President Obama considers the Republican party an international outlier, and so does MSNBC's Steve Benen. (That’s “outlier,” not “outlaw,” though, who knows, for them that may be a distinction without a difference.)

After quoting Obama’s recent comment that the GOP is “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” Benen, who’s also the primary blogger for the Maddow show's website, wrote in a Monday post that “hearing Obama talk about this got me thinking about other ways in which the contemporary GOP is an international ‘outlier.’”

With Monday marking the third anniversary of the horrifying murders of 20 children and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News used the somber occasion to lament the lack of gun control passed by the GOP Congress and compared the need for gun control to seat belts and passing a driving test to obtain a driver’s license.

For a change, Martin Crutsinger's coverage at the Associated Press of the federal government's November Monthly Treasury Statement wasn't completely full of rose-colored baloney.

Crutsinger managed to note how auto-pilot entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the country (not in those words, of course). That said, he somehow thought that highlighting a rare and small increase in year-over-year defense spending was worthwhile, while ignoring several other larger percentage increases in other areas. Most importantly, he failed to note that the national debt has increased by far more than Uncle Sam's reported deficits. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Planned Parenthood executives appeared twice on MSNBC on Monday with female interviewers who acted more like facilitators than journalists. Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards appeared on Andrea Mitchell Reports. Meanwhile PP's Executive Vice President, Dawn Laguens, was on MSNBC Live with Tamron Hall.

The press's reluctance to relay Obamacare-related bad news has been obvious for years. Nowhere is this more consistently the case than at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press.

Over half of the state non-profit co-ops set up under Obamacare with $2 billion-plus in taxayer funding are failing. The AP has generally treated those failures as local stories, even though they relate to the Affordable Care Act, the passage of which they still call President Barack Obama's "signature domestic achievement." Most of the other co-ops are either incurring huge losses, have become undercapitalized, or both. So watch, in context, how AP business writer Tom Murphy, in a dispatch primarily about UnitedHealth Group's announcement that "it is pulling back from its push into the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges":