Obama’s political problems stem from a broader Democratic inability to counter the infernal GOP noise machine — a failure now two decades old. Republican rejectionism ought to have been clear to the White House from the moment they voted unanimously against the economic stimulus — cynically betting that recovery would come too late for the [...]

This is predictable: Wall Street is messing with you. At a Paris conference on new approaches to capitalism last week, Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told reporters that “Wall Street is talking up the recovery because it would like to sell stocks.” This is consistent with the financial industry’s shady tactics that David Corn and Kevin [...]

Unemployment surged from 9.8 percent in September to 10.2 percent last month, its highest level since 1983. At the same time, the economy lost 190,000 more jobs. That means employers have eliminated 7.3 million positions since the recession began in December 2007. As dreadful as they are, the headline numbers understate the severity of the [...]