“New claims for state unemployment aid unexpectedly rose last week, heightening fears the U.S. economic recovery is stalling.”
— Reuters, “Surprise Rise in Jobless Claims Stokes Recovery Worries,” July 1, 2010

Hmmm. As of noon today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at its lowest point in more than eight months, and an analyst says the latest economic data are “clearly pointing to a double-dip recession.”

Last year, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress pushed through hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit-funded bailouts and stimulus spending, promising to create 4 million jobs. These policies elicited hosannas and hallelujahs from establishment media. Now the same establishment media tell us that the increasingly evident failure of the Obamanomics agenda is “unexpected.” Unexpected by whom?

“Failure is a foregone conclusion for the Democrats’ economic agenda . . . Infrastructure ‘investments’? It won’t work. Pump-priming ‘stimulus’ payments? It won’t work. More taxpayer-funded bailouts? It won’t work. Go through the familiar liberal litany of economic prescriptions that Democrats are now suggesting, pick any proposal, and the message is the same: It won’t work.”
— “It Won’t Work,” The American Spectator, December 8, 2008

“No amount of presidential persuasion, nor any conceivable quantity of federal spending, can repeal the basic economic law of supply and demand. Thus, if Congress should enact this idiotic “stimulus” — a neo-Keynesian pump-priming venture absurdly overbalanced to the demand side of the equation — nothing is more predictable than its failure to spur real recovery.”
— “It Still Won’t Work,” The American Spectator, February 9, 2009

“As if Keynesian theory had not been completely discredited by the ‘stagflation’ crisis of the 1970s, just wait and see what happens now, as unprecedented government deficits siphon already scarce capital supplies away from private-sector investment.”
— “The Fundamentals Still Suck,” The American Spectator, May 4, 2009

The sad reality of journalism is that there is no bonus for being right. More to the point, the people who got it wrong are still as wrong as ever — and they’re still in charge.