Last evening, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" marvelously mocked President Obama's recent State of the Union address.

In the opening sketch, Fred Armisen as Obama began by talking about last Tuesday's surprising victory in the Massachusetts special senatorial election.

"Our nominee Martha Coakley was the single most incompetent candidate ever to seek public office in this nation's history," said Armisen to thunderous applause.

"Martha Coakley, you are a disgrace," he continued. "You couldn't beat Dick Cheney for mayor of Berkeley" (video embedded below the fold):

There's just something about Sarah.  A morsel, any morsel, about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that can possibly be used to belittle her is rabidly devoured by many in the mainstream media.  On his CNN Newsroom segment today, anchor Rick Sanchez highlighted Palin's difficulty in keeping Joe Biden's name straight.  Four different times, he played the same video from 2008's vice presidential debate in which she referred to him as "O'Biden."  Sanchez played part of an interview with McCain campaign staffer Steve Schmidt, who described Palin's error as "a verbal tic" that could prove "devastating beyond words." Then:

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: How did you get around it?

SCHMIDT: Multiple people, and I wasn't one of them, all said at the same time, just say, "Can I call you Joe?" Which she did.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

President Obama is now claiming he never campaigned on a government-run healthcare "public option," and despite abundant evidence to the contrary, MSNBC's Chris Matthews not only believes him, but is also willing to defend the clearly indefensible.

When confronted by Salon's Joan Walsh, who told the "Hardball" host Wednesday, "I personally don`t believe he`s honest about it," Matthews stuck to his guns:

Did they find any evidence of that? No, wait a minute...Did he at any time in the campaign create a sound bite where he said, I`m for a public option? Did he ever do it as candidate Obama? 

Did they find any evidence of that? As Walsh pointed out, "[I]t took an intern 30 seconds at Salon to find it on BarackObama.com" (video embedded below the fold with transcript along with videos of candidate Obama stating what Matthews and others have conveniently forgotten, h/t Story Balloon):

It was a metaphysical certitude the most biased television news network on the planet would be giddy with Politifact's announcement that Sarah Palin's "death panel" remark won the website's dubious honor of "Lie of the Year."

And MSNBC sure didn't disappoint.

On Monday's "Countdown," fill-in host Lawrence O'Donnell took on the issue by immediately labeling the object of his disaffection "Palinocchio" complete with a picture of the former Alaska governor sporting a large nose.

Even less surprising was how O'Donnell, despite claiming the runner-up list was bipartisan, didn't mention that President Obama was on it (video embedded below the fold with transcript and commentary):

If President Obama or any Democrat had actually won the dubious honor of committing PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year," do you think CNN would have reported it?

Fat chance, right?

Before you answer, consider the glee exhibited by CNN's Josh Levs Sunday when he announced Sarah Palin had "won" for her Facebook comment concerning a "death panel" in healthcare reform legislation (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

On its Web site, GQ Magazine asks the burning question, "Has the Capital Gotten Cooler Under Obama?"  The magazine says yes and no.  But when it comes to Barack Obama and Co., you'll be relieved to know that the answer is a resounding YES!!  In a slide show, we learn that Obama is "our best-dressed prez since JFK. When he goes tieless, Ahmadinejad should take notice."  On Obama in jeans, "the loose fit seems presidential."  

Also lookin' good to GQ is Joe Biden: "The veep has terrific style. He deftly mixes colors and patterns with his shirts and ties, and his superb Hickey Freeman suits fit impeccably."  Senator John Kerry (D-MA) "looks best when dressing like the patrician he is. Super 180s suits and Hermès ties—senators ought to look senatorial."  Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is "groovier than his usual banker attire would suggest. . .  He goes for cool detail, like green ties on Saint Paddy's. And he has a thing for Panama hats."  Senator Roland Burris (D-IL) has "a sharp eye for detail and a suave color sense."

Representative John Conyers (D-MI) is a "clotheshorse" who is "a lifetime sartorial achiever."  Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) "can match sartorial splendor with Sean Combs and purples with Prince. . . "  We're told of Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY): "The dapper former roommate of Jon Stewart could almost pass for European."  And who wouldn't want to pass for European?  When it comes to speechwriter Jon Favreau, "Obama's golden boy of letters epitomizes style's new wave in D.C."

It is the joke told by Sarah Palin on Saturday at the Gridiron Club that has spread far and wide. It was featured by many websites and news outlets including Politico and U.S. News & World Report. Here is how the Associated Press reported the joke:

Palin targeted her hosts, Democrats and Sen. John McCain's campaign staff, as well as herself.

If the election had turned out differently, she said, "I could be the one overseeing the signing of bailout checks and Vice President Biden could be on the road selling his book, 'Going Rogaine.'" Biden has sparse hair.

For your humble correspondent, the most fascinating thing about this joke was how it came into being. You see, it was born on my DUmmie FUnnies blog and the person who brought it to life was my DUFU "co-conspirator," Charles Henrickson. 

Maybe President Barack Obama's administration is just trying to trying to get some George Soros funding. Why else would Obama's people be playing the media criticism game again?

In the latest of a series of White House - media head-on confrontations, Jared Bernstein, the chief economist and economic policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, took on the Wall Street Journal in a Dec. 1 post on the federal government's WhiteHouse.gov Web site.

"There's a new report out from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the economic impact of the Recovery Act," Bernstein wrote. "I'll get to the findings in a second, but somebody over at the Wall St. Journal's editorial page has a whole lot of explaining to do."

Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer on Wednesday conducted a generally tough interview with Joe Biden on the subject of Afghanistan, but ignored an embarrassing gaffe from the Vice President: "Our number one enemy concern is the existential threat, al Qaeda. Number two is the stability of a nuclear state called Afghanistan, under siege by radicals." Did the Vice President, perhaps, mean Pakistan? It's unclear as Sawyer didn't follow up. [Audio available here.]

Earlier in the segment, responding to Sawyer’s comment that Republicans believe setting a date for removing troops is a bad idea, Biden argued, "How are they emboldened, knowing that by the time we train up the Afghanis, we're going to be gradually handing off, beginning in 2003 [sic]?" Beginning in 2003? Would journalists allow Sarah Palin to get away with such obvious malapropisms?

In its opening sketch last night, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" mocked Vice President Joe Biden and healthcare reform.

With the President out of the country for a week, Biden, played by Jason Sudeikis, has picked the lock on the Oval Office in order to get something big done while Obama is gone.

He opted not to solve what's going on in Afghanistan because it's "a mess - it can't be fixed...It's worse than Scranton."

As for fixing the economy, "We already did it...The stimulus is working."

With that in mind, Biden opted to reform healthcare by "[caving] in like crazy!...The President wants to pass a healthcare bill so bad that he will literally sign anything" (video embedded below the fold, h/t Story Balloon): 

Thursday’s off-lead story by James Glanz and Walter Gibbs is on recent revelations that Peter Galbraith, an “unpaid adviser to the Kurds” who has influenced Democratic policymakers like former senator (now Vice President) Joe Biden and Sen. John Kerry, stands to make millions from his closeness to the Kurds and a Norwegian oil company.

Given the typical Times sympathies for anti-war and leftish “blood for oil” arguments, the Times couldn’t ignore the story, and indeed provides a lot of new damning details -- but also has one enormous gaffe that lets Vice President Biden off the hook.

Chris Wallace's much-awaited "Fox News Sunday" interview with conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh began exactly as one might have expected with the guest stating right from the start:

I'm really, really worried. We've never seen this kind of radical leadership at such a high level of power in the -- in the country. I believe that the economy is under siege, is being destroyed. Anybody with any economic literacy would not do one thing this administration's done to try to revitalize the private sector. They're destroying it. And I have to think that it may be on purpose, because this is just outrageous, what is happening -- a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.  

And that was just the beginning.

From there, Wallace and Limbaugh discussed healthcare reform, Afghanistan, Fox News, the NFL, painkillers, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, and the future of the Republican Party (videos embedded below the fold in three parts with full transcript): 

Update [Ken Shepherd, managing editor]: Scarborough responds via Twitter, insisting he was joking [see more at bottom of post]. Video embedded to the right.

Joe Biden is the "greatest Vice President of our time."

No, dear reader, I have not lost my marbles.  I'm merely citing MSNBC's token quasi-conservative Joe Scarborough, who said on this morning's edition of "Morning Joe":

We understand that Joe Biden's numbers are going down, which I think is just stupid because all he has done is – I mean, he's become, in a couple of short months, the greatest vice president of our time.

Not content to allow his credibility to go down in flames alone, Joe took the rest of the Brew Crew with him:

It's bad enough that the new design of Newsweek came with blatant cover-story campaigning for Joe Biden. Then in the next edition, when it was time for Letters to the Editor, was there any chance of an anti-Biden message being published? No.

In the October 26 edition, there were only four pro-Biden letters hailing his "valiant voice of sanity." But here's where it gets funny: Newsweek ran a chart of its reader mail. Of the letters on the Biden cover, it said 25 percent were positive, 25 percent were neutral, and 50 percent were critical.

Not one of them was worthy? It's like Newsweek is saying: "Stop criticizing our heroes. We're not going to publishing your critical letters anyway."

In fact, this issue ran only seven letters: four for Biden, two criticizing Newsweek for allowing Christopher Hitchens to lament Obama's Nobel Prize, and one generic attack on "the right wing media."

Three weeks after their gushing praise of President Obama's meeting with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the media have taken a cue from the lack of action that followed.

It was a good run while it lasted.

Word from the conflict became more dire almost by the day as Obama's cabinet squabbled. The American media, having sensed Afghanistan could be lost without action, chose to cover for their favorite president and begin the process of mentally preparing the public for defeat.

The Washington Post published a perfect example of the new meme in Howard Kurtz's column on October 23. Kurtz attacked Republicans as "armchair quarterbacks" for their criticism of Obama's stalling and said it was "rich" of Dick Cheney to demand a new plan. As for what that plan might be, Kurtz's Vietnam defeat song sounded all too familiar:

Last week’s Newsweek starkly illustrated on its cover again just how much it’s rooting for the perpetual Obama-Biden campaign. Next to a picture of firm, smiling Vice President Biden were the words "WHY JOE IS NO JOKE: From Afghanistan to Health Care, a Vice President to be Reckoned With." It looked so much like a campaign sign, readers might have been unsure whether to read it or nail to a piece of wood and post it in the front yard.

Inside were several pictures of Joe Cool – Biden in sunglasses rocking the tarmac at the Atlantic City airport. The headline of the article was "An Inconvenient Truth Teller: From Health-Care Reform to Afghanistan, Joe Biden Has Bucked Obama – As Only a Good Veep Can."

This is not the way Newsweek saw Dick Cheney, obviously. In February of 2006, they made a cover story out of the Cheney hunting accident.

The Biden cover story by Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas insists that Biden is getting over his gaffe-prone ways, not that they were "damaging" – what with the media trying hard to ignore them, unlike the Dan Quayles of the world. Biden was never a buffoon:

At least he didn't call them "clean and articulate" . . .

Joe Biden has given the latest, best example of the adage that "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."

Appearing on Good Morning America today to talk up Pres. Obama's health care speech to Congress, the veep praised his boss for debunking various supposedly false assertions, including "how we're going to insure illegal aliens."  Biden was just about to move on when, realizing his crime against political correctness, he revised his remark: "undocumented aliens," quoth the VP.

Radio's Don Imus appeared on a special Labor Day edition of "Hannity" Monday evening, and really let President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have it.

In a no holds barred discussion on Fox News, Imus said he thought Obama "was a hypocrite and a phony," and that Biden, in the 100 times he's interviewed him, has said "far worse things" than he's ever said on radio.

In Imus's view, Biden's "a moron" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

Were you, like me, surprised to see that Biden turned up at the beer fest? I hadn't picked up any prior indication he was going to be there.  To the contrary, check out what Pres. Obama said just before the event:

A short time earlier from the Oval Office, Obama had done what his aides had been doing for days: lowering expectations.

"I noticed this has been called the 'Beer Summit.' It's a clever term, but this is not a summit, guys," Obama told reporters. "This is three folks having a drink at the end of the day."

Vice-President Joe Biden, July 16, 2009. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Today Joe Biden was in Alexandria, VA, and said, as reported by CNS News:

People look at me and say, "What are you talking about, Joe? You're telling me we've got to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?" The answer is "Yes,"I'm tellin' ya.

Matt Drudge thinks this is news (link is to his time-stamped archive, which won't change); it is his top headline. Allah at Hot Air thinks it's news, as do many other center-right bloggers.

So did Sean Hannity tonight.

Anyone with a fifth-grade sense of journalism would know that Biden's statement is newsworthy.

The Associated Press reported on Biden's Alexandria appearance. Here are the first three paragraphs of the wire service's unbylined story:

On AOL Politics Daily, long-time White House reporter Carl Cannon bluntly declared that the political press gave Sarah Palin a raw deal in the 2008 campaign, and seriously failed to scrutinize Joe Biden, especially his fact-mangling and odd statements in the vice presidential debate. Cannon summed up:

In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don't know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I'm not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.

Cannon suggested female journalists failed to make up for male sexism in Palin coverage because she didn’t match the kind of Hillary Clinton candidate they wanted to represent women in politics:

Joe Biden is coming to Cincinnati to tout the stimulus plan. A local TV station is thrilled.

If this is considered a good way to use stimulus money, we're in $800 billion worth of big trouble:

The entire nation is about to get a look at exactly how federal stimulus money is being spent in the Tri-State. Tomorrow morning, Vice-President Joe Biden will be in Northside to look at how that neighborhood and the city plan to use $1.6 million to help rehab the old American Can plant on Spring Grove Avenue. The huge building, which you can see from I-75, has been largely empty since the fifties, but not for much longer.

If you've even been in Northside, you've probably seen this building and wondered about it. Back in the days before aluminum cans, American Can made the machinery here that made the old pop cans in the days when cans had seams. Empty for decades, with a little luck, starting late this summer, this building's next life will get underway.

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" That's a saying once bungled by President George W. Bush, to the loud delight of the liberal media. But that same media should keep it in mind as Washington mulls a second round of stimulus spending.

A July 7 Bloomberg story by Shamim Adam reported that Laura Tyson, an economic advisor to the Obama administration, had put forward the notion that the $787 billion approved in February was "a bit too small," and that government should consider a second stimulus package "focusing on infrastructure projects."

Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., maintains there is "no showing that a second stimulus is needed," other members, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in a July 7 Politico article, say it shouldn't be taken off the table.  

Why is CNBC's Rick Santelli one of the few press members willing to point out when the emperor isn't wearing any clothes?

As you ponder that important question, consider how Santelli on Tuesday morning recognized how absurd Vice President Joe Biden's Sunday comments were concerning the Obama administration misreading how bad the economy was.

After all, as Santelli marvelously asked: "How many hundreds of times has the current administration talked about the worst recession in history? The worst time since the Depression?" 

Exactly, but that wasn't all: