The pesky thing about abortion for pro-choice stalwarts is that when it comes to the will of the people through their legislatures, they often lose more battles than when the voters in question are black-robed judges in a courtroom.

Just ask Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, who is bummed about the Stupak-Pitts Amendment and its effect on the Democrats' hopes for a health care reform bill that puts in place a government-run health care "option" (emphasis mine):

When health-care reform passed the House by just two votes late Saturday night, I assumed Speaker Nancy Pelosi had several more votes in her pocket from Blue Dogs who would be there if she needed them. After all, that's how Washington works. I also figured I shouldn't get too worked up about the restrictive amendment on abortion that was added at the last minute because it would be stripped from the legislation when it went to conference and was merged with the Senate bill.

It took just a little reporting for me to discover how wrong my initial assessments were.... [D]itching the amendment advanced by pro-life Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak is unlikely.

In announcing that she was stepping down as Alaska Governor on Friday, Sarah Palin noted the unrelenting hostility of liberal media elites. In the barely ten months since she burst onto the national scene, Palin has been scorned and mocked by journalists -- including many supposedly objective reporters -- like few other politicians. Here are a few of the choicer attacks, as compiled from MRC's Notable Quotables newsletter:

"She is a far-right conservative who supported Pat Buchanan over George W. Bush in 2000. She thinks global warming is a hoax and backs the teaching of creationism in public schools. Women are not likely to be impressed by her opposition to abortion even in the case of rape and incest."
— Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter in a "Web exclusive" posted on his magazine’s Web site, August 29, 2008.

"[McCain has] done it [picked Sarah Palin] at great cost, because the whole Republican convention...was going to be the slogan, ‘He’s not ready to lead,’ meaning Barack Obama. Well, Sarah Palin makes Barack Obama look like John Adams. I mean, it’s just, it’s no contest."
— Newsweek’s Howard Fineman on MSNBC’s Countdown, August 29.

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift: "This [McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin] is not a serious choice. It makes it look like a made for TV movie. If the media reaction is anything, it’s been literally laughter in many places across news-"
Host John McLaughlin: "Where is that? See that?"
Clift: "In very, very many newsrooms."
— Exchange on The McLaughlin Group, August 31, 2008.

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift seemed flabbergasted on this weekend’s McLaughlin Group as fellow panelists Pat Buchanan, Monica Crowley and Mort Zuckerman all criticized President Obama’s speech to Muslims in Cairo. Perhaps reflecting the mindset of her Newsweek colleagues, Clift exclaimed: “Until I came on this set, I heard nothing but rave reviews for this speech. I feel like I’m in a total parallel reality.”

The McLaughlin Group tapes on Friday afternoons, which means that for the better part of two days Clift was completely insulated from the various criticisms of Obama’s speech which were easy to discover on talk radio, many newspapers, and the Internet. She seemed particularly enraged by the group’s consensus that Obama has been “badmouthing” the United States by repeatedly emphasizing past misdeeds and ignoring America’s valuable contributions to the rest of the world.

Eleanor Clift is by no stretch a conservative apologist, but her reporting in Newsweek on the Specter switch exposes an angle that the broadcast networks are omitting: the Machiavellian maneuvers behind-the-scenes to coax Specter to jump the GOP ship.

Of particular interest is Clift's revelation that Gov. Ed Rendell's motive for pushing Specter to become a Democrat was to shut down a potential Democratic rival for the U.S. Senate, Rep. Joe Sestak (Pa.) [emphasis mine].:

 Those who know Rendell say he really wants the seat that Specter holds but would not run against his friend. The scenario that was unfolding had Specter losing in the Republican primary to Club for Growth President Pat Toomy, the favorite of Pennsylvania's conservative Republican base, and then had Toomy losing to a Democrat in November 2010. The Democrat suiting up for that task was Rep. Joe Sestak, a retired Navy admiral in his second term, eager to move up, and at 57 years of age, young enough to stake a claim on the seat.

A Sestak candidacy would derail Rendell's future plans. Keeping Specter in the seat at his age, which is 79, makes it far more likely that the seat would open up in the kind of timetable Rendell would hope for.

It's a response that might incite laughter, as it did from conservative pundit Monica Crowley and MSNBC paleocon talker Pat Buchanan. According to Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, the current problems facing the country and President Barack Obama are due to capitalism.

Clift, appearing on the syndicated April 26 "The McLaughlin Group" gave Obama high marks for his first hundred days and said Republicans were misguided for attacking the growth of the size of government.

"I give him a B+ because there's a lot of outcomes that haven't come in yet," Clift said. "But look, this isn't about the failure of government and the Republicans are on the wrong tact talking about big government. This is a failure of capitalism. He's trying to save capitalism."

Is this a sign of the times? Liberal columnist Eleanor Clift has joined her ideological colleagues, Mika Brzezinski and Paul Krugman, in criticizing President Barack Obama recently. What set Clift off was Obama's evasiveness in revealing whether he approved or knew in advance the AIG bonuses provided by his stimulus bill. Clift takes aim at both Obama and Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, in her latest Newsweek column:

Who would have thought 55 days into this administration we would be asking the question, what did he know and when did he know it? Word that a provision in the stimulus bill gave the green light for AIG to hand out bonuses using taxpayer money sent the media bloodhounds hot on the trail of whoever is the culprit. For a time, it looked like Senate Banking chairman Chris Dodd would take the fall, but after 24 hours of twisting in the wind, Dodd said the change that exempted past agreements to pay bonuses was made at the request of the administration.

When New York. Gov. David Paterson picked Rep. Kristen Gillibrand (a gun-rights-favoring Democrat) instead of Caroline Kennedy to take Hillary Clinton’s place in the Senate, many liberals howled. Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift unloaded an editorial at NPR.org on Tuesday that used that nasty P-word to insult Gillibrand: Palin.

Gillibrand is to Kennedy what Sarah Palin was to Clinton: a very different political package. Women who supported Clinton did not flock to Palin once they knew what she stood for. Gillibrand is pro-choice and she won't be gunning down wolves from a helicopter like Palin, but her pro-gun position is at odds with every other Democrat in the New York delegation, men and women alike. Maintaining the Senate's gender balance won't be much consolation to New Yorkers who back gun control.

After the Palin slap, Clift hoped: "Now that Gillibrand has the entire state to represent, she may moderate her views." But she certainly worries about them:

Starting this week, MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter is evolving from a printed hard-copy product to an all-electronic Web and e-mail publication, complete with audio and video clips of the worst quotes from each issue.

Every two weeks, Notable Quotables offers a concise summary of the liberal media’s most outrageous and/or humorous eruptions, and the very best quotes are harvested once a year so the journalists can receive “awards” at our annual DisHonors dinner in Washington, D.C.

To give you a flavor of what’s in each issue, here are the most obnoxious quotes from this week’s (January 12) edition. If you've been a subscriber to the print edition, or if you’d like to sign up for our new HTML or plain-text e-mail, please go to www.MRC.org/subscriptions.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a voice crying in the wilderness that the mainstream media and middle class America weren't quite ready for and megachurch pastor Rick Warren is an ignorant evangelical rube who isn't totally without hope, given his awareness of AIDS and other favored liberal causes.

That's essentially what Eleanor Clift preached to her choir in her December 19 "Capitol Letter" column, "Choosing a Church: Obama's next big decision -- and its implications."

Wrote Sister Eleanor (emphasis mine):

Remember how most of the mainstream media used to deride Ronald Reagan to the extent of constantly declaring the "end of the Reagan era?' Well, now the MSM is starting to find "strange new respect" for Reagan but primarily as a way to boost Barack Obama. Newsweek columnist, Eleanor Clift, now favorably compares Obama to Ronald Reagan. Gone is the previous antagonism to The Gipper which has been replaced by admiration for his wisdom (emphasis mine): 

Enough with the Lincoln analogies; Reagan is the president that Barack Obama is most closely modeling himself after. Ronald Reagan inherited stagflation, a defeat abroad and a nation at its nadir in morale. Through the sheer force of his personality as much as his policies, four years later, it was "Morning in America," the theme of his 1984 re-election campaign when he won 49 states. Obama isn't president yet, but his determined calm and orderly transition pace appear to be soothing the financial markets, producing the first sustained gain in stocks since the mid-September meltdown.

On August 31 at Newsbusters, Warner Todd Huston caught NBC political correspondent Andrea Mitchell's assessment about the kind of women who would be supporting the McCain-Palin ticket:

..... they (McCain-Palin) think that they can peel off some of these working class women, not college educated, who, the blue collar women who were voting for Hillary Clinton and may be more conservative on social causes.

Combining Mitchell's take with the statement by Eleanor Clift (noted by NB's Brent Baker) that "in many newsrooms" McCain's pick of Sarah Palin was "greeted by "laughter," you get the distinct impression that the media believe that women who are supporting McCain-Palin aren't very smart.

The Mitchell-Clift Maxim isn't passing the smell test in Ohio, at least if the results of the University of Cincinnati's Ohio Poll released earlier today (a PDF can be retrieved at this link; HT to NB commenter Dee Bunk) are to be believed.

When MSNBC’s Chris Matthews suggested in Denver that Barack Obama earned his present elevation in American politics, unlike "showcase appointments" like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, he reminded the world of the peculiarity of liberalism. John McCain’s selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate underlined it. Liberals find no joy when Republicans select women or minorities for top positions. They are all fraudulent traitors to their own apparent group interests. Conservative blacks aren’t really black. Conservative Latinos aren’t really Latino. Now, conservative women are somehow not really women.

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift spoke for her colleagues on the Palin selection: "If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in many places...In very, very many newsrooms."

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift disclosed on the McLaughlin Group -- seemingly without any compunction for how she was outing her fellow journalists as behaving the same way as Barack Obama's campaign staff, but I suppose we already knew that intuitively -- that John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for VP was greeted by “literally laughter” in “very many newsrooms.”

