Earmarks

"Pay attention to Senator Cruz because he is the unsmiling, contemptuous face of the wild, nasty, hard-right fringe of a Party that once competed with the Democrats to be the country’s governing Party."

So said MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Friday's Hardball (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Most Americans would agree that a federal study -- burning through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by the way -- on duck penises is not exactly a high priority when we need to get our fiscal house in order. But Patricia Brennan would disagree with you, and she took to the liberal online journal Slate to do so last Tuesday.

Wait, did I mention that Brennan has a vested interest in defending the study of duck dongs? She's a research professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst receiving federal money for the study?

Aside from insinuating that conservatives "miss the point of basic science" and whining about the “fierce” competition within the scientific community for federal funding, she explained why we should pick up the bill -- sorry I could resist -- for her study:

As hard as the establishment press has worked over the years to make certain politicians appear to be somehow out of touch with the situation of average Americans, you might think that two legislative leaders complaining about cuts in their Congressional offices' allowance might be news. One whined that her aides, some of whom "earn" in excess of $100,000 per year, are being "priced out" of a good lunch on Capitol Hill.

Don't be silly. The press only cares about making Republicans and conservatives appear out of touch. The complainers in question are Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also heads the Democratic National Committee, and longtime Democratic Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia. The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard noted Schultz's and Moran's whining on Wednesday:

Has Slate’s John Dickerson been replaced with a pod person?  If not, the CBS Political Director is exuding signs of schizophrenia – or sheer forgetfulness. While in January Dickerson counseled the president to "go for the throat" of the Republican Party, in today's piece at the online opinion journal he's calling for Obama to court Republicans on a "grand bargain" to avert the looming debt crisis.

Today, Mr. Dickinson used anecdotes and Sun Tzu axioms to convey the point that Obama should not be such an agitator if he wants a deal to solve our fiscal woes.

NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno took a fiscal poke at President Obama Thursday.

After mentioning that it was Michelle Obama’s birthday, and that she told reporters that she wanted “a nice gift from Barack, but nothing extravagant,” Leno quipped, “Oh, don't worry. Obama is very responsible when he's spending his own money. Don't have worry about that. No problem there” (video follows with commentary):

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.

America has created almost six trillion dollars in new debt in the past four years and Time magazine's Joe Klein wants to "bring back earmarks."

On ABC's This Week Sunday, Klein also said, "I think John McCain did a tremendous disservice to this country by making such a huge campaign about earmarks" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

We at NewsBusters have been calling MSNBC's Chris Matthews a sycophant for Barack Obama since at least February 2008 when the so-called journalist bragged on the air about getting a thrill up his leg at the sound of the former junior senator from Illinois' voice.

It was therefore quite pleasing to hear former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele tell the Hardball host that to his face Thursday during a contentious exchange about the current White House resident's economics policies and who should be blamed for their failure (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The $82 billion auto bailout has been a Crony Socialist nightmare mess. We’re going to lose at least $30 billion on the deal.  And that’s only if the Barack Obama Administration’s math can be trusted - a dicey proposition at best.

The Administration eviscerated two hundred-plus years of bankruptcy law, throwing bond holders over the side to over-reward their United Auto Workers shock force buddies.

General Motors (GM) is cutting undisclosed deals with executives’ wives businesses.And on, and on, and on....Haven’t heard most or all of this?  Not surprising - the Jurassic Press ain’t reporting it.

Readers are strongly advised to remove food, fluids, and flammables from proximity to their computers prior to reading any further. You've been warned!

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said on ABC's This Week Sunday, "It's terribly unfair that [President Obama is] being judged on the failure of the economy to respond to policies that had been largely dictated by a hostile Congress" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Bill Maher is either a blithering idiot, a pathological liar, or both.

On HBO's Real Time Friday, the factually-challenged financier of Barack Obama actually had the gall to say the President didn't support the recommendations of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (aka Simpson-Bowles) because - wait for it! - Republicans didn't support it (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney during the previous day's press gaggle cited a bogus MarketWatch report hysterically claiming "Obama Spending Binge Never Happened."

