Tag: charles payne
'Fox & Friends' Just Couldn't Handle That Huge February Jobs Report

'Fox & Friends' Just Couldn't Handle That Huge February Jobs Report

A strong monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) beat expectations last week, but Fox & Friends struggled to characterize it, absurdly claiming that the numbers reported by the government had missed expectations while arguing with no evidence that the data were unreliable.

On March 4, the BLS released its initial jobs report for February 2022, which showed the economy creating 678,000 jobs last month as the national unemployment rate fell slightly to 3.8 percent. The report also included substantial positive revisions to the jobs estimates for December 2021 and January 2022, showing job creation over that period to be “92,000 higher than previously reported.” The topline job creation number for February easily exceeded expectations reported by MarketWatch and Reuters, which forecast 400,000-440,000 jobs created last month.

None of these facts were good enough for the team at Fox News, which honestly seemed almost unprepared to discuss the breaking news. The Fox & Friends studio at first struggled with audio issues when returning from commercial break, and then flashed a red upward arrow on screen seeming to indicate that the unemployment rate had climbed last month (the rate actually fell 0.1 points). After correspondent Carley Shimkus finished reporting the numbers, noting twice that the monthly jobs report beat expert expectations, all three co-hosts — Pete Hegseth, Brian Kilmeade, and Ainsley Earhardt — fumbled their transition to discussing the jobs report with Fox Business host Charles Payne.

The absurdity continued during Payne’s supposedly expert commentary, as he claimed without any evidence or reasoning that he “thought it was going to be a higher number,” saying the report was “really weird.” When pressed by co-host Pete Hegseth about the fact that the report actually beat expectations, Payne doubled down, falsely claiming “everyone thought it was going to be higher.” As Payne listed off made-up expectations and unnamed sources who thought the economy would add 770,000 or more jobs last month, a graphic again flashed on-screen demonstrating that the 678,000 jobs added last month were more than the 400,000 “predicted” by economists.


PETE HEGSETH (CO-HOST): Charles Payne is here, host of Making Money on Fox Business, who is going to help us break down these numbers. Your reaction, Charles?

CHARLES PAYNE (FOX BUSINESS HOST): I thought it was going to be a higher number, I really did. Now, this is not unusual that they missed, and this is really weird. Let me just explain to the audience.

HEGSETH: Okay now, higher number – this is a higher number than expected?

PAYNE: Than consensus, right. But, everyone thought it was going to be higher. I saw some folks on Wall Street at 770, and some even higher than that. Just so you understand how this consensus things [sic] works. Last month, it was 300,000 better, but the month before that they missed it by 200,000, the month before that they missed it by 340,000. In August of last year, they missed it by 515,000. Forget about it, go back to April 2020, and they missed it by 2.2 million. You know, so, the consensus thing, let's look past that for a moment.

We’ve got almost 11 million job openings, we’re still not at the participation rate we were at just before the pandemic. So, this is a good number, but it could have been even better than this. For me, what’s more important is participation, I don’t know what that is just yet, because we want people coming back to the labor force, right. Also, wages. Now, wages were expected to go up 5.8 percent. Normally that’s good, but we’re going to find out next week that inflation, during this same time period, probably up more than 8 percent. So that means any raise you got was evaporated.


Throughout Payne’s commentary, he seemed confused about how the BLS reporting process works, and he ignored a key component of the entire process by which numbers are revised over time. For example, Payne said that the previous jobs report for August 2021 had missed its expectations by 515,000 jobs, totally ignoring the fact that subsequent revisions had made up for half that gap.

Payne also struggled to explain how economic forecasters form “consensus” expectations, and complained about low labor force participation rates, even though the report he held in his hand showed an increase in that rate from month-to-month.

Eventually, the Fox & Friends team got their footing and returned to the bread and butter misinformation we’ve come to expect from Fox News. Unable to coherently describe the economic data in front of their eyes, the team pivoted to complaining about President Joe Biden’s energy policies and mocking teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg for somehow contributing to both increased gas prices and Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Fox’s almost comical hot takes on the routine data release stand as a reminder that the Fox News propaganda machine will never miss an opportunity to cast the economy in a negative light, so long as it reflects poorly on Democrats.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Rick Perry Hits At Trump — And Trump Hits Right Back

Rick Perry Hits At Trump — And Trump Hits Right Back

Rick Perry is one of the first Republican presidential candidates to seriously take on Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants being rapists and other types of criminals. And for his part, The Donald is answering right back — by trash talking Perry on Twitter.

