Liberals hate it when conservative politicians talk about their religion. Except when they don't. They hate that too.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't. (video after page break)

An example of this could be seen Monday night on "The Rachel Maddow Show" when Maddow was talking about Mitt Romney with guest Frank Rich, former drama critic for the New York Times now writing for New York magazine.

Rich theorized that Romney fails to connect with many voters because of reticence about his Mormon religion –

RICH: One thing that I've been grappling with, I think a lot of people have been, is why does this guy not connect? Why has he seemed plastic, basically? And the standard answer is, he's stiff, he's rich, he needs better performance skills, he needs to learn how to speak better before crowds. But I think part of it is also that there's one thing that he feels really passionate about is his religion. He's had a long history in the Mormon church as a leader and because he feels, and it would be sad if it was true, that people are bigoted about it, he just doesn't want to talk about it. And yet, that's something I think he probably cares about more than Bain and all the money and all the Cayman Islands and Swiss bank accounts. But I think you feel that there's some-, you're not getting the true Romney and I don't think we are.

MADDOW: So you feel like because, maybe that is the thing that he could tell stories about, that he could talk about in a personal way that would, for lack of a better term, animate him, that would make us sense more of who he is.

RICH: I agree. I think that's exactly it and I think, look, the Mormon religion is a really interesting kind of great American story that, you know, a lot of things about it have been good for the country and helped build the country, particularly in the West, but he just doesn't go there. So it's almost as if he's closeted about his religion and I think that makes him seem fake.

Say for the sake of argument that Romney did as Rich suggests and spoke more about his religion. Can there be any doubt that liberals like Rich and Maddow would hesitate all of a nanosecond before condemning Romney as yet another conservative foisting his religion on others?

Another scenario comes to mind: Romney elaborates on his Mormonism as Rich suggests. Followed by Rich criticizing Romney for not divulging enough, campaigning when he should be observant, not leading Mormon pride parades through Salt Lake City … the demands would never end.

What is arguably most notable about Rich's criticism is the compliment he included in it, describing Romney's religion as something "he probably cares about more than Bain and all the money and all the Cayman Islands and Swiss bank accounts." Mark your calendar — this may be the only praise of Romney you'll ever hear on MSNBC, or at least during that 95 percent of its airtime when the views heard are from left of center.

On Tuesday's NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams fretted over winter doing a "disappearing act" and proclaimed: "It was so warm today across much of the country, as you know, they're calling it June-uary. It's got a lot of people wondering whatever happened to winter?" The headline on screen pondered: "Where's Winter?"

In the report that followed, chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson added to the alarmism as she declared: "This most unusual January ending on a remarkably mild note across the country….2,890 daily high temperature records broken or tied." She later cited climatologist and global warming proponent Dr. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research: "Add to that a world warming because of climate change and it stacks the deck, Dr. Meehl says, against a traditional winter."

On Wednesday's NBC Today, Thompson went further, seeming to suggest that the more mild temperatures actually caused deaths: "In upstate New York, where Lake George is only partly frozen, they are trucking in ice to build the winter carnival castle. Thin ice in Patterson, Iowa tragically took the lives of two friends out fishing."

In January of 2007, during a similar period of unseasonably warm weather, former Today co-host Meredith Vieira went so far as to blurt out: "So I'm running in the park on Saturday, in shorts thinking this is great but are we all gonna die?"

On Wednesday, Thompson repeated her assertion that it was a "most unusual winter" and noted how: "It is confusing crops in California, blooming too soon….The Sandhill cranes are early birds, returning to Lincoln County, Nebraska, a month ahead of schedule. So, yes, even nature is confused."

Concluding the morning segment, Thompson again pushed the global warming message: "Now scientists are unwilling to pin any one weather event on climate change but they say there's no question that our warming world is shifting the odds against a traditional winter, winters as we have known them."

Back in November, just days after a snowstorm the weekend before Halloween, Williams somberly observed: "Everybody out East said the same thing about this freak snowstorm, 'This kind of thing didn't used to happen. This never happened before.'"

In the report Thompson did at that time, she cited the same climate scientist, Dr. Meehl: "He says our warming planet makes extreme weather events more likely as greenhouse gases created by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal, alter the climate."

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who's next?

This weekend, Catholic bishops informed parishioners of the recent White House edict forcing religious hospitals, schools, charities and other health and social service providers to provide "free" abortifacient pills, sterilizations and contraception on demand in their insurance plans — even if it violates their moral consciences and the teachings of their churches.

NARAL, NOW, Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation all cheered the administration's abuse of the Obamacare law to ram abortion down pro-life medical professionals' throats. Femme dinosaur Eleanor Smeal gloated over the news that the administration had rejected church officials' pleas for compromises: "At last," she exulted, the left's goal of "no-cost birth control" for all had been achieved.

As always, tolerance is a one-way street in the Age of Obama. "Choice" is in the eye (and iron fist) of the First Amendment usurper.

Like the rising number of states who have revolted against the individual health care mandate at the ballot box and in the courts, targeted Catholics have risen up against the Obamacare regime. Arlington (Va.) Bishop Paul Loverde didn't mince words, calling the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services order "a direct attack against religious liberty. This ill-considered policy comprises a truly radical break with the liberties that have underpinned our nation since its founding." Several bishops vowed publicly to fight the mandate.

Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Mich., asserted plainly: "We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law."

It's not just rabid right-wing politicos defying the Obama machine. Pro-life Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania denounced the "wrong decision." Left-leaning Bishop Robert Lynch threatened "civil disobedience" in St. Petersburg, Fla., over the power grab. Lefty Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama "botched" the controversy and "threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus" by refusing to "balance the competing liberty interests here."

White House press secretary Jay Carney blithely denied on Tuesday that "there are any constitutional rights issues" involved in the brewing battle. Yet, the Shut Up and Hand Out Abortion Pills order undermines a unanimous Supreme Court ruling issued just last week upholding a religious employer's right to determine whom to hire and fire. And two private colleges have filed federal suits against the government to overturn the unconstitutional abortion coverage decree.

Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the nonprofit law firm The Becket Fund, which is representing the schools, boiled it down for Bloomberg News: "This is not really about access to contraception. The mandate is about forcing these religious groups to pay for it against their beliefs."

How did we get here? The first salvo came in December 2010, when the American Civil Liberties Union pushed HHS and its Planned Parenthood-championing secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions in violation of their core moral commitment to protecting the lives of the unborn.

The ACLU called for a litigious fishing expedition against Catholic hospitals nationwide that refuse to provide "emergency" contraception and abortions to women. In their sights: Devout Phoenix Catholic Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who revoked the Catholic status of a rogue hospital that performed several direct abortions, provided birth control pills and presided over sterilizations against the church's ethical and religious directives for health care.

The ACLU and the feminists have joined with Obama to threaten and sabotage the First Amendment rights of religious-based health care entities. The agenda is not increased "access" to health care services. The ultimate goal is to shut down health care providers — Catholic health care institutions employ about 540,000 full-time workers and 240,000 part-time workers — whose religious views cannot be tolerated by secular zealots and radical social engineers.

Is it any surprise their counterparts in the "Occupy" movement have moved from protesting "Wall Street" to harassing pro-life marchers in Washington, D.C., and hurling condoms at Catholic school girls in Rhode Island? Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

On their Wednesday morning shows, the Big Three networks continued their trend of all but ignoring the Obama administration trying to force religious institutions to include coverage of sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraceptives in their health care policies without a co-pay. The new mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services would force Catholic hospitals and schools to decide whether to submit to the new policy or follow the Church's teachings against birth control.

Instead of covering this growing dispute between the Catholic hierarchy of the United States and the federal government, CBS This Morning brought on Rev. Edward Beck, a Catholic priest, to respond to a story that might cast the Church in a bad light with regards to how it manages the donations it receives.

Anchors Erica Hill and Charlie Rose turned to Father Beck, their religious and faith contributor, after airing a report from correspondent Michelle Miller on how Anita Collins is accused of stealing $1 million from the Archdiocese of New York's fund for its schools. Rose first asked the priest, somewhat bizarrely, "How could she think she could get away with it; and…is the Church going to be…a forgiving church in the great Christian tradition?" Hill followed up by asking, "You mentioned the responsibility, too, that the Church has with this money the donors give to it. Is the Church too trusting?"

Neither CBS on-air personality raised the HHS mandate issue with their guest. However, somewhat to their credit, their program was the only morning or evening news show on the Big Three networks that has mentioned the controversy over the past 12 days since it began. Two days earlier, on January 30, Rose devoted a news brief to "a headline in USA Today says Catholics blast federal birth control mandate….The Obama administration says large religious institutions will have to include birth control in their employees' health care plans."

The full transcript of Erica Hill and Charlie Rose's segment with Father Edward Beck, which began 32 minutes into the 7 am Eastern hour of Wednesday's CBS This Morning:

CHARLIE ROSE: Faith and religion contributor Father Edward Beck is with us now. Good morning.

FATHER EDWARD BECK, CBS THIS MORNING RELIGIOUS & FAITH CONTRIBUTOR: Good morning-

[CBS News Graphic: "Of Faith And Fraud: Clerk Charged With $1M Theft From Archdiocese"]

ROSE: As you were watching this, you said, 'unbelievable.' I have only two questions: number one, how could she think she could get away with it; and number two, is the Church going to be forgiving about this- a forgiving church in the great Christian tradition?

BECK: Well, you know what, Charlie? The Church is forgiving- it's part of the Gospel- but forgiving doesn't mean you excuse this kind of behavior. I mean, this woman stole from the institution, but also its donors. You have to realize that people give money to the Church for certain ministries that the Church carries out. So they have an obligation to be good stewards of that money. This woman stole from an institution, namely, the education fund, where Catholic schools in this archdiocese were closing and she knew that. So you can forgive, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have to do penance- she doesn't have to be prosecuted- and justice has to be wrought.

ERICA HILL: You mentioned the responsibility, too, that the Church has with this money the donors give to it. Is the Church too trusting?

BECK: Well, sometimes, I think the Church is too trusting and a little naive. I'll give you an example. I was giving a retreat in Florida, and I was in the rectory- and this wasn't a parish that I was associated with- and I happened to open a door and I look in and there is a woman with a mound of money on a table. And she just looked up and she was, you know, fine about it, and I closed the door. And I went to the pastor and I said, you know, what was that? And he said ,well, she's counting the collection from Sunday. I said, alone in a room counting all of that money? I mean, any accountant will tell you, two people in a room- don't do that even to the worker. So, I mean, that is very naive, and I think now, when something like this happens, the Church says, ah, what are our fiscal controls? What do we need to do to get our house in order?

HILL: So you're saying that will change?

BECK: It already has changed-

HILL: Now, they do background checks, but still moving forward?

BECK:  There is now background checks that need to be done. And I think, as far as the archdiocese, what we're seeing is- yeah, they have those controls now in place, and there'll be more controls in place.

HILL: Nice to see this morning, Father. Thank you.

BECK: Thank you-

ROSE: Thanks.

The media may be busy trying to reelect Barack Obama, but it's never too early for them to start grooming the 2016 field. Look no further than the Washington Post, for example.

"O'Malley to set ambitious agenda," read the teaser headline posted this morning at the  Post's website. "Watch the Maryland governor deliver his sixth State of the State address now," read the caption beneath a photo showing Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley in front of two American flags. A few hours later, following the speech, an updated teaser headline reading "Gov. O'Malley calls for 'tough choices'" takes readers to an article about O'Malley's February 1 speech in which the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) chief "urged Maryland lawmakers to act on gay marriage, tax hikes."

"Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) on Wednesday called on Maryland lawmakers to make a series of 'tough choices,' including voting for several tax increases, that he argued are needed to maintain the state’s top-ranked schools, build its transportation infrastructure and address other priorities," Post staffers John Wagner and Aaron C. Davis began their 11-paragraph recap.

Wagner and Davis relegated the Republican opposition to two sentences in paragraph 6 but quoted seven sentences from O'Malley, allowing him to close out the article with the closing lines of his speech to a state legislature dominated by fellow Democrats:

Wednesday’s speech was an opportunity to make his case for those initiatives individually and collectively to a captive audience of lawmakers and assorted dignitaries.

“May the choices we make on behalf of the people of Maryland — the choices for job creation, the choices for human dignity, the choices for a better future — be the right choices for the generations counting on ours,” the governor said at the close of his speech.

What's more, O'Malley finds not only gauzy coverage in the news pages but solid political coverage by the paper's editorial board. In an editorial in today's paper, the Post approved of Gov. O'Malley's tax hike push in "Maryland steps on the gas"*:

Rather than hiking the flat per-gallon charge, the governor urged a phased-in sales tax, rising to 6 percent by 2016, the same rate charged for goods. If gas prices stay where they are, the governor’s legislation would add about 21 cents a gallon by 2015.

It’s easy to predict that the idea will be unpopular. A poll published last weekend in The Post found about three-quarters of Marylanders opposed to higher taxes for gasoline. And the governor’s strategy (if there is one) of rolling out a gas tax a couple of weeks after proposing new taxes on income, water usage, cigars and Internet sales hardly seems like a recipe for legislative success.

Still, by aiming high — the 6 percent sales tax on gas would yield $615 million annually, more than the increase urged by the commission — Mr. O’Malley may be giving Democratic lawmakers cover to settle for a lesser amount. It is critical that he fight hard for what he has rightly identified as a critically underfunded area.

By contrast, I've not found any coverage by the Washington Post of conservative Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's January 11 State of the Commonwealth speech, although the Post did print an article in the January 11 paper about how Gov. McDonnell (R) urged legislators of both parties to get along. And of course, the Post editorial board often chastises McDonnell — whose national profile is enhanced by his chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association — for his staunch line against raising taxes to fund northern Virginia transportation projects.

O'Malley and McDonnell are both considered potential contenders for their perspective parties' 2016 nominations, but it's clear the Post is intent on puffing the profile of the liberal chief executive of the Old Line State rather than the solid conservative from the Old Dominion.

*headlined as "Maryland needs a gas-tax hike to fund transportation needs" in the online version.

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Mitt Romney can’t win for losing. Wednesday’s New York Times “news analysis” by Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker posed as concerned over the “heavy new baggage” the Romney campaign had acquired by successfully going negative against Newt Gingrich in his Florida primary victory Tuesday night: “A Nasty Fight Carries Risks for the Winner.” Of course it does.

With his resounding victory over Newt Gingrich in Florida on Tuesday, Mitt Romney showed a worried Republican base a side of himself that it has both longed for and feared that he lacked: the agile political street fighter, willing to mock, scold and ultimately eviscerate his opponent.

But if he has quelled doubts about his toughness, he also emerges from the Florida free-for-all and the three contests that preceded it carrying heavy new baggage.

Mr. Romney was savaged by Mr. Gingrich over his record at Bain Capital, softening him up for the coming Democratic effort to portray him as a heartless capitalist happy to fire people to enrich himself. His release of his tax returns, complete with details about a Swiss bank account, provided new facts for opponents seeking to cast him as out of touch with ordinary Americans.

And the very trait that propelled him in Florida — a willingness to descend into the muck and run a relentlessly negative campaign — distracted from his economic-themed argument against Mr. Obama while deepening his rift with some populist conservatives. Should Mr. Gingrich remain a viable enough candidate to stay in the race through the summer, as he vowed on Tuesday, Mr. Romney could be forced to maintain an angry edge that could undermine his appeal among moderate and independent voters — groups whose views of him, polls suggest, appear to have been harmed by the Florida melee.

….
Mr. Romney has never been especially squeamish about negative campaigning. As jarring as his tone has seemed over the past 10 days, he has a long history of resorting to such tactics. (The exception was 2008, when Mr. Romney bowed out relatively early in the primary season.)

During his 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney ran biting commercials that portrayed his Democratic rival, the state treasurer Shannon O’Brien, as a basset hound asleep on the job as men walked off with bags of money. His poll numbers soon surged, and he pulled out an unexpected victory.

“He has learned along the way that this stuff works pretty well,” said Ms. O’Brien, who called the ads inaccurate and unfair.

Even as they employ hostile and loaded language against Romney's "negative campaigning," Times reporters surely realize such things go in both directions. Romney himself was the victim of harsh attacks on his religion by Sen. Ted Kennedy when they faced off in the 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts, as the Times documented: “Mr. Kennedy said in response to a reporter's question that Mr. Romney should be asked about his stand on the Mormon church's racially exclusive policies of the past.”

Over at Daily Kos, Jesse “Ministry of Truth” LaGreca is infuriated that RedState’s Erick Erickson would proclaim on the radio that “watching that hippy protester get tazed [at Occupy DC]  just made my day.”

He wrote, “Eric [sic] Erickson gleefully illustrated yesterday that the only thing that truly makes conservatives happy is watching someone else suffer. Since Conservative policies are causing 99% of us to suffer, they have a lot to be happy about these days. Dear CNN, do you find police brutality in America 'Hilarious'? If you don't, why would you employ Erick Erickson?"

Naturally, Jesse thinks MSNBC is much, much more dignified in its rhetoric than CNN or Fox News. (Don't hurt yourself as you fall down laughing.) He taunted Erickson, and urged the launch of a thousand hostile tweets:

You are cheering the suffering of others. Last I checked, that makes Sweet Baby Jesus cry.

This is why Republicans, despite their blather, totally suck at upholding the constitution and protecting Americans, they are too busy undermining the government so special interests can exploit Americans, but ooh, look, I have a flag lapel pin! Shiny!

Imagine if I went on MSNBC and said something truly horrible, something totally indefensible, maybe something about enjoying the suffering of my fellow countrymen. I don't think they would ever invite me on again. Well at CNN they give you a paycheck for that. And at Fox News they run you for President. (Italics his)

The thing I take away from watching GOP debates is that the only thing conservatives can cheer for in America anymore is for the things that conservatives like, and a boot stamping on the face of the people they hate. A banker stamping on your fingers as you try to climb the economic ladder, that's the modern conservative movement. (Bolding mine.)

Republicans cheer the death penalty. They cheer for torture. That creeps me out. Now it is getting obvious that Republicans don't just cheer cruelty, they get off on it.

So here's a New Rule: If your first reaction to any human suffering is to cheer, you don't get to complain about Hitler ever again.

His twitter handle is @ewerickson. Dear Anonymous, do your worst.

If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, Romneycare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles — as it was at the time.

It's not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance. In 2007, when Romneycare became law, the federal government alone was already picking up the tab for 45.4 percent of all health care expenditures in the country.

Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats' piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry.

In November 2004, for example, libertarian Ronald Bailey praised mandated private health insurance in Reason magazine, saying that it "could preserve and extend the advantages of a free market with a minimal amount of coercion."

A leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped design Romneycare, and its health care analyst, Bob Moffit, flew to Boston for the bill signing.

 Romneycare was also supported by Regina Herzlinger, Harvard Business School professor and health policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute. Herzlinger praised Romneycare for making consumers, not business or government, the primary purchasers of health care.

 The bill passed by 154-2 in the Massachusetts House and unanimously, 37-0, in the Massachusetts Senate — including the vote of Sen. Scott Brown, who won Teddy Kennedy's seat in the U.S. Senate in January 2010 by pledging to be the "41st vote against Obamacare."

 But because both Obamacare and Romneycare concern the same general topic area — health care — and can be nicknamed (politician's name plus "care"), Romney's health care bill is suddenly perceived as virtually the same thing as the widely detested Obamacare. (How about "Romneycare-gate"?)

 As The New York Times put it, "Mr. Romney's bellicose opposition to 'Obamacare' is an almost comical contradiction to his support for the same idea in Massachusetts when he was governor there." This is like saying state school-choice plans are "the same idea" as the Department of Education.

 One difference between the health care bills is that Romneycare is constitutional and Obamacare is not. True, Obamacare's unconstitutional provisions are the least of its horrors, but the Constitution still matters to some Americans. (Oh, to be there when someone at the Times discovers this document called "the Constitution"!)

 As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws — including laws banning contraception — without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally.

 The only reason the "individual mandate" has become a malediction is because the legal argument against Obamacare is that Congress has no constitutional authority to force citizens to buy a particular product.

 The legal briefs opposing Obamacare argue that someone sitting at home, minding his own business, is not engaged in "commerce … among the several states," and, therefore, Congress has no authority under the Commerce Clause to force people to buy insurance.

 No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance.

States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive.

 There's no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today's world to equip themselves with health insurance.

 The hyperventilating over government-mandated health insurance confuses a legal argument with a policy objection.

 If Obamacare were a one-page bill that did nothing but mandate that every American buy health insurance, it would still be unconstitutional, but it wouldn't be the godawful train wreck that it is. It wouldn't even be the godawful train wreck that high-speed rail is.

 It would not be a 2,000-page, trillion-dollar federal program micromanaging every aspect of health care in America with enormous, unresponsive federal bureaucracies manned by no-show public-sector union members enforcing a mountain of regulations that will bankrupt the country and destroy medical care, as liberals scratch their heads and wonder why Obamacare is costing 20 times more than they expected and doctors are leaving the profession in droves for more lucrative careers, such as video store clerk.

 Nothing good has ever come of a 2,000-page bill.

 There's not much governors can do about the collectivist mess Congress has made of health care in this country. They are mere functionaries in the federal government's health care Leviathan.

 A governor can't repeal or expand the federal tax break given to companies that pay their employees' health insurance premiums — a tax break denied the self-employed and self-insured.

 A governor can't order the IRS to start recognizing tax deductions for individual health savings accounts.

 A governor can't repeal the 1946 federal law essentially requiring hospitals to provide free medical services to all comers, thus dumping a free-rider problem on the states.

 It was precisely this free-rider problem that Romneycare was designed to address in the only way a governor can. In addition to mandating that everyone purchase health insurance, Romneycare used the $1.2 billion that the state was already spending on medical care for the uninsured to subsidize the purchase of private health insurance for those who couldn't afford it.

 What went wrong with Romneycare wasn't a problem in the bill, but a problem in Massachusetts: Democrats.

 First, the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature set the threshold for receiving a subsidy so that it included people making just below the median income in the United States, a policy known as "redistribution of income." For more on this policy, see "Marx, Karl."

 Then, liberals destroyed the group-rate, "no frills" private insurance plans allowed under Romneycare (i.e. the only kind of health insurance a normal person would want to buy, but which is banned in most states) by adding dozens of state mandates, including requiring insurers to cover chiropractors and in vitro fertilization — a policy known as "pandering to lobbyists."

 For more on "pandering" and "lobbyists," see "Gingrich, Newt." (Yes, that's an actual person's name.)
 Romney's critics, such as Rick Santorum, charge that the governor should have known that Democrats would wreck whatever reforms he attempted.

 They have, but no more than they would have wrecked health care in Massachusetts without Romneycare. Democrats could use a sunny day as an excuse to destroy the free market, redistribute income and pander to lobbyists. Does that mean Republicans should never try to reform anything and start denouncing sunny days?

 Santorum has boasted of his role in passing welfare reform in the 1990s. You know what the Democrats' 2009 stimulus bill dismantled? That's right: the welfare reform that passed in the 1990s.

 The problem isn't health insurance mandates. The problem isn't Romneycare. The problem isn't welfare reform. The problem is Democrats.

Oh joy.

Today at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, in response to the Congressional Budget Office's release today of an awful 10-year baseline outlook, Andrew Taylor made sure that his first paragraph was only about the projected "dip" in the fiscal 2012 deficit, and dedicated his second paragraph to the bad things that will happen if "the Bush tax cuts" are extended and Congress fails to live within "tight" spending "caps" (when did those happen?). Towards the end he spoke of the deficit-cutting wonders ending "the Bush tax cuts" might bring about. What follows are the first two paragraphs of Taylor's report, followed by the "Bush tax cut" passage:

---

Federal budget deficit to dip to $1.1T, CBO says

The government will run a $1.1 trillion deficit in the fiscal year that ends in September, a slight dip from last year but still very high by any measure, according to a budget report released Tuesday.

The Congressional Budget Office report also says that annual deficits will remain in the $1 trillion range for the next several years if Bush-era tax cuts slated to expire in December are extended, as commonly assumed – and if Congress is unable to live within the tight "caps" the lawmakers themselves placed on agency budgets last year.

… The CBO report shows that the deficit dilemma would largely be solved if the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 – and renewed in 2010 through the end of this year – were allowed to lapse. Under that scenario, the deficit would drop to $585 billion in 2013 and to $220 billion in 2017.

But expiration of those tax cuts would slam the economy, CBO said, bringing growth down to a paltry 1.1 percent next year. However, the economy would quickly rebound in 2014 and beyond.

Really? Taylor does not explain exactly why that would happen, especially given the track record of how tax increases (which is what ending "the Bush tax cuts" really amounts to) fail to bring in the anticipated extra tax collections static analysis (which is primarily what CBO does, assuming no behavior change as a result of higher rates) would predict. The reason they don't is that growth (i.e., the "rebound") ends up being less than what was expected.

Taylor conveys far more certainty about the outcome than is warranted in the circumstances.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

New York magazine political reporter John Heilemann proclaimed the obvious as he discussed media bias: "No person with eyes in his head in 2008 could have failed to see the way that soft coverage helped to propel Obama first to the Democratic nomination and then into the White House. But in the course of the past three years, reporters, as is their wont, have arrived at a more measured (and even jaundiced) view of him. Let’s hope that means that in this fall’s horse race, both ponies get ridden equally hard."

Heilemann thinks that "the press may help keep Gingrich on life support into the spring," because he knows how to play the press game and be interesting. Mitt Romney, by contrast, is already in trouble with the journalists:

Most plainly, there is the media’s antipathy to the kind of disciplined, unspontaneous, inaccessible campaign that Romney is running. Also to the fact that, hey, let’s face it, he’s not exactly a Roman candle of a candidate. Then there is the temperamental gorge that separates him from most journalists. “Reporters are the kids in the back of the classroom, throwing spitballs,” says Lewis. “McCain would be sitting back there, too, saying, ‘I’m not listening to this B.S.,’ and so would Gingrich. Romney is the guy sitting up in front, raising his hand to every question. Reporters listen to Arcade Fire; Romney listens to the Carpenters and Donny and Marie.”

Honk if you find it unlikely that old political hands like Dan Balz of The Washington Post are jamming to the Arcade Fire on their i-Pod (or that Gingrich does). While it's true that Romney very safely listed the Beatles as his i-Pod favorite to NBC's Jamie Gangel, Heilemann's trying to imply Romney is stale and kitschy. He failed to notice how that back-of-the-bus-buddy routine ultimately worked out for McCain! He continued:

The suspicion of Romney is even deeper than that, however. Ever since his run in 2008, when his contortions on various issues earned him his reputation as an inveterate flip-flopper, the members of the ­media—and his rivals, then and ­today—have regarded him as a phony, his candidacy based on, as Smith puts it, “some ­really brittle half-truths about his consistency.” But now there is a creeping sense that he may be something worse; that on a range of issues, notably his finances, Romney is making claims that may be less than fully truthful. This perception may or may not be fair, but trust me, it is ­growing—and problematic. Much as the press enjoys poking at phoniness, it absolutely relishes demolishing a liar.