The Washington Posts's first ever “chief digital officer” came aboard the newspaper, where he also oversees Newsweek's online efforts, after three years of working diligently to help elect liberals and Democrats to office -- including Barack Obama. A short profile of Vijay Ravindran, in the July issue of Washingtonian magazine, noted that “Democratic strategist and entrepreneur Harold Ickes,” a veteran of the Clinton administration and 1996 re-election campaign, enlisted “Ravindran to build Catalist, a national voter database for Democratic candidates and liberal organizations. From the fall of 2005 through the election of Barack Obama, Ravindran built systems for Catalist.” His title at Catalist: Chief Technology Officer.

Catalist, which dubs itself “The Future of Progressive Organizing,” lists a who's who of left-wing groups and causes on its client list, from ACORN and the AFL-CIO to Wellstone Action, with MoveOn.org, the National Resources Defense Council and Obama for America (the official Obama campaign) alphabetically in between.

In an interview last November with the “Sepia Mutiny” blog about South Asians, Ravindran recounted his political/career odyssey, including how “I feel somewhat embarrassed that I didn't appreciate the Clinton years.”

On Thursday's Today, Meredith Vieira tossed mostly softballs to Senator-elect Al Franken, offering no hard questions about the disputed 2008 election, instead fawning, "...Are you more worried about becoming a target for the GOP or a target for Saturday Night Live, your old stomping ground?" In regards to the post-election wrangling for the Minnesota Senate seat, the best Vieira could do is to wonder, "It did get a little contentious, didn't it?"

To be fair, she did reference the closeness of the election. Noting Franken's 312 vote margin of victory, Vieira observed, "Are you conscious of that as you head to Washington D.C. next week?" However, there was no mention of the reports of irregularities in the state. If the co-host wished to challenge the incoming senator, she could have read from a July 1 Wall Street Journal editorial which asserted, "Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election."

While many on the left are reveling in the downfall of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford after he disclosed his affair with a woman in Argentina, there's a sympathetic figure being overlooked that might have the necessary background to fill the void left by the governor should he resign.

On CNBC's June 30 "The Kudlow Report," Wall Street Journal senior economics writer Steve Moore explained his close relationship with the Sanfords and raised a new political possibility.

"This is such a tough thing for me Larry, because as you know Mark Sanford has been a long-time friend of mine," Moore said. "This story truly breaks my heart." Moore suggested that South Carolina First Lady Jenny Sanford run for her husband's seat - as he called her "the brains of the operation."

Obama and Neda: same struggle!

Who says Pres. Obama isn't backing the Iranian uprising strongly enough?  Why, supporters of the struggle have chosen to immortalize Neda, the young student reportedly slain by the current regime, by creating a poster of her in the style of the iconic Obama poster made famous during his presidential campaign.

Might that have been CBS's subliminal message this morning?  Of all the possible posters of the fallen girl who has become the symbol of the Iranian uprising, the Early Show chose the one displayed here in the unmistakeable style Shepard Fairey used to create his Obama poster [displayed after the break].

Maybe reporters Brian Faler or Nicholas Johnston at Bloomberg asked Barack Obama some really challenging questions when they had a chance to interview the President at the White House. Maybe they even did some basic fact-checking. If so, there's precious little evidence of either in their June 16 report.

They allowed the president to blame most of the current year's deficit on George W. Bush. They let him speak of "robust" growth when the best guesstimates they quoted for the second half of this calendar year and all of next year are anemic -- at least as the press benchmarked growth during the Bush 43 years.

The Bloomberg pair also ignored the alarming deterioration in federal receipts from economic activity that has continued into June, one of the four biggest collections months of the year.

Here are key paragraphs from Faler and Johnston's failed filing (bolds are mine):

CBS Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez wondered on Friday: "Lots of politicians get caught having affairs, as you know. The trick, though, is making a comeback. It’s happened before, but the question is does John Edwards have a political future?"

Rodriguez later introduced the segment by citing Edwards’ recent comments about his political future in a Washington Post interview: "Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, just two of the high profile politicians who’ve survived the scandal of having an extramarital affair. Now John Edwards is speaking out for the first time, since his affair, about testing the waters for a possible political comeback. But is it too late? Is the damage done?"

In the report that followed, correspondent Nancy Cordes quoted Kenneth Vogel of Politico on the topic: "His cancer-stricken wife knew about the affair, asked him not to run for president. He did anyway. He kept it from his staffers. His political committees may have paid hush money. All of these things put together just make it that much more difficult for him to find a way to rehabilitate himself in the public eye." Cordes responded to that seeming political obituary by declaring: "Not so fast. Lots of politicians, after all, have had affairs and gone on to successful careers. Crisis management experts say Edwards may be testing the waters and could still have a political future."

Earlier today, Julia A. Seymour of the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute (BMI) pointed to a fact-check done by her group showing that "from January 20 to June 16 those quoted in health care stories on ABC's morning and evening news shows favored ObamaCare by a 3-to-1 margin (55 supporters to 18 critics)."

You think that margin is bad; wait until you see the ratio at ABC of Obama vs. McCain campaign contributions.

At its blog, Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) did the dirty work. The results are below the fold.

ABC has made the unprecedented move of giving prime-time programing air time to President Barack Obama for a health care reform special to be aired next week. Perhaps it is not too surprising that Obama has landed himself some prime viewing time on ABC. After all, former ABC News correspondent Linda Douglass is now the Director of Communications for the Obama White House Office of Health Reform. Coincidence? One would be excused to suspect it.

If you've ever wondered why the mainstream media didn't show much curiosity about how 20 years of attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church shaped President Barack Obama, there is a perfectly logical explanation. Obama wasn't really there.

According to Richard Wolffe, an MSNBC contributor and former Newsweek columnist that covered the Obama presidential campaign for the weekly magazine, people don't have to worry about the rantings and ravings of Obama's controversial preacher having any impact on his world view because he wasn't there.

Wolffe, in an appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. on June 15 promoting his book about Obama, "Renegade," told the audience the president wasn't naïve about Wright - he was ignorant.

The Associated Press posted an "analysis" piece by writer Tom Raum on June 15 to address the GOP strategy against Obamacare and other administration policies but the APs characterization of the GOPs efforts almost seem meant to belittle and de-legitimize that opposition as opposed to describing it. The entire GOP argument against Obama is boiled down to a use of "buzz words" as far as AP's Raum is concerned. Apparently, no political truth or ideological disagreement really enters into it. Only "tactic," and "strategy" built on "buzz words" and "fear" is offered by the GOP instead of real issues according to the AP.

In "GOP using buzz words to taunt Democrats," with a subhead of "Republicans claim Obama embraces 'socialism,'" Raum never once admits that Republicans just might have a principled ideological opposition to Obama's policies leaving readers to get the vague feeling that the GOP is trying just anything to find a winning issue. Further, the entire article is premised as if the Democrats are correct and the GOP is just trying to chip away at their essentially correct stand on the issues. AP even presents a lefty professor to shore up the AP point of view -- naturally the professor's propensities are not divulged.

Jack Cafferty seems a bit bitter.  He apparently hasn’t gotten over Al Gore losing Florida in the 2000 election.  

On today’s CNN Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, guest analyst Rob Sobhani briefly mentioned that the democratic process in Iran would be a bit like if the American Supreme Court chose who would be allowed to run for President:

ROB SOBHANI: Well for your viewers, I think the best example is if the Supreme Court of America decided who’s going to run for office.  And that’s exactly what happened in Iran, the council of guardians decided that Mr. Mousavi, Karroubi, Rezaee, and Ahmadinejad were going to run.  So in essence, it is not democratic, but the process ends up being democratic.  And that’s the dilemma of the United States right now.

Immediately after this, Sobhani was dismissed, and Cafferty introduced.  Blitzer wondered aloud if the recent Iranian elections could possibly incite a repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution – but Cafferty was not satisfied with that historical comparison:

For the last several months, New York Times reporter turned international columnist Roger Cohen has filed naïve apologist columns about Iran, often attacking Israel in the process. Previously mocked for this embarrassing display of Obama-mania in March 2008, Cohen attracted negative attention on the foreign affairs front earlier this year by telling readers how good things really were for Jews in Iran.

After that line of argument failed to convince, he then accused Israel of lying about the Iranian threat while constantly insisting that Iran was actually a functioning and reformist democracy. Cohen minimized the danger posed by Iran's demonized leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, excusing his anti-Israel rantings. And of course, Cohen strongly favored Obama's brand of diplomacy with Iran as opposed to Bush's hostility.

Cohen's Thursday column from Tehran, "Iran Awakens Yet Again," which ran in the Times international edition the day before the vote, featured some poorly timed fawning over Iran's "unpredictable" democracy.

Leave it to the British press to once again do the job of real reporting that U.S. journalists apparently won't do.

This time, it's Tom Leonard at the UK Telegraph. From Flint, Michigan, he tells us of a "pioneering scheme" that involves tearing down entire neighborhoods and simply abandoning them -- oops, I'm sorry, I meant to say, "returning them to nature."

This is apparently what passes for sophisticated urban planning these days.

Here are key paragraphs from Leonard's story. Especially note the breathtaking anti-progress hostility of the idea's champion (bolds are mine; Getty picture at top right is from that story):

Harold Ford, Jr. is the epitome of the equivocating politician who tries to play things both ways.  But that strategy came a cropper for the MSNBC contributor on Morning Joe today. 

Ford claimed that though Letterman was wrong to make sexual jokes about Sarah Palin's teenage daughter, somehow the Palins are "unique," and thus presumably an understandable target. Mika Brzezinski came down on him.  A clearly uncomfortable Ford was soon seeking cover.

You might recall back in 2008 when Diantha Harris, a teacher from a North Carolina grade school, made a YouTube splash for having verbally berated a soldier's young daughter that said in class she was for John McCain instead of Barack Obama for president. Of course the righty blogs immediately went wild for the story, but eventually the Old Media came to the teacher's rescue and reported that the teacher never meant any harm. The story appeared on cable and local TV for several days last November.

Well, last month another teacher found himself making news -- or not making it as the case may be -- for having been fired because he is a conservative. Lawrence, Kansas teacher Tim Latham was fired early last month, he claims for being a conservative, yet the Old Media even in Kansas has been very quiet on the story.

(I know; it almost doesn't count, because it's in the lefty-despised Wall Street Journal Opinion section.)

As yours truly noted a month after the presidential election (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Barack Obama's handlers and his teleprompter began telling the president-elect to begin using variations on the term "create and/or save" in speeches about jobs and the economy within days of his electoral victory. During the campaign, I found no example of where Obama used any variation on that phrase; it was always "we will create X number of jobs."

Until now, no one in the press of note has paid any attention to this "clever" abandonment of logic and accountability. After all, by the new "create and/or save" non-logic, Dear Leader has "saved" over 130 million jobs since his inauguration -- even though, on a seasonally adjusted basis, almost 2.2 million Americans lost theirs from February through May:

Finally, someone in the establishment media has done a serious call-out of Team Obama's risible ruse. Here are excerpts from William McGurn's hard-hitting column in today's Wall Street Journal:

NBC’s "Today" picked their leader to revive the Republican party: MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. The former congressman (and former conservative) who admitted to bashing Republicans more than Democrats, appeared on the June 9 edition of "Today" to promote his new book "The Last Best Hope."

Host Matt Lauer inquired as to who should speak on behalf of Republican principles and quickly added "leave your name out of it for a second." Lauer then branded Christopher Buckley, who endorsed Obama, "a modern conservative" and then proceeded to quite "Obamican" promoting Scarborough as the "new face" of the Republican party.

The man media hate more than virtually any other living American, former Vice President Dick Cheney, is currently more popular than the woman the press have been gushing and fawning over since it first became apparent she could end up being the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

After they fall off their chairs and get over their disgust, will media members share this startling news with the citizenry, and, if so, how?

As reported by Gallup moments ago:

On Friday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC, host Bill O’Reilly interviewed liberal civil rights attorney Bartle Bull about the Justice Department’s recent decision to drop charges against Black Panther members who engaged in voter intimidation in Philadelphia polling place last November. Bull – who worked for both Robert F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter – was an eyewitness to some of the intimidation, and charged that Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to pursue the case was "100 percent politically motivated."

Below is a complete transcript of the interview from the Friday, May 29, The O'Reilly Factor on FNC:

Hmm, I wonder what's changed?

Former ad man turned pundit Donny Deutsch has proclaimed that "positivity" is the new in thing for the media—"the new black" as he puts it.

Deutsch appeared with Tom Brokaw on today's Morning Joe.  The former NBC anchor was touting his new USA Network series, "American Character Along Highway 50," featuring encounters with "real Americans" he meets on the road.

That set Deutsch off on his paean to positivity.

In another nearly orgasmic tribute to The One, in its Arts section The New York Times published a May 30 story buoyantly jubilant over the fact that Obama's face "rules the web." The story is in glee over how the Obammessiah's portrait fills the web and that some folks are even making a bit of cash off the deal.

To my mind, though, the amusing thing about the piece is that, if read closely, it appears that only schlocky Obama art can bring any sales as any serious artistic efforts are going unsold. I don’t know what that says about Obama art aficionados, but there you have it. Obama schlock rules.

"Dealergate" is a term referring to a collection of evidence indicating that dealership termination decisions at bankrupt Chrysler may have been based on factors other than maximizing the chances that the company, post-bankruptcy, will be viable and profitable.

Josh Painter at RedState has a roundup focusing on what have been the primary concerns, which continue to be vetted by Doug Ross (here, here, here, and here), Joey Smith, and several others. Those concerns are that dealers with records of supporting Republican candidates and organizations were disproportionately terminated in comparison to those with records of supporting Democratic candidates and causes, and that certain terminated right-leaning dealers have seen their territories gobbled up by Democratic Party-connected business cronies.

A separate but very relevant Dealergate issue should be whether minority-owned dealerships were unfairly spared at the expense of non-minority dealers.

Remember how everyone in the Old Media delighted in lambasting Governor Sarah Palin when the GOP bought all those clothes for her use during the McCain campaign? Remember how it was reported as nearly a foregone conclusion that these purchases must have somehow been illegal? It was even bigger news when the left-wing group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an ethics complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against the GOP. The whole thing was the talk of the Old Media, as you may recall.

Well, as of May 15, the FEC ruled that there was no ethics violation and the clothing spending was deemed legal. One would think that this news concluding the story would make as big of a splash with the Old Media as the beginning of the tale did. Naturally, crickets have been heard throughout the media establishment as little notice has been paid to this story.

With Saturday Night Live now in re-runs until September, my offering for a little Saturday night -- media bias-based -- humor.

Nearly five years ago, when compliant journalists were touting then-vice presidential candidate John Edwards and admiring his supposed idyllic marriage to Elizabeth Edwards, Katie Couric celebrated the happy couple's annual wedding anniversary “romantic ritual” of eating at Wendy's, wondering as all three laughed together: “What do you say, 'One Frosty, two straws?'” Pretty ridiculous in retrospect.

In the taped interview aired on the Thursday, July 15, 2004 Today show, Couric cued up the couple: “I know you'll be celebrating your 27th wedding anniversary. And I understand you go through a romantic ritual every year to commemorate that date. Share it with us will you?” John Edwards answered that “we go to Wendy's for our anniversary” before his wife provided her take, prompting a delighted Couric to marvel: “So every year for 26 years so far?” As John Edwards quipped “you could question our sanity,” Couric jumped in: “I was gonna say, what do you say, 'One Frosty, two straws?'”

Audio: MP3 clip (48 seconds)

The New York Times is still having difficulty dealing with democracy in California -- namely the state's unique ballot initiatives, which sometimes produces results inconvenient to a liberal agenda. First it was last year's surprise passage of Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage that threw the Times for a loop. This week it was the rejection of five fiscal measures in a special statewide referendum on Tuesday, notably Proposition 1A, pushed by supporters and the Times as a necessary measure of fiscal solvency that would have raised or extended a variety of taxes in return for a vague spending cap.

Thursday's front-page story by Jennifer Steinhauer, "In California, Democracy Doesn't Pay the Bills," came on the heels of her equally insulting Wednesday piece, "Calif. Voters Reject Measures to Keep State Solvent."

