After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2025 ~ Last Thursday, while taking questions from the press in the Oval Office (where the 59-Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press is still banned by Donald Trump) the President called out by name two MSNBC news program hosts that he said “should be forced to resign.” The journalists are Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow, both of whom have doggedly connected the dots for their viewers on Trump’s grifting and unsavory alignment with his largest campaign donors and with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s attack on these two specific journalists followed a more general attack on the MSNBC cable network on February 18 during a Sean Hannity interview. Five days later, Joy Reid, another MSNBC program host – and one of Trump’s worst critics – learned that her program had been abruptly cancelled. (See our report: News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling … Continue reading →

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Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2025 ~ On the very day that Donald Trump is set to deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, with a disapproval rating of 52 percent according to a CNN poll out on Sunday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s model for predicting U.S. economic growth is flashing red. The model is known as GDPNow and is highly respected for its accuracy. After an update yesterday based on new, incoming economic data, GDP for the first quarter is predicted to be -2.8 percent. The GDPNow staffers wrote this yesterday: “The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.8 percent on March 3, down from -1.5 percent on February 28. After this morning’s releases from the US Census Bureau and the Institute for Supply Management, the nowcast of first-quarter real … Continue reading →

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