“Well I don’t think he’s reflecting the Republican Party with his statements about Mexicans. I think that was a huge error on his part — and number one, it’s wrong,” Perry said Thursday, during an appearance on Fox News. “When I think about the Hispanics in Texas, and I think about the individuals who have paid a great price, whether they were Tejanos at the Alamo in 1836, or whether it’s been as late as the last wars that we’ve had — when you see Hispanics being killed, for America.”

Fox News guest host Charles Payne interrupted to say that Trump was referring to people who are here illegally. Perry replied: “But I will suggest to you — he painted with a very broad brush, and I think that’s the problem.”

Perry also touted his own experience with the southern border as governor of Texas.

“What I would say is that we want somebody that’s actually dealt with this before, not somebody that’s just gonna shoot from the hip,” he said. “And I will suggest to you, I know how to secure the border.

“And the border security is the real issue here —it’s not painting with this broad brush that, obviously, I think Donald Trump painted with where he tried to say, you know, Mexicans are bad people, they’re rapists and murderers. Yes, there are bad people that cross the border. But how about, let’s get a Commander-in-Chief that knows how to secure the border, and at that particular time we can have a conversation about how to deal with this immigration issue — but not until that border is secure.”

Payne asked Perry whether the many companies that are dumping their deals with Trump were right to do so. “Listen, that’s their call,” Perry said. “My way to address this is to talk about the contributions that the Mexican-American has made to this country.”

Later that night, Trump posted on Twitter:

Perry previously got in trouble with the GOP base during his campaign for president in the last cycle, when at a September 2011 debate hosted by Fox News he defended his state granting in-state tuition at public colleges to students who had been brought into the United States as children of undocumented immigrants.

But if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children, because they will become a drag on our society.

Within about a week’s time, however, he walked that comment back: “I probably chose a poor word to explain that. For people who don’t want their state to be giving tuition to illegal aliens, illegal immigrants in this country, that’s their call, and I respect that.”

This Week In Crazy: Ted Nugent Saves Independence Day, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Ted Nugent Saves Independence Day, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Charles Payne

Screenshot: YouTube

Screenshot: YouTube

For years, Fox News has slammed President Barack Obama for presiding over a sluggish economic recovery that has featured stubbornly high unemployment. So the network must have been thrilled with Thursday’s expectations-shattering jobs report, right?

Not so much.

As Media Matters for America points out, Fox News buried the happy story on its website, instead of prominently featuring it like its competitors did. Then, when discussing the report on air, the network chose to focus on the “real unemployment rate” of 12.1 percent, before quickly pivoting to a discussion of a recent poll suggesting that Americans wish that Mitt Romney were president.

But nobody on Fox was more bummed about the nation’s robust job creation and declining unemployment rate than Fox Business host Charles Payne, who suggested that the new report is actually “too good.”

If anyone knows what sends stock prices tumbling, it’s this guy.

For those of you keeping score at home, the strong jobs report actually helped the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all-time high of 17,068. But fear not, Fox: Somewhere out there, Jack Welch is surely tracking down the real numbers.
4. Dennis Prager

Keith Allison via Flickr

Keith Allison via Flickr

Plenty of right-wing pundits have defended Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder’s right to name his football team with a racial slur, but few have done so in as clunky a way as Dennis Prager.

In a column in the National Review, Prager begins by (falsely) claiming that Native Americans don’t actually have a problem with the name.

“The great majority of American Indians understandably just don’t care,” he writes. “Like heterosexual AIDS and so many other crises, this has been entirely manufactured by the Left.”

Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time that Prager has claimed that heterosexual AIDS is a myth (just like secondhand smoke and climate change!).

Prager goes on to make a five-point case for why whiny liberals should shut up about the Redskins. It basically goes as follows:

1.“[T]he Left is far more concerned with attacking America — its alleged racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and economic inequality — than with fighting Islamism.”
2. “The Left today hates traditional America much more than it hates traditional Islamists. The Redskins name is a symbol of that hated America.”
3. Liberals love the ’60s, so “therefore getting the Redskins to change their name is a contemporary expression of working to give blacks full voting rights.”
4. “[A]side from tearing down another American tradition, and showing how awful America was and remains, the motivating issue here is left-wing self-esteem.”
5. The Left “is totalitarian at heart,” and while today liberals are criticizing George Will and the Redskins, tomorrow it will be you.

First they came for Dan Snyder, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Republican multi-millionaire…

3. Ben Carson

Dr. Ben Carson is still dominating the “say crazy things to sell copies of your book” phase of his rise to prominence as a right-wing leader.

During a recent interview promoting Carson’s book, DoveTV host Perry Atkinson suggested that if America bans abortion, then “it seems that all of the other things that God would be interested in helping us with would fall into alignment.

Carson agreed.

“It’s interesting that we sit around and call other ancient civilizations ‘heathen’ because of human sacrifice,” he mused, “but aren’t we actually guilty of the same thing?”

In related news, the guy who thinks that abortion is the same thing as human sacrifice, and that gay marriage is a Marxist plot to impose a New World Order is surging in Republican presidential polls.
2. Gordon Klingenschmitt

It may not stun you to learn that Colorado state House candidate and self-proclaimed demon expert Gordon Klingenschmitt is not thrilled with the recent decision striking down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage. But he’s not going to let it keep him down.

According to Klingenschmitt, he’ll get the last laugh — when Jesus overrules the Supreme Court and sentences gay men to eternal damnation.

“OK, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t get this right…but then there’s a higher court,” Klingenschmitt explained. “Because after that, these two men will appear before this court, the Great White Throne of Judgment, where Jesus Christ himself is sitting on the throne.”

“Jesus as the judge will overrule the Supreme Court,” he continued, “and what will he do with these two men? It’ll be printed in Heaven’s newspaper in a hundred years that God throws them into Hell.”

Klingenschmitt, who tends to stick to the more fire-and-brimstone-related sections of the Bible, clearly hasn’t considered the possibility that Heaven’s newspapers might also have a liberal bias.

Meanwhile, a few thousand voters in El Paso County haven’t considered the possibility that Gordon Klingenschmitt could be their representative in the state legislature.
1. Ted Nugent

Mike Licht via Flickr

Mike Licht via Flickr

In honor of the Fourth of July, it’s only fitting that this week’s “winner” is a man who loves this country so much that he pooped his pants for a week to dodge the draft: Ted Nugent.

In his latest column for conspiracy repository WorldNetDaily, Nugent wishes “real” Americans a happy Independence Day. But he has a different message for all of the “bloodsuckers and scammers” who voted for President Obama.

“With the runaway fraud and deceit infesting the welfare scams, entitlement scams, unemployment benefit scams, food-stamp scams, fuel subsidy scams, transportation scams, child support scams, disability scams, the suicidal scams running amok here, there and everywhere, it actually appears a sure thing that a huge swath of Americans actually do celebrate ‘Dependence Day’ every day,” Nugent writes.

“The dumbing down of America was necessary to de-soul America, and the Saul Alinsky gang infesting our government today rejoices that The Last Best Place is now plummeting downward at a high rate of speed, on course to be more ‘equal’ to all those lesser countries that are not allowed to have a Declaration of Independence,” he continues.

“I’m thinking ‘Orwellian’ here, Planet of the Apes, Many Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Twilight Zone, Soylent Green,” he adds, “but I’m sure hard-pressed to think ‘land of the free home of the brave’ much anymore when so many Americans have fallen for the anti-American scammasters.”

What’s a good patriot to do? Coincidentally, it turns out that the only way to save America is to buy a ticket to see Nugent’s self-described “killer band,” which he promises will “unleash a torrent of freedom soundtrack R&B&R&R.”

“I suppose it is no coincidence that my new record and tour are titled SHUTUP&JAM!, for my ‘we the people’ hell-raising duties are so full-time and exasperating in the face of this crazy government and the sheep that follow them that more often than ever in my life I need to indeed shutup and jam just to cleanse my soul and escape this heartbreaking fundamental transformation insanity, thereby celebrating my rugged individual independence with like-minded independent Americans,” he writes without any sense of modesty (or commas.)

Thanks for saving America, Ted Nugent! Just please finish the job before you end up dead or in jail.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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