Media watchers have been asking themselves since Barack Obama became the front-runner to win the Democrat nomination for president when the press will turn against him and start treating the junior senator from Illinois like a candidate instead of a rock star.

The worm might have turned on Sunday's "This Week," when, as my colleague Brad Wilmouth reported, Cokie Roberts actually used the feminist card to trash Obama for Hillary's sake.

Almost as tasty, about three minutes later, a discussion about how Obama is beatable as the Democrat candidate began with Cokie saying (video available here, relevant section begins at minute 12:30):

Ron Brownstein is a liberal. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

On Sunday, the national affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a liberal notwithstanding, went on NBC's "Meet the Press" to discuss the just-announced imminent departure of Karl Rove from the White House.

Like many of the really disingenuous liberal shills in the media, Brownstein chose to ignore extremely pertinent facts as he disparaged the soon-to-be-former Administration member:

As people who are following the G-8 summit in Germany are well aware, it is highly doubtful that any meaningful accord will be reached at this meeting concerning CO2 emissions. In fact, reports out of Europe and Asia for many weeks leading up to this event have made this eventuality quite clear.

Yet, this didn’t prevent the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein for blaming the lack of such an agreement on President George W. Bush.

In an op-ed published Wednesday entitled “Don't Sugarcoat Climate Change; Calling out Bush's intransigence on emissions caps may be the best way for other G-8 countries to get the U.S. to budge on global warming,” Brownstein chose to ignore all of the facts surrounding this issue, and instead pointed an accusatory finger at the media’s favorite target (emphasis added throughout):

Los Angeles Times columnist (and longtime political reporter) Ron Brownstein tackles the issue of the Nevada Democratic Party dumping Fox News Channel as a debate partner. He thinks this rejection is similar to how "conservatives deal with mainstream media organizations they consider biased against them." Put aside for a minute the odd notion that Republican Party organizations or politicians would refuse to do debates thrown by liberal networks. As if. In his March 16 column, Brownstein's peddling the old canard that Fox News is exponentially more biased than "mainstream" news organizations:

The situation isn't exactly parallel. For all the howling on the right, it's difficult to argue that mainstream news organizations operate with anything approaching Fox' partisan and ideological agenda. (E-mails: commence now.) But there's no question many conservatives feel as wronged by elements of the mainstream media as Democrats do by Fox.

On NBC’s “Meet The Press” this morning, host Tim Russert stocked his panel with three left-of-center journalists – Nina Totenberg of NPR, Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, and David Gregory of NBC News – to discuss the events of the week. When they got to the nomination of Samuel Alito to replace retiring justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Russert mentioned that when Bill Clinton was president, both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, despite obvious Liberal leanings, were approved by a strong majority of both Democrats and Republicans. “And they say, ‘Why can't we have the same courtesy to conservative jurists under President Bush?’"

In response, Totenberg said: “If you look at the Ginsburg nomination, for example, she'd been a judge, I think, for 12 years. She'd been, actually, a pretty conservative liberal judge, if you can be such a thing.” This could be the first time that anyone has referred to the former general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union as being “pretty conservative.”

As the discussion ensued, Totenberg expressed frustration with the president’s second choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor:

(As read on-air by Rush Limbaugh)

One hot and humid weekend this past July, America’s leading Democrats -- including some of the early favorites for their party’s 2008 presidential nomination such as Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN), Governor Tom Vilsack (D-IA), and Governor Mark Warner (D-VA) -- gathered in Columbus, Ohio at a conference hosted by the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

Predictably, the press had a hard time controlling its glee when Senator Clinton was announced as the point-person to lead the DLC’s new political offensive -- code name “American Dream Initiative” -- to define the party’s agenda for 2006 and 2008.

As Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times put it:

The appointment solidified the identification of Clinton, once considered a champion of the party's left, with the centrist movement that helped propel her husband to the White House in 1992. It also continued her effort, which has accelerated in recent months, to present herself as a moderate on issues such as national security, immigration and abortion.

Unfortunately, Mr. Brownstein -- much like the rest of the mainstream print media as far as I can tell -- chose not to be completely honest with his readers -- or the American public for that matter -- concerning just how far to the right Mrs. Clinton was going by affiliating herself with this organization, and, maybe most important, what was actually in this “Dream Initiative”. (cont'd...)