“Did President Obama save General Motors?” CBS’s Dean Reynolds asked General Motors Chairman and CEO Daniel Akerson as both sat inside a GM plant. On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, Akerson affirmed he did and “the Obama administration did a good job.”

Reynolds pointed out how Mitt Romney “argued the bailout was unnecessary, and that the regular bankruptcy process would have made GM and Chrysler stronger companies. Would that have happened?” Akerson rejected the notion, insisting if not for the bailout “you could have written off this company, this industry, and this country.”

Leading off Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams spun hard for the Obama administration as he distorted Mitt Romney's opposition to the government bailout of the auto industry: "The fight for Michigan as Mitt Romney scrambles to explain to the voters in his home state why he thought the auto industry should be allowed to fail."

Having ignored the fact that Romney called for a "managed bankruptcy" of General Motors and Chrysler in order for them to reorganize and become healthier companies, Williams announced to viewers: "Mitt Romney's in a tough spot....he's working hard to explain why he was against the government's auto industry bailouts. That doesn't go over well in the state we associate with Detroit and American cars."

The shrill, extremist comments coming from the co-hosts on The View continued, Thursday. Liberal comedienne Joy Behar trashed Virginia for passing abortion restrictions, saying the new law makes the state like "the Taliban." 

Behar highlighted legislation requiring women, in some cases, to have an ultrasound before getting an abortion, decrying the move as "invasive." She then hyperbolically shrieked, "It's like, what are we? What is this, the Taliban now? What are we, in Afghanistan? Where are we exactly in this country?"  [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

It seems even when a Democrat Congresswoman calls Republicans demons, the host of NOW with Alex Wagner still needs to find a way to agree with her.  On Thursday's show, Wagner insisted she wasn't ‘defending the semiotics’ of the statement.  She then pivoted and sympathized, "...But I think what you see reflected especially on the side of the Democrats is an incredible amount of frustration in terms of the political process."

Speaking last week at the California Democratic Convention, Congresswoman Maxine Waters fired off typical vitriol at Republicans, going so far as to call Speaker of the House John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor "demons." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

While former environmental reporter Andrew Revkin showed a double standard in his Wednesday coverage of Climategate versus his coverage of documents swiped from climate-change skeptics, he looked positively fair compared to the hostile reporting on the stolen documents Thursday by Times colleagues Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman, “In Documents, a Plan to Discredit Climate Teaching.” The reporters suggest a highly dubious two-page "Climate Strategy" memo "closely matched that of other documents" in tone and content, reminiscent of the paper's September 15, 2004 headline in defense of the infamous Rathergate fraud: "Memos on Bush Are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says."

Gillis and Kaufman accuse Heartland of fighting “climate science,” and cast its opponents as noble “defenders of science education.” Skeptics would accuse them of using classrooms to spread global-warming hysteria. (Last Christmas, a piece by Gillis was eviscerated by a climate scientist as “perhaps the worst piece of reporting I've ever seen in the Times on climate change.”)

Unlike the Times’s arms-length treatment of the “Climategate” emails, the Times embraced these stolen documents in much the same way it welcomed the secret and classified diplomatic cables from Wikileaks, while giving only lip service acknowledgment to Heartland pointing out at least one of the trove is a fake:

[Updated with video.] Where in the world was Kent Conrad? The Senate Budget Committee Chairman was supposed to appear on Thursday's Morning Joe program to dispute the idea that the Democrats are being irresponsible for not passing a budget in over 1000 days. Senator Conrad left viewers without a defensible argument, because he never showed up for the interview. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski seemed clueless as nobody was on camera when they shot over to Capitol Hill for the interview.  The irony of the Senator not showing up for an interview to defend the do nothing Senate from being labeled as irresponsible was so clear that the liberal cable network MSNBC couldn’t help itself.  Even the left-leaning Brzezinski joked, “Maybe he’s looking for the budget.”

Seeing little hope for Republican chances against Obama in November on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer put this question to Donald Trump: "Isn't any Republican nominee going to have a problem, and that is, by all indications, the economy is getting stronger. So if you're the Republican nominee, how do you run against a recovering economy? How do you say, 'I'm not up with that'?"

As NewsBusters has been reporting, the perilously liberal media have been focusing a great deal of attention on contraception in order to assist President Obama's narrative that Republicans want to take away everyone's birth control.

Doing his part on MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday was CNBC contributor Howard Dean who actually said with a straight face, "Very conservative women want their kids, their daughters taking birth control" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

I wrote last week about a theory put forth by Washington Post's Sarah Kliff that abortion proponents were shifting strategies to focus on contraceptives rather than abortion, the reason being their own polls show abortion is no longer a winning issue with young people and women, but contraception is.

This week Republican strategist Dick Morris pitched the same theory on Hannity, adding some corroboration: