Twenty-four years ago, Los Angeles Dodgers VP Al Campanis was forced to resign his position for saying on national TV that blacks lack "the necessities" to be baseball managers and executives.  

On today's Hardball, Chris Matthews was so enjoying himself mocking Rick Perry's intelligence, that he decided to use a slightly mangled version of the same line on the Texas governor. Video after the jump.

Speaking with Susan Page of USA Today, Matthews first said that Perry "doesn't have the brains to be president." The crowd laughed uproariously, as you'll hear in the video and see in the screengrab of the man sitting behind Page. Perhaps spurred by the public's reaction, Matthews continued "he doesn't have the basics, the necessaries, to be president."

It's certainly not the most egregious media bias or error story you'll every see. But hey, it's the end of the year and almost GOP primary time, so take a break, lighten up a bit, and enjoy this one.

On Wednesday, as shown here and based on when comments first appeared, USA Today's Chris Woodyard put up an item in McPaper's "Drive On" blog about how the funeral of North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Il used decades-old Lincolns. The headline: "North Korea's elite use Nixon-era Lincolns." Figures, right? Any chance to get in a dig at a Republican or conservative. What's wrong with just saying "1970s"? Well, nothing, especially when you're proven wrong about the Nixonian lineage.

For posterity, here's what was carried originally at Topix (the Nixonian headline is also in my cars-related USAT email):

Woodyard didn't fully acknowledge the original headline error as he corrected himself (or perhaps his headline writer). His post began with the update noted:

Kim Jong Il's death: North Korea uses 1970s Lincolns

Updated 5:58 p.m. ET, to reflect the car appears to be a 1976 model. As we were watching coverage of the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, we couldn't help but notice what the elite consider the epitome of luxury one of the world's most isolated countries: Detroit-made 1970s-era Lincolns.

The body of Dear Leader was strapped to the top of an mid 1970s Lincoln limousine. Jalopnik identifies it as a 1976, and who are we to disagree. (Apparently, food isn't the only commodity in short supply in the desperate Asian nation: It's hard to find a decent working hearse as well.) Another almost identical car was being used for the Kim Jong Il billboard, lest anyone forget that dictators can indeed smile. We suspect one strong breeze or the rush of air from driving a little too fast could have toppled the sign.

Nixon resigned in August 1974. Sales of the 1976 Lincoln would not have begun until a year later in the fall of 1975 at the earliest. Gerald Ford was president. USA Today was not launched until 1982, which for the historical record is roughly when the country under Ronald Reagan finally began to recover from the Jimmy Carter Era-Driven early 1980s recession.

A couple of decades from now, we'll accurately be able to look back and poke fun at "Obama Era Chevy Volts" — if any are left on the road. Hopefully we'll still be a bit more free — oops, I said I was going to keep it light.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Chris Matthews showed up from Java Joe's in Des Moines in the 11 am hour on MSNBC Friday to underline the liberal arrogance that in the Obama era, all the country's hatred is against Obama, and apparently liberals are utterly incapable of adding anything to the Hate Quotient.

"I heard a voice this morning a woman came up to me and said I’m really for Obama, but I want to end these years of hatred. Now if people start voting for the Republicans because there’s too much divisiveness because of Obama, that’s real trouble for the White House," Matthews said. He then declared: "In other words, the way to end the hatred in America is to get rid of the object of the hatred. Well, that’s a strange way to do things."

Speaking of a strange way to do things, Matthews somehow thought it was odd that Romney wouldn’t say “Let them eat cake” in French for him, as if that wasn’t a stunt or a trap. Instead, it was a clue that Romney is a "closeted" Massachusetts moderate:

I asked Romney if he could say “Let them eat cake” in French, and it was a very interesting moment, a telling moment. He said yes. I said can you say “Let them eat cake in French,” and I knew he was a Mormon missionary over in France. He said, "Yes but I won’t." There’s a lot of Romney inside him that he won’t show. And I lot if it, they think, is moderation. That he thinks is moderation. So although he’s running to the right out here, he may be offering a closeted offer of moderation to a lot of these middle-of-the-road, or not that right-wing Republicans.

Matthews the Pundit sounded the bad news, that if Romney “gets that middle-of-the road vote, plus the red-hot anti-Obama vote, he wins. In other words, if he puts together the middle with the right, he wins. If everything votes for him because he’s a secret middle-of-the-roader, and they vote for him for that reason, and the right wing just wants to get rid of President Obama, that adds up to a lot more than 50 percent."

He then returned to the odd, "perverse" idea that you please the haters by voting out the hate object: "And if you throw in some people who just want to end the divisiveness in America, and get one party running the country, and no more Obama hatred, now this is a very bizarre way to do things, maybe perverse, you get rid of the hatred by getting rid of the object of the hatred? Well, that’s certainly an odd development here, and not a healthy one for the White House, or perhaps the country." 

[Hat tip: Pie Fan Dan Isett]

Leave it to a fringe leftist to tout a rarely-defended plan proposed by Franklin Roosevelt.

Angered by Supreme Court rulings that blocked many New Deal initiatives, Roosevelt in 1937 came up with what he considered an ingenious scheme to get around the court — increasing it from 9 to 15 justices, the additional six most assuredly sharing Roosevelt's politics. (audio clip after page break)

FDR's plan met the same fate as the Hindenburg that year, though it took a bit longer to burn and crash.

It was not until this week that I ever heard any liberal defend Roosevelt's court-packing folly, at least not that I recall. Enter Mike Papantonio, attorney and "Ring of Fire" radio show co-host, filling in on Ed Schultz's radio show Wednesday.

Here's what Papantonio said in comparing the current Supreme Court with its Roosevelt-era predecessor (audio) –

We have the same kind of Supreme Court in place now that FDR had when he had to threaten 'em. He had to say, listen, you guys want to keep, you want to keep taking our legislation like Social Security and saying it's unconstitutional or safety net programs and saying it's unconstitutional, fine. I'm going to appoint some new Sup-, more, we're going to have, we're going to increase your numbers and I'm going to make all the appointments. That's what it took.

"That's what it took," Papantonio proclaims — while neglecting to mention that it didn't actually take. Details, details.

In fact, the proposal was among the worst disasters of Roosevelt's presidency, a debacle unsurpassed until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor four years later.

Roosevelt may have succeeded in nudging the court in his direction but it was a Pyrrhic victory, according to historian Alan Brinkley in his 1995 book, "The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War" –

The President's motives were obvious: to shift the balance of the Court decisively in his favor. But his explanation was deliberately deceptive. His message to Congress and his accompanying public statements said virtually nothing about ideology and spoke instead about "congestion," "delays," "overcrowded dockets," and "insufficient personnel with which to meet a growing and more complex business." This would be legislation, Roosevelt claimed, to improve the efficiency of the courts. Only weeks later, after the opposition had begun to coalesce, did the President  begin to speak openly of his real intentions: to bring to the judiciary younger men "with a present-day sense of the Constitution."

In one sense, at least, the Court-packing plan was a considerable success. Within weeks of the bill's introduction (and almost certainly in response to it), the Supreme Court began prudently to change course by upholding New Deal measures that months earlier it seemed prepared to invalidate. In May, a conservative justice, Willis Van Devanter, retired, giving Roosevelt the opportunity to name a sympathetic replacement, Senator Hugo Black of Alabama. The appointment consolidated the new pro-administration majority. The danger that a hostile judiciary would dismantle the New Deal and thwart all future progress had disappeared. Simply by proposing to reform the Court, the President had accelerated something close to a revolution in constitutional law — a movement away from fixed principles and toward a more fluid view of the Constitution, a movement already in progress before 1937. By the time the bill actually came to a vote, it was largely redundant.

Poltically, however, the Court-packing plan did deep and lasting damage. Although there had been considerable popular hostility toward many conservative judicial decisions, Roosevelt's frontal attack on the Court (and his obviously insincere explanation of his purposes) struck even many of his admirers as dangerous and duplicitious. In attempting to bend the Court to his will through extraordinary measures, he seemed to be challenging the constitutional separation of powers and giving credence to the charges of "dictatorship" that had been surfacing intermittently since 1933. …

By the middle of summer [Roosevelt made the proposal in February 1937] , congressional sentiment had turned decisively against the plan; and the rapidly emerging conservative coalition, which would do so much to frustrate the administration for the next eight years, had gained substantial strength as a result. "Only last November, Mr. Roosevelt was elected by 11,000,000 votes," the New Republic noted. "Both friends and enemies agreed that he had come to hold greater effective political power than any other man in our history. Now, incredible as it seems, he may have to accept partial defeat from a Congress that he was supposed to own, body, votes and soul."

At a moment when critics of the administration felt timid and insecure, Roosevelt had given them the confidence to strike at him. When Congress finally defeated the proposal in July 1937, the New Deal absorbed a humiliating defeat from which it never recovered. In the process, the battle destroyed the image of invulnerability that had been among the President's greatest political strengths.

Roosevelt's miscalculation cost Democrats dearly in the 1938 midterms, as did anger at New Deal policies that exacerbated the Depression and a wave of sit-down strikes after passage of the National Labor Relations Act.

Republicans gained six seats in the Senate and the governorships of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania — along with an epic 81 seats in the House.

Roosevelt did what it took, Papantonio says, to stack the Supreme Court in his favor. And no other president in the last 75 years has tried anything remotely comparable, including Barack Obama when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.

Has Andrea Mitchell appointed herself hall monitor of the 2012 elections?  On her MSNBC show today, Mitchell asked Mitt Romney whether he had "an apology to make to the voters" for the negative ads against Newt Gingrich being run by Romney-friendly Super PACs.

For good measure, Mitchell scolded: "is that the kind of campaign you want to run: a negative campaign?" Video after the jump.

Anyone care to speculate whether, next time Mitchell's granted an interview with Barack Obama, she will similarly scold him for the barrage of negative advertising his campaign will unleash? 

ANDREA MITCHELL: Newt Gingrich has tanked, and by all accounts it's because of the Super PAC barrage of ads from both you and some of the other campaigns. But the Super PACs that are supporting Mitt Romney have just been savage against Newt Gingrich. I know you've said you'd go to the Big House if anyone can establish that you were involved, but the fact is it's your former colleagues, your friends, former colleagues contributed anonymously a million dollars.  Do you have an apology to make to the voters in Iowas and around the country for the kind of negative advertising that's been run?

MITT ROMNEY: Actually, Speaker Gingrich's numbers have gone done more in New Hampshire than they have in Iowa. And I don't think there are any negative ads in New Hampshire at all.

MITCHELL: But they've really plummeted here, Governor –

ROMNEY: They've gone down even more–

MITCHELL: Because of those ads.

ROMNEY: They've gone down even more in New Hampshire than they have in Iowa. And the nature of a campaign is that you're going to have attacks coming from the Obama team.  Their Super PAC has already gone after me, the Obama PAC has.  If you can't stand the heat in this little kitchen, wait until you get Obama's hell's kitchen. It's going to be a battle of ideas, but of course, recognize that campaigns are going to point out distinctions between the candidates. And I can handle the heat.  I've got big shoulders. I know there are tough blows that will be coming my way. But I know how to deal with it.

MITCHELL: Is that the kind of campaign you want to run: a negative campaign?  
 

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported "Four-star general-turned-CIA director David Petraeus almost resigned as Afghanistan war commander over President Barack Obama's decision to quickly draw down surge forces, according to a new insider's look at Petraeus' 37-year Army career." Network coverage? Zero. Nexis searching showed nothing on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today.

But NPR's The Two-Way Blog noted one reason: the insider author, Paula Broadwell, said AP was mistaken. She replied on Twitter: "#Petraeus did NOT consider quitting, though mentors/friends encouraged it". It's obvious that if Bush were still president, this report and this author would be red-hot and high-profile. Are they waiting on this story until a real "news cycle" emerges? Or is it more Obama Defense Syndrome? No Bob Woodward treatment here?

AP NPR blogger Mark Memmott added:

The book — All In: The Education of General David Petraeus — is by Paula Broadwell from Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. Vernon Loeb, metro editor at The Washington Post worked with her on it…

This isn't one of those "right-wing Obama hater" books the media would dispatch without a second thought. Broadwell has contributed to NPR as well as the Washington Post-owned Foreign Policy magazine's "Best Defense" blog, operated by ex-WaPo bigfoot Tom Ricks. One wonders why NPR and the Post (the newspaper whose Metro editor worked on this book) has been slow off the mark like everyone else. The Post did run the apparently erroneous AP report on its website. AP later fixed the story:

Conservative writer Max Boot had urged he take that course of action, but Petraeus decided that resigning would be a "selfish, grandstanding move with huge political ramifications" and that now was "time to salute and carry on," according to a forthcoming biography.

"Director Petraeus has publicly stated that he never contemplated resignation," CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said Thursday.

Oh, conservatives said something to Petraeus. We know what conservative writers have to say isn't as newsworthy as say, a Rolling Stone journalist.

As 2011 draws to a close, let's look back on the year while we make some predictions for the coming one.

What was the most important event of 2011?

What was the event most over-hyped by media?

Who will be the GOP presidential nominee?

Who will win the White House?

Which Party will win the Senate? Which will win the House?

What will the unemployment rate be on Election Day?

Will the economy as measured by the Gross Domestic Product grow in 2012, shrink, or stay flat?

What will be the most shocking geopolitical event of 2012?

Between Bowl games, the end of the NFL regular season, basketball, and hockey, there's got to be something on your mind.

As 2011 draws to a close, what was the finest sports moment of the year?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air put it best on the latest Obama campaign video: "You know, nothing says classy in a presidential campaign like having to bleep out a word from the national campaign manager in a prepared video." Campaign manager Jim Messina tells supporters it's "bulls—" that Obama will run a "billion-dollar campaign." In the shadow of Occupy Wall Street, will the media help Obama implausibly frame his campaign as somehow a small-bore, Mom and Pop enterprise?

Some in the major media have noticed, too, like Devin Dwyer at ABCNews.com, who added "The Obama campaign has never explicitly thrown out the billion-dollar figure and aides have pushed back hard on media reports that they anticipate raising that much during the campaign. They raised a record-high $746 million in 2008. Obama has raised $87 million so far this year for his re-election fight." Is it implausible to guess they'll get to a billion dollars this time? Messina also sent this not-a-billion message in an e-mail to supporters in mid-week:

This campaign is funded almost exclusively [!!] by more than a million grassroots supporters giving what they can afford — $3 and $10 donations have powered us from the start. And unlike our eventual opponent who will employ a top-down strategy, we measure our success not by how many dollars we raise, but by how many people are inspired to own a piece of this campaign…

You may have heard chatter from the other side about the President's so-called "billion-dollar war chest." When they say that, they're intentionally doing two things:

1.) Because they know that kind of sum turns people off from politics, they're misleading you. We do not and will not have a billion-dollar war chest.

2.) They're trying to make you think your support doesn't matter to the President. What kind of difference does $3 or $10 make to a billion-dollar campaign?

Spread the word to friends and family who may not know by forwarding this email, then help put these rumors to rest by making a grassroots donation of $3 now.

It's not the amount of money we'll raise that scares them.

Where are the cynical reporters on this baloney being handed out to small donors? Ed Morrissey underlined what ABC's Dwyer did not:

The billion-dollar campaign theme started with this Wall Street Journal article, where Democratic Party leaders (unnamed) speculated that the 2012 presidential election would cost each party one billion dollars — not necessarily the campaigns alone.  That’s due in large part to Obama himself, however, who refused to participate in the federal election fund and its spending limitations in 2008 after promised earlier to comply, and then doing nothing to fix the system he claimed was “broken” for the three years he’s been in office.  Obama raised $600 million on his own in 2008 after bailing out of the system, and he didn’t do that in increments of $3, either.

Nor has he done so in this cycle.  Messina conveniently neglects to mention that the Obama campaign has a few bundlers raising big money for the campaign.  Did I say “a few”?  More like three hundred and fifty-seven of them, including Obama’s personal envoy to Wall Street, MF Global CEO Jon Corzine, a magician whose firm made $1.2 billion in customer funds disappear.  That figure includes 78 from law firms, 62 from the investment community, 31 from “business services,” and 15 from the entertainment industry.

A quick look at Ed's link at Open Secrets finds not just Corzine, but at the top of the list Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg (and a few slots down, another Hollywood mogul, Harvey Weinstein). Also on the bundler roster: fashion-magazine executive Anna Wintour, the inspiration of the book and movie "The Devil Wears Prada." Not exactly an Occupy Wall Street vibe.

The number-two bigwig at the top of the Obama bundlers: David Cohen, the executive vice president of Comcast, which now owns NBC News. Last June, Cohen hosted a dinner with Obama for about 120 people in his home in Philadephia, with each of the attendees giving at least $10,000 for Obama 2012. In the last few months, Obama's held a pile of fundraisers charging $35,800 a couple, like the one Lady Gaga attended in San Francisco. In other words, that's enough to match about 12,000 "little people" kicking in three bucks. Keep that in mind and then check out the latest campaign e-mail signed by Barack himself: 

Friend –

It's not all that often that Michelle and I get to host a casual meal with friends.

That's one of the reasons we're both excited about the upcoming dinner with three supporters and your guests.

It's the first one we've ever done like this together, and we'd love to have you and whoever you choose to join us.

Chip in $3 or whatever you can today — and you'll automatically be entered to be one of our dinner guests.

I enjoy these dinners not just because they're a way to connect with supporters across the country.

They also say a lot about what kind of campaign we're running.

We don't take a dime from D.C. lobbyists or special-interest PACs — never have and never will. Instead, we believe in the kind of politics that gives everyone a seat at the table — so we're literally offering these seats at dinner to folks who are willing to step forward and be a part of it.

These campaign messages are just begging for factual evaluation from the "objective" media.
 

Jean H. Lee's Friday afternoon report at the Associated Press on the omnipresence of images of the late Kim Jong Il throughout North Korea reads more like an audition to be the communist nation's next propaganda minister than a wire service report.

Not once does she call the late tyrant a tyrant, or for that matter even a Communist. If you didn't know any better, you would think you're reading about some idyllic place where people are happy, content, and well-off — not a place where oppression rules, hundreds of thousands starve, and millions more would but for the kindness of foreigners. Though there is no substitute for reading the whole relatively short thing, here are several paragraphs indicating just how bad Lee's report really is (saved here in full as a graphic for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes; HT to an NB tipster):

---

Kim Jong Il's presence is felt in series of images

It's hard to imagine a North Korea without Kim Jong Il, who led the nation for 17 years until his death in December.

His portrait hangs in every building, his visits to factories and shops are commemorated with signs in his honor. The song book at the hotel at Mount Kumgang features a full page of tunes with his name in the title, and the airline hostesses in lacy gloves give their thanks to him as Air Koryo flights cross into North Korean airspace.

Kim's death on Dec. 17 marks the end of an era for North Korea, which has known only two leaders: Kim and his father, Kim Il Sung. Already, a new era has begun under the leadership of his young son, Kim Jong Un.

… Doctors and nurses laugh as they huff and puff their way past mountains carved with Kim's sayings and signature.

Young men in bumper cars bash each other gleefully at an amusement park that Kim ordered renovated as part of a bid to "improve the people's daily lives," one of the goals he left unfinished when he died at age 69.

If the nominations for worst single sentence written by a wire service journalist in 2011 are still open, I'd suggest that Lee's final excerpted paragraph would end up at or near the top of the awful heap.

Memo Ms. Lee: The only place where Kim's magical presence is not so magically being felt is far away from North Korea, in a place usually characterized as being quite hot.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.