Out of the lengthy interview sessions Matt Lauer conducted with President Barack Obama which were played back over the first hour-and-half of Tuesday’s Today show, Brian Williams decided to highlight on Nightly News only Obama’s explanation for “why his family hasn’t found a church to attend yet in their new adopted home of Washington, D.C.” Obama’s reasoning satisfied Lauer, who quipped: “It’s a spirituality meets high-tech! That’s pretty good.”

As Lauer and Obama strolled down the main White House corridor, Obama blamed how he and Michelle would be “very disruptive to services,” but he’s taken advantage of how “there was a prayer circle of pastors from across the country who during the campaign would, would say a prayer for me or send a devotional.” So:

We’ve kept that habit up and, and it’s a wonderful group because it’s a mix of some very conservative pastors, some very liberal pastors, but all who, you know, pray for me and Michelle and, and the girls and, and I get a daily devotional on my BlackBerry which is a, is a wonderful thing.

To which, an impressed Lauer approved: “It’s a spirituality meets high-tech! That’s pretty good.”

Wonder how “conservative” are those “conservative pastors”?

NB post by Geoffrey Dickens about Tuesday’s Today show: “Lauer to Obama: How Do You ‘Move On’ from the Vitriol, Sniping and Threats?”

From the Tuesday, March 30 NBC Nightly News:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: And an interesting note from the White House. In a wide-ranging exclusive interview on political and personal matters, Matt Lauer asked the President, with Easter weekend approaching, why his family hasn’t found a church to attend yet in their new adopted home of Washington, D.C.

MATT LAUER: As of yet, I haven’t heard that you’ve settled on an exact church. Where do you stand on that and how important a decision is it for your family?

BARACK OBAMA: You know what? What we’ve decided for now is not to join a single church. And the reason is is because Michelle and I have realized we are very disruptive to services. [edit jump] And in the meantime, what we’ve done, there was a prayer circle of pastors from across the country who during the campaign would, would say a prayer for me or send a devotional. And we’ve kept that habit up and, and it’s a wonderful group because it’s a mix of some very conservative pastors, some very liberal pastors, but all who, you know, pray for me and Michelle and, and the girls and, and I get a daily devotional on my BlackBerry which is a, is a wonderful thing.

LAUER: It’s a spirituality meets high-tech! That’s pretty good.

WILLIAMS: We’ve posted the full interview Matt conducted with the President on our Web site nightly.msnbc.com.

Actually, Joe was merely channeling Nostradamus and predicting the future.

Are young people completely in the tank for Barack Obama and the left? They voted for Obama over John McCain by a greater than 2-1 margin. Obama was young, cool, good looking, and well-spoken — all the characteristics for a winning candidate in the eyes of the nation’s youth.

But it was more than just Obama’s charisma that handed him the youth vote in 2008. He was abetted by lapdogs in the press, reliably liberal pop-culture icons, and ultra-leftists in academia. Combined, they created a bloc of "Obama Zombies," writes Jason Mattera, author of a new book by that name.

Mattera was kind enough to give NewsBusters an interview. He described some of the themes of his book, including the incessantly liberal mainstream press — "pre-pubescent little girls at a Jonas Brothers concert" is how he described the Obamaniacs in the press corps. NB’s Steve Gutowski noted the book’s tremendous assessment of media bias in his review yesterday.

"Obama Zombies" is the perfect primer for all conservatives worried about the movement’s past troubles and hopefully brighter future with newly minted voters. Read the transcript of the interview below, or listen to the audio file here.

NEWSBUSTERS: I just wanted to start out asking you about something that Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher said today. I think you’ve heard it, I thought I saw something on your Twitter feed. But just for our readers’ sake, he said, "Aside from [Mattera's] ardent fans, I think most people will find his attack on funding for playgrounds pretty hollow, and his attack on breastfeeding just bizarre," obviously referring to your interview with Al Franken. He goes on to say, to compare you to ACORN scourge James O’Keefe, and says "Rather than search for the truth, both Mattera and O’Keefe seek to create truth. As entertainment, their value is open for debate. As journalism? Not so much." So I just thought I’d give you a chance to respond to that.

MATTERA: Tommy Christopher’s a joke. Nobody reads him. It’s probably him and his two moms. That’s about it.

NB: Okay. Great. Moving on, that’s kind of a perfect segue into your style of interviewing, and you’ve had some great bits recently with Steny Hoyer, asking him about having tax cheats write and enforce the ObamaCare bill, a good one with Bob Gibbs. So does that sort of style of interviewing, was that something that — because I know you were very active with the college Republicans when you were in school — was that something that started early in your career as a journalist?

MATTERA: You know, actively, or aggressively beating down liberal ideas and advancing conservative ideas did start on the college campus when I was in school. And that’s just because political correctness is so sick, as any conservative will tell you. You have a liberal idea that you’re just bombarded with. Conservative ideas are only given a forum when it’s the students that take the initiative. So yeah, you’ve got to be aggressive in promoting it. So, the videography was just a natural fit.

For instance, we know it’s nothing new, we have lapdogs in the mainstream media, who would rather cozy up to the cool campaign. They act like they are pre-pubescent little girls at a Jonas Brothers concert every time they’re in a room with Obama or one of his minions. So therefore it’s up to people like people, to people like you, the great sites that are out there, including NewsBusters, to keep the media accountable.

If Robert Gibbs is not going to be — if Robert Gibbs is going to dodge question after question, or the media’s just going to give him a pass. Same thing with Charlie Rangel. I mean, my goodness. Charlie Rangel. The fact that he is still a member of congress and has not resigned is a scandal of itself. Here’s a man who has — it seems every month there is a new ethics probe against him. And nothing. I mean, we know, if we just have a thought experiment, if there was an R next to his name, we’d see story after story.

Now, this translates into Obama Zombies in the fact that young people just are not up to speed about the activist nature of the media. So that’s why people like me, people like you, will have to confront members of the media and expose their own corruption, their own fawning coverage, and in the process, expose political corruption. And hopefully young people not be — will get rid of the zombie target that is on their foreheads, and realize that there is no such thing as objectivity any more. The mainstream media has declared war on conservatism, and is going to provide a base of support for liberal candidates.

NB: Well that has certainly become evident. You’ve also taken a more active approach to exposing the "Zombie" nature of so many young Obama supporters, well even before Obama. Before they were "Obama Zombies" they were still, I don’t know, liberal zombies maybe. And I thought you could say a few words about the "Whites Only Scholarship."

MATTERA: Sure. It was a parody of racial preferences on the college campus, and liberals — what’s interesting is my university used to have an all student-wide email saying they have compiled a list of scholarships for students of color only, and I was on the email list because I’m Puerto Rican. I showed it to one of my buddies who was not on the list, he was Irish. He was just fuming mad, because he thought the university — it was accurate — the university was balkanizing people on the basis of their race, and he worked hard for his grades and why can’t he have the same assistance?

So we said, let’s parody the idea, let’s have a scholarship just for white kids. We’ll call it a "Students of Non-Color Scholarship," a caucasian scholarship. And it aint going to be big. It was something like 300 bucks. It maybe gets you a textbook on campus. But it was not for monetary reward. We knew the left would go ape, and once they did go ape, they would expose their own hypocrisy.

Was it offensive? Was it divisive? Absolutely. That was the point. Dividing people on the basis of race and having racial quotas and racial preferences not only is a slap to minorities, because it treats them as inferior like they need help and a handout from the white man, but it also balkanizes people and doesn’t treat them equal on the college campus. So naturally, the reaction was crazy from the left on campus, they exposed their own hypocrisy. But there was a lot of good that came out from it. Most students were — while the administration went bonkers, most students agreed with the message of the initiative. And that is, the university should go out of their way to focus on students who need it financially, regardless of race, and I think that’s something we can all agree on.

NB: And you seem — in the book, you’re very confident that once the conservative message is presented to students in a truthful way — you say, "Since young people never hear conservative ideas, those ideas by definition sound fresh, rebellious, and provocative: all the things that interest young and hungry minds." Is that something that you experienced personally, in either your experience at school, or friends, or people that you knew?

MATTERA: Yes. When I was on my campus, we would bring conservative speakers — Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Tammy Bruce, a lot of others — and every single time we had so many students who came up to the speaker, or came up to us after and were like, "wow, I’ve never heard that perspective before. My thinking has been completely revitalized and changed."

That is because students are subjected to liberal nonsense. It’s not just through the campus, it’s intravenously given through MTV — I mean, you become a liberal today through osmosis. It just hits you in every single area. And young people, unfortunately, don’t have the critical thinking skills, because they’re just not paying attention to the classics anymore, because they’re not being taught on the college campus, again so they have that zombie target on their forehead. They’re more interested in thinking Barack Obama is going to [unintelligible] and melt away their student loans forever. And they’re like "oh sweet bro that’s great my student loans are going to be taken care of by Barack."

So when they hear actual truth — remember, liberalism’s greatest threats are evidence, logic, thinking — and if we present it in a fun way, if we have bedrock conservative principles, but with smart messaging, I think we could awaken our generation of Obama Zombies. It’s not going to happen overnight, but if we don’t start having a conservative youth outreach effort, than not only will we lose elections — that’s minor. We will lose a generation of young people who are not versed in the notion of freedom and liberty and that is more scary than losing one election.

NB: And you mention that in the book. You say Republicans are getting older, Democrats are getting younger, and the candidacy of John McCain certainly didn’t help it in your mind.

MATTERA: Oh it was awful.

NB: Now, at CPAC we saw an interesting trend, where there were a lot of young attendees obviously, and the straw poll seemed to be the talk of the day, how Ron Paul came away with 30-something percent, far and away the number one presidential candidate according to the straw poll. So do you see a more libertarian trend among young conservatives, or is Mike Huckabee correct?

MATTERA: You know, it’s hard to gauge that because Ron Paul’s supporters are a small bunch but they’re very vocal, and I give him credit for that. Now what Paul has tapped into is, he speaks with — I think he’s a nut on foreign policy, but when he speaks to the side of the growth of government entitlement spending, he’s right on. And he’s not afraid to speak his mind on those issues. He’s not a politician giving political speeches, he’s giving just what he considers truth, and he doesn’t hold back. So I think that is why many young people are attracted to him, because he doesn’t hold back in his analysis.

I would hope, I do hope, that a lot of people aren’t attracted to Ron Paul. I don’t think so. I think a very small segment, again a vocal segment, but a small segment. I mean we can even go back to the primary debates where Drudge would have those links up, who would win, and Ron Paul would always come out the victor. And we all knew Ron Paul didn’t win the debate. But again, it was his concentrated online lackeys who really boosted up his message. And that’s good, I mean he’s inspired people. You want that in a candidate. I’m just not sure there are — which politician is going to inspire young people today. I’m not really thrilled by any of the leading candidates right now.

NB: So do you think that there’s — we also see an older demographic, for the most part, not all older people, but the Tea Party is made up, primarily, of not so many young voters. So do you think there’s potential to get the youth involved in the Tea Party and that might translate into more Republican involvement from young people?

MATTERA: Well I think — possibly. But let’s look at what Barack Obama did during the election and I lay this out in my book in chapter 2, Will You Be My Facebook Friend. He set the standard of how you reach out to young people on social networking sites and with new media. I mean completely set the standard. He demolished John McCain in that area. Every single area related to new media, John McCain got walloped. By the end of the campaign, he had almost 30 percent of all young people saying that somebody from the Obama campaign contacted them, whether it was through Facebook, Twitter, or through their cell phones. That’s a huge percent. Almost a third of young people say they were actually contacted directly by someone from the Obama campaign. Higher than any other age demographic.

So the rallies are great, but we have to have smart messaging, and relay why conservative principles are in the best interest of young people. And one of the things that I talk about in the book is something that’s sort of far off. You know, to you and me, we’re in the policy minutiae. We can see how ObamaCare is an infringement on freedom and all these other policies down the pipe that they’re looking to institute. The average student — that’s who we’re talking about, I’m not preaching to the choir, but winning new converts — the average young person does not care about the health care debate. The average young person, if you ask them what Cap and Trade is, they have no idea. They don’t know what Cap and Trade is. So that’s where you have to bring it to a level they can understand.

So Cap and Trade comes up, just to use that as an example. There was a headline I put in my book from the Seattle Times that ran, it was late 2008, and the headline was "Charge an iPod, Kill a Polar Bear." That was the exact headline. And it just said that with the infusion of so much new technology, and it has increased over the years, that we are actually causing a polar meltdown to happen more quickly because we’re consuming so much more energy, we’re burning so much more carbon fuels, and therefore we need policies in place to regulate plasma TVs and other electronic devices including iPods.

Now you tell that to a young person, they would care about that. The left actually wants to institute policies to regulate your plasma TVs, to regulate your iPod. They actually want to have policies in place — I mean, what is a carbon footprint? Energy production. Energy. That’s your computer. They want to have policies in place that regulate your habits. Your online habits. I mean that’s where young people can see I think why, whoa, talk about Big Brother, talk about nanny state, talk about someone looking over your shoulder. That is the left. I mean the left is all about top-down control, and we need to continue to get that message out there in ways that young people not just get, but can relate to. I mean that’s what it has to be: relatable.

So redistribution of wealth? Obama and his socialist administration is all about that. We’ll talk to young people about redistribution of GPAs. They think social justice is such a great idea, and that the people at the top deserve — or that the people on the top, it’s right and somehow fair to slash their income and give it to someone down below? Let’s do the same thing with GPAs. You have a 4.0, a 3.5, you worked hard to get it, you may have gone to a good school and had good SAT prep, or whatever your circumstances are. Alright, that’s unfair. Use the left’s language. We’re going to halve your GPA, and that kid at the very bottom who’s struggling to get that C [unintelligible] D right now, we’re going to make sure he passes, and we’re going to redistribute your GPA to his and we’re going to have a nice true egalitarian society. Well I’ll tell you, young people go ape off that. They would balk at that.

Young people are innately conservative because they value and are consumers of services that big government can never provide. And that’s why I really wanted to write Obama Zombies, to give a behind the scenes look into the tactics and strategies team Obama employed because they were very successful, and then talk about how these policies are torpedo-aimed at young people’s financial futures.

NB: And with Obama Zombies — and the right has actually had a lot of success in the book market lately, not that that really gets much press, and then it seems there’s also the new media aspect which conservatives are really starting to pick up on, but from your book, I can’t help but gather than until conservatives find some way to counter the really unbelievable influence that pop-culture icons have on young people’s preferences and habits and political views, then — you know, the news media only plays so big of a part, and sadly young people get a lot of their news from entertainment sources, like, as you point out, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

MATTERA: Yeah, no you’re absolutely right. The ramification was — it didn’t take that much. I have a chapter on how the use of celebrities — we know celebrities are always endorsing some left wing candidate. That’s nothing new. But what team Obama did is juice up their support. So they turn their support into collecting text messages. They would have 80,000 people go hear Jay-Z, oh any by the way text your cell phone number to this specific code, and then the Obama administration would constantly keep up with people.

They would institute call stations throughout their rallies, and hand out scripts, and say "hey, you’re at this call station, call this undecided person." It was peer pressure to help gin up support for Barack. Moreover, they would register these people to vote, and in some states, you can register to vote and vote on the same day. That’s the key. So then they would bus them to the polls. And you have people who are going "oh wow Barack’s hooking me up with Dave Matthews tickets. I’ll vote for him!" It’s unfortunate, but that’s the level of the dumbed down culture we’re dealing with.

So yes, conservatives are always going to have an uphill battle against Hollywood. That’s nothing new. But if we — so we have to realize our tactics — but if we don’t have a vibrant youth outreach to try to fight back, we just can’t give up, and, you know, John McCain didn’t have one, the GOP still doesn’t have one, Barack Obama is always at a college to this day giving some campaign speech. Always has young people behind him. It’s the cool campaign. They think "oh I’m hip, I’m down with Barack." But the opening is there for us to reach out to young people because they are the highest unemployed in this Obama economy, so we can — it’s the same thing that happened with Jimmy Carter: he won over the youth vote, the economy sucked, we were in a "malaise." Ronald Reagan came in without Fox News, without talk radio, without NewsBusters, without all of these sites we take for granted today, and he was still able to penetrate the youth vote. So, you know I’m optimistic, I hold on hope. THere are people like you and me who are out there trying to reach the next generation, but we do need the resources to do it.

NB: Okay, and real quick. Just last question. Who’s your 2012 pick? Who do you think has the best chance of capturing that youth vote?

MATTERA: I have no idea. Honestly I have no idea. I am just, I’m not thrilled by any candidate right now, to be quite frank with you. It’s just nobody, no one gets me motivated. I’m waiting to see who emerges, and I’ll give everyone a fair shot. What we can’t have is a repeat of John McCain. Someone like John McCain. We can’t have someone who’s going to try to play nicey nice with the left and play patty cake with them and not bring up the left’s dirty laundry.

We need conservatives who are going to bring up the left’s dirty laundry and say, "here, sniff this, Rahm Emanuel," to expose them and their corruption to the entire world, the entire country, and we need someone with a fighting attitude, someone who’s a winner, someone who can articulate our message. I’m not implored by anyone right now, but I’m hoping. I’m hoping. We’ll see what happens.

The latest edition of CBS’s “Sunday Morning” featured a glowing profile of “The View” co-host Joy Behar in which the stand-up comic implied that conservatives are not intelligent and insisted that liberals are more open-minded.

Interviewer Russ Mitchell asked Behar how she developed a liberal worldview, to which Behar responded: “It comes from, uh, being smart.”

Mitchell then pressed Behar on how her conservative co-host on “The View,” Elisabeth Hasselbeck, would respond to that statement.“Listen, I have my prejudices, you know, too,” she said. “I think that people who are liberal are more open-minded. That’s all. I just believe that. You know, you can argue with that all you want—you can say, ‘Oh, conservative people are open-minded,’ and I don’t agree with that. I don’t.”

It’s ironic that someone who claims to be so open-minded could not come up with a more thoughtful answer on the source of her liberal proclivities. What’s more, it’s ironic that someone who claims to be so open-minded would promote closed-minded stereotypes to characterize conservatives.

A partial transcript of the profile, which aired on “CBS News Sunday Morning” on 3/28/10 at 10:08 am, can be found below:

RUSS MITCHELL, CBS News anchor: Where did this liberal streak come from?

JOY BEHAR: It comes from, uh, being smart.

MITCHELL: What would Elizabeth [Hasselbeck, “The View” co-host] say to that?

BEHAR: Listen, I have my prejudices, you know, too. I think that people who are liberal are more open-minded. That’s all. I just believe that. You know, you can argue with that all you want—you can say, ‘Oh, conservative people are open-minded,’ and I don’t agree with that. I don’t.

MITCHELL: While Behar is the first to admit she’s a comic and not a legitimate journalist, in 2008 when presidential candidate John McCain joined the co-hosts of the “The View,” Behar wasn’t shy about asking him some tough questions.

–Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.

No, hell hasn’t frozen over but, yes, the Huffington Post now has a religion blog. The Huffington Post, a Web site devoted to rankling conservatives and pushing a liberal agenda, announced on Feb. 24 that it was launching HuffPost Religion.

Huffington Post’s co-founder, Arianna Huffington, claimed it would simply be "a section featuring a wide-ranging discussion about religion [and] spirituality," but the numbers prove that it is more of an attack on traditional Christianity than a discussion.

The site didn’t waste any time throwing punches. In its first two weeks, it churned out articles by a liberal nun calling Catholicism sexist; a Rabbi claiming that Judaism will "stagnate and cease to be meaningful" unless it participates in the "green movement;" an avowed atheist comparing those who believe in God to a 7-year-old still believing in the tooth fairy; a science writer warning being religious could lead to "dangerous side-effects" such as "the crusader jihadist mentality;" and a neuroscientist calling those who believe in "obsolete religious ideas" a "lunatic fringe."

HuffPost Religion is the religion blog that hates religion, but the faith it abuses the most is Christianity.

Everything’s Okay But Christianity

• Eighty-one percent of the stories and columns (13 out of 16) that focused on Christianity either criticized certain Christian denominations, leaders or beliefs. Five other articles negatively portrayed well-known Christians, specifically Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum; no articles portrayed those three in a good light. Bill Maher, a regular site contributor, went so far as to call Sarah Palin "a babbling, barely-housebroken, uneducated being" and compared her followers to Buddhist monks that hail a 2-year-old toddler as the reincarnation of the sacred Dalai Lama. 

More than 240 million Americans will be celebrating Easter and the resurrection of their savior Jesus Christ this week. It’s a sacred time – a time to rejoice, reflect and repent, but the writers of HuffPost Religion will probably just see it as another chance to take a swipe at Christians.

In a 2008 Pew Research poll, nearly 80 percent of Americans identified themselves as Christians. That’s a significant majority yet, during the first two weeks of HuffPost Religion’s existence, only 16 out of 78 articles focused on Christianity – a full 13 of those were negative.

On the day it launched, the site featured an article written by liberal nun Sister Joan Chittister calling Catholicism sexist and demanding that priesthood be made available to women.

Chittister said, "Churches that cling to sexism in the name of God will find themselves ignored on other issues. Young women will begin to wonder how it is that churches that teach equality are the last bastions of sexism in the modern world. People of faith will be hard pressed to explain how it is that the question of equality of the sexes is being led by secular institutions rather than by ministers who proclaim the Good News and then stop it from coming."

On that same day, Brian McLaren, a HuffPost contributor and blogger for Beliefnet’s Progressive Revival, wrote an article titled "A New Kind of Christianity," which called its readers to not be limited by their "conservative bias" but instead to question what has been preached in the past. He suggested questioning such things as "Who is Jesus and why is he so important?" and "Why has homosexuality become such a divisive issue?" and "Are there fresh and better options for Christian eschatology?"

A week later, on March 5, religion professor Richard Hughes wrote that "conservative Christians … often fail the common good." He pointed to their support of the Iraq War and their supposed inability to accept and help those who don’t believe in Jesus as evidence.

"[B]enevolence typically takes a back seat to preaching, mission work, and Evangelism in most evangelical churches, since a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’ and saving souls almost always trumps the saving of human lives – especially the lives of the poor – in the here and now," Hughes said. 

Other articles attempted to paint Christians as intolerant radicals by hyping abstract stories about individuals, such as Janet Porter, the president and founder of Faith2Action, praying for the "Christian takeover" of the media. Alvin McEwen wrote he’d be "remiss" if he didn’t point out that Porter said this prayer "in front of a huge multitude during one of those dreary we have to save American values from the forces of secular evil conferences which religious right organizations seem to hold more often than World Wrestling Entertainment hosts wrestling pay-per-views."

In another article, author Dr. Charles Cogan mocked former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin for her belief that God has had a hand in her life. Cogan recounted the story of when Sen. John McCain’s aid, Steve Schmidt, asked her how she had managed to remain so calm during the hectic days after she was chosen as the vice presidential candidate. She had replied that it was "God’s plan." Cogan wrote, "God’s hand was certainly missing in the answers she was soon to give in television interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric." He concluded that Christians like Sarah Palin who believe God watches over them aren’t just simpletons  - they’re egotistical:

One may ask, How can a God care for – or not care for – each and every one of the nearly seven billion inhabitants of the planet? It defies imagination, or at least human imagination. Yet Sarah Palin is not alone in thinking she has a special place in God’s concerns. But then, maybe God is more attentive to elect categories of people – in this case, evangelical (pentecostal?) Christians.

With the exception of three articles discussing Lent, Jesus’ temptation in the desert and His call to forgive others, every HuffPost Religion article on Christianity depicted Christians as intolerant, fringe radicals unwilling to progress with society. But when the articles weren’t bashing Christians, they were twisting their arms.

Over 20 percent (17 out of 78) of the articles posted on HuffPost Religion during its first two weeks exploited religion for the purpose of promoting a liberal agenda. The authors attempted to manipulate Christian believers by pointing to their liberal agenda and saying, God would want you to be tolerant.

You Can’t Say No If You Believe in God 

• Over 20 percent (17 out of 78) of the articles exploited religion to promote a liberal agenda, focusing on topics such as homosexuality, global warming and universal health care. HuffPost Religion’s editor, Paul Raushenbush, described the new site as a “more accurate representation” of religious people’s views on “controversial issues of the day such as health care, immigration, abortion and gay rights.” 

The first article posted on HuffPost’s new site, written by editor Paul Raushenbush, gave a taste of what was to come. He wrote, "Dear Religious (and sane) America … HuffPost Religion will provide a more accurate representation of the wide range of concerns held by religious people, and dispel the myth that religious people have only one stance on the controversial issues of the day such as health care, immigration, abortion and gay rights."

Articles that followed included "What Would Jesus Do If Invited to a Gay Wedding?," "Healthcare is a Moral Right" and "Immigration Reform: Change Takes Courage and Faith."

Rabbi or Rose wrote that Judaism "will stagnate and cease to be meaningful" unless it becomes "actively engaged" in the "green movement." Another article, this one written by Rita Nakashima Brock, blamed those who support war, especially those who are religious and support war, for the moral injury inflicted on soldiers who are forced to "fight wars they know are morally wrong." And Steve Maesler wrote an article that didn’t just claim that rejecting homosexuality is religiously wrong, he also claimed that those who reject it are "more vulnerable … to mental illness and every other self-crippling limitation" and, the more "hostile and antagonistic" they feel, "the greater the danger … that [they] will be inclined to do harm."

Each of these articles viewed religion as a means to an end – an argument to prove that they should get what they want, but if, in the end, the two could not be reconciled, the thing to be discarded was not their agenda, but "obsolete religious ideas," as neuroscientist Dan Agin put it. In his article, "Myths of the Crazy Ape," Agin claimed that religious people are shoving America to the brink of failure because "they don’t like science."

"What they prefer is a closed ideational system, usually a closed system provided by religion," Agin claimed. "They would rather not think … In America, these people would be a harmless lunatic fringe were it not for their political power and their demand that they control the teaching of children in public schools."

David Horton, a biologist and avowed atheist, not only agreed with Agin in his article "Putting Away Childish Things," he went so far as to compare those who choose religion over "reality" to a 7-year-old that still believes in the tooth fairy:

Does it matter if grown people keep on believing in things that a seven year old child, given freedom of thought and action, would dump into the wastebasket along with the tooth fairy? Yes, of course it does, because if you can get an adult to keep on believing in untrue things in this area [religion] you can get them to believe untrue things in any area. Enter creationists, and tea-baggers, and climate change deniers, and birthers, and truthers, and WMD in Iraq, and death panels, and the global war on terrorism, and Obama is a socialist, and all the rest of this childish rubbish that is constantly being trotted out these days by children in adult bodies.

Religions that didn’t step on HuffPost’s liberal toes, however, were given plenty of attention and a great deal of respect.

Courting Atheists and Non-Christian Religions

• Nearly 50 percent (36 out of 78) of the articles focused on atheists, agnostics, opponents to organized religion or non-Christian religions, despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of Americans claim the Christian religion. Clay Farris Naff, a science writer and regular contributor to HuffPost Religion, wrote that any religion that claims to have all the answers is a "fraud." "If they offer you truth, happiness, or eternal life in return for your obedience, turn around and run for the hills." 

According to the same 2008 Pew Research poll, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and atheists comprise less than 8 percent of the American population, yet nearly half (46 percent) of the articles during HuffPost Religion’s first two weeks were devoted to them. Atheists and those opposed to organized religion in particular were given free rein to hack away at everything and anything considered sacred by others.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi teacher, lamented in his article "Reclaiming Our Spiritual Heritage" that "religious teachings have often emphasized that following religious doctrine is more important than one’s individual spiritual experience." 

Science writer and HuffPo contributor Naff wrote that those who follow "hand-me-down, superstition-laden" religions aren’t "rational" and that such a belief can lead to "dangerous side-effects" like the "crusader-jihadist mentality" and "the rejection of science" (the second side-effect seems to be far more dangerous in Naff’s opinion than the first).

"No God worth worshiping would go about things in such a mean-spirited, vague, illogical, shifty, and partisan manner as the history and theology of traditional religion reveals," Naff said. His solution was to believe in a "non-steroidal, generic God" for a "healthier, freer mind."

In another article written by Naff called "Alleged Abuses in Scientology Are Far From Unique," he criticized anyone who believes their church has the whole truth for lying to themselves. "You don’t have to earn a doctorate in philosophy to recognize that anyone who claims to have all the answers is a fraud. Sincere or sham, they are frauds. If they offer you truth, happiness, or eternal life in return for your obedience, turn around and run for the hills."

Deepak Chopra, a well-known advocate of New Age spirituality and dubbed the "poet-prophet of alternative medicine" by Time magazine, echoed that sentiment when he called organized religion "quarrelsome" and "divisive." "The custodians of organized religion have frequently ended up with destructive behaviors – power mongering, cronyism, control, corruption, and influence peddling."

His solution to this problem and, in fact, the problems of the entire world was to focus on individual spirituality, or, as Chopra put it, "getting in touch with our deepest self."

But for 240 million Christian Americans, Chopra’s solution blotted out who and what their religion is all about - something that they’ll be celebrating this Sunday: Jesus’ crucifixion and His miraculous resurrection that made salvation possible for all of mankind.

Methodology

CMI analyzed the first two weeks of stories and columns from HuffPost Religion from its start date, Feb. 24, through March 10. Only original content written by HuffPost contributors and staffers was analyzed. CMI researchers analyzed stories they found appearing on the site during the analysis period, but given the rapidly changing nature of the Web, it is possible a few stories were missed.

In case there are any residual doubts about how bad the tea partiers have been treated, here are the Top 5 ways the left and the media have abused a grassroots movement. The coverage has been so hateful and so biased, it was almost impossible to narrow the list. Here they are in reverse order, just in time for the big tea party events April 15:

5) Protesters are Anti-Government

The media and the left portray tea parties as "anti-government" because it undermines a patriotic grassroots movement. Tea partiers aren’t anti-government, they are anti-big government. That’s just not the story journalists tell. The "anti-government" theme is strong, cropping up in more than two dozen stories in The Washington Post and New York Times combined. Very few of them mentioned the word "big" in reference to government.

Instead, it’s NPR’s Liz Halloran claiming tea parties have been boosted by "restive Republicans who have found refuge in the year-old anti-tax, anti-government uprising." Or Frank Rich of The New York Times who compared tea partiers with Andrew Joseph Stack, the man who flew a plane into an IRS building. "Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a ‘Tea Party terrorist.’ But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner."

Then there’s former CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen, who became the story when she reported from the Chicago tea party on April 15 last year. Roesgen rudely interrupted one of the protesters and slammed the event for being "anti-government." After she bullied her interview subject, Roesgen concluded that "you get the general tenor of this," tea party. "Anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox and since I can’t really hear much more and I think this is not really family viewing."

CNN is more family friendly now. Roesgen no longer works at the network.

4) Tea Partiers Are Stupid

Calling conservatives stupid is typical left-wing strategy. The left labeled Reagan stupid or senile. George W. Bush was consistently portrayed as stupid by detractors in the left and the media. It only makes sense that tea partiers get the same treatment.

In the case of the tea parties, some of the biggest offenders were also some of the biggest mouths on the left. Last August, former Air America host MSNBC regular Janeane Garofalo let the venom fly during an appearance at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 21. Garofalo called tea partiers "functionally retarded adults."

Bill Maher deployed the same strategy in February of this year during HBO’s "Real Time" calling tea partiers "cultists. "The teabaggers, they’re not a movement. They’re a cult, and I’m going to prove it. You know someone has fallen into a cult if you see these signs: One. Cults have their own vocabulary. Now, I don’t speak sh**kicker, but I know that in their world, freedom means guns, diplomacy means weakness, elitist means reader, and socialist means black." In Maher’s world, stupid means anyone who is conservative.

3) Protesters are Nazis

Nazis are the ultimate villains both for the horror they brought to the world through conquest and their use of industrialized genocide. But while the left went crazy when Lyndon LaRouche fans carried Obama/Hitler posters to protests, they were quick to use the slander for their own devices.

Take MSNBC’s relatively obscure host Dylan Ratigan. In February, the host of "The Dylan Ratigan Show" began the program by doing what his network always does – attacking conservatives. "The tea party has a bit of an integrity problem, as everybody from birthers, to open racists, to outright Nazis are actually on the team. And no one involved, including its leadership, seems to mind that fact."  

Ratigan learned from the best, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who called the tea parties "Astroturf" before she went on to link them to Nazis. "They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare." Later she backed off her complete attack and tried to latch onto tea party popularity claiming, "but, you know, we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers." Sure…

2) Homophobic Slurs

To most ordinary Americans in early 2009, the term "teabagging" meant using a tea bag to make actual tea. Then entire world learned the term had an overt, oral sex connotation, thanks to the media and left-wing pundits.

Nowhere was the use of the term more pronounced than MSNBC. The day before the big tea party event last April, MSNBC’s David Shuster made numerous sexual puns during a "Countdown" appearance. "It’s going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they’re going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals," he told viewers.  He later used his Twitter account to attack "teabaggers" and their "teabag leader."

Shuster lost out to fellow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for most adolescent behavior. Maddow’s and then Air America radio contributor Ana Marie Cox used the word "teabag" at least 51 times in a in a 13-minute long segment of bad "teabag" puns.

It wasn’t just MSNBC. Journalists at numerous outlets used the derisive term. But CNN anchor Anderson Cooper went even farther during the April 15 "Anderson Cooper 360" program. CNN’s senior political analyst David Gergen said Republicans were "searching for their voice" after two electoral losses, Cooper followed up by saying, "It’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging." The irony of this attack is that it allows lefties and the media to feel smart and act juvenile at the same time.

1) Calling them "racist"

Playing the race card has become the left’s favorite move. It trumps everything else and is virtually impossible to defend against. Naturally, with an African-American president, crying "racism" has become a routine occurrence. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is just one of the milder examples of someone who injects race into everything except commercials.

Whether it’s Colbert King of The Washington Post or loose cannon former comedienne Garofalo, racism is the left’s preference in attempts to undermine the tea parties.

Former funny lady Garofalo bashed the attendees at last year’s tax day tea parties by using several different attacks. The "Countdown" guest called party-goers "a bunch of teabagging rednecks," adding "this is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up."

At least she didn’t invoke the KKK or talk about tea partiers wearing sheets. But she didn’t have to because Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., did it for her. Clyburn showed up in a column by The Post’s Colbert King that claimed "Today’s Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies." "It reminds me of that period in our history right after Reconstruction," Clyburn said, "when South Carolina had a black governor and the political gains were lost because of vigilantism, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan."

He wasn’t alone. In February, "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann focused on suggestions there should be civics literacy testing for registered voters made at the recent Tea Party convention, which Olbermann referred to as the "Tea Klux Klan."

Maddow attacked the same suggestion with her own Klan spin. "And as you could hear, the tea party convention crowd erupted in cheers at the suggestion, although, to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the white hoods," she mocked.

Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum. He can also be contacted on FaceBook and Twitter as dangainor.

The Washington Post rendered itself indistinguishable from the White House publicity effort on Wednesday. At top center of its front page was an article by reporter Eli Saslow — the man who hailed Obama’s "glistening pectorals" in 2008 – on the letters President Obama reads from, and writes to, average Americans.

Under a photo of unemployed Michigan woman (and Obama voter) Jennifer Cline, the gooey headline was "Dear Mr. President…A Michigan woman wrote to Obama about her life. And he responded."

Saslow underlined the usual Obama trope about how he reads 10 letters from Americans every day, and they are considered "among his most important daily reading material, aides said." Cline found out just how wonderfully responsive the president was:

Obama’s face appeared on the screen. It was a holiday special of some kind, featuring the first family, and Cline set down the remote. She had voted for Obama, and she liked him even more now on TV, glimpsing his life inside the White House. He had two young daughters; she had two young sons. He had a dog; she had a dog. It occurred to Cline that Obama seemed normal somehow, like the kind of person who might want to read a letter.

Inside the paper, the letters-to-Obama story covered the entire page of A-4 complete with a photo of Cline in a psychology class and a large photo of Obama reading a letter to insurance company executives. In large type, they put this sentence from Cline’s letter:  "I lost my job, my health benefits and my self worth in a matter of 5 days."

Obama sympathetically replied:

"Thanks for the very kind and inspiring letter," he wrote to Cline. "I know times are tough, but knowing there are folks out there like you and your husband give [sic] me confidence that things will keep getting better!"

He signed his name in the bottom right corner, with a sweeping "B" and "O." Then he set Cline’s letter aside and moved on to the next.

Saslow and the Post ended the story with their subject, still dealing with skin cancer, screaming in joy that the sensitive, in-touch president had replied:

She walked out to the porch on a freezing weekday in January, feeling nauseated from the latest round of chemo, or maybe from the diet of scrambled eggs and Twizzlers, which had become the only foods she could keep down. Inside the box was a big yellow envelope, stamped first class from the White House, and Cline immediately thought: How did I get in so much trouble that now the president is involved?

She opened the envelope to find two pieces of cardboard taped together. Protected in between was another envelope, much smaller, and inside that envelope was a notecard adorned with the presidential seal.

Cline remembered the letter she had written to Obama three weeks earlier, and her hands started to shake. She carried the notecard into the kitchen and held it under the light: cursive handwriting, a grammatical error and small smudges of black ink.

Was it real? She thought so. She started to laugh, then scream.

"Jennifer," the letter began, and this one was not from a bill collector.

When the Republicans shocked the liberal media elite by winning back Congress in 1994, they had been demonized for months. But it took the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 for Bill Clinton and all of his "objective" media devotees to really pull the violence card and smear that mass murder all over Newt Gingrich and conservative Republicans, blaming it on their "anti-government" rhetoric.

In 2010, our partisan liberal media aren’t waiting for the elections to arrive. An arrest of "Christian militia" activists in southern Michigan led Washington Post columnist (and former reporter) Eugene Robinson to proclaim implausibly on March 30: "The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction — the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day — and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies — is calibrated not to inform but to incite."

Robinson wrote this in the very same edition of the newspaper where on page A-8 — not on page A-1, but A-8 — the Post reported a Philadelphia man was charged with threatening to kill House Minority Leader Eric Cantor and his family. Norman Leboon posted a YouTube video in which he said Cantor was "pure evil" and "you and your children are Lucifer’s abominations."

In an online chat later in the day, Robinson dismissed the threat: "A crazy, anti-Semitic wacko can do terrible things. That said, I don’t think that’s the same thing as heavily armed militia groups training for war against the state."

A few days before on NBC’s "Meet the Press," Newsweek editor Jon Meacham denied reality by claiming there is no gap in political passion: "I would say it’s a pretty close call." Liberals, after all, succeeded in ramrodding the bill through to passage, and conservatives only stood out because their passion was "raw, and tragically unfortunate. When John Lewis can’t walk across Capitol Hill without being spit on and called the worst thing he can be called, a man who helped change America, then we’re out of whack."

That was a pretty shoddy charge for such a prestigious journalist to make. First, John Lewis was not the man who claimed he was spit upon. That was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, and he later told Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy that he felt a man angrily yelling at him didn’t so much spit as "allowed saliva to hit my face." In other words — and video confirms it — this conscious spitting never happened.

Milloy should be better known as the ranter that doubly ruined Robinson’s claim that today’s leftists never incite. Here’s how Milloy responded to the tea party protests on Capitol Hill: "I want to spit on them, take one of their ‘Obama Plan White Slavery’ signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads."

Robinson somehow missed that article in his own newspaper, too.

This absolute tunnel vision about which side is ferocious was almost comical on NBC. John McCain came on NBC’s "Today" on March 25 and was assaulted by Ann Curry about the "incendiary" language of his old running mate, Sarah Palin. But when Barack Obama showed up five days later, Matt Lauer "balanced" it — by talking about the ferocity of the Republicans. "The vitriol, the rhetoric, the sniping, the threats. How are you possibly going to continue with any kind of legislative agenda when your opponents have said to you, ‘I’m not gonna cooperate with this president, with these Democrats, unless it’s a matter of national security.’ How do you move on?"

This allowed Obama to joke that "no asteroid had hit the planet" since he signed his health bill passed. But Lauer never raised the Cantor death threats with Obama, and they didn’t appear anywhere else on "Today."

This anti-"vitriol" stance is most comical for this network because MSNBC churns out vitriol and ferocity against conservatives and Republicans on a daily and nightly basis. Do Curry and Lauer never watch it?

All these people — from Robinson and Meacham to Curry and Lauer — are knowledgeable people who cannot deny that the left is deeply stocked with rabid bloggers, talk-radio hosts and cable-TV shouters. Their ability to pretend that these voices do not exist is quite an acting job.

How one-sided is their reporting? Imagine the media reaction if Rep. Steny Hoyer, the second most powerful Democrat in the House, were targeted for death by a tea partier. Eric Cantor is the No. 2 House Republican. When the arrest of his would-be killer was made, how much coverage did it receive? A brief mention on NBC on the evening of March 29, a brief mention on ABC on the morning of March 30, and CBS never touched it.

"The View" co-host Joy Behar isn’t known for being the most graceful person, but for whatever reason she has managed to land her own cable news show and is now a sought after personality for shows like NBC’s "Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

In a March 30 appearance on "The Tonight Show", Leno asked Behar about her feud with Fox News and talk radio host Glenn Beck. Beck recently suggested there is an "I Hate Glenn Beck" club and that Behar was a member. Behar denied she hated Beck.

"Oh yeah, Glenn Beck – I can’t take a man who cries," Behar said. "I mean, it’s enough on my wedding night I had to watch that. You know what I mean? I can’t, but — he does. He talks about me. I’m on his list of ‘I Hate Glenn Beck.’ It’s like being on Nixon’s enemies list. I loved it. But I don’t hate him. I don’t hate him."

Behar told Leno she would have Beck on her HLN program, even though Beck’s program draws roughly four times the audience at 5 p.m. ET that Behar’s 9 p.m. ET prime time HLN program draws, with the caveat he is "neutered and spayed."

"It’s showbiz," Behar said. "But you know what, if I could take the opportunity to tell Glenn — which is my camera — because I’d like to say I don’t hate him and I want him to know that. Where is it? Glenn, listen, I don’t hate you. Sincerely, Glenn Beck, from the bottom of my heart, I don’t hate you. I don’t give a flying [expletive] about you."

Behar’s statement is a tad curious because on her HLN show, the topic of Beck has come up time and time and time again. But despite that, Behar said she would have Beck on, who once had a show on Behar’s network, but said she wouldn’t go on his and he likely wouldn’t go on hers.

This item may not surprise those of us who have watched politicians take the safe way out at any opportunity, but it will give any voters who come across it reason to doubt any Democratic congressman who says that he or she voted no on principle against Obamacare on Sunday, March 21.

This explains why it hasn’t been covered much — and maybe not at all — in any establishment media outlet.

On March 26, the Catholic News Agency had an exclusive interview with Michigan congressman Bart Stupak. Wait until you see some of the things he admitted to CNA (bolds are mine):

Rep. Stupak: Speaker Pelosi had extra health care votes ‘in her pocket’

The health care reform bill would have passed the House without the votes of Rep. Bart Stupak’s pro-life Democrats because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “always carries a number of votes in her pocket,” Stupak told CNA in a Thursday phone interview.

The Michigan Democrat explained that by opting for the executive order, pro-life Democrats believe they ensured the legislation was “somewhat restrictive” towards abortion funding.

“Speakers never bring a bill to the floor, unless they have the votes. And they always have few in reserve,” Stupak revealed, describing this as a “common tactic” that was used in the defeat of the Dornan Amendment in a funding bill earlier this year.

“The Speaker always carries a number of votes in her pocket,” he said, meaning that some members who voted ‘no’ would have voted ‘yes’ if needed.

“I had a number of members who thanked us after because they could vote no.”

Rep. Stupak said he thought the votes available for Sunday’s vote totaled 222.

Well, okay Bart, who were these Dems who didn’t have the courage to vote their convictions, and instead wish to go back to their constituents and claim they didn’t support the ObamaCare monstrosity? (crickets …)

Better yet, pal, don’t tell us. It would be much more convenient for November voters to presumptively assume that their no-voting Democratic congressman really was a "yes" until Bart bailed them out. That works for me, and it would work for many other like-minded Americans — which is why the press will more than likely pretend that the CNA-Stupak interview doesn’t exist.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.