2012 Presidential

Good Morning America on Friday offered a fawning preview of Barbara Walters' exclusive interview with Barack and Michelle Obama. Walters gushed over the "touching," "charming" couple and asked the President softballs such as "What's your favorite app?" [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

The journalist couldn't get over just how adorable the two Democrats are, fawning, "Together, she teases him. He teases her. It's a whole other look." Quite pleased with herself, Walters declared that such moments are what's "charming about this interview."

There has been no shortage of deceptive ads, factually-distorted statements, and outright fabrications from the political left over the campaign year to choose from, but leave it to the Tampa Bay Times's PolitiFact to give its "Lie of the Year" award to the Romney campaign. The now infamous "falsehood" in question was Romney's claim that Jeep was planning on moving production of some of its vehicles to China. This was in fact technically true, but PolitiFact trademarked it as its "Lie of the Year."

In a fit of glee, multiple left-leaning news outlets have promoted the proclamation, including of course, MSNBC. [video below, MP3 audio here ]:

After Karl Rove disagreed with other Fox News Channel contributors that President Obama had won re-election on the night of Nov. 6, a reporter for the New York Magazine website has claimed that network president Roger Ailes was “angry” at the GOP strategist's “tantrum,” which led to Rove being “benched” from the cable channel for 27 days.

In a story on the subject, Gabriel Sherman relied on many anonymous “sources” to claim that “Rove's meltdown” resulted in his banishment by Ailes, who sought to “reposition” the news channel “in the post-election media environment.” In truth, according to Fox officials who spoke on the record, Rove has been less of a presence on the channel because the election has ended.

Chris Matthews has found the problem with how the media covered the 2012 election: Unbiased journalists were simply too focused on being "even-handed" and treating Republicans fairly. Yes, really. The Hardball anchor on Wednesday began his program by declaring, "Did you get the impression during the presidential campaign that the press was trying too hard to be even-handed?" [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Matthews continued, "Did you think the people delivering the news were pushing what we call balance at the expense of the obvious facts, that the day-to-day stories never got across the obvious big fact, that the Democrats in this election were like Democrats going back to Jack Kennedy?" Matthews, who previously compared the GOP to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, declared himself the arbiter of media fairness: "So tonight we're going to nail it. We go to the truth, and why was the truth that dared not be reported in the mainstream media?"

New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan posted Monday on a report by two "centrists" ludicrously lambasting the media for letting Mitt Romney get away with lie after lie during the campaign: "Did the Mainstream Press Really Bungle the Campaign’s ‘Single Biggest Story’?"

In one of the most fascinating media-related pieces I’ve read in a while, Dan Froomkin interviews Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, two longtime Washington observers who wrote a book together and soon after, they say, found themselves near pariahs in a city that didn’t want to hear what they had to say.

How could a liberal actually be upset with the liberal media for their coverage of the 2012 presidential election? Well, Daniel Froomkin of The Huffington Post (formerly of The Washington Post) is furious. His complaint carried the headline “How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign.”

What would that story be? “Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.”

Appearing on Tuesday’s Starting Point, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) was savaged by host Soledad O’Brien for daring to suggest the federal food stamp program should be one of the many programs that are trimmed in order to achieve spending cuts to avert the so-called fiscal cliff on January 1.

O'Brien predictably used a talking point that sounds a lot like the left-wing complaint that the GOP wants to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor":

The first entirely post-election reading from the University of Michigan-Thomson Reuters consumer confidence survey came out on Friday. It was awful. As reported at MarketWatch, the overall index "fell to 74.5 from 82.7 in November," far below expectations of 82.0, representing "the biggest one-month drop since March 2011." Zero Hedge noted that it's the "biggest miss on record" compared to expectations.

Of course, in Establishment Medialand and with the analysts they chose to consult, the plunge has everything to do with the "fiscal cliff," and nothing to do with the reelection of President Obama to a second four-year term or his intensely partisan conduct since then. Sure, guys.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd didn't hide her contempt for the GOP, or her pleasure in predicting its eternal demise, in Sunday's "A Lost Civilization."

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Jay Leno took a poke at the GOP on Friday.

During the opening monologue of NBC's Tonight Show, the host said, "According to a new study at UCLA, Latinos live longer than non-Latinos. More bad news for Republicans" (video follows with commentary):

The U.S. Department of Agriculture released its latest report on food stamp program participation through September today. I received the email alerting me to the release at 5:17 p.m., so it seems reasonable to believe that USDA and the Barack Obama administration wanted the new data to get as little attention as possible (as will be seen later, it's currently getting none). If so, they have two probable reasons for wishing to minimize its impact.

The first and more obvious of the two is that the food stamp rolls increased by over 607,000 in September to 47.71 million, yet another all-time record. That's awful enough, but here's the real kicker: the participation figure for July, the last month of data available before Election Day, was revised up by over 150,000, changing that month's reported increase from 11,600 to just under 166,000. As will be seen after the jump, no other month's data was revised except August, where the changes were infinitesimal.

If you were a Republican presidential candidate, wouldn't you jump at the chance to do a one hour primetime interview on Fox News Channel the night before Election Day?

According to Bill O'Reilly who appeared on NBC's Tonight Show Thursday, that's what Mitt Romney was offered and he turned it down (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Following Senator Jim DeMint’s abrupt resignation to run The Heritage Foundation, much has been made over who South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley might name to replace him.  One name mentioned is that of African American Congressman Tim Scott,  a prospect which prompted MSNBC anchor Richard Lui to sneer: "... Is the South ready for a black Senator?"

On Friday’s MSNBC Live, Lui baited fellow MSNBCer Melissa Harris-Perry into trashing the South as intolerant. Surprisingly, she did not fall into this trap.  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

In what appears to be the latest homage to the moribund if not completely defunct Occupy movement, Los Angeles Times writer Frank Shyong chronicled the lasting impact of the movement in a December 7 article, gushing that in its heyday it had “enjoyed widespread popularity, and politicians responded with resolutions of support.” 

Shyong lamented, however, that “as demonstrations wore on and public sentiment shifted, cities got tougher with protesters.” Oddly enough, Shyong failed to note a huge factor in the shifting public sentiment: Occupy camps were plagued with violent crimes, including rape. What's more, on at least one occasion, a child was left abandoned in one of the squalid squatters' camps.

MSNBC's resident RINO Joe Scarborough has resumed his regularly-scheduled conservative bashing on Morning Joe.  While discussing the impending fiscal cliff on

Thursday, co-host Scarborough said that following President Obama’s “great victory” in November, it will be very hard for the president, who, “for four years, was told that he was an illegitimate president, that he was a socialist” to be gracious to folks like Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

Chris Matthews is not one to let a pesky thing like facts get in the way of a favored liberal narrative. That's why, for example, on the Oct. 22 edition of Hardball he insisted the 9/11 assault on the Benghazi compound was "all about" the YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims," when by that time it was most clearly established that it was a premeditated terrorist strike.

Well, yesterday, Matthews's obsession with painting a significant minority of Republicans as loony secessionists colored his cherry-picking of a Public Policy Polling survey. The Hardball host glommed onto a statistic in a December 4-released PPP poll that found some 25 percent of Republican respondents said they favored their state seceding in light of President Obama's reelection. "What do you want to bet these are the same people who say that President Obama is a Muslim?" huffed Matthews in a tease for a segment entitled "If at First You Don't Secede." But a look at the cross tabs in the poll shows that 27 percent of Hispanics, 29 percent of voters aged 18-29, and even 12 percent of African-Americans favor secession. Those demographics, of course, are all ones which the president handily won. At no point in his segment on the poll, however, did any of these facts come up. [MP3 audio excerpts here; video follows page break]

Jay Leno took a cheap shot at Texas governor Rick Perry Tuesday.

During his opening monologue on NBC's Tonight Show, the host said Perry is "taking steps to run for president in 2016. Yeah, in fact, this week he's meeting with donors. You better hope they're brain donors" (video follows with commentary):

While it's not fair to criticize the press's coverage of November's vehicle sales as unfair or not balanced, it would be more than fair to say that the press is either ignoring or minimizing the impact of two important influences which have been at work all year. The first is the continued loss of combined market share at the industry's two US-headquartered makers, General Motors and Ford (Chrysler, the other member of Detroit's "Big 3," is owned by Fiat).

The second is that 2009 government bailout beneficiary GM continues to "channel-stuff" its dealers with vehicles they won't sell for four months or longer -- and that's if the economy doesn't slow down or go into a recession. Dealer inventories are now twice as high as they were three years ago -- and no, GM's sales haven't doubled in the meantime -- which makes one wonder, especially this fall, if it was being done solely to make the government and President Obama look good.

At the top of Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie cheered the news that President Obama may make one of his major campaign donors, Anna Wintour, an ambassador: "Going Vogue? A report this morning that the President could appoint Vogue's famed editor-in-chief Anna Wintour to be his next ambassador to England or France. More on what could be a very fashionable decision." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

During a panel discussion later in the show, fellow co-host Willie Geist excused the obvious patronage job: "This is not unusual...I think something like 30% of appointees to ambassadorships are political, as a reward for people who raise a lot of money." That prompted a round of jokes about giving money to Obama to get an appointment. Fill-in news reader Tamron remarked: "[Wintour] raised more than $500,000 for his campaign, so we need to get on the ball....We need to get it going..."

Despite President Obama’s reelection nearly a month ago, MSNBC has continued to attack Mitt Romney and his family every chance it gets, with the latest being a vicious critique of Ann Romney on the December 3 The Last Word w/ Lawrence O’Donnell.  Mr. O’Donnell brought on Washington Post writers Jonathan Capehart and Philip Rucker to comment on recent articles they penned on the Romneys. 

Mr. O’Donnell started the segment by gleefully claiming that, “They [friends of Ann Romney] said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses."  "[G]iven the way you saw the character of Ann Romney unfold during the course of the campaign, what’s your reaction to that?” O'Donnell asked Capehart, a liberal columnist.   [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

To paraphrase the estimable Yogi Berra - it’s like deja vu all over, and over, and over, and over again.

The Jurassic Press media is enraptured with a certain story.

Despite Chris Matthews having worked for former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, his grasp of how the United States government works is tenuous at best.

On Monday's Hardball, the host repeatedly said current Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) "lost" on Election Day despite the Congressman winning 99.9 percent of the votes in his district while his Party retained control of the House (video follows with transcript and commentary):