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Following the insulting trend of tagging every objection or concern raised about Obama administration policy and conduct as exclusively the province of Republicans and conservatives to an outrageous extreme, Rebecca Kaplan at CBS News opened her Monday story about whether the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) might plan terrorist acts in the U.S. as follows: "Republicans are sounding the warning that the next 9/11-like terror plot could emerge from the regions of Iraq and Syria that are currently dominated by an extremist group bearing down on Baghdad." Really, Rebecca? No one else is worried about that? Wanna bet?

Kaplan also seemed to believe that it would calm readers' nerves if they learned that it will be "at least a year before ISIS might pose more of a serious threat to the U.S." If that was meant to make me feel better, it didn't work. Excerpts follow the jump (links are in original; bolds are mine):

In the Bush years, New York Times columnists like Frank Rich mocked the “fictional realities” being sold by the White House. Now in the Obama years, it’s Times columnists who are struggling to sell an unpopular president.

In his Monday cheerleading column titled "Yes He Could," leftist economist Paul Krugman complained that liberals are listening too hard to the “prevailing media narrative” of a “troubled if not failed” presidency. Nonsense, says Krugman. Everything’s coming up roses, including Obamacare.

The Washington Post editorial board used the tragedy on Tuesday morning, June 10, in Troutdale, Oregon -- where a 15-year-old boy armed with an AR-15 rifle shot and killed a 14-year-old student before taking his own life -- to declare in a June 13 editorial that “such senseless violence shouldn't happen” and put the blame on Congress for not passing “any kind of responsible gun control.”

“A Congress that’s more terrified of the National Rifle Association than another Sandy Hook needs to be pushed to change by a public willing to vote out those who won’t act,” the editors declared. “It’s clear from the countless locales that have been scarred by gun violence that no place is really safe.”

On Monday, June 16, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams did his best to not only spin the recent surge in violence throughout Iraq as being George W. Bush’s fault but managed to completely contradict the reporting of NBC’s own journalists. 

Williams opened the broadcast by falsely declaring “As a group of heavily armed and highly motivated terrorists continues its way across Iraq, it's not yet clear if the U.S. will take any action in Iraq...The U.S. may have to work with Iran before this is all over as another Iraqi city has now fallen to this group called ISIS.” 

Earlier today, Washington Post columnist Melinda Henneberger favorably retweeted a story by NewsBusters alumna and Washington Free Beacon contributor Alana Goodman regarding newly-discovered audiotape of Hillary Clinton from an interview in the mid-1980s in which the likely 2016 presidential aspirant was rather lighthearted and occasionally laughing as she recalled a time where she successfully defended an accused child rapist by working out a plea deal for a much lighter sentence. "Defends man accused of raping 12-yr-old, laughs abt case RT @alanagoodman Hillary Tapes: http://wfb.tc/1iA2uMv v," Henneberger tweeted shortly after midnight on Monday.. 

Yet on the June 16 Hardball program -- on MSNBC, the nation's premiere "War on Women" network -- neither Henneberger nor Hardball anchor Chris Matthews nor Politico's Roger Simon broached the topic at any time during their discussion about the former secretary of state's rocky rollout of her Hard Choices memoir. Here's an excerpt of the June 15 story from Goodman (emphasis mine):

MSNBC is known for its promotion of abortion and “abortion rights” and on Monday, June 16 its afternoon program The Cycle showed just how over-the-top its activism is.

“The Cyclists” played host to Jill Filipovic, Senior Political Writer at Cosmopolitan.com,  to promote an article she wrote about new abortion laws being pushed in Ohio. During the interview, the Cosmopolitan editor proclaimed that “I mean all of these kind of real horror stories because as you said we've become essentially a country of have and have-nots when it comes to abortion.” [See video below.]   

Last Friday, the Internal Revenue Service announced that it had lost approximately two years of emails from former employee Lois Lerner. 

Despite the damning new revelations in the IRS scandal, ABC and NBC have failed to cover the story as of Monday June 16, and only CBS This Morning reported on the emails on Monday but their evening news program ignoring the IRS alongside ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer and NBC Nightly News.

William Devane (IMDb page), who plays “President James Heller” on Fox’s prime time 24: Live Another Day, told USA Today that “obviously I’m a big fan of Obama, as a guy who’s smart and articulate” and, in his acting, “I say to myself, ‘what has got to be going on in the private side of this guy’s brain’ –  the pressure, the racism that is thrown out — and he handles it with such dignity.’”

The people at NBC who are agonizing over David Gregory's ongoing audience freefall at his Meet the Press perch need only look at the first half of his interview with 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to see why it's happening.

Gregory basically refused to acknowledge the existence of Romney's core argument, which is essentially that he wouldn't have done what President Obama did in withdrawing from Iraq so hastily and leaving things to run on auto-pilot. Instead, he insisted on sticking with a "Well, what would do now?" line of questioning, even though, as Romney indicated, he doesn't have access to intelligence briefings necessary to assert an informed opinion. When that didn't work, he tried to hold Romney to a stale 2007 quote from when conditions were obviously very different. The fact is that wouldn't be facing the present quandary if Obama hadn't acted directly against the (often privately expressed) desires of Iraqi leaders and U.S. intelligence officials to maintain at least a significant advisory presence there. Video and a transcript of the Iraq-related portion of the interview follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

In a scathing column for The New Republic, Alec MacGillis charged–with scarce evidence–that Governor Scott Walker’s (R-Wis.) political success is the result of racial politics in the state of Wisconsin. MacGillis’s headline is predictable left-wing race baiting: “The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker”.

MacGillis suggested that the Badger State governor’s political rise is the product of the urban-suburban divide that exists in the metro Milwaukee area, and then proceeded to explain the long history of the racial tensions that have existed in the state, connecting precisely none of it to Walker himself, unless you count a few forwarded emails by low-level Walker staffers.

Bill Maher and his guest MSNBC’s Krystal Ball spent the June 13 edition of Real Time With Bill Maher whining that conservatives and liberals are physically and culturally separating themselves in deep red pockets of the country while these “polarizing extremes” lead to political “gridlock” that keep moderates from voting. If they voted, the liberal talk show hosts – who live in the vaunted purple battlegrounds of New York City and Los Angeles, respectively – agreed, “this country would look so different.”

Not to be outdone in left-wing rhetoric, Maher claimed, “Let’s be honest, the only way the Republicans win is they cheat.” [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]

The journalists at ABC and NBC on Monday couldn't manage to cover the revelation that the IRS lost two years-worth of Lois Lerner's e-mails. Yet, reporters on all three networks mourned the loss of a parking garage connected to the four decade-old Watergate scandal. Sunday CBS Evening News anchor Jeff Glor pronounced, "The world's most famous parking garage will be destroyed." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Just how many "famous" parking garages are there? 

Glor explained that  the county board in Arlington, Virginia "voted this weekend to demolish the garage where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met secretly with his Watergate source Deep Throat, Mark Felt." However, he reassured viewers that a "historical marker will remain." The story was also covered on Sunday's World News, Monday's Today show and CBS This Morning.

Now this makes sense: a TV actor educating Washington media types about the Constitution. Weren’t there any professional wrestlers available?

NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” star Nick Offerman served up his insights about the Bill of Rights, of all things, at the Congressional Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C. June 12 and peppered it with plenty of GOP bashing.

Offerman professed that he is neither a Democrat or a Republican, but a Teddy Roosevelt “ proud bull moose.”  Video after the jump.

Time’s Belinda Luscombe offered a somewhat tough “10 Questions” with the rapper Ice Cube for the June 23 issue. She asked how he could rap about being poor – “I’m squeezing the penny so hard a booger came out of Lincoln’s nose” – when he is very wealthy. She asked how much his young kids curse after listening to his music.

But the most interesting part was asking him how the Obama presidency is going. “Mr. Cube,” as she called him, was still totally down with Obama, and busting on whites not wanting to “play” with him in Washington:

On Thursday's The Lead on CNN, James Allen Fox used actual crime data to splash cold water on a liberal talking point claiming that mass shootings on the rise: "It's a horrific event when four, five, twelve people are gunned down...But let's not think that this is an epidemic." Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, also pointed out that the now-expired "assault weapons" ban had little impact on the number of mass shootings.

Anchor Jake Tapper wondered "what does society need to do" to prevent such events from happening. His guest actually contended that it would be overkill to implement draconian measures in response to such massacres: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]

On the June 16 edition of MSNBC’s Jansing and Co., guest host Craig Melvin channeled far-left anti-war opinion in his questioning of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). While the left has been persistent in their arguments that the Iraq War was the ultimate cause of the current conflict, Melvin was willing to take things a step further.

Melvin posed quite the loaded question to Whitehouse: “Senator, is what we’re seeing unfold right now in Iraq, is it–is it sort of chickens coming home to roost? I mean, is this a failure of U.S. policy in Iraq? Is that what we’re seeing bear out?” [MP3 audio here; video below]

Apparently CBS News believes in the Easter Bunny.

Brad Wilmouth reported this morning that CNN's John King made this comment about the Lois Lerner emails that the IRS now claims are supposedly lost: ""Do you believe in the Easter Bunny? Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe that Lois Lerner's emails just suddenly went poof?" Well, CBS News seems to be in Easter Bunny belief mode based on their narrow online report Friday, IRS lost Lois Lerner's emails in tea party probe, which carefully avoids any curiosity as how such emails are now supposedly irretrievable. In fact their own former reporter Sharyl Attkisson is now asking on her website the questions that CBS should but so far hasn't been asking:

Even MSNBC journalists are unable to ignore Hillary Clinton stumbles after unveiling her new memoir Hard Choices last week. On the June 16 edition of Morning Joe, the liberal pundit Donny Deutsch described the first week of her book tour as a “disaster,” and an indication that the American public may be feeling “Hillary fatigue,” quite surprising coming from a network that inaugurated a new book club with Hillary’s memoir first on the reading list.

Former Republican congressman and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough questioned why Hillary was unable to “stay on message” and deflect any hardball questions. According to Scarborough, Hillary was “selling a book,"  not “running for president” and should have been able to stay “on message” and avoid scraps with liberal media outlets like NPR. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]

On Monday, only CBS This Morning reported Friday's stunning revelation that the IRS somehow lost two years worth of emails from Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were unfairly targeted. At the top of the morning show, co-host Norah O'Donnell wondered: "How did the IRS lose emails in the scandal targeting conservatives after the government spent millions to back up data?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Introducing the later report, fellow co-host Charlie Rose noted: "The Washington Times says congressional Republicans are blasting the IRS for losing some of Lois Lerner's emails.... the controversy that started last year is erupting again." Correspondent Nancy Cordes reported: "Republican lawmakers, as you can imagine, are furious. They say the IRS has been promising to get them these emails for a year, and now suddenly says that Lois Lerner's computer crashed way back in 2011."

Was St. Joan of Arc a medieval French heroine who followed God’s instructions and united her country against the marauding English? Or was she a dude Jay Michaelson sat next to in his Queer Theory survey class? 

Michaelson, writing for The Daily Beast, recently bashed the 2014 Southern Baptist Convention for declaring, to his ears, that, “Trans People Don’t Exist.” He vented that “the Southern Baptist Convention has gone ahead and decided gender is only about your junk” – and countered the decision by claiming St. Joan of Arc as a transgender. 

Well, ABC and NBC are acting to type, ever reluctant to call evil by its name when doing so is politically incorrect (and possibly dangerous).

Consider both networks’ reporting on the story of the school girls kidnapped last month in Nigeria, and a second, smaller group kidnapped last week. To date, NBC identified the kidnappers of hundreds of Christian girls as Islamist less than 33 percent of the time (12 mentions in 37 reports). ABC’s record is particularly shameful – just 22 percent (eight of 36 total reports) of stories mentioned that Boko Haram, the terrorist gang that abducted the girls, are radical Muslims.

So it turns out there that something doesn't have to be true to be funny.

Many a thinking American - who knows media bias - finds the following perversely appropriate.

Young Get News From Comedy Central

Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather ... and Jon Stewart?

Readers over 30 might scoff at Stewart's inclusion - assuming they know who he is. For many under 30, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" is, improbably, a source for news.

During New Day's regular "Inside Politics" segment on Monday, CNN's John King declared that it "makes me suspicious" as he informed viewers of revelations that some of former IRS official Lois Lerner's emails not only went missing, but that it took over a year for the White House to inform Congress.

After beginning the segment by rhetorically asking, "Do you believe in the Easter Bunny? Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe that Lois Lerner's emails just suddenly went poof?" King recalled the details, including a quote from House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp complaining about it taking so long for the White House to inform him of the emails. King then commented:

Jane Pauley, who campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008 as she declared “I want to see the cool, steady hand of Barack Obama on that Bible on Inauguration Day,” on CBS’s Sunday Morning pleaded for Hillary Clinton to try to succeed him: “If not you, who? Who is the viable woman of either party who could win a primary nomination in 2016 if not you?”