News Media Bias
in President Obama's Favor

Note:  You might want to start at the Barack Obama Index Page, especially if you arrived here by using a search engine.

The subsections on this page were originally located on three other pages, but I thought it would be useful to put the subject of pro-Obama media bias on a page of its own.  The American news media seemed to have picked a winner in the 2008 election about two years before the hoi polloi went through the motions of voting for him.  Every imaginable positive pronouncement was made loud and clear, and every negative warning sign was ignored, suppressed, or sent to the most obscure sections of the newspapers where nobody would likely see them.

The warning signs popped up on the internet soon enough, bypassing the mainstream media, and some of them were collected and posted here, here, here, and here.  Yes, I know Mr. Obama's principal opponent was no great prize himself, but at least that former opponent appears to be a sane and rational man, and in my opinion, the country would have been a better place (already!) if the other guy had won.  At least America's downward spiral wouldn't be so frighteningly steep!

Examples of media bias in Obama's favor are almost too numerous to list — but I'll try.

On this page:

Media favoritism in the 2008 presidential campaign

Media favoritism between the November 2008 election and the January 2009 inauguration

Media favoritism in Obama's first term

The Unexpected

ABC is the most obvious about it

The Obama team manipulates the media

"Spontaneous" events and "randomly selected" people

Friday night document dumps

The strange case of "Ellie Light"

Barack Obama vs Fox News Channel

And not only Fox News...
 White House pressure is applied to all who disagree

Obama and the news media versus Toyota

Using doctors as props on the White House lawn

Using the National Endowment for the Arts as a propaganda tool


Related topics on other pages:

Biased news coverage of "tea parties"

Obama is a cigarette smoker  but nothing is said about that on TV.

Similarly, the media has covered up Joe Biden's gaffes and baggage, before and after the election.

There are many other examples of news items unfavorable to Obama that have been actively suppressed by the "mainstream" news media.

Calls for Obama's impeachment, although muffled by the news media, are finally surfacing.


Media favoritism in the 2008 presidential campaign

The assassination of King Coal.  When Democrat Joe Biden said on the campaign trail in 2008:  "Guess what?  We're not supporting Clean Coal... No coal plants here in America," liberal reporters rushed in to protect Barack Obama.  They passed it off as a gaffe.

Liar, liar:  Why Obama is failing.  [Scroll down]  Barack Obama told us on several occasions then that he had not been aware of Wright's extreme black nationalist views during the candidate's twenty years in the reverend's church.  That made no sense, since Obama had dedicated his book to Wright, had his children baptized by him, etc.  Also, Wright's separatist brand of black liberation theology was no doubt quite familiar to Obama.  It had been to many of us for decades.  Yet the mainstream media paid little attention, or tried not to, certainly did not deign to investigate in any depth.

Leftist Media Attempts to 'Swiftboat' DOJ Discrimination Scandal.  All through the 2008 presidential campaign we saw it time and again:  any potential threat to then-candidate Barack Obama was sought out and destroyed by the Leftist media — MSNBC, Media Matters, Daily Kos and the like — before it could could reach a critical point in the MSM and do any damage to Their Annointed One.  Whether it was Bill Ayers, Sarah Palin, Reverend Wright or Obama's weaker than weak resume, the goal was to blow legitimate stories out of the water using whatever amount of lies, distortion, or double talk was needed to muddy those waters and confuse the narrative.

Review of a new documentary...
 Media Malpractice:  How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted.  In journalistic terms it's called a "tick-tock."  This is when the media crafts a news story that takes you behind the scenes of an event and breaks down, piece by linear piece, the individual acts which led up to that event.  With "Media Malpractice:  How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted," director John Ziegler turns the art of the tick-tock around and aims it, with damning effect, squarely at the news media.  The result is not a documentary, at least not for anyone who believes in truth, fairness or journalistic integrity — the result is a horror film.

Liberal Media Unemployment.  [Scroll down]  The economy, much like the political process, is driven in part by perception.  These liberal editors and reporters certainly understood that.  For much of the last three years, they did everything in their power to talk down the American economy in a blatant attempt to ensure the election of a democrat in the 2008 presidential election.  From one end of the nation to the other, liberal newspapers and television networks would unleash their Chicken Littles to proclaim that the sky was falling and only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could save us.  When the economy imploded in mid-September of 2008, they piled on even more to help push Obama over the finish line.

Halperin:  'Extreme Pro-Obama' Press Bias.  Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.  "It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts.  "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

The Prevalence Of Media Bias:  Public opinion research on the media agrees with [Mark] Halperin.  By a substantial margin, the American public believed it favored Obama throughout the campaign.  The Pew Research Center reported in October that 70% of Americans thought that "most newspaper reporters and TV journalists" wanted to see Obama win the presidential election.  Just 9% said they thought the media supported John McCain.

Two Scientists, Two Standards.  The New York Times recently warned its readers about a wacky scientist in the Obama administration.  But the fish wrap of record let the real nut job off the hook. ... The rationality police in the newsroom have not ... seen fit to print the rantings of a radical secular evangelist now serving as the White House "science czar."  John Holdren, Obama's director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-authored the innocuously titled "Ecoscience" in the 1970s with population control extremists Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

Life At New Animal Farm Won't Be All That Bad.  By July, we will come to feel that 2009 will be one of the most upbeat years in our history, as what used to be the news media* begins to get behind America and report on all the mysteriously wonderful things that are suddenly taking place.
* I say used to be the news media, since when they report good news about the Divine Obama we have no idea whether it's encomium or fact; and if they are ever slightly negative, we don't know whether the complaint derives from His real error or merely that they are stung by past criticism and ostensibly trying to be periodically balanced.

What I Saw At McCain Headquarters On Election Night 2008.  [Scroll down]  Later that night, when the clock struck 9pm on the West Coast, and California was "called" for Obama, and Obama was thus declared the winner of the election, several American journalists began cheering, "high-fiving" each other, and dancing about in the McCain media center.  A shot of staffers jumping and hugging on the set at CNN in Atlanta appeared on our big screen monitors, as well.  "Oh dear..." Ian exclaimed in his thick Irish brogue.  "You weren't jokin about the bias." ... "What's with all this celebration for one candidate over the other?"  "It's real" I told him.  "You're seeing some American media professionals in a rare moment of candor.

Obama Must 'Win Over' Media? Is CBS Joking Here?  [Few in the Old Media] cared much about the lack of transparency in Obama's donor base.  Millions of dollars were likely donated to Obama's campaign illegally yet not a word was ever uttered by the largest number of Old Media establishments.  The Old Media obviously wasn't interested in the transparency of Obama's past.  The media didn't care much about looking into Rev. Wright until the Internet beat the bushes for the story and never did say a word about his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.

Did someone mention Frank Marshall Davis?

George Stephanopoulos Tells Oprah: 'Impossible' Not to be Excited by Obama Win.  Former top Democratic aide-turned journalist George Stephanopoulos appeared on Friday's [11/7/2008] edition of the "Oprah Winfrey Show" and agreed with the host that it was "impossible" not to feel exuberant when Barack Obama was declared the winner on election night.  Stephanopoulos also repeatedly admitted that he fervently believed all along the Democratic candidate would defeat Senator John McCain.

Media Covering For Obama.  The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight out propagandists for the Obama campaign.  While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08 for the first time, the major media are consciously covering for one candidate for president and consciously knifing the other.  This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda.

Big Media Pull Out All Stops to Elect Obama.  Big Media have pulled out all their stops in trying to elect Barack Obama by withholding from the American people the truth about his radical record and associates.  Big media, their polls and the presidential debates practically ignored front-burner issues important to millions of Americans.

Senator Stealth (Revisited).  The [Jeremiah] Wright affair was no fluke, but part of a systematic pattern.  Unfortunately, as Obama moved closer to nominee status, the press circled the wagons and began its own systematic pattern of refusing to question or report on his past.

The End of Journalism.  The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny.  It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired.  And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Obama's Slobbering Scribes.  To paraphrase Queen Elizabeth II, 2008 is not a year on which honest journalists shall look back with undiluted pleasure.  So many journalists were swimming in the Democratic tank this year, the nation's newsrooms looked like overcrowded aquariums at PetSmart.  In less than a week, the campaign will be over.  But the Obamedia's most shameful biases and blunders shall not be forgotten.

Obama And His Silly White Women Behind Him.  Obama is a black man who lacks substance and continues to be exposed time and again as having no moral authority whatsoever to be elected and installed as the President of this nation.  Moreover, if it were not for the negligence and, at the same time bias, of the news media, and their refusal to report the news about the candidates objectively and fairly from the start of the campaigning, then Obama's candidacy would have been stopped long before now.

Why the press is in the tank for Obama:  When a reporter for WFTV in Florida asked tough questions of Democrat Joe Biden, Obama's campaign immediately pulled all its ads from the station.  There was no protest from the complacent press.  The station pulled the interview off its Web site.  When politicians succeed in pressuring news outlets in that way, the Republic suffers.  The herd mentality has taken over the airwaves.

Media's O-Colored Glasses Blank Out Leftist Truth.  The assorted radicals — from ACORN to Ayers, from anti-white Jeremiah Wright to Saudi-adviser Khalid al-Mansour to former PLO associate Rashid Khalidi — who have peopled Obama's ideological passage from rising leftist to post-ideological cipher, have been lost in the blur to a media focused solely on their own prize: Obama in the White House.  Such focus has created a drastically blinkered journalism, particularly in these final weeks.

Obama Speechwriter Switches to McCain; Ignored by MSM.  Imagine if a speechwriter for John McCain had switched sides and announced she was going to vote for Barack Obama.  Would she not be featured bigtime in the mainstream media complete with new thrills running up Chris Matthews leg?  Well, this did happen except that it was an Obama speechwriter, Wendy Button, who became disillusioned with The One and switched to supporting McCain.

Media's Presidential Bias and Decline.  The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.  The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.

What Obama Really Means by 'Change'.  We're days away from a national election, and no one in the media has even bothered to explain Obama's "tax cut."  No one has broken down just what Obama is proposing and what it will mean for you, your family budget, your retirement savings and your job security.  Obama's tax plan includes four main components: Higher marginal rates; higher estate taxes; higher corporate taxes; and higher taxes on investments.

Study: Media coverage has favored Obama campaign.  [Scroll down]  "For whatever reason, the media are portraying Barack Obama as a better choice for president than John McCain," said Robert Lichter, a George Mason University professor and head of the center.  "If you watch the evening news, you'd think you should vote for Obama."  The center analyzed 979 separate news stories shown between Aug. 23 and Oct. 24, and excluded evaluations based on the campaign horse race, including mention of how the candidates were doing in polls.

On Matters of October Surprises and Media Malpractice:  With just two weeks to go before choosing the next president, the election cycle is producing some strange and troubling October surprises, and the media are absent on several significant stories.  But what is no surprise is that the mainstream media are doing their best to ignore these stories when they are damaging to Democratic candidate Barack Obama, or dispose of them by using charges of racism, mean-spiritedness, or desperation, when in fact, they deserve — even demand close scrutiny.

No Doubt About It:  All But Fox News Tipping Obama's Way.  Yes, the media are rooting for Barack Obama.  Two studies out in the past couple of days show that it's not just conservatives who see a strong tilt by journalists in favor of the Democrats:  A nonpartisan media monitoring group and a liberal-leaning research organization both confirm the pro-Obama, anti-McCain bias of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC.

News Flash:  The Media Back Obama.  The single constant in the eternal election remains the media, whose activist role no one will seriously dispute.  To point out the prevailing (with honorable exceptions) double standard of reporting so favorable to Mr. Obama by now feels superfluous — much like talking about the weather.  The same holds true for all those reports pointing to Mr. Obama's heroic status outside the United States — not to mention the cascade of press analyses warning that if he fails to win election, the cause will surely be racism.

Obama's Publicists:  Have the feeling Barack Obama gets more favorable coverage than John McCain?  It's not just a perception, it's a reality, according to yet another study confirming media bias.  The right-of-center sector of the blogosphere has for months maintained that the mainstream media are "in the tank" for Obama.  The observant bloggers were right.

The dangers of liberal bias.  Obama sports a halo on a Newsweek cover; the magazine's photo of Palin unveils the witch behind the beauty.  Of the many examples of media bias to which the right points, however, it was the Public Broadcasting System poll that swept this liberal into its vortex.  The poll asked:  "Is Sarah Palin [not Governor Palin] qualified to be Vice President?"

The Increasingly Erratic, Super-Gaffetastic Joe Biden.  Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged left and elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture.  They've ridiculed her family, her appearance and her speech patterns.  They've derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness and her intellect.  Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass.

The press 'pulling' for Obama.  This time around, Sen. John McCain continues to get relentless, negative coverage in news outlets both here and abroad, according to new research from several sources.  The phenomenon has not escaped the public's notice:  70 percent of voters say that the media wants Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to win the presidential election while just 9 percent said the press favored Mr. McCain, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 1,003 adults conducted Oct. 17 to 20.

Liberals let loose on Palin and Joe the Plumber.  I thought liberals were supposed to be good-hearted, open-minded and non-judgmental.  Tell that to the angry Left's favorite piñata, Sarah Palin.  As far as liberals are concerned, Palin can do no right just as Barack Obama and Joe Biden can do no wrong.  In fact, Biden is catching more passes than an NFL wide receiver.

Anti-GOP partiality continues in the media.  The phenomenon has not escaped the public's notice:  70 percent of voters say the media wants Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to win the presidential election while just 9 percent said the press favored Mr. McCain, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 1,003 adults conducted Oct. 17 to 20.  Among Republican respondents, the figure was 90 percent, and even 62 percent of Democratic respondents agreed with the idea that "most journalists are pulling for Obama."

Lying By Media Knows No Bounds.  [A]t this late date in the campaign, the [Washington] Post still has not uttered a word about Barack Obama's childhood mentor, a communist named Frank Marshall Davis.  Post writer David Maraniss wrote a 10,000-word article about Obama's growing-up years in Hawaii, without noting that Davis was a significant influence over Obama during that time.  Maraniss simply made the decision that the information was not significant or relevant and that Post readers didn't have the right to know.  This is a case of lying by omission.

Did someone mention Frank Marshall Davis?

Who Vetted Obama?  We are living witnesses to an incredible media double standard, whereby a Republican vice-presidential candidate's personal life is being torn apart, while the Democratic presidential candidate continues to get a free ride.  Obama has a 30-year history of associating with unsavory characters, beginning with communist Frank Marshall Davis and continuing with Jeremiah Wright and communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, which should disqualify him from getting a security clearance in the government that he wants to run.

A Shameful Week for the Press.  I have always tended to think that conservative complaints about the media are a little exaggerated.  There are occasionally obvious instances of bias and clear examples of a double standard, but most reporters don't want to fall into those and some conservatives are surely too sensitive to them.  But this week has changed my view.  I have never seen, and I admit that I could never have imagined, such shameful, out-of-control, frenzied, angry, condescending, and pathetic journalistic malpractice.

What happened to the media?  Never would I have thought that the American media would let an unknown politician running for President get away with having "Community Organizer" as a main feature of his short resume and the seemingly endless radical connections that keep emerging.  Let's recap some of what Barrack Obama seems to have skated passed the American media — and by default — much of the American public.

Berg v. Obama continues to be ignored in the "media".  There continues to be little coverage of Berg v. Obama in the media.  (For the purpose of this article, we define "media" as those venues available to the general public other than those exclusively available on the Internet.)

The Bomber as School Reformer.  Back in the early eighties, in an interview with David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Bill Ayers remembered his reaction upon learning that he would not be prosecuted by the government for his bombing spree as a member of the Weather Underground.  "Guilty as hell, free as a bird — America is a great country," he exulted.  Ayers is now a university professor, but he must have been exulting all over again after reading Saturday's front-page story in the New York Times.

Who will be sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom in an Obama White House?.  How many reporters are looking for people who can tell Obama's story?  I'm not sure anyone can without damaging Senator Obama.  The media is not looking for them.  Who are the people endorsing Sen. Obama?  Many of those who want our destruction.  Ask yourself about the feeding frenzy the media is engaged in regarding Gov. Palin.  Regrettably, it appears that 2008 will be noted as one of America's worst years for journalism.

Axelrod Astroturfs an Attack Against Palin.  The media love covering grassroots attacks on major political candidates.  The attacks signal a large base of Americans disturbed by a particular candidate or issue.  When those grassroots attacks are manufactured by public relations firms, they aren't real:  they're astroturfed — fake attacks designed to look like a grassroots movement.

Media's Treatment of Palin and Obama:  Where were the probing analyses of Obama's improbable claimed shock at his minister's racist and hate-filled ravings? ... What about the deep articles describing "community organizers", what they do, who they revere, etc?  The nation has never had a President whose principal job before entering politics was "community organizer."  One would think at least some people would be interested to learn a bit about that profession before voting a "community organizer" into the Oval Office.  If Sarah palin had been a "community organizer" would we see such articles?

Obama's missing years.  Now that we've had full field MRIs of Palin, her family and their pets, perhaps the media could focus on the many missing aspects of Obama's bio.  Tom Maguire noted that we know virtually nothing about his time in NYC when he was attending Columbia (where no classmates seem to remember him and we have no transcripts or other records of his attendance there).

Obama covers his tracks.  The mainstream media — with a few courageous exceptions (the pages of National Review, Weekly Standard, ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper) — have aided and abetted Barack Obama's quest to change history retroactively by immunizing him from any serious examination.  Meanwhile they send the journalistic equivalent of the dogs of war to create their own history of Governor Sarah Palin (notably by pulling journalists off the terrorism "beat" to cover Palin's record in Alaska).

Media loves to hate Sarah Palin.  [Scroll down]  She went to multiple colleges as an undergraduate, which shows how flighty and immature she is, unlike Barack Obama, who went to multiple colleges as an undergraduate, which shows the inquisitive nature of his intelligence, which has been such an inspiration, at least to everyone who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Media's Obama Crush Flunks Smell Test.  Anyone who thinks the media have been balanced and unbiased during this election season simply hasn't been paying attention.  Barack Obama has benefited from adoring coverage, a lack of journalistic rigor and a sizable advantage in media coverage.  In short, everything in the media seems to break his direction.

Obama, the Showman-in-Chief.  The titles Barack Obama has used — community organizer, state senator, US Senator — are like theatrical flats, intended to provide scenery, framing the performance he delivers on a daily basis.  They were never intended to bear close scrutiny, and never would have but for the efforts of bloggers and National Review.

Democrats and Double Standards.  Two things are clear with six weeks left in the presidential race.  Barack Obama will practice the old-style politics that he lamented throughout the Democratic primary.  And the media will give him a pass.

Media bias backlash.  It seems that a majority of voters perceive the media is slanted in favor of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.  As a result, we are in the midst of a voter backlash against the media.  The issue has come to the fore over the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate.  In a Rasmussen poll published Sept. 4, 51 percent of respondents said that reporters are trying to damage Mrs. Palin's reputation with their news coverage.

The Media Descend to a New Low.  Time's Mark Halperin has posted an advance copy of the cover of US Weekly magazine, the tabloid published by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner.  That cover shows a smiling Sarah Palin, holding her youngest son Trig.  The screaming headline:  "Babies, Lies and Scandal:  John McCain's Vice President."  Wenner has contributed $5300 to Obama's campaign since 2007.  The cover was sent to select news organizations by Mark Neschis, the head of corporate communications for Wenner Media and former director of television in the Clinton White House.

Sarah smears continue.  While the full extent of the relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers, and the utter failure of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to produce results after spending over 100 million dollars, are of no interest to the nation's major media, the possibility that Sarah [Palin] or someone related to her might have made a mistake is the highest priority for many.

Sarah Palin is Sounding the Death Knell to 'Feminism' As We Know It.  First there was outrage because the media, safe in their liberal cocoon, had no idea that Palin was even under consideration….  And so to punish the "mushroom" (a phrase from the days of the British Regency that means "social upstart"), rumors, condescension and hand wringing replaced honest reporting.

Journalists Literally Applaud Obama Speech.  Chris Matthews is apparently not the only one who gets "inspired" by Barack Obama.  Blogging from the convention floor, a reporter for the Hill, a DC political newspaper observed "dozens of men and women wearing green media floor passes chanted along with the crowd" at Obama's speech last night [8/28/2008].

Barron's:  'It's Almost as if Obama Wants to Repeat the Mistakes of Herbert Hoover'.  Seems like a no-brainer:  Raising taxes is bad.  It's a shame that Barron's is one of the few outlets to pick up on it.

Obama Stories Should Come With Hip Boots.  It's easy to forget just how [tight] the primary race was between Obama and Hillary Clinton.  It ended up with a vote gap of just one-tenth of a percentage point.  The real difference maker in the 2008 race was the Obama favoritism of the national media, led by the television networks.  It was his margin of victory. … "Coverage" is too bland a word.  "Anointing" might be more appropriate.

Moronic media:  In a delusional state of denial.  When I turned the TV on, the political cable shows were filled with liberal pundits, liberal anchors, liberal guest historians, liberal weather gals and guys, liberal news you can use chicks, liberal political "strategists" (i.e. out of work former Democratic National Committee gofers.)  What a relief — nothing had changed.  And, of course, all of the above immediately went about their predictable chore of transforming Sen. Joe Biden from what he is to what Mr. Obama needs him to appear to be.

A Knock or a Boost?  It is doubtful whether the public is half as obsessed with Sarah Palin's daughter as CNN obviously is.  Even before this particular story was hyped, CNN was among those in the media who had become something of a laughingstock for how they had gone overboard in favor of Barack Obama.

Major Media Decide — Vote Obama.  When the Post's Howell pointed out the discrepancy, [why] did the disparity disappear over the next two weeks? … If the Post assumed that photographs of Obama drive sales, then what happened?  The likely explanation is that the Post considers itself a "news" organization, and was embarrassed when one of its own columnists revealed its blatant partisanship.

Is the Media Trying to Elect Obama?  The Illinois senator has been a media darling since he burst onto the scene at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004, and during the Democratic primary season, he bested Hillary Clinton in both quantity of coverage (he got more) and tenor (his was way more positive).  But McCain has gotten so much favorable media attention over the years that he often joked that the press was his political base.  In a head-to-head competition, who would win?

Barak Obama bubble bursts.  In The Washington Post alone, Obama has had three times as many front-page stories as McCain since early June.  One or two other media outlets — [in England] as well as in the US — have also expressed enthusiasm for Obama.  Yet that mighty Obama lead that everyone anticipated just isn't happening.

Drift and complacency are dooming Obama's campaign.  Obama has committed no obvious super-blunders, but he has had his share of embarrassing bloopers, as has McCain. … However, the mainstream U.S. media have magnified and even distorted McCain's every hiccup and ignored the far more numerous gaffes from Obama.

Why Won't the Mainstream Media Question the Obama Narrative?  The Democrats can usually depend on the mainstream media to accept their narratives uncritically, while the Republicans can expect them to punch holes in their story lines.  In 1988, the media didn't note that Dukakis was less an earthy ethnic than a reformer in the Massachusetts Puritan tradition, but they were eager to point to the senior Bush's aristocratic eastern background.

How many Obama magazine covers is too many?  Another week, another magazine cover devoted to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.  Many bloggers vented their ire at Time magazine this week for publishing its seventh cover story on Obama in 2008 compared to only two for Republican rival John McCain.

Study:  Networks Gave Fawning Coverage to Obama.  "Perhaps if he had faced serious journalistic scrutiny instead of media cheerleading, Barack Obama might still have won his party's nomination," the report says.  "But the tremendously positive coverage that the networks bestowed upon his campaign was of incalculable value.  The early celebrity coverage helped make Obama a nationally-known figure with a near-perfect media image."

I stand with Jerry Corsi.  So successful has been Corsi's "The Obama Nation" that last night the Democratic Party presidential candidate released a 40-page report attacking him and his work — the work that should have been done long ago by Obama's chums in the establishment press.  Unlike most of the critics of "The Obama Nation," I have actually read the book from cover to cover.  It is a thoroughly well-documented piece of first-rate journalism.  Are there mistakes in it?

Obama Confirms Relationship with CPUSA Member.  [Scroll down slowly]  The American people understand that they are not getting the truth about Obama from the mainstream media. ... [Jerome] Corsi has written a book on Obama for the obvious reason that little is known about the Democratic candidate, and there is no evidence that the major media are interested in uncovering or publicizing the hidden facts about him.  On the other hand, the media are doing a good job covering McCain's controversial connections, such as his ties to lobbyists for foreign countries.

The Mainstream Media Smears 'Obama Nation'.  Like it or not, we have a mainstream media that closely resembles the Russian Kremlin-controlled one-party media that basically reports only the Putin party line.  Our mainstream media, instead of supporting only Vladimir Putin, supports only Sen. Barack Obama.  That's a dangerous way to elect a president, only hearing about what the mainstream media thinks will help elect Mr. Obama.

Obama's Communist Cover-up Continues.  The 40-page report, advertised and sold to the media as a refutation of Corsi's "lies," doesn't identify [Frank Marshall] Davis as a hard-core communist and it dishonestly edits an article about Davis to eliminate references to his admitted involvement in CPUSA activities and make the black revolutionary writer and "poet" look like a civil rights activist.

Obama:  Running on the Cult of Personality.  [Jerome] Corsi's book tells us what the voters do want to know about the personality and character of the candidate, who are his friends, who and what were the influences that shaped his worldview, and who does he owe for his rapid ascendancy to political power.  The voters do care a lot about who will have access to the Oval Office and who will be invited to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.  Corsi's book introduces us to Obama's friends and mentors, most of whom we would not want to see as White House guests.

The Case For The Case Against Barack Obama:  [David] Freddoso hones in on one aspect of the Obama message, the idea that Obama is a reformer, and obliterates it in the manner of a professional demolitions crew.  When Obama tried to argue that he was actually a supporter of Second Amendment rights, gun owners wondered why he'd never spoken out against Chicago's handgun ban.  Freddoso applies the same "where was Obama, anyway?" logic to the city's endemic corruption.

Who's the "New Face"?  It is now more than seven months since [Obama] devastated Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.  In that time, he has received, by some accounts, nearly three times the press coverage that his rival has — not to mention the current president of the United States, whom he has left in the dust.

McCain's Saddleback Grand Slam:  Barack Obama bumped into something hard on Saturday night [8/16/2008].  The nuanced naif of Illinois preceded — in Paris Hilton's wonderful snark — the "wrinkly white-haired dude" in Pastor Rick Warren's civility summit and came up very short.  You can judge how well McCain did by the minimalist coverage in the media.  The highlights reported here were virtually ignored in the Sunday papers.

Now it's 'swift-boating'?  The mainstream media have had no taste for exploring Obama's background whatsoever.  They are in the tank for Obama, and don't want anything to come out that might lessen his chances of winning.  So their objections to others who investigate Obama ring hollow.  The book authors are doing what the network news divisions should have done.

Obama's Edge in the Coverage Race.  The Project for Excellence in Journalism has been monitoring campaign coverage at an assortment of large and medium-circulation newspapers, broadcast evening and morning news shows, five news Web sites, three major cable news networks, and public radio and other radio outlets.  Its latest report, for the week of Aug. 4-10, shows that for the eighth time in nine weeks, Obama received significantly more coverage than McCain.

Liberal Press Circles Wagons Around Obama.  Sunday show hosts, editorial pages, and both print and TV news stories this past weekend were pregnant with outrage over McCain's "negative" campaigning — "negative" being defined as anything, truthful or not, that places Obama in a less favorable light than they require.  Their attitude toward Obama is not unlike their approach to the global warming issue:  They accept the environmentalists' edict that man-made, apocalyptic warming is occurring, and no one is allowed to dissent.

Six Degrees of Barack Obama:  Barack Obama Senior had multiple children by a variety of women and died as the result of one of his many drunk driving episodes.  It is messy and sordid tale that has been reported upon in Europe while being largely ignored in the United States.

FCC Chairman Fears Obama Regime Would Silence Blogs.  Blogs have been a major thorn in the side of the left-wing mainstream media, exposing its lies, shining light on stories it wants to bury, and offering alternative points of view that undermine establishment propaganda.  This may be one reason the MSM has labored so mightily to install Barack Obama in the White House.

Biased media easily entranced by Obama's magic.  Few things are more worthless than journalists, leaking bias like malarial sweats, in the pose of objectivity.  Unfortunately, a large portion of today's media chasing after Barack Obama like an army of lapdogs waiting for him to whistle would make Dr. Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda proud of such peerless objectivity.  "Bias?  I don't see that at all," opined one such peerless observer.

Media in love with Obama.  All of the major media outlets were there when Obama gave a speech from Berlin.  It's as if they hang on his every word.  If all we had to go on were the reporting from the country's major media outlets, most of us would think the election in November is actually scheduled to be a coronation of Obama, rather than a contest between two presidential candidates.

Media's Campaign Donations Tilt 100-to-1 In Favor of Democrats.  It's not just the thrills racing up and down Chris Matthews' leg.  Writing in Thursday's Investor's Business Daily, author William Tate documents that campaign donations from employees of big media companies are tilting 100-to-1 in favor of the Democrats so far this election cycle.

MSOBAMA.  It is not a compliment to human nature to say that there is something within us that is sometimes drawn to watching — for a limited period of time, anyway — the comically deranged on display.  Which brings me to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

Jane Pauley Stumps for Obama:  40 People Show Up.  Jane Pauley, one-time co-host of NBC's Today and Dateline NBC programs, is actively campaigning for Barack Obama.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote of one such appearance in Portage, Indiana that attracted only eight people.

Media Blackout On A Far-Left Past.  [Scroll down]  CNN glossed over his late Kenyan father's own radical politics by leaving it up to him to describe his "reputation."  "My father had this reputation as being this larger-than-life figure, charismatic, very smart, very engaging," Obama said, "and all those things were true."  It's also true that as a Nairobi bureaucrat, his father proposed a socialist economic plan for Kenya so radical it got him blackballed from the government.  CNN left that part out, while also omitting Obama's recent support of Raila Odinga, a Communist-trained politician in Nairobi.

Obama and Quayle:  By and large, much of the mainstream media is unethical, biased toward the Democrats, and openly trying to elect Barack Obama. … What makes the above statement of fact of interest is that the complaint was vocalized to me by two editors at two different top-20 newspapers.  Both editors are self-described "liberals" and both bemoaned the "growing lack of integrity" within their own business.  To the point where one of the editors told me unjust liberal bias was one of the deciding factors in his decision to quit the paper.

The Green Hornet:  Al Gore said the other day that "the future of human civilization" depends on giving up fossil fuels within a decade — and was acclaimed as a prophet by the political class.  Obviously boring reality doesn't count for much these days.  Even so, when Barack Obama wheels out an energy agenda nearly as grandiose as Mr. Gore's, shouldn't it receive at least some media scrutiny?

Obama the Understudy.  For now Obama is simply playing on the stage of a very exclusive theater, packed with a rather charitable audience that consists mostly of fawning supporters and a starry eyed media that thrives on using mere appearances to create the illusion of reality.

Not So Fast, President Obama!  It began with the presumptive nominee's trip to the Middle East and Europe.  The Obama campaign began referring to the candidate as if he already were President.  That, while politically risky, is certainly understandable.  What is not understandable is how many in the media went along with what the campaign fed them.  They began to treat the Senator from Illinois as if he already had been elected President.

Obama and the Affirmative Action Media.  Sometimes it's important to state the obvious, as George Orwell urged in another era of big lies and Political Correctness.  It's obvious that the media are in the bag for Obama for one big reason, and one reason only:  his race.  The media have adopted liberal race bias as it is practiced on hundreds of campuses, in newsrooms all over, and in corporations galore.  It's "affirmative" race discrimination, but it's still completely arbitrary favoritism based on skin color.

Young Obama's Red Mentor:  The mainstream media have finally gotten around to revealing Barack Obama's early mentor.  But they've downplayed the mystery man's communist background.

AP Lies About Obama's Red Mentor.  Under the innocuous headline, "Writer offered a young Barack Obama advice on life," the story calls [Frank Marshall] Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) when it faithfully echoed the Stalinist line, merely a "leftleaning black journalist and poet" known for "leftist politics" and someone who might be accused by some of having "allegedly anti-American views."  Davis was not a "journalist" in any real sense of the term.  He was a propagandist and racial agitator for the CPUSA.  He was also a recruiter for the communist cause.

Did someone mention Frank Marshall Davis again?

The Brangelina-fication of the Obamas:  The spread in People, which earlier this year fawned over a photo of the bare-chested Obama in his swimsuit, was supposed to be an "exclusive" first and last look at life at home with the Obamas.  Knowing what we know about the Obama we know now, it probably won't be the last.  They've hawked the kids to TV gossip show "Access Hollywood," blabbed about their romance to Us Weekly magazine, and plopped Michelle O — the purported "civilian" whom the Obamessiah declares immune from public criticism — in front of the cameras to schmooze effortlessly for "The Colbert Report" and "The View" demographics.

Happy Birthday, Barack!  It is widely accepted that the junior Senator from Illinois has had a free ride from the media so far, but with the publication of The Case Against Obama, that may soon come to a screeching halt.

Crowds for Obama, or for rock bands?  I've gotten some emails complaining that the mainstream media didn't mention something about Barack Obama's speech in Berlin: He was preceded on stage by a couple of popular rock bands, which could account for the size of the crowd.  That's a fact worth knowing, and one the major U.S. newspapers didn't report.  If a presidential candidate is hanging onto the coattails of a music act, voters watching from the other side of the planet ought to be aware of it.

Who died and made him president?  In the past few days I've been repeatedly assured that our new leader-apparent is "burnishing his foreign policy credentials" (rather than creating them) on his fly-past of exotic distant locations.  And that is so much more interesting than the boring fact that Obama's unsung rival already has foreign policy credentials.

The Final Six Reasons Not To Vote For Obama:  Bernard Goldberg recently made a telling observation.  He noted brigades of cameras and reporters are following Mr. Obama.  Then he said when John McCain recently arrived in Manchester, N.H., and got off the plane he was greeted by a single camera.  The American people have to decide if they are going to let the mainstream media, with its biased, false and fraudulent journalism, elect our next president, or whether the American people are going to do so on the merits of the candidates.

Obama Wows at Journalists' Convention.  Barack Obama returned to Chicago Sunday and made an appearance before the UNITY minority journalists' convention (including the whole soup of black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalist solidarity groups.)  The Chicago Tribune's Swamp blog found some journalists were restrained, and some were not:  "At UNITY, the applause was restrained, after organizers reminded conference participants that the appearance was being nationally broadcast and they should make every effort to maintain 'professional decorum.'"

When journalists applaud Obama.  Journalists, of course, are not supposed to wildly applaud or boo politicians.  It's unprofessional.  Worse, the rapturous reception for big-name Democrats gives the impression that Unity conventiongoers may be more committed to the Democratic party than to journalistic detachment.  To their credit, leaders at Unity '08 asked attendees to restrain themselves when Obama appeared.

The Top Ten Things that Creep Me Out About Obama:  It creeps me out that the press seems hypnotized by this guy.  Grown men and women blubbering like babes when talking about how exciting he is, how mesmerizing he is when he speaks. … Big media is in the tank for this guy in a big way.  They have thrown off all semblance of fairness (never mind objectivity) and just don't care that people know they are in Obama's corner.

Love for Obama infects news coverage.  Members of the media, by a 4-to-1 ratio, self-identify as political liberals.  This does not fully explain why Sen. Barack Obama received preferential treatment in his campaign against Hillary Clinton.  However, it could explain why they are ignoring his flaws and untruths.  The term "mainstream media" is really a misnomer.  It is unfair to call the news media "mainstream" when you compare them to America.

WaPo Addresses Obama's Faith — With NO Wright?  The Washington Post published a front page story on Sunday headlined "Obama Addresses His Faith:  Senator Describes Spiritual Journey."  But it completely ignored Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ.  Obama was allowed to declare to audiences how he "let Jesus Christ into his life" on the south side of Chicago, but the Post utterly left out the fact that it was Rev. Wright who was his spiritual mentor.

Obama, the PAC-Man.  While the media elite goes after Vets for Freedom for making a TV buy for John McCain, they're giving Barack Obama a free ride as he surfs a wave of PAC money to the Democratic nomination, a wave that, if anything, is nearing tsunami proportions despite his boasts that he doesn't accept donations from PACs.

Liberal Media Downplays Threat Of Terrorism To Elect Democrats.  [Scroll down]  Another of the most dangerous failures of the mainstream media is its acting as a virtually cheerleader and campaign manager for Barack Obama for president, hitting new lows in slanted journalism every day.  If the mainstream media gets away with their attempt to elect a president based on biased and dishonest reporting, it will come close to a coup d'etat.  There is the failure of alternative media and public figures to properly criticize the journalistic malpractice of the mainstream media.

Media Excuse Obama's False Advertising.  What happens when the "fact-checkers" don't check facts and the "watchdogs" don't watch? Consider the case of those who claim to be watching politicians for lies and deceptions and pretend to analyze Senator Barack Obama's new patriotic "Country I Love" television ad, airing in 18 states.

Anchors Away!  Barack Obama is headed overseas, with the three network anchors trailing behind him like groupies ga-ga over a rock star.  And they say that media bias is just a myth.

The Obama Rules:  Obama must believe that most Americans suffer from an attention-deficit disorder so crippling that they can't concentrate on their own interests or values.  Obama has an acute self-interest in so diagnosing the American electorate.  His campaign knows he's vulnerable to the charge of being an elitist liberal.  Unable to argue the facts, it wants to argue the law — defining his weaknesses as off-limits.  The campaign can succeed in imposing these rules on the race only if the news media cooperate.

Media Covers Obama's Liberal Flanks.  Barack Obama's climb to the Democratic nomination was given a small boost this week by Hillary "Combat" Clinton's encounter with the footage of her not-so-hostile fire Bosnian trip.  But ahead lays a problem nearly as daunting as his 20-year association with the hate-monger Reverend Jeremiah Wright:  Obama would be the most liberal man to run for president since George McGovern. … Obama's greatest cheering section, the MSM, is painfully aware of this dilemma and is already trying to debunk the notion that Obama is an unrequited liberal.

Did Obama Plant Bogus Dowd Column to Victimize Himself?  While the main stream media hasn't caught on, most politically Internet savvy people are fully aware of "viral communications," the strategy of posting entries on blogs in favor or in opposition to a candidate or campaign. … However, the fake Maureen Dowd column has certain attributes which only persons intimately familiar with the Obama campaign would normally have privy to.

Many Recognize Media's Pro-Obama Bias, Democrats Prefer CNN.  "Far more Americans believe that the press coverage has favored Barack Obama than think it has favored Hillary Clinton," a just-released survey, from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, discovered in determining 37 percent recognize a bias in favor of Obama.  Even 35 percent of Democrats "see a pro-Obama bias" compared to 45 percent of Republicans and 40 percnt of independents.

Untraceable e-mails spread Obama rumor.  When Fox News aired a report in January claiming that Sen. Barack Obama had been educated at a radical Muslim madrassa, his campaign beat the story back — hard — with the candidate himself going on television to call it "ludicrous" and a "smear."  And his aggressive defense worked, or so it seemed at the time:  The notion that Obama has secret Muslim roots faded from the mainstream media, and even from most conservative blogs and magazines.

Follow-up:
 The Myth of 'Anonymous Emails" Against Obama.  I have yet to receive an email regarding Barack Obama that hid its sender behind an anonymous cloak. … All of the criticism and questions I have received have come with name tags attached.  Criticism has been posted on a wide variety and number of sites.  These have provoked, at times, misplaced and unjust-attacks by supporters of Barack Obama.  Critics do not hide from such debate; they welcome it.  Why does the media keep referring to "anonymous emails" when these emails have return addresses?

Salon Editor:  Most Press Members 'Hate Hillary Clinton'.  "I was struck when I got to Iowa and New Hampshire in January by how our media colleagues were just swooning over Barack Obama.  That is not too strong a word.  They were swooning.  I was at a speech, I remember it, I will write about it some day, in Manchester, and every, the biggest names in our business were there, and they were, they could repeat some of his speech lines to one another.  It was like a Bruce Springsteen concert where the fans sing along."

Meet Obama's Useful Idiots.  At the risk of being accused of "racism" for not falling in line behind the first half-black but wholly unqualified man ever to run for president, allow me to introduce the useful idiots at the core of Obamamania. … As if we have not already seen enough evidence of ill-informed political lunacy surrounding the anointment process of the chosen one, Obama useful idiots have found a new way to demonstrate their gross youthful ignorance.

Obama's Clintonesque Speech.  Barack Obama came to Philadelphia on March 18 not so much to address his poisonous pastor, Jeremiah Wright, but to talk vaguely of race relations.  The news media swooned. … Newspapers and news networks tried to insist that Obama's speech drew praise "across the political spectrum," but this was nonsense.  Many outlets utterly excluded conservatives and Republicans from their stories.  They were hermetically sealing Obama from criticism.

Obama and the Childish Left:  The Washington press corps has the teenie bopper hots over Barack Obama — such a romantic name.  A real African!  Almost.  What does he believe?  What has he actually done?  Uhmmmm…  Well…  It's Son of Camelot!  And he's got the youth vote!  Children just know these things!  This is straight out of Dumb and Dumber.  If you despaired about the media's endless love affair with Bill Clinton, the Master of Slick, because he Cares About You, you'll get to revisit those feelings now.  For we have a new national idol!

CBS Has Barack's Back:  Wright's Words Compared to Those of Jesus.  The Early Show did its best this morning [3/17/2008] to help Barack Obama climb out of the hole he's dug for himself with his close association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama's Problem with White Voters:  The racial dimension of Barack Obama's electability problem is now apparent, but no prominent Democrat dares discuss it openly.  Similarly expect no discussion of the subject in the major media.

Barack Obama:  The Human Rorschach Blot.  Barack Obama is like a small, shiny object.  The easily fascinated can stare deeply into his blank sheen and see … their own reflections.  He can be anything to anyone because he is nothing in particular.  Yet listening to the leftstream media, one would have to conclude that the man is a multifaceted miracle.

Pins for Obama's balloon.  Did you know Sen. Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein?  You do now.  Make no mistake:  If he decides to run for president, quite a few people will be reminding you of it.  Those people are not his friends.  It's funny how much people don't know about the Illinois Democrat, even as he rides a wave of rapturous news coverage.  Santa Claus could hardly have drawn more excited crowds than those that turned out for Mr. Obama in New Hampshire.  Almost no reporter seems to be able get through an entire Obama story without using the phrase "rock star."

The Media's Love Affair With Obama:  There is no doubt that Senator Barack Hussein Obama, a black Democrat from Illinois, is being supported in an unprecedented way by media from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to New York, who want him to become the first black president of the United States.  But if our media would take the time to analyze what he says, rather than roll out a red carpet for him wherever he goes, he might be exposed as an expert in political doubletalk.

I've got the sauce to say it:  Barack Obama is a loser.  On Saturday [2/10/2007] Senator Barack Obama entered the battle for the White House.  He did so to the backdrop of a media swoon.  He trumpeted the themes of his recent volume, The Audacity of Hope.  That his candidature is essentially audacious and relies an awful lot on hope was ignored by most of those who reported it.  Someone has to point out that this balloon has hype not helium inside it.  I will do so.

Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform.  It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign and decided that its contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google owned Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message.

Who Dares Oppose the Obamas?  Think of all the inane stories designed to boost the picture of Obama being loaded with charisma and momentum.  All "news" that is good is presented with great enthusiasm — like the utterly unsurprising and uninspiring endorsement by Al Gore.  All news that is bad is buried — or if that seems too obvious, it's mentioned briefly, and then killed and buried.

Obama Doesn't Understand Role of Joint Chiefs:  Will MSM Take Note?  A couple days ago at the gym, listening to a Hugh Hewitt podcast and perhaps not paying as much attention as I should have while pedaling away, I heard Hugh mention that Barack Obama doesn't understand the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  What was Hugh referring to?  As the British would say:  the penny just dropped.

Media are gonna Barack around the clock.  Barack Obama announced last week that he was forming an exploratory committee to explore whether he can really be as fabulous as the media say he is.  And happily the answer is:  Yes!  He's young, gifted and black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist, and Muslim.  He rejects the way "politics has become so bitter and partisan," he represents "a different kind of politics."  He smokes, which is different.  He was raised in an Indonesian madrassah by radical imams, which is more than John Edwards can say.  And he looks totally cool when he smokes!

Puff piece.  Organizations such as the American Lung Association see the issue of Obama's cigarette use as a teachable moment.

How crypto-Marxism won the Cold War.  Today, for the first time in American history we have two — count 'em, two — hard-core Leftists running for the Democrat Party nomination.  The Left hasn't had this kind of chance for power since Truman defeated Henry Wallace in 1948.  Hillary and Obama are Marx twins who only differ in race and gender.  All the media tell us is how great it is to have a woman and a black man running for president.

What else are the news media not reporting?

Media Gaga For ObamaRama.  In order to squeeze out every last possible drop of free publicity, Obama noted that his formal declaration of running will not come until Feb. 10, in Springfield, Ill., home of Abraham Lincoln.  Everyone plays up the impending rivalry between the two candidates everyone assumes as frontrunners — Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton.
That's Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.
Belief Growing That Reporters are Trying to Help Obama Win.  The idea that reporters are trying to help Obama win in November has grown by five percentage points over the past month.  The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey, taken just before the new controversy involving the Times erupted, found that 49% of voters believe most reporters will try to help the Democrat with their coverage, up from 44% a month ago.  Just 14% believe most reporters will try to help McCain win, little changed from 13% a month ago.  Just one voter in four (24%) believes that most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage.

Another inconvenient truth down the Obama Memory Hole.  The staggering implications of another embarrassing Obama statement would remain unexplored, with the public record obscured, were it not for a video clip of one of his speeches posted to the web and alert internet journalists.

Camouflaging News:  Leave it to the New York Times to take a major story discrediting Barack Obama's Iraq policy and pitch it as a human interest feature on "mixed feelings."

Fawning, groveling, Euro-lickspittle Press for Obama.  The Associated Press used to be — in its heyday — a reliable source for unvarnished news.  They had to be.  Hundreds of newspapers across the country used AP wire reports in their papers and trusted that what they were printing was factual and devoid of opinion and bias.  And then there is AP today….

McCain faces real media bias.  For conservatives around the country, especially across the American Heartland, will see the decision to ban McCain from The New York Times' op-ed page because his proposed article was too different from an Obama one as unfair and outrageous.  It will only serve to confirm their long-established distrust of the mainstream American media for having an enormous and ineradicable liberal bias.

Big Media Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is.  Even the Associated Press — no bastion of conservatism — has considered, at least superficially, the media's favoritism for Barack Obama.  It's time to re-visit media bias.  True to form, journalists are defending their bias by saying that one candidate, Obama, is more newsworthy' than the other.  In other words, there is no media bias.  It is we, the hoi polloi, who reveal our bias by questioning the neutrality of these learned professionals in their ivory-towered newsrooms.

Obama orgy:  The blatant bias of the major national news media toward Barack Obama is now so overwhelming that it would not be worth noting, except that the election of a President of the United States is involved.  It is a propaganda blitz that would make the Kremlin blush.

Iraqi Billionaire Threatens Reporters Investigating Rezko Affair.  Why aren't the American media investigating the role of British billionaire businessman Nadhmi Auchi in supplying loans to Barack Obama fundraiser Tony Rezko?  Some point to media bias, but there is another factor.  Working for Auchi, who was born in Iraq, attorneys from London law firm Carter-Ruck have for several months been flooding American and British newspapers and websites with letters demanding removal of material they deem "defamatory" to their client.

The Frank Marshall Davis Cover-Up Is Over.  [Scroll down]  [Frank Marshall] Davis was identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), controlled and subsidized by the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB.  As late as 1956, when he was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Davis was still refusing to deny that he was a communist.  Wouldn't it be helpful if [Jon] Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, would make an elementary effort to get the facts right?  But that is too much to ask when the presidency is at stake and the media-backed candidate is trying to cover up his controversial background.

Obama's easy ride.  It is truly extraordinary how Barack Obama has taken on an almost messianic stature among the mainstream media, not only in the United States, but even more so in Europe and Canada.  Clichés become profound statements and empty rhymes are vital statements when they are spoken by this severely mediocre but savvy man.  Part of this is the fact that to middle-class journalists he is the acceptable face of the black community.

Why Islamists Cheer For Obama:  If any other candidate were caught in a similar situation [i.e., Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright], he or she would have been forced out of politics in disgrace.  The same media that hounded Sarah Palin's old pastors deliberately overlooked a cleric who told them that his protégé shared his hatred of America.  This failure to expose a major presidential candidate for the anti-American radical he is will surely go down in history as one of the most egregious cases of media malpractice.  Had it not been for the media-led cover up, Barack Obama would have been by now only an embarrassing footnote in the annals of American presidential politics.

Media pummel Palin while Obama gets kid gloves.  The scrutiny accorded Governor Palin is far more intense and malicious in its intent than any directed toward either of the men on the Democratic ticket. ... [T]he attacks on Mrs. Palin of which I'm speaking come not from "Swift-boaters" or extremist bloggers, but from the bastions of American journalism.  The opinion-makers in American journalism seem to loathe Mrs. Palin.

A Tale of Two Lies.  When it comes to lies, the media get far more exercised over unflattering truths about Barack Obama's record than they do about real distortions of John McCain's.

The End of the Bridge to Nowhere.  Liberal columnists and the mainstream media have been unusually tolerant of Barack Obama's exaggerated claims of major legislative accomplishments.  Just this week, Obama said his proposal was the "basis" for the economic stimulus package that was enacted last winter, a claim even Democrats regard as false.  But Sarah Palin's insistence that, as governor of Alaska, she killed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere — that's another story.  She's accused of lying by the Obama-leaning media.

Subversives for Obama.  If any other candidate had had merely a fleeting relationship with William Ayers, his candidacy would have been terminated before it was even articulated — let alone what we now know about Obama's key role in Ayers's CAC and its funding of radical groups; let alone the fact that Obama had been mentored during his formative years by a Communist Party plant; let alone his work for organisations modelled on the seditious philosophy of Saul Alinsky; let alone his two-decade membership of a Black Power church; let alone his relationship with fraudster Tony Rezko.  And yet despite all of this, virtually no-one in the mainstream media is asking any questions.

Anonymous Reporter:  'Fix Is In' for Obama.  A reader at a major newsroom emails:  "Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true.  We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in Arizona.  Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae.  Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others.

No one's clean in this mess.  The one man who truly tried to treat this crisis like a crisis — McCain — was ridiculed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who implored him to come to Washington to help in the first place.  And the news media, which now treat any Republican action that threatens a Barack Obama victory as inherently dishonorable, uncritically accepted the bald Democratic lie that McCain ruined a bipartisan bailout deal last Friday.

Obama Proves All Too Human.  [Scroll down]  Why was Gov. Palin characterized by Obama as a mere small-town mayor — and by Biden as a "lieutenant governor," as well as "good looking" and, given her positions, "a step backward" for women?  The pro-Obama media don't help, sneering about what Palin wears, whether she spends enough time with her kids, and the minutiae of her husband's past conduct.  The public certainly never hears about Biden's grooming, the amount of time he spent with his children when they were young, or his spouse's private life.

Biden's medical history not scrutinized.  While John McCain's past battles with skin cancer has received a great deal of scrutiny, Joe Biden's near-fatal aneurysms in 1988 have yet to come under the spotlight.  Soon after ending his first presidential bid that year, Biden, who had been suffering from what he thought were headaches and a pinched nerve, collapsed in a hotel room shortly after giving a speech on foreign policy.

The Editor says...
 Remember the election cycle eight years ago?  Wasn't the press oh so terribly concerned about Vice President Cheney's health back in 2000, saying he was unfit for service because of his frail cardiac health?

MSNBC Teams Up With ACORN, La Raza.  MSNBC has launched a news project with a variety of left-wing special interest groups to boost their Election Day coverage and help viewers experiencing problems at the polls.  One of the groups involved in MSNBC's "Election Protection" project is the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now.  ACORN has been involved in rampant voter registration fraud across the nation this election cycle and is actively supporting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for president.

What is it that Barack Obama knows that the rest of us don't?  The tragicomedy of Obama as "The Messiah" includes an advance to the White House with a largely AWOL mainstream media, who having come up empty on Sarah Palin in Alaska — one outlet even after advertising that they'd pay for provable dirt — are now vetting Joe the Plumber, rather than Obama sidekick Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist bomber, who launched the senator's career in his living room.

Did someone mention Joe the Plumber?

Time for "Propagandist Buttons" to identify biased "journalists" on air.  Canada Free Press (CFP) editors Judi McLeod and Arthur Weinreb advocate that [Gwen] Ifill and others of her ilk should be identified for what they are:  propagandists not journalists; that "journalists" advocating for the election of Obama should be forced by the networks who hire them to wear buttons proclaiming them as "Propagandists".  In short, in fairness to television viewers everywhere, the Katie Courics, Rachel Maddows et al should be forced to wear on-air the "Propagandist Button", a sort of Fairness Doctrine that really works.

Lou Dobbs, Alone in MSM, Reports on Ohio Early Voting Abuse.  Lou Dobbs, along with Glenn Beck, are probably the only two CNN hosts who are not completely in the tank for Barack Obama.  So it is interesting to see this report by Dobbs about early voting in Ohio which allows people to register to vote and cast an absentee ballot at the same time.  This opens up a great opportunity for election fraud ... .

Radio reporter fired over Obama T-shirt.  Longtime Metro Detroit radio reporter Karen Dinkins has been fired after wearing a pro-Barack Obama T-shirt while covering a rally for the presidential candidate Sunday at the Detroit Public Library.  Dinkins, who has worked at WWJ for 13 years, acknowledged that the radio station fired her Monday, but she did not elaborate.

McCain vs. the Media.  On Wednesday, radio star Rush Limbaugh — who two decades ago established himself as a one-man alternative to the mainstream media — declared that "there's no journalism today."  Every day Hannity describes "2008 as the year that journalism died" on his radio and TV shows — inspired by their love for Obama, dubbing them the Democratic nominee's press-secretary corps.  If the McCain-Palin ticket can further expose media bias on the road to the White House, John McCain — unexpected though it might be — could very well become another kind of hero:  slayer of the MSM.

Spinning Into Orbit.  [Governor] Palin, of course, knows all about [media bias].  Obama-linked blogs like the Daily Kos invent charges out of whole cloth, like the time one claimed Palin wasn't the mother of her own baby.  The media reported that as news.  Meanwhile, ad agency personnel linked to the Obama campaign faked charges in videos that Palin belonged to an Alaska secessionist group.  The media picked that up too. … The more we observe media bias in action, the more we're amazed by its new ways of distorting and concealing news.

Night of the (Character) Assassins.  By now, everybody must know that Rolling Stone magazine has the hots for Barack Obama.  One need only look at the hagiographic articles and iconographic covers of the Anointed One which have graced the pop culture rag over the past two years.  No longer content at tossing up puff-piece interviews ... the magazine has decided to take up the cudgels on behalf of its candidate by going after John McCain's character.

How Obama Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the R-Bomb.  All GOP candidates seeking the White House are forced to deal with a national media so ensconced with de facto Democratic campaign volunteers, it's amazing any ever get elected.  But the skin color of their current candidate has created an irrational PC ecstasy amongst the fourth estate, one that finds them simultaneously agitating and exploiting racial divides to an extreme that borders slimy.

Lies by Omission: Media and Obama withhold truth from voters.  It's time to cut through to the truth since some representatives of the media are shying away from it. ... The media is complicit in backing Barack Obama.  All of the networks (except maybe Fox News) slant their news to favor Obama.  They give John McCain his props, but are willingly shilling for Barack Obama.  Here and there, the truth does come forth.  The media calls them "attacks"; I call it revealing the truth.

Al-Jazeera for Obama.  Al-Jazeera, a mouthpiece for enemies of the United States, aired a Moammar Gadhafi speech praising Obama and followed with a story depicting supporters of Sarah Palin as white racist Christians. ... The Al-Jazeera "reporter" who did the hit piece on Palin was Casey Kaufmann, who surfaces in Federal Election Commission (FEC) records as a $500 contributor to the Obama-for-president campaign and is based in Doha, Qatar.

Media Declares Obama The Winner.  The media has decided.  Case closed.  And those pesky polls, like Zogby's most recent one showing McCain trailing by only 3 points (the margin of error), have fallen into the left's favorite chasm, the "fake but accurate" void which has become so popular on the left these last few years.

Chi Trib Writer Solicits Communist Party USA to Defend Obama.  Chicago Tribune staff writer Rex Huppke has solicited the expertise of communist party leaders to defend Barack Obama from the fallout of the now famous answer he supplied to a man referred to as Joe the Plumber.  In an article with the misleading headline "Socialists:  Obama No Socialist" Huppke applied some painstaking logic to reach his conclusion that Barack Obama can not be a socialist if avowed communists will not state that he is.

The Obama Temptation:  Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama.  Yes, the media are liberal.  Even so, it is obvious that this election is different.  The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election.  I've never seen anything like it.  Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources.  The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place.

Mainstream Media In Bed With Obama.  It has been almost 20 months since Barack Obama announced his bid for the presidency.  Candidates for president of the United States of America are usually heavily vetted — the public learns all but the most intimate details of their lives.  However, very little is still known about Barack Obama this late in the game.  His most fervent supporters do not even want to know. ... To paraphrase Winston Churchill, when it comes to the mainstream media and Obama, never have so many been so uninterested in so much.

An Obama Antidote:  The American public is finally waking up to how insidiously dangerous Barrack Obama is — and not a moment too soon.  The survival of the United States of America is at stake in the upcoming election.  In case you're just emerging from the Obama trance — congratulations, it's not easy to escape from the mesmerizing pull exerted by the Obama-promoting media.  And make no mistake; with few exceptions the mainstream media (MSM) are entirely Obama propaganda outlets.

Reader responses overflow after story.  When Politico editors John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei tackled the subject of media bias Tuesday [10/28/2008], they knew they were venturing into controversial territory.  Still, they hadn't predicted the most intense reader response Politico has ever received, with hundreds of e-mails pouring into their inboxes within hours of the story hitting the web.

Obama on being a beneficiary of racial preferences:  Despite promises of transparency and openness, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has deliberately been opaque about his past and beliefs, carefully crafting his own story in his autobiographies The Audacity of Hope and Dreams From My Father while sealing his own academic records and often voting a noncommittal "present" as an Illinois state legislator.  Instead of questioning him and demanding the promised transparency and openness, the media have gone along with Obama ... they accepted Obama handouts without question while continuing to entertain the most outrageous speculations about McCain and Palin.

Hidden Audio: Obama Tells SF Chronicle He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry.  Imagine if John McCain had whispered somewhere that he was willing to bankrupt a major industry?  Would this declaration not immediately be front page news?  Well, Barack Obama actually flat out told the San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate) that he was willing to see the coal industry go bankrupt in a January 17, 2008 interview.  The result?  Nothing.

Palin Attacks Obama on Coal Production.  Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin unleashed a new volley against Barack Obama on a four-city tour of Ohio on Sunday [11/2/2008] by touting newly released audio comments made by the Democratic presidential candidate promising to restrict the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the U.S.  The issue is particularly sensitive in coal-rich Ohio, West Virginia, and Colorado.  Obama made the comments to the San Francisco Chronicle in January, which were posted on YouTube over the weekend.

Media in the tank for Obama.  Less is known about Mr. Obama than about any major party candidate for president in modern history.  His public resume is thin:  eight years in the Illinois Senate, four in the U.S. Senate, with two of them spent running for president. ... "If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends — at least who will talk — and has entire years missing out of his biography," [Michael] Malone said.  And no candidate for president has had more problematic associations.

Deceptions of my Father.  If [David H.] Blake's treatment of Davis and Rev. Wright could be described as wanting, his characterization of the Democratic standard bearer's dreaming dad is one that gentleman's contemporaries might scarcely recognize.  "After graduating from Harvard, the Old Man, as his African children called him, had taken a lucrative job with an oil company," Blake writes.  "His education and commitment to his people had given him prominence in the young country."  "He married several times and raised several families."  Actually, as journalist Jerome R. Corsi points out in Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality:
  •  There is no record that Barack, Sr., graduated Harvard;
  •  The oil company job may have been genuine but Barack Sr. had a reputation for what we would today call "padding his resume"; and
  •  The marriages overlapped.

Yet Another Study Shows How Tough the Media Has Been on John McCain.  The independent Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at coverage in the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate and found on FOX News 40 percent of stories on John McCain were negative, while 40 percent of stories on Obama were also negative.  In contrast, on MSNBC the study found that 73 percent of stories on McCain were negative while Obama received just 14 percent negative coverage on that channel.

I'm not the only one to have noticed this trend.
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Media Meltdown.  Most people will never meet a presidential candidate so their impressions are formed by media coverage.  If McCain is portrayed as old and out of touch, rather than experienced and toughened by his prisoner of war experience and Obama is presented as young, hip and "news," that leaves an impression on those voters who don't dig beneath the superficial.  The media now own Barack Obama.  Let's see how long they take to turn on him once he starts making mistakes.

Matthews: My Job Is To Make Obama Presidency a Success.  Just in time for the new James Bond movie, Chris Matthews has earned himself a new moniker:  Odd Job.  Matthews says he sees his job as a journalist as doing everything he can to make the Obama presidency a success.

An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage.  Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago.  The [Washington] Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

Washington Post concedes bias for Obama.  The mainstream press have been accused of being biased in favor of President-elect Barack Obama for months — a phenomenon now acknowledged by one of the nation's media heavyweights.  On Sunday, The Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, offered evidence of an "Obama tilt" in her own newspaper.

They Shilled for Obama.  Guilty!  One of the nation's premier newspapers fesses up about allegations of pro-Obama bias.  The Washington Post's ombudsperson, Deborah Howell, tracked its presidential campaign stories, front-page coverage and use of photos covering the period from Obama's nomination on June 4 to Election Day.

Obama's pesky loose ends:  As this columnist has indicated previously, for reasons that beg deeper analysis, grave and troubling facts pertaining to President-elect Barack Obama were kept from the electorate by the establishment press.  It is therefore arguable that had some or all of these come to light and been scrutinized with half the alacrity as was Sarah Palin's wardrobe, Obama may never have been elected at all.

Public Perception Worked For Communism Too.  The media here in America aren't owned by the government, but they might as well be owned by the Democrat party when 90% of newspaper and broadcast media are liberal supporters of what ever Bozo the Democrats run for president.  With their vast resources, the only information they were willing to distribute on Barack Obama was kept in a small box, and nothing outside of that box was ever discussed in any mainstream media outlet.

Where was Mention of Obamas' Personal Chef During Campaign?  During last year's presidential campaign, the media worked overtime to portray John and Cindy McCain as wealthy private jet junkies with more homes than they can remember, while showcasing Barack and Michelle Obama as just another middle class family with two working parents, one car and freshly paid off student loans. ... Mrs. Obama was defined as an average mom who juggled work and home with extraordinary skill.  According to the media, she arranged sleepovers, scoured Target for the perfect wardrobe and served healthy organic dinners.  Just like us common folk, right?  Well, almost.  Those healthy organic dinners were cooked by the Obamas' personal chef, Sam Kass.

The Obama We Knew But Denied:  [Scroll down slowly]  I would submit that it is not possible for an electorate to make wise decisions without the benefit of full disclosure about their candidates, without the tenacious investigating and forthright reporting by the fourth estate — our media complex. ... In failing to adequately cover candidate Obama's past, the host of his unreleased documents, including grades, and in otherwise defending every deficiency, from over-dependence on the teleprompter to his refusal to answer questions, our press demonstrated at nearly every turn its own institutional racism of the most condescending nature.  President Obama took advantage of this and received a 53% majority of the vote.

Michael Steele states the obvious:
 RNC chair:  Media didn't vet Obama because of race.  Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said Friday [5/22/2009] that President Obama has not been vetted thanks to a complicit media that wanted to see a black man become president.  Serving as a guest host for conservative radio personality Bill Bennett, Steele, who is also African-American, said Obama's political philosophy and principles remain largely unknown.  "He was not vetted, folks," Steele said.  "He was not vetted because the press fell in love with the black man running for the office.

"Vetting is a process of examination and evaluation, generally referring to performing a background check on someone before offering him or her employment."*

Vetting is a word that has been in the dictionary for many years, meaning the performance of the duties of a veterinarian, but it was only recently (no earlier than 1970) that an additional definition included the concept of preemptive scrutiny or expert appraisal.

Vetting means finding out if the man really is a natural born citizen.
Vetting means questioning his loyalty to this country, given his previous associations with America-hating communists (like Frank Marshall Davis) and left-wing domestic terrorists (like Ayers and Dohrn).
Vetting means finding out who put him through Harvard law school.
Vetting means asking him if he is now — or has ever been — a Muslim.
... or a radical leftist.
Vetting means digging for (or demading to see) his medical records.
Vetting would include asking tough questions about a presidential candidate's voting record.

It just didn't happen.

Media Viciousness and Obfuscating the Meaning of "Natural Born Citizen":  [Scroll down]  I hope you all remember the media was completely absent about all this, AWOL, running from and covering up anything critical of Obama during the election.  They were running from William Ayers, Tony Rezko, Gov. Blago, Rev. Wright, Farrakhan, the socialist mentor who was a pedophile — Frank somebody, questions about Obama fund raising, lack of patriotism, and ACORN.

The Anti-American President.  In actuality, nobody vetted Obama.  We should have known the Democratic National Committee (DNC) wouldn't.  Relying on the DNC to vet a candidate would be as derelict as putting Tim Geithner in charge of the IRS.  The American people were obliged to do the vetting.  We are supposed to have a non-partisan, autonomous press just for this kind of thing.  Instead, the fourth estate collapsed completely into a propaganda arm for the Democrat party.

Don Hewitt's Biased Specter Haunts Us.  In CBS's softball Obama interview by Steve Kroft — the same lapdog reporter Hewitt had used in the 1992 Clinton infomercial — Obama was repeatedly pictured before adoring, cheering crowds.  CBS even showed him embracing an African-American woman who "wanted to tell Obama that she had just lost her husband of 70 years, and that he tried to live long enough to vote for him."  Whenever Obama spoke, Kroft let him orate almost uninterrupted.  After merely mentioning that Obama had "never run anything," Kroft left unchallenged Obama's dishonest retort that "if the question is executive experience, then Senator McCain and I are on equal footing."  In fact, McCain commanded the largest fighter squadron in the U.S. Navy, but viewers would never know this from CBS.

Who Is Behind Quashing the Birth Certificate Issue?  [Scroll down]  Even more significant is that no one in the media thought Obama's missing birth certificate worth even casual mention.  Their thinking seemed to be:  If we're not going to check on his eligibility to be president, then why question why the other crucial documents were — and continue to be — sealed?  For instance:  his baptism certificate; elementary, high school, college and graduate school transcripts; visa(s); selective service record; alleged multiple Social Security numbers; Illinois attorney's license; Illinois State Senate records; law practice client list; Univ. of Chicago scholarly articles; financial records while a community organizer in Chicago; and medical records.  I'm also curious about why Michelle Obama's law license was suspended in 1993 by the Illinois Supreme Court, but then again she wasn't running for president.

Van Jones and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.  It was always striking that Obama, who had written two autobiographies at such an early age, had paid no real attention in either book to his only real executive experience before seeking the Presidency.  The media went along.

Why did the press ignore the Van Jones scandal?  On March 13, 2008, ABC News broke the story that Barack Obama's longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had made a number of incendiary statements from the pulpit of Obama's church in Chicago.  The most inflammatory of those remarks was Wright's notorious "God d--- America" sermon.  The news set off a media firestorm.  "God d--- America" was in the papers, magazines, the Internet, television, radio.  It was everywhere, except one place:  the news pages of America's most powerful newspaper, the New York Times.

Baier Shares Poll on How 90% Recognize Media Helped Obama Win.  "A new national poll finds most of the people surveyed think the media helped get President Obama elected," FNC's Bret Baier noted in his Thursday night [9/24/2009] Grapevine segment in highlighting a September 8-11 national survey of 800 Americans by Sacred Heart University which discovered "a large majority, 89.3%, suggested the national media played a very or somewhat strong role in helping to elect President Obama."

Dog the Wags.  Forty years ago, Big Media icon Walter Cronkite might have been America's most trusted man, but according to a recent national survey conducted by Sacred Heart University, 89 percent of Americans suspect that Big Media played a strong role in getting President Obama elected.

The shocking lesson from the climate scandal.  The election of Barack Obama is a prime example.  Because Candidate Obama was not vetted by the liberal media the campaign was able to present Obama as the most transparent and post-partisan candidate in history.  Of course, the media were not just negligent in investigating the real Obama, they actively promoted the narrative.  It turns out, of course, that the narrative was a complete fraud.

Obama's Afghan Pickle.  [Scroll down slowly]  By Memorial Day 2008, however, Obama was claiming that it was his "uncle" who was "part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz."  When reminded that his mother was an only child and his father a Kenyan, Obama designated his "great uncle" as the liberator of Auschwitz.  This proved problematic as well because Auschwitz, as the Republican National Committee gleefully pointed out, was actually liberated by the Soviets.  No matter.  Obama was learning that he could say pretty much anything he wanted without consequence.

Obama:  What a Difference A Year Makes.  I long ago stopped reading news magazines such as Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report because they became increasingly useless as a mean to know what was actually occurring.  Throughout the 2008 campaign they and others devoted cover-after-cover to the face of Obama, becoming in the process a very bad joke.  It was a total abnegation of objectivity.

Editor Tina Brown Admits: Obama 'Got the Best Press Known to Man'.  Two prominent journalists appeared on Friday's [2/5/2010] Good Morning America and casually admitted that Barack Obama has received glowing coverage from the press.

Decrypting Obama's 'Pop':  [Scroll down slowly]  If [Frank Marshall] Davis named the poem "Pop" for his own literal fatherhood, it is quite possible that Obama himself never knew.  The progressive media do not care to know.  And in their world, there is no greater offense than to seek to know something they have chosen not to.  Ask Joe McCarthy or Whittaker Chambers or Gary Aldrich or the AGW "denialists" or the Swiftboaters or the CIA interrogators or even poor Linda Tripp.  Ask the "birthers."

Funeral Dirge for the Main Stream Media?  The greatest reality check for the Old Media (MSM) is yet to come.  Complicit in their coronation of Barack Obama during the last presidential campaign — indeed during the first several months of his presidency — the established news organizations, with the exception of Fox, licked the boots of BHO.  Uninterested in digging into Obama's lack of experience, lack of family history, and lack of anything substantive, the MSM donned their cheerleader outfits and hoisted pom poms to root for The One who would show America had finally progressed enough to accept a "black" president.

Deadly Triumvirate Destroying America.  [Scroll down]  Perhaps the primary blame should be assigned to the mainstream media, which gave Barack Hussein Obama a free pass.  The mainstream media by and large reported only the positive news on Mr. Obama.  They downplayed or censored out all the negative news ... His record was clear.  He associated with bigots, racists, terrorists, America-haters and others, which citizens of the greatest country in the history of the world would almost automatically avoid.  He had a record of radical leftism and liberalism and one of the most highly partisan records.  He broke key campaign promises even before the campaign was over, such as his promise to take public funding for his campaign.

Hope(fund) and Change:  Breaking the Obama Code.  [Scroll down]  Post-Iowa, the MSM no longer resembled slumbering giants; they now seemed downright sedated.  One of the stories they missed involves tens of millions of dollars and a few activist campaign finance lawyers, some left over from the Dean campaign, who concentrate on areas of regulatory issues, elections/campaign finance, and developing non-compliance strategies.  As late as October 2, 2008, the American Spectator ran a chilling Prowler column, "Obama's Fishy $200 Million," in which an FEC auditor, declining to be identified for fear of retribution, describes his attempts to open a formal investigation in the last weeks of the campaign.

Baked in the Cake.  Everything you needed to know about Obama could have been learned from his campaign.

He's Not a Muslim!  ("Not that There's Anything Wrong with That")  The entire issue of religion in the 2008 campaign was somewhat successfully pigeonholed into neat little compartments by the media — pigeonholes that have little to do with reality.  Everything was built around hiding or obfuscating or outright lying about who Obama is and what he believes.

A President Who Wants to Be Anywhere but Here.  Obama seems to have been restless all his life.  During the 2008 campaign he tried to turn that restlessness into a political asset.  His supporters argued that his travels gave him insight into other people and how to get us all working together even as the media avoided the negative side of such restlessness — that Obama had seldom stayed at one place or position long enough to show any accomplishments.  His undergraduate degree was earned at two institutions, and transcripts have never been provided for either.

The malignant malice of Chris Matthews.  MSNBC political pundit Chris Matthews was so smitten with the President's speechifying that stirring electrical currents physically manifested in his body.  The separation-of-church-and-state commentator admitted he "cried over an Obama speech" and "compared him to Jesus."  Completely infatuated, Matthews openly gushed when Barack spoke: "I felt this thrill going up my leg.  I mean, I don't have that too often."


Media favoritism between the election and the inauguration

Tavis Smiley of PBS:  'We're All Working For Barack Obama'.  Chris Matthews won't be working alone.  Back in November, the Hardball host said it was his job to make Barack Obama's presidency a success.  Today, another TV journalist expressed a similar sentiment.  Tavis Smiley has declared that "we're all working for Barack Obama" and that "we have to help make Obama a great president."

So Now It's Cool For Presidents To Dodge Questions.  What a difference an administration makes.  During the Bush years, if a spokesman or the president himself attempted to dodge a tough question, the media would go into their Sam Donaldson impressions and pundits would see a conspiracy of silence.  But now that it's Obama, the dodging that was once denounced is suddenly celebrated.

What Democrat Scandal?  With the governor caught on tape unloading obscenity after obscenity about how he expected to reap a financial bonanza for handing out his gubernatorial perks, this story was so undeniably big, even the Obamaphile press couldn't ignore it.  So instead these reporters tried to downplay its impact on the President-elect and the Democrats.

Life At New Animal Farm Won't Be All That Bad.  [Scroll down slowly]  Indeed, almost supernaturally crises will be solved with the departure of the hated Bush:  no more flooding streets from cracked water mains that were a result of a President's neglect of infrastructure, and no more spontaneous crashes of Mississippi River bridges due to diversions of critical federal aid from cash-strapped states to Iraq.  And when the temperatures rise or drop, the wind howls, the clouds burst forth or go away, the snow melts or piles up, it will be, well, nature that caused the havoc, not the current occupant of the White House who failed to sign Kyoto.

An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage.  Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago.  The [Washington] Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

Chicago Tribune:  All Obama, All the Time.  Both of Chicago's major dailies have sold out editions containing special "commemorative" sections devoted to Barack Obama.  Judging by today's Chicago Tribune, perhaps the strategy is to push out an Obama commemorative issue every day.

Post-journalism:  The mainstream press ... blew up their credibility in the past election by morphing into the Team Obama press agency.  There will come a time in the year ahead when either Obama's unexamined past will come back to haunt him, or his inexperience and tentativeness in foreign affairs will be embarrassingly apparent, or his European-socialist agenda for domestic programs simply won't work.  And as public opinion falls, what will MSNBC, the New York Times, the editors of Newsweek, a Chris Matthews or the anchors at the major networks say?

Majority Say Reporters Tried To Help Obama.  As the presidential campaign comes to a close, a majority of voters (51%) say most reporters have tried to help Barack Obama win the presidency.  Just seven percent (7%) think they tried to help John McCain.  Thirty-one percent (31%) say reporters have offered unbiased coverage, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.  Ten percent (10%) are undecided.  Men are far more suspicious than women.

Media Defeats McCain?  Obama faced none of the withering scrutiny applied to even the Republican vice presidential candidate.  Instead, he was treated to a nearly constant string of encomiums and tributes to his transformational candidacy, while nearly every possible pitfall of political embarrassment or inconvenience has been omitted or dismissed.

Media Meltdown.  Most people will never meet a presidential candidate so their impressions are formed by media coverage.  If McCain is portrayed as old and out of touch, rather than experienced and toughened by his prisoner of war experience and Obama is presented as young, hip and "news," that leaves an impression on those voters who don't dig beneath the superficial.  The media now own Barack Obama.  Let's see how long they take to turn on him once he starts making mistakes.

Obama's cheerleaders in the media do a disservice.  [Scroll down slowly]  This week and last I've been disgusted at the rampantly tacky and flagrantly unethical posts on the Facebook pages of working journalists I know in Toronto and around the country.  Unabashed in their cheering at Barack Obama's victory in the U.S. presidential elections, they're giving me ample reason to think the foaming-mouth conservatives who decry the "liberal media" aren't so crazy after all.

Liberalism = Genius?  If there is a dreadfully overused word in the giddy countdown to the Obama inauguration, it is "smart."  Not just "smart," but also its stronger cousins like "brilliant" and "genius."  These words have been offered shamelessly for nearly every person assigned a role by President-Elect Obama.  They are assembling an "all-star cabinet."  This was not an honor for those having attended all the right schools, but a tribute to people who have all the "right" ideas.  Liberals are smart because they're liberals.

Obama as Hoover:  The Importance of Storytelling.  [Liberal journalists] are busy re-creating a freshman U.S. Senator and his announced political policies from the campaign as the new gold standard of American and global life.  What they are pushing here is not, to say the least, true.  And unlike the days when conservatives were effectively shut out of the media world, it will now become both possible and critical to meet the daily barrage of distracting falsehoods as well as the long term assaults on conservatism that are to be expected.  Assaults on individual freedom, on capitalism itself, on the free-market and, in foreign affairs, the time-tested principle of peace through strength.

Playing 20 Questions with the Media.  Journalists are inquisitive creatures by nature, constantly asking questions and demanding answers.  Loudly.  Yet, some questions never seem to be thrown their way.  Here are twenty questions I would like to ask the media.

Obama a Centrist? Like I'm a Liberal.  I am far less convinced than many that Barack Obama will be a centrist in office.  Despite his announced future Cabinet appointees, I find it amazing that people are so willing to believe he'll change his stripes that fast. ... Also, just because this or that appointee was in the Clinton administration does not mean Obama is a centrist.  The media have whitewashed any liberalism associated with the Clintons and portrayed them as committed moderates.

The Obama presidency begins to emerge.  Anyone who thinks I'm rushing the advent of the messianic presidency is invited to take a closer look at recent media coverage.  Obama has declared himself president in all but name.  He has gone so far as to call for his policies to be put in place even before being inaugurated.  The mass media, from Time magazine to barely-hanging-on fish wrappers like the Detroit Free Press have declared the current incumbent to be irrelevant, the "lamest of lame ducks", in the words of Joe Klein.

Time's Glowing Obama Person of the Year Story.  With the level of surprise set firmly at zero — Time magazine routinely chooses the presidential election winner as Person of the Year — Time gave that honor to Barack Obama on Wednesday.  But the first peek at David Von Drehle's cover story shows that Time's gooey valentines to Obama know no end.  The headline is "Why History Can't Wait."

Shirtless Obama photo staged?  A photo of President-elect Barack Obama strolling shirtless Monday in Hawaii is the shot seen 'round the world.  And it has spawned nearly a thousand news stories, not to mention giddy headlines from a gushing press.

Tale of Two Presidential Workout Fanatics.  On Christmas Day, the Washington Post delivered a front-page paean to Barack Obama's workout habits.  The 1,233-word ode to O's physical fitness read more like a Harlequin romance novel than an A-1 news article.  Sighed smitten reporter Eli Zaslow, "The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games." ... Zaslow mentioned in passing that President George W. Bush shares Obama's commitment to health.  What he failed to acknowledge is that the same reporters who so greatly admire Obama's lithe figure derided Bush for his training schedule.

The Friendly Neighborhood Press Corps.  Tired of all the bad news from Washington?  The Democratic ascendancy ought to provide some relief.  Most of the people who report the news are Democrats, or at least sympathize ideologically with the Democratic Party.  As a result, the so-called adversary press is at its least adversarial when the Democrats are in power and the Republicans are weak, as they are now.

In Love With Obama.  Bringing love-worship to the presidency is an unnecessary risk.  Applying the same high emotions to a thing, in this case the federal government, amounts to idol worship.  For these reasons, I am finally canceling my subscription to the Washington Post.  I had been maintaining it, simply to keep an eye on what the "other side" is thinking, planning, doing.  But lately all they are doing is worshiping "Blessed Leader."  Their coverage of the coming inauguration is more hysterical drama than you could find at a dozen teenage weddings.

Network Evening Shows Downplay Geithner Tax Evasion as a 'Speed Bump'.  The network evening shows didn't have much of an appetite for Democratic hypocrisy among the team they hailed as a "superstar Cabinet" on Tuesday night [1/13/2009].  Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama's nominee for Treasury Secretary, a man who would oversee the IRS, failed to pay $42,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes — and waited to pay more than half of that amount — $26,000 — only after Obama decided to nominate him.

President Obama?  Could you be more specific?  Breaking with a decades-old tradition, the Associated Press — keepers of the AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, which purports to serve as the "bible" for copy desks everywhere — announced in a Nov. 12 ruling that henceforth, it would use a president's title, first name and family name whenever he or she is first referenced in a story.  In other words, rather than calling him President Obama, newspapers will be expected to spell out that it is President BARACK Obama to whom they are referring (presumably, to distinguish him from the very many other President Obamas out there.)

Day 15 of Obama's honeymoon.  Barack Obama and his supporters have been relentlessly comparing the new president to Franklin Roosevelt.  At least one similarity is shockingly accurate:  They were both beneficiaries of an obsequious press corps.


Media favoritism in Obama's first year as President

Media bias is probably the second biggest reason Mr. Obama was elected.  Numerous examples of bias in Obama's favor during the 2008 campaign can be found here.  (Conversely, Obama's team has been shown to exert its leverage on the media.)  Now that he is in office, the bias hasn't subsided a bit.

Media Fawns Over Obama Inauguration.  President Barack Obama's inauguration received 35 times the coverage in the world media than George Bush did in 2005.

The smoker-in-chief.  It's been a long time since we've had a smoker in the White House.  The media, of course, never really got around to telling the American public that the Democratic candidate for president was a nicotine addict.  Even now, they prefer to write stories about his 45 minute daily work outs, and how awesomely lean and fit he is.  But the plain fact is that the President first smokerhas a nicotine jones, and can't get the monkey off his back.

Is President Barack Obama still smoking?  [Anderson] Cooper's question:  "Have you had a cigarette since you've been to the White House?"  The president's answer:  "No, I haven't had one on these grounds."

What's that?  You didn't know he was a smoker?

Obama Thinks Original Declaration of Independence is Not Good Enough?  In his Saturday remarks during his campaign train ride, President-elect Barack Obama issued some soaring rhetoric about the state of the country today.  At least the Old Media thought it was soaring rhetoric, anyway.  Typically, the media was overawed by his mellifluous tones, of course.  But during these remarks in Baltimore Obama made a startling suggestion.  He said we need a "new Declaration of Independence." ... Can you imagine the media giving a pass to a Republican that proposed making a new Declaration of Independence?

Obama as God's Instrument:  There was the populist effect of the "Joe the Plumber" narrative, the eleventh hour unearthing of a video exposing Obama's undiluted wealth redistribution philosophy in his own words, and Obama's past liaisons with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and Reverent (sic) Jeremiah Wright, to name a few.  It is left to the discretion of future historians to decide how to exculpate the media for the many other, even more disturbing nuggets that it actively suppressed or simply chose not to report.

Fifteen Reasons I'm Already Tired of the Obama Era:  [#9] It's grotesque to see the worshipful treatment Obama is getting. It seems like his face is on the cover of half the magazines in the country, the press treats him with kid gloves, and they're naming schools after him. Meanwhile, he's just another sleazy politician who has yet to show an aptitude for much of anything other than reading off of a teleprompter.

Seven reasons for healthy skepticism:  The big media companies that once invested in serious accountability journalism are shells of their former selves. ... The end result:  There are few reporters in this country doing the kind of investigative reporting that hold government officials' feet to the fire.

Sorry media, Obama's just not that into you.  The vaunted fourth estate of American democracy has transformed itself into a bunch of breathless and biologically-pressured thirtyish career women hoping to be noticed by the hot guy who just walked into the room and winked in their direction. ... It would appear Obama phones ahead to the ones he plans to call upon at news conferences, and the leftover ladies and gentlemen of the press don't like it.

Clear and Present Danger.  Now that the festivities are over, it is time for the masters of the media to stop asking inane questions of the new folks in town — such as, "How do you like your new office?" — and for the Obama administration to get down to work on a clear and present danger.

The Phenomenon as President:  Obama is the object of unprecedented media adoration.  Part of it, of course, is because he is the first black man to be elected president, which is an extraordinary and authentically moving achievement in American history.  But ideology is also at work.  If, say, Clarence Thomas had been elected president, the media attention would not be anything like what we have witnessed.  I find Obama to be an interesting and in many ways an attractive figure, but watching the media coverage of him over the last several days has been embarrassing.

Inauguration extravaganza sees journalists caught up in the moment.  When George Bush's people put on a $42-million inaugural program four years ago, many editorial writers and columnists around America came unglued.  A St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times commentator said the president needed to prove that his call for sacrifice "is more than just empty words." ... A columnist at the New York Observer evoked images of Louis XIV.  It would have been nice, for the sake of consistency and fairness, if the commentariat had leveled a measure of that same attitude at last week's Obamapalooza, which cost roughly the same but drew a fraction of the blow-back.

The Immaculate Perception.  He hasn't taken the oath of office yet, but Barack Obama is expected to Do Great Things.  What this expectation is based on is anybody's guess, unless you count promising all things to all people on the campaign trail.  He is, for many, a new Messiah who can do no wrong.  To see the media coverage, one would think his election is the greatest thing this nation has seen since its very inception.

Media averts eyes from subpoenas to Obama top staff.  If this had happened to Bush 43, do you suppose the media would have ignored it?  The meme of Karl Rove being frog marched out of the White House would have been born immediately.

Ushering in the error of Obama.  The inauguration-ordination-coronation of Barack Obama on Tuesday was heralded by his fawning media as nothing less than a "messianic" revival, with endless inaugural balls and star-studded celebrations on either end.  Strange, but I seem to recall that the Leftmedia skewered George W. Bush for spending almost $40 million on his first inauguration, proclaiming the events to be "grotesque" and all about "excess."  But with deficit spending estimated to fly past the trillion-dollar mark in Obama's first year in office, not one of his media sycophants has questioned the cost of this week's events.

Obama: The Endless Honeymoon?  "When," someone recently asked me, "does President Obama's media 'honeymoon' period end?"  Answer:  It won't.  Oh, sure, every relationship experiences peaks and valleys.  But the "mainstream media" wanted Obama to win, and helped him do so.  If Obama were a stock, the media would be "fully invested." ... The major news media saw former President George W. Bush as a villain and themselves as sheriff.  Obama, on the other hand, enjoys their support.

Time Mag Photographer Works as Both a 'Journalist' AND Team Obama Employee?  Time Magazine has employed a photographer named Callie Shell that has apparently been doing double duty as both a "journalist" AND a member of team Obama, taking pictures subsequently sent out as official White House photos.  How is it that we can have someone thinking that bias cannot be presumed when that same person is working for both a news agency and at the same time for the subject of that news?

Pliability Journalism.  More than 144 hours into Barack Obama's presidency, the economy is still in recession, the country is still at war, and in many parts of the country it's still cold outside.  Citizens are growing impatient:  Wasn't President Obama supposed to bring change?  Yet one institution has changed dramatically, and in a very short time:  the press.  After spending the Bush years as a voice of opposition, American journalists have by and large turned on a dime and become cheerleaders for the man in power.

CBS's Andy Rooney Can't Find Anyone Who Dislikes Obama.  At the end of Sunday's 60 Minutes on CBS, commentator Andy Rooney did some of his usual thinking out loud, praising Barack Obama:  "I've lived through the election of a lot of American presidents — more than ten, I think — and about half the people I knew at the time hated one or the other of the two candidates ... Maybe I'm reading the wrong newspapers and listening to the wrong people, but I'm not hearing anyone who hates Barack Obama."  Perhaps Rooney should stop listening to his own network's fawning Obama coverage and consult the 46% of the country that did not vote for the Democratic president.

Stop Shoving Obama Down Our Throats.  No space needs to be taken up here to provide examples of the mainstream media's unyielding affection for the new leader.  There are too many to list.  In ordinary times, it might not matter that so-called journalists choose to become toadies and roadies for the president's band.  But we are in a place and time where we need the President of the United States to have a successful administration, as defined by economic growth, not the growth of a personality cult.  We want an ailing economy to get healthier.  But some of us don't see how the personality cult being watered and fed daily by the mainstream media is going to produce that result.

CNN is Still Pushing Lie of Wright/Hagee Comparison.  Not only did CNN fall back on the lie that Hagee is somehow just as bad as Wright — and thereby smearing John McCain with Wright's racist hatespeak — but CNN got a twofer with this piece by again portraying America as the land of permanent, unrelenting racism by hinting that Obama will never get a chance because he's black.

It's hard to believe I'm no longer American.  On the front of USA Today was the screaming headline, "Americans go gaga over first lady's inaugural gown."  I didn't even know she had an inaugural gown.  Then, and this is the tricky part, it turns out, according to rumor, that she hadn't actually picked out the gown she would wear; it was still before noon on the day of the inaugural.  Evidently, I would be gaga later, but the USA Today was so sure that I, as an American, would be gaga that the headline could be written in advance.

The Impending Obama Meltdown.  Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary.  And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.  We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion — and with no Dick Morris to bail him out — brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking.

Exclusive:  Interview with Bernie Goldberg.  This is not a book about the same old media bias.  They crossed a very bright line this time, the main-stream media, a very bright line.  And they moved from media bias to media activism.  We know about judicial activism where judges know what's best for everybody, and to [heck] with the legislature, we know what's best.  And in a similar way a lot of reporters thought that they knew what was best, and what was best was not only to be partisan witnesses to history, but to help shape history.

Obama's Press List:  Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness.  We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors.  Mr. Obama can more than handle his own, so our guess is that this is an attempt to discipline reporters who aren't White House favorites.  Few accounts of Monday night's event even mentioned the curious fact that the White House had picked its speakers in advance.

Blue Skies For Obama.  Katrina crashes into New Orleans, FEMA responds feebly and President Bush is blamed for the loss of life and limb.  Winter smacks middle America, killing 55, FEMA's late again, but President Obama gets a pass.

The Slobbering Love Affair Between Obama and the Press.  [Bernard] Goldberg often inserts corny jokes into the text for levity, but underneath it all is a sadness, a sense that a profession he once was proud to call his own is less than a shell of its old self.  And he's not just bemoaning an industry's self-induced collapse.  He's afraid of what an ineffective press means for the country.

ABC:  Part of the Obama Media Machine.  Is it unethical for former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos — an independent journalist — to participate in daily conversations with three of the Democratic Party's top strategists while employed as ABC News' chief Washington correspondent and anchor of "This Week"?  "If Karl Rove took a job as an anchor on FOX News you would have to pass smelling salts around Washington DC," Media Research Center President Brent Bozell told Human Events.

Obama Ignores Intelligence Findings.  When Barack Obama hit his head while entering Marine One, this is how one objective journalist covered it:  "It looks like those finely honed reflexes sharpened on the basketball court served him well as he appeared to bend in order to soften the blow almost as soon as he sensed it coming."  When Gerald Ford did it, we got Chevy Chase mocking him every Saturday night.  When Barack Obama does it, it just shows how honed his reflexes are, and the need for an upgraded helicopter.

Obama and "Me".  It's one thing for a supposedly combative press to fawn over a presidential candidate — and now a president.  Who wants to devote precious column inches to Barack Obama's ties to radical bomber Bill Ayers when Sarah Palin's wardrobe demands investigation?  Why shoot ordinary photographs of the president when you can portray him as a haloed Byzantine saint? But now the New York Times has gone too far:  it is attempting to rewrite the history of English grammar in order to flatter the president.

Media idiot of the day.  Combine Obama idolatry with malignant fanning of racism, and you get today's winner.  The title goes to Jon-Christopher Bua, political analyst for Sky News, whose embarrassing near-orgasmic tribute to Obama betrays a singular lack of knowledge, combined with a malignant fanning of racism.

How media sucks up to the White House:  In the early days of any administration, reporters reach out to the men and women who might become their sources over the next four years — then slather them with glowing profiles suitable for framing in their mothers' bedrooms. ... But this proliferation of profiles isn't about the reader's need to know, or at least not entirely.

Obama and the Stock Market.  [Almost nobody in the media is] saying anything critical of Obama's policies which, obviously, the stock market — conventionally the predictor of our economy — thinks are dead wrong.  Cognitive dissonance?  Mental imbalance?  Slavish idolatry?  Or just plain inability to admit you made a mistake?  You tell me.  Meanwhile, the market goes lower and lower while the media continues its hosannas to BHO.

Obama Can't Double-Talk Us Out Of This.  Obama is a great pretender.  He repeatedly says he's doing things that he isn't, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. ... He's helped by much of the media, who seem so enthralled with him that they don't see glaring contradictions.  During the campaign, Obama said he would change Washington's petty partisanship; he also advocated a highly partisan agenda.  Both claims could not be true.  The media barely noticed; the same obliviousness persists.

Nickelodeon Broadcasts Cartoon Homage to 'Dear Leader' Obama.  Does anyone here recall Nickelodeon presenting a cartoon homage to President George W. Bush?  No?  Of course not.  "Wrong" politics.  However, if you think your very young children are safe from being exposed to subtle political brainwashing while watching Nick Jr., which presents Nickelodeon cartoons for children 5 and under, you would be wrong.

There'll Be No Debate.  While the erudite, urbane left demonstrates its sophistication and collegiality by personally attacking Rush Limbaugh, the nation is going down in financial flames, largely because of the unchecked policy insanity being unleashed by our new president.  Yet his flacks in the media continue to shield him from even rudimentary questions that any other president would receive.

The Plight of the Right Could Have an End in Sight.  Politics these last few weeks have been a game of distraction.  Pres. Barack Obama gives a State of the Union?like speech, and we subsequently fixate on the first lady's daring to bare her well-toned arms in February.  A young, rising-star Republican gives a response to Obama's address, and we focus on the way his suit billows off his shoulders.

Late-Night Comics Still in Thrall to Obama.  As a fan of comedy in general and satire in particular, I've always enjoyed the late night television circuit. ... One of the chief complaints I've been hearing from conservative friends over the last several years, though, is that these shows are nothing more than thinly disguised bastions of left-wing brainwashing where pseudo-intellectual elites bash the Grand Old Party and indoctrinate the nation's socialist youth against sound conservative thinking.

If Bush Had Done What Obama Is Doing...  Herewith some questions about contrasts and double standards — and how the leftists comprising the nameless "they" who rule the world would react to what Barack Obama is doing if Obama were George Bush.  For instance ... If Obama were Bush, what would their reaction be to the president's failure — even now — to submit a plan to salvage the nation's banks?  What would they think of their president if he and his acolytes took out after the other party's leading entertainer — Oprah Winfrey — declaring her not only de facto head of the Democratic Party but the foremost embodiment of that party's ideological excesses?

Media Bias Against Traditional Values:  Not only does Google enjoy a 70-percent share of the ads accompanying search results and articles and 90 percent of U.S. advertising profits, but it also accounts for almost 70 percent of U.S. searches.  This means if Google buries a site, an archeological dig may be necessary to find it.  That is, for most Americans, anyway.  We should also note that Google has forged quite an alliance with Barack Obama. Not only did CEO Eric Schmidt campaign for the president, he also was on Obama's economic advisory committee.  This isn't surprising, given that they're ideological soulmates.  But this similarity does bring to mind my observation that people not only get the government they deserve, they also get the media they deserve.  Let's just hope they don't end up being one and the same.

Wikipedia scrubs Obama eligibility.  Wikipedia, the online "free encyclopedia" mega-site written and edited entirely by its users, has been deleting within minutes any mention of eligibility issues surrounding Barack Obama's presidency, with administrators kicking off anyone who writes about the subject, WND has learned. ... The Wikipedia entry about former President George W. Bush, by contrast, is highly critical.

A Front-Page Story:  President McCain's First 50 Days.  Suppose Sen. John McCain, rather than Sen. Barack Obama, won the presidency but made the same decisions and pursued the same goals to turn around the economy.

Conservatives and the death of newspapers.  It didn't require the Obama candidacy to tell us that newspapers are virtually the house organs of the Democratic Party (which is why an industry bailout may soon be in the offing).  Yet MSM journalists continue to see no bias, hear no bias and speak no bias.  Despite the extensive damage this problem has done to the industry and the profession, journalists refuse even to address the issue, let alone talk about remedies.

Imagine if 'President McCain' Joked About the Special Olympics.  President Barack Obama ... quickly apologized.  Crisis averted.  Fair enough.  But the real story is the media double standard:  Imagine the uproar if a President John McCain made the Special Olympics comment.  For that matter, imagine if a President McCain mistook a White House window for a door; his secretary of Treasury had not paid taxes; he granted two dozen waivers to his no-lobbyists-in-government rule; and he had promised bipartisanship but got only three across-the-aisle votes for his "stimulus" package.

Freeman Affair Reveals Problems For Obama and the Media.  The recent appointment and ultimate withdrawal of Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council has exposed much that is wrong with President Barack Obama's first months in office, both in terms of policy and vetting, as well as the media coverage surrounding both.  Many of Obama's supporters said it was unfair to criticize Obama's associations with people like the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and the anti-Semitic preacher of hate, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and called it guilt by association.  It is now becoming clearer why those sorts of associations matter.

TV Journalists Enchanted by Obamas:  'America's Unofficial Royalty'.  NBC's Chuck Todd then admired how "the President was able to do a diplomatic decathlon, packing in a week's worth of international diplomacy into 12 hours," before he hailed how "America's unofficial royalty, the President and First Lady, reconnected tonight for more ceremonial duties, including a private audience with actual royalty, the Queen herself."

Gag me — Press goes ga-ga over Michelle.  Is Michelle Obama the second coming of Jackie Kennedy?  That seems to be a common theme among a press that has gone over the top with their coverage of the First Lady.

Laura Ingraham Tweaks 'Today' On Obama Obsession.  The "Today" show devoted much of last week's coverage of Obama's European trip to obsessing over such frivolous matters as what Michelle Obama was wearing and what kind of gift the Obamas gave the Queen, so when Laura Ingraham was invited on Wednesday's "Today" show, the conservative radio talk show host couldn't resist knocking the silly coverage...

A Fawning Frenzy For Michelle.  Imagine being Laura Bush and turning on the television and watching the absolute deluge of sticky-sweet syrup being poured all over Michelle Obama during her European debut as first lady.  It is as if every TV reporter was handed a pamphlet of talking points and ordered to compare Mrs. Obama to Jackie Kennedy.  NBC's Dawna Friesen gushed:  "Though Harvardeducated Michelle Obama has substance, not just style, and that's what sets her apart."  Apart from ... whom?

Media Insiders Say Internet Hurts Journalism.  In a poll of prominent members of the national news media, nearly two-thirds say the Internet is hurting journalism more than it is helping. ... The media insiders were also asked about coverage of President Obama.  Of 45 respondents, 71 percent say it has been "about right," 22 percent say it's been "too easy" and 7 percent say it has been "too tough."

Obama, aided by media, falling short on pledge for change.  The purpose of the press is supposed to be to report the news in an objective manner to the public.  Once reporters start adding their own personal perspectives to the story it is hard for the public to trust the accuracy and objectivity of the reporting and it starts to become similar to entertainment reporting.  It is worse when the press underreports or down plays newsworthy items.  An example would be the increase troops in Afghanistan.  If I had not been watching the news on that particular day, I would not have even known about it.

It's all Obama, all the time.  If it's Thursday, it must be Obama.  Or Friday.  Or Saturday.  Or just about any day.  Barack Obama has gone from being historic to being ubiquitous.  He doesn't just control the news cycle, he is the news cycle.

Boss Obama.  The mainstream media has been called the fourth branch of government because it has a duty to monitor the actions of our politicians.  However, journalists have already abdicated this role — as was clear during the campaign.  We are seeing the rise on an imperial presidency, and the media, or what is left of it, snoozes.

O's Foreign Follies.  The world has rabies and our swooning media deliver headlines about the new Obama family dog.  Yeah, the puppy's cute.  But must journalists be lapdogs?

Media Cover Obama Like He's Ultimate A-List Celebrity.  For the national media, Barack Obama isn't merely the president of the United States.  He's so much more than that.  Obama is a celebrity, and he and his family are covered that way.  That means there is a heavy focus on the personal, making Obama the first "Entertainment Tonight president."  First, it was Michelle's wardrobe.  Then, it was the kids' school.  Then it was Michelle's White House vegetable garden.  And most recently, it is the new dog, Bo.

Consequences Of An "American Idol" Presidency.  According to the press, collegiality and even love now abounds among nations that excoriated the United States and its former President, George W. Bush, only months ago.  In wonderful contrast, they extol America for its openness and professed willingness to sit down and talk with adversaries.  At least that is the picture that Obama's leftist cohorts want the general public to receive.  Unfortunately, the truth is far less rosy.  And the likelihood of a day of reckoning for all of this foolishness is far greater.

Media Cover Up Obama's Spelling Error in Letter to Fan.  If former President George W. Bush made a spelling error in a written reply to a piece of fan mail, would press outlets have covered for him or pointed it out?

Shirtless Obama magazine cover generates heat.  A photograph of a bare-chested Barack Obama on the cover of a popular Washington magazine had some fans swooning while others cried foul, saying the image had been doctored.  The Washingtonian has been swamped by readers who had seen the May edition showing the US President wearing nothing but swimming trunks and sunglasses, next to the line:  "Our new neighbor is hot."

Passing Judgment.  We are now on the 95th day of Barack Obama's presidency, and that revving sound you hear is the machinery of the media-industrial complex, gearing up for the Big Day.  There will be special sections, news analyses, cable logos and round-the-clock chatter as journalists race into their 100-day evaluations.  This arbitrary benchmark has become nothing less than another opportunity for media marketing. ... So why do we do it?  The media love anniversary-type stories.  They want to feed off the high public interest in Obama, his family and his dog.  They are desperate to keep the excitement of the campaign alive.

"Never Again," Obama Style.  No president in modern times has managed to conceal so much of his biography as this one.  The journalists assigned to the Obama beat seem to have lost their traditional avidity for digging out the missing details.  We do not have a medical report, or a college transcript from Columbia, or a notion of how well he did in Harvard Law School.  These things are not automatically significant, but they can be.

100 Days of Love.  There's something very curious — even laughable — about watching the media assemble to offer President Obama a grade after the first 100 days.  They weren't exactly a team of dispassionate scientists in a lab.  They continue to be what they've been all along — a rolling gaggle of Obama cheerleaders — only before it was a campaign and now it's an administration.  So now they're assessing whether their awe-inspiring historic candidate still glows with the luster of victory.

Obama Staffers Attend Secret Dinners With Lefty Media.  The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has let the cat out of the bag in the Post's April 27 issue about a regularly scheduled secret media dinner attended by some of the top left-wing journalists in the country. ... The secret dinners for Obama staffers and his boosters in the Old Media have been going on for "more than a year" and are sponsored by David Bradley, the owner of the Atlantic.  In attendance have been some of the most well known lefty journalists in Washington.

What Would the Media Say if Obama's Frequent Hollywood Guests Were Oil Execs?  The Hollywood contingent is downright chummy with this president.  That's not a surprise — Hollywood gave tens of millions to Obama, and Obama returned the favor by attempting to shoehorn a $246 million tax break for Hollywood into the stimulus package.  What's shocking is the media's soft treatment of this phenomenon.  Suppose that every single day, oil magnates stopped by the White House to chat with Obama.  Or — Heaven forefend — executives from WalMart.  Do you think the press would stand for that sort of favoritism?  Or would they scream bloody murder from the rooftops?

Barack Obama aglow after 100-day honeymoon — just like Carter.  [Scroll down]  The day has been seized as another opportunity to hone the Obama image, which was carefully crafted and protected during a campaign in which his persona and life story, rather than his policies, led to triumph.  Advisers who publicly mock the theme of 100 days have been discreetly parcelling out made-to-order anecdotes to the press, each one designed to show how decisive, far-thinking or cool under pressure he is.

The things you don't read about Barack Obama:  The Chronicle Herald recently made space for an urgent Associated Press dispatch from Washington informing readers the Obamas had chosen a Portuguese water dog.  Not original reporting, of course, but an AP rephrasing of a White House-arranged scoop in the Washington Post online. ... So here is a small selection of news on the most powerful man on Earth which has been deemed unfit to print.

Gingrich:  'Press Corps Has Taken Such a Pathetic Dive' with Obama.  Reacting to the questions posed during Wednesday's presidential news conference, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich expressed disappointment with the White House press corps, telling FNC's Greta Van Susteren the journalists have "taken such a pathetic dive with this President that they ought to be part of his PR firm.  I mean it's embarrassing to watch."

Watchdogs are heeling for Obama.  With few exceptions, the mainstream news media have been dutifully pushing the Obama message, burnishing his carefully crafted image and offering few challenges when he makes questionable or misleading pronouncements, gestures or policy statements.  In short, they seem mesmerized by the glamour of this new and different president. ... Whatever Obama says, or doesn't say, is usually good enough for them.

Lies And Liars.  Last week saw an unusual number of outright lies from our media and political class.  Lies that went virtually unchallenged. ... Lie #1:  ABC, celebrating Obama's 100 day mark, announced he is enjoying the best presidential job approval rating of any president at this point in 20 years.  Not so.  A simple google search shows that George W. Bush, at the 100 day mark in his presidency, enjoyed a 62% approval rating.  Obama, alas, enjoys only a 52% approval rating.  ABC lied.

Broadcast Networks Devote Half Their Nightly Newscasts to Obama.  Earlier on Monday [4/27/2009], my colleague Tim Graham previewed a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs finding that Barack Obama received more television coverage in his first 50 days in office than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did through similar points in their presidencies combined.  The final report has now been published, and the results are even more absurd.

When Reporters Rise For The President.  Some people noticed that many reporters rose from their seats last Friday [5/1/2009] when President Obama unexpectedly entered the White House briefing room, but the same courtesy was not always extended in the past when President Bush would make an appearance.  Comparison videos were even posted on YouTube.

Puffball Nation.  As the lamestream media continues to swoon Scarlett O'Hara-like over this president, we now know two things for sure:  they're really cheap dates.  Easy too.

Pardon Me, But Did He Just Ask for Grey Poupon?  [Scroll down]  And that burger "joint" — well, it's not exactly a glorified White Castle or Steak and Shake — or even a Five Guys, it's a spot where you can drop up to $17.50 on a burger.  You can get yours with foie gras, bordalaise sauce, and even white truffle oil.  Just like Mickey D's, right?  It turns out that maybe the cool "let's-show-them-we-are-just-like-them" adventure was at least a little flawed, but you'd never know it by the news coverage.

Obama gives the far Left 99 dreamy days.  President Obama reaches his 100th day in the White House Wednesday, so the liberal press is about to burst with flowery tributes to multiple milestones — some real, most imagined — of this most radical American chief executive ever.  Contrary to the plaudits flowing from America's left-leaning journalists this week, The Examiner must dissent by noting three of Obama "achievements" that likely mark his administration as a disaster in the making.

Pro-Obama bias is so routine that the few exceptions are newsworthy:
 Too Silly, Even for the MSM.  For once the mainstream media was not entirely snowed by the Obama administration's dog-and-pony show.  The subject was healthcare "savings" and everyone from the AMA to major insurers to drug companies pledged to do their part.  The only thing missing was any reasonable explanation for how they'd do so.  And the MSM figured it out.

Just suppose for a moment ...
 President Palin's First 100 Days: A near disaster.  The first 100 days of the Palin presidency, according to a consensus of media commentators, have proven a near disaster.  Perhaps it was Palin's scant two years' experience in a major government position that has eroded her gravitas, or maybe it was her flirty reliance on looks and informal chit-chat.

Thoughtful voice all but lost in Obama-Notre Dame drama.  Given how this has been spun, by an adoring pro-Obama (and pro-abortion rights) media, the weekend's news coverage is tiresomely predictable:  Christian protesters whose faith teaches them to oppose abortion will be depicted as intolerant extremist fanatics, perhaps just one step removed from the Appalachian snake dancers.

News Media:  Stop Digging.  The first rule of getting out of a hole you have dug yourself into is to stop digging.  But at the White House Correspondents' Dinner Saturday, they handed out shovels at the door. ... Now, if I remember correctly, about 53% of voters voted for the President.  Well, there's no disputing that American journalism serves that chunk of the audience.  Their fawning subservience to those in presently in power is even starting to creep out President Obama.  "Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me," he told his audience of tingle-legged supplicants.

CNN Invents the News, Again.  Yesterday's top news story was the very public debate between President Barack Obama and former Vice-President Dick Cheney regarding the interrogation of captured terrorists. ... [But] CNN chose as its top news item something that happened over five years ago, not even providing its readers with a single sentence explaining how this particular story was remotely newsworthy.

Narcissus And Echo: Obama And The Mainstream Media.  It is troubling that our president is a pathological narcissist caught up in the thought patterns of Darwin, Marx, and Alinsky.  Even more troubling is the fact that the Mainstream Media, suffering from an Obama-inspired narcosis, shirks its duty, refusing to publish or even explore any aspect of Obama's dark side.

The Cynical Idealism of Obama.  Barack Obama is able to wrap his Chicago cynicism in the language of idealism, making him appear to be what he is not.  But much of the press, which has an unprecedented emotional investment in Obama and his success, has decided to look the other way, time and again.  Countless reporters and commentators thirst for his approval; they clearly count it a privilege to be part of his team.  At least a few of them have done us the courtesy of doing so explicitly and officially rather than maintaining the fiction of disinterestedness.

The Obama Infatuation.  The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time.  Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage?  Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment; but no president since.  On the whole, this is not healthy for America.  Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power.  But the main checks on Obama are modest.  They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means.  The leaderless and confused Republicans don't provide effective opposition.  And the press — on domestic, if not foreign, policy — has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

Obama's lie of the day.  The USA in fact has less than 1% of the world's Muslim population of an estimated 1 billion people.  So why would a president make such an outrageous lie?  Because no one will fact check him.  Least of all the New York Times.

Another Men's Mag Votes for The One.  It's time for me to end another men's magazine subscription.  Sad.  I thought this one might last an entire 12 issues.  "Details" just declared its unconditional love for President Obama with a "think" piece teased on the front cover — "Can Obama make you better in bed?"

Journalists who don't kiss Obama's feet.  The White House press corps is now completely supine, utterly shameless in its groveling cowardice.  Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps.  Rather than mailing them nice little Lipton tea bags, millions of sane Americans might consider sending air sickness bags to our Reigning Media.  But not, thank haven, across the broad Atlantic.

For journalists, how close is too close?  Author and former Newsweek journalist Richard Wolffe is refuting charges that he acted more like Barack Obama's campaign spokesman than as a journalist covering Obama's presidential campaign.  It was Obama, himself, who suggested that Wolffe write his book Renegade: The Making of a President.  Wolffe, however, denied that writing the book meant trading objectivity for access.

Obama, a "Sort of God"?  On Friday evening Newsweek editor Evan Thomas had an extraordinary exchange with MSNBC's Chris Matthews.  Thomas, commenting on Obama's Cairo speech, said, "I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above — above the world, he's sort of God." ... It is now impossible to mock the media's adoration for Obama.  In the past, if conservatives had said that MSM commentators viewed Obama as God, people would have assumed they were exaggerating in order to make a point.  But in this instance, there is no exaggeration; Thomas stated that Obama is "sort of God."

Missing in Action: American Mainstream Media.  The government now puts itself in charge of everything from running large companies, such as General Motors, to determining compensation for businesses under government control. ... Objections or concerns about an unconstitutional seizure of power, anyone? Where are the stories reminding us of the smashing job government does in running Amtrak or the post office? Where are the stories contrasting Canada's move toward greater privatization of its health care system to the President's desire to move toward a Canadian model?

Unquestioned Authority.  This religious-like faith in Obama has led the media not to question much of what he does.  He claims his stimulus plan has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs and that "stimulus II" will "save or create" 600,000 jobs this summer.  How does government "save" a job and how does one measure such a claim?  In January, before taking office, the president said 90 percent of the new jobs he would create would be in the private sector.  The media have yet to ask him why that promise has not yet been fulfilled.

Why the suddenly shy press corps?  The May employment figures are out.  The new jobs data blatantly, unambiguously contradict the claims made by the President earlier in the year when he was justifying the stimulus bill.  But the silence from the mainstream media over the difference between President's promises and his results has been nothing short of deafening.

The Man Who Would Be God.  One of the things that annoy me the most about Obama is how easily he lies.  One of the things that annoy me about the media is the way they enable him to get away with it.  For instance, when he jammed through the trillion-dollar pork pie, he claimed it was so urgently needed he couldn't spare the legislators even 48 hours to plow through the 1,100 pages.  However, once they passed the bill, Obama waited four days before flying off to Denver to sign it.

Obama's Other Controversial Church.  While John McCain was being tortured as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, First Unitarian Church of Honolulu — at which the elementary-age Obama would later attend Sunday school after returning from Indonesia in 1970 or 71 — was sheltering deserters and AWOLs recruited by 'flirty fishing' coeds from a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) group known as "The Resistance". ... The story of his ties to the church began to emerge only after he attended [his grandmother's] memorial service. ... The connection to Vietnam deserters has not been included in any of the Obama-related coverage.

Wolffe: President Missed Rev. Wright's Racist Rants Because 'He Wasn't Much of a Churchgoer'.  If you've ever wondered why the mainstream media didn't show much curiosity about how 20 years of attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church shaped President Barack Obama, there is a perfectly logical explanation.  Obama wasn't really there.

Obama cruises past media.  President Bush and his team were regularly savaged by the media elite if they so much as sniffed a hint of evasion over the rule of law and the bounds of constitutional authority in fighting terrorism.  So why is President Obama's unprecedented intervention in the auto industry, including a TARP-fund bailout expressly ruled out by Congress, all but ignored?

1984 all over again.  On the night of June 24, ABC News will turn their broadcast over to the White House so that Obama can sell his national health insurance program. ... It is true that the networks routinely hand over time to the party in power so that the president can address the nation.  But this is much different.  In essence, I agree with Drudge; this makes ABC a part of the executive branch — a cog in the Obama PR machine.  It makes a cruel joke of the idea of an independent press.

The Obamedia.  [Scroll down]  This exchange is revealing on several fronts. First, it demonstrates that Obama — who is (literally) compared to God by some journalists, who sends a thrill up the leg of others, and who causes reporters and editors to weep and choke up with emotion in simply thinking about The One — apparently believes he deserves worshipful coverage across the board; when he doesn't receive it, he views it as a grave injustice.  It warrants a stronger response from him than, say, the repression of freedom in Iran.

From Newsroom to Bedroom.  Today ... the press has become a subsidiary of the advertising department, catering to target groups that are most likely to buy advertisers' products.  The ABC News division has taken this one step further.  On June 24, it will essentially become a mouthpiece for the Obama administration and its position on reforming health care.

The Editor says...
 The article below is an example of glowing Obama worship in the press. Father's Day, San Francisco Chronicle.

Obama's example: Putting family first.  On this Father's Day, the American public should proudly note that our president takes his personal role as father (and spouse) as seriously as he does his job as father of the country. ... We can only hope that fathers and spouses everywhere will be thinking "What Would Obama Do?" as they navigate through the murky waters of parenthood and family life.

The Editor continues...
 Besides the author's blindness toward's Obama's massive character flaws, her ignorance of history is showing as well:  George Washington, not Barack Obama, is generally thought of as the "father of our country."

Media's Mask Is Slipping As Deficits Surge.  A calm Sunday breakfast might have been ruined after a glance at the Washington Post's front page on June 14.  A chart below the fold explained that under Obama's federal spending proposals, the U.S. would be required to borrow $9 trillion during the next decade.  That's $9,000,000,000,000.  The Post compared that, in today's dollars, to the financial burden of World War II:  $3.6 trillion.  That's not all of Obama's spending plan.  That's only the part that's in the red. ... Sadly, this Washington Post article notwithstanding, the news media aren't questioning the new health "reform" drive.  They are enabling it.

An end to the Obama love affair.  "Obama Kills A Fly."  "FLOTUS In The Garden."  "The Obama Diet."  These aren't tabloid tales.  These are a few of the headlines — just from one day — by journalists who regularly cover the Obama administration.  Is this really what Americans want to know about our commander-in-chief?

Media Cheer Obama's Golf Outings; Criticized Republicans' Trips to Course.  President Barack Obama has gone to the golf course at least 11 times since he took the oath of office a little more than six months ago — three rounds were played during the late January, 12-day holiday Obama took with his family in Hawaii; one at Andrews Air Force Base; and seven at Ft. Belvoir Golf Course, including a round on Sunday, Father's Day, with Vice President Joe Biden.  These 11 rounds played by the president are documented through media reports of his golf trips.

Politics of personal perfection.  Let's be honest:  Barack Obama is better than you are.  He's a better father — taking breaks from running the world to cheer on his daughters at soccer and basketball games.  He's a better husband — zipping his wife off for dinner in New York and Paris.  He's got a better diet — nibbling on vegetables from his homegrown garden to keep his love handles in check.  And he's got a terrific jump shot. ... "This is a guy who was elected as a celebrity and is governing as a celebrity," said Republican consultant Rick Wilson.  "If George Bush had been photographed taking his daughters out for ice cream [as Obama was on Saturday], it would have been:  'Nero fiddles while Rome burns.'"

Cap and Trade: Political Alchemy, Economy Buster and Disaster for Poor.  [Scroll down]  Many believe there is a more sinister aspect behind Obama's Cap & Trade legislation.  Faltering companies, like General Electric, have been awarded or promised huge government contracts regarding the research and development of alternative energy sources.  NOTE:  General Electric is expected to receive billions of dollars in government contracts.  General Electric owns NBC and MSNBC and they have been some of Obama's biggest supporters in the mainstream media, both prior to and after his election.

Endless Love.  Thanks to a few pointed questions from the press corps at a White House news conference, the long Obama captivity of the media is at an end.  The Hotline, an inside-the-Beltway tip sheet, proclaimed June 23 "The Day the Love Ended." ... But what truly confuses is how a few tough questions make up for months of forehead-scraping obeisance to The One. ... Indeed, shouldn't this be a moment for reflection on how bad the press has been until now?

When did the lowbrows take over the culture?  [Scroll down]  In his press conferences he hypnotizes all the ink-stained wretches of the media.  It's a sight to behold.  The man swats a fly and the suck-ups of the media go ga-ga with applause, and go back and write articles about it.  That's not just a reflection on their (lack of) character and judgment.  It's not just their childish immaturity.  It's a reflection on their brains, or rather, on all that empty space between their ears.  Our media stars are just not very bright.

Silent Scandals:  In just the last month, an unusual number of what were formerly regarded as scandals went unnoticed and largely unreported by the old media, to wit:  Obama recently fired an Inspector General of Americorps, giving him one hour to resign or be fired.  This, in direct contradiction to legislation Obama co-sponsored as Senator, requiring 30-day notice and an explanation.

Did someone mention Inspector General Gerald Walpin?

Media pussy cats.  What were the people at NBC News thinking?  Long-time NBC anchor Tom Brokaw was being considered for a White House appointment when he interviewed President Obama on Jan. 5 and covered him on the news.  The position in question was to become a commissioner on the White House Fellows Commission.  Neither NBC nor Mr. Brokaw ever made any disclosure that Mr. Brokaw had been offered or was considering the position.  It was not until June 17 that NBC made public that Mr. Brokaw was joining the commission.

I'd like to ask Mr. President a few hardball questions.  I don't go to those fancy presidential press conferences and ask the softball questions the reporters there like to ask. ... The questions I have in mind are more of the hardball variety, to wit: ... Mr. President, when are you going to develop an exit strategy for getting out of owning General Motors?  Why didn't you have such a strategy before you obligated all of us to buying such a turkey?

Hey media, Obama isn't 'God'.  So, as it turns out, U.S. President Barack Obama is not "God" when it comes to dealing with the Islamic world, after all.  This, contrary to that gushingly inane description of him by Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas, following Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo, seeking reconciliation with Muslims.

Washington Post Hired Left-Wing Obama Enabler as Its 'Chief Digital Officer'.  The Washington Posts's first ever "chief digital officer" came aboard the newspaper, where he also oversees Newsweek's online efforts, after three years of working diligently to help elect liberals and Democrats to office — including Barack Obama.

Administration, Lobbyist, Journalist:  Who Can Tell the Difference?  The [Washington] Post, embarrassed by disclosure of its cozy, profitable relationships with lobbyists and the Obama administration, has repudiated the "salon" program.  Given that their publisher was the program's host and the paper's "news executives" were set to participate, the paper's suddenly discovering its ethical standards rings rather hollow.  It's worth mentioning that the story came to light because a lobbyist who received the Post's flyer was offended by the ethics of the event and blew the whistle.

Welcome to Obamacare Theater.  The White House sure likes to put on a show.  Fresh off its joint stage production with ABC News, the Obama administration broadcast another health care propaganda play this week under the guise of a citizen "town hall."  Chicago consigliere and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett managed the floor and human props for Obama.  In a telling moment as the event kicked off, she protested a wee bit much:  "I want to emphasize that the President has not seen the questions ahead of time."  The audience responded with polite laughter.  But the denials of pre-planning and stacked decks deserve nothing but derisive mockery.

Obama reads Pushkin.  Two weeks ago it was the Urdu poets.  This week it's Obama's love for Pushkin's poetry.  The week before it was probably the Bhadavad-Gita in Sanskrit.  If it's Tuesday this must be Zorba the Greek — in Greek.  It's all in a day's light reading for our Obama.

News Executives In The Tank.  It seems like a never-ending spin cycle:  laudatory coverage leads to popularity, which leads to higher TV ratings, which leads to more laudatory coverage.  But it's not working any more.  Behind the glittery curtains, Obama's polls are falling.  Worse, some ink-stained wretches are getting a little sick of the propaganda merry-go-round.

Fox News Notes Communist Past of the 'Green Jobs' Czar.  The administration's "Green Jobs" czar, Van Jones, has a "very checkered past" deep-rooted in radical politics, including black nationalism, anarchism, and communism.  The broadcast network newscasts have mostly failed to report on Mr. Jones's past political affiliations which are lock-step with the network's downplay of coverage regarding President Obama's associations with the former radical and terrorist William Ayers during the election.

Obama's Weakened Condition:  What did President Obama achieve for himself and for America during last week's G-8 summit?  Not much.  Despite what presumably was his best effort at using the charm, personality and teleprompter that catapulted him into office, he was unsuccessful in persuading either wealthy or developing nations to sign off on a plan to combat "global warming."  It's not that he lacks support from the European media.  CNN International and the BBC, among others, continue to blanket their networks with "green" propaganda in a disinformation blitz that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.

Two Scientists, Two Standards.  The New York Times recently warned its readers about a wacky scientist in the Obama administration.  But the fish wrap of record let the real nut job off the hook. ... The rationality police in the newsroom have not ... seen fit to print the rantings of a radical secular evangelist now serving as the White House "science czar."  John Holdren, Obama's director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-authored the innocuously titled "Ecoscience" in the 1970s with population control extremists Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

Barack Obama is dumb.  Admittedly, George Bush was not the most eloquent President we've ever had, but of course, neither is Barack Obama once he gets off his teleprompter.  The biggest difference between the two men is not their speaking ability; it's that the mainstream media decided from day one that George Bush was dumb just because he was a Republican from Texas. ... Was it George Bush who claimed that there were more than 57 states?  Did Bush say he saw our "fallen heroes" in the audience during a speech?  Was it George Bush who made a racist comment about "typical white people?"  Did W. spend 20 years without complaint at a church where the pastor spouted off ignorant, anti-Semitic ideas and conspiracy theories?  Was George Bush so much of an airhead that he actually ended up "thanking himself in a speech" because that's what his teleprompter said to do?

We Must Destroy The Economy To Save The Economy.  In a recent New York Times post, [Paul] Krugman proclaims that "Deficits saved the world."  The unspoken logic is pretty clear, and inside Krugman states, "government deficits... are the only thing that has saved us from a second Great Depression."  The unspoken logic is pretty clear.  Since Obama must be given credit for saving the world, and saving America from a second depression... and the only thing Obama has done is run up a huge deficit... the new line of argument has to be that "Deficits saved America and the World from a second Great Depression."

Rare, Truthful Treat:
 AP's 'Fact Check' On Obama Presser Hits Surprisingly Hard.  [Calvin] Woodward [of the Associated Press] and ABC's Jake Tapper remain virtually alone in the White House press corps in their willingness to report negative news about Obama when it occurs (unless it's impossible to avoid, as in the Obama-Gates matter), or to criticize him in identified analysis items.  Will that ever change?

Just how smart is Obama?  Just how smart is the President? Famous presidential historian Michael Beschloss, a regular on PBS's Newshour show, says his IQ is "off the charts" and that he is "probably the smartest guy ever to become president," while admitting he doesn't know what his IQ is.  I say:  let's look at the evidence.

Where's Obama's Birth Certificate?  The mainstream media have been extraordinarily disinterested in any credible documentation of Obama's life story. Something is very wrong about that. Something is bizarre that Time Magazine is putting Obama's picture on the cover for a twelfth time in twelve months! Obama's rise to power has been meteoric.  His path there remains shrouded in deliberate obscurity.

Obama's birth certificate and the real issues:  The major media have done their best to obscure the existence of oddities in Obama's life story that never made it to the two autobiographical works purportedly authored by him. It has been left to the blogosphere to point out his many lies about his past.  Yet the general public remains blissfully unaware of these lies, though it does know everything about Sarah Palin's family thanks to inquiring minds of the media.  Even worse, the mainstream media twice dug up intimate details of the lives of two men who stood in his way in acquiring his seat in the United States Senate. ... If the media had not abandoned its watchdog role for Obama, while aggressively pushing it on two strategically situated opponents, he would never have become president.

Camera Hog In Chief.  President Barack Obama appears to be breaking every record kept on U.S. presidential press coverage.  Over the first six months of this year, he was cited in a staggering 1.1 million stories across mainstream, Internet and social media — an average of 6,100 references a day.  That's more than triple what Obama's last two predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, got in the mainstream press during their first six months.

Revolving Door from Journalism to Team Obama Now Up to a Dozen.  With the revelation that Newsweek Washington bureau reporter Daren Briscoe will start a new job on Monday as Deputy Associate Director of Public Affairs for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, my list of journalists who have jumped to the Obama administration — plus one who traveled through the revolving door from helping the Obama campaign into a news media slot — is up to a dozen.

Newsweek's Embedded Obama Campaign Reporter Joins Obama Administration.  The revolving door between the media and Team Obama continues to rotate.  Some journalists on the campaign trail were infatuated with Obama, and that's certainly true of the Newsweek reporter who covered Obama in-depth (with the promise that nothing he learned would be revealed until after the election).

The President's Biggest Whopper and MSM's Complicity In Serving It Up:  President Obama did it again yesterday, "guaranteeing" Americans that if they liked their health insurance, they could keep it.  (Exact quote:  "Here's a guarantee that I've made:  If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance.  If you've got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.")  This is obviously, almost absurdly not true, but still the president repeats it again and again, probably because he knows that if Americans genuinely understood the threat to their existing insurance posed by his plan, they would pursue their representatives and senators with a fury that would kill the plan off immediately.

All-Access Obama.  A new study by the Business and Media Institute shows that if liberal health plans are losing popularity, it can't be blamed on TV news.  From Jan. 20 to June 24 on ABC, CBS and NBC, fully 70 percent of the soundbites supported Obama's leftist health-care ideas.  Network reporters exaggerated the number of uninsured Americans up to "50 million."  The networks ignored how big-government health schemes like the one in Massachusetts were more costly than planned.

Health Care Facts Not In Evidence.  It's pretty daring to question the very premise required to stampede-sell the destruction of the private insurance industry and takeover of health care. ... For the most part, though, it seems that urgent need for "health care reform" — whatever that actually means — is a fact unquestioned by the media, like the article of faith anointing the president as "The Greatest Communicator Ever" (despite the evidence to the contrary:  his total dependence on scripted words on teleprompters; his ever increasing disasters when off-prompter).

Obama on Time magazine cover

Seven Time Mag Covers Since Election for Obama.  Time magazine's August 10 edition with President Barack Obama on the cover ("Paging Dr. Obama") trying to heal the nation in a photo illustration as a physician, wearing a white smock with a stethoscope around his neck, brings to seven the number of issues the magazine's cover has featured Obama just since November's election — make that eight for the First Family if you add in June 1's genuflecting "The Meaning of Michelle."

Unread Lips.  It should not take alternative news sources to bring the president's multiple "read my lips" reversals to public awareness.  Isn't it obvious that if such inconsistencies — suggesting calculated untruthfulness — had come from a Republican president, the establishment media would have unearthed them long, long ago?

CNN Runs Glowing Segment About Pro-ObamaCare Rally.  CNN's Newsroom on Thursday [8/6/2009] ran a glowing documentary-style report about a pro-ObamaCare rally on Capitol Hill that was organized by a coalition of left-wing organizations.  Anchor Heidi Collins introduced the report without referencing any of the organizers, which included ACORN, MoveOn.org and SEIU.  The report also featured a former Obama campaign operative who pushed for the president's plan.

The empty words of a journalist turned flack.  Linda Douglass, the former CBS and ABC News correspondent who joined the Obama presidential campaign and later the administration, has emerged as the point person in the White House push back against "disinformation" regarding national health care.  She's one of several former journalists who are part of Team Obama, and her story, in particular, illustrates the difficulties that politically connected Democratic journalists can face both inside and outside the government.

The Obama family sure does spend a lot of time on vacation.
 First Family Heading to Yellowstone, Grand Canyon.  The First Family is taking a vacation before their vacation.  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday [8/7/2009] the president, First Lady Michelle and the kids are heading west on Aug. 14 for a long weekend to visit Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National parks.  Just days later, the First Family travels to Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts.

The Editor says...
 Where are the reporters who complained so loudly about George W. Bush taking so much vacation time?  You may recall that when President Bush was in office, "mainstream" reporters counted weekends as vacation time, and complained that Mr. Bush was away from the White House one third of his term.  The big difference is that President Bush spent his time at Crawford, or Camp David, or Kennebunkport.  Obama travels to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Central America — wherever totalitarian dictators can be found — and the press is perfectly content.

MSNBC Anchor:  "'Socialist' Is Becoming the New N-word".  Did you know that when you refer to someone as a socialist, you're really calling them the N-word?  Such an astonishing hypothesis was offered by MSNBC's Carlos Watson Monday [8/10/2009]...

Protesting the Protesters.  How odd that in a different context, with different protesters, these disruptions would be seen as brave.  But it's not brave at all, according to the media.  That's because, for once, the media is not on the protesting side.  Instead, the media is the "power" that's being spoken to — and that confuses them.  And so they mock.

CNN Lets White House 'Fact Check' Anti-Obama Claims.  CNN's 3pm ET Newsroom anchor Rick Sanchez on Tuesday pleaded with White House spokesperson (and former ABC and CBS reporter) Linda Douglass to reject as a "falsity" that the health care "public option" desired by congressional liberals would include government payments for abortions.  "There's no evidence, as we've found out, that there's any plans to make the government or make all Americans pay for abortions in the plan," Sanchez insisted before lobbing this softball to Douglass:  "What's your strategy for dealing with those falsities?"

Obama Merchandise a Big Seller at NBC Store.  If you're a fan of all things Obama, NBC Universal's online store has no fewer than 29 options for your buying pleasure — from a shirt with the president's picture proclaiming "YES WE DID" to both of his books to a special inauguration DVD to a refrigerator magnet of the first couple.

New York Times' Disgrace Deepens.  It is not just the rapid growth of online news alternatives that is destroying newspapers.  The New York Times was once the most respected paper in America.  Now it has become a paper in service to an agenda and a political party.  Is it any wonder why people look elsewhere for news?

What Went Wrong:  [Scroll down]  There is a growing fear that Obamism is becoming cult-like and Orwellian.  Almost on script, Hollywood ceased all its Rendition/ Redacted-style films.  Iraq — once the new Vietnam — is out of the news.  Afghanistan is "problematic," not a "blunder."  Tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, and Predators are no longer proof of a Seven Days in May coup, but legitimate tools to keep us safe.  Words change meanings as acts of terror become "man-caused disasters."  Hunting down jihadists is really an "overseas contingency operation."  Media sycophants do not merely parrot Obama, but now proclaim him a "god."

Obama unaccustomed to having his lies challenged.  President Barack Obama is one of the most spoiled politicians ever to capture the imagination of a nation.  He has enjoyed what author and newsman Bernard Goldberg has described as "a slobbering love affair" with the American media.  So many members of the Fourth Estate in this country have so thoroughly compromised themselves to sell his radical agenda that the American people no longer trust them even to report the news.

Michelle Obama and the double-edged sword of fashion.  I suppose there must be some people who genuinely regard Michelle Robinson Obama as beautiful, elegant, and tasteful.  But I am not among them.  I have yet to meet a heterosexual male who finds Michelle a hottie.  The media hype portraying her as the heir to Jackie Kennedy may persuade a few, but in most instances I believe that it only reinforces the reputation of such media outlets as purely propagandistic organs, the same folks selling the equally implausible narrative of the town halls as full of Nazis and astroturfers.

The thrill is gone for Obama and the media.  There's nothing like a summer vacation to rekindle a romance.  So maybe a week on Martha's Vineyard can bring back some of the magic between the Obama administration and the media.

Obama and faith:  Reaching out to progressive faith leaders in two massive conference calls, Obama insisted that God was on his side. ... When President George W. Bush invoked God as his inspiration, many liberals lamented the shattering of the wall between church and state by our theocrat in chief.  When Obama does likewise, it's inspiring, spiritual leadership.

Palin Flummoxes the Elites with Common Sense.  As you may have noticed, the "traditional" media recently morphed from administration critics into a pro bono public relations firm for the White House.  It happened on or about January 20, 2009.  Now, they're flummoxed by their failure to refute a woman they believe has the communications savvy of a pimento.

The Editor says...
 In my opinion, "it happened" no later than November 4, 2008.

Obama and the Media:  Trouble in Paradise.  Many have remarked upon the growing rift between the former sweethearts. ... It's the president and the mainstream media.  Those soul mates are at odds — squabbling in public and tossing about recriminations.  What had been a match made in heaven has turned sour, and it's not clear they can ever go back to the way things were during their long and intense courtship.

False reports about guns.  Countless newspapers and television networks — from CBS to MSNBC — have misreported that conservative protesters are threatening President Obama with guns at public events.  It hasn't happened.

The Internet power grab by the Obama White House.  "Once Americans realize what's happening it may be too late thanks to Obama's supporters in the news media.  Do a search and you won't see stories about this power grab in the major media," warns [political strategist Mike] Baker.

MSNBC Guest Comments on Obama in Classroom.  Once again, one of the masters of the universe trotted out on MSNBC has discovered the cure to one of society's ills — more Obama.

Van Jones story finally goes mainstream.  I say finally because as Byron York pointed out yesterday in the Examiner, not one major media organ had a word about the Truther.  Today [9/5/2009], however, that has changed as WaPo, CBS, and CNN have discussed the controversy.

Networks censor health care debate.  Both [ABC and NBC] have refused to run an ad proposed for national telecast by the League of American Voters, a nonprofit group with 15,000 members.  The supposedly offensive ad makes the simple claim that the proposed government-run health care program would ration medical care.

Couric should look in mirror.  Now that White House "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones has resigned, what's next?  Inevitably, the American mainstream media — ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, et al — must be held to account for sitting on the sidelines as this major story kept building without them, went viral on YouTube, and then became so large that a key appointee of President Obama was forced to step down.

Obama Set to Force ObamaCare while His Eligibility Trial Date Set?  If Obama's motion to dismiss is not granted, [Orly] Taitz' discovery hearing will take place that same day and the case challenging Obama's eligibility will proceed.  ... As of this writing not one of the major news outlets (aka Obama's State-run media) have reported anything at all on Judge Carter's ruling.

Imagine Van Jones in a GOP White House.  Perhaps you are tired of pundits writing "If a Republican president had done what Obama just did..." or "If a Republican had said something like that..."  It does get rather boring to point out double standards that the press uses to report on Democrats and Republicans — and especially Barack Obama and any GOP president, past or future.  But the record must be made...

Obama's Lies Matter, Too.  It is telling that so many people who claim to be speaking on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way of Journalism have consistently focused their outrage-o-meters at individual townhall attendees, political broadcast entertainers, and the lesser lights of a lame (if resurgent-by-default) opposition party, while letting walk nearly fact-check-free the non-irrelevant occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Flashback:  CBS Had No Difficulty Finding Van Jones in 2003.  If you rely only on the three major broadcast networks or one of the top major national papers as your news sources, the name "Van Jones" might prompt you to say,"Who?"  But, while the media had difficulty reporting on Van Jones the embattled member of the Obama Administration, it had no such trouble covering Van Jones the anti-Iraq War protestor.

Flick Off Obama.  The omnipresence of Barack Hussein Obama is guaranteed by the television, more aptly identified by the little people as, "the boob tube".  Obama's speech to Congress last night was forced upon the unwashed masses.  Or was it? ... The television networks and lying politicians do not deserve your patronage.

First reports from AP and NY Times indicate 'thousands' at DC protest?  Pictures supplied by Fox and CNN appeared to me to show a crowd stretching all the way from the Capitol steps, back many, many blocks, stretching off into the distance.  By any stretch of the imagination, such a crowd should have been indentified in "the hundreds of thousands."

Analysis of the House ACORN vote:  The House's 345-75 vote to defund ACORN is indeed, as my Examiner colleague Byron York put it, extraordinary.  Democrats voted 172-75 to defund ACORN; Republicans voted 173-0 to do so.  This would not have occurred but for the [BigGovernment.com] videos of ACORN employees encouraging tax evasion and prostitution.  "Mainstream media" studiously ignored this big, big story, because it put Obama's political allies in ACORN in a bad light ... As indicated by members' votes, mainstream America was clearly repulsed by the facts that "mainstream media" tried to conceal.

Did someone mention ACORN?

'Killing Granny'.  Newsweek seeks to make us more comfortable with the idea of killing our parents and grandparents.  The ObamaCare deal they want us buy is that only if more old people die, will there be better medical treatment for everyone else.  That is, you and me.  It's a sucker's deal.  Because not only will more "old" people die with ObamaCare, but more of everyone else will die too.

YouTube Caught Red-handed Cooking Stats for Obama.  DrudgeReport.com is currently linking to a YouTube video of a government schoolteacher instructing young students to praise Obama in song.  While this is shocking, there is an even bigger story here.  Consider this:  the video's "views" counter listed only 363 views as of 1:04 p.m. EST on Sept. 24.  But at the same time it had 2,279 comments.  What's wrong with this picture? ... YouTube likely doesn't want you to know about the Obama worship video.  So, perhaps, like a sleazy car dealer dialing down an odometer, they dial down the hit counter to a point where the video languishes in the recesses of the site.

Obama and ACORN:  Barack Obama gave five interviews last Sunday, and only one interviewer bothered to ask him about the ACORN scandal.

More about Obama and ACORN.

Pollsters push people to accept Obamacare.  Gallup has unintentionally revealed how they, and other polling organizations, have been pushing the public to accept Obamacare.  The revelation came in a report late last month which revealed that a significant majority of Americans believes that individuals themselves, and not the government, should be responsible for ensuring they have health insurance. ... Even though the survey was released on September 30, not too many folks have seen these numbers.  As they do with most anti-Obamacare news, the Democrats' Big Media acolytes have avoided the report...

How The VRWC Really Works:  The more accurate the reporting on a story that unnerves the Democrats, the more likely the major media are to block it.  There is no more stunning example of this than the reporting on Christopher Andersen's new best-seller, Barack and Michelle:  The Portrait of an American Marriage.

MSNBC Goes Into Astroturf Mode.  Remember back just a few short months ago — when thousands, if not millions, of Americans were protesting out-of-control government spending and other policies favored by President Barack Obama's administration?  Surprised by the resounding turnout, the usual lefty talking heads on MSNBC ... explained the protests away as being fake grassroots aka AstroTurf.

CBS Awed By Obama — for Blocking a Basketball Shot.  Hours before the Nobel committee awarded its "Peace Prize" to President Barack Obama, the CBS Evening News found another "achievement" to tout:  A White House-released photo of Obama blocking a basketball shot.

Consumer Reports Chucks Reputation to Hawk ObamaCare.  Consumer Reports has tossed away political neutrality to side with Democrats in support of a government run health care system that will be costly to consumers.  "[W]e are doing something that we've never done before.  For the first time ever, Consumers Union is weighing in with a TV ad that calls on lawmakers to find a solution for health reform," said Jim Guest, publisher of Consumer Reports.

20 More Questions for Barack Obama.  Because our servile journalists spend their days awash in ecstasy, thinking endlessly of the tingle that runs up their leg when they see Barack Obama, they don't seem to be able to find the time to ask him any tough questions.  That leaves the rest of us out in the cold, dreaming of queries we'd like to see asked of the President of the United States — if our press would turn in its Obama Fan Club memberships and start acting like members of the media again.  With that in mind ... I've come up with 20 questions I'd like to see asked to Barack Obama.

Despite Evidence to Contrary, Boston Globe Says MA Economy is 'Generally Improving'.  In an October 16, 2009, article in the Boston Globe, staffer Andrea Estes makes the eye-opening assertion that the economy in Massachusetts is "generally improving."  Facts and reality suggest otherwise.

CBS's Couric Finally Notices Obama's $1.4 Trillion Deficit.  Back on October 7, when the Congressional Budget Office reported that the federal deficit had ballooned to a massive $1.4 trillion during President Obama's first year on the job, Katie Couric's CBS Evening News did not tell viewers.  But Couric finally caught up to the bad news after the Obama White House put out its final numbers on Friday afternoon [10/16/2009].

Magazine Editors' Group Creates Award Category for Obama Covers.  The Magazine Publishers of America's American Society of Magazine Editors has added a category to its annual magazine cover awards:  Obama.  This new category is the only ASME category focused on a single person, and highlights the reverential attitude for the President widely held in the magazine publishing community.

Obama's Pedophilia Czar.  This is the only time in our recent history that the White House has directly complained about news coverage by naming an entire news organization. Of course Fox is the only network that did not participate in the last election as if it was one of Obama's campaign outlets.  [Anita] Dunn went on to complain that Fox could not be a real news organization because of the fact that it did not blindly support Obama.

His propaganda has seeped into everything.  With the full blessing of the media, Obama is still in election mode, and I say:  If elections persist more than 24 months, it's a problem.  Especially when the networks are giving him free time to air what amount to campaign commercials.

Firing at Fox, Shooting Themselves.  The White House's effort to target a news organization like Fox is vaguely Nixonian.  The case put forward by the pro-Mao political theorist Anita Dunn is filled with errors and erroneous statements. ... This whole anti-Fox gambit will come across to a lot of people as misguided and petty, the product of a White House that is unusually thin-skinned and somewhat paranoid — and, perhaps, as one that can't be trusted with power.

Does Anyone Know Barack Obama?  If, as the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good, then Barack Obama is his own worst enemy.  That becomes clear in the upcoming HBO documentary "By the People:  The Election of Barack Obama," which is the product of many months of behind-the-scenes access to Obama during the presidential campaign.  It reveals — you will be surprised to learn — that Barack Obama is pretty close to the most perfect person you will never get to know.

Silence of the Lambs.  Words have the power to wake people up.  Silence can lull them to sleep.  Silence legitimizes abnormal behavior, makes it appear normal and acceptable.  People become desensitized, numb.  First there's one advisor to Obama linked to Communism.  The MSM doesn't say a word.  Then there are three or five or ten or [who] knows how many.  If The New Black Panthers bring billy clubs to polling sites and get away with it, that's the new normal.  The next thing we know, a union thug bites off a finger at a Town Hall.  If Hillary and Sarah are vilified and enough people don't speak out, then everyone, from Rush to us, becomes fair game.

Evita Obama.  A New York Times op-ed today verges on self-parody, as the biggest cheerleader for Michelle Obama, graphics editor Charles Blow, expresses his adoration for the First lady.  He has enough sense to begin with the words, "Forgive me in advance for fawning..." and lives up to the billing.

Media Discovering that Obama Balloon a Hoax.  [Scroll down]  If not for the Obama mania, the soaring rhetoric, the messianic frenzy, the tingling legs, the false hope, the thronging, the fainting, the gushing, the emotionalism, the fawning, the hype, the rapture, the delusion, etc., the news reporters would have noticed. ... They should have noticed that the man didn't come out of Middle America, but out of the crooked streets of Chicago machine politics.  They should have noticed his associates were not exactly normal Americans.  They should have noticed it wasn't guilt by association, but guilt by associating.  They should have noticed that remaining in Jeremiah Wright's racist, divisive, anti-American church for 20 years was simply not reasonable.

Did someone mention Jeremiah Wright again?

What if George W. Bush had done that?  A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.  Snubbing the Dalai Lama.  Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.  Freezing out a TV network.  Doing more fundraisers than the last president.  More golf, too.  President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more. ... Conservatives look on with a mix of indignation and amazement and ask:  Imagine the fuss if George W. Bush had done these things?

Congress Uses Sham Poll to Force Total Control ObamaCare.  Liberal and leftist Congressional leaders have recently used what strongly appears to be an exaggerated and embellished-in-ObamaCare's-favor poll in order to bolster the case for their government-run healthcare mandate — no it is neither a public "option" nor Nancy Pelosi's consumer "option" but, it is no option at all.

Obama 'Most Powerful Writer Since Julius Caesar,' Says NEA Chief.  Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, declared in a speech to art philanthropists in Brooklyn last week that President Obama is the world's most powerful writer since the days of Caesar.

Obama's bootlicking NEA chairman.  I suspect that Obama would prefer [Rocco] Landesmann keep his mouth shut when it comes to claims that Obama actually wrote his own books.  Given the accumulating weight of evidence that Obama's first book was actually ghost-written by his neighbor Bill Ayers, the less attention devoted to the subject, the better.

Did someone mention plagiarism?

He Came, He Saw, He Kowtowed.  It seems Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, didn't get the memo, literally. ... By demonstrating with brazenly self-abasing ignorance that he is wholly Obama's man, Landesman is making it clear that the NEA is completely committed to Obamaism.  There's no need for any more of Mr. Sergant's tacky, Chicago-style pay-to-play.  Self-humiliation sends a far more powerful signal.  No doubt the provincial official has pleased his Caesar.

Crushing the media.  The American media elected Obama.  No presidential candidate's past ever went so deliberately underexposed.  So the attack on Fox may simply have been payback to the networks that are hemorrhaging viewers, the equivalent for the media of a night in the Lincoln bedroom.  Whatever the rationale, Team Obama's apparatchiks were fully in step with the global left's war on freedom of speech.

We know more about the Obama's marriage than we do about healthcare.
 False transparency:  I've given up hope of ever finding out what young Barack actually did at Occidental and Columbia or even reading a snippet of what he wrote, if anything, for the Harvard Law Review. ... I'm not really interested in Obama as a man (or as a husband).  I'm interested in what he does.  And most of that, of late, he has done in secret.  We know more about his marriage than about how the healthcare legislation was drafted or how its contents are being negotiated.

Sick-bags at the ready:  The New York Times gushes over the Obamas' state dinner.  If you're feeling queasy, look away now.  The New York Times scales new heights of sycophancy in its report of the White House state dinner last night, which by their account was the most charming, imaginative, glittering — yet tasteful! — social event since Jackie Kennedy was Queen of Camelot.  Indeed, it may even have surpassed Jackie's standards, since Barack and Michelle added a deeply appropriate and thoughtful element of multiculturalism to the glamorous proceedings.

Media follow W.H. script.  [Scroll down]  But a detailed examination of news coverage of the reassessment issue in the major national newspapers, primarily The Washington Post and The New York Times, suggests that many angles and details of the stories were being carefully fed by White House aides to all-too-willing reporters who dressed it up as the inside dope.  In reality, many reporters were steered into spinning the story exactly the way the White House wanted it told, with relatively little skepticism or criticism.

ADL Report Smears Tea Party Conservatives.  The report has been all the "rage" in the Obama PR machine — a.k.a. the mainstream media — which has exhausted any remaining trace of objectivity by spending a summer and fall crudely mocking average Americans who've shown up at town halls and tea parties in a true exercise of "community organizing" that the Beltway-Greenwich cocktail axis just can't stomach.

Did White House "Gatecrashers" Have Ties to Obama?  While the major media have bought the official storyline about the so called White House gatecrashers, could there be more to this scandal?  The mainstream media have ignored obvious holes in the story and important facts about the alleged gatecrashers.

N.Y. Times Downplays 'Non-Religious Christmas' Plans at White House.  Maybe they didn't know it, but The New York Times left a Christmas bomb in paragraph 12 of its syrupy Sunday story on Desiree Rogers, the bumbling Obama social secretary. ... In a description of how Rogers would make sure the White House was "Obama-tized," Stolberg noted Rogers would bend tradition to make Christmas much more secular in the new era.

Entertainment Media Finds Any Excuse to Blast Sarah Palin.  The entertainment media's treatment of Sarah Palin and her family has been abhorrent.  Like their biased and unjust hard news media brethren, entertainment outlets have gone out of their way to tarnish Palin's image.  While tabloids, semi-legitimate entertainment programs and celebrities issue incessant praise for President Obama and his leftist policies, Palin is showered with insults and inappropriate slurs.

Mr. Obama:  Tear Down Your Wall of Secrecy.  At a press conference earlier this year, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about Obama's detailed birth certificate.  His response?  He laughed.  And he laughed some more.  The room filled with journalists laughed heartily with Gibbs.  The question continues to "astound" him.  After all, it's posted right there online.  As long as it's a laughing matter, why not humor us, Mr. President?  Humor us with your complete birth records, naming the hospital and physician.

A Year of Obama Love.  The year 2009 might be classified as the year Barack Obama came down to Earth.  The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that 47 percent approve of the job Obama is doing, and 46 percent disapprove.  Those are not exactly Messiah numbers.  And that's the big difference between the public and the press.  The media do believe he's God.

Percy Sutton dies; His Obama revelation omitted from obituaries.  However, one of [Percy] Sutton's most notable moments is absent from the media hagiographies I have seen:  he stated on television that he knew that an Islamic supremacist, Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and advisor to a wealthy Saudi, had paid for Barack Obama's education at Harvard Law School.  Exactly how young Barack Obama, a man of slender means, managed to pay for a Harvard Law degree has long been a mystery, and the President has not been forthcoming about any details of his elite education.

Boo hoo.
 CBS Frets Obama Must Work.  The failures that allowed the unsuccessful Christmas Day terrorist attack have marred President Barack Obama's relaxation schedule in Hawaii, CBS's Jeff Glor and Chip Reid regretted Thursday night as Reid fretted Obama had "hoped to spend this vacation recharging his batteries, but now he appears to be spending most of it working"...

Translation:  Newsweek is letting White House speech writers produce their magazine.
 Obama to Pen Cover Story on Haiti and the Earthquake for Newsweek.  Like at a lot of publications, Newsweek was forced to start its week over when the earthquake hit Haiti.  Give the magazine credit for an artful recovery.  The Washington Post Co.-owned publication has tapped President Barack Obama to pen a cover story on Haiti for the Jan. 25 issue hitting newsstands on Monday [1/18/2010].

The Editor says...
 The article probably will not be written by Barack H. Obama, because apparently he has never written anything before.

'American Idol' Goes Out of the Way to Pay Tribute to Current President.  Now even pop culture platforms like "American Idol" are in the tank for President Barack Obama?  It appears so.

How To Kill Political Correctness Before It Kills Us.  I've been doing consumer reports for over 34 years and, from my perspective, the No. 1 consumer issue is the sad state of the mainstream media.  It has become something other than a segment of the media, and now can be correctly described as a propaganda organ of a Democratic Party controlled executive branch of the U.S. Government.  What's worse, it is totally biased, dishonest, and fraudulent and can no longer be trusted to deliver the information needed by the American people.  It pulled off the biggest fraud in electoral history by pushing the election of President Barack Obama, and is continuing to work hand-in-hand with the Obama administration in destroying America as we know it.

Obama's Bipartisanship Scam:  [Scroll down]  Flipping between CNN and Fox, I couldn't hear much of what Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said.  Pence's microphone wasn't working.  And when members asked the president questions — tough ones from Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) — the cameras never panned to show the congressmen.  They showed the president and only the president.

The Most Important Story You Didn't See Last Week:  A Senate hearing last week confirmed the public's worst concern about Barack Obama:  that when it comes to national security, Obama hasn't just been asleep at the switch — he hasn't even bothered to find the switch. ... The Obamedia all but ignored the hearing, of course.  It was more important for them to protect their anointed One... even if folks' lives are at stake.

Obama vs. Einstein:  According to the Washington Post, David Axelrod, Barack Obama's senior advisor, said that the president worked with "[Harvard professor] Laurence Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein's theory of relativity."  I've read that paper, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space."  It's complete nonsense.  It shows no understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity, or of the relationship between relativity theory and Newton's theory.

By Dawn's Early Light:  How the MSM Fawns over Johnsen.  Despite repeated, uxorious, absurdly one-sided endorsements from the liberal media, the February 4 vote on President Obama's year-old nomination of "darling of the left" Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has mercifully been postponed.

More about Dawn Johnsen.

Limbaugh Bashes Blitzer For Ignoring Obama's Sinking Poll Numbers.  Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh absolutely trashed Wolf Blitzer Tuesday [2/9/2010] for ignoring Barack Obama's declining poll numbers. ... "He's down to 44% in a couple of polls, 46% in another, and where is the State-Controlled Media reporting this?"  To drive home the point, Limbaugh shared a montage of how Blitzer one day in March 2006 reported George W. Bush's sagging poll numbers almost every hour on the hour.

Obama's Balloon Hits the Dirt.  The hot-air balloon has crashed to Earth, and you can tell conservatism is back with a swagger.  You can tell because the media's daily output has gone from breathless valentines for Obama to angry denunciations of Tea Party protesters.

Ignorance is Strength.  When it comes to Obama, the "New York Times" always looks on the bright side of life.

From the administration's lips to the pages of the Washington Post.  [Scroll down]  I also find it interesting that [Walter] Pincus is reporting the administration's line so uncritically.  If the Bush administration had presented, a month and a half after the fact, a set of alleged facts designed to counter public perception that it had botched a matter like this, would the Washington Post's crack investigative reporters fail to entertain the possibility that they were being fed self-serving spin?  I don't thnk so.

Wire Watch:  AP's Ben Feller Shamelessly Spins Obama Talking Points.  It's not exactly surprising to see a writer for the Apparatchik Press — er, the Associated Press — compose an in-the-tank item sympathetic with the Obama administration.  But Ben Feller's unlabeled analysis Monday morning [2/15/2010] is so over the top and totally backwards that it may merit its own place in the journalistic Hall of Shame.

Blaming 'Gridlock' For U.S. Budget Woes.  Less than a month after Scott Brown whittled Democrats' Senate majority to a mere 59-41, the Old Gray Lady is already blaming "gridlock" for America's budget woes.

CNN Celebrates Obama Stimulus With a Birthday Cake.  Over at the most trusted name in news, they sure know how to party when it's called for.  That was evident this afternoon on CNN Newsroom when anchor Ali Velshi gushed:  "Happy birthday, dear stimulus.  Our producer Ben Tinker (ph) baked this cake.  It is a stimulus happy birthday — first birthday cake, which is also a pie chart.  It is the birthday of the stimulus."

How the Left Reveals Itself:  I have recently come to the conclusion that leftists reveal their innermost thoughts when attacking those with whom they disagree.  This was perhaps illustrated most clearly when, after President Obama's recent State of the Union address:  MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews revealed that for an hour he forgot the president was black.

What a Difference a Year Makes.  A year ago the media resonated with the celebration of democracy, grassroots pushback against the existing order, the renewal of Congress, and the novel harmony between government and the people.  Now?  Suddenly all this seems to be inoperative: ... The people themselves have almost magically gone from enlightened to dense, gullible, and undeserving of their one chance at progressive salvation.

Breitbart to NY Times Reporter: 'You're a Despicable Human Being'.  After Barack Obama's election as the first black president of the United States, we were supposed to have entered a new, post-racial era.  However, as many feel it has turned out, any dissent or criticism of the most powerful man in the free world or his agenda draws allegations of "racial tones," as happened on the New York Times Web site on Feb. 18.

Everybody but NBC played along with the White House on this one:
 NBC:  Obama Made Dalai Lama Sneak Out of White House Past Trash Bags.  Uniquely among Friday's broadcast network evening newscasts, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams gave his viewers a glimpse into the undignified exit endured by the Dalai Lama, who was made to walk past a number of trash bags as President Obama sought to keep the Chinese government from noticing the meeting.  A photograph of the Tibetan spiritual leader walking past the bags was shown as Williams read the piece.

What's the Plan?  [Scroll down]  The President's tactic, it seems, is to demand that the Republicans put forth a plan, regardless of how often Republicans say, "Here it is!" Obama will just keep demanding that the Republicans put forth a plan.  He is confident — obviously with very good reason — that the MSM, in full lapdog mode, will help all it can in convincing the public that the Republicans have no plan.  The cynicism is just stunning.

Cuba's Free and Fabulous Healthcare.  Back in August 2009 ... CNN was frantically producing infomercials for Obama's healthcare plan.  Lucky for them Michael Moore had a handy supply of valuable footage from his infomercials for Castro's healthcare plan.  So on the August 6 edition of CNN's "Newsroom," while Morgan Neil "reported" on location from a Potemkin Havana hospital, gushing about Cuban healthcare's "impressive statistics!" the broadcast included clips from Michael Moore's Sicko, adding much oomph to the propaganda montage.

Is Disillusionment with Media-Created Obama Causing People to Snap?  [Scroll down slowly]  Many, evidently, believed the whole rotten fairytale spun around this mere mortal.  And let's face it.  Barack Obama had absolutely no accomplishments to his name other than a couple of Ivy League degrees (degrees, but not a transcript or a paper or a shred of research), a bunch of radical political connections from the most corrupt city machine in American history and a childhood narrative of pure political gold in a country still guilt-ridden over the racist actions of their ancestors.  Yet, the establishment media drooled...

At Health Care Summit, Republicans Calm, Collected, and Camera-ready.  Speculation was rampant that today's health care summit could be a trap for Republicans. ... The concern for the GOP going in was that President Obama, with his supreme oratory skills, would back the GOP into a corner and get them to agree to legislation out of sheer political necessity.  The national news media would, of course, be lying in wait, cameras rolling, anticipating a slip up to fill the evening broadcasts.

Matthews:  GOP Worried About Obama Standing Over Them 'Like God'.  Even when Chris Matthews attempts to side with the conservative/Republican position on an issue, he ends up either bashing them or praising Democrats, something he did three times on Wednesday's Hardball.  First up Matthews raised a GOP concern that Barack Obama should not speak in an "elevated" position, by using a podium, at the health care summit because it would present Obama as "standing up there like God" over them.

Where's the accountability?  Two years ago, the Democrats and their friends in the liberal media were patting themselves on the back because of a National Intelligence Estimate that baldly stated, "Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in the fall of 2003."  This was thought to make President George Bush look bad because he was insisting that Iran was a rogue nation that presented a growing threat in the Mideast and throughout the world.  Since it made George Bush look bad, it was therefore considered of major significance.

Why Are the Media Still Falling for Obama's Health Care Deadlines?  President Obama's so-called reform is getting readies for yet another "final push," so why do journalists still believe Obama's deadlines?

Michelle Obama named fitness role model.  Fitness magazine named Michelle Obama one of 10 role models committed to bringing healthy living, exercise and better nutrition to U.S. communities.

Stop 'Healthzilla' Monster Now, Or Live With MSM-Created Horror Forever.  [Scroll down]  And don't underestimate the power of the MSM.  When the January jobs report showed a fractional decrease in the number of unemployed, the MSM jubilantly proclaimed that the economy had turned the corner and hailed Obama as an economic savior.  And all for a microscopic, temporary improvement in the jobless rate, due largely to the sad fact that more people simply stopped looking for work.

Talking Points vs. Reality:  [Scroll down]  I can say that I can afford to buy a Rolls Royce, without going into debt, by using my inheritance from a rich uncle.  But, in the real world, the question would arise immediately whether I in fact have a rich uncle, not to mention whether this hypothetical rich uncle would be likely to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls Royce.  In politics, however, you can say all sorts of things that have no relationship with reality.  If you have a mainstream media that sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil — when it comes to Barack Obama — you can say that you will pay for a vast expansion of government-provided insurance by taking money from the Medicare budget and using other gimmicks.

Obama to America:  Bend Over and Cough.  [Scroll down]  Democrats bask in an Obama-loving liberal traditional media.  The media cheerlead for health care "reform" and desperately want to give the President a "victory" — while accepting preposterous claims at face value.

Bachmann Rips Media for Not Covering Deem and Pass; Suggests Pelosi Impeachment Warranted.  [Scroll down]  "Well yeah and the other thing is treason media," Bachmann said.  "Where is the mainstream media in all of this not telling this story?  This is a compelling story — that the Speaker of the House would even consider having us pass a bill that no one votes on?"  According to Bachmann, this is such an egregious maneuver by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, to force through health care reform using the Slaughter Rule, as known as deem and pass, that it warrants her impeachment from the post.

Cheerleaders for ObamaCare:  A Year of Slanted Media Coverage.  As the Media Research Center's latest Media Reality Check details, over the past year, the media have served as cheerleaders for ObamaCare, praising the proposed legislation, while continually slamming its critics.

The Media Have Voted:  Health Care Reform Passes.  Forget democracy, journalists have thrown their weight behind the president on nationalized health care since the beginning.

You Lie!  MSNBC Lets Dem's False 45,000 'Uninsurance Deaths' Go Unchallenged.  Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, for one, does not want blood on his hands from 45,000 Americans who allegedly die every year due to lack of health insurance.  And MSNBC's Alex Witt, for one, doesn't think it worth questioning the veracity of that number.

AP:  Goverment Secrecy Increasing Under Obama, But It's Not His Fault.  In a week that has been chock full of lame claims, it would not be correct to say that the howler propagated by Sharon Thiemer of the Associated Press on Tuesday [3/16/2010] is the worst.  But it's definitely in the upper echelons.

MSNBC Contributor Equates State Lawsuits Against ObamaCare to Causes of the Civil War.  Why miss an opportunity to inject racism accusations into a highly charged debate like health care reform that was recently signed into law by President Barack Obama given the opportunity?  Melissa Harris-Lacewell, also of The Nation Magazine, in appearance on MSNBC's March 24 "Countdown" found a way, without exactly calling detractors "racists."

Obama's Pseudo-Achievement:  The story here is not that he succeeded against all odds and with the winds against him to push through historic legislation, even though that is what the media would have you believe.  The story is that a party holding a 75-seat margin in the House of Representatives was barely able to squeak by with its greatest legislative priority and most devoutly desired policy.

Where Were You When the Republic Died?  [Scroll down slowly]  The worst part of watching the proceedings unfold on Sunday was the endless stream of commentators and pundits calmly discussing this bill as if it were just one more piece of bad legislation that we will have to live under.  In fact, what has transpired is nothing less than an overthrow of the old Constitutional order.

Tens of Thousands Protest ObamaCare in D.C., Legacy Media Unimpressed.  Fox News made it "thousands," and the Washington Post first estimated hundreds and then stopped mentioning crowd size at all.  Yes, it's time for another game of "Legacy media, let's estimate that crowd."

Dissent's Noble — Until Aimed At Democrats.  During the Bush years, the news media were the promoters of protest, the champions of dissent.  Denouncing the president as a brain-damaged warmonger was the most patriotic thing you could do (just ask the Dixie Chicks), and it was guaranteed to please the press.

Message to Dems:  People still don't like Obamacare.  Did the world really change overnight?  If you listen to some Democratic spinners, you might think that the same American people who opposed Obamacare for many, many months now support it.  This week the president's supporters embraced a quickie poll by Gallup/USA Today showing that more Americans say it was a "good thing" than a "bad thing" that the health care plan has now been passed.

Will MSM Let Obama Get Away With 'We Don't Quit' War Whopper?  There are lies, damned lies, and then the kind of brazen rewriting of what a man stands for that Barack Obama engaged in yesterday [3/28/2010].  The swaggering Barack Obama, in his faux-military leather jacket, who boasted to American troops that "the United States of America does not quit once it starts on something," is the same man who in 2007 told the troops and the entire world that America and its military couldn't win in Iraq, never could, and should immediately quit.

Apple Boycotts Glenn Beck — Promotes Che Guevara.  "More than 200 companies have joined a boycott of (Glenn) Beck's program," reports the Washington Post.  "A handful of advertisers, such as (IPhone owner) Apple, have abandoned Fox altogether."  We can only assume this Apple "boycott" was prompted by what CBS's Katie Couric (quoting the Fox commentator's critics) describes as Beck's "inflammatory, unfair, despicable, hateful rhetoric."

Alexander:  Obama's 'Soviet-Style' Takeover of Student Loans.  Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), the U.S. secretary of education from 1991 to 1993, tells National Review Online that President Obama's revamping of the federal student-loan program is "truly brazen" and the "most underreported big-Washington takeover in history."  "As Americans find out what it really does, they'll be really unhappy," Alexander predicts.

In Cantor Case, Media Fanned Flames of Violence:  'There Will Be Blood'.  [Scroll down]  But if you are waiting for the mainstream media to cover this, put down the bong.  Leftist media propagandists and their despotic leaders continue to smear and slander good, decent Americans who are trying to save the country from subversives, traitors, overthrowers and savages.  While the left and their media handmaidens rammed a bone-crushing, freedom-killing Obamacare bill though Congress, Americans had to listen to the wailing and caterwauling of the media over fake threats to Democrat criminals.

Michelle Obama Garden Photo-Op.  ABC and NBC on Wednesday night [3/31/2010] managed to contain to a brief item their enthusiasm for First Lady Michelle Obama planting her garden for the season, but not CBS which dedicated a full story to how the hula-hooping First Lady "is enjoying the kind of popularity her husband would jump through hoops for."

When Media Become Obama PR Agents.  In December 2004, my wife and I were invited to and attended the White House Hannukah Party.  Try as you might, you will not easily find anything in the mainstream media to reveal that President Bush was the first president to hold such an event.  His guest list included both Democrats and Republicans.  Now we have the spectacle of the White House seder, glowingly detailed on the front page of the New York Times.

Wonder where the next 'crisis' will be manufactured.  Now the MSM plays a vital role covering up initial results that fall well short of "expectations" and the financial justification erodes before our eyes.  Never once does the MSM compare real versus actual results, or re-examine the business case, or question the ability to achieve the desired outcomes.  The stimulus inability to create jobs and the inconsequential climate improvement promised by the "cap and trade" bill are conveniently ignored by the MSM.  The Mainstream Media is an active co-conspirator to government greed and manipulation, hiding in plain sight, and has forfeited any credibility as a fair and balanced check and balance of power.

ObamaCare and the Constitution :  The constitutional challenges to ObamaCare have come quickly, and the media are portraying them mostly as hopeless gestures — the political equivalent of Civil War re-enactors.  Discussion over:  You lost, deal with it.  The press corps never dismissed the legal challenges to the war on terror so easily...

HuffPo Columnist:  Media Didn't Do Enough to Shill for Health Care.  A lefty columnist for the Huffington Post believes that the media's coverage of the health care debate was sorely lacking. ... [Allison] Kilkenny's complaint seems to be that all media did not skew their coverage to the left, and those that did simply didn't skew it enough.

Seriously, why does Newsweek heart Joe Biden?  Please do read Newsweek's mash note to the vice-president "Why Liberals Have Grown to Love Joe Biden" — provided you're able to properly keep your gag reflex in check.  There are so many embarrassing things about it, it's hard to know where to begin.

Time Mag Chief Stengel:  Obama a Mandela for the 21st Century.  Time magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel, who will be part of the roundtable on today's [4/4/2010] Meet the Press, wrote in a new book released on Tuesday:  "It is impossible to write about Nelson Mandela these days and not compare him to another potentially transformational black leader, Barack Obama.  The parallels are many."

Obama is no Mandela.  At a time when the press corps is competing to find the most creative ways to fawn over President Obama, I really have to hand it to Richard Stengel.  The managing editor of Time has a new book out on Nelson Mandela, released last week, and he goes to great lengths to compare the two leaders.

Obama Spares Us From Energy Independence; Ignorant MSM Cheers.  [Scroll down]  The drilling would not be permitted any closer than 125 miles from any shoreline, which is well into international waters.  In fact, nobody would ever see the drilling platforms.  A person of average height can only see about three miles into the horizon and even folks in the tallest luxury hotels have a vista that extends maybe 25 or 30 miles tops.  No, wrecking the view isn't something that folks are being spared from.

Because Frank Rich Says So.  It's an amazingly consistent process:  Frank Rich conjures up his thesis, scouts around for confirming evidence, and finds it every time!

O'Reilly Blasts Media for Demeaning and Neutralizing All Who Oppose Obama.  "If you oppose the Obama administration, you must be demeaned and neutralized."  So said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly Monday [4/5/2010] about the state of today's media.  "Ever since the Tea Party protest began last summer, the left-wing media in America has been attacking the movement," he began his Talking Points Memo.

Does Anybody Really Understand ObamaCare?  Since the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill, the Democrat leadership has embarked on a strategy of demonizing its opponents as angry, potentially violent racists.  Charles M. Blow developed a new line of attack in his New York Times column last weekend, with an argument based on a recent Pew Research Council poll: Republicans don't understand ObamaCare, so they have no right to criticize it.

Should Obama Step Down?  On page 31 in the transcribed text of the March 25, 2010 session of the Kenyan Parliament, there is a brief statement by the Kenyan Minister for Lands (Mr. Orengo).  What Mr. Orengo says is nothing short of a bombshell, and yet not a mention has been made anywhere in the mainstream media.  I think, for obvious reasons.

Say Barnicle:  Ever Heard Of Bork?  Mike Barnicle just wrapped up the Obama Parrot of the Week.  That's the award I hand out on my local TV show to the MSMer doing his sycophantic best to parrot the Obama party line.  Barnicle gave his award-winning performance on today's Morning Joe, in the course of tossing two super-softballs to David Axelrod.

GE's Big Brother.  [Scroll down slowly]  First and foremost, GE has been the recipient of bailout funds and stands to benefit from current and future contracts with the U.S. government.  This may partly explain MSNBC's highly favorable treatment of the Obama administration.  With GE's CEO sitting on Obama's economic panel, it is no surprise that MSNBC rarely provides critical coverage of the administration.  Furthermore, GE's environmental business interests may explain why NBC recently joined Hollywood in inserting environmentally-friendly messaging into network programming.

White House press corps turns on Barack Obama.  It's well established that Barack Obama, both as a candidate and a President, has received very favourable coverage from the American press.  But what's less known is that many of the White House reporters who cover Obama greatly resent the way they are treated by the Obama administration.

Why Is the L.A. Times Burying the Obama/Khalidi Tape?  Given the extraordinary sudden turnabout in US policy toward Israel under the Obama Administration, I have become obsessed by the repressed 2003 videotape of Rashid Khalidi and Barack Obama.  That tape — or so we are told — is ensconced in a safe at the Los Angeles Times building.  In the current situation, its release by the paper is more important and newsworthy than ever.  The Khalidi tape could be of tremendous significance in revealing the provenance of Obama's views on the Middle East and the degree to which the public was misled on those views during the presidential campaign.

More about the Khalidi tape.

Barack Obama plays eight times more golf than George W Bush.  President Barack Obama has played golf 32 times since he took office, eight times more than his predecessor George W. Bush — who was mocked by the Left for his fondness for the game — did in his entire presidency.

How's His Handicap?  Remember when Democrats used to criticize George W. Bush for golfing at the wrong time?  Maybe there was a crisis somewhere; maybe someone had died in combat; maybe legislation was being debated on the Hill.  It didn't matter.  Every time Bush golfed, the Democrats woofed.  So it is interesting to see that Barack Obama went golfing today rather than attending the funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria.  This is the 32nd time Obama has golfed since taking office less than a year and a half ago.

After Obsessing Over Enron, Media Mostly Ignore Obama-Goldman Sachs Connections.  President Obama has extensive ties to Goldman Sachs.  Yet even given record-breaking financial contributions and sketchy relationships between Goldman executives and Obama officials at the highest level, the mainstream media will not afford Obama the same scrutiny it gave to George W. Bush during the collapse of Enron.

The Provocateur-in-Chief.  [Scroll down]  Following the President's lead, the liberal media will reinforce and defend any and all of his provocative statements.  Once the opposition is identified, they will be branded as dangerous right-wing radicals and railed against, on a daily basis, by the liberal media until they are marginalized.  This scenario has been playing out since before President Obama was elected, and will continue throughout his tenure in office.

Time mag lauds Obama as "on the path to huge success," ignores facts.  President Obama's success is underestimated by his critics and he's on path to become one of the most successful presidents ever, writes Mark Halperin of Time magazine. ... As for scandals, let's see:  There's the questionable dismissal of Gerald Walpin, the gangster-like shunting aside of creditors to General Motors and Chrysler, and the Justice Department's refusal to pursue charges against the Black Panthers who threatened Philadelphia on voting day.  There are the phantom districts getting stimulus money.  There's the administration's revolving door relationship with Goldman Sachs and other special interests.

Obama's Weekly Address Ignores Oil Spill.  Talk about your Katrina moments:  as the Gulf Coast deals with one of the biggest oil disasters in history, President Barack Obama used his weekly address to push for campaign finance reform. ... [C]onsider how media members would have responded if he was a Republican.

The Origins of the Lapdog Media.  Noam Chomsky, a self-declared socialist, once said, "Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US [mainstream] media."  Never would he have imagined that his critique would apply more than ever to the present-day relationship between the mainstream media and President Obama.  This march to the media's present role of being in league with the Obama administration is the culmination of the good-versus-evil narrative of modern journalism.

'Daily Show' Writers Helped Obama With Correspondents' Dinner Jokes.  It now makes total sense why so many liberal media members thought President Obama killed at Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner.  Writers from the "Daily Show" helped craft the jokes.  Such was reported Sunday by the Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove.

Obama/Media vs. Arizona/America.  Obama and the liberal mainstream media apparently couldn't care less about the national racial tension and violence fueled by their irresponsible distortion of the Arizona law.  This is the Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley Hoax all over again.  Only this time, it is the President of the United States spreading lies and fueling the flames of racial hatred.

More about Race-based Political Opportunism.

Time Editor Thrills Over Obama Performance, Compares it to the Beatles.  The hosts and guests of a special Sunday edition of Morning Joe fawned over Barack Obama's May 1 performance at the White House Correspondence [sic] Dinner.  Time managing editor Richard Stengel appeared and knocked host Jay Leno by comparison:  "I think that's one of the things that undermined Jay's routine is that it's like coming after the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show."

The Media's Obamacare Whitewash.  Now they tell us.  The same press that swallowed President Barack Obama's every talking point about healthcare reform over the last year is now starting to shed some unflattering light on the numbers behind the recently passed legislation.

Obama's Burden of Brightness.  President Obama is frequently described as highly intelligent.  His advisor Valerie Jarrett has described this as a "burden." ... The "progressive" media can be counted on to regurgitate this mantra.  They have, in fact, surpassed it, and they have often entered the realm of idolatry or even adolescent infatuation.  Chris Matthews is perhaps the leading example of this.

The Editor says...
 If President Obama is so terribly bright, why does he need a Teleprompter for every speech?  Without a Teleprompter, he is a stammering dolt.  He only knows what he is told by his speech writers.  When he speaks extemporaneously, it is obvious that he is still just a "community organizer" (troublemaker) from Chicago.  Before pronouncing him a genius, let's see some test scores and college transcripts.  Show me his law license.  (He voluntarily surrendered it.)  Show me his diploma from Occidental College.  (Nobody remembers him being there.)  The "burden" of his intellect isn't that great.

When White House Correspondents Go Green, Follow the Money.  In the Politico today [4/30/2010], there's a story about how the Natural Resources Defense Council is advising the White House Correspondents' Association on how to "go green" with their annual dinner.  They seem to be taking this very seriously.

Obama's Supermarket-Scanner Moment: I Don't Know How To Work an iPod.  Remember when the MSM went crazy over [and likely exaggerated] George H.W.'s supposed unfamiliarity with a supermarket scanner?  Pres. Obama has now had his supermarket-scanner moment, claiming he doesn't know how to operate an iPod, among other popular electronic devices.  Do you think the MSM will pick on this in the same way to paint a portrait of an out-of-touch president?

Strange new respect.  Just turn on your TV, open a paper, or walk around your local downtown, and you'll notice love for the troops we've not seen since at least 1991, if not 1945.  Suddenly, aside from the clinically insane, most everyone seems to admire the soldiers who provide us our cherished freedoms; but why, especially when from 2001-2008, that admiration was pitifully lacking?  Oh yes, we have a different president.  That's the unspoken reason.

Media Double Standards:  Some Fair and Others... Not So Much.  Less than five years after George W. Bush wrecked his presidency through his limp response to a natural disaster in Louisiana, Barack Obama has escaped largely unscathed from his similarly feckless response to a man-made disaster in precisely the same part of the country.

Time Magazine Introduces Radical Obama Nominee, Says He's Not Radical.  "Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate.  Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.  Britain, you chose well."  Was that a British socialist speaking in Parliament?  Nope.  It was Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor about to face Senate confirmation as President Obama's nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid.

We Have to Talk About Elena Kagan.  While the mainstream — or irrelevant — media waxes on about how she is a surprisingly moderate nominee for the president to have chosen, the extent of their critical examination of Ms. Kagan, former and first female Dean of Harvard Law School, consists of yarns about basketball and softball pickup games.

Google clamps down on Obama's Social Security story.  Internet behemoth Google apparently is clamping down further on consumers' access to a report about President Obama's Social Security number, which points out the number was designated for a Connecticut applicant, by warning that some sites carrying information on the situation "may harm your computer."

The Editor says...
 For those of you who get all your information from television, and have just recently discovered the news media bypass known as the internet, here's the story:  Barack H. Obama is a man with a remarkably murky past.  His own grandmother says she witnessed his birth -- in Kenya!  He's the only American president who has had his name legally changed.  His name used to be Barry Soetoro -- that's why columnists sometimes refer to him mockingly as "Barry."  When he was a kid, he was registered in school as a Muslim.  He says he attended Occidental College, but nobody remembers him being there.  The people who call themselves "journalists" haven't really cared about any of this, but a handful of investigators and attorneys have been digging, and one of the most remarkable discoveries is that Mr. Obama has apparently used multiple social security numbers in the past, including one that was issued to somebody else in Connecticut, where Mr. Obama has never lived.  If Obama were a Republican, would this not be a front-page scandal?

More about Obama's Social Security Number(s).

Holder's 'Haven't Read It' Arizona Immigration Law Admission Gets Little Coverage.  It will surprise almost no one who visits this site that Holder's admitted ignorance about a routinely misrepresented law — misrepresentations that have led to calls for boycotts of Arizona, a PC-obsessed cancellation of a girls high school basketball team's hoop dreams, and hysterical hyperventilation at Holder's Justice Department as well as by the President of the United States himself — has received very little establishment media attention.

Eric Holder Can't Read?  Liberal reporters always think that the liberal politicians they're covering are the smartest people in the room.  In fact, when they're opposing something, they're so smart that they don't have to read the policy they're discussing.  They have a clairvoyant sense of how wrong it is. ... If it weren't for Fox News and The Washington Times and talk radio and blogs, this embarrassing episode might have vanished into thin air.  Once again, the so-called "prestige" media simply blacked out the news that they would dismiss as tiresome Republican talking points.

Kagan Has Donated Exclusively To Democrats; MSM Pretends Not To Notice.  In the aftermath of President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, ABC and Politico, among others, have reported on Kagan's history of political contributions.  Not surprisingly, she has donated exclusively to Democrats, with Obama receiving more than half ($6300) of the $12,300 in total she contributed to national level campaigns in the preceding 10 years.

More about Elena Kagan.

Did Sestak Get WH Job Offer?  Media Seem Not to Care.  In February, Congressman Joe Sestak, D-Pa., alleged that the White House had offered him a "high-ranking" job in exchange for him refraining from challenging Sen. Arlen Specter in that state's primaries.  Since Sestak defeated Specter on Tuesday [5/18/2010], a number of media outlets have profiled him.  The White House denies that it ever made such an offer, which means either the Obama administration or Sestak is lying.

More about this topic is posted under Obama's Culture of Corruption.

Establishment Press Largely Covers Obama's Tracks on Disgraceful Daniel Pearl Remark.  President Barack Obama's statement just before he signed the Freedom of the Press Act on Monday painfully avoided reality to the point of giving offense.  If it became widely known, it would likely become very problematic.

What Did President Obama Know And When Did He Know It?  Unfortunately, there are no alleged reporters in all of the Washington press corps who are either smart or curious enough to ask the President what the American people are to believe about the appearance of the Administration coordinating with unions to intimidate private citizens in their homes, terrorize their children, and break federal laws by organizing mobs to occupy and shut down bank buildings.  If the Executive branch of the government were conspiring with any group to break the laws of this nation, would that be grounds for impeachment, if not a few questions on the subject?

Obama:  He's Better than Teflon — He's a Democrat.  The difference in coverage between Katrina and the twin disasters of the Gulf oil spill and the Nashville flood?  The "D."

What Our Media Taught Me:  Somewhere around the millennium, a new style of aggressive, public-interested, and astute reporter began sermonizing in print, advising on the Internet, and lecturing us on television.  At the time I mistakenly assumed that reporters were too often partisans who were creating new, almost impossible standards of probity in order to embarrass conservative opponents:  they wanted Republican scandal first, news second.  But now, I see that they were simply laying nonpartisan new ground rules for the Bush administration so that they could later prove their integrity and professionalism when a member of their own faith would come into the new crucible of public examination.  There was never, you see, a hate-Bush media.  So we will shortly see that now as they unrelentingly turn their scrutiny on Barack Obama and his legion of ethical and competency lapses.

Sestak:  Once again, it's the "coverup" — or is it?  [Scroll down]  But the real issue now is not the "Deep Dish Sleazemeisters" from Chicago.  They are who they are.  Rod Blagojevich, Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama are all cut from the same cloth.  The real issue is our media — the Fourth Estate that we all are supposed to depend on to vet these people.  When Nixon was president, they did so with an alacrity hitherto unseen.  With Obama, as we all know, it has been completely the reverse.  The press' record on investigating the president — as a candidate and in office — has been nothing short of embarrassing.

Barack Obama didn't part the waters — he just made them dirtier.  On the day of the memorial service for the 11 dead on the oil rig last week, Barack flew to San Francisco for a fund-raiser on behalf of the hideous Sen. Barbara "Botox" Boxer.  It was held in a mansion owned by a member of the Getty family, of Big Oil infamy.  And yet nary a word among the usual Ivy League pukes on MSNBC and in The New York Times.

Michelle Obama's top chef friends.  When Michelle Obama kicks off her "Chefs Move to Schools" program on Friday afternoon [6/4/2010] at the White House, she'll be accompanied by a stellar roster of chefs.  Home cook extraordinaire and talk show host Rachael Ray — a last minute addition to the lineup — will be at Obama's side, along with the Food Network's Cat Cora, Anne Burrell, Aaron Sanchez, Ellie Krieger and Alex Guarnaschelli, sources tell POLITICO.

ABC Bashes Bush on Memorial Day.  The ABC News report on the rainout of President Obama's planned Memorial Day speech in Illinois noted that Obama had been criticized for not staying in Washington to go to Arlington National Cemetery.  But ABC provided a ready excuse, subtitling its report "Obama Not First to Skip Arlington on Memorial Day" and asserting that George W. Bush "did not attend in 2001 or 2002."  ABC was flat-out wrong about 2001, and highly misleading about 2002.

Seizing The News Business.  If journalists ever venerated anything, it was the First Amendment shield that blunted efforts to limit their freedom.  So why, as the administration contemplates a federal takeover of their business, such thundering silence?

The Man Who Would Be King.  Over the heads of some of the sycophants in the mainstream media there appears to be the proverbial light bulb turning on.  After sixteen months of the Obama presidency, questions are being asked about not only his competency, but what motivates this putative savior.  The current President of the United States, acting in a way that would make Nero proud, continues to fiddle while not only the United States burns, but the rest of the world begins to spin out of control.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough Continues Defense of Obama.  Joe Scarborough continued his open defense of the Obama administration's response to the BP oil spill, on Wednesday's [6/9/2010] "Morning Joe."  Facing off against Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), Scarborough called comparisons of the president's handling of the current crisis with Bush's handling of Katrina "obscene."

CNN's Sanchez Highlights 'Big Oil' Cash to Republicans, Omits Obama.  On Wednesday's Rick's List, CNN's Rick Sanchez twice highlighted how "several Republicans want to keep the cap on what oil companies pay for spills at $75 million" and how apparently that's about "how much they [oil companies] spend on campaign contributions to politicians each year," but omitted that President Obama was the top recipient of money from BP during the 2008 election cycle.

Obama's radical associations matter, but go ignored by press.  From Obama's participation in the socialist New Party in the mid-1990s, to his connections to communist-terrorist Bill Ayers, it's all relevant today.  How?  For example, some of the same anti-American, anti-capitalist revolutionaries from those bad old days now help craft republic-changing legislation.

The Media's Obama Malfeasance.  You don't need a time machine to recall how the media portrayed then Sen. Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election.  Scribes dutifully reported on Obama's bipartisan nature, his intellectual fitness for the task at hand and his promise of a truly transparency administration.  Business as usual would no longer hold the political process in its meaty grip.  That was the narrative not just from Team Obama but from the starry eyed reporters covering the well-spoken candidate.

Obama Speaks At Lower Grade Level Than Bush.  You know why President Obama's Gulf Coast oil spill address from the Oval Office failed so miserably on Tuesday?  It went over too many heads.  At least that's what the folks at CNN.com believe.

CNN:  Americans are Too Stupid to Understand Obama's Brilliant Speech.  President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Olbermann Quits Daily Kos After Being Bashed For Criticizing Obama's Oil Speech.  When the vitriol is too much for Keith Olbermann, something is seriously wrong.  The MSNBC prime time anchor parted ways with the far-left Web site Daily Kos on Wednesday [6/16/2010], citing the site's apparent unflinching, see-no-evil attitude towards President Obama, and the omnipresence of wild leftist conspiracy theories there.

Media ignore Obama's radical past.  All of this isn't "guilt by association."  It's association, a key to understanding how the radicalism of Obama's past today shapes the policy dictating our future.  And it cries out for further journalistic digging.  Consumers of New Media blogs, talk radio — already know some of the story, while The Manchurian President's brisk sales guarantee a wide audience.  But the MSM?  Clueless.  Which wouldn't much matter if it still weren't the case that only the MSM cover the president.  Or do they cover-up the president?

Obama's oil disaster.  You can bet that if George W. Bush were in the Oval Office, the media would be blaming the president for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.  But they're largely giving Obama a pass, implying that small-government conservatives have no room to complain when government fails to live up to its responsibilities.

Obama is in over his head.  [Scroll down]  President Obama and his congressional allies expect to be assisted in their casual shuffling off of the most basic of Article I duties by a Manhattan-Beltway media elite, quick to assure their dwindling audiences that the abandonment of budgeting isn't completely without precedent.  Lefty pundits can and will point to a year or two where the pressures of business ended the hope of a formal budget.  The president's pals in the press will be hard-pressed, though, to find any years in which the effort wasn't even begun, and there is no example of a year wherein a deficit like the one the country faces today went unaddressed by a national budget plan.

President Obama media doubles down on doublespeak.  The fawning media rumpswabs are finally turning on Barack Obama — to a point.  So let's review the state-run media's role in creating this calamity, by substituting hagiography for journalism in coverage of this clueless boob. ... Criticizing Bush — the highest form of patriotism.  Criticizing Obama — hate speech.  Who caused Bush's problems? — Bush.  Who causes Obama's problems? — Bush.

MSNBC, Joke Network.  This really has to be seen to be believed.  We all know that MSNBC — Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, etc. — is in the tank for the Obama administration, but I think this is the first time an on-air MSNBC personality has confessed to "working with the White House" on talking points; here, regarding the Gulf oil spill.

Obama White House loved the magazine cover of him walking on water.  Ever since the Obama White House got rid of that colonial era bust of on-loan from Great Britain, they've been on the lookout for new less offensive art.  Now we learn, thanks to Howard Kurtz on CNN, that Obama adviser David Axelrod made a call to the editor of the New Yorker magazine requesting a copy of the Feb. 1 cover of the magazine showing No. 44 walking on water.  (No, not the newly-resurfaced Gulf of Mexico.)  The only stipulation:  the cover art had to be autographed by artist Barry Blitt.

Media Praise Obama's 'Brilliant' Handling of McChrystal Controversy.  President Obama's decision to relieve General Stanley McChrystal of command in Afghanistan and replace him with General David Petraeus was met with a chorus of praise in the media, as anchors and pundits on CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC all sang in unison that it was a "brilliant" move.

Will Media Report Professional Misconduct?  Did you know that President Obama has nominated for a federal judgeship someone who believes a serial killer and rapist's "sexual sadism" should be a cause to give him a less serious punishment?  Probably not, since the media have given it almost no coverage.

Vice president's wife set to guest on 'Army Wives'.  Lifetime network's "Army Wives" is set to welcome the wife of Vice President Joe Biden in a future episode.

When Folks Stop Liking Barry.  [Scroll down]  What, then, is preventing a total collapse of Obama?  In a word, it is Obama's likability.  Before my conservative friends commit me to an asylum, we must be objective:  Many millions more Americans like Obama than see him as an effective leader.  He is (or is seen as) a loving father, a good husband, a sincere man who rose out of difficult circumstances into high office.  Obama speaks well, he talks about sports, he is seen in every flattering photo-op which the servile leftist press can engineer.

What You're Not Hearing from the Liberal Media About Immigration Reform:  A popular narrative about immigration reform has emerged in the media:  that Congress would be discussing comprehensive immigration reform right now if only President Obama could get support from Republicans.  This narrative lets Obama off the hook for a string of broken promises to Latino voters that he would tackle immigration reform — in his first 100 days, or in his first year in office, or before the midterm elections, or after the midterm elections but still in his first term, or in his second term.

MSNBC's Witt:  I Got 'Chills' Listening To Obama Immigration Speech.  When it comes to Barack Obama, MSNBC is the network of thrills and chills ... Chris Matthews famously felt a thrill going up his leg listening to an Obama speech.  Now, MSNBC anchor Alex Witt has been similarly moved by Obamian oratory, declaring this morning "I got a few chills" listening to PBO's "very powerful" speech on immigration.

AP Quietly Lowers the 'Normal' Unemployment Bar to 6%.  Those looking for evidence that there is a move afoot in the establishment press to lower the bar for whatever economic accomplishments might be accomplished during the Obama administration will be interested in how the Associated Press's report on the government's June jobs report defined "normal" unemployment.

Media blackout for Black Panthers.  Where is the New York Times?  Where is The Washington Post?  Where are CBS and NBC?  A whistleblower makes explosive allegations about the Department of Justice; his story is backed by at least two other witnesses; and the allegations involve the two hot-button issues of race and of blatant politicization of the justice system.  A potential constitutional confrontation stemming from the scandal brews between the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  A congressman highly respected for thoughtfulness and bipartisanship has all but accused the department of serious impropriety.  By every standard of objective journalism, this adds up to real news.  Or it would be real news if a Republican Justice Department stood accused.  It would be real news if the liberal media weren't mostly in the tank for our celebrated but failing first black president.

Boring Barry.  Camera angles, editing, selection of questions asked, choice of news covered, and a dozen other tricks can make a candidate more likable.  Magazine covers treat Obama like a rock star and show adoring photos of his wife and children.  Marvel Comics, Tiger Beat, Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Vogue are magazines supposedly not connected with partisan politics, but Barack and his family find their photographs in good poses, smiling amiably at readers of those magazines. ... The propagation of leftism in America means that Obama is never shown in unattractive poses or losing his temper at underlings.

Zuckerman, Beckel Reveal Previously Undisclosed Ties to Obama WH.  The confluence between the Obama administration and the journalists who cover it can leave news consumers wondering if they're getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Two prominent media personalities — liberal Fox News Channel commentator Bob Beckel and media mogul Mort Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News — have recently let slip that they have worked closely with the Obama administration.

On the other hand...
 Only Mort Zuckerman Seems To Recall Writing A Speech For Obama.  Apropos of very little, Zuckerman told Fox's Neil Cavuto that "I voted for Obama, I in fact helped write one of his speeches, we endorsed Obama" but declined to say which speech.  Turns out what sounded like misplaced overzealous cocktail chatter might have been just that.  Politico's Ben Smith says no one in the Obama camp can recall even meeting Zuckerman let alone getting speech assistance from him.

Bowdlerizing Berwick.  [Donald Berwick] has written and spoken extensively, and his views concerning wealth redistribution, rationing, and the free market are very much at odds with those of mainstream health policy experts as well as the electorate.  Moreover, he has not been reticent about revealing his positions in writing and public statements.  This is one of the reasons Obama chose to bypass the Senate confirmation process and it is why Democrat-friendly journalists and bloggers have worked diligently, since his nomination last April, to bowdlerize Berwick's record.

Obama Team Blocks Media from Oil Spill.  [Scroll down]  To this day, the media continue to have unnecessarily limited and prohibitive access to the disaster area, including reporters being hassled on public streets.  NPR reported yesterday [7/11/2010] on a reporter who was asked to reveal the images on his camera, and his social security number by members of the local police, FBI and BP.  But there is a second story.  The second story is that while national reporters are fighting the Obama administration's lack of transparency, they're not reporting the Obama administration's lack of competence.

You're a Liberal/Progressive if You Believe...  the mainstream media is completely unbiased — except for Fox News.  Fox is singled out because they dare to question the radical agenda of the Obama administration and our Democratically-controlled Congress, or because they broadcast news stories that other organizations consider "unimportant" — like the video of the New Black Panthers intimidating voters in Philadelphia in 2008.

Today Show Job Search Segment Turns Into Ad for Obama Agenda.  A segment that was billed as a guide to help some of Today's unemployed viewers find work, on Wednesday's show [7/14/2010], turned into a platform for the president of the liberal National Urban League to attack those who opposed the President's plans, as he railed against those in Congress who have been filibustering extension of the unemployment benefits.

Real Simpletons.  In the latest issue [of Real Simple, I saw a short feature titled "How Health-Care Reform Affects You."  The article reads like an advertisement for Obamacare.  One would be forgiven for thinking it a part of the administration's campaign to improve the legislation's popularity.

Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama's political career.  In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself.  Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright.  Now the black nationalist preacher's rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama's campaign.

Did someone mention Jeremiah Wright?

We know more about the Tiger Woods sex scandal than about our own president.  [Scroll down]  Obama has been in office for over a year now, and this same press:
Still cannot find any of his childhood friends or neighbors,
Or locate any of Obama's college papers or grades,
Or how he paid for a Harvard education,
Or which country issued his visa to travel to Pakistan in the 1980's,
Or Barry Soretoro or even Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis on racism.
... Yet the public still trusts that same press to give them the whole truth!

Alex Jones' Documentary 'The Obama Deception' Censored On YouTube.  A viral YouTube video of documentary movie "The Obama Deception", which was buzzing on Internet in recent days, has been censored.  The movie by Alex Jones is seen to be questioning US President Barack Obama.  "The Obama Deception" YouTube link has been viewed about 6.5 million times, but now all the links throughout the web will reach to a dead page.  How the video disappeared is still not known.

Is MSM Admitting Collaboration With Obama?  Only someone who has been on a spaceship on a mission to a far away planet for the past decade would be unaware of the nauseous and fawning relationship the mainstream media (MSM) has had with Barack H. Obama since his entry into the political world and the years to date.  It is so disgustingly apparent that even people who rarely ever consider involving themselves with political circle happenings have become aware of this heavily one-sided favoritism that causes a blank in what should be reported news.

Obama's Poll Numbers Down, Imaginary Racism Up.  The Democrats are depressed about their collapsing poll numbers, so it's time to start calling conservatives "racist."  As we now know from the Journolist list-serv, where hundreds of liberal journalists chat with one another, and which was leaked to Daily Caller this week, journalists cry "racism" whenever they need to distract from bad news for Obama.

Obama wins! And Journolisters rejoice.  Ostensibly unbiased reporters weep for joy as Obama wins the 2008 election.

More about the JournoList.

Too Many Voters Unaware Of How The Mainstream Media Corrupts The News.  My sister is an intelligent senior citizen but she doesn't watch Fox News very much though does watch CNN and upon further discussion told me she'd never heard of Anthony ("Van") Jones, the green-jobs czar ousted from the White House after Mr. Beck exposed his communist background.  Her television news sources are CBS, NBC, and ABC, and, as a Democrat, she had no problem voting for the relatively unknown Illinois Senator Barack Obama.  She also refuses to get involved with the World Wide Web.  I've done a similar personal survey of persons I know to be Obama supporters and, similarly, their news sources are the same.

With Fox News seated up front, how about some real questions?  [For example,] Mr. President, why do you persist in ignoring the documented security risk of jihadist infiltration through the Mexican border and instead turn the Arizona law into a rather transparent bid for future votes from illegal immigrants?

Trash Drudge, Bash Rush and Get a Career Boost?  Although it has long been well-known that journalists overwhelmingly have liberal leanings, they have typically claimed that it doesn't affect their reporting.  But the boost given Weigel's career by the revelations that he advocated shaping news coverage to help President Obama pass his legislative agenda was extremely surprising.

Will MSM Immortalize Obama's Laughable Proclamations?  For the media, "Mission Accomplished" represents everything that was wrong with the George W. Bush administration and its war policy. ... Will Barack Obama have a "Mission Accomplished" moment?  That is, will the media seize on something he or his administration has said as evidence of the large gap between his rhetoric and the effects of his policies and tout it for years to come as indicative of his flawed style of governing?  The gap already exists.

Reporter Suspended for Accurate Report on BP's Donations to Obama.  WJLA-TV, a Washington, D.C. ABC affiliate, suspended reporter Doug McKelway following his alleged "partisan" comments at a liberal rally on Capitol Hill marking the three-month anniversary of the Gulf oil spill.  Video of the broadcast tells a different story.

Charlie Gasparino:  GE Execs Encouraged CNBC Staff to Go Easy on Obama.  On last night's 'O'Reilly Factor,' Fox Business Network reporter Charlie Gasparino claimed that during his time at CNBC, General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt suggested to senior CNBC staff that they were being too hard on President Obama.  Gasparino did not say that it became official CNBC policy to tone down criticism of the president.  But he claimed that "the question of whether they were being fair to the president was brought up" and that he had "never heard that before."

Newsweek Defends Obama's Leisure But Mocked Bush's Working Vacations at Texas Ranch.  While Newsweek's David Graham is hard at work defending President Obama's summertime leisure — "A Short History of Presidential Vacation Outrage"  — by insisting that the press corps always complains about any president's vacation habits, it's instructive that he failed to indict his own magazine.  "War on terrorism stalled, economy on precipice, time for a month on the Crawford ranch."

WaPo JournoLista Sargent Gets Sandbagged by Obama and Harry Reid.  Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger and compromised JournoList hack whose "Plum Line" entries are decidedly left of center.  Greg was overwhelmed with enthusiasm last Friday [8/13/2010] when, for a brief but shining moment, it appeared President Obama was supporting the construction of the ground zero mosque.  He gushed that it would "go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency."

The Media and the Mega-Mosque.  It was deceptive.  At a White House dinner with Muslims celebrating Ramadan, Barack Obama finally weighed in on the Ground Zero mosque controversy.  Incredibly, he lectured Americans about the religious freedom of Muslims "that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan."  Those were prepared remarks, a clear and very deliberate effort to skirt the issue.  But this time, it was blatantly sophomoric, too.

The Separation of Islamophilia from State.  By modern secularist standards, Barack Obama's boosterism for Islam violates the "separation between Church and state."  Had George W. Bush held a rosary and modest fish dinner at the White House to mark the beginning of Lent, the ACLU left would have freaked out.  But these same secularists didn't mind Barack's "Iftar dinner" last Friday night.

Let Me Translate:  We Don't Believe Him — or You.  Memo to the ruling class media:  We are not ignorant or stupid.  We've not forgotten Jeremiah Wright.  It's not that we don't "know" what faith Obama subscribes to — it's more that we don't believe him.  Or you.

Media Nearly Silent as ObamaCare Proponents Drop Deficit, Cost Savings Claims.  It has now been five days since Politico's Ben Smith published a powerpoint presentation created by an amalgamation of powerful left wing interest groups, conceding that two of the central arguments for passing ObamaCare — that it will lower the deficit and will reduce health care costs — have failed.

Obama has Played More Golf in Two Years Than Bush Did Both Terms.  Between 2000 and 2008 one of the left's most cherished ways to ridicule President Bush was to point out how often he went golfing.  Bush's golfing was a clear sign that he was ignoring the work he had to do in Washington and that he just didn't care, they claimed.  He was a playboy, a goof off, a time waster.  But now that Barack Obama has come to office all of a sudden the left has found that golf isn't worth noting...

Where Are the New Jobs?  "Corporate profits are soaring.  Companies are sitting on billions of dollars of cash.  And still, they've yet to amp up hiring or make major investments."  So writes The Washington Post about the recession's stubborn refusal to go away.  The statisticians at the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the Great Recession over — but tell that to people who can't find jobs.

How 'Brilliant' Can President Obama Be?  Every person, newscaster and commentator always prefaces any, even the mildest criticism, of President Obama's policies with some statement about how dazzlingly brilliant the man is.  Liberals, conservatives, independents — it never changes.  Why is this?  And most important of all, is it true?


The Unexpected

Great Expectations, Disappointing Results.  The media breathlessly report an "unexpectedly" large increase in unemployment applications with inflation rising "faster than expected."  Given the wasteful spending spree we've been on, what do they expect?

What Do You Expect with Obama?  It's funny how the media almost always use the word "unexpectedly" whenever they report this country's state of affairs under the Obama administration.

Obama Double Standard Disease  [is] an affliction that causes the media to ignore, rationalize or trivialize in order to defend, support and advance the tax-the-rich, spread-the-wealth, expand-the-government agenda of President Obama and his party. ... [For example,] When the economy recovered under President George W. Bush, the major news media pronounced it a "jobless recovery."  Now, despite unemployment stalled at 9.7 percent for several months, the same media call it a "surprising" or "unexpected" recovery.

These days, it's best to expect the 'unexpected'.  The national economy is in the tank — unexpectedly.  At least it's "unexpected" by the mainstream media, and professional economists.  After all these months, these pampered pukes remain flummoxed by how clueless their hero Barack Obama has shown himself to be on economic (and other) issues.

The cost of progressivist worship.  Why is it that one government report after another "unexpectedly" bears more bad news about jobs?  Last week, according to Bloomberg, "The number of unemployment claims unexpectedly shot up."  Before that, Reuters reported, "Employers unexpectedly cut jobs."  This "unexpectedly" bit has been going on for quite a while, suggesting that journalists continue to be surprised that President Obama's progressive agenda has failed to revive private-sector job creation.  One might as well say, "Monday unexpectedly will come next week."


ABC is the most obvious about it

ABC's Moran, Stephanopoulos Shill for Obama's Gulf Address.  Despite widespread criticism of President Barack Obama's Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill — including flak from MSNBC's left-wing posse of Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Howard Fineman — ABC's Terry Moran and George Stephanopoulos on the June 15 "Nightline" fawned over the president's speech and ignored its obvious shortcomings.

ABC's George Stephanopoulos Defends Obama's Smoking, Coos Over Physical Fitness.  Ex-Clinton aide turned journalist George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday gushed over the results of Barack Obama's first White House physical, even going so far as to defend the President's continued smoking.  Talking to Dr. Richard Besser, the Good Morning America host defended, "My reaction is, what is the big deal?  He's got the most stressful job on the planet."

ABC Sticks to Obama Staffers and Friends on Church Avoidance in Year One.  The Obama family's continued lack of church-going in Washington was spun by ABCNews.com into something cute and positive... No one in the ABC piece is allowed to question if Obama now has a phobia about church attendance due to his 20-year membership in the church of radical-left Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  Dwyer can't even bring himself to mention Wright's name, only that Obama quit "Chicago's embattled Trinity United Church of Christ."  He couldn't get any more specific than that.

ABC You Later.  Once upon a time the press wasn't simply an advocate for a particular brand of politics, it was their responsibility to be a watchdog of our government and report the facts and subsequently the general public could weigh those facts and form some sort of opinion.  In the Age of Obama, that idea is as foreign as the Votian language.  Today, our established media not only decide what should be constituted as news but also determine what news is factual.

ABC infomercial for ObamaCare
ABC Self-Nationalizes For Obama.  As much of the U.S. private sector, including health care providers, resists government takeovers, what a sorry sight to see ABC News leap forward to make itself a propaganda arm of the government.

ABC becomes the 'All Barack Channel'.  The mainstream media is so in love with Barack Obama that they continually try to one-up each other in their sycophantic coverage of their new president.  But ABC has raised the stakes by taking up residence in the White House for a day in order to spew the Official Party Line on health care.

ABC:  A Love Story.  A full day's worth of single-payer friendly health care coverage on ABC was just what President Barack Obama's doctor ordered.  The president hopes to radically change the country's current health care system, so he enlisted his one of his more powerful constituents — ABC News — for help.

Welcome To The Ministry of Propaganda.  We now hear that on June 24, ABC Television will provide Barack Obama with free time, pre-empting prime time entertainment for what amounts to an infomercial promoting nationalized health care.  Of course, they have no intention of doing the same for the opposition.  They have ceded their independence and become lapdogs to the government.

ABC Should Drop All Pretense and Go With An All Barack Lineup.  Let them all know that you're sick of it.  Stop watching their "news".  It's no longer news.  Send them the only message they understand; crash their ratings, and thus their revenue.  Rent a DVD, or tune into Fox on June 24.  Then boycott Charlie, Katie and Brian everyday before it's too late.  Stop feeding the beast.

Did ABC Fabricate Projections of an Underwater Southern Florida?  Yesterday [6/16/2009], the White House released an over-the-top climate report, meant to bolster waning public support (through fear-mongering) for the administration's disastrous carbon taxation scheme.  But as overly-alarming as was the document itself, its portrayal by ABC's crack meteorologist Sam Champion on today's Good Morning America may have redefined hysterical reporting.

ABC ObamaCare Special Turns Into Presidential Filibuster.  Call this a teachable moment, but even with ABC's best-laid plans to kickstart the debate about health care reform and not allow the "Prescription for America" special to become an "infomercial," as many have complained — the president spent more than twice as much time as his questioners vaguely answering or not answering the questions asked of him.  But the network consistently presented the event as part of the need to fix a "broken system."  When asked, every one of the 164 hand-picked audience members said they felt that health care needed to be changed.

The media's love affair with President Obama.  There are several troubling aspects to ABC's relationship with the administration.  Linda Douglass, a former ABC News journalist, is now communications director in the White House's Office of Health Reform.  The Washington Times recently reported that employees of ABC gave 80 times as much in contributions to Obama's campaign ($124,421) as they did to his Republican opponent, McCain ($1,550).  And a study released this month by the Business and Media Institute found that ABC News had aired stories with positive reviews of Obama's health-care policy 55 times, while it featured just 18 negative stories on the subject.

How ABC Stacked the Deck for Obama:  With the very first question of its prime time special, Questions for the President: Prescription for America, ABC set the tone that essentially confirmed for viewers that the president was right in his desire to radically remake America's healthcare system.  As the infomercial began, "moderator" Charles Gibson asked a seminal question of the doctors and other participants that were about to hear the president speak:  "How many of you agree with the president that we need to change our healthcare system?"  Naturally they all raised their hands.

'How... Can Anyone Take ABC Seriously?'  In an open letter sent today [7/30/2009] to ABC News President David Westin, NewsBusters.org Publisher Brent Bozell questioned the ethics of ABC as a "news" network and wondered "how in the world can anyone take ABC seriously" after it was announced that ABC News has hired Democratic donor Dr. Richard Besser to be their new Senior Medical Editor.

Obama's Classroom Campaign: No Junior Lobbyist Left Behind.  "ABC" stands for All Barack's Children.  On Sept. 8, young students across the country will be watching television.  Yes, they'll be parked in front of boob tubes and computer screens watching President Obama's address on education.  Instead of practicing cursive, reviewing multiplication tables, diagramming sentences or learning something concrete, America's kids will be lectured about the importance of learning.

ABC's Jake Tapper bans "Obamacare" from his blog.  For a guy from Salon, Jake Tapper has struck me as someone who has been very conscientious as the White House correspondent for ABC News.  He usually is trying to be a watchdog, even when his colleagues are content to be lapdogs.  That does not make the story coming from his Twitter feed tonight any less odd.


The Obama team manipulates the media

Obama WH Secret Phone Conferences Bear Fruit With TV Media's Limbaugh Attack.  As soon as the sun rose on the day after Limbaugh's CPAC appearance, three of the four of the phone call participants attacked Limbaugh with the same talking points.  It seems obvious that they coordinated their attack together in the Obama secret strategy session.  It is amazing that a president's staff can have such power over major media figures without a peep being heard from those that only months ago bashed former presidents over a perceived undue, even "dangerous," control of the media.

Ultra Secret Website for Behind Scenes Media Planning Sessions Revealed.  First came word of the daily secret planning session phone calls between Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and several highly placed Old Media types and now Politico has revealed the existence of a hush, hush web message board where denizens of the lefty media get together on a daily basis and plan how they will all cover the news for the great unwashed out there.

The MSM isn't liberal enough for Obama...
 Obama seeks filter-free news.  The highest-profile moments in the new approach have been well-noted, such as the president giving an interview to progressive radio host Ed Schultz and Obama calling on a reporter from the liberal-leaning Huffington Post at his first news conference.  But those moves are only part of a much larger strategy aimed at communicating directly with audiences the White House believes are more sympathetic to the president's agenda — and one in which much of the work is being done by Obama's top advisers.

Obama has new flag frenzy.  Oh, say — can you see?  Look.  It's President Obama, and he's surrounded by American flags.  They're on the dais in star-spangled glory.  They're at the town-hall meeting and the news conference, in bold folds of red, white and blue.  The White House has rediscovered — or possibly reinvented — the patriotic cachet of Old Glory as a perfect frame for the new president.  That's the same president who once would not wear an American flag pin.  Things have changed.

The Editor says...
 When you see American flags carefully placed behind Mr. Obama at his staged photo opportunities, it should be obvious that the presence of these flags has nothing to do with patriotic pride, especially given his earlier reluctance to show respect to the American flag.  Flags as big as basketball courts are commonly used to draw attention to used car dealerships.  In these cases, the American flag is just a prop whose only purpose is to make you (subconsciously) feel a little better about the ugly business at hand.

What Releasing the CIA Memos is Really About:  It's about controlling the news cycle, putting opponents on the defensive, and diverting attention away from other, more-timely battles underway.  We recently witnessed a similar tactic.  The release of the Department of Homeland Security's "rightwing extremism" report, dated April 7, offered the MSM a counterpoint to frame their minimum coverage of the April 15 Tea Parties. ... It's all about misdirection of public attention, and all sides of the media are conscious, or unconscious, facilitators of the ploy choreographed from inside the Obama administration.

Was Obama trying to run out the clock?  It's not uncharacteristic of this administration to run late.  But seeing that 28 minutes elapsed before Obama took the stage, you could make a case that the Obama team is trying to make it difficult on networks to carry former Vice President Cheney's speech.

How Obama's team ensures his messages get delivered properly.  Here's the new Obama communications wrinkle, which has former journalist David Axelrod's Chicago fingerprints all over it:  Unbeknownst to the invited writers, they've been classified politically, say, centrist in one group or more conservative or more liberal in another group.  That way the aides' presentations can be tailored to go down best with each group's ideological leanings.  Last week, as Ed [Morrissey] reports, the Obama communications team had two writer briefings going on in the White House simultaneously.  And you'll be surprised to learn the president managed to make surprise entries at both of them.

Obama Lifts Ban on Lobbyists! Back to Business as Usual.  Roll Call is reporting that during the typical Friday afternoon document dump — a practice used to hide actions that might prove somewhat embarrassing to the White House — the administration quietly announced that some of the former restrictions on lobbying ballyhooed about during the late campaign have been lifted.  And now, we have to wonder:  will the media notice this sudden change?  I mean, a whole day has gone by and so far only Roll Call has mentioned it.

If this is transparency, what's accountability?  The White House press corps is challenging the Obama administration's reliance on background briefings by unnamed officials — noting that the same officials tend to turn up soon after, delivering the same message on television.  And more to the point, didn't President Obama run on a promise of transparent government?

Obama Quietly Issues Statement on Terrorist Attack in Arkansas.  After two days of silence, President Obama issued a statement Wednesday on the shooting of two U.S. soldiers by a Muslim militant in Arkansas — but the White House didn't even email the statement to its list of national reporters.  Rather, the White House appears to have quietly released this statement to a local AP bureau in Arkansas...

Barack Obama and the White House woo The New York Times.  [Scroll down]  One part of Obama's Times fixation is strategy.  For all the proliferation of news outlets, Obama aides believe the paper still has an outsize ability to shape perceptions among political elites and other journalists.  But part of the relationship is more complicated, according to some close observers, flowing from a cultural affinity that makes Obamaites crave the validation that comes from being written about by the Times.

The morning conference call and Democrat media manipulation.  Every morning, a group of old friends have a nice chat.  ABC's George Stephanopoulos, CNN's James Carville, CNN commentator Paul Begala, and Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have a wide ranging conference call, usually starting just before dawn.  Democrat Pollster Stan Greenberg is a frequent participant.  They examine current events and how they fit into the new administrations policies.  They determine how to best get their message to the public.

Obama manipulates the media.
 Do You Want Your OTV?  [Scroll down]  After the event, President Obama went to the White House basketball court to shoot hoop with the Lady Huskies.  The White House press corps was not allowed to attend. ... Now we know why:  Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who's speaking. ... Do Obama White House officials think their media coverage isn't flattering enough?

The Editor says...
 Attention White House reporters — here is a quick and easy solution to your problem:  When the White House provides their own sanitized media coverage, don't put it on the air!

NYT/CBS Stock Pro-Obamacare Poll With Obama Voters.  Realizing that Barack Obama's healthcare initiative has hit some roadblocks in Congress, the good folks at CBS News and the New York Times figured they'd help it along by creating a new poll on the subject that WAY oversampled people who voted for Obama.  Although the then junior senator from Illinois received 53 percent of the votes last November, NYT/CBS surveyed almost twice as many Obama voters as McCain voters.

The President Packs the Press Corps.  During the eight years of the Bush administration, liberal outlets such as the Huffington Post often accused the White House of planting questioners in news conferences to ask pre-planned questions.  At this afternoon's news conference, President Obama fielded a pre-planned question asked by a planted questioner — from the Huffington Post. ... [Nico] Pitney asked his question, as arranged.  Reporters in the room looked at each other in amazement at the stagecraft they had just witnessed.  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel looked at the first row of TV correspondents and grinned.

Stay Tuned for More of 'The Obama Show'.  [Scroll down]  And, as it turned out, he [Pitney] was not the only prearranged questioner at yesterday's show.  Later, Obama passed over the usual suspects to call on Macarena Vidal of the Spanish-language EFE news agency.  The White House called Vidal in advance to see whether she was coming and arranged for her to sit in a seat usually assigned to a financial trade publication.  She asked about Chile and Colombia.  A couple of more questions and Obama called it a day.

Isn't Obama Planting a Huffington Post Question Worse Than Bush's 'Gannongate'?  [Scroll down]  Will these networks find it even more scandalous that the Obama White House much more explicitly pre-arranged a question from the left-wing website The Huffington Post, and allowed their reporter Nico Pitney to have the second question of the entire event, like they were the second most important "news" outlet in America?

White House Denies HuffPo Set-Up.  The White House defended its treatment of HuffPo blogger Nico Pitney at a presidential press conference on Tuesday. ... The White House has made a point of selecting journalists that are not part of the mainstream media for questions at his press conference and that has made even an Obama loving media suspicious of his motives and methods.

Obama presses the press into service.  [Scroll down]  Pitney, play-acting right along, did his part, beginning, "I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian."  He could have said, "I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian, because that's what you asked me to do and because I really, really want you to like me."  But he had more sense than that.

Decision-based evidence making.  The Obama administration yesterday [6/16/2009] released its blockbuster global-warming propaganda document, Global Climate Change Impacts on the United States.  It's a doozy, filled with colour graphics, maps and dramatic pictures.

Helen Thomas: Not Even Nixon Tried to Control the Media Like Obama.  Following a testy exchange during today's briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press. ... Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site.

White House Press Corps Happy to Attend Barack Obama's Off-the-Record BBQ.  Reporters from roughly 30 television networks, newspapers, magazines, and web sites celebrated the Fourth of July with Barack Obama at the White House last weekend.  Why didn't you know that?  Because they were sworn to secrecy.

The Cost of Controlling The Press.  Barack Obama's White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices.  Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.  Based on the coverage the President has garnered so far, it is money well spent.

A Sponsorship Scandal at The Post.  The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons" was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.  Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have now taken full responsibility for what was envisioned as a series of 11 intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues.  For a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations.

What's really behind Obama's sudden plea for troubled health reforms today.  Friday afternoons and evenings — as we've mentioned here previously — are usually a dumping ground for political news its originators do not want noticed much.  Especially entering warm summer weekends.  The flip side of that adage is that there's rarely much competition for the news at those times.  Tah-dah!  Not by accident today President Barack Obama (despite the shattering death of his beloved teleprompter earlier this week) staged an unscheduled media availability to insert himself into the news.  Not much competition, so he got lotsa coverage.

Obama Complains About the News Cycle but Manipulates It.  It has become his common lament.  Challenged about difficulties with his economic or legislative programs, President Obama complains about the tyranny of "the news cycle," pronouncing the words with an air of above-it-all disdain for the impatience and fecklessness of today's media culture.  Yet after six months in office, perhaps no other president has been more attuned to, or done more to dominate, the news cycle he disparages.

Rahmbo browbeat network heads to carry Obama's health care presser.  It is the simple exercise of power.  Obama's got more of it than the TV networks.  And if you have someone in the White House perfectly willing to exercise that power by making implied threats, there isn't much even giant corporations can do to deny Obama what he wants.

Baskin Becomes 13th MSM Journalist to Spin Through Revolving Door for Obama.  Roberta Baskin, a veteran of CBS News, ABC News, PBS and Washington, DC's ABC affiliate, with a stint at the Center for Public Integrity mixed in, "will join the Department of Health and Human Service's office of inspector general as a senior communications adviser in mid-August," Washington Post "Federal Eye" blogger Ed O'Keefe reported late Monday [8/2/2009].

Media Blackout on Obama eligibility dates back to November.  The Northeast Intelligence Network and Canada Free Press are in possession of extremely sensitive investigative documents, including a stunning written admission by a nationally known talk show host stating that he was threatened with his career — or worse — should he talk about the issue of Barack Hussein Obama's birth records to a national audience.  This document was obtained on December 10, 2008, and provides explicit detail of a "gag order" imposed on this host before and immediately following the national election last November.

Liberals' birther obsession:
 It's the left-wing, not the GOP, that's pumping up the story.  You could be forgiven for thinking that a serious campaign is afoot — aided and abetted by the national Republican Party — to question Barack Obama's citizenship. ... It is not Obama's right-wing opponents, however, who are devoting the most attention to this obscure, Internet-driven "movement" ... Rather, it's liberals, bent on portraying their conservative opponents as extremists — and changing the subject to help a President under increasing scrutiny for the substance of his policies — who are driving this story.

Did someone mention President Obama's birth certificate again?

Firing up the leftist base.  I've been watching the media onslaught aimed at these townhall protesters, and now think I understand why we saw a huge pickup in coverage on the birth certificate controversy over the last 2 weeks.  Media Matters and other 527s, like Moveon, send daily communiqués to left-leaning media with their issues highlighted, and talking points suggested.  Clearly, they decided to hype attention to the birthers over the past couple of weeks, so that they could now use them to try to discredit other legitimate protest, especially that occurring over the health care takeover.

Did someone mention tea parties again?

Rahm's Media Muscle:  Is it just us or is there something wrong with the White House dictating news coverage to advance the president's medical insurance agenda? We thought this sort of thing happened only in Venezuela.

"Miss Information".  [Linda Douglass] makes no attempt whatsoever to prove her assertion that Obama's comments were out of context or irrelevant.  And that's what's sort of interesting to me.  Her rebuttal technique is truly Obamaesque, in that she does what Obama himself does:  Quotes Obama as proof that Obama is always right.

Glenn Beck Loses Advertisers Over 'Racist' Remark.  White House Involved? Glenn Beck has lost advertisers on his TV show after calling President Obama "a racist" in the context of the Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy.  The pressure on advertisers has become a politically charged debate about the right to free speech, censorship and what constitutes hate speech.  Conservatives are questioning if the campaign against Beck is connected to the White House staff.

Just Make Stuff Up:  President Obama's war on the truth.  Why has President Obama developed a general disregard for the truth, in a manner far beyond typical politicians who run one way and govern another, or hide failures and broadcast successes?  First, he has confidence that the media will not be censorious and will simply accept his fiction as fact.  A satirist, after all, could not make up anything to match the obsequious journalists who bow to their president, proclaim him a god, and receive sexual-like tingles up their appendages.

Barack Obama doesn't care what you think.  What I am concerned about, and warning everyone about, is the media machine that uses these organized events to broadcast the agenda. Framed differently, these activities aren't meant to convince attendees that healthcare is good; these activities are meant to manufacture the news, spread propaganda tropes, and over-inflate the image of the pro-socialized healthcare forces.  PR stunts.  The Obama modus operandi is to make his goons look bigger than they are.  These are the people who will make a group of twenty conservatives appear diminutive with a far-away camera angle, and then give individual interviews to all three liberal attendees.

Obama the Omnipresent.  Even by the norms of his ubiquity, Mr. Obama has been on an especially prodigious media binge lately, pitching his health care plan seemingly everywhere but the Food Channel and Fox News.  He will sit for interviews on Sunday with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Univision, and hit the "Late Show With David Letterman" on Monday (he is scheduled to be the show's only guest), to go with his recent run in the print media (Men's Health), on the Web (Bloomberg) and on cable news (CNBC).

On-the-air prez seems like endless 'infomercial'.  During his first eight months in office, President Obama has sat down for three times as many television interviews as his most recent two predecessors combined. ... "He's turning the presidency into an infomercial," warned former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer.

Obama:  We Need To Bail Out Newspapers Or Blogs Will Run The World.  Obama yesterday [9/20/2009] expressed concern at the sorry state of the news industry and said that he will look at a news paper bailout, because otherwise, blogs will take over the world, and that would be a threat to democracy, The Hill reports.

Manipulation of another communications medium:
 Capital Hill Switchboard Illegally Being Used to Push Obamacare?  If you call one of the numbers that leads you to the switchboard for Congress, the number you'd call to be put through to your Congressman or Senator's office, you get a short message selling Obama's healthcare policies before being transferred to the switchboard operator.  This should be the sort of story the Old Media would investigate fully.  But will it?

Obama's Olympic bid stagecraft.  Sixteen days ago, Richard Baehr noted speculation that President Obama would make a last-minute dramatic trip to Copenhagen this week, to pitch the case for Chicago hosting the 2016 Olympics.  The publicly-announced plan had been for Michelle to represent Chicago's bid.  Because other contenders were sending their top leaders, it seemed as if Obama were letting Chicago down.  Unless you took the cynical view and saw this all as dramatic framing of an upcoming event, so as to maximize propaganda benefits.

President Obama — We've Got Questions.  Alessandra Stanley, reporting for the New York Times on President Obama's Sunday talk show grand slam with same-day interviews on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Univision, commented on his "remarkably overt display of media management."  On talk shows that are known for their challenging questions, Stanley observed, "No one shifted an armchair, moved a flower arrangement or asked an unexpected question."  Media management is not what America needs.

The Most Transparent Administration Ever?  Not at DOJ.  Is the Department of Justice engaging in fraud, or is it simply trying to hide its propaganda?  Those of you wondering how DOJ uses your tax dollars to enforce our nation's laws might be interested to learn that Eric Holder has apparently hired former Democratic campaign bloggers to work at the department in what appears to be a secret propaganda unit.

Obama Controls Your Televison Set.  Next week the networks will coordinate their shows' story-lines to promote volunteerism. ... You know how folks always say:  "If you don't like what you see, just change the channel."  Well, clearly next week that won't be an option.  It's going to be a full-court press... nowhere to hide.

The Editor says...
 You have another option that's really quite refreshing:  TURN IT OFF!

Rush Rammed.  The partisanship and dishonesty of the American media is a familiar story and a slightly pathetic one.  What makes the ongoing assault on Rush disturbing is that the White House is a participant in it.  As Time magazine and others have reported, a small group of Democratic operatives and media figures — Stanley Greenberg, Paul Begala, and James Carville — have colluded with members of the Obama administration — Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs — in a campaign to demonize [Rush] Limbaugh, using him as a proxy target for congressional Republicans.

Personal Fouls.  The Left has opened up a new front in its ongoing efforts to censor conservative voices and to ban conservative political thought from polite society.  Their latest target:  Rush Limbaugh, who is now being viciously smeared as a black-hating racist.  Of course, the Left has viciously smeared Rush and other conservatives for some time now.  That's their modus operandi; it's how they operate.

White House aide says Barack Obama team 'controlled' the media.  Anita Dunn, a senior White House aide, has boasted of how Barack Obama's presidential campaign managed to "absolutely control" the press during the 2008 election.  The top campaign strategist who has shot to attention recently as President Obama's main attack dog against Fox News, the conservative-leaning cable network, was speaking at a conference in the Dominican Republic in January.  "Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control," she said.

Sotomayor Says White House Even Picked Out Her Clothes.  Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's nomination process was so controlled that the White House even approved her clothes, she told Yalies when she appeared at her 30th Yale Law School reunion on Saturday [10/17/2009].

Anita Dunn:  Working 'around that filter'.  White Houses lately, and successful campaigns as well, have prided themselves on "media management" — with carefully planned campaign and official events aimed at steering "around that filter" of the national media and delivering a controlled public message.

Community service as a TV theme.  More than 100 programs on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and cable networks will spotlight the idea of giving back, through story lines or public service announcements.

The Editor says...
 Giving back.  Phooey!  Don't let anyone twist your arm and badger you to "give back to the community."  The "community" already comes and takes what it wants — right out of your paycheck.  Take a good look at your paycheck stub and add up all the money you've "contributed" to FICA, Social Security, and the welfare state.

Obama and his 'Enemy' Fetish.  There's nothing in the world like freedom of speech, so long as the speaker booms out your praises, sprinkles his remarks with words and expressions such as "hope," "change" and "the fierce urgency of now."  In such a case, welcome to the White House.  Can we pour you a glass of lemonade, give you an autographed photo of the president?  You others out there — shut up!

The Censorious Sound on the Left.  Team Obama's idea of "straight news" is that which goes straight from Rahm Emanuel's cellphone into Stephanopoulos's mouth.  Team Obama's idea of news without "perspective" is Brian Williams broadcasting publicity stunts like Obama buying hamburgers for his staff and the "news" of the day is how many apples can be spotted at the White House.  The only thing in their way is the emerging alternative media, which is why they're out to destroy Rush Limbaugh.

What would Mao do?  "What would Mao do?" seems to be the guiding question in White House communications strategy.  [Anita] Dunn bragged that during the 2008 presidential campaign, "very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control."  The Obama White House continues this drive for control using the tools of government, seeking to harness all means of communication and organize a Cultural Revolution Lite.  A push for control is revealed in attempts to organize Hollywood to help convey party messages and to use the National Endowment for the Arts to promote Obama policy initiatives.  The Federal Communications Commission is considering content regulations on radio stations under the guise of promoting "diversity."

The White House Takes a Chokehold on the Media.  [Scroll down]  After all nothing can be allowed to interfere with the White House's media echo chamber in which reporters repeat White House talking points to the public and back to the White House again.  That is not journalism.  It is very literally propaganda. ... The Obama Administration has tried to create its own economic reality, its own military reality, its own diplomatic reality and above all else, its own spin reality.  And to do that, to make sure that the public hears nothing but the White House talking points day in and day out, you need control of the press.

Top White House Official Says Obama Team 'Controlled' Media Coverage During Campaign.  White House Communications Director Anita Dunn is seen in a video from January talking about how the Obama campaign exercised absolute "control" over media coverage.

Anita Dunn:  How We Created Obama's Cult of Personality.  With a compliant media willing to focus on his "rock star" personality, Obama got away without having to address many of his questionable friends that never even made it into the public discussion.  Seeing how well this method worked on Obama's church, the campaign decided to use his charm as an answer for most everything else. ... Most Obama supporters had no idea there was a purposeful strategy of fabricating an intimate relationship.  Yet once again, the media chose to ignore all warning signs and encourage people to get swept off their feet.

The Volunteerism Scandals Hollywood Won't Be Broadcasting.  Hollywood hearts Obama.  Obama hearts government-directed national service.  That is why you won't be able to change the TV channel all week without getting lectured about the need to get off the couch and Do Something.  (After your favorite shows are over, of course.)  Creeped out?  You should be.

Lies That Are Disputed.  I remember, as a very young person, the august comparative tranquillity of the Eisenhower era, when the president requested national air time only for matters of indisputable national interest.  He never abused this privilege, and there was no call for equal time.

Does Obama want to control the message or the media?  Controlling the message, for any White House, is hard work. ... It's a laborious process that's full of traps and pitfalls.  And the Obama administration has no use for any of it.  It would rather control the media instead.

Using Dead Soldiers as Props.  The photo-oped dead/wounded soldier routine is one of Obama's favorites.  Back in July 2008, Obama cancelled a planned trip to visit wounded troops at Rammstein and Landstuhl U.S. military bases in Germany because, as MSNBC reported, Obama "could not bring any media.  Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama's visit."  Dead soldiers are not props for Army diversity, props for health care reform or props for Obama's perennial campaigning.  They are men and women who make the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our nation.  Their memories should not be tarnished by cheap politicking by cheap and tawdry politicians.

Obama's Door-to-Door Sales Team.  President Obama's 13 million-strong campaign e-mail list has been transformed into a mass political operation dedicated to enacting his agenda — along with its apparent readiness to help elect Democratic candidates and eventually re-elect the president.

Obama's Doubletalk on Political Dissent.  While the kowtower-in-chief's press shop feeds paeans to free speech into Obama's globetrotting teleprompter, the White House is still waging war on vocal foes at home.  Obama has lectured his critics in Washington to stop talking and "get out of the way."  He has stacked his carefully staged town halls with partisan stooges and campaign plants throughout the year.

'Overexposed' Obama begins to duck the WH press corps.  After months of what some critics called overexposure, President Obama has of late avoided questions from the White House press corps at large, closing the Oval Office to traditionally informal question-and-answer sessions with reporters and pulling back from the fast pace of news conferences he established when taking office.  The president, whose job-approval ratings have been on a steady slide, hasn't held a formal news conference in 19 weeks, since July 22.

Duck-and-Run Obama.  President Obama's athletic prowess is becoming a real advantage in office as he recently has taken the duck-and-run approach to the media.  Instead of defending himself in front of the open microphone, he is dispatching his cronies to defend his policy positions.  Our commander-in-chief isn't living up to his campaign promise of presidential access and transparency.

President Obama Names Transgender Appointee to Commerce Department.  President Obama recently named Amanda Simpson to be a Senior Technical Advisor to the Commerce Department. ... While Simpson is clearly one of the first transgender presidential appointees, Democratic officials say they're unsure if she is the very first one.  The White House had no comment on her appointment.

Meet Obama's transgender appointee.  The Obama administration's appointment of Amanda Simpson to a relatively low-profile spot as advisor to the Commerce Department felt intentionally buried over the New Year's news cycle.  Why?  Simpson, who will be working in the Bureau of Industry and Security, used to be a man.

Phony Fruits in the Obama White House Garden.  Hold on to your hoe.  It turns out that the fruits and veggies used in a special edition of the popular Food Network TV show "Iron Chef America" featuring first lady Michelle Obama did not, in fact, come from the White House garden.  Could there be a more deliciously fitting symbol of Obama White House fakery than Garden-Gate?

President Obama's Official Twitterer Connected To MoveOn.org.  The woman that poses as Barack Obama on all his social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is connected to the far-left organization MoveOn.org.  For those scratching their heads, the President in theory is a member of these websites.  However, he obviously isn't responsible for typing in the little messages that are going out to his followers almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Obama Seeks New Social Media Mouthpiece.  The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America — the successor organization to Obama for America — are seeking a "social networks manager" to oversee Obama's accounts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.  The ideal new hire, according to the official job description, will possess "strong, sharp and personable" writing skills, as well as the ability to craft messages that "move people to act" and managing multiple "complex" projects.

Organizing the Coffee Party.  When I heard about Annabel Park's grassroots coffee party movement and her background in the Obama campaign it piqued my curiosity.  The two most recent Obamaganda projects, pro-Obama letters to the editor (see Ellie Light) and the even less successful pro-Obamacare push on the conservative talk radio airwaves, were reliant on individual action supported and inspired by the future former president's propaganda machine.  The coffee party movement represents a shift back towards the sort of large scale community organizing that helped Team Obama win in 2008.

The Coffee Party Con:  The new and much-publicized Coffee Party movement sports a fairy-tale narrative about a spontaneous uprising of concerned Americans appalled at the Tea Parties and determined to restore civility. ... No thanks to the liberal media, we know that its founder, Annabel Park, is an Obama-supporter, filmmaker (she made one for the Obama campaign), and former New York Times strategy analyst.  In other words, she's a progressive activist.

Coffee Party 'founder' in Astroturf hole, keeps digging.  Annabel Park, the purported creator of the Coffee Party movement does damage control with the help of CNN, claiming that her movement, aided by Soros-funded organizations and planned at RootsCamp, a left wing organizing workshop held at the teachers union NEA Headquarters, is actually a spontaneous, self-organizing movement.

Transparency?  Are you kidding?  The Obama White House did not allow the press to cover the president's signing of the executive order created to win Rep. Bart Stupak's vote for Obamacare.  At the daily briefing, reporters wanted to know why no press photographer or reporter was allowed in.  Press secretary Robert Gibbs told them they should be happy with a picture from the White House photographer, Pete Souza — a photo produced and selected by the White House.  It will be a "nice picture," Gibbs assured reporters.

Silence that speaks volumes:  blackout as Israel's leader leaves White House.  Two separate meetings between President Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, failed to produce so much as an official photograph as a chill settled over US-Israeli relations and secrecy shrouded any efforts to repair them.

Obviously President Obama is no friend of Israel.

The next move of the Alinsky left.  [Scroll down]  Why did these congresspeople, including Emmanuel Cleaver (the alleged "spitee", who actually walked too close to a protester shouting "kill the bill" and got sprayed), Barney Frank, and Nancy Pelosi deliberately march into the demonstration and confront the Tea Partiers?  After all, wasn't it Nancy herself who said she was "frightened" by these supposedly violent people?  Is it possible that they wanted to provoke a reaction from the crowd to be used by the media to demonize the Tea Party movement (i.e., "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it")?  Is it also possible that when there was nothing sufficiently provoked by the lawmakers' confrontation, they decided to fabricate it?  I believe their previous record of untruthfulness supports this hypothesis.

Left Playing the Hate Game.  In reality, this kind of commentary is nothing new.  We see it every time conservatives have any political momentum whatsoever.  The idea is that by shouting "racist," these liberal columnists can make their opponents shut up.  But this is a very angry and polarized political climate.

Is the White House press corps necessary?  Has the YouTube presidency pre-empted the journalists who cover the White House every day?  If you can get the news directly from the president and his Twittering West Wing staff, why do you need the press corps?

Is Obama Making the MSM Obsolete?  The White House Press Corps and the MSM are becoming very nervous.  The White House has discovered that they can get their message out to the public without the "filter" of the media to slow them down.  Continuing to operate under the template that it is their job to make Obama a success, the MSM has been completely unwilling to call him out on this.  Alternatively, President Bush was excoriated by the MSM for avoiding the press for any extended period of time throughout his two terms of office.

Obama leaves WH without press, breaking protocol.  President Barack Obama quietly breached years of protocol on Saturday morning [4/10/2010] by leaving the White House without the press with him.

Presidential Motorcade Leaves Press Corps In the Dust... Again.  President Obama caused quite a stir on Saturday after he left the White House without the traveling press corps, but it's not the first time he's slipped away without them.

The Judas Kiss, the Brutus Stab, the Obama bow.  [Scroll down]  Obama's bow-wow in portraiture far outshines the hardly ever seen Portuguese Water Dog, Bo, last seen all over the Internet in April of 2009.  The lens have captured Obama's subservient bows to Saudi King Abdullah; Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko and even to Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio.  Photo ops one and all.

Obama Attends Non-Existent Soccer Game?  Reading the story about President Obama breaking tradition and ditching the presidential press pool over the weekend to watch one of his daughter's soccer games, it appears harmless, right?  Not so.  It is rather disturbing when you dissect it.

Why Is the 'Master Communicator' Ducking the Media?  [Scroll down]  During the same 265-day time period when he studiously avoided press conferences, Obama delivered dozens of prepared speeches to friendly audiences, most to pitch his pet project, "Health Care Reform."  Obama also granted dozens of interviews, the overwhelming majority of them, not surprisingly, to MSM interviewers sympathetic to his policies.

'Most Transparent White House Ever' Prevents Reporters From Covering Protest.  While mainstream media reporters are generally pretty supportive of the Obama administration, they bristle, and rightly so, at incidents where the administration is less than transparent or actively seeks to impede journalists from working.

Most transparent White House ever...  Police chased reporters away from the White House and closed Lafayette Park today in response to a gay rights protest in which several service members in full uniform handcuffed themselves to the White House gate to protest "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."  People who have covered the White House for years tell me that's an extremely unusual thing to do in an area that regularly features protests.

Red Dawn alert?  Cranky policeman boots reporters from White House protest.  A protest outside the White House?  Yawn.  They happen all the time.  Usually they're ignored.  What's the best way to get some attention for it?  Don't let the press cover it.  Even better, have some loudmouth policeman boot the reporters away.  But whatever you do, make sure videocameras are rolling.  If this was the plan, it was executed flawlessly Tuesday afternoon [4/20/2010].

From 'The Front Page' To a Flock Of Sheep:  Reporters, Then and Now.  Petty tyrants love to shove other people around, but when those hired to "protect and serve" start acting like they're armed bureaucrats who don't have to answer questions from the rabble, then we're in trouble.  Especially when it was not an emergency, and lives were not in danger.  There had better be a pretty darn good reason from barring citizens, and their representatives in the media, from a public park, and this sure doesn't seem like it.

Media Kept Well Away as Obama Clashes With Gays and Lesbians in Washington, L.A..  President Obama has had two run-ins already this week with gay and lesbian activists  — and judging by his and his staff's reaction  — he doesn't like the challenge coming from his left flank.  So, naturally, he responded by excluding the media.

An Incurious Media or a Four-Leaf-Clover President.  Maybe the timing of the Securities and Exchange Commission's fraud case against Goldman Sachs was legitimate.  Maybe the arrest of nine Hutaree members for seditious conspiracy and a host of other crimes was also properly timed.  If that's the case, then we need to start calling Obama the four-leaf-clover president because every time he needs a villain, the government picks one.

Obama shoos press during coffee stop.  The president of the United States likes his pie tart, his coffee stale and his reporters out in the parking lot.

Why reporters are down on President Obama:  Obama and the media actually have a surprisingly hostile relationship — as contentious on a day-to-day basis as any between press and president in the past decade, reporters who cover the White House say.  Reporters say the White House is thin-skinned, controlling, eager to go over their heads and stingy with even basic information.  All White Houses try to control the message.  But this White House has pledged to be more open than its predecessors, and reporters feel it doesn't live up to that pledge in several key areas.

Up in the Air, Obama Meets the Press.  President Obama made a rare appearance in the back of Air Force One to chat with reporters on Wednesday.  The president, who does not often chat with his "press pool," came back ostensibly to share the news that he was congratulating Republicans and Democrats for moving a financial regulation bill to the senate floor.  But then he stayed and took five questions.  For nine minutes.

President Obama Makes Rare Visit to Press Cabin.  President Obama strayed from his normal routine Wednesday [4/28/2010] and made a surprise visit to the press cabin aboard Air Force One upon his return from Quincy, Illinois where he wrapped up a two-day swing through the Midwest. ... It was rare for reporters traveling with the president to have this kind of access to Mr. Obama, who has become notoriously inaccessible to the press.

The Editor says...
 Notice that Mr. Obama controls access by the press in a most selfish manner.  He appears unexpectedly while the reporters are eating and only stays a few minutes.

Obama's war on the press gets some ink.  Richard Wolffe, a former Newsweek reporter who wrote a very favorable book about President Obama's 2008 campaign, is getting special treatment from the White House according to a Politico story.  And according to Examiner White House correspondent Julie Mason, Wolffe was even allowed into Obama's health care summit, which could barely accommodate the pool.  In a catalogue of the various grievances, members of the press express exasperation with the administration's insistence on providing access to sympathetic voices, like Wolffe and the New York Times, while limiting contact with others.

Obama's Dysfunctional Marriage to the Press.  It has all the trappings of a dysfunctional marriage.  The press wants to communicate with Obama via direct questions, but he's aloof.  The press wants behind-the-scenes access, but Obama is too busy feeding exclusives and scoops to his mistress, The Gray Lady, and he doesn't even try to hide the affair.  He gives the quiet treatment to The Wall Street Journal and scolds Fox News — and in so doing telegraphs a message to other journalists:  criticize me, and we'll freeze you out.  Or worse.

Never let a crisis go to waste.
 Obama Heading to Gulf Coast for Update on Oil Spill.  President Obama will go to the Gulf Coast in the next 48 hours for a firsthand assessment on efforts to contain the massive oil spill from an offshore drilling rig, a White House official said Saturday [5/1/2010].

Elena Kagan White House "Interview" Riles Reporters.  The White House today [5/11/2010] posted on its website a video allowing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to speak "in her own words" about her personal history and perspective. ... While the White House seems to believe the American people deserve to hear from Kagan, it has not made her available to reporters.

Nothing to see here:  Kagan "interview" just another infomercial.  It's standard practice around the White House (going back administrations) for any big nominee pending confirmation to stay away from interviews and unscripted public utterances until the voting is over.  It keeps things tidy and minimizes variables.  No biggie.  The Obama administration, however, made SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan available for an interview — by White House staffers. ... It's just another campaign commercial, masquerading as openness.

Increasingly Opaque White House Insulates Kagan From Press Corps.  In the latest example of a pattern of opacity, the White House has cut off the press's access to Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  Kagan has extensive ties to journalists, which only serves as a testament to this administration's determination to control the message on its major initiatives, including Kagan's nomination.

Want to Talk to Kagan's Family?  Permission Denied.  White Houses traditionally put a muzzle on their Supreme Court nominees, to keep them from saying anything that might jeopardize Senate confirmation.  But the Obama White House has taken it one step further.  It is limiting, if not blocking, access to the nominee's family.

Obama doesn't take questions at Freedom of Press Act signing.  After the signing of the Freedom of Press Act on Monday, President Obama declined to take any questions from the press.  During a pooled press event in the Oval Office, President Obama was asked if he would take a couple questions.  "You're certainly free to ask the question," Obama told the reporters in the room.  "I won't be answering..."

Obama signs bill to encourage press freedoms, then refuses press questions.  An amazing scene Monday in the Oval Office of the administration that's raising opacity to new densities.

Obama Turns His Back On the Press.  At a ceremony to sign a bill promoting press freedom around the world on Monday [5/17/2010], President Obama refused to take questions from reporters.  "I'm not doing a press conference today," he told Chip Reid of CBS News, "but we'll be seeing you guys during the course of the week."  So when the president hosted a "news conference" in the Rose Garden with the president of Mexico on Wednesday, Mr. Reid thought maybe this time Mr. Obama would take questions.

Obama News Conference:  One Question, Two Reporters.  Obama has not held a full-scale, White House press conference since July [2009].

Obama Avoids Tough Questions from Press, Again.  [Scroll down]  So-called "press conferences" with foreign leaders usually allow for only two questions from the White House press corps and two from foreign reporters.  But today [5/19/2010] he said there was time for only one from each side.  And in what I suspect was a White House effort to assure that the questioning was limited to immigration and other issues of U.S.-Mexico concern, he called on the Univision reporter from the U.S. side.  So if his goal was to avoid answering any tough questions about yesterday's elections, or the oil spill in the Gulf, or financial regulation, or Iran, or

Afghanistan — he succeeded.

Obama's (Axelrod's) Choreographed Media Blackout.  The "most open and transparent" president in American history is still playing hide-and-seek with the press, and even the liberal New York Times has begun to notice it, as indicated by this headline:  "Obama Turns His Back On the Press."  If the mainstream media were not so ideologically wedded to Obama's big-government agenda, they would be doing more than pointing out his secrecy and hypocrisy with the occasional headline.

Media Are In Love With Obama Despite His Contempt For Them.  National Review's Rich Lowry on Saturday's [5/22/2010] "Fox News Watch" noted a bizarre relationship between Barack Obama and the media:  "they're in love with the guy and he has contempt for them."  Host Jon Scott started the discussion by mentioning the peculiar irony of the President on Monday signing the Press Freedom Act while refusing to take any questions from media members at the event.

Fawning press now gets cold shoulder from Obama.  Will Barack Obama go an entire year without holding a formal news conference?  He's getting close:  The president's last full-scale session with the press was on July 22, 2009, which was 307 days ago.  When Obama last held a big news conference, there had not yet been terrorist attacks at Fort Hood, Detroit, and Times Square.  Scott Brown was an unknown Massachusetts state senator.  There was no national health care bill, much less national health care law.

Obama Can Treat Media with Contempt Since He Knows They'll Always Be 'On His Side'.  The Washington press corps "have only themselves to blame" for President Obama refusing to answer their questions at White House events, exemplified by how he hasn't held a press conference in ten months, Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York contended in his Tuesday column, "Fawning press now gets cold shoulder from Obama."  After all, "Obama treats them with contempt because he knows that when big tests come, they've always been on his side.  There's no reason for him to think they won't be there in the future."

BP paid workers $12-per-hour to be props for the photo ops.  Has it really come to this?  Yahoo News' Brett Michael Dykes reports that BP paid busloads of temporary cleanup workers to show up as stage props for President Obama's visit to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup operations on Grand Isle.

Limited Media Access to Oil Spill?  Media organizations say they are being allowed only limited access to areas impacted by the Gulf oil spill through restrictions on plane and boat traffic that are making it difficult to document the worst spill in U.S. history.

Obama and Media Minions Inspire Violence.  Most assuredly, the tea parties are not about racism or hate.  The truth is quite the opposite.  The tea parties are about love; love for the greatest nation on the planet and a fervent desire not to see it transformed into something unrecognizable.  The Tea Party Movement is no more complicated than that.  So where did the New Black Panther Party get the erroneous idea that the tea party patriots are, as Janeane Garofalo says, "a bunch of redneck racist against a black president"?  The unfortunate answer is the Obama media machine.

FTC draft study proposes massive bailout of newspapers.  The Obama FTC is attempting to commit the liberal press to permanent, government-run life support, with the federal monolith and the state-funded press each supporting the other in perpetuity.  Let's see, raise taxes, reduce competition, expand government, drain the profit, control the news... Music to Obama's ears.

DNC, Obama Now Astroturfing Talk Radio.  The shameless media manipulators at the DNC have a new campaign designed to promote Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court.  As with previous campaigns, the "Kagan for Justice Action Center" is run via a special website set up by Organizing for America.  It encourages people to write letters to the editors of newspapers nationwide (And we can presume that, as before, local newspapers will publish DNC talking points without realizing it).

Another Round of Obamacare Obamaganda.  As soon as Obama can spare the time to take a break from entertaining himself with publicly funded rock 'n' roll parties, he'll begin an Obamaganda campaign to convince the stubbornly unsophisticated majority that Obamacare is the panacea for not only their health needs but also the nation's financial difficulties.  I wish I were being facetious.  The first stop on his tour will be Wheaton, Md., where he'll conduct a nationally televised stunt with senior citizens timed to coordinate with the mailing of the first batch of his magnanimous $250 rebate checks to Medicare beneficiaries to help pay for their medicines.

There's a pipe spewing oil into the gulf, so let's build more windmills.  Obama, the first modern president to pass his first full year in office without addressing the country from his historic desk, had the setting right.  Just back from a day-and-a-half on the gulf coast listening, reassuring, talking tourism, eating seafood.  He wore the proper suit, had the requisite flags and family photos in the background.

Obama's disastrous Gulf disaster team.  [Scroll down]  Politico's Mike Allen channels West Wing thought this way:  The Gulf gusher is a battle we can't win.  So we had to make this tragedy about something bigger than the liveshot of spewing oil.  So having surrendered on the challenge of stopping the oil, Obama tried to redirect the public's attention away from the spill and onto the political debate over a cap-and-trade bill.

Censors In, Liberty Out.  [Scroll down]  Thus, as Anthony G. Martin has opined, it is clear that the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court is intended to bolster the Obama's intention to censor anything he chooses.  Obama, the dictator would come full circle.  Why aren't the journalists up in arms about this?  Don't they see that this is yet another of Obama's serial double-crossing strategy?  He smooth talks a group, invites them into his lair, and then tears them apart when they are no longer useful to him.

White House Enacts Rules Inhibiting Media From Covering Oil Spill.  The White House Thursday [7/1/2010] enacted stronger rules to prevent the media from showing what's happening with the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.  CNN's Anderson Cooper reported that evening, "The Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches — 65 feet."

Gibbs Evades Question of Whether Obama Agrees With His Medicare Director.  White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs has evaded answering the question of whether President Barack Obama agrees with Dr. Donald Berwick, his newly appointed director of Medicare and Medicaid, who has insisted that health-care systems must redistribute wealth.  "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional," Berwick said in a speech delivered on July 1, 2008.  When asked directly at the July 7 White House press briefing whether Obama agreed with this, Gibbs would not answer the question.

White House Successfully Puts Cap on Gusher of Unflattering Oil Spill Stories.  It's as if the entire country decided that the president had bombed in his speech, that the federal response was an immense disappointment, and that the coast was doomed ... and then moved on to more interesting topics.

Why Obama evades reporters.  Let's face it; the more Barack Obama exposes of himself the more America has no confidence in, or respect for, him.  His serial lies have become obvious, as has his lack of knowledge.  America was sold a story — and this story had a very bad ending.

The President's One-Man Death Panel.  The president recess-appoints a fan of rationing and Britain's National Health Service to direct one-third of American health care.  Why does the administration want his views hidden from scrutiny?

Most Transparent Administration Ever Makes Effective Reporting from Gulf a Felony.  Effectively reporting on the Gulf oil spill is now a Class D felony, punishable by a fine of up to $40,000.  That's right, the most transparent administration in history has made it a felony, effective July 1, to get within 65 feet of what the Coast Guard determines are essential recovery efforts.  According to Anderson Cooper, officials tried to up that number to 300 feet.

Berwick Doesn't Stick Around for Questions.  President Barack Obama's controversial pick to run Medicare and Medicaid made his first public appearance Tuesday [7/13/2010] since he landed the job in a recess appointment, but he did not remain at the press conference long enough to take any questions from the news media.

Memo to the Media — Obama's Just Not That Into You.  Love is a many splendored thing — except when the feeling isn't mutual.  Then, love stinks.  That's the position journalists find themselves in as their love for President Barack Obama has been a one-way street.  The rejection is much harsher than screening their calls.  Obama has done everything to keep them away except take out a restraining order.  The latest examples of mistreatment include actions by both the Defense Department and government agencies in the Gulf clean-up.  In both cases, journalists have been restricted in ways that have made scribes scream.

Benevolent Billboards.  What a coincidence.  Just as Obama is about to institute health care reform, up pops a billboard on Route 22 in Hillside, New Jersey advertising a group supporting the Right-to-Die.  What an ironically opportune time for the euthanasia discussion to begin again.

White House looks to leverage Michelle Obama's popularity.  Playing it safe can sometimes pay off, as first lady Michelle Obama is finding with some of the highest favorable ratings in official Washington.  And she could be taking those numbers out for a test drive, as the White House looks for ways to leverage her popularity without diminishing her value as an asset.

Michelle's life is a holiday.  Not cognizant that the masses have already blacked her out of mind, Mrs. Barack Obama has put a media blackout on her latest holiday including an about 30-room reservation for herself, daughter, friends and bodyguards at a five-star hotel in Benahavis, Spain.

Jobless Nation:  Heckuva Job, Barack.  Earlier this season, Team Obama launched a PR offensive designed to convince Americans that a real economic recovery was underway.  They called it "Recovery Summer!" Note the exclamation point.  They wanted you to really, really get that they believed we were in "recovery."  It wasn't just a "recovery."  It was "Recovery Summer!"

Obama's curious silence.  HR2765 would seem on the face of it to have been a signal victory for American authors and for their free speech rights.  It would seem logical that the White House should have trumpeted its promulgation to the high heaven.  Instead, the Adminstration's silence has been deafening.  The Act was subject of no ceremony.  No photograph was released to the public, and only Representative Steve Cohen was present at its signing.

White House reporters mum on Obama lunch.  White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who've advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors. ... Obama has met several times with columnists and television pundits for off-the-record lunches to discuss a variety of issues since becoming president.  Today, he reached out to the White House beat reporters who file their papers' straight news stories.

Feed the Reporters!  Nuance and President Obama's Media Strategy.  Today President Obama tried to make nice with White House reporters by hosting an off-the-record lunch.  The reporters are mad and sad because the President doesn't speak to them very often, especially not in casual settings.  The New York Times didn't go to lunch — no time to waste with off-the-record chicken salad — but blogged about the invitation.  The dozen or so reporters who did eat with the President this afternoon weren't allowed to write about it.
[Emphasis added.]

Examiner takes principled stand!  Skips OTR lunch with Obama!  It takes more than a cheeseburger to buy our silence, Mr. President!

Stop Obama's tax-paid propaganda.  Recovery.gov, for example, is a tax-paid website that cost $18 million to create, yet does little more than peddle job-creation data that are discredited almost as soon as they are posted.

Paying for hope with your change.  In the modern era, all presidents have to some degree used their office to promote themselves and their policies.  The Obama administration, however, has taken the practice to new heights.  The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last month unveiled a slick, $700,000 television commercial featuring crusty old actor Andy Griffith announcing that "more good things" are coming to seniors — thanks to Obamacare.  Just add the O Force campaign logo, and the advertisement will be ready for use in the 2012 presidential race.


"Spontaneous" events and "randomly selected" people

Obama's use of audience plants is nothing new. [1] [2] [3]

Welcome to Obamacare Theater.  The White House sure likes to put on a show.  Fresh off its joint stage production with ABC News, the Obama administration broadcast another health care propaganda play this week under the guise of a citizen "town hall."  Chicago consigliere and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett managed the floor and human props for Obama.  In a telling moment as the event kicked off, she protested a wee bit much:  "I want to emphasize that the President has not seen the questions ahead of time."  The audience responded with polite laughter.  But the denials of pre-planning and stacked decks deserve nothing but derisive mockery.

Housing For The Needy Not The Greedy.  In view of latest developments in the Homeless Henrietta Hughes matter, Canada Free Press (CFP) is suggesting "Housing For The Needy Not The Greedy" as a more realistic slogan than "Hope & Change" for President Barack Obama.  Obama's Homeless Woman of Ft. Myers, Florida Stimulus Package Promotion fame is in reality a Real Estate Investor.

White House Says Girl With Campaign Ties Chosen at 'Random' to Speak at Obama Town Hall.  Facing a barrage of questions Wednesday [8/12/2009] over the friendliness of the audience at President Obama's New Hampshire town hall meeting, the White House insisted that all questions were selected at random — including one from an 11-year-old girl whose mother worked as an Obama organizer.

The little girl who talked about mean signs at the Obama town hall.  Like many others I watched the "town hall" meeting in Portsmouth NH with the supposedly randomly selected audience.  The second person "randomly" selected to ask a question was a young girl called Julia Hall from Malden MA (asks question at 29 mins 25 secs into the video).

Obamacare Pep Rally Fact Check.  Any doubts that President Barack Obama's "townhall" in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday [8/11/2009] was a complete farce were dispelled early on when the hand picked crowd broke out in a chant of:  "Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!" at the close of his opening remarks.

Potemkin town halls.  President Obama should be charged with false advertising for calling yesterday's Portsmouth, N.H., event a "town-hall meeting."  It was a staged, partisan campaign rally.  The Portsmouth rally was the first of three such events planned for this week.  If nothing else, it was well-choreographed, if not completely scripted.  The questions posed to the president were all softballs; his answers were mostly platitudes.

The Obama team has been known to use doctors as props on the White House lawn.


Friday night document dumps

The best way to keep unflattering information out of the headlines and off the television is to release it to the news media in massive quantities on a Friday night.

The Permanent Campaign Continues.  Every modern White House has put out news on contentious issues late on Friday in the hope that doing so will bury it, or reduce the amount of critical scrutiny it would otherwise receive.  What is unusual is the degree to which this White House has relied on this tactic. ... Do Friday news dumps work?  Yes, but marginally.  The White House press corps is generally exhausted at the end of a long week.  Congressional critics are either in route back home to their districts or already there.

Promises, Promises:  Friday is still WH 'trash day'.  President Barack Obama entered the White House promising a new era of openness in government, but when it comes to bad news, his administration often uses one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook:  putting it out when the fewest people are likely to notice.

Friday Night Hack Attack.  On February 19, Attorney General Eric Holder took part in the time-honored Washington tradition of dumping undesired news on Friday afternoons or evenings. ... This is bad news for Holder and certain other Obama appointees at Justice — it undermines the story they've been telling for years that the lawyers who found the CIA program lawful were sadistic criminals committed to torturing poor souls such as Khalid Sheik Muhammad...

Living Legends.  This month in Chicago, an event will honor three men as "living legends."  The men are Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of Barack Obama's church, and Father Michael Pfleger, a radical-left Catholic priest. ... There are many interesting things about this exposition.  First, it has received almost no media coverage, even though Farrakhan, speaking before a crowd of 20,000 a few days ago, accused the "white right" of planning the assassination of President Obama.

Not exactly terrorists.  Despite numerous requests from Senate Republicans for more information, the Justice Department waited until Friday [3/26/2010], just as Congress was leaving town for a recess, finally to provide support for Mr. Holder's assertions.  At one point, the department ridiculously claimed that federal regulations precluded it from providing such a list. ... Rather than bolstering Mr. Holder's position, the data dump showed that Republicans were right to look askance at him.

National Security Mush.  President Obama's so proud of his new National Security Strategy that the White House released it on the eve of a holiday weekend — when everybody in Washington's racing for the beach, the 'burbs or a bunker.  With good reason.  This isn't a strategy.  It's a stump speech.

White House says 51 percent of company health plans won't meet Obamacare guidelines.  Internal White House documents reveal that 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage by 2013 due to ObamaCare.  That numbers soars to 66% for small-business employers. ... The Associated Press is also on the story.  Even they can't ignore the dishonesty that was used to sell the health care overhaul.

Terror trial locations?  Oh, we'll figure that out after the election.  In case you missed the Friday news dump for Father's Day...

Joe Biden update:  He's fined $219,000 for campaign violations.  Due to an unfortunate (and no doubt accidental) error of timing, the news of a nearly quarter-million-dollar federal fine levied against the vice president of the United States, Joe "What Checks?" Biden, was announced Friday — a hot summer day when hardly anyone was paying attention to anything but the tempting weekend at the next exit. ... A Biden spokeswoman, who apparently uses a different money-measuring gauge than the 9.5% of Americans currently unemployed, called the $219,000 penalty as "relatively small."  It is equal to about 96% of a vice president's annual salary.

Obamanomics:  Kneecapping America's Future.  The Obama Administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unloaded its disastrous mid-session budget review in a Friday afternoon dump and run — updating its own budget projections from February.  By the administration's own analysis the forecast is bleak:  10% unemployment this year and a $1.47 trillion deficit next year.  The President's plan is to add crippling tax hikes to the unrestrained spending and unprecedented deficits and debt.


The strange case of "Ellie Light"

Is this person a White House employee or just an activist?
 Obama has suspicious number of letter-writing fans named 'Ellie Light'.  Ellie Light sure gets around.  In recent weeks, Light has published virtually identical "Letters to the Editor" in support of President Barack Obama in more than a dozen newspapers.  Every letter claimed a different residence for Light that happened to be in the newspaper's circulation area.

Obama-Loving Spammer 'Ellie Light' Dupes 42 Newspapers.  In January, an anonymous person supposedly named "Ellie Light" launched a massive PR campaign on behalf of President Barack Obama.  The goal appears to have been to infiltrate as many newspapers as possible to spread pro-Obama propaganda — as if the press needed the help. ... It seems that lying about your identity is not a big deal if you write gushing praise of Barack Obama — and even if you get caught, the mainstream media will actively keep it covered up.

Is This the President's Fake Letter to the Editor:  The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper happened upon a curious letter to the editor in support of President Obama that seems to have suddenly popped up in nearly 40 newspapers across the country all at once. ... The whole thing stinks of an astroturf effort — an effort to carpet the news with a fake grass-roots styled letter.  Who had the power to get this letter placed in so many papers all on the same day?

New Bogus Obama Letter To Editor Writer Turns Up.  The letters are nearly identical in grammar, tone, and gist.  The letters also contain the following closing statement:  "...and a president can't just wave a magic wand and fix everything."  That may be true, but the President's political adviser David Axlerod can wave a magic wand and send letters to a few dozen newspapers all under the same name, after all he is the master of Astroturf.

Ellie Light responds:  Prolific pro-Obama letter writer talks about her online critics.  Ellie Light has responded to her critics, but has kept her location — and perhaps her true identity — a secret.  A well-traveled letter writer who has used dozens of different addresses to publish a pro-Obama letter-to-the-editor in at least 40 newspapers around the country in recent weeks denies allegations that she's secretly a White House official or is part of an organized propaganda campaign.

'I'm Ellie Light,' California man says.  Ellie Light, the ubiquitous letter writer whose name appeared in newspapers nationwide praising President Barack Obama, appears to really be a male health care worker from California.  A man who identified himself as Winston Steward, 51, of Frazier Park, Calif., says he made up the name "Ellie Light" to protect himself from criticism and possible physical attacks, and used fake addresses across the country to get local newspapers to publish his letters.

The lesson of Ellie Light:  Obama's so hard up for advocates these days that this is the best he can do.


Barack Obama vs Fox News Channel

White House:  Fox News 'a wing of the Republican Party'.  The Obama administration declared Fox News — and its owner, reporters and commentators — shills for the President's Republican opponents Sunday [10/11/2009].  "Let's not pretend they're a news network," White House communications director Anita Dunn said on CNN's "Reliable Sources," firing the latest salvo in the long-simmering feud.

Obama has found his oppressor.  Why would President Obama openly challenge the highest rated news channel in existence? ... Many in the media are scratching their heads trying to figure out why a sitting President would do something so foolish.  The answer is simple.  Obama's stock and trade when he was a community organizer was peddling a victimization mentality that blames all manner of bogeymen but never looks at the culture of failure that created the conditions he railed against.  For a every victim our community organizer needs an oppressor.

Why Declaring War on Fox News Could Be a Mistake for Obama.  Over the weekend, White House communications director Anita Dunn announced the official beginning of the Obama administration's war with Fox News.  Of course, the battle has been openly brewing for months now.  Even during the campaign, Obama's team gave up on sending surrogates to the network.  "It was beyond diminishing returns," Dunn told the New York Times.  "It was no returns."  But now the war is out in the open.

How Dare They!  The White House is attacking Fox News again:  it's insufficiently obsequious for the White House's taste.  It's a "research arm" of the Republican party, you see.  And no, it's not just Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity whom the Obama team is miffed at — it's the whole network.

The press should stick up for Fox News.  For the first time since Nixon, we have a president who is so vain and so thin of skin that he has an enemies list.  As the boycott led by the Jones group showed, this administration is not above acting against its enemies, even pursuing economic sanctions.  Obama's juvenile boycott of appearing on Fox News is unpresidential.

Video of Obama Communications Director Claiming Mao One of Her 'Favorite Political Philosophers'.  The feud between the White House and the Fox News Channel took another, thanks to one of Glenn Beck's viewers.  On Beck's Oct. 15 program, the Fox News host played video sent to him of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who had previously slammed Fox News and called it an organ of the Republican Party.

Why the White House Picked Anita Dunn to Wage War With Fox.  This weekend, after White House communications director Anita Dunn forthrightly declared war on Fox News, some people thought she might have gone a little too far in explaining a tacit understanding in the Obama administration that they didn't deal directly with the right-leaning network. ... But of course, Dunn's statements had been carefully scripted by the Obama team — as is pretty much everything you hear from them, except things that are supposed to be off the record.

Fox News Locked Out.  On September 20, 2009, Obama appeared on five Sunday morning news shows in one day — Fox News Sunday was not included.  Two weeks later, following what the New York Times referred to as a "Fox Summit" between Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, and David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Obama, Fox News was told they wouldn't get to conduct any Obama interviews in the foreseeable future and all members of the administration, from the top down, were ordered to stay off Fox News.

Unlike Nixon, Obama's Media Attacks Generate Little Press Anger.  Is Barack Obama turning into Spiro Agnew?  The White House's attacks on the Fox News smack of the distaste for media opposition espoused by Nixon's vice president almost 40 years ago but are being met with a decidedly different reaction today by the elite media.

White House Cites Opinion Shows as Basis for Fox News Complaints.  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Tuesday [10/20/2009] pointed to two top-rated opinion shows on Fox News as the reason why the Obama administration has castigated the network as an illegitimate news organization.

White House:  Media shouldn't follow Fox.  A White House attempt to delegitimize Fox News — which in past times would have drawn howls of censorship from the press corps — has instead been greeted by a collective shrug.

Media Wars:  White House Crosses the Line.  Every White House complains about its press coverage.  A contentious relationship between the Executive Branch and a free and independent media is part of America's DNA.  Always has been.  But this White House seems to feel they're different. ... Not since Nixon conjured up an "enemies list" have we seen the full weight of the Office of the Presidency brought to bear in such a targeted and deliberate effort to delegitimize a media organization critical of the President.

FCC-Church Conspiracy to Silence Talk Radio and Fox?  What we are documenting here is a full-fledged assault on conservative media.  On talk radio and on Fox News.  An assault by name on some, on others with their names left out, but surely every bit the target as the others.  You can be assured that also in the bull's-eye here is Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and others.  Someone like Levin, who has both a popular talk radio show and a bestselling book, would be of particular concern.  So too those without their own shows but with successful books and websites — the Michelle Malkins, Dick Morrises.  Surely Andrew Breitbart, already in their sites for the ACORN investigation, sits on this enemies list.

Obama Attempts to 'Wag the Fox'.  [Saul] Alinksy, a left-wing community organizer and author, advised his acolytes to "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities.  One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and 'frozen.'"  Recent comments by White House Communications Director Anita Dunn have done nothing to allay conservatives' suspicion.

Media Matters & President Obama in Lockstep.  Revival of right-wing conspiracy charges are all the rage in the age of Obama, but liberals are just playing the same old shell game.  The real action is on the left, with lockstep collusion by the President with Soros-funded Media Matters.  While the President sends his surrogates onto national network programs to decry Fox News, Media Matters is behind the scenes working its Fight Fox campaign.

Why the White House attack on Fox is backfiring.  A number of mainstream journalists are reacting badly to the attempt to declare a journalistic organization off-limits.  Why the negative reaction?  Is it because of solidarity among reporters?  A reflexive defense of freedom of the press?  Secret sympathy for Fox?  None of the above.  The real reason the White House campaign is backfiring is that it offends journalistic self-esteem.  Most mainstream reporters are already ignoring stories critical of the Obama administration that Fox plays up.

Obama's war on Fox & half the country.  On the one hand, we should celebrate the war between Fox News and the White House.  It is a good thing President Obama & Co. are angry with Fox.  It means Fox is doing its job, you know, holding the Executive Branch accountable, like a real news organization.  This is good news.  Traditionally in America, the Fourth Estate's role has been to challenge those in power, challenge the assumptions, examine the assertions, and check for accuracy, all the while carrying both sides of the story.

Mass media and private liberty.  The spectacle of a White House warring against the single television news network which does not fawn over the president, and attacking his most prominent talk radio show critic, brings home just how bureaucratized information, opinion, and thought have become in America.  In television news a handful of institutions determine what is newsworthy and what is not for those tens of millions who only get news from the video screen.  That decision — what is "news" — decides everything.

The Real Flaw:  Fox Is a No-Fawn Zone.  [Scroll down]  Now, I happen to agree with Obama boosters who argue that the president has no obligation to appear on Fox News shows.  If Obama and his minions don't think they can hold their own with Chris Wallace, they are free to cower in their comfy offices.

'Radio Free America'.  [Scroll down slowly]  It is no mystery why the White House has made Fox News a target.  If its reporting and commentating were not effective in exposing things the administration does not want the public to know, Fox would be ignored.  But it is increasingly effective because the public is sensing that the administration has a lot to hide about its personnel, ideology and objectives.

The Grating Communicator.  I think the administration should have picked someone other than David Axelrod to deliver the claim that Fox News is "not really news," inasmuch as Axelrod was behind the leak of scurrilous allegations in Jack Ryan's sealed divorce papers when he was running for a Senate seat against Obama.  Talk about vicious personal gossip.

White House shows immaturity, thin skin .  By brazenly declaring war on a member of the Fourth Estate, the Obama administration is making a first-rate error in judgment.  Just because White House officials, and maybe even President Barack Obama himself, don't like Fox News doesn't mean they have the right to decide that the network is — in the words of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn — "opinion journalism masquerading as news."

The Editor says...
 If the White House staff objects to "opinion journalism masquerading as news", they should boot Helen Thomas out of the daily press briefings at the White House.  She's an opinion writer, not a reporter.

Fox Wars:  The 'post-partisan' president makes an enemies list.  Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster.  Now he's put a horse's head in Roger Ailes's bed.  Not very subtle.  And not very smart.  Ailes doesn't scare easily.

Why the White House Bullies Fox.  The Obama team isn't at war with Fox because it's conservative.  They're angry because Fox has embarrassed them.

The White House wages an unworthy media war.  Politicians are sounding a little paranoid about the media these days.  The White House is trying to blockade the largest cable news network.  A House candidate called the police when a reporter asked her about abortion.  Congressional leaders turn to angry media critics as they talk about why support for health care legislation remains tepid.  Lashing out at the press has always been a popular play for politicians in distress, and it's often a precursor to eventual failure.

Obama Manipulates Media to Expel Fox.  Whether the White House's "war" against Fox News is a ruse to divert attention from President Barack Obama's plummeting poll numbers and unfavorable policies, or an all-out attack to exclude Fox News from the White House press pool, the self-proclaimed government "watch dogs" are virtually AWOL or turncoats.

An Open and Transparent Presidency, Complete with an Enemies List.  By October 22 the White House had created a schedule for the White House Press Corps to interview Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg.  However, to the surprise of all (well maybe not a complete surprise) this interview schedule excluded Fox News.  Fortunately, ABC, NBC, CNN and CBS refused to interview Feinberg unless Fox was also permitted to do so.  Reinstated to the White House Press pool through the heroic efforts of their colleagues, Fox News White House correspondent Major Garrett eventually succeeded in interviewing Mr. Feinberg.

Obama Escalates Feud:  Administration Attempts to Exclude Fox News from White House Pool.  Just when you thought the White House couldn't possibly do anything to make their bizarre feud with the Fox News Channel an even larger spectacle — the administration manages to take it to another level.

Obama a tough guy, at least with Fox News.  The most recent whine — the anti-Fox campaign — is, apart from anything else, unbecoming to the office.  President Obama is the chief of state of one of the oldest free societies in the world, but his official White House Web site runs teasers such as:  "For even more Fox lies, check out the latest 'Truth-O-Meter.'"  It gives off the air of somebody only marginally less paranoid than this week's president-for-life in some basket-case banana republic ranting on the palace balcony because his interior security chief isn't doing a fast-enough job of disappearing his enemies.

Administration Loses Bid to Exclude Fox News From Pay Czar Interview.  The Obama administration on Thursday [10/22/2009] tried to make "pay czar" Kenneth Feinberg available for interviews to every member of the White House pool except Fox News.  But the Washington bureau chiefs of the five TV networks decided that none of their reporters would interview Feinberg unless Fox News was included.

FOX and Foes.  President Obama has yet to decide on deploying more troops to fight the Taliban, but his administration is resolved to defeat at least one pressing security threat:  FOX News.  For the past week, the administration has been waging a full-bore political offensive against the cable news network.

Obama's Third World get-the-press rant.  Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and Fox News are big enough to take care of themselves, but the implications of what the Obamanauts are trying to do are scary, indeed.  Brisk and even brutal opposition is something every president must endure; it's a pity that Mr. Obama skipped school the day the class studied American history.

Obama's War on Fox Is Liberalism's War on Dissent.  A handful of liberals, to be fair, have criticized Obama for his war on Fox News and conservative talkers.  But most aren't the least bit troubled by it and are probably secretly relishing it.  Have you ever heard prominent liberal voices go after Keith Olbermann or other extremely liberal and biased MSNBC or CNN hosts as they have Fox and Sean Hannity?

Obama's War on FOX.  [Scroll down]  The assaults sunk to new lows this week when President Obama personally entered the scene.  Illustrating just how thin-skinned our commander-in-chief is, he pronounced that Fox News is "operating basically as talk radio," meaning, talk radio allows people to criticize Obama.  It is particularly telling when a president stoops to the level of criticizing a news organization, because it reveals how desperate, frightened and threatened he truly feels.

Light 'em Up, Fox News.  Obama loves the media as long as it loves him, and not a New York minute longer. ... The first target of Barry O's administration was radio juggernaut Rush Limbaugh. ... Their second target is now Fox News, which Barry O's administration claims is a mouthpiece for the Republican Party and, as such, has imposed a White House blockade against Fox News in hopes of damaging the fair and balanced network.  Bad move.

Maybe Obama will publicly attack akdart.com ...
 Ratings for Fox News up 10% since attacks by Obama.  The last couple of days have seen the White House back off a bit — no doubt they realize the mistake they've made.  But the perception is out there that this is a very thin skinned president who will attack those who don't worship at his feet.

Whose Idea Was It To Go After Fox News?  If Fox hadn't covered the specifics about what Obamacare will really cost taxpayers, and covered the growing anti-government tea parties, and the September 12th march on Washington, would the health care reform bill have already passed both houses of Congress without anybody actually reading it?  Isn't that why Democrat-controlled committees in Congress are now hiding behind closed doors and not letting in Republicans or the press?

'Non-news channel' tops in Fort Hood coverage.  Fox News Channel was the cable channel of choice for Americans eager for news about the Fort Hood massacre Thursday night [11/5/2009] according to Bill Gorman of TV by the Numbers.  Similar to election night coverage two days earlier, in overwhelming numbers viewers turned to "the non news network," as President Barack Obama's strategists Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod derisively labeled it, for information and updates on the unfolding tragedy.

The Mao The Merrier.  Anita Dunn may be leaving with her little red book, but her husband enters as the next White House counsel, bringing experience in suppressing dissent, assaulting the First Amendment and limiting speech.  Dunn, whose favorite philosophers include mass murderer Mao Zedong, was expected to leave after a short stint.  She rose to fame as chief strategist for former Senate majority leader, now national health care guru, Tom Daschle.  While serving as White House communications director, she was the commanding general of the administration "war" on Fox News.

Fox and Foes.  Whenever I hear people outside the administration prattle on about how evil and biased Fox News is, I know I am listening to a flock of parrots who have never even tuned in.  As a conservative myself, I have a number of problems with the network.  For one thing, I resent Bill O'Reilly's ridiculing those who merely ask for documentation that their president was born in the United States, and I also wish he'd stop defending Obama against charges that he's a Socialist or worse.

Fox News Making More Money Than All Its Rivals, Combined.  When it comes to Fox News, otherwise rational people — and even some who were irrational to begin with, such as your average progressive — suddenly become deranged and start foaming at the mouth.

Six for Six.  What was the White House thinking when it decided to single out the Fox News Channel for derision?  Sure it might have impressed some of Obama's most ardent followers, but as a general rule it's not a good idea to insult the viewing public.

The dividends keep coming in...
 The First Amendment.  Real Clear Politics reports that Fox News audience numbers continue to climb while Air America has declared bankruptcy.  "According to Neilsen, Fox News drew an astonishing 6.2 million total viewers during primetime Tuesday night [1/19/2010], compared to only 1.5 million for CNN and 1.1 million for MSNBC."  But it is not just the shifts within the industry that are tectonic.  The whole scene has been disturbed by a Supreme Court decision.

FOX News' Bret Baier Shows Why Obama Has Been Dodging FOX News.  [Scroll down]  In response, Baier was respectful, but not intimidated.  Unlike most of the legacy media interviewers, Baier understands that he represents more than himself and his network.  He represents the viewing public.

Why the White House Bullies Fox:  The Obama team isn't at war with Fox because it's conservative.  They're angry because Fox has embarrassed them.

Irony:
 Look what cable news channel Obama's own Justice Dept. chooses to watch.  The briefing room's main TV's are tuned to the top-rated cable news channel.  Trouble is, that's the dreaded Fox News Channel that Obama aides including David Axelrod so weirdly picked a fight with last fall...

Cavuto Strikes Back At Gibbs For His 'Botched White House Presser'.  Fox News's Neil Cavuto on Wednesday [5/5/2010] struck back at Robert Gibbs for his "botched White House presser."  On Tuesday, the White House press secretary took exception with Cavuto inviting former FEMA director Michael Brown on the previous day's "Your World" to offer a conspiracy theory about the Obama administration's response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As NewsBusters reported, Gibbs badly misstated what Brown said during the interview as he chastised Fox's Wendell Goler who had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Are conservatives suspicions regarding the media justified?  Yes.  Howard Kurtz whines that "[Conservative] candidates seem to regard it as an affront when reporters challenge them on their past statements and inconsistencies, which is a basic function of journalism.  They are avoiding or limiting interviews with all but the friendliest faces as a way of circumventing the press.  And some of them delight in skewering the mainstream media, a tactic that plays well with their base."  It's interesting that Kurtz doesn't mention the Obama administration's attempt to boycott Fox News, and its ongoing complaints about that network.

Somewhat related:
 Group Claims FNC Lies, Proceeds to Lie About Fox, Tea Party.  Reading through material from the "Turn Off Fox" campaign, one gets the very clear impression that the folks at the Fox News Channel are bold-faced liars.  They have "no regard for the truth," and uses "half-truths" to push a "stream of misinformation" and "distortions of the truth."  Turn Off Fox is a project started by Color of Change, the far-left political organization founded by neo-Marxist and black liberation theologist Van Jones.


It's not just Fox News.
 White House pressure is applied to all who disagree

Crushing the media.  The American media elected Obama.  No presidential candidate's past ever went so deliberately underexposed.  So the attack on Fox may simply have been payback to the networks that are hemorrhaging viewers, the equivalent for the media of a night in the Lincoln bedroom.  Whatever the rationale, Team Obama's apparatchiks were fully in step with the global left's war on freedom of speech.

The White House Stupidly Goes To War With Car Website Edmunds.com.  It is an odd, and we'd say regrettable, pattern of this White House that it lets itself get dragged down into fights with specific media outlets. ... But in addition to Fox News, now The White House is going after highly-respected and influential car site Edmunds.com.

'Clunkers' critique draws fire from White House.  The White House lashed out again Thursday [10/29/2009] at a media outlet, calling the automotive site Edmunds.com "wrong (again)" for saying that the "cash for clunkers" program cost too much money and had little lasting impact on car sales or the economy.

Why Liberal Journalists are Joining the Obama Administration's Attack on Fox News.  While the Obama Administration continues its war against its media critics, well known liberal journalists — instead of defending freedom of the press — are joining the attack on a news network they despise as much as does the Administration.  Gone is any seeming concern for the right of commentators to voice their own opinion, because mainstream liberal editorial writers are sure their opponents are both extremists and wrong.

The Vilification of Rush.  Liberals would prefer no opposition.  Behind the force field of political correctness, there should never be any disagreement once the liberal mind has decided that something is good for society.  There can be no opposition to the "correct" way of thinking, and if you don't think "correctly," you are attacked.  Those who dare to disagree with liberal orthodoxy are punished sooner or later.

New Anti-Limbaugh-Beck Group Tied To Ex-Obama Czar Van Jones.  A new left-wing organization created specifically to attack Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Brown has ties to ex-Obama green jobs czar Van Jones.

White House's Media Attacks Part of a Troubling Trend.  The White House is taking it upon itself to police the news media.  The trend started of course with the Fox News Channel, but the administration has moved on to bash other organizations, most recently the Associated Press and car site Edmunds.com.  It seems to believe that any criticism of its policies is worth attacking.

This isn't White House pressure, but the effect is the same:
 High School student in danger for disagreeing with Obama.  A high percentage of Americans believed race relations would improve with the election of America's first black president.  Today, that percentage has dropped dramatically.  Could it be because the Obama administration, at every turn, has shamelessly exploited race to further its agenda?  The message of the liberal media/Obama administration tag team comes across loud and clear.  If you disagree with Obama, we will brand you a racist and we will hurt you.

Obama will attack anyone who makes him look bad.
 White House Attacks Gallup Now.  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs lashed out at Gallup polling today for releasing poll data that the administration does not like.  The most recent Gallup poll shows President Obama's approval ratings at 47 percent, the lowest rating on record at this point in any presidency.

The Obama 4 year plan to re-make America.  [Scroll down]  President Obama wants more than to just simply remain a favorite of the Media.  He intends to silence the few remaining bastions of free information that countenance any significant opposition to his ideology, if not by excluding them from key press conferences, then by effectively sending his minions to publicly demonize them.

Dems rip Rasmussen.  The pointed attacks reflect a hardening conventional wisdom among prominent liberal bloggers and many Democrats that Rasmussen Reports polls are, at best, the result of a flawed polling model and, at worst, designed to undermine Democratic politicians and the party's national agenda.

The White House resorts to mocking derision:
 Talk to the hand.  Say one thing for White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:  The hypocrite's got chutzpah.  Too bad he's so dumb.  Gibbs took a moment from his Tuesday [2/9/2010] press briefing to mock Sarah Palin for delivering a speech at last weekend's Tea Party convention in Nashville — with notes ("Energy," "Tax cuts," etc.) scribbled on her hand.  Gibbs stood at the podium and showed his press audience that he had jotted down "Eggs," "Milk," "Hope" and "Change" on his hand.


Obama and the news media versus Toyota

One way to pay back the unions for their support in the 2008 presidential campaign -- while propping up the recently nationalized GM and Chrysler -- is to amplify the troubles of the most popular foreign auto makers.  Personally, I don't buy "the floormats make the accelerator stick" when the gas pedal is connected to a computer, and the computer decides whether the gas pedal is up or down.  Nonetheless, it is beginning to appear that the Obama administration is drumming up unnecessary panic.

Gangster government targets Toyota.  What is it about the automotive industry that inspires such thuggish attitudes in the Obama administration? ... Given the Obama administration's catering to one of its favorite special interest groups, the United Auto Workers union, during the government's bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler last year, it is difficult to avoid wondering whether Toyota has become a victim of the Chicago Way of dealing with competitors.

Local Toyota dealer calls LaHood's comments 'ridiculous' and 'irresponsible'.  Kent Newbold could not believe what he was hearing Wednesday [2/3/2010] when the nation's leading transportation official initially warned Toyota drivers to stop driving their cars.  "It was ridiculous," said Newbold, owner of a Toyota dealership in O'Fallon [Illinois]. "It's irresponsible, and it's not necessary."

The war on Toyota:  There can be little doubt that Toyota, the world's greatest automaker in recent years, has become the victim of much more than another typical out-of-control All-American media frenzy. ... The attack on Toyota, at this time of U.S. economic weakness and populist excess, is fast turning into a great American nationalist assault on a foreign corporation, an economic war.  The White House has denied any such motivation on the part of the United States.  But that denial lacks credibility.

Does the Government Pose a Bigger Threat to Toyota Than its Sticky Pedals?  Toyota's bad press has been for its sticky pedal incident certainly isn't surprising, but is all the negative attention warranted?  When asked about the Toyota recalls, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood responded by saying, "My advice to anyone who owns one of these vehicles is stop driving it, and take it to the Toyota dealership because they believe they have the fix for it" and that "we're not finished with Toyota."  Hood later toned down his remarks but immediately after his "stop driving" comment, Toyota's stocks plummeted.

After Toyota's Hit, Why Invest Here?  Now that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has served notice he's "not finished" with Toyota, how keen will other foreigners be to invest and create jobs here? This political show could cost us.  The grandstanding against Toyota over a safety issue hasn't been limited to LaHood.  House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman also got out front the cameras to announce congressional hearings.

AFP Asks:  'Is US Bullying Toyota on Recall?'  [Scroll down]  If the government hadn't decided to become the controlling owner of two auto companies, the worst suspicion would be that it's picking on a foreign-based competitor of a large U.S. industry.  Now the suspicion is that it's trying to hurt the strongest foreign-based competitor of two companies it controls and from which it hopes (someday) to recover tens of billions of dollars it has thrown at them.  No amount of outwardly professional behavior will negate the existence of that inherent multibillion-dollar conflict.

Toyota and the Union-Backed, Government-Led Witch Hunt.  Toyota, which employs over 35,000 workers in the United States with factories in eight states, is the target of a government-led and union-supported attack due to recent recalls.

DOT Spokesperson's ACORN-y Background 'Very Telling'.  So in Barack Obama's America, what happens to a person who ... In October 2008, registered to vote in the Buckeye State, even though she was not a resident, and apparently obtained an early-voting ballot?  [And] Along with a dozen others, avoided a threatened felony prosecution that month by signing "a form letter asking the Franklin County elections board to pull their names from the rolls."  Why, you get hired by Uncle Sam at what is probably a six-figure salary to be a Transportation Department spokesperson.  Isn't that obvious?

The taint in the Toyota probe:  Regardless whether one loves or hates Toyota, a herd of huge elephants in the living room of this controversy have thus far been completely ignored in news reports and analysis.  These include, first, a pair of related conflicts of interest underlying the government's role, and, second, the disreputable records of several key "expert" witnesses in the mounting crusade against the besieged automaker. ... The other conflict of interest is with the government's major partner in GM ownership, the United Auto Workers union.

Toyota tangled in Washington show trial.  Congress dragged Toyota to Washington to testify in one of the indignant show trials they so love.  I wish they would subpoena themselves and bring Congress before a Senate hearing, under oath and under the hot lights of TV cameras.  Then we might get to the roots of most problems in America:  too much government intervention, confusing rules, and second-guessing politicians.

Sudden Acceleration of Washington Falsehoods.  Overwrought, tort-fed accusations of automakers designing "killing machines" have historically been based on half-baked, even fraudulent, manipulations of data.  When Audi was accused of making runaway cars in the 1980s, 60 Minutes doctored accelerator pedals.  In 1993 NBC used hidden rockets strapped to the bottom of GM trucks to make them explode to "prove" GM's side-saddle gas tank design was unsafe.  Now the other shoe is dropping in the Toyota "sudden acceleration" case.

What are the odds your Prius will kill you?  Prof. Paul Fishbeck of Carnegie-Mellon University, did the calculation on that choice between walking a mile or driving it in a recalled Prius.  Here's his conclusion: ... "Walking a mile is 19 times or 1,900 percent more dangerous than driving a mile in a recalled Toyota."

Is the White House sitting on a report that exonerates Toyota?  With the Obama eager to justify the GM bailout by pushing Chevy's new "electric lemon," Walter Olson at the indispensable Overlawyered blog discusses whether that the White House is sitting on a report that clears Toyota in the sudden acceleration fracas.


Using doctors as props on the White House lawn

3 of 4 doctors flanking Obama at event donated to his campaign.  Not only did the four doctors who flanked President Obama at his White House press event on Monday [10/5/2009] recommend his plan; three out of four of them donated to his presidential campaign.  It could be an ad slogan to put the toothpaste marketers who like to brag that nine out of ten doctors recommend their brand to shame.

White House's botched 'op'.  A sea of 150 white-coated doctors, all enthusiastically supportive of the president and representing all 50 states, looked as if they were at a costume party as they posed in the Rose Garden before hearing Obama's pitch for the Democratic overhaul bills moving through Congress.  The physicians, all invited guests, were told to bring their white lab coats to make sure that TV cameras captured the image.

White Coats at the White House.  With each new day, President Obama seems more and more all show and no substance.  The latest:  a glitzy photo-op to push his health-care plans.  Monday [10/5/2009], the White House assembled 150 hand-picked doctors to tout the "wonders" of ObamaCare.  Alas, not everyone followed the careful instructions to bring their white lab coats.  No problem:  As The Post's Charles Hurt reported, presidential staffers rustled up a whole bunch of them (left over from the set of "ER," no doubt) and gave them out to anyone needing one.

Spin Doctors for Obamacare.  Lights, camera, agitprop!  The curtains opened on yet another artfully staged performance of Obamacare Theater this week.  One hundred and fifty doctors took their places on the plush lawn outside the West Wing — many acting like "Twilight" groupies with cameras instead of credible medical professionals.  The president approved the scenery:  "I am thrilled to have all of you here today, and you look very spiffy in your coats."  White House wardrobe assistants guaranteed the "spiffy."

Those White Coats In The Rose Garden.  Rather than a grass-roots uprising of physicians, this was a classic case of AstroTurfing.  Attendance was by invitation only, and 40 of the 150 were said to be members of Doctors for America, a reincarnation of the Doctors for Obama arm of the Obama campaign that boasts of having more than 15,000 members.  The physicians were told to bring their white lab coats with them to make sure the TV cameras to capture the proper image.  Those who just showed up wearing suits or dresses were provided with lab coats hastily rustled up.

Lipstick On A Pig.  [Scroll down]  It didn't work the first time, when the White House last year assembled enough sympathetic medical professionals to stage a photo-op in the Rose Garden trying to persuade us that, as the commercial goes, three of four doctors really, really support the administration's attempt to nationalize health care.  Rather than a grass-roots uprising of physicians, last year's event was a classic case of astroturfing.  Attendance was by invitation only, and 40 of the 150 physicians were said to be members of Doctors for America, a reincarnation of Doctors for Obama, an arm of the Obama campaign that boasts of having more than 15,000 members.

More about "Spontaneous" events and "randomly selected" people.

I can show you another example of Obama's propaganda team using doctors as props.


Using the National Endowment for the Arts as a propaganda tool

The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?  A machine that the NEA helped to create could potentially be wielded by the state to push policy.  Through providing guidelines to the art community on what topics to discuss and providing them a step-by-step instruction to apply their art form to these issues, the "nation's largest annual funder of the arts" is attempting to direct imagery, songs, films, and literature that could create the illusion of a national consensus.  This is what Noam Chomsky calls "manufacturing consent."

Film Producer Accuses NEA of Enlisting Artists to Push Obama's Domestic Agenda.  The National Endowment for the Arts initiated a "call to action" earlier this month for members of the art community to push President Obama's recovery agency through works that focus on health care, energy and the environment — a troubling sign, one artist said.

Politicizing the Arts.  The NEA, along with the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve (the administration's volunteerism initiative), had invited 75 members of the arts community to listen to a discussion supposedly about national service. ... [But apparently] the nation's top funder of the arts was abusing its position as custodian of taxpayer dollars to promote the Obama agenda.  This is unprecedented.

The NEA's partisan work for Obama.  When the Obama administration launched its United We Serve volunteerism program earlier this summer, it was all about building playgrounds, caring for wounded veterans and reading to homeless children.  Weeks later, the Obama White House, the National Endowment for the Arts and United We Serve have revealed the actual agenda — backing the administration's political priorities with coordinated propaganda, perhaps boosted by millions in stimulus cash.

Who Set Up Government 'Propaganda' Conference Call?  Another conference call has materialized, revealing a concerted effort by government to use the arts to address political issues. ... The meeting invitation went out to all "member local, state, and regional arts agencies, community-based arts organizations, and national partners of Americans for Arts."  Americans for Arts is a non-profit arts organization that has received substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The NEA's new mission:  Obama's sermon to the children followed on the Obama administration's epistle to the arts community.  Yossi Sergant is the communications director of the National Endowment for the Arts.  On August 10 Sergant held a conference call with 75 members of the community funded by the NEA.  As Abby Wisse Schacter reported, Sergant's sounded "a lot like an effort to get recipients of government grants to lobby for the Obama agenda."

NEA in politics flap.  The communications director for the National Endowment for the Arts is no longer in his job amid a flap over suggestions he suggested artists work to further President Obama's legislative agenda.  A conservative artist writing on the site Big Hollywood first complained that the official, later identified as Yosi Sargent, had been on a conference call with artists aimed at furthering President Obama's legislative agenda — a bit of a no-no for the agency, which does its best to stay apolitical.

High Noon for politicized arts funding.  The National Endowment for the Arts and White House official Buffy Wicks are bracing for the new bombshell coming from Andrew Breitbart and BigGovernment.com.  The website offers a preview this morning on BigGovernment.com, citing the notorious and likely illegal politicization of the NEA, bullying artists receiving grants into works supporting the administration's legislative priorities.

Explosive New Audio Reveals White House Using NEA to Push Partisan Agenda.  Should the National Endowment for the Arts encourage artists to create art on issues being vehemently debated nationally?  That is the question that I set out to discuss a little over three weeks ago when I wrote an article on Big Hollywood entitled The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?"  The question still requires debate but the facts do not.

After 'Inappropriate' NEA Conference Call, White House Pushes New Guidelines.  An August 10, 2009 National Endowment for the Arts conference call in which artists were asked to help support President Obama's agenda — a call that at least one good government group called "inappropriate" — has prompted the White House to issue new guidelines to prevent such a call from ever happening again.

At Least 6 Federal Laws and Regulations Violated By the NEA Conference Call.  Yesterday, I posted about the NEA conference call's clear and obvious violations of the Anti-Lobbying Act (19 U.S. Code §1913) ... But that's not all.  The conference call also violates the Hatch Act — in particular, 5 U.S. Code §7323(a)(4)...

The Art of Corruption.  Through the work of artist and blogger Patrick Courrielche, Andrew Breitbart's new website Big Government — reporting the news so the mainstream media won't have to — has just released a sickening transcript of an August 10 conference call jointly hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House's Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve, an initiative overseen by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency.

What Is Yosi Sergant?  Here's how Obama-era "transparency" works in practice:  A government agency is caught in a scandal.  The chairman of the agency issues a statement blaming the scandal on an unnamed "employee," who, the chairman asserts, "has been relieved of his duties."  The statement omits the fact that the offending employee still works for the same agency, in the same office, as he did before.  When a journalist inquires about this, he is told by a colleague in that very same office — the communications office! — that she knows nothing about his new assignment.  It's hard to imagine government being more evasive and opaque.

NEA communications director resigns.  The National Endowment for the Arts said Thursday [9/27/2009] that its communications director, Yosi Sergant, has resigned.  "This afternoon Yosi Sergant submitted his resignation from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His resignation has been accepted and is effective immediately," said a spokeswoman, Sally Gifford, in a statement.

Unanswered questions from the NEA.  National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman and the White House finally responded to a controversial effort by political appointees of both the White House and the NEA to "leverage" government funding of the arts into cultural support for the administration's legislative agenda.  This is the short version of the Obama administration's position:  Nothing bad happened.

Why Didn't The White House Call Me?  It's not every day that artists are contacted by the White House to do its bidding, so I was somewhat miffed to be left out of its telephone conference hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)?  After all, I'm an award-winning artist who designed a domestic violence poster for New York State.  I've also created an anti-smoking poster (seen here) that would have warmed the cockles of our nanny mayor, Michael Bloomberg.  In all seriousness, I hardly expected inclusion because I don't get government funding.  Hmm, but isn't that illegal?

Is Obama Breaking the Law?  The meeting was dedicated to putting community organizers and artists in the same room, with the tacit promise of funding from the NEA ever present.  According to the report, that promise was actually more than tacit:  Garcia Durham allegedly told the assembled crowd that "government and its policies should be shaped by participants' voices in connection with the NEA."  There's only one problem with this:  it's illegal.

Selling White House Policy Through Art.  Were Sergant and Abernathy really working alone on this effort?  Did Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, actually have no idea that the goal of the conference call was to encourage artists to create art on politically controversial issues?  Through Wicks' own words during the conference call, she acknowledges the group was a pro-Obama collective and thanks them for their efforts.

Newly disclosed emails link White House directly to NEA politicalization scandal.  Former actor and present White House associate director of public engagement Kalpen Modi was directly involved in planning the controversial conference call hosted by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) flack to encourage tax-supported artists to create propaganda for President Obama, according to emails obtained by Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Federal Volunteer Agency Misrepresented Involvement in White House, NEA Conference Call.  Recently revealed documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show a few interesting facts and supports the claims made in my earlier articles — namely, Yosi Sergant, the former NEA Communications Director, did not work alone in organizing the controversial August 10th conference call; that the White House Office of Public Engagement was fully aware of his efforts; and most importantly, that The Corporation for National and Community Service misrepresented who actually initiated the meeting.