2012 Presidential

"While I sat at my laptop, most of the reporters around me stood and put their hands over their hearts. This time instead of just sitting and working, I tweeted what I was feeling." So wrote NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro Tuesday about refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the national anthem at the beginning of a Mitt Romney campaign event the previous day.

Former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania turned MSNBC contributor Ed Rendell said something on Tuesday's Hardball that is going to make a lot of jaws drop. "Even people who lost their jobs are better off" under Obama (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Taking into account how the majority of Hollywood supports the Democratic Party no matter what, it should come as no surprise that Entertainment Tonight continues to produce segments of political fluff in an election year. The president himself showed up for a softball interview with his wife on Aug. 15, where he insisted that his re-election campaign hasn’t “tried to divide the country.” …

James Taranto, who puts together the Wall Street Journal feature Best of the Web, was in excellent form Monday on the shifting standards of a certain economist turned partisan hack columnist who writes for the New York Times. When it comes to Republican presidents, four years is plenty of time to deal with inherited economic problems, but when it comes to Obama, "you've got to be kidding" that…

Eight weeks before the presidential election, Tuesday's CBS This Morning marked the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by helping Vanity Fair's Kurt Eichenwald forward his accusation that the Bush administration ignored warnings about a possible terrorist strike as early as May 2001. Eichenwald claimed that "the CIA did a spectacular job...the White House and others said, well, they didn't…

Good Morning America co-anchor George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday attacked Bob Woodward and his new expose from the left, worrying that "Speaker Boehner [is] using your book as a sign that voters should turn away from President Obama." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Woodward appeared on ABC to promote The Price of Politics, his new book on the 2011 battle over the debt ceiling. According…

CNN's Anderson Cooper smacked the Romney campaign Monday night for alleged dishonesty. He claimed they were talking too much about social issues while saying the economy is their real focus. "The question tonight, and not just from the opposition, have the Romney forces been moving away from dollars and cents and jobs, and shifting toward more red meat, hot-button culture war mode?" Cooper…

During any presidential campaign, wild accusations fly back and forth between the GOP and the Democratic Party, but the liberal media hit a new low last Wednesday when they made the ridiculous assertion that Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan has been lying about the number of times he's hiked Colorado's mountainsides. With the economy and jobless rate in the nation in terrible…

If journalists were interested in fairness, there's nothing more basic than giving a similar amount of airtime to each major party convention. An MRC analysis finds that's exactly what CBS and ABC did, giving virtually identical airtime to the Republican and Democratic conventions on their morning and evening news shows. But NBC skewed in favor of the Democrats, donating 25 percent more…

New York Times White House reporter Jackie Calmes filed from Charlotte on Saturday after the Democratic National Convention had passed, "Democrats Face a Juggling Act Over Jobs." Surprisingly, Obama loyalist Calmes discerned political problems in the president's anti-business rhetoric. More predictably, she defended Obama's anti-entrepreneurship remark "you didn't build that," accusing the…

The title of John Cassidy's column in the New Yorker is "Rational Irrationality" but after reading the reason he gives for Barack Obama ditching his outdoor stadium speech at the Democrat convention in Charlotte, NC, I think it would be safe to ditch the "Rational" part of the column title. One of the big reasons why Cassidy pretty much comes off as completely irrational was his explanation…

Over the years, comedian Wanda Sykes -- a staunch liberal Democrat and outspoken advocate of gay marriage -- has been no friend to Republicans. So it should come as no surprise that Ms. Sykes would appear on NBC’s Today on September 6 to promote her special on the LOGO television network entitled, ‘NewNowNext Vote.’  LOGO promotes itself as a cable channel devoted to gays and lesbians.…

Poll cooking season is officially in full swing. The headline today at the Washington Post reads: "Among likely voters, Obama-Romney close." Dan Balz and Jon Cohen report that in a September 7-9 poll, "the (presidential) race remains close among likely voters, with Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions." Ah, but Obama…

Promoting his fawning profile of President Obama for the October issue of Vanity Fair on Tuesday's NBC Today, contributing editor Michael Lewis described a game of basketball he played with the commander in chief: "...it was actually very revealing...he doesn't let anybody treat him like the president. If you're watching the game, you'd have no idea who – which one is the president...he likes a…