This has to be the media’s version of a comedy bit.

Across the board from the activist old media we find the universal common thread, they ask: “Are we seeing a pause in the recovery?”

When was the recovery? Are you talking about the recovery of the Lakers in the second half of the NBA Finals?  The recovery of British Petroleum from the worst disaster in the history of the world forever and ever?  The recovery of Jet Blue from a wacky flight attendant?

Oh, they’re talking about the financial recovery. When did that happen?

The same media that was begging to preach financial disaster for the final 18 months of the Bush administration (don’t doubt me, I was told to read those scripts and caught trouble for correcting them at the time) is now working overtime to call for a recovery where there is none.

Tell the nearly 10% of Americans who are unemployed that there was a recovery that has now supposedly just “paused.” Of course, that number is greater than ten percent in reality because so many have just stopped looking for work because they know there are no jobs during this “pause in the recovery.” (more…)

Back when George W. “Miss Me Yet?” Bush was President, liberals exercised their right of free speech ad naseum to complain about how Bush was taking away their right of free speech. So you might expect that a liberal or two would express at least a little concern when freedom of expression in the western world is threatened in reality, instead of in theory. After all it’s happened just across the border in Canada and it’s happening right now, just across the pond in the Netherlands.

Try searching MSNBC or the Daily Kos for information about the Geert Wilders trial. Find anything? Me neither. Democratic Undergound, to their credit, did run a version of the story, although the fact that it was Al Jazeera’s version is disappointing, if predictable. A commenter or two even dared to suggest that perhaps Wilders should be free to criticize any religion he wants, including Islam. That kind of heresy was, of course, quickly slapped down with replies like this one:

It’s informative that your ideological hostility, towards major religions, leads you to sympathize with this rightwing European xenophobe: the fact, however, that you can patch his anti-Islamic rants into your own simplistic worldview, does not really qualify as evidence that Wilders is “on trial for telling the truth.” He is on trial because a court decided his remarks might violate the criminal law against incitement to hatred. (more…)