Politico

If you thought the Democrats would be satisfied with the fact that a solid phalanx of liberals have been chosen to moderate the presidential (and vice-presidential) debates, you would be wrong. Now they want to dictate what questions will be forbidden from being asked at the debates. I kid you not. The Politico reports on the question that the Democrats want to make taboo:

Some Democratic lawmakers want to make sure that one question does not get asked at the upcoming first presidential debate - about Simpson-Bowles.

Politico's Jonathan Martin is putting on his "cracker counties" snob act again in attacking Paul Ryan's resume, much like Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, only meaner.

This was how it started: "Flipping burgers at McDonald’s, steering the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, slinging cheap margaritas, and toning abs and pecs. That’s about the extent of Rep. Paul Ryan’s private sector experience." Again, this from the liberals who weren't in the habit of mocking Barry Obama slinging Bubble Gum ice cream?

NewsBusters reported Friday that Politico's Roger Simon, appearing on PBS's Inside Washington, accused the Romney campaign of employing a racist "dog whistle" in its anti-Obama welfare ad.

Also appearing on the program was syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer who scolded, "Any time a real issue is brought up here, all of a sudden it’s a silent dog whistle that only liberals hear...Clinton’s the guy who passed the law in the first place. Was that a dog whistle? Was he a racist?" (Video follows with transcript and commentary).

Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, Politico's Roger Simon claimed to see racism in a campaign ad against President Obama which criticizes the President for granting waivers to some states to loosen work requirements for welfare recipients.

After host Gordon Peterson recalled that fellow panel member Charles Krauthammer had called the ad "accurate," Simon launched into race-baiting:

On Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, regular panel member Evan Thomas dismissed media claims that Mitt Romney's recent trip abroad suffered from gaffes as the Politico correspondent asserted that the GOP presidential candidate spoke the truth about the Olympics in London and the social problems of the Palestinians.

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) had some harsh words for Newsweek and its Washington bureau chief Howard Kurtz Monday.

According to Politico, the former Republican presidential nominee said of Kurtz's newest article "John McCain Stages Romney Intervention," "It’s just the kind of liberal left-wing trash that I have to put up with from time to time."

Back in May, a handful of Senate Democrats attempting to open a new offensive front against Republicans in the "War on Women" introduced The Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA). "Democrats cited statistics showing that women today are still paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, or $10,784 less a year on average. That’s the equivalent of 183 tanks of gas or 92 bags of groceries," Politico's  Matt Wong helpfully noted in a May 23 story.

One day later, the conservative-leaning Washington Free Beacon, published an article which exposed how the very same Senate Democrats out in front on the PFA were egregious violators when it came to a pay gap among members of their own congressional staffs. Reported Andrew Stiles:

The Jurassic Press was in full-throated ObamaChorus mode in reporting on General Motors (GM)’s allegedly strong June sales.

Very few failed to receive the sheet music.

Politico ran a story yesterday about a sobbing woman thanking President Obama for ObamaCare.  To read the story you would think the woman, Stephanie Miller, had no ulterior political motive. However, she has been busted by Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit who has exposed her  as @obamasbestfan which is her twitter handle whose tweets demonstrate not only over the top enthusiasm for Obama but which are also chock full of vitriolic hate such as wishing that prominent conservatives had been aborted. Here is but one example of Miller's hate tweets:

If there ever was a valid def. why women need birth control & legalized abortion it would b ROMNEY, SANTORIUM, GINGRINCH, PAUL, & LIMBAUGH!!

Politico's Patrick Gavin on Monday hyped the evolution of a 13-year-old conservative to a 17-year-old liberal in an article trumpeting, "CPAC's Boy Wonder Is All Grown Up." Grown up equals liberal? The headline proved too much even for Politico. It was quickly changed to "CPAC's Boy Wonder Swings Left."        

Gavin breathlessly recounted what a difference four years makes: "[Jonathan] Krohn is bucking the received wisdom that people become more conservative as they get older, a shift he attributes partly to philosophy."

Politico announced Saturday that recently suspended Romney-trashing White House correspondent Joe Williams is leaving the organization.

The following statement was released moments ago:

Joe Williams, Politico's White House correspondent that was suspended after stating Mitt Romney was most comfortable around “white folks,” said on a Wednesday radio show that he was a victim of conservative websites that seized upon those words to make a point about the media.

While a guest on “The Bill Press Show,” Williams was asked by the liberal host, “Do you believe those words were seized upon, taken out of context, blown up by people with their own political agenda?”

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his campaign have issued a strongly worded written challenge to the Washington Post refuting claims in its June 21 article that Bain Capital outsourced jobs while Romney was there.

On Thursday, the Post's Jennifer Rubin published some excerpts:

The count of prominent Democratic Party politicians who have decided not to attend the Democratic Party's convention in Charlotte, thereby attempting to avoid direct association with the formal renomination of incumbent President Barack Obama, is up to seven. Press coverage has been sparse. One can only imagine how much media end-zone dancing there would have been in 2004 had one governor, one senator and five congresspersons chosen not to attend the Republican National Convention to renominate George W. Bush.

On Thursday, the Hill had the story about the latest declared non-attendee, who admittedly is the least surprising addition to list (internal links are in original):

A June 16-18 YouGov.com poll (at Page 25) reported that 47% of Americans in a sample of 1,000 U.S. citizens 18 and over had heard or heard about President Barack Obama's June 8 claim that "the private sector is doing fine."

The reaction of John Sides, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University, as picked up by Byron Tau at the Politico, is that this "low" percentage shows that "even after national headlines, some kinds of stories just don’t register to busy Americans who have more things to do than follow every jot and tittle of the news." You've got to be kidding me; 47% is amazingly high.

Politico announced Friday that it has suspended White House correspondent Joe Williams for "controversial comments" he's made about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in recent days.

Dylan Byers reported hours ago:

A Politico reporter has suggested that racism was behind Neil Munro's questioning of President Obama at the White House yesterday.  Saying "it's very, very difficult to place race outside of this context," the Politico's Joe Williams claimed racially-motivated direspect of PBO is part of a pattern among conservatives, citing Rep. Joe Wilson, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, and the Tea Party.

Williams made his remarks in the course of responding to a question from Michael Eric Dyson, subbing for Ed Schultz on MSNBC last night.  View the video after the jump.

If you're starting to lose Jonathan Alter, reporters at Politico, and other left-leaning outlets, you're starting to get into trouble. Double that if you can't even get Julie Pace at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to muster more than eight paragraphs relating to a 53-minute speech pre-positioned as a "major address."

Hunter Walker has compiled several less than complimentary tweets at Politicker, including the following:

Michelle Obama said at a campaign stop in Philadelphia Wednesday, "When we need a leader to make the hard decisions to keep this country moving forward, you know you can count on my husband, your president."

On PBS's Inside Washington Friday, Politico's Evan Thomas surprisingly said, "That’s precisely wrong. You can’t count on him to make the tough decisions, and I think that most voters sense that" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

At National Review (here and here), Stanley Kurtz has proven beyond doubt that Barack Obama sought the far-left New Party's endorsement in 1996. In the process, he has rendered a central claim made by the Obama campaign at its "Fight the Smears" web site in 2008 ("Barack Did Not Seek New Party Endorsement") and swallowed whole by the gullible establishment press utterly false.

In 2008, Ben Smith, who was then at Politico, also swallowed the line from the New Party's founder that the party never really had "members," which is going to be the focus of this post:

After being pilloried for months for the half-billion dollar Solyndra debacle, Obama Democrats are desperately trying to push a the idea that Mitt Romney has a Solyndra like failure of his own to answer for.

Upon further inspection, this claim has been shown to be false but that hasn't stopped DC newspaper Politico from repeating the false notion and crafting headlines implying the charge is true.

Politico went to its “Arena” pages to ask the experts if its recent story on the New York Times and The Washington Post being "in the tank" for Obama was accurate or inaccurate. The expert mix was pretty balanced.

Former USA Today reporter Richard Benedetto was candid: “As a daily reader of the print edition of The Washington Post, I have the clear anecdotal impression that President Obama and wife Michelle receive better headlines, photos, story placement and more-positive story angles than Mitt Romney and his wife Ann. My thesis is that an empirical study would bear that out.” Others were deniers:

Artur who? The seems to be the question at the New York Times and the national site of the Associated Press. Searches on former Congressman Artur Davis (in quotes at the Times, not in quotes at AP) return nothing relevant and nothing, respectively, even though Davis appears to be the only African-American current or former congressman to leave the Democratic Part and become a Republican in decades. As noted yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the AP treated the story as a local item yesterday, and the Washington Post carried the AP's story in its Metro local section.

It appears that the two entities might be using the old "Well, Politico covered it, so we don't have to" excuse. On Tuesday of last week, the online publication filed a story reporting rumors that Davis was changing parties. Two days ago (updated yesterday), Alex Eisenstadt made it appear as if anger and not political philosophy largely drove Davis to switch:

NewsBusters reported Thursday disgraced former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather said the idea of liberal media bias "is a sham."

Hours later, Politico surprisingly took a different position saying the presence of such bias "often rings true, even to people who don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh":

If between now and Election Day unemployment numbers improve, particularly if they dip below the 8% barrier, you know President Obama, with an MSM assist, will be out there pounding his chest about the number of jobs "he created."

But when the unemployment numbers remain weak?  Well, that's not Obama's fault.  Just ask Mike Allen of Politico.  On today's Morning Joe, trying to explain Obama's early campaign stumbles, Allen declared that certain factors, including the bleak job numbers, were "beyond the control" of Obama.  View the video after the jump.

Imagine that in one 2004 Republican primary, an opponent running to George Bush's left got 40% of the vote, and in another primary, more than 4-in-10 Republicans voted for "uncommitted" rather than support the incumbent president.  Now imagine the doom the MSM would have found that to portend for Bush.

But when a candidate running to the right of Barack Obama garners 40% of the vote in the Arkansas Dem primary, and "uncommitted" amasses an astounding 42% in Kentucky . . . crickets.  On Morning Joe today, Politico's Patrick Gavin proclaimed that PBO's embarrassing performance "doesn't matter."  View the video after the jump.

Let's grant that Associated Press reporter Mitch Weiss, in his dispatch Saturday on the headache Democratic National Convention host state North Carolina has become for the left, acknowledged by quoting someone else that "Nobody can sugarcoat the fact that we got problems here." That said, the AP reporter applied quite a bit of sweetener with generous pinches of distortion in several instances.

Weiss's biggest howler was the patently falsely impression he gave that the constitutional amendment approved by voters on Tuesday limiting marriage to one-man, one-woman relationships achieved success solely because of a "fired-up Republican base," when the support for it had to be far broader for it to achieve its 61.06%-38.84% victory margin (scroll to the very bottom at the link; the state's Board of Elections would appear to be quite unhappy with the result).