Wow. Just wow. If this New York Times headline isn't an act of advocacy for higher taxes in California, what is? With its May 20 coverage of the vote for California's tax hiking ballot measures, the Times plainly scolds fed-up voters for rejecting them with a headline that pointedly says: "Calif. Voters Reject Measures to Keep State Solvent."

Really? The Times thinks California's voters want a state headed into bankruptcy, that they voted for insolvency? The paper is strangely furious that voters rejected tax hikes, but I hate to break this to the New York rag: voters did not "reject measures" to keep the state "solvent." What voters did was reject wild tax hikes that would only lead to more corruption and profligate spending. The voters weren't fooled and knew that these measures would not lead to any long-term solution to the state's budget woes. If the state house in Sacramento had done its job properly and proposed a sensible budget in the first place, Californians would be happy to vote for it I am sure.

At the top of Tuesday’s 2:00PM EST hour on MSNBC, co-anchors Contessa Brewer and Melissa Francis spoke with Reuters correspondent Jon Decker about a speech by Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele on the future of the GOP, with Brewer citing Democratic reaction: "Here's the Democratic National Committee's response to Steele: ‘The test of the sincerity of the Chairman's words will be if he and other GOP leaders stand up to the fringe elements of their party and whether they tell the polarizing faces of the past, including Cheney, Gingrich, and Limbaugh, to stand aside. Unfortunately, they have shown no willingness to do so.’"

In response to the DNC talking points, Decker argued that Steele would have to turn to moderate Republicans: "Michael Steele will have to recruit candidates that may not be the typical type of Republican that we've seen in the past few election cycles, the hard right social conservative Republicans. He's going to have to perhaps look to some moderate Republicans, some of the people who have left the party, who have been defeated over the past few election cycles, if he wants to try to be a majority party once again."

At that point, Francis wondered if the GOP should allow the more conservative members of the party to be "crushed" by Obama: "...but in some sense, doesn't it make sense to put a lot of the old faces out there right now? Because almost anybody is going to get crushed in the undertow of President Obama's popularity. So why not make the sacrificial lamb, you know, some of the people that, you know, are part of the old Republican Party, and just let them get crushed for now. Can you see that strategy at all?"

Who did MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell feature to respond to Michael Steele's Tuesday speech about the future of the Republican Party? Chris Shays, the liberal, former Republican congressman with a lifetime American Conservative Union score of 44, appeared on "Andrea Mitchell Reports" to critique the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

After Shays insisted that Dick Cheney shouldn't be deciding who is and isn't a solid member of the GOP, Mitchell complimented, "Chris Shays, a good Republican." Responding to the Steele speech, Mitchell pontificated, "No mention of Dick Cheney. No mention of Rush Limbaugh. Is he [Steele] trying to move the party to a broader party, one that would include you? You were the last standing moderate from the northeast."

As Californians go to the ballot box to vote whether or not to increase their taxes, government leaders in Sacramento are trotting out "the usual human shields" - kindergarteners, firefighters, policemen and nurses to frighten people into voting.

The ballot initiative, promoted by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has little to no chance of passing according to the Los Angeles Times. But that did stop the governor from using fear tactics, as Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck pointed out on his May 19 program.

"What's their plan to turn the state around? They have one?" Beck said. "Yes - the Governator, he proposed $15 billion in cuts. Wow. And he warned that if his, if his propositions failed, California will need to release 40,000 prisoners out on the streets."

At the top of Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith teased an upcoming interview with Caroline Kennedy about the annual John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Awards: "Profiles in Courage, it's that time of year again where we chat with Caroline Kennedy about the people who will be honored up in Boston. May ask her a question or two about her own brush with courage and the Senate."

Smith was of course alluding to Kennedy’s bid to be appointed to the New York Senate seat left vacant by Hillary Clinton becoming Secretary of State earlier this year. However, based on his later question to Kennedy about it, one would have a hard time figuring out what he was referring to: "You had your own brush with public service, and politics, this year. Does it give you an even greater appreciation for some of the risks involved?" An on-screen graphic was a little more to the point: "Failed Senate Campaign: Caroline Kennedy Opens Up."