The recent midterm election drubbing of leftist legislative allies of Argentinan power couple President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and husband (and former president) Nestor Kirchner is partly thanks to the imperial designs of power-hungry former U.S. President George W. Bush and the consensus-building ethos of Barack Obama.

Or so Time magazine's Tim Padgett asserts without evidence in a June 30 piece, "Kirchner Loss a Lesson for Latin America":

Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald attempted in an article on Time’s Web site to make connections between two of the most prominent issues facing America and congress today, healthcare and energy. But he put forward a flawed argument that lacked balance and fell into the doomsday language so common in the main stream media.

“Everyone knows we use too much energy,” lamented Grunwald, “Our addiction to fossil fuels is torching the planet, empowering hostile petro-states and straining our wallets.” 

To justify his crisis language, Grunwald cited studies by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which “suggest that more than half of our energy is lost through inefficiencies, calculations that don't even include the energy we fritter away through wasteful behavior like leaving lights on or idling cars.” He failed, however, to mention that Livermore is not an unbiased source. According to its Web site, “More than 40 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers were key scientific contributors to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which, along with former Vice President Al Gore, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.”

The White House denied Time's Monday report that the Obamas have ended a search for a church home in the nation's capital. Here's Politico:

The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama continues "to look for a church home," and said a magazine report that he has stopped is erroneous.

White House deputy press secretary Jen Psaki said by e-mail: "The president and first family continue to look for a church home. They have enjoyed worshiping at Camp David and several other congregations over the months, and will choose a church at the time that is best for their family."

The Obamas haven't faced much questioning from the White House press corps about when they're going to make a church decision. With most presidents, this might not be a big deal, but the establishment media's reluctance surely reflects its sensitivity to Obama's political problems with choosing radical, ranting Rev. Jeremiah Wright in Chicago and staying in his church for 20 years.

Time’s Amy Sullivan, who worked tirelessly to sell Barack Obama as an acceptable choice for Bible-toting Evangelicals -- a choice that most evangelicals didn't accept -- reported Obama has refused to pick a D.C. church as his religious home. In his latest move copying George W. Bush, he’s going to designate the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David as his official church. Now go away, she insists to people still disturbed by his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright.

She quotes Obama religion adviser Vashti McKenzie: "Everybody needs to just back off and settle down. Let him choose where he's comfortable, choose where he and his family are going to be spiritually fed, and then let it be his choice." Sullivan added her own "Amen."

Between the lines, a cynic can see all the political convenience on display: no flashy minister, and not much ministerial contact either:

For Time Magazine, Kevin O'Leary has decided that he's figured out why California is in such a budget mess. Is it because the state indulges over generous social programs, or always has some of the highest taxes in the nation, or because the denizens of its capitol in Sacramento are paragons of waste, fraud and theft? Nope. It's because California has Proposition 13, a measure that prevents state government from too easily raising taxes. Yep, O'Leary thinks California is in a mess because it doesn't have high enough taxes. And it's all Reagan's fault.

With some of the highest taxes in America, California is a hard place to make a living. According to the Tax Foundation, on average it takes a citizen 110 working days to earn enough money to pay his yearly tax bill. That is the fourth worst in the country. California consistently ranks in or near the top 10 worst states for its tax burdens from property taxes, to corporate taxes, to individual taxes and fees of all sorts. So, how can O'Leary imagine that taxes aren't high enough in California?

If beating dead horses were an Olympic event, Joe Klein would have more medals gracing his neck than Michael Phelps.

On his magazine's Swampland blog, the Time columnist returned to his latest overwrought left-wing pandering point: labeling hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Iranian version of George W. Bush:

The protesters admire our freedom, but they are appalled--and insulted--by our neocolonialist condescension over the past 50 years. The reformers, and even some conservatives, consider Ahmadinejad the George W. Bush of Iran--a crude, unsophisticated demagogue, who puts a strong Potemkin face to the world without very much knowledge of what the rest of the world is about. This was an anology [sic] that came up in interview after interview, with reformers and conservatives alike.

Klein doesn't explicitly reference the "axis of evil" remarks  in then-President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address as an offense, although he quite probably has it in mind. Yet a review of the relevant passage from that speech shows Bush was dead-on and arguably eerily prophetic about the iron-fisted repression that the world is witness to presently on the streets of Tehran (portion in bold is my emphasis):

In the midst of his June 16 Swampland blog screed leveled against the "unhinged" Sen. John McCain for his criticism of President Obama's low-key response to the Iranian election, Time magazine's Joe Klein [shown in file photo at right] also worked in a comparison of hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's support base with former U.S. President George W. Bush's core supporters:

It is not even clear that Ahmadinejad--who has significant backing from the sort of people who support Republicans here (the elderly, the religious extremists) plus a real following among working-class Iranians--would have lost this election, if the votes had been counted fairly. (I tend to believe that they weren't counted at all, but that's just my opinion.)

Twelve days earlier, Klein more subtly made the Ahmadinejad/Bush connection in a comparison that favorably compared Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi to Bush's 2004 rival Sen. John Kerry (emphasis mine):

The second hottest item on Time.com on Tuesday morning was an article titled "Barack Obama, Stop Ruining My Marriage." Time reporter Sean Gregory’s shtick is that the President’s date nights with the First Lady are setting too high a standard for the average American husband. It begins with the obligatory compliment:

The list of reasons to admire Barack Obama is longer than Pennsylvania Avenue. But please, and I'm begging here, let's not hold him up as an exemplary husband simply because he takes his wife out on a date.

On Sunday, the New York Times did just that, with a story headlined "If They Can Find Time for a Date Night ..." The gist: If the Obamas — with Mom committed to her various causes and Dad trying to save the free world — can still find time for each other, hey, lame husband sitting on the couch watching sports, time to step it up. The writer suggests that the President has placed an "elbow in the ribs of husbands," while Jon Stewart has joked, "Take it down a notch, dude."

You want a blatant example of the Old Media's over-the-top, gobsmacked love affair with Obama? Well, one would be hard pressed not to see Time Magazine's latest piece by Nancy Gibbs as a perfect example of the media ignoring all ills and of projecting only what is wonderful onto the dearly beloved as this piece represents. The lionization of Obama is bad enough, but the selective memory of the writer is even more appalling.

Writer Gibbs begins her column trying to "place" Barack Obama in a "cultural map." Most famous people are remembered for a certain place that formed their inner core, of course, and Gibbs tries to pinpoint that place for several presidents including Obama. She pegs Ronald Reagan to Hollywood, Clinton to Hot Springs and W. to Texas. But where does she place Obama?

Time’s Nancy Gibbs has found the true home of President Obama, and it’s not Kenya or Kansas. "None of these quite fit our blender in chief, but it struck me recently that Obama does have a cultural home: he's the first President from Sesame Street."

In a gooey article titled "Tickle Me Obama" in the June 15 edition of the magazine, Gibbs giddily associates educational programming and Barack Obama as very similar concepts:

The President is every bit as much a product of the show, but it's not just his age and mastery of the alphabet that make Obama the first Sesame Street President. The Obama presidency is a wholly American fusion of optimism, enterprise and earnestness — rather like the far-fetched proposal of 40 years ago to create a TV show that would prove that educational television need not be an oxymoron.

She was thrilled that Sesame Street taught numbers and letters, but in an urban milieu with "noise and grime and grouches." Houses that were "not white, not rich" knew this show was for them:

MTV really knows how to stage the stunts that generate big publicity for their major events. In 2004, MTV produced the CBS Super Bowl halftime show where Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast. In the fall of 2003, Britney Spears kissed Madonna suggestively at their Video Music Awards program. They’ve done it again with the 2009 MTV Movie Awards show. Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s dressed like an angel and his flying over the audience during the live show went badly awry. He crash-landed in the audience and ended up upside down with his bare buttocks exposed right in the face of the rapper Eminem.

The seeming perfection of this gross-out embarrassment, complete with Eminem wearing a microphone, having a swearing fit, and walking out of the theater, caused some to smell a calculated stunt. Cohen seemed to be wearing a thong so the gross-out didn’t include an upside-down whole-crotch hangout. So was it a fake? Scott Aukerman, head writer of this sorry program, admitted they staged this disaster. "That's all anyone wants to talk about, so let’s get it out of the way. They rehearsed it at dress and yes, it went as far as it did on the live show then."

Time magazine's Joe "Anonymous" Klein is at it again.

Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb yesterday picked up on how the journalist -- who as we've documented is harsher on Israel than Iran -- credited a terrorist with having a "good question" about what pressure the Obama administration will place on the Netanyahu government regarding settlements in Palestinian territories:

Joe Klein, who has in the past boldly declared himself "not a big fan" of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, sits down with the terror group's commander in chief for an interview in the wake of Obama's speech:

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The back page of this week's Time magazine is an essay by editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs on the new Gallup abortion poll. Gibbs reasonably wonders about why a majority of Americans now say they're pro-life. She even bows to the notion that the GOP's "message on abortion is closer to the mainstream than Democrats care to acknowledge."

It only verges on syrupy at the end, when Gibbs claims Obama -- on the cusp of nominating a leftist to the Supreme Court who thinks Latinas are wiser than white men -- is wishy-washy on the social issues:

You can tell Obama isn't interested in a culture war. He has left gay marriage to the states, dropped family-planning money from the stimulus bill, refused to fund needle-exchange programs and said he wants to "tamp down some of the anger" surrounding the abortion debate. He is inviting all sides to the White House to discuss ways to reduce the number of abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies.

Time magazine’s senior editor Amy Sullivan, who, like most of her peers in the mainstream media, is an amateur when it comes to religion, twice implied in May that the pro-life Catholics in the U.S. who are upset about President Obama’s recent commencement address at Notre Dame are more Catholic than Pope Benedict XVI. In a May 16, 2009 article on Time.com, Sullivan, the former aide to Democrat Tom Daschle, and the author of an entire book on how Democrats could appeal to Christians, snarked that the Pope “may find his next trip to the U.S. dogged by airplanes overhead trailing banners with images of aborted fetuses,” due to his purported silence on the matter.

Less than a week later on May 21, after outlining on Time’s “Swampland” blog that the semi-official Vatican news has been “calm” and “fairly positive” towards the Democratic president, “in stark contrast to the furious reaction of many conservative Catholics here,” the editor quipped, “Uh, oh. It sounds like the Vatican newspaper ‘doesn’t understand what it means to be Catholic.’” Sullivan, like the rest of the media, was also selective in the articles she chose to emphasize from the newspaper.

On May 20, Politico had an interesting little treatment of columnist Charles Krauthammer crowning him as the most important conservative columnist of the day. A brief overview of his life and his emergence as the most reliable voice against Obamaism served as the main subject for the piece, but a few quotes on Mr. Krauthammer made by other columnists added a sense of how respected Krauthammer is to scribe Ben Smith's piece. All the quotes were complimentary but shockingly, in one of those quotes, lefty Time columnist Joe Klein seemed to hint that a person in a wheelchair was incapable of really understanding enough of the world to make for a worthy columnist.

Can you imagine? In this day and age, saying that a person in a wheelchair is incapable of really understanding the world because they can't easily get out there themselves because of their disability? And, how does a lefty columnist get away with saying this? Will no one scold Klein for his conceit that because he has two working legs that this fact somehow automatically makes him better qualified to opine as a columnist than a wheelchair-bound Krauthammer? Here is how Politico quoted Joe Klein on Charles Krauthammer (my bold):

Time magazine is not wild about capitalism. In a "business roundtable" on the "future of capitalism," Time assembled several liberals to decry the idea: PBS host Tavis Smiley, blog founder Arianna Huffington, and soul singer John Legend all found the need for capitalism to have a large dose of government intervention.

Smiley was frankest: "I don't think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody’s got to look over the shoulder of that child."

Time described its roundtable as a symposium on economic evolution: "With our economic world changing so rapidly, many writers and thinkers are looking at the roots of capitalism and how it must evolve. In the first of our series of Time 100 roundtables, we gathered a stellar cast of honorees to ponder the road ahead." None of them came to assert that economic liberty was a great value.

Arianna Huffington offered the familiar Greed Isn't Good attack:

Usually when CNBC's Jim Cramer is making headlines, it's for his outrageous antics or over-the-top statements. Not this time.

Time magazine's Justin Fox interviewed Cramer asking him questions submitted by readers which was posted on Time.com May 14. Two of those questions dealt with his March 12 appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." In his answers, Cramer accused Jon Stewart of personal attacks, being "vicious," and said that ultimately he had been had."

Fox asked Cramer if this was just a case of him taking "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart's criticism of the entire CNBC network too personally.

Recently I have been messing around with Twitter, the social media site of the day (shameless plug: see me as warnerthuston on Twitter). So, checking out some of the Old Media to see what they were saying about Twitter, I ran across Time Magazine's attempt to seem cool with the Twitterers, er Twitterists, er Twits, er whatever they are called. Time was following some "Tweets From a Washington Dinner" and I found something amusing there. Time, you see, added the Tweet from a guy claiming to be a John McCain adviser that was outed as a fraud months ago; Martin Eisenstadt.

You will recall that this fake Martin Eisenstadt was the same nonexistent fellow that fooled the media for weeks into thinking he was part of the McCain campaign for president. This Martin Eisenstadt even pretended to be a "Senior Fellow of the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy." But it was finally revealed that this Martin Eisenstadt was really a liberal named Eitan Gorlin. But it didn't come to light before he was quoted by several Old Media news outlets as a legitimate McCain adviser.

How many times can you use the discrediting term “extremely,” suggesting extremist positions, in a single sentence describing the state of the Republican Party? Three, if you're writing Time magazine's cover story. Michael Grunwald contended “the party's ideas -- about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else -- are not popular ideas.”

He then asserted in the article for the May 18 edition of the magazine: 

They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base.

Grunwald proceeded to characterize the GOP's agenda as a “hard right” one which pleases Rush Limbaugh but not a majority of people, arguing: “A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda.”

Contributing to Time Magazine's 2009 "Time 100" list, New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. sucked up to Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim (who has coincidentally purchased 6% of NYT Co. shares and lent the company $250 million recently). After acknowledging Slim's investment in NYT Co., Sulzberger gushed:

Carlos, a very shrewd businessman with an appreciation for great brands, showed a deep understanding of the role that news, information and education play in our interconnected global society....As he spoke at our meeting, he conveyed the quiet but fierce confidence that has enabled him to have a profound and lasting effect on millions of individuals in Mexico and neighboring countries. Carlos knows very well how much one person with courage, determination and vision can achieve.

Geez. That slobbering is quite a change from the paper's attitude toward Slim less than two years ago, when Eduardo Porter labeled the Mexican mogul a thief and robber baron in an August 2007 editorial:

Newsflash: ABC's "The View" leans left.

Barbara Walters, host of the daytime chat-fest revealed to CNN's Anderson Cooper on May 1 that "in general, [the] panel, with the exception of Elisabeth [Hasselbeck], tends to be, shall we say, more liberal."

Even casual viewers of Walters and company can tell the show is a liberal bastion. It features Joy Behar's repeated calls for the impeachment of Dick Cheney, Whoopi Goldberg asking John McCain, "Do I have to be worried about becoming a slave again?" and Sherri Shepherd's suggestion that "every woman" rooted for Hillary Clinton.

Thanks to Time magazine, we're having a "View" moment. Time recently honored Walters, Behar, Goldberg, Hasselbeck and Shepherd with a place on its list of "The World's Most Influential" under the category of "Artists and Entertainers." 

The media's pro-Obama love affair is so obvious, even overdramatic New York Times liberal columnist Frank Rich thinks his colleages are overdoing it. In his latest Sunday column, "Enough With the 100 Days Already," Rich briefly empathized with conservatives who think the press is pro-Obama:

Believe it or not, there are Americans who have a "very negative" opinion of Barack Obama (13 percent, in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll). Some are even angry at him (10 percent, New York Times/CBS News). As the First 100 Days hoopla started to jump the shark last week, I tried, as an experiment in empathy, to see the world through their eyes.

It was difficult at first, but an interview with the official White House photographer, Pete Souza, on CNN, pushed me over the edge. Souza was showing all those beguiling behind-the-scenes pictures that, though government issued, were more or less passed off as journalism by virtually every news outlet in the land.

Inevitably we got to The Dog. "I want to show this picture because I find this to be a fascinating picture," said the CNN anchor John King, who found almost every picture fascinating. "The president running down the hall with his new jogging partner there, Bo." What, he asked Souza, is it like "to add this to the diversity of your work at the White House?"

I'll leave the photographer's answer to your imagination. But for a second, anyway, I could imagine what it's like to be among the Limbaugh-Cheney deadenders who loathe Obama. Those who feel the whole world is against them. Those who think the press corps is in the tank. Those so sickened by the fawning that they'd throw a brick through the television screen if the Bush-Cheney economy had left them with enough money to buy a new set.

People who use Yahoo! or Google for Jack Kemp obituaries found Time's first headline on its Kemp obit: "Jack Kemp, GOP's Supply-Side Radical, Dies." (UPDATE: It remained "radical"on Time Mobile, but then they updated that as well. See Blogrunner.) Time's Web site now calls him a "Supply-Side Beacon" instead.

Michael Duffy's Kemp obituary was kind, never tearing into supply-side economics as the magazine did so ferociously in Reagan's time. He did refer several times to Kemp's willingness to work on the GOP's "weakness" with black voters, as in this passage:

Hee! Hee! Hee!

Isn't it just a laugh riot! We keep asking the White House for information about the Air Force One flyover incident by Lower Manhattan and they keep responding with evasions.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

And then they keep referring us to the Air Force which keeps bouncing the questions back to the White House which, in turn, refers us back to the Air Force again!

Isn't this just too funny!

That pretty much sums up the attitude of Time Magazine towards the Air Force One flyover affair as you can see in this  article by Mark Thompson and Michael Scherer:

Dear religious pro-life Catholics, get over yourselves. Signed, Amy Sullivan.

Okay, I'm paraphrasing, but the Time magazine staffer practically expressed those sentiments in two April 30 Swampland blog posts wherein she suggests that even the pope wouldn't mind hanging out with Obama on stage at Notre Dame when he accepts his honorary doctorate later this month.

"The Vatican apparently needs to get on-message--its newpaper gives Obama's first 100 days a tentative thumbs-up," Sullivan snarkily noted in a an April 30 post entitled "The Phantom Menace," referring to the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which Sullivan considers a virtually non-existent pro-life movement bogeyman:

[Ed Henry's press conference] question is a misstatement of Obama's campaign pledge to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that "the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." Of course, before Obama could sign the bill, Congress would have to first pass it. And he's never expressed the hope that Congress drop what it's doing and prioritize FOCA.

Less than an hour later, Sullivan sought to marginalize conservative Catholics who are disturbed by Notre Dame honoring the very pro-choice President Obama: