Mitt Romney

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham doesn't think the liberal media's bar is very high for Barack Obama to get wildly favorable reviews after Tuesday's upcoming presidential debate with Mitt Romney.

Appearing on Fox & Friends early Tuesday morning, Ingraham said, "He can sit there playing Angry Birds on his iPhone and I think they’ll go, 'Oh wow, masterful performance'" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Tonight’s town hall-style presidential debate will ostensibly feature questions from undecided voters, but the evening’s agenda will really be decided by the moderator, as CNN’s Candy Crowley will select which of the more than roughly 80 voters in the room will actually get a chance to talk to the candidates.

Reviewing the five previous town hall debates, the journalist-moderators have tended to skew the agenda of these so-called citizen forums to the liberal side of the spectrum, but not always. Overall, questions have been twice as likely to favor liberal causes versus conservative ones.

The Left and the establishment press (but I repeat myself) are taking heart in the fact that Bruce Springsteen has agreed to campaign for Barack Obama in Ohio and Iowa later this week.

The campaign of Mitt Romney, and Republicans in general, are the ones who should be cheered by this development for two reasons. One of them, which is being reported, is that Springsteen said earlier this year that he wouldn't be campaigning; the fact that he has changed his mind proves that Team Obama is genuinely worried about their boss's reelection prospects. The second isn't as well-known, but should be. "The Boss" (i.e., Springsteen) went all-in with the Occupy movement earlier this year, essentially ratifying our incumbent president's endorsement. Springsteen's stance was described in several places in February, including at the Gothamist:

On Monday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd analyzed the state of the presidential race following a series of new national polls showing a slight Romney lead: "Well, look, the first debate really did sort of shift things....the numbers I've seen, and in talking to both campaigns, something shifted fundamentally."

However, only four days earlier, on Thursday's Today, Todd argued the debate was "not as helpful to Romney as he might have hoped," leading co-host Savannah Guthrie to conclude: "Alright, so the debate had maybe not as much of an impact." That was as the ABC and CBS morning shows highlighted Romney's clear momentum.

Has CNN's Piers Morgan had a revelation? Or is he simply praising Mitt Romney in the British press while peddling Democratic talking points on CNN?

Romney "just might save America," Morgan proclaimed over the weekend in Britain's Daily Mail. "His track record as a businessman is better than almost any presidential candidate ever."

Good Morning America's Jake Tapper on Sunday actually raised the issue of media bias, highlighting that Mitt Romney operatives "generally think that the media is in the tank for President Obama." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Some of Tapper's colleagues on ABC have given Republicans good reason to believe this.

The journalist was responding to weekend GMA anchor Dan Harris's question about whether the "stage may now be set for an Obama comeback narrative." Tapper replied, "absolutely" and added, "So, yes, they [Team Romney] think that, without question, the media is ready to write the Obama comeback story."

With less than 48 hours to go before Tuesday's presidential debate, the moderator's role is being questioned because of things Candy Crowley has said on CNN.

Time's Mark Halperin reported late Sunday:

For some peculiar reason, NBC's Meet the Press spent precious air time Sunday just weeks before a presidential election on an interview with Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert.

By far his best line was, "I don't really watch the news so much. I come in around 6:30 and I just say the opposite of whatever Rachel Maddow says the night before, and I'm usually good" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"The key difference between these two candidates is that one is going to do all he can to avoid a new war in the Middle East and the other one is going to hand over U.S. policy to Bibi Netanyahu and launch a new global war."

So actually said the Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show Sunday (video follows with commentary):

If you've been paying attention to the Drudge Report lately, you've seen headlines linking to Real Clear Politics data showing how the presidential race has tightened since President Obama and Mitt Romney debated in Denver.

Rather surprisingly, the folks at USA Today not only noticed, but also published an article Sunday with the shocking headline, "Obama, Romney Nearly Tied in Electoral College'':

Criticism of Barack Obama came from a surprising source Sunday.

Appearing on Meet the Press, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw said the President “is going to have to answer for” the explosion in the federal budget deficit that “happened on his watch” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Jay Leno spent nearly three minutes of his opening monologue Friday trashing Vice President Joe Biden for his performance during Thursday's debate.

Although the Tonight Show host did poke some fun at Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin, the bulk of his jokes targeted Biden including him saying it was "really smart" of moderator Martha Raddatz "to cut Joe off after that third scotch and soda" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Colby King on Friday jokingly accused Charles Krauthammer of writing Mitt Romney's talking points.

Appearing on PBS's Inside Washington, Krauthammer responded, "Well, it’s better than what you guys do is to receive the talking points" (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo):

In an op-ed at "Bloomberg View" on Wednesday evening, editor and columnist Michael Kinsley's headline teased that "Maybe President Romney Wouldn’t Be So Bad," before twice urging readers to vote to reelect President Obama, including in the final paragraph after an alleged parenthetical (and obviously mythical) "Pause for reflection." Ha ha.

What came in between wasn't very funny at all -- and since he's an editor, his view of things presumably has impact beyond his columns. The worst whoppers came in the following paragraph:

There are plenty of reasonable explanations for why Republicans have a hard time winning over black voters. Leave it to a Kossack to offer an unreasonable explanation: that today's GOP "looks and acts like a white supremacist lynch mob." That blogger also likens Ann Coulter to a rabid weasel and presents her as one of the leading apologists for this violently racist party.

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

Conservative author Ann Coulter made minced meat out of Bill Maher Friday.

As HBO's Real Time host spewed Democrat talking point after Democrat talking point, Coulter told him, "You're watching MSNBC, and I would not trust them to give you the truth" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

On October 3, as Kyle Brennan's at NewsBusters noted the next day, NBC News political director Chuck Tood, appearing on CNBC, characterized presidential polls generated by Scott Rasmussen's polling group as "slop."

The specific quote: "We spend a lot more money polling than Scott Rasmussen does. We spend a lot more money on quality control....I hate the idea that [NBC] polling, which is rigorously done, has to get compared to what is, in some cases, you know, slop." At the time, while many polls, including NBC's (done in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal), were showing Barack Obama with leads of four points or more nationally, Rasmussen was virtually alone Obama barely ahead and occasionally tied with Mitt RomneyChuck was clearly not pleased with that. Someone ought to ask Todd if his evaluation holds based on the results following the jump which were posted at Real Clear Politics early Friday morning.

On Friday afternoon, Joe Biden lived up to his reputation for committing gaffes, not even a day after Paul Ryan zinged the Vice President over how "sometimes the words don't come out of your mouth the right way" during Thursday's debate. At a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Biden claimed Planned Parenthood "under law cannot perform any abortions." In reality, the organization is the largest abortion racket in the country.

Hours later, none of the Big Three's Friday evening newscasts had covered Biden's patently false claim. But just two days earlier, these programs devoted a combined five minutes and 1 second on Wednesday to Mitt Romney's statement to The Des Moines Register that "there's no legislation with regard to abortion that I'm familiar with that would become part of my agenda." NBC's Brian Williams mouthed the Obama campaign's spin - that "what Mitt Romney said about abortion that sure sounds like a change."

Adopting Obama campaign talking points that Mitt Romney has dramatically shifted positions, on Friday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer asked Donald Trump: "Are you happy with the Romney campaign right now? In the last couple of weeks he has clearly moved toward the center, way closer to the center than he was during the primaries and the early part of the campaign. His comments on abortion out in Ohio." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Trump dismissed any concerns: "I think he's doing amazingly. It started with the debate. We were all a little bit worried for a while. He just knocked it out of the park in the debate, and you look at the polls, he's generally winning." Lauer pressed: "But you think he's the same candidate that you signed on with several months ago?" Trump replied: "I think he's a great candidate and I think he's going to win." Lauer couldn't let it go: "Same candidate?" Trump reiterated: "Yes, I think he's a great candidate."

As Election Day nears, the on air personalities at MSNBC are dropping all pretense of impartiality and journalistic integrity.

On Thursday's Hardball, at the conclusion of a lengthy segment about the upcoming vice presidential debate, host Chris Matthews actually said, "Biden better win" (video follows with commentary):

And they wonder why we sometimes question whether they love America.

On his liberal radio show yesterday, Bill Press was disparaging Christians as hypocrites when he expanded his criticism to Americans as a whole (audio) --

At the top of Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams recited Obama campaign talking points as he proclaimed: "What Mitt Romney said about abortion that sure sounds like a change."

Moments later, Williams attempted to frame Romney's innocuous comments on the subject to the Des Moines Register as a misstep: "Mitt Romney is trying to take advantage of a bounce coming off the last debate, but it was something he said on the subject of abortion that is getting a lot of the attention today and tonight. It's where we begin tonight..."

On Thursday, New York Times campaign reporters Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker filed a relatively positive story on the suddenly resurgent Romney campaign: "Romney Campaign Looks to Capitalize on Image Voters Saw in Debate."

Inside Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters over the past few days, the data pouring in was unmistakable. Aides scouring the results of focus groups and national polls found that undecided voters watching the presidential debate in Denver seemed startled when the Republican candidate portrayed all year by Democrats -- the ultraconservative, unfeeling capitalist -- did not materialize.

In August, in response to an ad from the campaign of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney claiming that the Obama administration's Department of Health and Human Services had just weakened the work requirements of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (also known as TANF, or "traditional welfare"), Molly Moorhead at the so-called fact check site PolitiFact gave the ad a "Pants on Fire" rating, the one supposedly reserved for the most scurrilous lies propagated by politicians and others. Russell Sykes, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute has just doused PolitiFact's imaginary flames -- but don't hold your breath waiting for PoltiFact to recognize it.

Specifically, Moorhead objected to the Romney ad as follows (bolds are mine throughout this post):

You would think that as poorly as President Obama did in his first debate with Mitt Romney last week that his supporters would want to stop talking about the embarrassment. Instead, the very opposite is true. Denizens of the fevered swamps of the online left not only want to talk about it, they also want to embarrass themselves by concocting all sorts of crazy theories about how Romney somehow "cheated" to win.

The Obama campaign is having none of that, however, telling Fox News that it's had absolutely nothing to do with spreading the nonsense idea that Romney had managed to smuggle in a "cheat sheet" into the debate and read answers from it. When asked about whether it was trying to spread the theory, the campaign responded emphatically, "No — We’ve never casted our lot with the tinfoil hat crowd."

The Associated Press has apologized for its rude picture of Romney with a young girl gaping from behind. That happened the morning after Bill O'Reilly trashed AP on Tuesday night and predicted they would apologize.

"Here is the photo the Associated Press took at the meet and greet, a foolish shot that makes Romney the butt of stupid jokes. Pardon the pun. The picture was taken by photographer Evan Vucci and never should have been published. The Governor doesn't know there is a child behind him. And the child is looking at something else. This is a cheap shot, literally.... So the person who did that at the Associated Press who put that picture out on the wire should be fired, and the Associated Press should put out an apology, in which they will by the way after tonight." Alan Colmes tried to make excuses for AP: