Government & Press

"Summer’s in full swing, and unless your family is rather Romney-esque, there’s a chance you’ll be spending some time in one of the country’s hundreds of national parks. " That's how Washington Post "In the Loop" columnist worked in a gratuitous swipe at the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in today's "In the Loop" column in which he interviewed Jonathan Jarvis, the head of the National Park Service. 

It's tempting to think this was an out-of-the-blue snark by Kamen, but you will recall that on June 25 he asked his readers for their input on where the Obamas should vacation, cheekily noting that it was "our civic duty" to help pick the next vacation spot for the first family -- although it appears Kamen never had such a contest when President Bush was in office.  

Herman Cain's new "Cain TV" project, which he announced in a promo video on his Facebook page, will feature not only "critical commentary on issues of the day" but "pearls of wisdom from Herman himself," MSNBC's Alex Wagner snarked in a segment on today's Now with Alex entitled onscreen "This Just Happened."

But the "pearl of wisdom" Wagner showed was a clip of Cain's video taken out of context that sounded completely bizarre in and of itself. What's more, liberal members of Wagner's panel reacted to the out-of-context comment to denounce Cain as "scary."

The day after Barack Obama won a major victory for his signature health care overhaul legislation -- which he and his allies insist will ultimately LOWER health care costs for Americans -- the president is threatening to veto a defense authorization bill in part because Congress is not acting to RAISE health care costs for American servicemen.

The Washington Free Beacon has the story here, and I've also excerpted it below the page break. It remains to be seen to what extent the Obama-boosting liberal media will acknowledge the president's hypocrisy:

Liberal hosts on MSNBC can’t get their talking points in order when it comes to how liberals should react to the Supreme Court.  On Tuesday’s The Cycle, co-host Steve Kornacki insisted that “if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate, that does not mean it's unconstitutional.”   To the Salon.com writer, just because the Court would have spoken thus doesn't make it final.

Such open and partisan comments are a stark contrast to those made by MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry today. On MSNBC Live following the Supreme Court upholding ObamaCare, Harris-Perry rebuked Kentucky Republican Rand Paul for his attack on the Supreme Court, saying he should respect the Court's word as final.  [Video follows page break;  MP3 audio here.]

Yesterday I noted that Fox News reported that the Obama administration was ending its program that deputizes local and state law enforcement officers so that they can arrest illegal immigrants. "By Monday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security had pulled back on a program known as 287(g), which allows the feds to deputize local officials to make immigration-based arrests," Fox reported, adding that "The move means that even if local police step up immigration checks, they'll have to rely on federal officials to make the arrests."

While it's clearly a sign that the Obama administration is intent on doing all it can to not aggressively enforce the nation's immigration laws, the liberal broadcast media greeted the news with a yawn. Neither ABC's Good Morning America, CBS's This Morning, nor NBC's Today noted the Obama administration's decision to kill the 287(g) program.

I will give this to Ezra Klein: unlike other liberals in the media -- Michael Tomasky and James Fallows come to mind -- the Washington Post economic and domestic policy columnist is decidedly less histrionic about the Court likely striking down as unconstitutional the ObamaCare "individual mandate" on Thursday. But all the same, Klein is seeking to dismiss the intellectual and legal credibility of the Court's ruling should a majority rule on Thursday that the individual mandate violates the Constitution's limits on federal power.

In a June 26 column, Klein sought to explain how "a radical and discredited reading of the commerce clause" came to be popular with American voters and palatable to a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court, all thanks to conservatives erecting a "permission structure" that overrode previous conservative backing for the idea of a health-care mandate.

Every summer, millions of Americans enjoy baseball, summer camps and vacation plans. But for the nation's political junkies, every fourth summer is filled with guessing games about the vice presidential nomination.

While the guessing games are fun, it's more accurate to look at the fundamentals facing the candidate and what he hopes to achieve.

Coming quickly on the heels of the Supreme Court's ruling today in Arizona v. United States that struck down much of the Grand Canyon State's anti-illegal immigration law -- but upheld a crucial provision to check the immigration status of persons held in custody -- the Obama administration announced today that it is ending a program that deputizes local and state police officers to help enforce federal immigration law.

Reports FoxNews.com (emphasis mine):

Time magazine is shooting straight at Mitt Romney’s religion. On the Time Ideas blog, the conservative-bashing psychoanalyst Dr. Justin Frank has an article titled “The Root of Mitt Romney’s Comfort With Lying.” That root, he says,  is Mormonism.

Dr. Frank is agitated that Romney would “lie” about Obama’s economic record: "But this pattern of lying and not acknowledging it, even when confronted directly, has persisted and led me to look for other sources of Romney’s behavior and of his clear comfort with continuing it. I think much of this comfort stems from his Mormon faith."

Two separate Fox News anchors on Wednesday took NBC and MSNBC to task for liberal media bias and outright deception. Bill O'Reilly slammed the egregious actions of Andrea Mitchell and her selective editing of Republican Mitt Romney.

O'Reilly played MSNBC's version of Romney mentioning the fast food outlet Wawa and the one that conforms to reality. The host mocked the liberal cable outlet for "doctoring" the tape. Video of both can be found below:

Driven close to a hydrophobic frenzy fearing that the Supreme Court will soon strike down ObamaCare as a transgression of the Constitution's limits on federal power, Newsweek's Michael Tomasky took to his keyboard to vent his spleen, all but denouncing the conservatives on the Supreme Court as "radical" racists and misogynists backed by shadowy right-wing money men.

Tomasky's piece is laughably predictable in its foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric -- Scalia, he tells us, belongs on a "marginal rubber-chicken circuit" rather than "on the highest court in the land imposing his 16th-century will on the rest of us" --  but it's also built upon some distortions of what the Roberts Court has actually done in some "hot-button" 5-4 cases.

Yesterday the Southern Baptist Convention elected their first black president, an historic moment for an organization that got its start defending slavery in pre-Civil War America.

CNN Starting Point host Soledad O'Brien interviewed Fred Luter Jr., who will be installed as president Wednesday evening. The interview on the main was fine, but towards the end, contributor Margaret Hoover pressed Luter as to whether he would champion as a "civil rights" cause, "inclusiveness of gay Americans," referring it seems to same-sex marriage. Luter answered in the negative, citing the Bible's teachings on the definition of marriage. It's then that O'Brien retorted that his stance put him in opposition to President Obama, as if to suggest that were a scandalous position for him to be in:

Any old liberal journalist can charge Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro for being a racist for rudely interrupting President Obama during a press conference. It takes a hard-core lefty to delve deeper to diagnose the Irish-born journalist as a bigot for, well, questioning Obama's policy vis-a-vis how it harms the job prospects of American citizens.

During a segment on the June 19 edition of his eponymous program, Bashir assented to the spurious charge by The Root contributor Edward Wyckoff Williams that Munro – an Irish-born naturalized American citizen -- was motivated by a "white supremist [sic] ideology" as evidenced by his belief that President Obama’s quasi-amnesty policy helps illegal immigrants at the cost of job opportunity to American citizens:

Barack Obama’s adoring cheerleaders at NBC are back in the editing room distorting the truth, and, not surprisingly, Andrea Mitchell has the gall to make no apologies for it.

First it was their vile attempt to make George Zimmerman sound like a racist to gin up racial conflict, and now they’ve set their sights on Mitt Romney who they’re desperately trying to paint as an out-of-touch, silver spoon Republican wowed by Wawa sandwiches. [Attached below page break: Our side-by-side comparison of the edited video plus video of Mitchell's non-apology]

Apparently MSNBC's Thomas Roberts doesn't seem to get the importance of knowing the partisan breakdown of a poll's respondents to assessing that polls reliability. In the midst of a segment centered around President Obama's quasi-amnesty-by-fiat policy announced last week, token conservative panelist J.P. Freire poured cold water on a new Bloomberg poll that shows 64 percent of Americans agreeing with the president's announced halt on deportations. Freire observed that the poll doesn't break down how many Democrats and Republicans were sampled and that it is contradicted by other polls.

But for his part, Roberts seemed to believe that because the poll didn't get into the partisan allegiances of its respondents, it was evidence that the respondents were largely independent and hence a good sign for Obama's reelection in November. Roberts then hypocritically chided Freire for spouting unwarranted "assumptions" on his program. [video follows page break]

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.

On Wednesday's edition of the Bill Press radio show, Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim put on his best conceited act and expressed that the Supreme Court just doesn't have great brains on it, and they're not qualified to overturn Obamacare. In fact, if they overturn Obamacare, Grim warned, "people's lives are at risk and people will probably die as a result." Conservatism kills.

It's amazing that Grim would say it's the Supreme Court with the failing brains, since he originally boasted (before oral arguments) that Obamacare would be upheld 6 to 3. Now he doesn't believe that, because the Justices are too stupid to rule on it, especially Antonin Scalia: [Video and transcript below]

The conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition is in the middle of a three-day "conference and strategy briefing" in Washington, D.C., which proved to be a sufficient justification for MSNBC's Martin Bashir to bring back anti-conservative-Christian hatemonger Frank Schaeffer to denounce the meeting as essentially a congress of an American Christian Taliban.

"I think what you have to understand when you look at the religious right in action these days is that they speak in Orwellian doublespeak. They say the opposite of what they mean. They talk about faith and freedom, the conference should really be called Politics and Bondage," Schaeffer, the prodigal son of the late famous evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer snarled. [MP3 audio here; video is posted after the page break]

MSNBC host Alex Wagner has made no secret of her disdain for the Second Amendment, telling Bill Maher last November that if it were up to her, she'd repeal the amendment which enshrines the right of Americans to keep and bear arms, saying the right to own firearms is not "in the grand scheme" of things as important as the rights to speech and assembly. Back in February, Wagner seized on a tragic school shooting to complain about the lack of new gun control legislation.

So it's no surprise that, when turning again to the topic of gun control and gun rights today, Wagner would stack the deck in favor of the former and dismiss concerns about the latter. Regarding legislation in New York State that would require "microstamping" of firearms, Wagner brought on Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence president Dan Gross, who insisted the legislation in question was "a simple case of right versus wrong" that should face no legitimate criticism from gun rights advocates.

Of course you probably won't hear an apology or retraction on the network's programming, but PolitiFact.com has determined that MSNBC's Chris Matthews was in error when the Hardball host claimed on his June 4 program that a new Florida law -- which has been on hold by a federal judge -- made it utterly impossible for voter registration drives to sign up new voters over weekends. The law requires voter registration drive volunteers to turn in new voter registration forms within 48 hours after having collected them. "You don’t have to be a lawyer to own a calendar or know what a weekend is. A weekend is 48 hours," Matthews sneered at Florida GOP chairman Lenny Curry, insisting that its impossible to register new voters over a weekend without running afoul of the law

But the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald-run PolitiFact site did what Hardball producers should have done before Chris took to the air, actually look up and read the text of the legislation. In doing so, PolitiFact found that there's an exception in the law that takes weekends into account: