2012 Presidential

Barack Obama is considered to be one of the least accessible presidents in decades. Despite this, Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman told NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno that he can get the President on the phone if he wants to (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Did Rob Portman's support of same-sex marriage cost him selection as Mitt Romney's running mate?  Mika Brzezinski imagines so. Brzezinski made that suggestion on today's Morning Joe, but Joe Scarborough sarcastically said that the reason Romney didn't pick Portman was that he didn't want to win Ohio.  View the video after the jump.

"If ever the mainstream media reaches a point where they recognize that if we destroy this nation and destroy the economy, they, too, will be destroyed, I think at that point they will start asking the tough questions and helping to move the population in the right direction." So predicted Dr. Benjamin Carson on Fox News's Hannity Monday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"If you look at President Obama, it seems like he doesn't want to recognize any limits on government power. I think we need to stand for limits on government power and for individual liberty." So said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) on Fox News's Hannity Monday.

Betraying his impatience with the Republican Party's insistence that President Obama cut spending, New York Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman sounded shocked that the GOP wasn't simply surrendering its principles in the wake of Obama's four–point victory last November, in Monday's "Republicans Determined To Press On With Air, If Not Vote, of Confidence." (Nice flattering photo of Paul…

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its 2013 pity party -- er, annual report -- on the State of the News Media (home page; full overview). Two things struck me in my initial scan-through: First, the whining about newsroom cutbacks, which are largely related to pervasive bias and misplaced priorities; second, the characterization of newsmakers' improved…

Scott Prouty is the man behind the now infamous “47 percent” video that the media hyped to bring down Mitt Romney’s presidential bid.  It’s unbearably stale news at this point, but MSNBC’s Ed Schultz found a fresh hook for resurrecting it recently on his soon-to-be-defunct weeknight program. Prouty insisted that Romney’s invitation to speak at CPAC prompted him to come out of hiding and in the…

On Thursday's NBC Today, White House correspondent Peter Alexander promoted the first public comments from Scott Prouty, the bartender who secretly recorded Mitt Romney's 47% comments during the 2012 presidential race: "Even today some political observers insist without that 47% tape, we might actually be talking about President Mitt Romney these days. Instead, the infamous comments marked what…

In Monday's New York Times, in a report which appeared online late Sunday, reporters Richard W. Stevenson and John Harwood devoted considerable space to the idea that President Obama's latest "outreach" effort is primarily an attempt to "salvage a big deficit-reduction deal," and not a political ploy to show voters in the 2014 congressional elections that he's really interested in achieving a…

It will be interesting to see how much national play this story gets. My guess is: "little." Following up on a matter on which I initially posted last month, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported yesterday that the prosecutor for Hamilton County, Ohio, where the county seat is Cincinnati, is bringing charges related to improper voting against three people – including a longtime poll worker and a…

While you were watching Rand Paul's historic filibuster and the debate surrounding budget sequestration, an economic theory battle was waging between two of the nation's foremost liberal economists Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs. In his most recent salvo published at the Huffington Post Saturday, Sachs spoke heresy to Obama-lovers across the fruited plain including Krugman claiming that…

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Ari Fleischer responds to accusation Milbank made about him in this segment. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank made an interesting observation Sunday about the vulgarity prominent in the current presidential administration. Appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources, Milbank said, "The number of F-bombs being dropped by this White House, scholars are going to look in the…

On Thursday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow mocked Republican party chairman Reince Priebus for listing as a lesson from 2012 "controlling the debate process, getting involved in moderators and networks and all of these other issues so that we don`t have chaos." Maddow found it odd that the GOP chair would (very sensibly) say "we just can`t have MSNBC, you know, hosting a debate at the Reagan…