Barack Obama

In his pre-Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer on Sunday, President Obama asked the following question about Iran in light of the heightening tensions over its nuclear program and the possibility of an Israeli air strike: "(In repsonse) Do you fear that they will wage attacks within the United States on American soil?", responded as follows: "We don't see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now."

Really? The President's statement directly goes against statements made recently by other government officials, up to and including Attorney General Eric Holder. Lauer, who is paid to look good while delivering the news and conducting interviews but not necessarily to deliver on substance, especially if it might disturb the American people before the Big Game, totally missed the contradiction. Fortunately, Ed Lasky at American Thinker didn't (internal links added by me):

Even Chris Matthews, who famously gushed about the "thrill" Barack Obama gave his leg, is troubled by the President's "frightening" decision to force Catholic charities to provide birth control through health care. Discussing the issue on Tuesday's Hardball, the host sputtered, "...How can you make the [religious] teacher pay for birth control without losing their authority, their moral authority?"

Matthews didn't seem sure how to broach the subject. Talking to E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Susan Milligan of U.S. News and World Reports, he warned, "It gets to that interesting point to me, which is frightening, when the state tells the church what to do." (Interesting?)

Is a Planned Parenthood poll really newsworthy? On Tuesday, NPR spotlighted a PPP poll commissioned by the abortion giant which found that a majority apparently supports a federal government mandate on birth control that violates the religious liberty of Catholic institutions. The network also trumpeted how "the poll...suggested that Mitt Romney...could pay a price at the polls" for opposing the mandate.

Writer Frank James began his article for NPR.org, "Poll: Majority Of Voters Support Birth-Control Mandate," by pointing out that the ObamaCare regulation was "controversial." But he didn't acknowledge that the poll was "done on behalf of Planned Parenthood" until the second paragraph, and left out any kind of ideological label for the left-wing organization.

Potential Obama opponent Mitt Romney is “the gift that keeps on giving” according to the Obama campaign team, the New York Times' Helene Cooper eagerly reports in her Monday “Political Memo,” “The Flub Watch Never Stops for Obama’s Team.” The text box reads: “If Romney makes a misstep, the Democrats are ready to pounce.” And Cooper is right there to cover Team Ohama's glorious Twitter victories in loving detail.

ABC broke network silence on Tuesday, finally offering a report on the Obama administration's decision to force religious organizations to provide birth control in their health care plans. CBS again skipped the subject. On NBC's Today, Andrea Mitchell admitted that the action has "even touched a nerve with some liberal Democrats." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

While Mitchell underlined the political danger the President is facing in swing states as a result of angering Christians, she softened the blow by making sure to note, "...Surveys indicate that most Catholics believe they can be good members of the church without following the church's teaching on birth control."

If you needed more proof of liberal media bias, just look at the orgasms created by Friday's announcement that unemployment in January dropped to 8.3 percent.

By contrast, these same folks were practically suicidal as the jobless rate dropped to 5.6 percent when George W. Bush was President in January 2004.

As NewsBusters has been reporting, NBC's Matt Lauer had an interview with President Obama on Super Bowl Sunday that was as soft as cream cheese that's been sitting in the sun for hours.

One such sickeningly squishy moment was when the Today show host let his guest get away with claiming he "ran an affirmative campaign" in 2008 without negative attack ads (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Despite Clint Eastwood's pronouncement Monday that he is "certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama," the President's fans in the media are doing a victory lap over Super Bowl Sunday's Chrysler commercial featuring the Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker.

So excited by this ad was MSNBC's Ed Schultz Monday that he disgustingly asked his audience, "Will voters hold Republicans accountable for trying to kill the American auto industry?" (video follows with commentary):

Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker Clint Eastwood has come under some heat for appearing in a Chrysler commercial on Super Bowl Sunday that some feel was pro-Obama.

Eastwood spoke with Ron Mitchell, the producer of Fox's O'Reilly Factor, Monday to set the record straight:

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there he goes again.

On MSNBC's Hardball Monday, host Chris Matthews said Barack Obama's smile "is worth five to ten points" on Election Day (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ABC, CBS, and NBC spotlighted the Komen foundation's about-face on funding Planned Parenthood on their Friday evening newscasts, and played up the apparent role of social media in getting the charity to reverse its earlier decision. On World News, ABC's Diane Sawyer trumpeted the "dramatic day for people power," while on Nightly News, NBC's Lester Holt concluded, "score one for the power of social media."

The Big Three outlets also covered the 180 by the breast cancer organization on their Saturday morning shows. Altogether, the networks added seven more reports to the 13 from the first 60 hours or so of the controversy, bringing the total to 20 since February 1, versus only three on the face-off between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration since January 20 (the MRC documented and highlighted this imbalance in a report on Friday; ABC and NBC added mentions on their Sunday morning political shows).

In his softball Sunday interview with President Obama before the Super Bowl, Today co-host Matt Lauer invited the Democratic commander in chief to speculate on Mitt Romney's ability to connect with voters: "He's a guy who's been incredibly successful in his life and career. He's made a lot of money, it's not a crime...can [he] identify with the middle class and the underclass in this country?"

While Obama refused to "comment on any particular candidate" he had no trouble hitting Lauer's easy pitch: "...people also want to see is that everybody is doing their fair share. That we're all pulling together....Whoever the Republican nominee is, I fundamentally disagree with a formula that would go back to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place."

While most in the liberal media are downright ignoring President Obama's attack on religious institutions -- via the mandate that they cover contraceptives in their health insurance plans, even if doing so violates church teaching -- MSNBC's Martin Bashir mentioned the issue in today's "Clear the Air" commentary that closes his eponymous program.

Of course, true to MSNBC form, Bashir ignored the legitimate policy and religious liberty implications of Gingrich's complaint to dredge up Gingrich's past moral failings, namely his adulteries, as a way of fatally wounding the messenger and hence, Bashir hopes, negating the message [MP3 audio available here; video posted below page break]:

On Saturday I noted how Washington Post staffer Laura Vozzella front-loaded her February 4 Metro-section front-pager with overheated rhetoric from liberal Democrats suggesting that voter ID bills pushed by Republicans were the second-coming of Jim Crow. As I wrote my critique, I wondered what sort of news editor would allow such extremely biased dreck to go to publication.

Today's Washington Post editorial blasting the voter ID bills may very well answer my question. In "How to discourage Virginia voters," the Post editorial board today suggested that Del. Mark Cole's bill to make the state's voter ID law stricter is evidence of "institutional racism" in the Old Dominion.

George Washington just got a promotion. Yes, he's still one of the slave-owning oligarchs who, according to liberals, stuck us with a short-sighted Constitution, and whose colleagues were probably having sex with slaves.

But with the 2012 election on the line and conservatives citing the Founders' legacy as a touch-stone of limited government, Time Magazine has found it useful to turn the first president into a proto-liberal.

Once again touting the latest cover of New Yorker magazine, NBC Today co-host Matt Lauer lobbed this softball to President Obama in a pre-Super Bowl interview: "...you watching the big game on TV...on screen it's not the Patriots and the Giants. It's Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, same team, and they are pummeling each other. And look at the smile on your face there. Is art imitating life here?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Obama began to answer: "Well, you know, look, I've been through these primaries, they're tough." Lauer quickly followed up: "But does this help you?" In an interview with Mitt Romney on Wednesday, Lauer promoted the same magazine cover and wondered about the ongoing primary race: "How can it not damage you?"

Joe Scarborough had a jocular way this morning of pointing out the pro-Dem bias in ABC/Washington Post polls.

On Morning Joe, after Mark Halperin cited a new poll from the conglomerate with many findings favorable to President Obama, Scarborough facetiously asked "does Axelrod poll for ABC?" He went on to detail the way the polling combine consistently puts its fat left thumb of the scales for Dems. Video after the jump.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there she goes again.

On Sunday's Meet the Press, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow falsely claimed, "Rick Santorum says that he would like states to be able to make contraception illegal' (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday, told host David Gregory, "You just managed to precisely repeat the Obama administration's line."

The subject being discussed was the new edict from the Department of Health and Human Services requiring religious organizations to provide contraception to their employees (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

A rather extraordinary thing happened on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday.

The host actually defended Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney from the media's proclivity to take his statements "entirely out of context" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"Barack Obama has not put anyone on food stamps."

So hysterically wrote Barbra Streisand at the Huffington Post Friday evening:

CNBC's Suze Orman bills herself as an "internationally acclaimed personal financial expert."

This "financial expert," appearing on HBO's Real Time Friday, said that in 2012, "We are average [sic] 200,000 jobs a month that are being created...[Obama's] done so much in the past four years I can’t even tell you" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In this week's "Is He Really This Stupid or Just a Bald-Faced Liar" segment, HBO's Bill Maher Friday night once again proved that he is either one of the dumbest people on television or is way too dishonest to have his own show.

On the most recent installment of Real Time, the host emphatically claimed, "We've lost 500,000 public sector jobs since Obama took office and added 3.7 million private sector jobs" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While Democrats mock Mitt Romney for his alleged lack of interest in the “very poor” and focus their political pitch on income inequality, one can’t help noticing the Obamas running around to $35,000-a-head fundraisers with the very rich and very famous in New York City and Hollywood.

Michelle Obama kicked off February with an exclusive fundraiser in Beverly Hills at the home of Netflix executive Ted Sarandos and his wife Nicole Avant, who raised Hollywood millions for the Obamas in 2008, and then became their ambassador to the Bahamas. Now Nicole Avant’s back managing Obama’s Hollywood money march. Many of Tinseltown’s titans ponied up: Jeffrey Katzenberg, Harvey Weinstein, Haim Saban, and Steve Bing, among others. (Katzenberg’s also given $2 million to the Obama-affiliated super PAC called Priorities USA Action.)

On Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, as the panel discussed the new Obama administration rule that requires even Catholic employers to provide health insurance coverage for contraception to their employees, both liberal columnist Mark Shields and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer hit Obama for the decision, while NPR's Nina Totenberg claimed that there were valid arguments in both directions as she made a flawed analogy between contraception and immunization as a defense of the Obama position.

But the blunt criticism directed at Obama by the liberal Shields, who is also a longtime regular on the PBS NewsHour, was the most surprising part of the show. After host Gordon Peterson noted that some Catholic leaders had supported Obamacare, and asked if they are "being hung out to dry," Shields responded:

It certainly is no surprise the Obama-loving media are doing a jubilant victory lap over the stronger than expected headline figures in Friday's unemployment report.

Also not at all shocking was MSNBC's Martin Bashir falsely claiming on the show bearing his name Friday, "Under this president over three million private sector jobs have been created" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Tuesday, Ken Thomas of the Associated Press covered President Barack Obama's appearance at the Washington Auto Show and allowed Obama's criticism of Mitt Romney as being among those "willing to let this industry die" to stand, ignoring known history in the process.

Obama's statement marks him as a true ingrate, because for better or worse (my opinion: worse; your mileage, so to speak, may vary) Mitt Romney, after warning of the dangers of bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, shifted gears four months later and vigorously defended the President when the administration orchestrated a boardroom coup at GM which included the forced resignation of CEO Rick Wagoner. This was the point at which it became clear that Obama wanted the government to control what happened at GM until it either recovered or was forced into what most were already seeing as an inevitable bankruptcy filing. In a CNN interview the day the news broke, Romney complimented Obama for demonstrating "backbone." What follows are five paragraphs from Thomas's piece, a screen shot of the article CNN posted that day, and a transcript of the relevant portion of Romney's March 31, 2009 interview:

CNN's Wolf Blitzer was apparently quite moved by President Obama's speech at Thursday's National Prayer Breakfast. Blitzer hailed it as a candid address and noted that the President spoke "very movingly" of his faith.

Of course, Obama's profession of his faith came shortly after his administration mandated religious-affiliated organizations to act against their church's teaching, a decision that caused great uproar. Blitzer did not mention that fact, but did cast Obama in a positive light as opposed to GOP candidate Mitt Romney. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]