Barack Obama

On Friday, January 17, President Obama unveiled the rough outlines of his plan to modify but maintain the National Security Administration's ability to collect telephony metadata from American civilians. For its part on the front page the following morning, The Washington Post exulted that "Obama moves to rein in surveillance" as he "[o]rders limits on phone data." Another front-pager sought to…

Appearing on Wednesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC.com Executive Editor Richard Wolffe asserted that Tea Partiers want someone to "be annoying and inflammatory" in responding to President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address as the group discussed the news that Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee will give a Tea Party response to the President.

In an exclusive report Thursday on al Qaeda's resurgence in Iraq, ABC's Martha Raddatz ignored President Obama's boast in 2012 that "al Qaeda is on the path to defeat." Raddatz's story aired on Thursday's ABC World News. In fact, the name "Obama" never came up in the story on Iraq falling apart. President Obama made his claim at the Democratic National Convention during the height of his re-…

On Thursday, the Moody's credit-rating agency downgraded its assessment of U.S. health insurance companies from "stable" to "negative," citing ongoing woes in ObamaCare's rollout. This is, of course, is yet another piece of bad news for President Obama, coming just five days before his State of the Union address and shortly after a new Quinnipiac poll finding 53 percent of respondents believing…

Jay Leno had some harsh words for President Obama last night. Speaking on the Tonight Show, Leno said that, “President Obama has a new political slogan. Yes we cannabis!” The long time Tonight Show host is ending his tenure at NBC in a few weeks and has used the opportunity to mock President Obama at every turn. One of his favorite targets has been the disastrous ObamaCare rollout, which he…

In an interview set to air Sunday on al-Jazeera America, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told the Arab network’s John Seigenthaler than the Obama adminisistration “is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering, and that includes — I spent 22 years of my career in Washington and covered presidents from President Reagan on up through now, and I was…

A big irony occurred on Tuesday's PoliticsNation when MSNBC's race-obsessed host, Al Sharpton, devoted a segment to fretting over right-leaning talk radio hosts and FNC hosts who have complained about a recent comment by President Barack Obama about there being "some" who harbor racist sentiments toward him.  But it was MSNBC political analyst and MSNBC.com Executive Editor Richard Wolffe who…

On Tuesday -- just one day before he hailed the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade -- President Obama's White House issued a press advisory noting that the president would meet with Pope Francis on March 27. Naturally the dutiful Obama acolytes at the Washington Post put staff write Juliet Eilperin hard at work spinning the forthcoming meeting as virtually guaranteed to be a net political coup for…

David Remnick of The New Yorker showed up on PBS’s Charlie Rose Monday night to discuss his long, mostly sympathetic profile of Barack Obama from the January 27 issue of the magazine. Near the end of the interview, Rose focused in on the president’s reported desire to be “big.” The host wondered, “[W]hat's his definition of 'big,' and does he believe in his deep recesses of his own mind that…

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton mentioned race 215 times last year according to research done by my colleague Katie Yoder. And yet, despite the Reverend’s obsession with race, the MSNBC host seems to believe he isn’t able to discuss race as much as he would like. The bombastic MSNBC host appeared on Morning Joe on January 20 to complain that President Obama personally told him and other civil rights…

The Washington Post celebrated Martin Luther King Day on Monday by publishing an op-ed on the front page of the Style section by Joshua DuBois -- President Obama's first-term adviser on faith-based initiatives -- that explicitly compared Obama to MLK. "Lessons from King for Obama's travails," read the headline inside the paper next to pictures of MLK and Obama. Somehow, the fight against Bull…

Much will be written, and should be, about President Barack Obama's whining that racism partially explains the year-long plunge in his popularity since his reelection in 2012. What's also worth noting about the ponderous and painfully long (18 web pages) January 27 writeup in The New Yorker ("Going the Distance; On and off the road with Barack Obama") is David Remnick's apparent obsessions with…

Here’s something you don’t see every day: Bill Maher poking fun at Barack Obama. On his first Real Time show of the year, the HBO host said of the scandal currently embattling Governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.), “They basically turned the bridge into the ObamaCare website” (video follows with transcript and commentary):