "called Mr. Bush’s frequent use of such statements an abuse of his power." On Wednesday, Obama issued another signing statement — there have now been over 30 during his presidential tenure — to put a thumb in…

This past week, two writers for Mother Jones contended that non-conservative Donald Trump’s presidential bid is actually a byproduct of longstanding Republican efforts to stimulate and profit from what one of them called a “climate of hate.” David Corn, best known for his role in the release of the Mitt Romney 47-percent video, argued that the GOP "raised the expectations of its Obama-detesting…

Politico’s Glenn Thrush was granted a 30-minute interview with President Obama, perhaps because the dominant issue was gauzy nostalgia over how awesome Obama was on the trail in 2008. It carried the flavor of the “Chris Farley Show” skit on Saturday Night Live. “Remember when you said you were Hope and Change. That was awesome.” Thrush told the president that covering Hillary Clinton wasn’t…

2016 was supposedly the “point of no return” for taking action on global warming, according to former Vice President Al Gore. His tipping point received widespread scorn on the right, resulting in an “Armageddon” clock posted on Rush Limbaugh’s site -- that turns zero Jan. 27. But don’t expect the liberal news media to remind anyone of Gore’s hyperbolic claim 10 years  later. After all, the…

Just under two weeks after ABC’s Terry Moran took a fawning trip down memory lane longing for the days when he covered the 2008 Obama campaign, former NBC News correspondent and current CBS News Sunday Morning correspondent Lee Cowan followed suit as Sunday’s program featured an interview with President Obama. “He’s overseen shrinking unemployment, a growing job market, a reduction in the number…

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…

Mainstream outlets have used polar bears to show the alleged dangers of climate change, but now this left-wing mascot is making its way to the big screen. Norm of the North will bring environmentalist propaganda back to theaters with its story of a talking polar bear who rescues his Arctic home from a housing development project “for the one percent.”

The left often downplays or overlooks differences among Republicans. For instance, plenty of liberals assumed that John McCain chose Sarah Palin mostly in an effort to attract disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, rather than for the likelier reason that McCain needed to reassure his party’s righty base. Similarly, Penn State's Sophia McClennen lumps Fox News with Donald Trump, whose…

A time-honored tactic in political TV ads is to use contrasting degrees of photographic exposure, one bright and snappy for your candidate and a darker hue, sometimes even going to old-fashioned black-and-white, for your opponent. On December 29, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfreund cited a conveniently timed "study" which looked at 2008 ads produced by and on behalf of GOP…

Michael Simon, who headed the 2008 Obama presidential campaign’s targeting and analytics team, has joined CBS Radio, the Tom Taylor Now radio industry e-mail newsletter reported last week. Taylor relayed how “Simon worked on the Obama campaign and later in the administration itself. He also started the ‘data science consultancy’ named HaystaqDNA.” Tagline on HaystaqDNA’s Web site: “We pioneered…