On Thursday, NPR's Morning Edition used a Republican mayor to boost Obama's push for infrastructure spending. On Friday, the same show displayed a new Tea Party Republican House member representing tornado-ravaged Joplin, Missouri to gush over the effectiveness of the Obama disaster relief team, as if to say "No Katrinas here, America." Janet Napolitano told NPR Long would give them a "12" out of 10.

Liberals have this habit of thinking that disaster relief somehow rebuts "foes of Big Government," or that Tea Party members ran on the promise of abolishing disaster aid. NPR reporter Frank Morris pressed hard on the chastened-anti-statist angle:

After a decade of playing one on television, I, along with my brother Aaron, was blessed a few months ago to become a real Texas Ranger in the presence of Gov. Rick Perry, fellow Texas Rangers and many others.

Perry mentioned at that induction: "As the drug cartels have turned up the heat on the other side of that border over the past few years, we have invested significant state resources to secure our border, looking to local police departments, county sheriffs, game wardens and even Texas Military Forces. However, when it was time to take the fight to the bad guys, there was only one choice to lead our efforts, so we formed our Ranger recon teams. It is reassuring to know that our Rangers are on the job, especially in light of ongoing reports of deteriorating conditions, with kidnappings, assassinations and terroristic acts just miles from Texas communities."

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift doesn't understand why Americans are uncomfortable with the new body scanners being used at some of the nation's airports.

Chatting about the subject on PBS's "McLaughlin Group," Clift sarcastically said, "Maybe we ought to worry about C-T x-rays and so forth - you never can tell when somebody might put that out" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

I was preparing to applaud the Obama administration and specifically Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for announcing the deportation of a record number of criminal aliens last year. According to the Washington Times, "the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 392,862 aliens in fiscal year 2010, slightly less than a 1 percent increase over 2009 but short of the agency's goal to remove 400,000 this year."

What curbed my enthusiasm was news that removal of other illegal immigrants -- those not convicted of crimes, though it could be justifiably argued that their status as illegal immigrants is, by definition, the breaking of American law -- fell to the lowest number since 2007.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said that while it is nice that Secretary Napolitano believes removing people in the country illegally is an important function for the Department of Homeland Security, "policy directives from the highest levels of DHS clearly demonstrate that the administration is refusing to enforce laws against noncriminal aliens."

That bad cop/good cop approach is designed to pacify those on the political right while the administration and some Democrats in Congress simultaneously lay the groundwork for legalizing those who broke our laws to get here and remain in the country illegally.

On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, as the panel discussed revelations that Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano admitted to not having read the Arizona immigration law even as they criticized it publicly, FNC contributor Jim Pinkerton cited the Media Research Center, parent organization of NewsBusters, and passed on findings contained in the May 18 "Bozell Column," as he informed the panel that ABC, CBS and NBC had all ignored these embarrassing admissions by Obama administration cabinet members. Pinkerton:

And it was interesting, as Brent Bozell at the Media Research Center pointed out, not any of the big networks – ABC, CBS, or NBC – reported that Holder and Napolitano hadn't read it. And the major newspapers, the Post and Times, also didn't report it. By comparison, we could imagine what would have happened if a Democratic Congressman asked Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney General under President Bush, if he hadn't read something. There would have been a typhoon of, "What a moron." And yet, stone silence from the mainstream media.

Panel member Rich Lowry of the National Review may also have picked up on a NewsBusters item when he recounted FNC veteran Brit Hume’s criticism of the inaccurate media coverage of the Arizona immigration law, and the mistake he admitted to making in initially believing the media misinformation. Lowry: