Mitt Romney

Coming down the stretch of the presidential campaign, it looks like NBC political director Chuck Todd has put getting it right over any personal or network partisan leanings.  On Morning Joe today, Todd declared that seven out of ten challengers in Mitt Romney's position in the polls win the election.

In an assessment sure to send shivers down Obama-camp spines, Todd added that "Romney appears to have the advantages going into the next couple of weeks."  View the video after the jump.

Seventeen days before Election Day and 45 months after Barack Obama's inauguration following a presidential campaign during which he expressed his eagerness to meet enemy leaders "without preconditions" (Obama responded "yes" to a 2008 presidential debate question containing those words), the New York Times is reporting that the U.S. and Iran "have agreed in principle for the first time to one-on-one negotiations," despite the fact that the White House has "denied that a final agreement (to negotiate) had been reached," and despite a reactive AP report (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) claiming that while "The White House says it is prepared to talk one-on-one ... there's no agreement now to meet."

Despite the supposed certainty of the Times's headline ("U.S. Officials Say Iran Has Agreed to Nuclear Talks"), the paper's Helene Cooper and Mark Landler report that "American officials said they were uncertain whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had signed off on the effort." If Khamenei isn't on board, it doesn't matter what anybody else, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says or does. Three years ago, two AP reporters covering the government's crackdown on dissidents noted Khamenei's "virtually limitless authority," i.e., he's the country's behind-the-scenes dictator. In a piece that's supposed to be about a supposedly important international development, Cooper and Landler predictably blow through quite a bit of ink and bandwidth trying to paint this development as a problem for Obama's GOP opponent Mitt Romney (bolds are mine):

Count former New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan as one of the media feminists who wanted to hit Mitt Romney with a binder for about a week. From her digital macrame rug on Yahoo News, Heffernan wrote an entire column insisting "The remark did not accomplish what he’d hoped. In fact, it tipped the hand of Romney’s women panic so thoroughly that it’s likely his court-the-undecided-females’ game is now thrown."

"Plus, it misses the mark of normalcy so absolutely that he comes off as comical," she guessed. "No wonder it became a meme on Twitter and other social media sites. Just in case the humor seems opaque, let me offer a binder full of analysis."

Drifting around the dial this morning, I happened on MSNBC's Weekends With Alex Witt.  Within minutes, I was stunned by two Witt whiffs, to wit:

1. Criticizing the Tea Party's lack of "diverse thinking," she asked Joe Scarborough "how much has the Tea Party damaged the Republican party?" Joe gently explained that far from damaging the GOP, the Tea Party propelled it to historic landslide victories in 2010. 2. Witt later cast the Salt Lake Tribune's recent endorsement of Barack Obama as a "surprise," ignoring the fact that in 2008, the Salt Lake Tribune endorsed . . . Barack Obama.  View the video after the jump.

In response to an innocuous joke Tagg Romney made on a radio show in North Carolina, Lawrence O'Donnell used the platform that is his late night talk show on MSNBC to taunt and threaten the oldest son of a presidential hopeful. 

Seemingly as serious as a heart attack, the nearly 57 year-old O'Donnell challenged the 42 year-old to a fist fight "any time, any where". [ video and transcript below ]

Liberal radio host Bill Press wants it both ways.

He's "blown away and upset" that Gallup's daily tracking poll yesterday showed Mitt Romney ahead of President Obama by seven points. Press also wants everyone to know that the poll is meaningless. (audio clip after page break)

The New York Times' s acclaimed poll-meister Nate Silver has a reputation for statistical expertise, but he's getting some guff for dismissing Mitt Romney's recent large leads in the Gallup tracking poll.

Silver's Thursday evening post on his FiveThirtyEight blog at nytimes.com, "Gallup vs. the World" claimed that Gallup's "results are deeply inconsistent with the results that other polling firms are showing in the presidential race, and the Gallup poll has a history of performing very poorly when that is the case."

The Big Three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) gave the faux furor over Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” statement in Tuesday’s debate a whopping 22 mentions through Friday morning. Yet when Vice President Joe Biden, on Thursday, told an audience member that Republican  “young guns” like Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan had “bullets” aimed at him the networks delivered just a scant two total mentions (on NBC and CBS, ABC skipped the gaffe entirely.)  

On the morning after the debate ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, on Good Morning America, singled out the “binders” comment: “You remember the Big Bird line that dominated the conversations online and around the water cooler, in essence, after the first debate? Last night, it was another Romney comment, ‘binders full of women’ that caused the heat to turn on.”

On Friday's CBS This Morning, John Dickerson was all too eager to pour cold water on the latest Gallup daily tracking poll that has Mitt Romney with a seven-point lead over President Obama: "There is a lot of debate about that...poll - whether it lags behind where the race really is....there's also other criticisms about...the way it looks at likely voters...it's a bit of an outlier from some other polls. So, if you're Mitt Romney, you like it, but we should, with all polls, be really, really skeptical."

The CBS political director raised no such objections back in mid-September, when the morning newscast spotlighted the same poll at a point where the two candidates were in a statistical dead heat, with Obama slightly ahead among both registered voters and swing state voters.

Timothy Egan, a liberal reporter for the New York Times who is now a left-wing columnist for nytimes.com, wrote a post Thursday on the second presidential debate. It followed the paper's desperate-sounding editorial that same day that tried to paint Mitt Romney as sexist for a reasonable observation about flexibility for women in the workplace. While Thursday's editorial accused Romney of a "1952 sensibility," Egan generously pegged it at 1956. Great minds think alike...?

The time capsule quality of Romney the C.E.O., circa 1956, was evident in several answers. On pay equality, it was not just “binders full of women” that made Romney seem like someone who popped to life with a hula hoop in hand. “I recognize that, if you’re going to have women in the work force, that sometimes you need to be flexible.” But only so the little honeys can get home in time to cook dinner for the gang.

With Friday's Gallup tracking poll showing Mitt Romney with a 51-45 lead over Barack Obama, the crew at NBC's Today decided to focus on a much more reliable method of predicting the next President of the United States: Halloween mask sales. Co-host Matt Lauer announced: "...there's some science behind this when it comes to the election. For example, according to the Huffington Post, this year Obama masks are out-selling Romney masks by more than 30%." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Lauer detailed how the candidate with stronger mask sales has won the past several presidential contests. Co-host Savannah Guthrie declared: "That's a perfect record....the polls are all over the place, so you know what? Maybe it's as good a predictor as any."

Running for president isn't just a long, arduous struggle anymore, it's downright dangerous! Proof of this can be found in hundreds of online death threats made against GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney that are receiving far less coverage in "mainstream" news outlets than when Barack Obama faced similar hostility while campaigning for the White House in 2008.

One example of the disparity between the coverage of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns is the multitude of death threats posted on the Twitter social website against the former Massachusetts governor since the second presidential debate on Tuesday.

"Anybody who runs interference for Obama on this one issue [the Benghazi attack] is deliberately misleading the American people," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Sean Hannity during his "Media Mash" appearance on the October 18 Hannity. "The record is clear here" that the Obama administration took weeks to publicly admit that the assassination of Amb. Chris Stevens and three others at the Benghazi consulate was a terrorist attack.

Hannity and Bozell also discussed how the media "never vetted" Obama in 2008 and are failing to scrutinize his economic record as president now (watch the segment in the video embedded below the page break):

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had some harsh words for the media at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner Thursday.

"I recognize that they have their job to do, and I have my job to do. My job is to lay out a positive vision for the future of the country, and their job is to make sure no one else finds out about it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

President Obama apologized to MSNBC's Chris Matthews at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner Thursday.

Speaking of his own horrible debate performance in Denver against Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Obama said with regard to Matthews, "Four years ago, I gave him a thrill up his leg. This time around I gave him a stroke" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In Thursday's Washington Post, reporters Scott Wilson and Anne Gearan really should have had their story labeled "commentary" or at least "news analysis." Or perhaps "journalistic crystal-ball-rubbing." It had the Obama-defending headline "Romney’s missteps on Libya may hurt criticism of Obama’s foreign policy." Not "Obama's missteps on Libya may help Romney criticism."

The story began: "A series of missteps by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in criticizing President Obama’s account of the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, might make it harder for him to continue using the incident as the heart of his wider complaint about the incumbent’s foreign policy record."

In the age where the 800+ word column is dead, The Washington Post seemed to make an exception Thursday for political writer Jason Horowitz to explore a sterile saga about Mitt Romney’s ’94 Massachusetts senate run against Ted Kennedy.  

The question is why did The Washington Post decide it was pertinent to publish this 3,800-word piece at this point in time?  Is it because Mitt Romney gained another point in the Gallup poll?  Regardless of the political angle, Horowitz's piece was filled with innuendo about Romney’s faith, as if the ’94 race was part of some grand Mormon conspiracy. 

President Obama is running for reelection because he feels the "higher calling" of the office, even though it's obvious he doesn't really love the political game, MSNBC's Alex Wagner told Conan O'Brien on his October 17 TBS program. By contrast, Gov. Mitt Romney is running simply because "it seems like the next thing he should be doing with his life."

Wagner made these comments after O'Brien observed that while Bill Clinton quite obviously loves hitting the campaign trail and stumping as a surrogate for Obama, it seems that the president himself would rather be doing something else than campaigning. [MP3 audio here; watch the video below the page break]

Not 24 hours after Tuesday's presidential debate, CNN's Jessica Yellin was working the Obama spin on Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" comment.

"You know, it made it sound almost like working women are some mail-order product you can order out of colored binders," she ridiculously claimed on Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360. CNN's White House correspondent played right into the White House talking points. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Singer and activist Harry Belafonte was at it again Monday night speaking ill of Republicans as well as capitalism.

Before receiving the Medal for Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, Belafonte told the Huffington Post, "I think that where we are now is in crisis and [at] a crossroads."

Leave it to MSNBC to set the record straight, where a defense of conservativism is strictly forbidden.  With no one to dispute such claims, one would think the GOP's "war on women" has never been more overt or frightening -- especially after watching News Nation's host Tamron Hall discuss these issues of inequality with her openly liberal guests.

On the Oct. 17 edition of News Nation, Hall invited Salon's fiercely feminist staff writer Irin Carmon and Democratic strategist Keith Boykin on her show to 'fact check' everything Mitt Romney had said the previous night. Hardly a non-partisan duo, their agenda was clear from the beginning. Voting for Mitt Romney could potentially be dangerous for women everywhere. [ video below, MP3 audio available here ]

Gayle King's support of President Obama - both vocal and financial - emerged on air on Thursday's CBS This Morning, as the newscast covered Mitt Romney's much-ballyhooed "whole binders full of women" answer at Tuesday night's debate. King blustered, "I think it's going to be the joke that keeps on giving. I really do." [audio available here; video below the jump]

Correspondent Seth Doane hyped "Romney's now-infamous phrase", and spotlighted how "on Twitter, a conservative binder backlash unfolded." Strangely, Doane cited a Tweet from Obama-defending journalist Mark Halperin as an example of a "conservative."

The New York Times must be really worried about bolstering Obama's support among women, with a Gallup poll shows Romney pulling even with Obama among women (though reporter Michael Shear strenously downplayed the fact in a Wednesday post by saying that "other surveys -- and Mr. Obama’s top strategists -- disputed that finding.")

In the last three days the paper has played into the Democrats' "war on women" theme, issuing two lead editorials on the dangers a Romney administration would pose to females. Tuesday's lead editorial fixated on the hazard a Romney presidency would pose to the left's beloved Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. On Thursday Romney was accused of having a "1952 sensibility" in "Mr. Romney's Version of Equal Rights – Facing a Gender Gap, the candidate looks at the issues through an out-of-date lens."

The reporters and anchors of Good Morning America on Thursday desperately hyped Mitt Romney's assertion that, while governor of Massachusetts, he had "binders full of women" applicants. David Muir played this as a gaffe, labeling it "the binder blunder." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos tried to build the remark into some sort of game changer: "We saw Mitt Romney make huge gains with women after the first debate. Democrats believe this will block that gains he's made." The "huge gains" Stephanopoulos referred to were first reported in a USA Today poll showing Romney and Barack Obama dead even with swing state women, 48-48. However, this is the first time the host actually mentioned the ominous news for the President.

Between Wednesday's Nightly News and Thursday's Today, NBC displayed an obsession with the liberal meme of attacking Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" remark during Tuesday's presidential debate. The network's delusional hyping of the manufactured controversy reached a crescendo when Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski appeared on Today to proclaim: "Romney just completely doesn't have any leg to stand on when it comes to women and the economy." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Today co-host Savannah Guthrie teed up Brzezinski to slam Romney: "...it has taken on a life of its own. The Democrats love it. They think it really shows Mitt Romney at his most awkward. But if the fight is for independent, undecided women voters, do you think this is an issue that's weighty enough to resonate?"

Unlike his former colleague Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein has once again shown he is no longer a serious journalist but instead a Republican-bashing liberal pundit.  Bernstein, who has consistently bashed the Republican Party as “extremist” has now turned to calling them anti-women.

Appearing on Thursday’s Jansing and Co., Bernstein was highly critical of Mitt Romney’s comments about hiring female members of his cabinet while he was Governor of Massachusetts.  [See video below break.  MP3 audio here.]

Last Friday, the Obama campaign released a Mitt Romney attack ad that deceptively edited a September 23 broadcast of CBS's 60 Minutes.

Take a look at the ad side by side with what Romney actually told Scott Pelley (video follows with transcript and commentary):