Appearing on Sunday's NBC Today, Meet the Press host David Gregory recited Obama campaign talking points perfectly as he predicted: "...Well, he's going to raise plenty of money.... even if people are disappointed with the President, they're going to focus on the alternative. They're going to say, 'Do you really want to hand it over to Republicans?' I think Democrats will be plenty energized..."
That response was prompted by co-host Jenna Wolfe helpfully touting Obama's fundraising numbers, emphasizing small-dollar donors: "...they raised over $29 million in January for their re-election. Ninety-eight percent of those donations were $250 or less. What does that say about Obama supporters?" The headline on screen added: "Obama's Fundraising Driven By Small Donors."
Campaign Financing
On Thursday's NBC Today, chief medical editor Nancy Snyderman scolded Rick Santorum for a recent humorous campaign ad that depicted Mitt Romney firing a mud-filled paint ball gun at a cardboard cut-out of the former Pennsylvania Senator: "I'm sick of guns. I'm sick of the violence. I'm sick of all of it. And I know it's tongue-in-cheek....I don't like it." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Snyderman made the declaration during the Today's Professionals panel discussion on the show, which prompted attorney Star Jones to chime in that the ad made all the GOP candidates look like the Three Stooges: "...it does go to the whole Larry, Curly and Moe mentality of the Republican primary over the last few months. It's been almost like joking."
You don't often see a well-known liberal media member publicly criticizing the liberal media he's a part of.
But when Dan Abrams, the former General Manager of MSNBC and founder of the left-wing Mediaite, trashes his former network - in particular Hardball host Chris Matthews - as well as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets for their "Shameful, Inexcusable Distortion Of The Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision," one should take notice:
Staking a principled hard-left position on campaign finance, the New York Times wailed over President Obama’s reversal on Super PAC's in its lead editorial Wednesday, “Another Campaign for Sale – President Obama reverses position and joins the sleazy ‘Super PAC’ money race.” (Yet the paper's news coverage failed to highlight those hypocrisies.)
CBS This Morning on Tuesday led its broadcast with the Obama re-election campaign's decision on Monday night to reverse its opposition to super PAC fundraising. Charlie Rose teased the report by noting how "the White House...flip-flops on controversial super PAC donations." ABC's Jake Tapper used the same term on Good Morning America. NBC's Today show completely ignored this breaking development.
During his report on the CBS morning show, correspondent Bill Plante highlighted President Obama's "denunciation of that Supreme Court decision which allowed unlimited fundraising" and played a clip from his 2010 State of the Union address where he ripped the Citizens United decision in the presence of several of the justices who handed it down [audio available here; video below the jump].
While Democrats mock Mitt Romney for his alleged lack of interest in the “very poor” and focus their political pitch on income inequality, one can’t help noticing the Obamas running around to $35,000-a-head fundraisers with the very rich and very famous in New York City and Hollywood.
Michelle Obama kicked off February with an exclusive fundraiser in Beverly Hills at the home of Netflix executive Ted Sarandos and his wife Nicole Avant, who raised Hollywood millions for the Obamas in 2008, and then became their ambassador to the Bahamas. Now Nicole Avant’s back managing Obama’s Hollywood money march. Many of Tinseltown’s titans ponied up: Jeffrey Katzenberg, Harvey Weinstein, Haim Saban, and Steve Bing, among others. (Katzenberg’s also given $2 million to the Obama-affiliated super PAC called Priorities USA Action.)
Late-night comedians historically have relished the opportunity to poke fun at politicians. Sometimes they savage them. In the Obama era, they haven’t been so enthusiastic about any of it. A recent study of political jokes on three late-night shows (Letterman, Leno, and Jimmy Fallon) by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that Barack Obama’s joke count is “substantially lower than any other president.”
Some of the Obama jokes are actually bipartisan slams. Jimmy Fallon joked that “Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are more mature than President Obama and John Boehner.” This is the classic comedian’s pose, and the safe one, that all the politicians are ridiculous, squabbling poseurs. Still, it’s every bit as much pandering to the public as the politicians are.
As NewsBusters has been reporting, the Obama-loving media are in a full-court press depicting Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his former company Bain Capital as ruthless, Wall Street raiders willing to step on anybody for money.
But will they inform the public that according to The Hill, Bain employees actually give more money to Democrats than to Republicans:
While Brian Williams warned of "those lethal weapons known as super-PACs" in the GOP primary race on NBC's Rock Center, he and correspondent Ted Koppel failed to recognize their own network's routine advocacy on behalf of liberal causes and in favor of Democratic candidates. Not to mention the barrage of negative coverage directed toward conservatives and Republicans.
The report itself on the Monday night broadcast was pushing the traditional liberal cause of greater government regulation of campaign finance. Koppel interviewed comedian Stephen Colbert, whose farcical super-PAC in South Carolina has begun running ads calling Mitt Romney a "serial killer." Koppel praised it as "proving how ridiculous this system has become."
Today's starter topic: Liberals fancy themselves to be the best proponents of free speech and tolerance. But when actual political speech is at issue rather than theoretical speech, their boasts are often revealed to be mere posturing. That's why we thought it'd be nice to start off today's OT by giving some well-deserved praise to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen for mounting a solid defense for political speech against the self-interested censors of the liberal press:
Republican Ohio State Treasurer Josh Mandel is challenging incumbent Democrat U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown this November. Despite the false bravado emanating from the DNC and Ohio's Democratic Party and polls solely based on name recognition, Brown, as the Senate's most liberal member (2009 and 2010 Club for Growth ratings: 0%) in a swing state, is very vulnerable.
Associated Press Ohio reporter Julie Carr Smyth has apparently preliminarily staked out a role as the race's designated Democratic Party talking point and innuendo relay person. Her Saturday report on Mandel ("Ohio Treasurer Seeks To Unseat Brown"; alternate title showing her byline is "Ohio treasurer focused on politics in 1st year") is so transparent it's almost funny.
On Friday, two Deputy Secretaries, one at the Department of Transportation and the other at Defense, in their capacities as co-chairs of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Executive Committee, released a one page letter concluding that the modified broadband deployment plan of LightSquared could not coexist with current GPS devices and their spectrum. That's because: a) LightSquared's deployment "would cause harmful interference to many GPS receivers"; b) It would not be "compatible with several GPS-dependent aircraft safety-of-flight systems," and c) "there appear to be no practical solutions" to the problems.
Stories about the release, to the extent they exist, are largely avoiding the mention of "Falcone" (that's hedge fund operator and heavy Obama campaign contributor Philip Falcone, "SEC" (which is investigating Falcone and his hedge fund, and "Obama" (as in President Barack Obama, the beneficiary along with the "Democratic Party" -- another unmentioned term in any variation -- of said contributions). Coverage by Daniel Fisher at Forbes at least brings up Falcone, the SEC, and the Obama administration: