On the eve of the Iowa caucuses Chris Matthews seemed to be issuing marching orders to Democratic voters as he declared that only a Barack Obama victory would send the message to the world that a "despised" America was truly ready to "change." In the event of an Obama win Matthews offered the following preview of his election night spin on the January 2 edition of MSNBC's "Hardball":

In a quick round of team coverage of top Democratic and Republican candidates in Iowa on Wednesday’s CBS "Early Show, " Political Correspondent Dean Reynolds led the segment with this glowing assessment of Barack Obama’s campaign:

Well, it's all about momentum now, and thanks to a promising poll from an influential newspaper, Barack Obama seems to have it and the others don't. Obama flew across Iowa lifted on the wings of a private jet and the news that he's ahead of his two main rivals. He was clearly encouraged by the priceless publicity.

Reynolds went on to promote the idea of Obama’s inevitability, something once reserved for Hillary Clinton: "A selling point now is Obama's electability, that the polls show him beating any Republican."

That observation was followed by this cheap shot sound-bite from Obama speaking about Republican rivals: "I intend to whup’em so good that it won't even be close and they can't steal the election." So much for Barack Obama reaching out to "every potential voter," as co-host Harry Smith suggested in his December 18 interview with the Illinois Senator: "Up in the northwest part of the state, the politics are conservative, but for a candidate locked in a tight race, every potential voter needs to be reached."

Credit Chuck Todd for candor. The NBC News Political Director has acknowledged that the media is poised to take a third-place finish by John McCain in Iowa, declare him the winner and catapult the Arizona senator to victory in New Hampshire. Todd appeared with the Politico's Roger Simon on this afternoon's Hardball.

View video here.

CNBC's ticking time bomb Jim "Mad Money" Cramer lashed out at the Federal Reserve again on January 2 for not cutting interest rates. This time he suggesting the Fed was intentionally doling out punishment to reckless investors.

"I have to tell you that I look at this situation and I say to myself, ‘They [the Federal Reserve] want it. They want a recession.'" Cramer said on CNBC's January 2 "Squawk on the Street." "They're Puritans. They want to punish the people who were reckless in their eyes and the punishment has still not finished being meted out."

Cramer was called into a discussion about the Fed with CNBC's David Faber and "Squawk Box" co-host Joe Kernan.

If Hillary Clinton’s trying to warm up her image in the last days before the first presidential vote, NBC’s Meredith Vieira threw another log on the fire, vouching strongly for her personal warmth on Wednesday’s edition of Today. "Her every word and move is caught on tape and while her critics assail Clinton as overly calculating, up close the Senator and former First Lady is natural, confident and warm," reported Vieira as she followed Hillary on the trail in Iowa.

After her report was over, Vieira underlined that private-warmth line to co-anchor Matt Lauer: "she's excellent, one-on-one with people. You know she has the image of being very cold and calculating but she's great one-on-one. I actually took my son Ben, who's a freshman in college, and wants to be president. He told her that and they sat and talked for the longest time and it was very genuine. I think she relates a lot to young people."

The economy is about to dive off a cliff and it's all President George W. Bush's fault, according to The New York Times editorial board.

A January 2 Times editorial was pretty pessimistic about the economy in 2008, mocking Bush and forecasting doom.

"As 2008 begins, house prices are still skidding, bank losses are still mounting, oil is again flirting with $100 a barrel and consumers are buying less as prices rise," the editorial said. "To many, the wheels appear to be coming off the economy. To others, including President Bush and his aides, the economy is fundamentally sound and resilient."

Well, the New York Times certainly can't be accused of excessive free market idolization. Peter Goodman breaks off from his gloomy economic assessments to cheer for regulation in Sunday's Week in Review story "The Free Market: A False Idol After All?"

In Goodman's telling, there is no question mark, stating the argument against the free market in simplistic liberal terms, right down to echoing the Reagan-era pejorative of "trickle down economics."

Update/Related Post link added below.

First, it goes without saying that Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy is entitled to his opinion as well, a columnist. So my gripe here isn't so much about liberal bias as it is about Milloy's insistence on projecting a politically correct pall, in the heat of playoff season, over the ONE thing that can unite Washingtonians across party lines. Our beloved Redskins.

Is it asking too much for the liberal Post columnist to refrain from resurrecting a fringe PC issue a mere three days after the Redskins clinched a playoff berth, and that while playing the despised Dallas Cowboys?

I guess it is (see excerpt below fold):

Secularized networks keep making mountains out of Christian-symbol molehills on the campaign trail. At CNN.com on Monday, reporter Rebecca Sinderbrand highlighted how a new Mike Huckabee ad has a Christian ichthys or fish symbol in it, on a banner for the Iowa Christian Alliance: "For the second time in two weeks, presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has aired a commercial in which a Christian symbol appears in the background." The ad script itself talks about defending "our values" and the worth of the unborn, but mentioned religion (rights endowed by "our creator") only in passing.

On Tuesday's edition of The Situation Room, CNN reporter Mary Snow implied incorrectly that the Iowa Christian Alliance was "backing" Huckabee when it's made no endorsement. An ICA officer had to apologize for making positive comments about Mitt Romney that sounded like an endorsement. Here's what Snow reported:

As you’ve already been told a thousand times, with only a day to go before the Iowa caucuses, the polls are showing a statistical three-way tie between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards atop the Democratic field, and a similarly close two-way race between Republicans Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

But the polls are probably wrong. Or maybe they’re right -- we won’t really know until Thursday night when the actual results are announced. And that’s the problem -- the media have given the polls so much emphasis that the actual results will only matter to the extent that they differ from the media’s pre-election expectations, i.e., only to the extent that this week’s polls are inaccurate.

In just the last month, RealClearPolitics has posted the results of 55 pre-Iowa caucus polls (27 for the Republicans, 28 for the Democrats). These are mostly media-generated polls, with a few conducted by universities. It’s because of these polls that reporters think they know who is and is not a frontrunner, who is and is not rising and/or falling, and who is and is not hopelessly behind.

For the second time in less than a month, "Good Morning America" co-host Chris Cuomo asked a Democratic presidential candidate to speculate about the inherent racism of American voters. Talking with John Edwards on Wednesday's edition of the program, the ABC journalist wondered about Thursday's Iowa caucus. He inquired, "When you think people get into the room, do you think race or gender may play an unspoken role in the caucus voting?"

Clearly, this is a topic that weighs heavily on Cuomo. On December 20, he spoke to Senator Barack Obama and asked, "What do you think the bigger obstacle is for you in becoming president, the Clinton campaign machine or America's inherent racists, racism?" In fact, GMA has a long history of harping on how bigoted America is. Since November 13, 2006, "Good Morning America" has featured the question, in some form or another, a total of five times.

Out: Green Week on NBC.

In: preachy AIDS activism on the peacock network's "ER."

Reports Los Angeles Times writer Greg Braxton in the the January 2 paper (emphasis mine):

Gloria Reuben raised more than a few eyebrows in 2000 when she went from the front lines of NBC's acclaimed "ER" to the back line of Tina Turner's rock 'n' roll tour. Now she's starting the new year by stepping forward into her past.

Reuben, who won accolades for her groundbreaking portrayal of Jeanie Boulet, a physician's assistant grappling with an HIV diagnosis, returns to the role Thursday night. She called the experience, which is being billed as a one-time appearance, both emotional and exhilarating.

[...]

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If you listen to the nattering nabobs of negativity in the media and on the left, the overwhelming majority of Americans think they're falling behind financially, are despondent about their lives and their futures, and are desperately looking for a change.

Yet, a new poll out from the folks at Gallup confirms what NewsBusters, the Business & Media Institute, and parent the Media Research Center have been saying for years: people are far happier with themselves and their lives than press members care to report.

In fact, the difference between what people feel about their immediate environment and what they think is going on outside of their sphere of influence is a stunning indictment of just how skewed media's account of the world really is.

For instance, here's the first result from Gallup that's got to utterly depress folks in newsrooms across the fruited plain (emphasis added throughout):

The Washington Post can't find a liberal label anywhere (merely the word "activist") to describe the boutique-left agenda of the Arlington (Virginia) County Board. They're "Targeting Smoking, Trans Fats, and Cars," says the Post headline on Kirstin Downey's story. How anti-car are they?

Board member Jay Fisette (D) will lead Arlington's effort to promote what Tejada called a "car-free diet." Fisette displayed a T-shirt with the slogan, "I lost 2,000 pounds in one day," and referred people to a county Web site, http://www.carfreediet.com, which calculates how much money people could save by getting rid of their car and how much weight they could lose.

Fisette also plans to promote a regional bike-sharing program, as some European cities have done.

Car-free diet? Who's proposed eating a car?

Fisette is usually celebrated by Post reporters for being openly gay.

What is not reported is often far more important than what is 

The Media, Their Mouths and Their Minds

And you thought the media made it tough with their mouths open.  They make things far more difficult when they choose to keep them shut.

Consuming news as a conservative is always an unappetizing proposition, given the Leftist slant to nearly everything on the menu.  Being fed a steady diet of what collectively amounts to "You are wrong, and an ass (to boot) for what you think" leaves the average diner unsatisfied.

We are delivered so many servings of these media bias sins of commission we have been forced to make antacids the fifth food group. Here at the Media Research Center we find ourselves perpetually understaffed and overwhelmed in our efforts to chronicle it all.  (We were going to address this by conducting a hostile takeover of the New York Times, but we found them to be too hostile and with too little left to take over.)

Two years ago, Old Media, particularly the New York Times, and quite a few chronic sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome (but I repeat myself), attempted to hijack the Sago Mine tragedy in West Virginia before the wakes for the 12 dead miners were even held. They wanted to pin the catastrophe, totally without foundation, on the idea that the administration had created the conditions for the tragedy by starving the budget of the Mine Safety and Health Administration and by putting industry cronies who were deliberately lax in safety enforcement in charge.

The Times even tried to tie the tragedy to Hurricane Katrina, which had occurred a few months earlier.

The claims of negligence and pervasive deteriorating safety conditions were definitively debunked at these posts:

• Jan. 5, 2006 at BizzyBlog (cross-posted at NewsBusters)
• Jan. 5, 2006 by Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics
• Jan. 6, 2006 at BizzyBlog

In short, yours truly and Bevan found that coal-mine deaths and injuries had been declining significantly during the previous four years; inspection hours had shown no indications of a safety letup; and the budget for MHSA had not been slashed.

So where is coal-mine safety, and mine safety in general, two years later?

Unfortunately, if you read the report published yesterday by the Associated Press's Tim Huber, you would think that nothing meaningful has happened:

This is one of the best short essays I have seen on Weapons in America, or at least what they once were. (Okay , so maybe you might want to secure your gun it a bit better these days when the kids are around than what he implies at the end, but still a good read.)

See here: