Politico

Following MSNBC coverage of ObamaCare protesters legally carrying guns, on Thursday, the Second Amendment Foundation condemned the liberal network for "using deceptively-edited video from a Phoenix, Arizona anti-tax rally on Monday to invent a racial stereotype in its on-going effort to demonize and marginalize American firearms owners as ‘racists.’"

As NewsBusters reported on Tuesday, MSNBC correspondent Contessa Brewer, along with Morning Meeting host Dylan Ratigan and pop culture analyst Toure, depicted all gun-carrying protesters as being "white," "racist," and even a threat to President Obama’s life. Brewer cited one such gun-toting protester, but used highly edited video footage that did not reveal the man was actually African-American.

The White House is striking back at recent revelations about what presidential candidate Barack Obama stated during the campaign concerning his desire to create a universal healthcare system in America and eliminate private health insurance.

On Monday, the Drudge Report linked to a video created by our friends at Naked Emperor News -- first reported by NewsBusters Sunday -- that contained clips of Obama making statements about healthcare that quite contradict what he's currently telling the American people as he pushes for radical reform (embedded right).

To counter what was in this video, the White House created one of its own as reported by Politico Tuesday (embedded below the fold):

Might Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) have some "'splainin' to do" about racial insensitivity? Both Associated Press editor Michael Giarrusso and Politico's Glenn Thrush raised the question in blog posts filed this morning.

Shortly before noon, Giarrusso noted that "Sen. Tom Coburn evoked a 1950s TV show in a quip responding to Sonia Sotomayor’s scenario about what he might do if she -- hypothetically, of course -- attacked him."

For online readers unaware of the half-century-old pop culture reference, Giarrusso explained:

It appears the Palins are tired of being defamed by media, for the day after the Alaska governor announced her intention to step down from her post later in the month, her attorney issued a written warning:

This is to provide notice...those who republish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law.

As reported by Politico moments ago:

Mark Sanford can’t run for President in 2012, all because he went for a hike. [UPDATE: He went to Argentina.]

At least, that’s what Mike Allen of Politico would have you believe.  On June 23, during his normal appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Allen was discussing the recent media snafu over the governor’s jaunt through the woodlands:

I think it might well be that he was just hiking. But the point is, he would have been a promising Republican for 2012. He's the rarest thing in the Republican party, which is a true conservative. There would have been a lot of momentum behind him. He threw out the idea very recently. But, you talk about the finger on the button – you want someone stable, someone you can trust. And this, as they were talking about yesterday on MSNBC right away, in a moment, diminished the brand.

Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, wrote an incredibly bizarre article for Politico. He accurately declares that the biggest problem for the Obama administration's health care plan probably wouldn't be Republicans but the assessment by the Congressional Budget Office warning of a trillion dollar cost of the proposal. Zelizer's solution? Just ignore the CBO. Zelizer starts off firmly planted in the realm of reality:

The most potent threat to the Obama administration’s fledgling health may come not from the insurance industry or skeptical doctors but from the Congressional Budget Office.

Okay, good beginning, Julian. Just stay on track and try not to come to any sanity-challenged conclusions.

"Ahmadinejad won. Get Over It."

That was both the headline and the theme of an astounding story written for Politico by the former foreign policy husband and wife team of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.  Their shtick while at the Bush White House was that we needed to "engage" Iran and left their jobs  "with a growing sense of alarm" that we were headed towards war with that Islamic regime which, of course, never happened. And now they are continuing to run cover for the mullahs with their Politico story about how the Iranian presidential election was fair and square:

Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and “Iran experts” have dismissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud.

They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The shock of the “Iran experts” over Friday’s results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.

Reports on Governor Sarah Palin's appearance at the National Republican Senatorial Committee dinner in D.C. on Monday nearly all mention that she was quite the center of attention with dinner attendees. Well, all agree with that characterization but Politico's Alex Isenstadt, that is. Isenstadt seems to have been the only one to report that her attendance was a dud. This spurred our friend Videmus Omnia to wonder if Isenstadt went to the same dinner as everyone else? After looking it over, I have to ask the same question.

For Politico, Isenstadt snorted that Palin's appearance at the dinner "went little-noticed." He also stated that, "If she hadn't walked quickly across the stage the outset and if her presence hadn’t been mentioned briefly in the remarks of some of the evening's speakers, it would have been hard to know that she had, in fact, shown up." So there you have it. No one cared a whit that Governor Palin attended the dinner.

But wait. A perusal of other media accounts says just the opposite.

President Obama is apparently out of touch with Americans on gay right issues according to the June 4 article by Politico’s Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin. In the article “Gay Groups Grow Impatient With Obama,” Smith and Martin criticized Obama for the not taking an active role in supporting gay rights, such as same-sex marriage, but paint an inaccurate portrayal of the American peoples’ stance toward same-sex marriage.

The article was critical of Obama for not helping advance gay and lesbian rights “President Barack Obama’s promises of change are falling short for one core Democratic constituency: gays and lesbians.”  But Obama never promised to change traditional marriage during the 2008 presidential campaign.

UPDATED below: Politico removes item, writer explains/apologizes decision to highlight the list.

Yesterday, Playboy writer Guy Cimbalo published a top ten list of conservative women against whom he would like to commit vulgar and violent sexual acts. His piece, which has since been removed by the skin mag's Web site, was actually promoted to conservative sites like NewsBusters by Playboy's PR people (see editor's note at bottom of the post). Cimbalo's hate-filled and misogynistic write-up drew the condemnation of many conservatives and even some liberals.

Yet Anne Schroeder Mullins of Politico.com remains unimpressed and disturbingly amused by Playboy's sick hit list. She was so amused in fact that she playfully white-washed Cimbalo's violent sexual rhetoric as the "lighter side of politics." But what if the tables where turned in this story?

The Politico's Jeanne Cummings, a veteran of the Wall Street Journal, fretted on this weekend's Inside Washington that former Vice President Dick Cheney has “changed this debate in a way that has made it much, much harder to close Guantanamo, which the President is already committed to doing.” So he's done an awful thing in daring to oppose something President Obama is “committed to doing.” Dreadful!

In fact, she soon charged that in complicating Obama's intention to close Guantanamo -- which Obama had announced without any plan for where to place the detainees -- “Cheney really did damage to the effort to keep our country secure by turning this into a political issue. We were going to have to deal with this and to make it a political issue is not helpful. It's just not.”

To which a befuddled columnist Charles Krauthammer retorted by pointing out the overwhelming bi-partisan vote to block the closing: “Cheney is the one who turned it into a political issue? I thought it was a 90-6 vote in the Senate. Just about every Democrat in the Senate-” Cummings jumped in to blame Cheney for turning virtually every Senate Democrat against Obama: “No, Cheney started making political arguments a week ago. That is when you did start to see the tide turn up on Capitol Hill. It was after Cheney started to talk about 'I don't want to be the Member who says I brought a terrorist to a jail in my district.'”

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):

Here's a headline you'd never expect to see at a left-of-center website so soon in the new President's first term:

Some on Left Souring on Obama

Maybe even more shocking was the content in Josh Gerstein's Politico piece that was so prominently placed as the feature story on the site's front page Sunday:

Those who believe that Politico is a hangout for former establishment media journalists who want to recreate a combination of the New York Times and Washington Post on the web -- complete with the insufferable biases of those two publications -- can look to the disparate treatment of two challenges to party congressional leaders as affirmative evidence.

In a search on "Cindy Sheehan" at Politico, I found that in covering the congressional candidacy of former media darling Cindy Sheehan in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Northern California district, the online news site carried two tiny items. Only one of them was originally produced there.

Politico on Saturday accused Greta Van Susteren of being Todd Palin's "host AND handler" at a pre-White House Correspondents' dinner brunch, and the Fox News host is none too pleased.

This was at least the second time in two months Politico has implied an improper alliance between Van Susteren and the Palins, and the "On the Record" host wasn't going to let them get away with it.

On Sunday, she posted a response at her FoxNews.com blog (h/t TVNewser):

This morning's remarks by Barack Obama on the latest unemployment figures included the usual self congratulations we've come to expect from The One.  CBS News quotes him as saying:

Such hard-working Americans are why I ran for President. They're the reason we've been working swiftly and aggressively across all fronts to turn this economy around; to jumpstart spending and hiring and create jobs where we can with steps like the Recovery Act. Because of this plan, cops are still on the beat and teachers are still in the classroom; shovels are breaking ground and cranes dot the sky; and new life has been breathed into private companies like Sharon Arnold's.

The woman to whom Obama referred appeared with him this morning and POLITICO describes her as "Sharon Arnold, a small biz owner from Illinois."

In a brief presentation viewable at C-SPAN's Web site, Arnold explained she owns a small landscaping business that has benefited from government contracts.  Last year, however, she "had to lay everyone off, including myself."  All of her employees went on unemployment.  But now, things are just so much better.  Under Obama, stimulus money is flowing back to Illinois and she's been able to hire back 90 percent of her employees.

When NewsBusters reported earlier today that media members were depicting April's 539,000 jobs loss as "good news," I never imagined anyone would characterize the data as "employment doing well."

Yet, that's how Politico's "44" blog -- "A Living Diary of the Obama Presidency" -- first teased Friday's Labor Department announcement at its front page.

Here's a screen-cap of the first picture taken some time after 10:23 AM EDT:

Now that Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. has been named the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, some on the far-left are gunning for Alabama's junior senator. The battle is happening as President Barack Obama is on the verge of naming an appointee to the Supreme Court to fill void of Justice David Souter.Some of the left-wing points that suggest Sessions has racist tendencies were incorporated into a May 6 Politico story by John Bresnahan and Manu Raju.

"By elevating Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to their top spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republicans have selected their chief inquisitor for President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee: a Southern, white conservative man who has drawn fire for racially insensitive comments in the past," Bresnahan and Manu Raju wrote. "Democrats like how this is looking."

The story sets up Sessions to be on the defensive about race by spinning the senator's own history. According to the Politico story, Sessions had been accused of unfairly targeting black civil rights workers for election fraud charges as a federal prosecutor during a 1986 Senate hearing for a spot on the federal bench.

Politico today reveals what those in the fawning mainstream media have known all along: "For Obama, hipness is what it is."  It begins:

During his first 100 days as president of the United States, Barack Obama revealed how different he is from all the white men who preceded him in the Oval Office, and the differences run deeper — in substance and style — than the color of his skin.

Barack Hussein Obama is the nation’s first hip president.

This, of course, is subject to debate. But watch him walk. Listen to him talk. See the body language, the expressions, the clothes. He’s got attitude, rhythm, a sense of humor, contemporary tastes.

To buttress his assertion of Obama's hipness, the author quotes John Leland of The New York Times, longtime Democratic operative Roger Wilkins, and Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics.  Wilkins and Tannen are themselves apparently hip, both having contributed money to Obama's campaign.  That hip fact didn't merit reporting.

Did you feel the earth shake under your feet in the past couple of hours?

It's because GM CEO Rick Wagoner has resigned...at the request of President Barack Obama.

As reported moments ago by Politico (h/t NBer AgentAmerican):

Greta Van Susteren is clearly sick and tired of people accusing her of advising Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

She's also fed up with what she referred to Sunday as a "hit and run":

This is why I hate “sources” and where journalism can be grossly unfair — in the law you have to step up on the witness stand and identify yourself and take an oath to tell the truth.

According to Van Susteren, that's not what Politico did on Sunday:

I don't know what got into MSNBC's Chris Matthews Thursday, but the "Hardball" host seemed rather annoyed by his President's recent treatment of the news media.

First, he opened up a segment with guests Roger Simon of "Politico" and USA Today's Susan Page by accusing Barack Obama of behaving "like the campaign never ended" asking:

[W]hat`s the president up to? Is he doing what he does well? Is he simply sticking to his strengths? Or is he trying to bypass what he sees as a problem area, meaning the national press corps?

Later, he suggested that the folks at Thursday's Internet town hall were "self-selected" much like a "Potemkin village" (video embedded below the fold with full transcript):

Imagine the howls of anguish that would have belched forth from the Old Media if George W. Bush had decided to only talk to Fox News and Drudge? Imagine if members of Bush's administration had reached out only to the Internet sites RedState and Powerline. What if Bush had instituted a concerted effort to only interact with conservative media sources? Who can doubt that the Old Media would have decried it as the end of the world as we know it? In fact, they did by so often attacking Fox News.

Yet, here is precisely where Barack Obama is going with his own media outreach. Not with out reach to conservative sources, of course, but to exclusively partisan, left-wing sources, often to the exclusion of moderate, right of center, and older media outlets. As Politico reported on March 24, the president's team is "reaching out to liberal commentators, local reporters and ethnic media" in hopes of going around long established Old Media outlets.

Carol E. Lee of Politico had a short March 5 piece about President Obama's singular inability to give a speech, even short ones, without the crutch of a TelePrompter in front of him to prod him about what to say next. This isn't the only time the media has raised its eyebrow about the president's TelePrompters (I even covered it myself not long ago), so the story isn't a new one, but one little thing that Lee wrote reveals how the media goes out of its way to help Obama's image by keeping the devices out of Obama's photography.

His use of the teleprompter makes work tricky for the television crews and photographers trying to capture an image of the president announcing a new Cabinet secretary or housing plan without a pane of glass blocking his face.

In other words, the Old Media puts in a herculean effort to make sure The One still looks like he is speaking extemporaneously by working overtime to make sure those speech prompters are NOT in the picture.

Have you wondered why there have been so many hit pieces lately about Rush Limbaugh?

Well, new revelations suggest that Democrats began a smear campaign against the conservative talk radio host last October, and now it's really caught steam.

Apparently, the Left feared its message would be muted without having George W. Bush to blame for all the world's problems, and Limbaugh made a nice substitute as the object of their disaffection to distract the public from real issues.

Given White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's connections to key media figures such as ABC's George Stephanopoulos as well as CNN's Paul Begala and James Carville, disseminating the hate was a piece of cake.

As Jonathan Martin reported Wednesday at Politico (photo compilation courtesy Edward Cropper):

Want to know the sordid details of how the press sucks up to staffers at the White House? According to Politico's Michael Calderone it is via a "beat sweetener" article, a concept well known in Old Media circles. A "beat sweetener" is an article meant to flatter a White House staffer so that said reporter might find easier access to the inside stuff later on.

Calderone's piece is an interesting glimpse into the world of Washington political reporters and it isn't one that builds much confidence among us, the readers. Perhaps, like a magician revealing his tricks, Calderone might find a few of his colleagues being a bit miffed at the spotlight he shines on this less than edifying practice.

In one of the most comical Politico stories I have ever encountered, several prominent journalists insisted that the revolving door between the media and liberal Democrats, especially Team Obama, is not a symptom of bias. Instead, they blamed the trend on the economy:

In three months since Election Day, at least a half-dozen prominent journalists have taken jobs working for the federal government.

Journalists, including some of those who’ve jumped ship, say it’s better to have a solid job in government than a shaky job — or none at all — in an industry that’s fading fast.

Despite all claims to the contrary, President Obama has not been very vigilant about pursuing that idea of "transparency" he ballyhooed during the recent campaign. Politico reported on a host of documents, proclamations and executive orders that Obama has made in the last month and none of them were online. In fact, many were not even released at all to the press by the White House.

So, where is the drumbeat of outrage about the "secret presidency" we heard for the last 6 or so years?

Remember all the mavens of the Old Media establishment that kept claiming that Bush was too secretive? Along with the Old Media, the nutrooters also took up the claim as a battle cry against the evil Bush administration. Of course, Bush was trying to fight an intelligence war where keeping secrets means life or death for our soldiers. But, regardless of Bush's reasons, the media and the left were constantly apoplectic over this supposed "secrecy."

Here's the relative tempest in a teapot that happened on Thursday:

Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe made an unusual request for his speech today at the National Press Club: he wanted it off the record.

..... Politico editor-in-chief John Harris said that after hearing of Plouffe’s request, and decision not to reverse course, he backed out from moderating the lunch-time event.

Harris said that as a news organization, he doesn't want Politico "being in the the business of sponsoring, or co-sponsoring, an off the record talk with a newsworthy person.”

Here's a much more relevant issue: How is David Plouffe (picture above is at Media Bistro) a "former" campaign manager?

Based on this e-mail I received on Friday, I'd say he's still in that role (bold is mine):

The Senator Speaks for Herself

UPDATE: We have been reminded that Senator Stabenow's husband, Thomas Athans, is the co-founder of the liberal TalkUSA Radio network and is now the Executive Vice-President of liberal Air America.  Liberal talk radio has of course failed miserably every time it has been tried, all the while watching it's conservative counterpart's success soar. 

Which might lead one to believe that Senator Stabenow, in addition to her zealous will to slam the fist of government down upon her opponents, has some business skin in the game as well.  If you can't beat 'em, censor 'em. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Michael Calderone in today's Politico reports on the latest liberal politician -- Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow -- openly touting their intent to silence their talk radio opposition with a reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine. 

"Whether it’s called the Fairness Standard (sic), whether it’s called something else – I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves."

Senator Stabenow was speaking on the air with liberal talk radio host Bill Press and to his eleven listeners nationwide. She insisted that she "think(s) it’s absolutely time to pass a standard" and indicated she had "already had some discussions with colleagues" about Fairness "Standard" hearings and that she "feel(s) like that’s gonna happen. Yep." 

Mr. Calderone delivers us the exchange (audio here):