Could that be because the MSM (still striving desperately to cover for the Democrat President) nevertheless is having to report things like these?
* America clocked up a record last week. The latest drop in house prices meant that the cost of real estate has fallen by 33% since the peak – even bigger than the 31% slide seen when John Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath. Unemployment has not returned to Great Depression levels but at 9.1% of the workforce it is still at levels that will have nerves jangling in the White House...The US is a country with serious problems. (Larry Elliott, Economics Editor of the Guardian, U.K.)
* "They're saying there are more jobs. I'm just wondering where those jobs are," Fabian Lambrecht said. About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months - a higher percentage than during the Great Depression. (Ben Tracy, CBS News
* Once provisions of the Affordable Care Act start to kick in during 2014, at least three of every 10 employers will probably stop offering health coverage, a survey released Monday shows. (Russ Britt, MarketWatch)
* The last month has been a horror show for the U.S. economy, with economic data falling off a cliff, according to Mike Riddell, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London.
"It seems that almost every bit of data about the health of the US economy has disappointed expectations recently," said Riddell, in a note sent to CNBC on Wednesday.
"US house prices have fallen by more than 5 percent year on year, pending home sales have collapsed and existing home sales disappointed, the trend of improving jobless claims has arrested, first quarter GDP wasn’t revised upwards by the 0.4 percent forecast, durables goods orders shrank, manufacturing surveys from Philadelphia Fed, Richmond Fed and Chicago Fed were all very disappointing. And that’s just in the last week and a bit." (Patrick Allen, CNBC)
* Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs announced at his own first daily briefing reporters that Obama asked for the daily economic briefing, described then as comparable to the daily intelligence briefing the president gets every morning.
“The president asked that this be added every day to his schedule,” Gibbs said at the time. Gibbs added that Obama believed it is “important that each day he receive the most up to date information as it relates to the economy.”
But at some point, the daily economic briefings stopped showing up on Obama's daily schedule... (Sam Youngman, The Hill)
* President Obama poll numbers are nearing the levels he enjoyed in 2008, with one glaring exception: young people. Especially young white people. His approval rating is at 56 percent approval rating among people ages 18 to 29. That's higher than the 51 percent national average, but that's a decline of 10 points compared to the 2008 exit polls...
A symposium last month called "Oberlin-based Perspectives on the Obama Presidency" noted that students don't think Obama's cool anymore -- all his cute little quirks have become grating, a polisci professor explained, and the real Obama can't live up to their idea of him. Students aren't even impressed that Osama bin Laden was killed, protesting that the world's most wanted terrorist was unarmed when he was shot. Vinocur writes that although disaffection at Oberlin is "a speck of confetti in a storm of pre-2012 election indicators in America... it's also a fact that Mr. Obama's most diligent canvassers in 2008 often came from the country's campuses." Brownstein, too, notes that the lack of youth enthusiasm is "worrisome" and could be related to young people's higher unemployment rates...(Elspeth Reeve, The Atlantic)