From the show taped on Friday at Washington, DC's CBS affiliate and airing at various times over the weekend around the nation, mostly on PBS stations:

ELEANOR CLIFT: This is not a serious choice. It makes it look like a made for TV movie. If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in many places across news-

JOHN McLAUGHLIN, TALKING OVER CLIFT: Where is that? See that?

CLIFT: In very, very many newsrooms.

Audio: MP3 clip which matches the video (13 seconds, 80 Kb)

The McLaughlin Group isn’t the hot buzz-machine show it used to be in the 1980s, but this weekend’s show brought a classic Eleanor Clift explosion. When Pat Buchanan mocked Barack Obama’s abilities at political street brawling, and suggested he needed surrogates like the ones Nixon had – John Connally, Bob Dole, Spiro Agnew – Clift scowled and said "What a Hall of Evil!" Bob Dole’s a super villain?

BUCHANAN: Here’s what he needs, John. What Obama needs more than anything else is, cause he's not good at it [fighting back]. He needs surrogates. Remember Nixon? We had John Connally, Bob Dole, and Spiro Agnew doing the cutting –

Eleanor Clift's latest online column for Newsweek assumes that white male "Reagan Democrats" are racist and sexist, or at least they're sickened by appeals by too much focus on the "rights" of blacks and women.

Whether the term is Reagan Democrats or NASCAR dads, they're euphemisms for the white men who deserted a party they thought focused too much on the rights of blacks and women.

Isn't that a bit simplistic? Couldn't there be a lot of reasons for white male Democrats to vote for Reagan? There's no room in Clift's racist/sexist analysis for the possibility that defections came because of issues like abortion, the Vietnam War and the "peace" movement, and later, in Reagan's case, the Carter mismanagement of the economy and the Iranian hostage crisis. Clift continued: 

One of the criticisms of the media's coverage of Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy - both from his opponents on the right and on the left, has been that he's been given a free pass on a lot of issue.

The latest in particular had been the recently uncovered of Obama's former church minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had made several incendiary remarks about race and the government.

Eleanor Clift, known for her defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton on the syndicated show, "The McLaughlin Group," came to the defense of Obama in a March 17 appearance at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Torn by her liberal guilt of being forced to choose between a woman or an African-American man to have a shot at making history, Eleanor Clift lost it on this weekend's "McLaughlin Group" as she called the choice a "tragedy." The "Newsweek" editor claimed liberals, particularly women, were confused as to whether to dump Hillary for Obama as she blurted: "Women have waited decades to see the first woman president and it's actually something of a tragedy that a talented African-American guy comes along at the same [time.]"

The following is the full exchange as it occurred on the March 1, edition of "The McLaughlin Group":

ELEANOR CLIFT, NEWSWEEK: Women have waited decades to see the first woman president and it's actually something of a tragedy that a talented African-American guy comes along at the same--this isn't liberal guilt.

PAT BUCHANAN: Why's it a tragedy?

CLIFT: Because you have to choose between two people who you–

BUCHANAN: That's a tragedy?

Some see the Democratic race as slipping away from Hillary Clinton, but others persist in seeing the race as "tick tight," to quote Dan Rather. On his Stumper blog, Newsweek cub political reporter Andrew Romano forwards the bundle of nervous energy that is Eleanor Clift, wondering if Al Gore will come to the rescue on the second ballot of the Democratic convention in Denver. Romano's take?

He foresaw global warming. He "took the initiative" on the Internet. And he knew exactly how Iraq would turn out. Who's to say that Al Gore hasn't known all along that the Democratic race would descend into some weird state of gridlock--and that only he, the Goreacle, could rescue the party from civil war?

The devil made Larry do it.

Don't blame Lawrence O'Donnell for his ugly anti-Mormon rant. It was really the fault of O'Donnell's fellow panelists. That's Frank Rich's take on the unseemly episode on the McLaughlin Group a couple Fridays ago.In his NY Times column of today, Rich claims that O'Donnell was:

pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on “Faith in America.” [Emphasis added.]

Questions:

Add Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to the list of journalists who ludicrously believe opposition to tax hikes has left the nation unable to repair infrastructure. On the McLaughlin Group over the weekend, she blamed crumbling infrastructure on how “now we have this tax-averse society, rallied by the Republicans, tax-averse where everything becomes sort of a right-wing, libertarian refusal to let government spend any money or raise any money.” Conservatives would wish.

In fact, as the Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl outlined in a March report (PDF of it), “in 2006, inflation-adjusted federal spending topped $23,000 per household for the first time since World War II” as “federal spending has increased by 42% (23% after inflation) since 2001" and “defense and homeland security are responsible for just above one-third of all new spending since 2001.” So it's hardly as if the federal government, with an annual budget of $2.6 trillion, is starved for money. It's just being spent on adding a prescription entitlement to Medicare ($822 billion over ten years) instead of highways ($286 billion over six years).