Campaigns & Elections

After years of downplaying ideological labels for Barack Obama, ABC has seemingly accepted the idea that the President is a "progressive" and a "liberal." While recapping the inauguration, Good Morning America's journalists used the terms four times in just two minutes and 45 seconds. Yet, when Obama was a Democratic primary candidate in 2007, the networks deployed the L-word just twice– in the entire year.

On Tuesday, George Stephanopoulos hyped the ideological content of Obama's second inaugural: "The speech, a call to action, an uncompromising enunciation of liberal principles." Seconds later, the former Democratic operative turned journalist reiterated, insisting that "liberals were cheering yesterday." Jon Karl trumpeted, "He went big. He went lofty. He went ambitious. And he went unmistakably liberal." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

In an exchange with former Secretary of State and prominent Obama supporter Colin Powell during NBC's live inauguration coverage on Monday, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams urged Powell to go after Republicans: "General, there's just flat-out hatred out there, too. There's nastiness out there in the land. There's nastiness between these two parties....Let's especially go to the Republican Party....What do they do to widen, if it is in their interest, widen their doorway to membership, to entry?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Chris Matthews, infamous for throwing out outrageous attacks against Republicans, has chosen President Obama’s second inauguration as a perfect opportunity to slam the GOP as a party of cheaters.  Speaking with the all-liberal MSNBC inauguration panel, Matthews suggested that in future elections, the only way Republicans can win election is if they rig them in their favor. 

Matthews’ rant began when he groused that the Republican-controlled state legislature in Pennsylvania could change the way the state allocates electoral votes for president to one based on winning congressional districs rather than the present winner-takes-all model. Of course, Nebraska and Maine have similar ways of apportioning their electoral votes. In fact President Obama won one electoral vote from the Cornhusker State in 2008, but now that Republicans in a blue state are considering it,  “There's so much of this willingness to rig the election by the Republicans now.”  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

CBS’s John Dickerson has once again used violent imagery to describe President Obama’s relationship with congressional Republicans in his second term.  Speaking prior to President Obama’s second inauguration ceremony on live network coverage shortly after 10:30 a.m. Eastern Monday, Dickerson insisted that, “only aggression will get deals made.” So much for "changing the tone" in Washington or appealing to the "better angels of our nature" to borrow from President Lincoln.

Dickerson’s violent rhetoric comes just two days after he commented that, “Obama can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP.”  Dickerson seems to place blame solely at the feet of House Republicans while the victimized President Obama needs to strike a “more aggressive tone” during his second term. “He [Obama] just thinks that a deal made with Republicans in Congress in the House specifically will not get through the House.”  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

Conservatives have long joked that the national press corps see Barack Obama as the second coming of Jesus Christ. Today, Newsweek – at least what’s left of it, an online product for tablets and e-readers – made it official.

Next to a side shot of Obama’s head, the “Inauguration 2013” cover story pronounces: “The Second Coming.”

It turns out that the Romney campaign was right to claim that Fiat, who owns Chrysler, would be making Jeeps in China instead of America, even though the media disparaged that case at the time with PolitiFact going so far as to declare the ad "Lie of the Year." According to PolitiFact, the campaign falsely implied the jobs would be outsourced, among other claims.

As Reuters reported yesterday, "Fiat (FIA.MI) and its U.S. unit Chrysler expect to roll out at least 100,000 Jeeps in China when production starts in 2014 as they seek to catch up with rivals in the world's biggest car market."

Weird stuff.  Then again, we are talking about Jim Moran.  Appearing on Al Sharpton's MSNBC show this evening, the Dem Congressman from Virginia declared that "older white guys" were "the most insecure component of our society."  Added Moran, possibly alluding to the difficulties in adopting additional gun control measures, "we're much the problem with these kind of things."

Joan Walsh was there to support the self-doubting Moran.  "There are a lot of terrific older white guys out there," reassured Walsh, naming Moran and Vice-President Biden among them.  View the video after the jump.

It's pretty safe to say that a Monday evening story appearing at Buzzfeed which should thoroughly embarrass President Obama will continue to be ignored or seriously downplayed by the Associated Press, (aka the Administration's Press), the New York Times, the TV networks, and most of the rest of the establishment press. Longtime media followers will also recognize the story as the type of item which would become a press obsession if it occurred betweem the election and inauguration of a Republican or conservative president.

It seems tha former Obama campaign staffers are getting seriously dissed in the runup to President Obama's second inauguration. It turns out that they shouldn't be surprised. Buzzfeed's Zeke Miller notes that more substative dismissive treatment -- and even dismissals -- began shortly after the election was over. Excerpts from Miller's write-up follow the jump (HT Instapundit, whose mini-post is titled "Used Up, Thrown Away"; bolds are mine):

It seems a day cannot go by without Joe Scarborough slamming Republicans as extreme and out of touch with middle America.  Appearing on Morning Joe on January 14, Scarborough took to chastising Republicans for going, “so far right and so extreme that they lost middle-America” and potentially ceasing to “be a player in presidential politics.”

Scarborough’s comments came a day after General Colin Powell’s comments on Meet the Press where he accused the Republican Party of being intolerant towards minorities.  Scarborough went on a long rant against Republicans by associating fringe groups with the general sentiments of the party:  

It seems as though MSNBC’s Ed Schultz has taken Rahm Emanuel’s belief that, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” to heart.  Speaking on Monday prior to President Obama’s final press conference of his first term, Schultz disgustingly suggested that the tragedy at Sandy Hook could be "the 9/11 of gun violence."

Schultz, along with the rest of MSNBC have been on a gun control tirade since Sandy Hook, and used President Obama’s press conference to disgustingly use a tragedy for political purposes:

Oh those racist Republicans.  Did you know that they're hostile to Colin Powell because he's black? Yup, just ask former Obama car czar Steve Rattner.  The Morning Joe regular today claimed that poor Powell "feels this hostility toward him from the rest of the party in part because he's a minority."

Really?  Colin Powell feels hostility from "the rest of the party" because he's a minority?  The Colin Powell appointed to a series of increasingly prestigious positions by a series of Republican presidents? The Colin Powell for whom so many in the GOP were clamoring to run for president in 1995-96?  That Colin Powell?  Please.  View the video after the jump.

President Barack Obama and his administration have been on the receiving end of a great deal of leftist criticism recently for its "lack of diversity" (to be clear, I find that entire discussion tiresome, as it would be more productive to spend time on problems like John Kerry's anti-American history, Jack Lew's bankrupting budgetary intransigence, and Eric Holder's unprecedented obsession with suing states exercising their sovereign rights).

With that backdrop, it's incredibly convenient that Colin Powell "just so happened" to appear today on NBC's "Meet the Press" with David Gregory, the Washington elitist disguised as a journalist who on Friday escaped prosecution for violating District of Columbia gun and ammunition law three weeks ago, to accuse the Republican Party -- the party whose members ended slavery, provided the margins by which landmark civil-rights legislation passed in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose ranks rarely if ever included members of the Ku Klux Klan while southern Democrats were infested with such members for nearly a century -- of having "a dark vein of intolerance."

In yet another attempt to inject her liberal bias into a discussion on abortion, NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell insisted that pro-life Americans call themselves "anti-abortion" instead because the latter term is "more value neutral."   Speaking on her MSNBC show Wednesday afternoon with Republican strategist Juleanna Glover, Ms. Mitchell decided that Glover’s self-identification as pro-life was inappropriate. 

Mitchell, who consistently brings on abortion activists to rail against conservatives who are pro-life, told Ms. Glover that she is in fact anti-abortion, “To use the term that I think is more value neutral.”  Ms. Glover who called herself deeply pro-life failed to challenge Ms. Mitchell on her categorization of the pro-life movement and instead when on a lengthy diatribe criticizing the Republican Party for many of its pro-life positions.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

We don't know if Joe Scarborough resolved to lose any weight this year, but he seems to have no game plan for diminishing his bloated ego. On Wednesday’s Morning Joe, the pseudo-conservative ex-congressman suggested that Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was afraid to appear on his program.

Speaking on the subject of gun control, Scarborough challenged Cruz’s belief that a ban on assault weapons was unconstitutional and then challenged Cruz to come on his show and defend his opinion, “Some people get scared, they don't like them coming on because you don't ask them three minutes' worth of questions. It’s not an easy give and take.”   [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

Ohioans can give thanks this week for at least one thing: Former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland has announced that won't be challenging incumbent John Kasich in 2014. During 2008 and 2009, Strickland's second and third years in office, the Buckeye State lost 420,000 jobs and saw its unemployment rate zoom from 5.7 percent to 10.6 percent, performances which were worse than nearly every other state in the union. In his final two years, the state ran billions in deficits which the rest of America covered by providing at least $4.8 billion in "direct relief" stimulus fuding. As he left office, Ohio faced an estimated $8 billion budget deficit and credit agencies downgraded its credit rating.

None of these facts about Ted Strickland's record got into Alexander Burns's Tuesday coverage of Strickland's decision at the Politico. Instead, readers were treated to a narrative which made Strickland's fundamentally deceptive attempt to keep his job in the 2010 election seem almost heroic (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Only at MSNBC would you see a segment entitled “by the numbers” that left out the most important figure: the price tag to the American taxpayer.   Such was the case on Monday morning, with MSNBC Live host Thomas Roberts gushing over the different activities the President Obama and his family participated in during their Christmas vacation in Hawaii. 

The “numbers” Roberts referred to was not the cost of the trip, but rather the number of times Obama and his family enjoyed time on the golf course or swimming [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]:

In a Washington Examiner column last night, Gregory Kane made several quite valid points in comparing the media firestorm over Rush Limbaugh's comments about Sarah Fluke to the virtual silence over Des Moines Register columnist Donald Kaul, who, if he were in charge, "would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner ... to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control." Kaul also wrote that he would, "If some people refused to give up their guns," make "that 'prying the guns from their cold, dead hands' thing" operative.

Confirming what readers here would expect, a search at the Associated Press's national web site on Kaul's last name comes up empty. Key paragraphs from Kane's column follow the jump (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine):

 PBS journalist Jim Lehrer chastised CNN's Candy Crowley for the assistance she provided Barack Obama during his presidential debate with Mitt Romney. Lehrer appeared at the Clinton School of Public Service on November 13 and critiqued, "As a general premise, I believe debate moderators are not there as fact-checkers...They are there to facilitate the exchange between the candidates."

Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard highlighted the "rebuke" of Crowley. Describing the role of a presidential moderator, Lehrer insisted, "You have to put a different cloak on, over your mind and your mouth and everything else. When you moderate something, you are a moderator, you are not functioning in a journalistic capacity." During her October 16 debate, Crowley famously– and incorrectly– backed up Obama's claim that he had referred to the attack in Libya as a terrorist act.

World News anchor Diane Sawyer on Thursday highlighted the 20 newly sworn-in women in the U.S. Senate as a way to push a liberal, pro-abortion agenda. Mostly ignoring conservative females, Sawyer stuck to Democratic talking points, lamenting, "So, they say they're ready to tackle big issues like jobs, transportation, immigration, but it's their male counterparts who keep reopening Roe vs. Wade and contraception." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

The ABC journalist then featured Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen lecturing that "government doesn't have a place in" dealing with abortion. In an extended rant, Democrat Elizabeth Warren scolded, "I mean, that's the problem is that there were amendments that were introduced to say that women wouldn't have access to health insurance coverage for birth control." During the segment, conservative Kelly Ayotte was only briefly featured (on an unrelated topic). Newly elected Republican Deb Fischer was mentioned, but got no screen time.

In a late Wednesday column at the Politico, the online website's Steven Sloan wrote that Democrats might be done hiking tax rates, specifically "that they’ve exhausted their ability to raise taxes on the richest Americans by jacking up their rates." But it's clear in later segments of his write-up that Democrats still want to go after "loopholes" and deductions, meaning that they still want to see effective marginal rates -- the ones which motivate high income earners' decisionmaking -- to get "jacked up." Such moves would also mean that the tax owed on a given amount of gross income would go up; i.e., they would be tax increases.

In suport of his misdirecting premise, Sloan quoted many Democrats, but somehow forgot to include Democratic President Barack Obama's stated position after the fiscal cliff mess concluded. In a video for supporters, as relayed by Joel Gehrke at the Washington Examiner, Obama didn't budge from using the same language he has used all along to justify tax increases. Gehrke's accurate headline captures the essence (video is at link; bolds are mine throughout this post):

On New Year's Eve, Chris Matthews got off one last sneering shot against conservatives. In a special 2012 retrospective, the Hardball anchor connected fiscal conservatism to segregation. After guest Howard Fineman insisted that Mitt Romney's aversion to tax increases during the primary doomed him in the general election, Matthews snorted, "It's today's politics! It's like, they used to say, you have to be the most segregationist guy in the south." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

He continued, "You can never be an inch away from it because somebody would always go to your right on that issue." Go to the "right?" Perhaps the history-challenged Matthews is unaware that segregationionist south was run by Democrats.

An unbylined Associated Press story at 1:34 p.m. (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) disgracefully covered a federal ruling which delivered a defeat (for now) against the enforcement of ObamaCare's contraception mandate.

Unlike the Hobby Lobby situation (covered earlier today at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), where the dispute is over certain portions of the contraception mandate requiring employers to cover abortifacient drugs and devices, the ruling in the case of Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza who is now has a property management business, involves the entire contraception mandate. Monaghan nevertheless was able to get a temporary restraining order (TRO). The full five-paragraph AP report is after the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):

In their December 27 story about Lisa Jackson's resignation from atop her perch at the Environmental Protection Agency, Darren Samuelsohn and Erica Martinson at the Politico wanted readers to believe that occurred after "after four years of battling Republicans and industry while also giving the White House some heartburn along the way over her push for new clean air rules."

Please. It's not as if only Republicans oppose the EPA's energy-hostile agenda; last time I checked, most of West Virginia's national politicians, as well as many if not most of the state's coal miners who are losing their jobs as a result of out-of-control environmentalism, are Democrats. And I don't recall President Obama or the White House ever having any problems with what Jackson was saying or doing. The Politico pair also waited until the sixth paragraph of their report to mention Jackson's admitted use of an accountability-avoiding email account in the name of "Richard Windsor" to conduct official business. Excerpts from their report follow the jump:

As 2012 winds down, it's time to look back at some of the year's most egregious media bias, as documented by the Media Research Center's "Best Notable Quotables of 2012."

Much of what made this year unique was how the so-called "mainstream media" linked arms with the Obama campaign to denigrate and demonize conservatives and Republicans, even those as mild and moderate as GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

If you're wondering what MSNBC hosts and regulars are up to, look no further than Al Sharpton's "Revvie Awards" where Democrats were honored and Republicans skewered for an hour on Wednesday night..

The "Blueberry Pie Lifetime Achievement" award was the highlight of the evening, going to MSNBC villain Karl Rove.  Rove also picked up the coveted "Lost Their Shirt" Award, which the MSNBC judges were ecstatic about.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]  

Strangely missing from NBC's look back on the 2012 campaign were gaffes and controversial statements from the Obama-Biden campaign. Friday's Today featured a mini-blooper reel of GOP mishaps on the campaign trail, but made no mention of Democratic controversies.

In its lengthy string of highlights from the 2012 campaign, Today included Mitt Romney's infamous "47 percent" remarks along with Rep. Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" meltdown. Today said nothing, though, of Biden's controversial "chains" comments or Obama's "you didn't build that" remark.

With four days until the "fiscal cliff," CBS This Morning peppered its report on the Congressional negotiations with four Democratic sound bites compared to just one from Republicans.

Chief White House correspondent Major Garrett quoted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) three times and simply relayed his smear of Rep. John Boehner's Speakership as a "dictatorship." Both ABC and NBC called out Reid's rhetoric, however.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]