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler looked at Carney's comments as well as Rex Nutting's article Friday and gave their assertions three Pinocchios:

A bogus report published by MarketWatch Tuesday claiming "under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s" has been all the rage at the White House and MSNBC.

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter correctly observed Wednesday:

One thing I’ve learned in the year I have spent tracking General Motors cum Government Motors (GM) - and all its Crony Socialist, green non-energy “energy”, flammable absurdities - is the fact that the car media are every bit the Leftist open-channel steno pool as are the political media.  

And with President Barack Obama running for reelection in large part on the utterly failed “success” of the $85 billion auto bailout, the car and political media have by now achieved fully melded fusion.

The examples are myriad.

You knew this was coming.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman - might he finally be realizing that our budget deficits can't possibly be solved by just eliminating the Bush tax cuts? - is now calling for marginal rates even higher than when Bill Clinton was in office:

Two weeks ago (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), yours truly pointed out how establishment press coverage of the bankruptcy of Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar had emphasized its Bay State assistance, and only rarely brought up how it benefitted by being able to sell solar panels it otherwise would probably not have bothered to produce to projects benefitting from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ("stimulus") dollars.

On August 17, Larry Dignan of ZDNet, in an item published at CBSnews.com, tried to convince readers that Evergreen's failure was not indicative of an industry meltdown (bolds are mine):

Lawrence O'Donnell on Tuesday accused Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) of being a socialist.

"The Last Word" host, who has admitted on national television to himself being a socialist, did so by cherry-picking from an article published at the perilously liberal website "The Huffington Post" (video follows with commentary and full transcript at end of post):

Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich wrote a truly nonsensical piece for the Huffington Post Tuesday ironically called "The Republicans' Big Lies About Jobs."

MSNBC's Chris Matthews must have loved this tripe and its sophomoric title for he invited the Berkeley professor on Wednesday's "Hardball" so that the pair could put on a clinic in liberal economic fantasy (video follows with partial transcript and oodles of commentary):

MSNBC's Martin Bashir has only been on the job for a few days, but the newly-minted anchor is already letting his liberal flag fly.

On his eponymous program today, Bashir was dumbfounded as to why Congress is reluctant to hike taxes on the rich and end tax deductions for oil companies.

"Why won't Congress simply do what the people want?" lamented Bashir, interviewing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the independent socialist lawmaker who caucuses with Democrats.

Something rather shocking happened on MSNBC Wednesday.

Not only was a compliment given to a Republican, but on the "Dylan Ratigan Show," it was said by a Washington Post columnist about a GOPer that is actually admired by conservatives (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Monday, President Obama announced that 2011's budget deficit is going to be an all-time high $1.65 trillion.

In an interview with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly later in the day, ABC's George Stephanopoulos predictably blamed the red ink on former President George W. Bush (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In his lifetime, Princeton economics professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has published 20 books, over 200 papers, and since the year 2000 two columns a week at the New York Times.

Clearly without understanding the irony of his question, the man once accused by the Gray Lady's ombudsman of possessing a "disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers" asked his readers Monday, "How can voters be so ill informed [sic]?":

 On Friday’s Political Capital show, Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson lavished praise on President Obama has having "negotiating skills" like the recently deceased diplomat Richard Holbrooke - known for facilitating a ceasefire in Bosnia in the mid-1990s - as host Al Hunt asked Carlson and the National Review’s Kate O’Beirne to describe what Christmas gifts they would figuratively give to various public figures. Carlson: "I’m going to give him an inscribed copy of the late, great Richard Holbrooke’s memoir, in honor of Obama’s negotiating skills in this lame duck session. All he had to do was give up tax cuts - for which the Republican Party stands - to the wealthy who don’t need it in exchange for everything else he got."

She went on to trash Tea Party Republicans recently elected to Congress as "blowing off steam." Carlson: "I’m afraid that they might succumb to earmarks and lobbyists. They give every sign of that. So I’m going to give them a tea kettle because all they’ve done so far is blow off steam."

St. Louis Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch took on CNN's Eliot Spitzer Monday evening in a classic battle between Right and Left.

From the opening bell, Loesch gave Spitzer a much-needed education on how extending existing tax rates isn't a tax cut (video follows with transcript and commentary):