Noah Counte

He went on to say that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices.

Apparently, all those issues are in our heads. Our collective head.

SNAP OUT OF IT!!

Maybe if we visualize prosperity, we’ll all be rich!

McCain, of course, had to distance himself from the comments, and several days later, Gramm left the campaign, accusing the liberal press of focusing on dragging him through the mud, rather than on the issues. Never mind that the economy is the issue that most worries Americans.

The mental recession hit housing prices, which dropped more than 15% in May. It’s unprecedented, but luckily, it’s all in our heads. We’ll wake up and it will be fine. One of the largest causes of the drop in sales prices is the high number of foreclosures stemming from that lending fiasco that has hit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lately. Banks suddenly own a lot of houses that once belonged to owners who borrowed more than they could afford, and they are unwilling to sit on them for months. They are discounting these properties, and that means competing sales in the neighborhood have to be discounted, too.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been listening to the McCain camp complain about a liberal media bias. Obama gets more press, and that doesn’t sit well. Personally, I don’t get it. I’m left of center, but not wacky: more moderate than liberal on most subjects. I watch McCain say some mighty peculiar things and no one in the media seems to notice. On the other hand, I’ve heard nothing lately, but that Obama hates the troops, because he didn’t visit a hospital in Rammstein, Germany. Never mind that he visited troops in four other countries and two other hospitals the same week.

Anyway, McCain isn’t the only one who thinks that the media is biased towards Obama: the American public thinks so too, according to a Rasmussen Poll carried out last week. Apparently, we’re all wrong! The Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research group published a study yesterday suggesting that McCain gets far more favorable treatment than does Obama. This is true on the Networks (and the gap increases over on Fox News). You can read more about the report here, but the thing that jumps out at me is that this is not a liberal think tank spinning things on behalf of a liberal media. This is the same group who has been publishing reports of a liberal media since the mid 80s, and lauding Fox News for their "unbiased" election coverage. Rush Limbaugh has cited them for decades, and Conservatives use their past studies to support fund-raising. Just so we’re clear, the President of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, Robert Lichter, is a paid consultant for Fox News. And he says there is no liberal bias. Quite the opposite, in fact. Read more about them here.

Liberal bias. Hah!