Obama Watch

As I noted yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday refused to call a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts, even though President Barack Obama days earlier urged passage of such tax cuts as soon as possible. Predictably, however, the July 11 editions of the network evening newscasts  -- ABC's World News, the CBS Evening News, and NBC's Nightly News -- all ignored the development. Ditto with the network morning shows today.

Each evening newscast did, however, note the House vote to repeal ObamaCare, the first such vote after the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate as a tax.

During Tuesday night's edition of CNN's Outfront, substitute host Tom Foreman departed from the network's usual liberal spin to accuse President Obama of failing to keep his promise of presiding over the most transparent presidential administration ever.

After running a clip of the president stating that “We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history.” Foreman asked if Obama's claims “add up” regarding the “transparency tornado.”

Any other President with Barack Obama’s record — high unemployment, record deficits, and scandals such as Fast and Furious and the leaking of our nation’s intelligence secrets — would face withering scrutiny from the press. But since Obama was elected, journalists have continued the adoring coverage that marked the 2008 campaign.

With the election now less than four months away, the MRC this week produced special edition of Notable Quotables documenting the media’s continuing love affair with Barack Obama. The entire issue is posted at MRC.org; here are fifteen quotes (six with video), exposing once again how utterly partisan the media have been over the past three and a half years:

Barack Obama has trouble telling the truth.

This is the man who admitted his memoir "Dreams of My Father" was semi-fictional. “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Translation: On some pages, I’m taking poetic license with the facts to burnish my image.

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.

The Washington Post reports on the front page Tuesday that their poll has Obama and Romney dead even at 47 to 47. The chart inside shows that after opening a 51-44 lead in April by the Post's measurement, Obama’s lead has vanished.

But the Post story by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen demonstrated that the Post went searching for happy news for Obama in swing-state subsets that suggest Obama’s anti-Bain ads are working against Romney:

The Washington Post's popular Fact Checker political column isn't known for being particularly balanced when it comes to choosing which statements to dissect. So, it was surprising when the column's author Glenn Kessler, who usually chooses to go after statements made by prominent Republicans, fact-checked a tweet made by President Obama.

On July 3, @BarackObama tweeted, "FACT: In 2010 and 2011, Romney paid less than 15% in taxes on $42.5 million in income—much less than what many middle-class families pay." Kessler decided to dig into this statement and gave it "3 out of 4" Pinnochios on the Fact Checker scale.

How cozy. Former Democratic operative turned television news host George Stephanopoulos used his ABC News platform on Sunday to celebrate, with Vicki Reggie Kennedy, ObamaCare’s Supreme Court victory. Stephanopoulos excitedly plugged his “special exclusive guest” on This Week, announcing: “We begin with something special. The first reaction on the ruling from Vicki Kennedy, the widow of Senator Ted Kennedy who fought for universal health care...”

A giddy Stephanopoulos conveyed how he’s vicariously living in the glory of the liberal triumph: “I can only imagine what it must have been like for you, at the moment you heard that the Supreme Court had decided.”

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:

It didn't take long after ObamaCare was upheld by the Supreme Court for CNN to browbeat Republicans about accepting defeat and getting behind the law. Anchor Brooke Baldwin asked Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) on Thursday afternoon why he was still fighting a law opposed by a majority of Americans.

"You lost in 2010 when this law was passed, you lost again today. Yet you are still pushing for the repeal of this law. Doesn't that make you look kind of like a sore loser?" Baldwin obnoxiously asked. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

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.]

Some creative spin in favor of President Barack Obama from Chuck Todd on Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News. Recounting the results of a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll which puts Obama ahead of Mitt Romney by 47 to 44 percent, Todd declared Obama’s “strongest positive was a surprise, ‘health care,’” though it actually was the third-most common positive reply to the question: “What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Barack Obama as President?”

Citing Obama’s negatives, Todd relayed how they “include the ‘economy’ and ‘unemployment’” – skipping over the second most-common reply – “lack of experience/incompetent” – and how more listed ObamaCare as a negative than a positive. [UPDATED below with Todd's later more accurate recitation.]

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.

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."

Unintentionally defining irony, in the midst of trying to rationalize news media disinterest in the “Fast & Furious” scandal by maintaining “it’s not a political scandal” but “a scandal of government,” Washington Post columnist and former reporter Dana Milbank claimed on CNN's Reliable Sources: “It’s not an ideological thing. I think the media would love to have an Obama scandal to cover.”

Cue the laugh track as you watch the video.

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: