In his The Plum Line op-ed on page A19 today, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent saw the presence of "relatively conservative Democrats Mark Begich (Alaska) and Jon Tester (Mont.)" on a letter by Senate Democrats blasting the Komen Foundation for withdrawing grants to Planned Parenthood as "testament to how broad the opposition to this decision has become."

But a few keystrokes on a search engine reveal Sargent's journalistic and intellectual laziness. Both Begich and Tester drew 100% approval ratings for 2011 from NARAL Pro-Choice America. Both senators drew 100% approval ratings in the 2012 Planned Parenthood action guide. Tester has received endorsements from both NARAL and Planned Parenthood and, in a photo I've attached below the page break, is shown smiling widely in a photo taken at the 39th annual NARAL Dinner (via TheHill.com)  held on January 26. Tester is pictured with NARAL president Nancy Keenan (center) and MSNBC contributor Karen Finney (right).

It certainly is no surprise the Obama-loving media are doing a jubilant victory lap over the stronger than expected headline figures in Friday's unemployment report.

Also not at all shocking was MSNBC's Martin Bashir falsely claiming on the show bearing his name Friday, "Under this president over three million private sector jobs have been created" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"If I may just interrupt you for a moment, under this president over three million private sector jobs have been created."  — Martin Bashir, February 3, 2012

Actually, no.

When Obama took office, there were 110,985,000 private sector workers. As announced by the Labor Department Friday, that number currently stands at 110,436,000, a decline of 549,000.

And this man has his own nationally televised show to lie to the public.

Associate Editor’s note: As you are likely aware, since the financial collapse of 2008, charities and non-profit organizations have seen a sharp reduction in donations. Although the environment has improved, contributions are still nowhere near where they were prior to the recession. Unfortunately, the Media Research Center has not been immune. With this in mind, your support has become more important than ever. With a critical election approaching, the liberal media needs to be monitored 24/7. As we have been predicting for months, the press are willing to do anything to get their beloved politicians elected and/or reelected. As such, we need your help to fight this fight. Any contribution, even $10, is greatly appreciated. Please consider a tax-deductible gift to the Media Research Center to help us battle the liberal media. Thank you.

After warning for years of the dangers posed by the Religious Right in politics, the New York Times is suddenly interested in injecting Mormon (and Catholic) religion into politics, at least when it comes to pet issues like amnesty for illegal immigrants. The top of Friday’s National section featured religion reporter Laurie Goodstein’s “Romney’s Tough Immigration View Is at Odds With His Church.”

There was no “I Wouldn't Buy the Underwear Just Yet” mockery of Mormons this time. And while the paper aimed a harsh front-page spotlight on the Mormon church for its involvement in passing California’s Proposition 8, which preserved the state ban on gay marriage, Goodstein has no criticism of its involvement in the Democratic-friendly cause of amnesty.

While Mitt Romney is taking a hard line on immigration even as the Republican primaries head toward the heavily Hispanic states of Nevada, Colorado and Arizona, the Mormon Church to which he belongs has become a decisive player in promoting policies that are decidedly more friendly toward immigrants.

The church was instrumental last year in passing controversial legislation in Utah that would provide “guest worker” permits to allow illegal immigrants with jobs to remain in the United States. The church also threw its weight behind the Utah Compact, a declaration calling for humane treatment of immigrants and condemning deportation policies that separate families, which has been adopted by several other states.

(Strangely, the Times wasn't much interested in the church’s “instrumental” support for the Utah Compact in 2011, mentioning it only once before in a news story before Friday.)

The church’s endorsement helped shift the debate on immigration in a Republican state where more than 80 percent of legislators are Mormons. It was the church’s most overt involvement in politics since 2008, when it joined other conservative churches in the campaign to pass Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

Goodstein even criticized Republican candidate Newt Gingrich for disagreeing with the Catholic Church on the Dream Act, which would grant amnesty to some college students.

Mr. Romney’s chief rival for the nomination, Newt Gingrich, has struck a softer tone on immigration, but he too is not entirely in step with his own Roman Catholic Church. Catholic bishops support the Dream Act and advocate broad immigration reform, including citizenship for the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants; Mr. Gingrich said he supports only “half” the Dream Act — the part about military service.

The Utah Compact was conceived as a counterpunch to the stringent immigration law passed in Arizona in 2010, which gave the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. The compact’s principles call for federal solutions to immigration reform, policies that support families and individual freedom, acknowledgment of the contribution of immigrants in the economy, and local law enforcement focus on crime, not immigration laws.

The paper showed strange new respect for the theology of the Mormon Church.

The Mormon Church has a variety of motives for its immigration stand: it is eager to be perceived positively by Hispanics in the United States, and in Mexico and Latin America, where it is making new converts; it identifies with the immigrant experience, having fled persecution before settling in Utah; and it places a strong premium on keeping families intact, in this life and the next.

Paul Edwards, editor of The Deseret News, a church-affiliated newspaper in Utah, said, “Latter-day Saints, because of their history of persecution and forcefully being dispossessed of their livelihoods and properties, do have compassion and understanding” for immigrants.

While Democrats mock Mitt Romney for his allged lack of interest in the “very poor” and focus their political pitch on income inequality, one can’t help noticing the Obamas running around to $35,000-a-head fundraisers with the very rich and very famous in New York City and Hollywood.

Michelle Obama kicked off February with an exclusive fundraiser in Beverly Hills at the home of Netflix executive Ted Sarandos and his wife Nicole Avant, who raised Hollywood millions for the Obamas in 2008, and then became their ambassador to the Bahamas. Now Nicole Avant’s back managing Obama’s Hollywood money march. Many of Tinseltown’s titans ponied up: Jeffrey Katzenberg, Harvey Weinstein, Haim Saban, and Steve Bing, among others. (Katzenberg’s also given $2 million to the Obama-affiliated super PAC called Priorities USA Action.)

California has the largest amount of "bundlers" who’ve raised gazillions for Team Obama. Bundlers collected at least $35 million from their wealthy-people networks. That represents at least 40 percent of the $86 million raised by the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee last quarter.

That list includes not only Katzenberg and Weinstein, but Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. ABC “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria was in the second highest tier, bundling $200,000 to $500,000. You don’t have to have a California address to be a Hollywood bundler, either. David Cohen of Philadelphia is executive vice president of Comcast, the new owners of NBC and Universal Studios.

In her remarks in Beverly Hills, Mrs. Obama plucked the liberal heart strings by touting her husband’s appointment of two “brilliant” women to the Supreme Court to push social liberalism: “We cannot forget the impact their decisions will have on our lives for decades to come — on our privacy and security, on whether we can speak freely, worship openly and, yes, love whomever we choose.”

That love-whomever-we-choose theme is a sop to another major Hollywood/New York constituency, the LGBT activists. Last summer, Michelle Obama appeared at another million-dollar California fundraiser at the luxurious Westwood mansion of her interior decorator Michael Smith and his partner James Costos, an executive at HBO.  Ellen DeGeneres and her partner Portia De Rossi were there, as well as Drew Barrymore, Ryan Phillippe, and Vanessa Williams.

Every time Mrs. Obama goes to California for cash, she also makes TV appearances to boost the Obama image. On the latest trip, she was honored by Jay Leno and by Ellen DeGeneres. Last summer, she taped an episode of the popular Nickelodeon show “iCarly,” which just aired in January. The Viacom network promoted her cool dance moves and her laudable support for military families.

Don’t think all these favors aren’t part of a deliberate attempt by the entertainment conglomerates to influence legislation designed to maximize their own profits. Their major initiative is the current “Stop Online Piracy Act.” Unfortunately, their opposition is the tech sector in Silicon Valley to the north.  Although the DNC received $1 million more from the entertainment sector than from the tech sector in the first three quarters of 2011, Obama just declared he could not support this bill.

In between Michelle’s Hollywood ATM withdrawals, President Obama landed in southern California late September for three events: one at the ritzy La Jolla home of Elizabeth and Mason Phelps; a gay event at the House of Blues in West Hollywood with ABC “Modern Family” star Jesse Tyler Ferguson; and then a $17,900-a-plate dinner with 100 top Hollywood bigwigs at Fig & Olive restaurant on Melrose Place, including Jack Black, Judd Apatow, Quincy Jones, Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman. This is Hollywood’s One Percent.

Of course, for the last two weeks, we’ve been incessantly reminded that Obama sang two lines of Al Green’s soul classic “Let’s Stay Together.” That was one of several Big Apple fundraisers for Obama at the Apollo Theatre. “American Idol” executive producer Nigel Lythgoe went on Twitter to invite the president to sing a duet with Al Green on his show. Smooch, smooch.

In the same trip, Obama held a $35,800-per-ticket fundraiser at the New York brownstone of director Spike Lee, who was infamous in Bush era for suggesting in a reckless conspiracy-theory HBO documentary that the federal government dynamited the levees to drown black people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Obama patronized Lee by claiming he and his wife went on a first date to see “Do the Right Thing,” which ends with a race riot. That’s a real hand-holding flick. Among the 45 guests were Mariah Carey and husband Nick Cannon.

Campaign Obama wants its candidate to be seen as the embodiment of the “99 Percent.”  In truth, he is the personification of the exclusive and ultimate One Percent – the superrich and superfamous. Our “news” and entertainment media have their hands full trying to meld those conflicting themes into one convincing narrative.

On Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, as the panel discussed the new Obama administration rule that requires even Catholic employers to provide health insurance coverage for contraception to their employees, both liberal columnist Mark Shields and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer hit Obama for the decision, while NPR's Nina Totenberg claimed that there were valid arguments in both directions as she made a flawed analogy between contraception and immunization as a defense of the Obama position.

But the blunt criticism directed at Obama by the liberal Shields, who is also a longtime regular on the PBS NewsHour, was the most surprising part of the show. After host Gordon Peterson noted that some Catholic leaders had supported Obamacare, and asked if they are "being hung out to dry," Shields responded:

They've been hung out to dry. I mean, this is a dissing, in common parlance, of Catholics. I haven't noticed thousands of people in groups lined up to provide services to the poor and the hungry and the left out and the left behind, and that's what Catholic Charities has done, that's what Catholic schools do in big cities.

And the idea that somehow that they're not doing societies – they aren't in it for the bucks. They're in it because they provide these services, and it's their mandate by their religion. I just, I don't understand Barack Obama on this, and I think that politically Catholics have voted on the winning side in every presidential election (INAUDIBLE).

Totenberg soon jumped in:

There's a very good argument that is being made by the Catholic Church, but if you take it out of the area of contraceptives and you said supposing you had a preschool that wouldn't do immunizations because its religion didn't allow immunizations, or wouldn't  insure for immunizations. We're not talking about paying here, we're talking about insurance and insurance that people can avail themselves of. The board of health would be in there. It's a very tricky question. There are very good arguments to be made on both sides.

Krauthammer ended up knocking down Totenberg's argument and attacked "liberal secular arrogance." Krauthammer:

Look, immunization is a matter of public safety; birth control is not. It's a huge difference, and what this is doing is saying, as Mark indicated, the Catholic Church isn't only a church. It's an institution that actually has outreach and social serviesa dn does good works. Liberals say, okay, "In the church, you can appoint anybody you want and we'll leave you alone, but once you step out into society, you have to be under our heel and you have to provide a morning after pill, which for Catholic, a believing Catholic in the hierarchy of the church, is an abomination. Otherwise, you're cut off, and that is liberal secular arrogance and has no place in this society.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the the Friday, February 3, Inside Washington on PBS:

GORDON PETERSON: New Obama administration policy requires all employers, including Catholic employers, to pay for FDA-approved contraceptives regardless of the Catholic Church teaching on this issue. Now, during the debate over the health care law, the president of the Catholic Health Association supported the President. Now, the President's critics say – Sister Carole Keehan and others who supported this bill – are being hung out to dry. Your take, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: They've been hung out to dry. I mean, this is a dissing, in common parlance, of Catholics. I haven't noticed thousands of people in groups lined up to provide services to the poor and the hungry and the left out and the left behind, and that's what Catholic Charities has done, that's what Catholic schools do in big cities.

And the idea that somehow that they're not doing societies – they aren't in it for the bucks. They're in it because they provide these services, and it's their mandate by their religion. I just, I don't understand Barack Obama on this, and I think that politically Catholics have voted on the winning side in every presidential election (INAUDIBLE).

PETERSON: Is it relevant or irrelevant that the vast majority of Catholics practice contraception in violation of this teaching?

SHIELDS: It is irrelevant because what you're doing is you're closing down Catholic institutions. That's what you're basically (INAUDIBLE).

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: Can I just say something here? This has been the law actually  since 2000. There's an EEOC ruling; 28 states have laws like this. There's a very good argument that is being made by the Catholic Church, but if you take it out of the area of contraceptives and you said supposing you had a preschool that wouldn't do immunizations because its religion didn't allow immunizations, or wouldn't  insure for immunizations. We're not talking about paying here, we're talking about insurance and insurance that people can avail themselves of. The board of health would be in there. It's a very tricky question. There are very good arguments to be made on both sides.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, immunization is a matter of public safety; birth control is not. It's a huge difference, and what this is doing is saying, as Mark indicated, the Catholic Church isn't only a church. It's an institution that actually has outreach and social serviesa dn does good works. Liberals say, okay, "In the church, you can appoint anybody you want and we'll leave you alone, but once you step out into society, you have to be under our heel and you have to provide a morning after pill, which for Catholic, a believing Catholic in the hierarchy of the church, is an abomination. Otherwise, you're cut off, and that is liberal secular arrogance and has no place in this society.

In what is apparently completely unimportant news to just about everyone except NBC2 in Southwest Florida and Andrew Breitbart, numerous instances of illegal voting by non-citizens have been uncovered. Projecting the problems across the state and into the rest of the nation would seem to indicate that many thousands of people who are registered to vote should never have been allowed to register and are routinely casting ballots illegally.

A Google News search on "Florida vote fraud" (not in quotes) at Google News at 11:00 PM ET indicated that there was a grand total of six stories on this disturbing development. Immediately below the reference to the non-citizen voting news is a link to a Tampa Bay Times editorial posted two days ago which claimed that voter fraud is "a nonexistent problem in this state." Uh huh. What follows are excerpts from each segment (Part 1; Part 2) of Andy Pierrotti's NBC2 report (also look at the TV reports at the links, which differ from the text below):

---

(From Part 1)

NBC2 Investigates: Voter fraud

Two elections supervisors are taking action after an NBC2 investigation uncovers flawed record keeping and human error allowing people who are not citizens of the United States to vote.

No one knows how widespread this problem is, because county election supervisors have no way to track non-citizens who live here.

So NBC2 did something election officials never thought to do, and found them on our own.

"I vote every year," Hinako Dennett told NBC2.

The Cape Coral resident is not a US citizen, yet she's registered to vote.

NBC2 found Dennett after reviewing her jury excusal form. She told the Clerk of Court she couldn't serve as a juror because she wasn't a U.S. citizen.

We found her name, and nearly a hundred others like her, in the database of Florida registered voters.

… Based on our investigation, both election offices say they'll now request a copy of every jury excusal form where residents say they can't serve because they're not a citizen.

(From Part 2)

Poor record keeping is what's leading to potential fraud in the elections system. And election supervisors say registering non-citizens will continue until they get more help.

Officials we spoke to say non U.S. citizens are voting in Lee and Collier counties.

"If there is a change by one vote and somebody's voted that really has no right to be voting," said Lee County Supervisor of Elections Sharon Harrington.

Nearly 100 registered are now under investigation for possible voter fraud.

"It could change the whole complexion of an election," Harrington said.

We found those 100 people after reviewing jury excusal forms. We compared the names of those who said they couldn't serve because they were not U.S. citizens to those listed on Florida's voter registration rolls.

"I was surprised that there were quite that many," Harrington said.

It would have been nice if Pierrotti had told viewers what the error rate was, i.e., how many jury excusal forms did it take before they got to nearly 100 ineligible voters. 200? 500? 1,000? It would also be nice to know what percentage of registered voters are called for jury duty in any given year, because the chances that there are non-citizens voting who have never been called for jury duty would appear to be quite high, and might possibly be a multiple of the number who were caught through excusal forms.

Depending on the error rate found, projecting the problem across all of Florida could lead one to reasonably believe that there are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of non-citizens who either registered themselves and are voting illegally, or that others who have posed as them, with or without their knowledge, have registered and are voting on their behalf. It's not a great leap to speculate that the number of illegally registered non-citizens is in the tens to hundreds of thousands nationwide.

But voter fraud "a nonexistent problem in this state." Just ask the Tampa Bay Tribune. What a crock.

Don't expect the rest of the establishment press to notice this disturbing and disconcerting story.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

On Tuesday, Ken Thomas of the Associated Press covered President Barack Obama's appearance at the Washington Auto Show and allowed Obama's criticism of Mitt Romney as being among those "willing to let this industry die" to stand, ignoring known history in the process.

Obama's statement marks him as a true ingrate, because for better or worse (my opinion: worse; your mileage, so to speak, may vary) Mitt Romney, after warning of the dangers of bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, shifted gears four months later and vigorously defended the President when the administration orchestrated a boardroom coup at GM which included the forced resignation of CEO Rick Wagoner. This was the point at which it became clear that Obama wanted the government to control what happened at GM until it either recovered or was forced into what most were already seeing as an inevitable bankruptcy filing. In a CNN interview the day the news broke, Romney complimented Obama for demonstrating "backbone." What follows are five paragraphs from Thomas's piece, a screen shot of the article CNN posted that day, and a transcript of the relevant portion of Romney's March 31, 2009 interview:

---

Obama plays up auto industry success story

… As the industry was collapsing in the fall of 2008, Romney predicted in a New York Times op-ed that if the companies received a federal bailout, "you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye." Romney said the companies should have undergone a "managed bankruptcy" that would have avoided a government bailout.

"Whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go," Romney said at a GOP presidential debate in Michigan in November. Romney said the nation has "capital markets and bankruptcy – it works in the U.S. The idea of billions of dollars being wasted initially, then finally they adopted the managed bankruptcy. I was among others that said we ought to do that."

Both the Bush and Obama administrations found themselves in uncharted territory in the fall of 2008 and early 2009. GM and Chrysler were on the verge of collapse when Congress failed to approve emergency loans in late 2008. Bush stepped in and signed off on $17.4 billion in loans, requiring the companies to develop restructuring plans under Obama's watch.

The following spring, Obama pumped billions more into GM and Chrysler but forced concessions from industry stakeholders, enabling the companies to go through swift bankruptcies. Obama aides said billions in aid – about $85 billion for the industry in total – was necessary because capital markets were essentially frozen at the time, meaning there was no way for GM and Chrysler to fund their bankruptcies privately.

Without any private financing or government support, they argued, the companies would have been forced to liquidate.

Here is the CNN report summarizing Romney's March 31, 2009 interview:

Here is the transcript of that CNN interview (bolds are mine):

Romney: I think a lot of people expected the president just to cave and to write a big check, and just hope for the better. I’m glad that he’s expressing some backbone on this and saying to those guys, “Hey, you’ve gotta get your house in order or you guys are gone. You’re going to go to bankruptcy.” That’s something I think he should have said months ago. There were a numbers of us who said that bankruptcy or a bankruptcy-like process was something that was needed to get GM and Chrysler, y’know, on their feet again. But by the way, kudos to Ford for running itself independently and apparently making a go of it on its own.

CNN Host: Now let me just bring you back to what you were saying about bankruptcy. In fact, you offered to call him on it. You said, quote, “In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.” Do you still think that that’s the best idea, to allow these companies to go into bankruptcy, restructure, then emerge?

Romney: Well it’s clear that just writing checks is not the answer. It really keeps the bondholders and the UAW and other stakeholders from taking the necessary haircuts that allow these companies to be competitive. You either have to go through a bankruptcy process, a pre-packaged bankruptcy, or special legislation giving an entity the power to get these companies through these difficult times. Or, if the parties want to do it voluntarily, great, but if they can’t do that — and apparently at this stage it’s looking like they haven’t been able to — then you’re going to have to have that kind of a club to get these companies to be able to restructure their excessive costs.

CNN Host: A couple of minutes ago, Jon Stewart made the joke about the government backing warranties here. The government’s gotten involved in so many things, backing warranties, guaranteeing bank accounts, buying up toxic assets. There was an interesting line in the New York Times this morning, quote, it said, “It means that the government is not only the ultimate guarantor of saving accounts and insurance policies – it will also cover that blown transmission.” The question that I had, in the next 30 days is, why would anyone but a Chrysler product, and in the next 60 days why would anyone but a General Motors product when they don’t know what the future of these companies is going to be, regardless of whether the government is backing the warranties?

Romney: Well, that’s in fact that’s why a number of folks, myself included, pointed out, said last November, “Don’t just write checks.” Because you’re sealing the fate of these companies, unless you help them restructure. Give confidence to the American people that they’re going to be here forever. If you don’t do that, well, just putting $17 billion into them is going to be wasted, and also, ultimately, seal their fate. You’ve got to get these companies back on a track where it shows that they can be successful and viable. That can only happen if they’re fundamentally restructured. Just writing checks, just saying you’re going to protect warranties, that’s not enough.

It's also worth noting that the Obama administration did what Mitt Romney said he wanted to see happen by taking GM and Chrysler into managed bankruptcies, except for one "little" thing: They were heavily managed by the government. As a result, United Auto Workers members at GM suffered very little while certain disfavored creditors suffered a lot (outrageous creditor favoritism, accompanied by White House intimidation, also happened earlier at Chrysler). The AP's Thomas "somehow" forgot to mention all of that too — all in the name of letting the President get in a cheap shot feeding the untrue stereotype that Republicans and conservatives just wanted the domestic auto industry to die.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.