The Magazine Publishers of America's American Society of Magazine Editors has added a category to its annual magazine cover awards: Obama. This new category is the only ASME category focused on a single person, and highlights the reverential attitude for the President widely held in the magazine publishing community.

ASME represents about 850 magazine editors nationwide. According to its website, the organization "works to preserve editorial independence." How they manage to maintain this air of objectivity while devoting an entire awards section to such a polarizing figure is a mystery.

This year's best Obama magazine cover, and recipient of ASME's Cover of the Year award, was published by Rolling Stone. Fawning coverage of president and candidate Barack Obama from the music (and wannabe left-wing politics) magazine appeared on the cover on numerous occasions. The winning cover is at right.

Did you know that no presidential couple ever "wanted each other" until the coming of The One and his Michelle? Well Stacy Schiff of New York Magazine knows, blurting out like a star-struck 13-year-old at a Jonas Brothers concert the question, “How long has it been since a First Couple seemed to want each other?” What about George W. and Laura's love? Must have all been a head fake. H.W. Bush and Barbara, it's all a sham I tell you. Nancy and Ron? Fuggedabout it. Bill and Hillary... OK, you might have something there. None of the rest really care about each other who can doubt? Not Schiff, anyway. No, as far as Schiff is concerned, love's been reinvented by Michelle and her beau, The One.

It’s either a sole example of love in the Oval office… or it's just another appalling exercise in Old Media sycophancy that takes slobbering devotion to a new level. I guess this is what passes for "reporting" these days, but it still seems like maudlin hero worship to me. It causes one to wonder what crackerjack box Schiff found her mind reading cap in to enable her to learn that no other presidential couple "want each other"? Still, Schiff has divined the fact for us like a late-night informercial psychic, nonetheless.

Some wag dubbed the Prius the "Pious," for the smug self-righteousness of its greener-than-thou owners.  CNBC ran a segment this morning highlighting an even pricier form of conspicuous green consumption: the installation of geothermal wells in Manhattan as an alternative form of HVAC.

Narrating a segment that would have had Veblen nodding in approval, CNBC's Bertha Coombs observed "for many, it represents bragging rights in the pursuit of green luxury."  That segued to a clip of New York magazine's Jesse Oxfeld explicitly making the conspicuous consumption point.

View video here.

Shortly before Election Day 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that the far-left-leaning activist group ACORN gave crack cocaine to one of its Ohio workers in 2004 "in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey."

Years later, when a conservative analyst mentioned it on television, H-I-L-A-R-I-T-Y ensued in the liberal media echo chamber at the conservative's expense.

The butt of the jokes this time was my colleague and NewsBusters contributor Matthew Vadum who during his appearance on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" last Thursday had the audacity to say (video available here):

If you needed any more evidence that the media meme regarding Sarah Palin not being qualified for vice president is nothing but liberal propaganda from America's Obama-loving press you got it on Sunday's "The Chris Matthews Show."

After the panel of New York magazine's John Heilemann, the Washington Post's Anne Kornblut, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, and the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page unanimously concluded that Palin was a horrible choice as John McCain's runningmate due to her lack of qualifications, they all agreed that she will be a serious candidate for president in 2012 if Obama wins this November.

Interesting hypocrisy, wouldn't you agree?

Readers are strongly encouraged to strap themselves in before proceeding to the following partial transcript of this astonishingly revealing segment (video embedded upper-right):

In what could turn out to be a classic "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment, New York magazine's most recent edition crowned Barack Obama nine days before Election Day:

The sub-headline for this forward-looking cover-story reads:

The Pew Research Center conducted a survey to see what the audiences of the various political shows knew about politics, and what they found goes against the conventional wisdom about whose audience is better informed about current events. With a simple three-question survey about politicians in high office, it turned out that the audiences of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity answered more questions correctly than fans of the "Colbert Report," "The Daily Show," and CNN.

The quiz asked the names of two of the world's leaders and one party in power to determine what audience is most well informed. Survey participants were asked the names of the Secretary of State, the British Prime Minister, and the name of the party currently controlling the House of Representatives.

Taking liberal media audacity to higher levels, John Heilemann would have you believe that the loss of support from liberal journalists is itself evidence the wheels are falling off the McCain campaign.  Heilemann recently wrote about a "shift" in the attitudes and opininos of the media away from John McCain and towards Barack Obama. His examples are, well, typical.

Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

By a show of hands, how many of you knew these guys were, as Heilemann reports, "former McCain admirers?"

Of all the criticisms an apparently panicky Dem party has heaped on Sarah Palin in the hours since her selection was announced, Keith Boykin [bio] has come up with perhaps the unseemliest.  The former aide to President Clinton has accused Palin of being an "affirmative action" pick.

Boykin, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law, was debating the selection with Republican Joe Watkins at the end of MSNBC's 4 PM EDT hour. After some preliminary jousting, Boykin dropped his bomb.

KEITH BOYKIN Let me just say something about this choice.  The reason why she doesn't help, quite frankly, is because it's an insult.  It's an insult to women. I spoke to several women today at the Democratic National Convention who said it's insulting John McCain would pick somebody—an affirmative-action candidate basically—who is not qualified.

Conservatives are more racist than the population at large, and John McCain plans to "viciously" stir up racism to beat Barack Obama.  That is John Heilemann's belief, as propounded in his New York magazine article, The Color-Coded Campaign, and spelled out in a CNN appearance today.  The author even broke out the trite "Wonder Bread America" epithet to describe that portion of the country not lucky enough to be NYC.

Interviewed by Kiran Chetry on "American Morning" today at 6:32 AM EDT, Heilemann's jumping-off point was the question of why Obama's lead over McCain is smaller than the 10-15 points by which Dems are generically leading Republicans nationwide.  Heilemann gave short shrift to the possibility that Obama is a weak candidate, given his lack of experience and most-liberal-in-the-Senate record that puts him at odds with the electorate.  He focused instead on what he claims is an under-reported factor—Obama's race.  It was there that he equated conservatism with racism.

JOHN HEILEMANN: During the Democratic primaries during the exit polls we would ask people whether race was an important factor for them. And somewhere, in places like New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania, 10 or 12 percent of the vote said race that was an important factor and voted for Hillary Clinton. And that's for many people a reasonable proxy to tell you about what the numbers were like for people who voted for Hillary because she was white, didn't vote for Barack because he's black.  And that number will be larger in the general election because general election is a more conservative electorate than the Democratic primary electorate was.

View video here.

In his tours at ABC (particularly the weekend versions of Good Morning America) and CNN, anchorman Aaron Brown was fond of liberal editorializing. So it's no shock that when New York magazine interviewed him as he takes on anchoring the PBS series Wide Angle, he declared he was a big fan of Keith Olbermann's show:

How about Keith Olbermann?
It’s a good television program. No, it’s a very good television program. That’s how I want to put that.

This matches his shout-out earlier in the month to TV Newser: Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly "are both larger-than-life figures," he says, but Olbermann is "smarter, funnier, better read and eminently more talented."

Some suspect Brown would like an hour next to Keith's on MSNBC. They certainly sound alike. On November 10, 2004, for example, Brown lamented poor, losing John Kerry as he looked at pictures in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes:

Slip of the tongue, or was the man who gets a thrill up his leg from Barack Obama's rhetoric voicing his innermost apprehension at the prospect of Hillary Clinton regaining the upper hand?

On this afternoon's Hardball, host Chris Matthews was discussing the March 4th Texas primary with Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News, John Heilemann of New York magazine, and Norah O'Donnell. The MSNBCer made the point that under the arcane Texas rules in which the race is a hybrid of caucus and primary, it's possible for one candidate to win the popular vote and the other to walk off with more delegates.

That seemed to trigger Chris's anxiety reflex at the prospect of Hillary getting good publicity . . .

In New York magazine, film critic David Edelstein (not to be confused with L.A. film critic David Ehrenstein, the man who launched the "Magic Negro" controversy) whacked away at Rush Limbaugh’s "freaky and terrifying" and even "psychopathological" story of how he intimidated a journalist by threatening to go into his personal life and his past writings.

Edelstein is scared by a Media Matters item on how Limbaugh criticized the new ProPublica investigative journalism group and its search for exposés with "moral force" – Rush made the point that investigative journalists have their own foibles that no one exposes – and said he once threatened a news magazine cover story writer that he could dish dirt back at him. Edelstein charged that Limbaugh was intimidating Time's Richard Corliss, who in return offered a "rather gentle" treatment of Limbaugh:

I should have known that elite Manhattan gossip site Gawker was a piece of crap the minute I saw the New York Times endorsement on the Gawker Media advertising page.

"…the national go-to spot for keeping up with the rich and scandalous, the media elite and the pop-culture trends of the moment." -New York Times

Let’s add self deprecating Jew bashing as another go-to category for Nick Denton’s flagship outlet of left of center writers who pride themselves in their unapologetic embrace of decadence.

Here’s the latest entry by Gawker editor Alex Balk (edit on f&%kfest and all emphasis mine throughout)

Happy Rosh Hashanah, Jews! It's time to celebrate the new year, eat apples and honey, blow the shofar, and, if you're lucky, blow some cute single guy you hook up with in temple! Apparently, these holy days are the genesis of a two-week f&%kfest amongst desperate single Jews who want to get their nagging mothers off their backs.