Government Agencies

Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures. On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a…

This shouldn't be a trick question, but to the nation's establishment press business reporters it apparently is: What is the current length of the U.S. economy's expansion? The answer, after yesterday's reported 0.7 percent annualized contraction in U.S. Gross Domestic Product, is obviously zero. But that's not what Bloomberg News and reporter Sho Chandra, who has used her full first name of…

This has to be the month's top entry in the "Just when you think you've seen it all" category — and it will be more than a little interesting to see how the nation's press handles it. As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the City Council in Los Angeles, by a vote of 14-1, ordered the drafting of a law mandating a citywide minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2020, noting that "the support of…

The Associated Press and Stephen Braun did all they could to cover for the Clintons yesterday. First, the wire service attached the most boring headline imaginable to Braun's story about Bill Clinton's shell company shenanigans: "Bill Clinton company shows complexity of family finances." The message to subscribers, particularly the broadcast networks: "This is boring and time-consuming. Don't…

Given how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there was in the press when the old Hostess liquidated in 2012, a mid-April story at Forbes on the company's has gotten surprisingly little attention. Well, maybe it's not that much of a surprise, for reasons which will be indentified here. Readers may recall that the final straw in that drama occurred late that year when the the AFL-CIO-affiliated…

In a complete non-surprise given her career track record, Hillary Clinton's definition of "cooperation" with requests to turn over whatever emails she unilaterally deigned could be seen meant giving them to the State Despartment on paper. That's lots and lots of paper, 55,000 pages in all, some of them double-sided, all seemingly part of a conscious strategy to deliberately slow down the process…

It's bad enough, as Bryan Ballas at NewsBusters noted on May 16, that the Washington Post's Philip Bump dishonestly used last week's Amtrak tragedy to rip Republican members of Congress for somehow being responsible for the (theoretically) for-profit entity's "constant struggle" for funding. As Sean Davis at the Federalist explained, Amtrak has really had no funding struggles. Bump had to make…

The folks at MSNBC exhibited a sick sense of "humor" on Friday. As Gateway Pundit's Kristinn Taylor reported Friday afternoon, the network posted "a video to MSNBC’s Facebook page that mocks police over a criminal dragging a police officer by a car as he attempted to flee ..." The post asked the following question, which was also tweeted: "Does it count as a police chase if you take the cop…

On Tuesday, Associated Press reporter Martin Crutsinger celebrated the federal government's large April budget surplus, caused by "a flood of tax payments (which) pushed government receipts to an all-time high." He didn't mention that the tax payments were higher largely because of tax increases passed in 2013. It certainly didn't occur because of an improving economy — because it's not…

Well, this takes the well-founded belief that the left only cares about blacks because of their votes to a new level. At the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog yesterday (seriously, that's it's name), Dean Robinson, an "associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst" who is apparently not a regular contributor, explores "the political consequences of…

With Camden Yards set to hold its first fan-attended Baltimore Orioles game in over two weeks tonight, it's a good time to go back to a May 2 item by Meredith Shiner at Yahoo Politics. Readers may remember the Duke-"educated" Shiner as the person who was flabbergasted that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz cited "God-given rights" when he announced his candidacy on March 23, tweeting in part…

On Thursday, CBS This Morning offered a scant 26 seconds on a Wall Street Journal story about nearly 1,600 IRS employees having evaded taxes over a ten-year period, with co-host Norah O'Donnell noting: "Workers improperly claimed dependents, repeatedly failed to file timely tax returns, and claimed a tax credit for first-time home buyers when the IRS worker didn't buy a house. Most of the IRS…

In a "completely unexpected" (no, not really) development, Dorian Johnson, the person who was with Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri when Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson, has been arrested. I know, I know, it's a real shock to learn that the guy who completely fabricated the "hands up, don't shoot" lie and, along with Brown, "stole a box of cigars" from a store before their…