WEST WING READS 04/12/2019 MSM BEGRUDGINGLY CHANGES TUNE ON BORDER CRISIS!

From ‘No Crisis’ to ‘Breaking Point’: Mainstream Media Changes its Tune “Months after repeatedly dismissing and mocking President Trump’s claim of a national emergency at the Southern U.S. border, the mainstream media are grappling with reality,” Lukas Mikelionis writes for Fox News. But it’s worth remembering that as recently as February, a New York Times “fact check” of President Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union address claimed that “President Trump described illegal border crossings as a ‘urgent national crisis.’ This is false.” Today, Mikelionis describes how “the same media outlets are now scrambling to accurately portray the border crisis, no longer fearing to quote top officials and their data, and declare that the southern border is at a ‘breaking point’ amid a surge in the number of illegal immigrant crossings.” Click here to read more.

“Tax Day is always bad because Americans are overtaxed. But this Tax Day, we can celebrate the fact that an overwhelming majority of people are being taxed less, thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Republicans passed in late 2017,” the Washington Examiner editorial board writes. “There was a deliberate attempt to trick the public into believing the bill was a middle-class tax increase . . . [but] no fewer than four out of every five taxpayers saw a reduction thanks to the law.”

“The Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday on Fox & Friends that the influx of immigrant caravans at the Mexico border was ‘a crisis by any measure,’” Jeffrey Cimmino reports in The Washington Free Beacon. “It requires a change in law,” Johnson said, calling for a bipartisan solution. A number of prominent Democrats continue to downplay the crisis, Cimmino writes.

U.S. weekly jobless claims dropped to a near 50-year low last week, pointing to continued market strength, Reuters reports. “Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 196,000 for the week ended April 6, the lowest level since early October 1969. Claims have now declined for four straight weeks.”