Government & Press

A recent Bloomberg Businessweek story focuses on how both the Romney and Obama campaigns try to control the story by limiting press access to fund-raisers. That's comparatively rare considering usually journalists like to complain only about Republicans doing so.

"Policies to limit coverage at a fundraiser help promote a feeling of exclusivity for top donors, and insulate candidates from verbal gaffes that have the potential to overpower their public messages," says the article by Bloomberg News’s Kate Andersen Brower and Julie Bykowic, summarizing why both campaigns do it. And yet, while both campaigns restrict the press to being present only for portions of most fundraisers, the story - and a follow-up commentary published yesterday - reveal just how much further the Obama campaign goes in trying to prevent the public from knowing what Obama says to donors in private.

Imagine if you will that an ex-con/former crack cocaine user, Republican ex-mayor of a major American city recently: denounced Asian-American store owners in his city for running "dirty" shops, insulted Filipina immigrant nurses, saying they were taking away jobs from Americans, and, most recently, wound up using a racial slur against another ethnic group during an event intended to mend fences with Asian-Americans. Oh, and also imagine that same Republican is a delegate for Mitt Romney at the upcoming GOP convention.

The national media would be all over the story. But it's not a Republican who's done all these things, it's Councilman Marion Barry (D) of Washington, D.C.

The broadcast media's blackout on news of the Catholic Church's lawsuit against the Obama administration continues apace, while the news media covers much more important events like who won American Idol.

So it's no wonder that MRCTV's Dan Joseph found only one person yesterday who knew about the lawsuit. Watch the video in the embed below the page break.

NBC, ABC and CBS have all ignored a new book by former Newsweek foreign editor Ed Klein that contains a shocking allegation from Klein's interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright in which the former Obama pastor claimed that an Obama supporter offered him $150,000 if he would refrain from preaching until after the 2008 election.

From "now until election day," the liberal media will be seeking to herald only news that "advances Obama" while spiking news that "hurts him in any way," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Hannity substitute host Tucker Carlson on the May 24 program's "Media Mash." [To watch the full segment, click on the play button in the video embedded below the page break]

It's been breaking news all over MSNBC, liberal blogs, newspapers and even The Wall Street Journal: "Federal spending under Obama at historic lows ... It's clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate president we've had in 60 years." There's even a chart!

I'll pause here to give you a moment to mop up the coffee on your keyboard. Good? OK, moving on.

Reuters columnist Chrystia Freeland must have editors who don't question her judgment very much. How else do you account for this gem making it into her final draft today?:

Like anorexics, who think they are grossly fat when they are very thin, the American body politic is suffering from a national version of body dysmorphia, with nearly half the country believing taxes are high, when they are comparatively and historically low.

Funny she uses that analogy when the Left is hard at work convincing Americans that they are all morbidly obese and in need of national nannying about their overeating and under-exercising. At any rate, Freeland justifies her claim by noting that:

Once again last night, President Obama faced an embarrassing showing in Democratic Party primaries, winning only 58.3 percent of the votes of Arkansas Democrats and 57.9 percent of Kentucky ones. Once again, in covering the story, the Washington Post buried the news placing the development on page A6. The last time the president faced such an embarrassingly low showing, the Post put its coverage of federal inmate Keith Judd's stunning 40 percent showing in West Virginia's Democratic primary on page A4.

This time around, Post editors gave readers a misleading subheadline that invoked an all-too-predictable liberal bogeyman: "His struggles in Appalachia, parts of South could be attributed to racism, some say." Yet in the article itself, two Southern Democrats told the Post that while a small minority of white Democrats may be motivated by antipathy to Obama's racial heritage, the vast bulk of the anti-Obama vote is predicated on their distaste for his liberal policies.

In her May 22 "Singles File" -- described as "A weekly playlist for the listener with a one-track mind" -- Washington Post music critic Allison Stewart suggested readers might want to download the new single "Reagan" by rap artist Killer Mike.

"The Obama years haven't been fruitful ones for sociopolitically minded rappers, at least until now," Stewart gushed, noting that the Atlanta musician "dusts off some late '80s ghosts on this unblinking and brutal track from his newest [album] 'R.A.P. Music.'" But when you check out the lyrics of the track, and read his May 21 interview with HipHopDX.com, what really becomes clear is Killer Mike's "unblinking" apology for the late terror-sponsoring Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

On today's edition of The Daily Rundown, MSNBC's Chuck Todd sat down to chat with Rev. Jesse Jackson to discuss a variety of issues, from Afghanistan to whether the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is fair game for Republicans to attack President Obama. In the middle of the interview, Todd asked the former Democratic presidential candidate about the NAACP Board of Directors's "historic" decision over the weekend to give the organization's stamp of approval to same-sex marriage.

"There has been this conventional wisdom that particularly among older African-Americans that the president's position on gay marriage is going to hurt him," Todd noted, adding, "Does the NAACP sort of backing up the president on this help convince the older African-American [voters], might be a little more religious, might be struggling with this issue, to ignore that part?"

"It does appear this year that the ghosts of presidents past have been haunting the current race for the future leader of the country," MSNBC's Chris Jansing noted as she opened up a segment featuring Center for American Progress's Daniella Gibbs Leger and Republican Strategist Joe Watkins about how both President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney, but chiefly Romney, have invoked other presidents in their campaign rhetoric.

Jansing seemed perplexed at Romney campaigning by invoking the liberal Clinton -- saying Obama discarded the Clintonian pronouncement that the "era of big government is over" -- but she wasn't equally incredulous at Obama citing the late conservative President Ronald Reagan to boost his call for tax hikes for the rich. What's more, not once did Jansing highlight recent revelations that Obama has altered WhiteHouse.gov presidents biographies to gratuitously insert himself into them, even though that news item was covered earlier this week by the Bible-for-liberal journalists, the New York Times:

Perhaps liberals are wising up and realizing that comparing voter ID laws to Jim Crow statutes is, well, a bit much. It seems now the preferred term of choice, at least on MSNBC, is simply "voter suppression laws."

During the 11 a.m. Eastern hour of MSNBC programming, host Thomas Roberts matter-of-factly labeled voter ID laws as "voter suppression laws" that "could keep minorities and young people away from the polls" as he introduced his guests Heather Smith of Rock the Vote and the NAACP's Marvin Randolph.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews is featured in a new "Lean Forward" promo spot [embedded below page break; MP3 audio here] quoting his "hero" Winston Churchill as having asked "Then what are we fighting for?" when his finance minister suggested that the government's budget for the arts would have to cut to aid Britain's war effort.  Matthews used that story as a warning to conservatives that the nation's dire financial straits are no excuse for cutting federal spending on the arts.

But alas, it seems the story is poppycock, as Churchill historian Richard Langworth noted in a March 2009 blog post.

Reuters correspondent Margot Roosevelt touted over the weekend that “Weary Warriors Favor Obama.” According to the latest Reuters-Ipsos poll, “If the election were held today, Obama would win the veteran vote by as much as seven points over Romney, higher than his margin in the general population.”

Under the heading “Fading Cool Factor,” Roosevelt summarized that many veterans sound like Obama did in the last election cycle, pessimistic about the wars Bush started:

If you had any doubts that the liberal media are doing their level best this year to shield the public from embarrassing news developments pertaining to President Obama, you need look no further than the strange tale of federal prison inmate #11593-051, Keith Judd, who gave President Obama a run for his money in yesterday's West Virginia Democratic presidential primary.

The quadrennial presidential vanity candidate who is serving out a 17-year sentence for extortion garnered more than 40 percent of the state's primary votes, well above the 15 percent threshold to secure at least one delegate at the national convention in Charlotte this summer. Keep in mind that West Virginia's primary is closed, meaning this is not a matter of Republican voters casting mischief votes to embarrass the president.  So how did the broadcast network mornings shows -- NBC's Today, ABC's Good Morning America, and CBS This Morning -- deal with what at the very least is a head-turning watercooler story? They didn't. All three networks ignored the story.

On MSNBC's Ed Show on Monday night, Ed Schultz attacked Mitt Romney for failing to disagree emphatically with a voter who said Obama should be tried for treason. "For all his faults, at least John McCain [in 2008] had the guts to talk down the crazy. Four years later, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party doesn't have the character or leadership skills to correct conspiracy theories on the road at an event? Romney didn't address the treason accusation at an event until a reporter grilled him about it."

Guess who didn't have the "character or leadership skills" to correct his supporters when they made crazy talk about "treason" in the last presidential election? That would be Barack Obama. Which supporters? You can start with...Keith Olbermann, occupying Ed Schultz's current spot on MSNBC. Check out Olbermann on April 25, 2008, for example, when the treason came from Team Clinton, which was supposedly going to undermine Obama in the fall:

One day after the lavish White House Correspondents' Dinner was held in Washington, D.C., former "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw stated that the annual event is diminishing the reputation of the journalists who attend it.

The longtime newsman made the remark to host David Gregory while appearing as a guest on "Meet the Press" the following morning, according to a column written by David Eldridge at the Washington Times on Sunday.

In the domain of what properly constitutes human rights issues, forced abortions and sterilizations have to fall in that category. So why isn't the Washington Post describing Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng as a "human rights activist"?

In two stories packaged side-by-side on page A9 of the May 8 paper, the Post's Andrew Higgins and Keith B. Richburg failed to use the term to describe Chen. Higgins tagged Chen a "blind activist," as in an activist who is blind, not an activist for the blind, but the term could confuse casual readers unfamiliar with Chen's plight. Richburg opened his story by tagging Chen as "the self-taught lawyer who has become the center of a diplomatic crisis between the United States and China."

Fifty-six percent of Virginians approve of Republican Bob McDonnell's job as governor and 49 percent believe the Old Dominion is on the right track. That contrasts with a 47 percent average approval rating for President Obama and an average of 32.7 percent of Americans who believe the country is on the "right track."

Yet the Washington Post chose to spin the polling numbers as a negative, noticing a downward trend from previous numbers and attributing the shift to "a contentious legislative session that drew large protests and national ridicule to the state Capitol."

If this is how Dan Rather at peace looks like, wonder what he's like when angry and embittered . . .

On Morning Joe today, Rather emphatically alleged that he was "at peace" over the Memogate fiasco that led to the end of his career. But he couldn't help himself from suggesting that his reputation had been destroyed by anonymous partisans employing "lies."  View the video after the jump.

A brief but telling episode from As The MSM Mask Slips . . .

On her MSNBC show this afternoon, chatting with chum and fellow Obama fan Tom Daschle about the anniversary of the killing of OBL, Andrea Mitchell said: "What do you think of the Republican criticism that we are politicizing it, that the White House, I should say, is politicizing it"?  View the video after the jump.

With President Barack Obama's officially starting his campaign this Saturday, many are wondering whether the GOP front-runner and former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, has a real chance at winning the general election. But I know a way he could pull it off, and my wife, Gena, even dreamed about it.

I said that I would vote for whichever candidate won the GOP nomination. As of this writing, it appears to be Romney. Truthfully, I believe that Mitt has the skills and organization to defeat Obama and stop his fundamental transformation of America. We all know what four more years of increased socialistic decisions would do to our country.