During the 2008 presidential campaign, Americans were treated to a number of populist sermons on the "special interests" who would oppose "reform" at any cost to maintain the "status quo" from which they "profit financially or politically." The drug companies, the energy companies, the Wall Street bankers, and the health insurers were the corporate enemies of a just and harmonious America, or so one might have gathered.

Obama was at the vanguard of this populist charge. But since his election, he has proposed health care legislation that would subsidize Pfizer and PhRMA, a cap and trade plan that would drive profits to General Electric, and Wall Street bailouts that lined the pockets of the same Goldman Sachs bankers he so reviled during the campaign. What happened?

Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney exposes and investigates this monumental disconnect in his new book "Obamanomics: How Barack Obama is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses." Carney explores the "political strategy of partnering with the biggest businesses in order to create new regulations, taxes, and subsidies." Those measures, he argues, actually benefit the biggest businesses by crowding out competition, consolidating market share, or giving billions in subsidies directly to those companies.

Last night's "apology" to Gov. Palin by comedian David Letterman "is slippery and Clintonian" but Gov. Sarah Palin "was right to rise above it and accept it," Media Research Center President Brent Bozell noted in a statement released today. 

While the CBS "Late Show" host issued what many are calling a full and complete apology to Gov. Palin, Mr. Bozell argued it is far from an unequivocal apology:

Letterman's ‘apology' is slippery and Clintonian. He talked about the ‘perception' of his joke three times in his statement. He then goes on to say twice that he was ‘misunderstood.'

There's no perception, no misunderstanding. The public understood exactly what he said - joking about statutory rape - and was outraged. It was David Letterman who misunderstood who was in the audience, as if making a degrading joke about an 18-year-old girl is much more acceptable than taking the cheap shot at her 14-year-old sister. 

Last month NewsBusters introduced readers to John Ziegler, a conservative filmmaker creating a documentary about the astoundingly poor job the press did covering 2008's presidential campaign.

Marvelously entitled "Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted," the movie is set for release on February 23.

I chatted with Ziegler earlier in the week about last year's campaign shenanigans and the film. Some of the highlights include (60-minute audio available here):    

Newsweek's Jon Meacham thinks that Governor Sarah Palin is too much a commoner and too stupid to be allowed to become vice president of the United States of America and apparently his employer agrees with him. The October 13 cover of Newsweek features a close up photo of the Governor with the headline "She's One of the Folks (And that's the problem)," and Meacham writes the accompanying cover story. Be clear about what this means: This is a direct attack on Mr. and Mrs. America. We are all too stupid to be president in the elite opinion of Jon Meacham and Newsweek magazine.

Meacham finds Palin to be incurious, unprepared, and even finds it "dangerous" if she were to become our vice president but he offers us nothing but his opinion to judge by. And it's all because she doesn't measure up to his personal standards. Sadly for Meacham's elitism, however, Palin easily satisfies the standards that the Founding Fathers set as criteria for stepping into the highest office in the land. Curiously, Meacham does not once mention the actual Constitutional requirements to run for office in his entire sarcastic attack on Sarah Palin. Like most of his ilk, the Constitution seems meaningless minutia to him.