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From Fox News Watch the panel has a nice 'fair and balanced' discussion on media bias, using of course Brent Bozell's winger site the Media Research Center as their guide for what to point to as their proof that the media has a liberal bias. I'm quite sure Bozell doesn't consider all the garbage Fox pumps out day after day as any sign that there might be just a slight conservative bias out there to counter whatever they manage to find from the other media outlets.

They show a clip of Katie Couric sucking up to President Obama which won Bozell's 'Let us Fluff Your Pillow Award' and cite an article by JokeLine in Time Magazine on Obama's first 100 days in office as two examples of bias towards Obama. When Dana Perino is asked to compare those stories to the kind of coverage Bush received here's how she responds:

Perino: Well there is no comparison and I gave up a long time ago as a Republican thinking that we were going to get comparable type of coverage. There are though--a lot of Democrats will tell you that President Bush got a lot of fawning coverage after 9-11 and obviously that swung back the other way. But I always say if you are, if you're looking for communications advice, ask a Republican because they've had to try so much harder.

Scott: To be fair Ellis, you think there's a quote from a conservative member of the media that deserves to be (crosstalk)

Henican: Those are two icky examples. I mean I wouldn't want to be caught on tape saying either of those things.

Scott: Icky.

Henican: But yeah, come on. Let's be honest though. There is some pretty awful stuff on the other side and I did a little poking around and how's this one from Limbaugh, right? You know he said a few things. He said we've been told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles because his father was black. And that's pretty awful.

Perino: Okay, that isn't... I would never say something like that, but Limbaugh doesn't pretend to be a... objective journalist. Okay? And Katie Couric does.

Henican: And there's a variety of quotes we can pull from any of those venues. But listen, people have asked stupid stuff in both directions. Let's admit that.

Lowry: What's different Ellis is one he's not supposed to be an objective reporter. Two if you go to the Media Research web site and look at...

Henican: An objective organization right?

Lowry: and look at every single video clip from the inauguration and in your words, icky, every single one of them is icky from every single major media outlet. They were in love with this guy. And they still are most of them.

So Perino thinks as long as you're not pretending to be objective, it’s alright to say the most foul, racist crap imaginable with sexual references to boot about the President, and Rich Lowry thinks that The Media Research Center’s video collection is a fair and balanced look at the media coverage of President Obama, and obviously doesn’t consider Fox News or right wing talk radio a 'major media outlet'.

I’m so glad sweet little Dana Perino at least qualified her defense of Limbaugh with saying that she wouldn’t have said it herself. Well, that makes your defense of his statement much better Dana. I'm sure Perino also doesn't think any of the negative coverage Bush got in the press was deserved but we'll never get any honest discussion on that on Fox News either. I assume playing apologist for him is at least paying well for her along with the rest of the Bush lackey's that keep showing up on my television screen on all of the networks.

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Rep. Peter King thinks the Obama administration's failure to have either the president himself or one of his officials give a press conference on the attempted Delta airline bombing is somehow the same as Bush not showing up in New Orleans right away after Katrina. I guess King wasn't satisfied that Rep. Pete Hoekstra was the only one going out there making a fool of himself immediately politicizing this thing.

Sorry pal but President Obama not rushing out to do a press conference about this attempted bombing that they probably don't even have a lot of answers on yet is not even remotely the same thing as Bush completely ignoring Hurricane Katrina and what was going on in New Orleans to the point where his aides finally had to put together footage on a DVD days later and get him to watch it for him to even have any idea what was happening down there. Unbelievable. And CNN's Drew Griffin was more than happy to help King along with this history revisionism.

For a reminder of how Bush reacted to Hurricane Katrina, here's a timeline put together by Think Progress.

Griffin also pointed out right after King got off the air with him that Janet Napolitano was going to be on State of the Union on CNN Sunday morning. I guess that's not soon enough to suit King and of course Griffin didn't bring that up while he still had him on the air either.

The Political Carnival pointed out another problem with King's hackery here--Pete King's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Memory:

Just now on CNN, Petey said that the ObamAdministration banned the word "terrorism", which is, of course, why Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab managed to smuggle explosives on board a jetliner.

Lose a word, gain a terrorist. See the logic?

Me neither.

No, Obama never eliminated the word "terrorism" from the government lexicon. It was the phrase "war on terror", one of the stupidest phrases ever concocted by any administration ever. That's why this administration is using different words. President Obama, rightfully, wouldn't want any association whatsoever with BushCoSpeak.

See? Some there is some change we can believe in.

So hey, Bogus Petey, check this out. It may jog your "memory".

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Full transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Drew Weston joins Ed Schultz to talk about the demoralization of the base and his statement the President made to the Washington Post:

Obama said the public option "has become a source of ideological contention between the left and right." But, he added, "I didn't campaign on the public option."

That's clearly not true as Ed Shows in the video clip. Drew Weston's recent article in the Huffington Post is Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator:

As the president's job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent, the Democratic base has become demoralized, and Independents have gone from his source of strength to his Achilles Heel, it's time to reflect on why. The conventional wisdom from the White House is those "pesky leftists" -- those bloggers and Vermont Governors and Senators who keep wanting real health reform, real financial reform, immigration reform not preceded by a year or two of raids that leave children without parents, and all the other changes we were supposed to believe in.

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

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Digby has more:

Not long ago, Dr Drew Westen was the "it boy" of the Democratic Party, with his book "The Political Brain." I doubt if anyone in the White House likes him much today.

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From Hardball, Chris Matthews goes into full bullying mode with Darcy Burner when she quotes Lieberman saying he wasn't pressured by the White House to give in on the Medicare buy-in or the public option on the health care bill. Matthews is right about one thing here. Lieberman is out for Lieberman. What type of pressure could have been put on him that would have done any good, who knows.

That said, I think Burner may also very well be right and and this may be one time you can actually believe something Lieberman said. The administration has been completely hands off with the Congress and has not pushed for the public option or the Medicare buy-in in public. There's no reason to think it's been any different in private and that Lieberman didn't help get them exactly what they wanted.

MATTHEWS: What are you, to the left of Barbara Boxer?

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: I mean, seriously. I don’t -- I mean, I think she’s a great liberal. I think she’s an amazingly gutsy person who’s been able to stake out a position on the left in politics, a progressive position, if you will and you want to use the new word. But she’s never been gutless ever. You disagree with her position now?

BURNER: I think that they could have done more and should do more. I mean the House bill...

MATTHEWS: Where are these extra votes they’re going to get, besides the ones they got?

BURNER: How are they going to get 218 votes in the House for the Senate bill? They don’t have them.

MATTHEWS: I know. I know that. Do you want them to get the 218?

BURNER: I want them to find a reasonable way...

MATTHEWS: You want the Senate to vote again on something that they didn’t want this time?

BURNER: I want the senators to put the needs of the American people above...

MATTHEWS: Well, you want them to change...

BURNER: ... their own priorities...

MATTHEWS: ... who they are.

BURNER: No, I want them to put the needs of the American people above...

MATTHEWS: In other words, we could get a more liberal bill out of the Senate than we got -- we’re getting?

BURNER: Yes.

MATTHEWS: How do you know that?

BURNER: Because, frankly, Joe Lieberman said today that the president never pressured him around some of these key issues, never pressured him around the Medicare buy-in, never...

MATTHEWS: So he’s now your -- he’s your witness.

BURNER: ... pressured him on the public option...

MATTHEWS: Joe Lieberman’s your witness?

BURNER: Joe Lieberman...

MATTHEWS: Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

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John Harwood in typical Villager fashion takes a shot at liberals who are not happy with the health care bill or how Harry Reid or the Obama administration have handled it.

Brewer: So in the end, how does this deal get done John?

Harwood: Contessa it was really hand to hand combat and hand to hand diplomacy one vote at a time, finally securing that vote of Joe Lieberman by ditching that Medicare buy in that he was against and Ben Nelson with the abortion language; but I gotta’ say Contessa, just because so much of the commentary I've heard has been really idiotic. Liberals who want universal health care ought to be thanking Harry Reid for getting this thing done rather than talking about what's inadequate in the bill. I'm not saying the bill's a good bill, but if you're a liberal, and you want universal coverage in this country and think that you could do better than Harry Reid, can do better than what he's done, or the White House can do better, they ought to lay off the hallucinogenic drugs because we have had a vivid demonstration of the limits of political possibilities on this issue.

From The Colbert Report:

If Congress doesn't reauthorize the Patriot Act, America's corporations are ready to step in.

TPM has more--How Easy Is It For The Police To Get GPS Data From Your Phone?:

Police can in some cases track cell phone location by merely telling a court that the information is relevant to an investigation, a legal expert tells TPM -- a fact that may partly explain how law enforcement racked up 8 million requests for GPS data from a single wireless carrier in a year.

An increasingly popular and easy-to-access surveillance tool for police, GPS data is not currently protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the standards for gaining access to the information are murky and highly variable. That's partly because one of the statutes that bears on the issue was passed in the mid-1980s, before many of the technologies involved were invented. And Congress hasn't done much to update the law since.

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Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner joined Bill Moyers to discuss the health care bill which appears to be on its way to passing the Senate now and what lessons the Obama administration took away from Bill Clinton's failure to get a health care bill passed. Robert Kuttner explained why even though he thinks this is an awful bill, if he were in the Senate, he'd vote for it. You can watch the rest of the interview at Bill Moyers Journal.

BILL MOYERS: Let's start with some news. Some of the big insurance companies, Well Point, Cigna, United Health, all surged to a 52 week high in their share prices this week when it was clear there'd be no public option in the health care bill going through Congress right now. What does that tell you, Matt?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, I think what most people should take away from this is that the massive subsidies for health insurance companies have been preserved while it's also expanded their customer base because there's an individual mandate in the bill that's going to provide all these companies with the, you know, 25 or 30 million new people who are going to be paying for health insurance. So, it's, obviously, a huge boon to that industry. And I think Wall Street correctly read what the health care effort is all about.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton's Political Director. And Rahm Emanuel's take away from Bill Clinton's failure to get health insurance passed was 'don't get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.' So their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the deal was, we're not going to attack your customer base, we're going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it's not surprising that this is what comes out the other side.

BILL MOYERS: So are you saying that this, what some call a sweetheart deal between the pharmaceutical industry and the White House, done many months ago before this fight really began, was because the drug company money in the Democratic Party?

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Ed Schultz pretty well lays it in the line with what a whole lot of the progressive community thinks about President Obama right now. Katrina Vanden Heuvel from The Nation weighs in on how "angry, infuriated and heartbroken" the base is and that they need to stand up if they don't want things to be very ugly in 2010. As Ed notes, the President needs to quit listening to Rahm Emanuel and the insurance lobby and start paying attention to those that got him elected.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis.

ED SCHULTZ: Good evening, Americans. And welcome to THE ED SHOW from New York.

Mr. President, pull that chair up in front of the fireplace here. What you say we sit down and have a little talk here tonight? What do you think, huh?

The base is restless. They are wandering in the wilderness, Mr. President. They are looking for your GPS coordinates.

They want to know, where are you? They think we can do a heck of a lot better. Liberals and progressives think that they`re not being treated properly.

Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you`re nothing but a sellout, a corporate sellout, out that. I know it`s tough audio, but I`m your buddy Ed. I`ve got to tell you this. I don`t think anybody else is.

You aren`t listening to the very people who put you in office, Mr. President. This isn`t about your legacy. It`s about the people in America who need health care now.

Mr. President, I don`t know if you`ve noticed or not, but you have carved out the most important elements of reform. The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry. They get a bunch of new customers.

Here is what Wendell Potter, a friend of mine, told me on the program last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WENDELL POTTER: The Senate bill is full of loopholes, and the insurance industry knows that. In fact, they`ve made sure that they are in there.

One in particular will allow employers to charge certain workers thousands of dollars more just based on health factors. And it can be obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol.

The insurance industry will be able to write the rules. They are not being set in the legislation as currently written.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHULTZ: Mr. President, don`t leave the room. We`ve got some more talking to do. You can`t make it?

Apparently none of that matters. You see, at the White House, not long ago, the president told liberal Democrats to suck it up and listen to Joe Lieberman`s version on health care.

Now, here`s what gets me. The guy standing behind Obama is the biggest taker from big pharma and the insurance industry. Our old buddy, Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, is taking $3.4 million from the health industry over the last six years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That`s an average of $1,500 a day to Baucus from big health care.

Now, the travesty continues. Last night, 30 Democrats voted against an amendment that would help you and me, the consumers -- the drug importation bill.

It would let consumers buy prescription drugs from overseas at a fraction of the price that we pay right now. But you see, voting for it would have really endangered the deal that the White House cut with big pharma.

Mr. Personality, Rahm Emanuel, he must have gotten a hell of a deal. So, the Democrats got together and they killed it. So much for change we can believe in.

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Looks like Dick had to send his daughter out to do his dirty work for him again this week on Fox News Sunday. It's hard to say who was more repugnant among this past week's panel line up--Liz with her denial that the United States tortured prisoners or Bloody Bill Kristol with his war mongering.

WALLACE: Liz, several leading conservatives applauded the president's speech -- Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich. How about Liz Cheney?

CHENEY: There were certainly parts of his speech with which I wholeheartedly agree, and I think it was really good, frankly, to have the president finally enunciate some of these things, talk about, you know, the insufficiency of engagement with respect to dealing with terror or dealing with enemies, talk about the importance of America supporting democracy around the world, and also talk about the role that America has played particularly in post-World War II Europe.

I think the key will be whether the policies now follow that, and I certainly hope that they do. But we still had in this speech -- you know, it's almost like it's become reflexive, this notion that America abandoned our ideals after 9/11, and I think that it is -- you know, as we see this president repeatedly go onto foreign soil and accuse America of having tortured people, talk about Guantanamo Bay as an abandonment of our ideals, you know, I -- that part of the speech to me really is nothing short of shameful.

And it's not just an attack on political opponents. You know, it really is casting aspersions and, I would say, slandering the men and women in the CIA who carried out key programs that kept us safe and the people, frankly, right now at Guantanamo Bay who are guarding some of the world's worst terrorists.

So I think that part of the speech represents something I hope the president will stop soon.

Alan Grayson had it right and his message for the Vice President applies to the daughter as well.

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From Think Progress--Kristol: Obama’s Nobel Speech ‘Lays The Predicate For The Legitimate Use Of Force’ Against Iran:

Since President Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech last week, Bill Kristol has been arguing that it is somehow in-line with his neoconservative philosophy and that it vindicates President Bush’s “global war on terror” that he wholeheartedly supported.

[...]

“The satisfying purity of indignation,” as Matt Duss noted, is “a wonderfully succinct description of the simplistic and destructive ideology that drove George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and which Bill Kristol is still trying heartily to convince himself and others hasn’t been discredited.”

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Transcript via.

WALLACE: After a series of speeches overseas in which he apologized for past American actions, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize this week with a strong statement of the positive role the U.S. has played in the world.

And it's time now for our Sunday group -- Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, Mara Liasson of National Public Radio, former State Department official Liz Cheney, and Juan Williams, also from National Public Radio.

So, Bill, the president chose an interesting time and place to make this speech, before an audience -- accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, of course, before an audience, I think it's fair to say, of European leftists. He defended the use of force and said that the U.S. is not the problem with the world.

How significant a change in the president's world view?

KRISTOL: It could be pretty significant. It wasn't the speech the Nobel Peace Prize committee expected him to give, I think, when they awarded him the prize entirely for being not George W. Bush. And he gave the most Bush-like speech of his presidency.

Those who -- what did he say? The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. That's a very elegant and strong statement of the fact that you can't just want peace.

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From TPM--Bachmann Doesn't Condemn Voight's 'Subconscious Programming To Damn America' Attack On Obama:

Appearing on ABC's "Top Line" Web cast, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) refused to distance herself from actor Jon Voight, who made this remark about President Obama at last month's Capitol Hill Tea Party: "His only success in his one-year term as president is taking America apart, piece by piece. Could it be he has had 20 years of subconscious programming by Rev. Wright to damn America?"

Jonathan Karl asked Bachmann whether she agreed with Voight, or if it was instead over the line. "I like Jon Voight I think he's a great American," said Bachmann, "and the 20,000-plus Americans who spontaneously gathered were there for one reason and one reason only and it was to say 'we want to make the decisions about our healthcare, we don't want government to take over.'

Check out the ABC news blog with the interview. No mention of crazy-eyes Bachmann endorsing crazy ass Jon Voight's statements about Obama. I guess it was too much trouble for ABC to let anyone know that just read their spot and didn't watch the video that they allowed someone who wants to keep hammering the Sarah Palin/Fox News mantra that the President hates America because of his association with Rev. Wright a format to be taken seriously. I thought Sean Hannity already ran that one into the ground over at Fox Noise in the lead up to the election, but apparently the likes of Voight haven't given up on it yet at these Tea Bagger rallies Bachmann is helping to organize.

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David Gergen and Anderson Cooper actually had the nerve to compare the White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers not appearing before Congress to Harriet Miers and Karl Rove ignoring Congressional subpoenas. It's bad enough that the press has spent as much time as they have on this overblown story, but to compare the White House not wanting to give Republicans another scalp in the form of Desiree Rogers--who Gergen admits was not the one responsible for the President's safety--to Karl Rove and Harriet Miers refusing to testify in the U.S. Attorney scandal is utterly ridiculous.

If the press had spent half the time they did on the party crashers story asking why Rove and Miers didn't show up to testify, or on the U.S. Attorney scandal at all, maybe the public would be more aware of how Republicans have been stealing elections, how they used the Department of Justice as a political arm of the Republican Party, and how they filled the D.O.J. with partisan hacks like Monica Goodling.

Transcript via CNN.

COOPER: Let's dig deeper with senior political analyst and former presidential adviser David Gergen. David testified before Congress during the Whitewater investigation, when he was a member of President Clinton's staff.

So, the White House is saying, all right, separation of powers, that's why she can't testify. Do you buy that?

DAVID GERGEN: Not really.

COOPER: That is usually used for extremely serious things, not a social secretary.

GERGEN: Yes, not really, Anderson. But let me say a couple of things, preliminarily. I think people ought to get off her back, personally, on a couple of counts. First of all, the one thing this White House has done well is, they have had a ton of people come through that White House, children and various people from poor neighborhoods. And she's been right at the center of that.

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From The Daily Show:

President Obama channels George W. Bush in his speech announcing the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

From The Colbert Report:

President Obama's speech to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan was missing passion and a certain word.

Best line of the clip going after the Fox talking heads saying we need to "win" in Afghanistan:

Colbert: Yeah, do as George Bush said, not as he didn't do!