Tim Graham's blog

The liberal media had a daily drumbeat of outrage over President Bush’s War on Terror, openly editorializing about closing Guantanamo and against harsh treatment of suspected terrorists. Barack Obama was elected in 2008 running against the Bush policies. Now that he’s president and he’s failed to live up to his anti-anti-terror promises, The Washington Post pollsters report Republicans should not attack him, because a majority of the Left apparently has changed their minds.

"The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, have broad public support,” reported Scott Wilson and Jon Cohen on Thursday, “ including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.”

CNN senior vice president and Washington bureau chief Sam Feist responded on Tuesday to MRC president Brent Bozell’s letter demanding television coverage of President Obama’s unprecedented attack on the religious liberty of Catholics through Obamacare. Here is the letter, and below it our response:

Hypocrisy knows no bounds on the airwaves of National Public Radio, as their Minnesota-based star Garrison Keillor led off his latest edition of “A Prairie Home Companion” by mocking the GOP frontrunners as “the Mormon running against the polygamist.” This is a rich dig coming from Keillor, since he has been married three times – just as many times as Newt Gingrich.

This was within three minutes of the program starting, just a little partisan liberal boilerplate before the folksy singers get started. Keillor mocked conservatives like Romney and Gingrich for believing "the solution to our current dilemma is to go back to the policies that helped cause that dilemma...deregulation, cutting taxes, starting a new war, if possible."

It’s apparently never too young to push social liberalism and call it “anti-bullying education.” Sunday’s Washington Post promoted D.C. schools with the headline “Redefining Family.” As usual, the Post featured happy color photographs of two lesbian moms – two on the front page of Metro, and two on the back page where the story continued.

Reporter Michael Alison Chandler began: “In the national push to prevent bullying, more elementary schools are introducing lessons about gay tolerance. Some lessons begin before the first day of kindergarten.”

Kudos to CNN "State of the Union" host Candy Crowley for bringing up on Sunday the undercovered story of the recent Obamacare-related decision to force Catholic employers to insure sterilizations, abortifacients, and contraceptives. When she mentioned "real outrage within the Catholic community" -- and bishops' letters opposed Obama were again read in parishes across America at Mass on Sunday -- liberal Gov. Martin O'Malley blew off the bishops: "most of those in the hierarchy are also Republicans." Is that why Obama's violating their religious freedom?

O'Malley also claimed that this is not a big deal because "these same rules apply in countries like Italy which have overwhelming numbers of Catholics, and yet we did not see the reaction in those countries to these sorts of things." This might be because while 97 percent of Italians think of themselves as Catholic, church attendance is very low (from 15 to 30 percent). They go to church on an Obama schedule. (Fore!)

On Thursday night’s All Things Considered, NPR publicized radical-left vegan activists putting up mocking images of fat people to scare people away from that menace known as cheese.

Reporter Allison Aubrey relayed “One billboard in Albany, New York features a huge photo of an overweight woman. She's squeezing the fattest part of her thighs with a message: ‘Your Thighs On Cheese,’ emblazoned across the side.” NPR publicized the group calling itself the “Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,” despite it being mostly a group of non-physician activists.

Sunday’s Travel section in The Washington Post carries the big headline “Meet Me In Havana,” or online, it’s “So nice to meet you, Havana.” Inside the headline was “In Cuba, finding vivid color and colorful people.” Team Obama has made it possible to go on “people-to-people” trips to Cuba.

This kind of detail was in small print in the “Travel Tips”: “Bring extra toilet paper or tissues. Public bathrooms often have no stash.” Post writer Andrea Sachs also paid tribute to the “reassuring fist pump” in the omnipresent image of communist thug Che Guevara:

The whiplash-inducing switch in policy (and back again) by the Susan G. Komen Foundation to stop funding (and then not stop funding) Planned Parenthood this week may have caused some pro-lifers to regret all the nice things they said.

But what if you were a leftist radio host who responded by calling the Komen people "Nazis" who would crucify Jews? Would you, could you gently back away from an attack like that? On Thursday, radical and splenetic Mike Malloy (the former CNN employee) uncorked his usual death talk against the Komen Foundattion, and most specifically the suspected bad girl in this plot, one Karen Handel, who apparently would kill Jews and Muslims:

The Obama administration announced plans to force Catholic schools, hospitals, and other church-affiliated organizations to subsidize sterilization, abortifacients, and contraceptives in their health insurance plans. Bizarrely, this is causing the media to wonder if the exact opposite is happening. Time.com posted this odd headline on Monday:  "Birth Control: Could It Be Illegal Again?"

On Thursday, NPR talk show host Diane Rehm echoed that science-fiction question: "Are we creeping towards a wiping out of the availability of birth control?" NPR health correspondent Julie Rovner replied "I'm not sure I would say that." Because it's not exactly supported by any present facts?

In noting the latest White House "hangout" with questions from YouTube users, Amie Parnes of The Hill noted that President Obama has failed to hold a press conference since early October -- three months without engaging with White House reporters who might feel professional pressure to ask unexpected hardball questions. Instead, Obama submits himself to softball sessions with ABC's Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters.

She reported Towson University professor Martha Joynt Kumar’s research indicates Obama has held more solo White House news conferences (17) than George W. Bush in his first three years (11). "On the other hand, Obama has held far fewer news conferences than former Presidents Clinton and George H.W. Bush, who held 31 and 56 news conferences, respectively." He prefers the more controlled individual interviews -- often loaded with softballs like which super power he'd like to have.

Everyone knows the folks at MSNBC nearly faint in outrage whenever the words “Obama” and “Kenya” are used in the same sentence. Barack Hussein Obama Senior had four wives (one at a time), and fathered eight children from 1958 to 1982, but climbing that family tree is no doubt seen as racist by MSNBC.

But on Monday night’s Last Word on MSNBC, host Lawrence O’Donnell not only mocked Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather Miles Park Romney leaving America for Mexico to preserve his polygamy. He claimed their history is “profoundly weirder” than you would think – and didn’t really explain what he meant. [MP3 audio here. See video below.]

New York magazine political reporter John Heilemann proclaimed the obvious as he discussed media bias: "No person with eyes in his head in 2008 could have failed to see the way that soft coverage helped to propel Obama first to the Democratic nomination and then into the White House. But in the course of the past three years, reporters, as is their wont, have arrived at a more measured (and even jaundiced) view of him. Let’s hope that means that in this fall’s horse race, both ponies get ridden equally hard."

Heilemann thinks that "the press may help keep Gingrich on life support into the spring," because he knows how to play the press game and be interesting. Mitt Romney, by contrast, is already in trouble with the journalists:

People at National Public Radio boast about themselves as a network for the smart people. So why must they try to tell smart people that a man who writes a book called “Rules for Radicals” offered “nothing terribly ideological” in his activism?

In an attempt to "correct" Newt Gingrich on Monday night’s All Things Considered newscast, NPR correspondent Ina Jaffe became merely the latest in a line of liberal-media specialists in selling the Opposite of Reality: that Alinsky wasn’t a leftist, and that besides, the conservatives are the ones using Alinsky’s radical rules:

In his Sunday column, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton agreed with readers who felt the Post “downsized” the massive “March for Life” by failing to show broad crowd shots. Pexton quoted AP that it’s “consistently one of the largest protests of the year in Washington” and “One observer e-mailed that he stood at the Supreme Court and it took marchers two hours to walk by. That’s a big crowd.”

Pexton failed to compare this massive crowd – and the Post’s failure to write more than one story (in Metro) on it – to the Post’s slobbering love affair with the Occupy DC protests that have spread far and wide across the liberal newspaper. Pexton found the Post photo editor sneering that pro-lifers can never be pleased:

In a Monday profile of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz headlined "Obama's Bodyguard," Newsweek's Howard Kurtz reminded readers how she outraged conservatives by suggesting the shooting of her friend Gabby Giffords showed how "the discourse in America" had taken "a very precipitous turn towards edginess and a lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement.” Kurtz added “Wasserman Schultz makes no apologies. Nibbling a sandwich in her House office, she says: ‘I make strongly worded statements so people pay attention a little to what I’m saying.’”

If they don’t pay enough attention to her little outrages, she skips their show. “The congresswoman appears periodically on Fox News, although she boycotts some hosts, such as Neil Cavuto, who she feels keep talking over her.”  Kurtz began by peering in at the congresswoman in a ladies’ bathroom:

CNN analyst John Avlon may have worked a while back for Rudy Giuliani, but on Saturday morning, he sounded like an Obama White House spinner. On the show Your Bottom Line, host Christine Romans asked if the economy will hurt or help Obama.

Avlon tried to compare Obama in 2012 with Ronald Reagan in 1984. This is dicey because the unemployment rate had plunged 3.6 percentage points from its cyclical peak of 10.8 percent that had been reached two years earlier (November 1982). That coincided with the bottom of the deepest recession since World War II (and liberal media types always skip over how badly the economy did under Jimmy Carter). Obama's only down a point and a half from his 10.0 percent high.