Yes,  that headline could cover just about all aspects of the network, but at the Tatler, Bryan Preston is focusing specifically on their coverage of tonight’s debate. As Bryan writes, “The Candidates Were Fine, but CNN is a Joke:”

None of the candidates committed a major gaffe. Santorum was wobbly at times as the central target, but never came off as unsuited to leadership. Romney was agile, Gingrich offered his usual mix of high level policy shrewdness and cynicism toward current federal practices. Ron Paul assailed spending and put himself to the left of the field on foreign policy. None of this was particularly new.

CNN, though, deserves serious criticism. These four men have put themselves forward as candidates to replace President Barack Obama as commander in chief. The economy is soft, gas prices are skyrocketing, the border is a violent mess and the world awaits the inevitable news that either Israel has launched a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, or Iran has conducted a nuclear test. That’s the binary choice the world is looking at. Whichever event happens, and one of them will, the world will change drastically and immediately. If Israel strikes, will Iran move to close the Strait of Hormuz? Will it activate Hizballah not just in Lebanon, but in South America and Mexico? Will the resulting oil shock from either event drive the economy over the brink into depression? If Iran is allowed to complete a nuclear weapon, will the rest of the Middle East follow suit? Instead of exploring these serious issues at a length that respects the gravity, CNN chose instead to waste time asking the candidates to define themselves with one word. Moderator John King teased that inane question both before and after a break, to make it the climax of the night.

This is CNN, and CNN is stupid. It is unserious, lacking in judgment, unfair, ridiculous, petty and malignant. The GOP should consider disallowing CNN’s participation in any future debates.

Instead of a serious security question, King asked, 81 minutes into the debate, about the role of women in combat. Romney took that question as an opportunity to discuss the Iran threat. The first actual question about Iran’s nuclear program came from an audience member, fully 85 minutes into the debate. Fifteen minutes later, the debate moved onto other issues.

To rank the candidates is always subjective, but Romney probably comes off as the strongest leader with the broadest experience, with Gingrich the most interesting and expansive thinker, Santorum the most passionate advocate and Paul the most consistent in his positions, though his positions are often at odds with the Republican Party and mainstream America. CNN badly mishandled this important debate, which may be the final one before the GOP convention, and did a disservice to the American people.

In today’s National Review Online is a suggestion that — at last — the GOP should drop having MSM anchors hosting the candidates’ debates, a vestigial  holdover from the mid-century days of three TV networks that at least (with notable exceptions) attempted to hide or play down their biases. Those days have been gone for decades, and TV itself is starting to look pretty long in the tooth as a medium. They don’t call it the stupid party for nothing, but maybe there’s a chance it will finally listen.

(I know, I know — who am I kidding?)

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To paraphrase Ace, Harry Truman, he of the famous “The Buck Stops Here” motto, wept:

President Obama does not “accept responsibility” for high gas prices, his spokesman indicated today, arguing that Obama has done everything he could to bring down the price of oil and blaming the high gas prices on oil price increases caused by global factors.

“The president accepts the responsibility that he identified the next president should accept, back in 2008, which is the need to develop a comprehensive energy policy,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today when asked if Obama “accept[s] responsibility” for the high price of oil and gas. “If you’re suggesting that there is responsibility for a rise in the global price of oil, it’s certainly not because of anything he hasn’t done to expand domestic oil and gas production,” Carney added.

Well, that’s one way not to put it.

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The slang term for rendering your laptop or cell phone inoperable is “bricking it.” Turning hundreds or thousands of dollars of electronics into an inert, brick-like state, which may cost a good chunk of change to fix — so much so that buying a new device might be the best bet.

That’s also a risk with the coal-powered uber-expensive Tesla electric car, according to Gawker-owned Jalopnik.com:

Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss.

* * * * *

Tesla Motors is a public company that’s valued at over $3.5 billion and has received $465 million in US government loans, all on the back of the promise that it can deliver a real world, all-electric car to the mainstream market. Yet today, in my opinion, Tesla seems to be knowingly selling cars that can turn into bricks without any financial protection for the customer.

Until there’s a fundamental change in Tesla’s technology, it would seem the only other option for Tesla is to help its customers insure against this problem. As consumers become aware that a Tesla is possibly just a long trip, a bad extension cord, or an accidental unplugging away from disaster, how many will choose to gamble $40,000 on that not happening? Would you?

Back in 2009, CNN reported that “The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it.” If the Jalopnik report is true, that’s yet more proof, as Rob Long wrote last month, “Obama is a terrible tech investor.  If the USA was a hedge fund, he’d be looking at a total collapse.”

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As Hugh Hewitt would say, Jim Geraghty proves to be indispensable once again, pulling up quotes from the memory hole of a decade ago:

“If drilling [in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] were approved today, it would be ten years before oil arrived in refineries.” — Sierra Magazine, January-February issue, 2002.

Similarly, while we’ve all seen the CNBC interview with then-candidate Barack Obama back in June of 2008 when he signed off on high energy prices as long as they rose “gradually,” he was also concurrently giving interviews in which he condemned them as a cudgel against the Democrats’ nemesis, as Investor’s Business Daily notes:

When gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said it was due to previous failed energy policies. Now that prices are heading still higher, President Obama calls it progress.

Already, pump prices are higher than they’ve been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.

President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.

“Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic,” Gibbs said Sunday. “Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we’re making progress.”

“Progress” isn’t exactly how Obama described the country’s energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of “Washington’s failure to lead on energy,” which was “turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans.”

“For the well-off in this country,” Obama said in May 2008, “high gas prices are mostly an annoyance, but to most Americans they’re a huge problem, bordering on a crisis.”

In August that year, he declared rising energy costs to be “one of the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced” and that gas prices “are wiping out paychecks and straining businesses.”

While Gibbs is right that domestic production has climbed in the past three years, Obama’s policies had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Oil coming from offshore wells was in the pipeline, so to speak, during the Clinton and Bush years, when those permits were issued. And the oil pouring out of North Dakota is the result of drilling on private lands.

Obama, in fact, has made it clear for years that he has no real interest in boosting domestic production.

Which brings us to David Harsanyi’s latest piece in Real Clear Politics. David asks, “Aren’t High Gas Prices What Democrats Want?”

According to the Institute for Energy Research, there is enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand, enough to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years and more gas in the U.S. than there is in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and some place called Turkmenistan combined. Oil? The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore oil here at home — and much more oil around the world.

Yes, gas prices have spiked an average of 14 cents a gallon in the past month and about 30 cents a gallon since last November, according to AAA. Oil prices jumped to a nine-month high — more than $105 a barrel — after the Iranians shut down their own energy exports to Britain and France so they could start a much-needed nuclear program, which is, no doubt, for wholly peaceful purposes.

Given the fungibility of commodities and the track record of civilization in the Middle East, we’ll likely always have to deal with occasionally painful fluctuations in the price of energy, regardless of what we do at home — drilling and new pipelines included. Still, fluctuations have a lot better track record than price controls.

Subsidizing quixotic green companies or creating carbon credits won’t stop the rules of basic economics. If the gas crunch starts hitting the economy, it’s doubtless that we will get an earful of populist hand-wringing and that we’ll hear the administration once again blame wealthy speculators and nasty oil companies.

Yet in the end, high gas prices are part of the plan. This is what the administration wants.

“Yeah, but they don’t like to admit it in an election year,” the Professor replies. I think it depends on who you ask.

Related: The chaps at JammieWearingFools spot $4.49 a gallon gas in New York City; could $5.00 a gallon gas be next? (Warning: auto-play video on that second link.)

Do I hear six dollars a gallon? Why yes, I do!

More: “Orwell wept.”

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Back in 2001, actor Stanley Tucci told Variety magazine that HBO has “the biggest balls in the business.” Maybe so back then. These days? Not so much. As Bryon York asks in the Washington Examiner, why did HBO focus on only one-half of the best-selling look at the 2008 presidential election, Game Change, written by liberal political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin? As York writes, “The other half would have made a great movie:”

And then there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What a great role the fiery preacher from Chicago would have made! “Game Change” — the book — reported that Obama and his top aides knew all along that Wright would be a problem, and yet did nothing about it until Wright’s “Goddamn America” sermon burst into the news.

The alternate “Game Change” could have featured top Clinton aide Harold Ickes’ suggestion that the campaign hire a private investigator to probe Obama’s connections to Wright. “This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty f–king years,” Ickes is quoted in the book as saying. “If you really want to take him down, let’s take him f–king down.” Screenwriter Danny Strong — he also worked on “Recount” — couldn’t have written it better himself.

The movie also could have focused on Hillary Clinton’s anger at Obama’s ability to escape the Wright mess unscathed. “Just imagine, just for fun, if my pastor from Arkansas said the kind of things his pastor said,” Clinton told aides, according to the book. “I’m just saying. Just imagine. This race would be over.”

Finally, the alternate “Game Change” could have focused on top Clinton strategist Mark Penn, the man who wrote campaign memos questioning Obama’s American identity. “Obama’s roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” Penn wrote, before concluding: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

It could have been an extraordinary look at the troubling issue of race playing out inside a party that takes pride in its civil rights record. The alternate “Game Change” could have been a complex picture of complex people in a complex situation.

And most of all, the alternate “Game Change” would have provided insights into the man who became president of the United States.

Instead, as York notes, “HBO decided to focus on an out-of-office, former half-term governor of Alaska who was on the losing ticket in the 2008 election and isn’t running for anything today.” Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again.

In the last five years, Hollywood and TV networks have gotten the vapors over mini-series involving the Kennedys of a half-century ago, and the Clinton administration’s decisions (and the lack thereof) in fighting Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s. How could they suddenly grow a pair of balls sufficient to properly cover both sides of a story as recent as 2008?

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The more things change at CBS…

Daniel Schorr’s passing on Friday, at age 93, reminded me of the kind of assaults CBS News unleashed on conservatives before there were any countervailing forums available. A 2001 Weekly Standard article (nine years in my “pending” file!) detailed a particularly vicious left-wing hit piece he narrated in 1964 which linked Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater with neo-Nazis in Germany, a CBS Evening News story notorious enough to earn a mention – if without any censure – in the New York Times and Washington Post obituaries.

In a June of 2001 Weekly Standard review of a memoir by Schorr about his years with CBS, CNN and NPR, Andrew Ferguson recited the piece which aired during the GOP’s convention:

“It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany’s right wing” also known, Schorr added helpfully, as “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.” Goldwater, he went on, had given an interview to Der Spiegel, “appealing to right-wing elements in Germany,” and had agreed to speak to a conclave of, yes, “right-wing Germans.” “Thus,” Schorr concluded, “there are signs that the American and German right wings are joining up.” Now back to you, Walter, and have a nice day!

Ferguson pointed out what eluded the Washington Post and New York Times: “Though easily checkable, it was false in all its particulars” and “was false in its obvious implication of an Anschluss between German neo-Nazis and U.S. Republicans.” Nonetheless, “if Schorr was embarrassed by the Goldwater episode, his memoir shows no signs of it.”

…The more they remain the same: “CBS accuses Santorum of comparing Obama to Hitler:”

Santorum makes the point of why the greatest generation is called the greatest generation, and it’s because they were there for American when it needed them, at a ‘time of great peril’, and they did great things. And his larger point from there is that we can be like the greatest generation because our country needs us right now.But this is where the MSM acts as though they don’t understand what he was saying. He then makes the point that the challenge we face now is not as clearly defined as was the challenge for the greatest generation, that is WWII. And yet still, even they sat on the sidelines for a year and a half while Germany plunged Europe into darkness. Why did they wait, he asks? He answers it this way:

Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, ‘Well, you know it’ll get better. Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This will be okay.’ I mean, yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy after a while, after a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe and he’s not so good of a guy after all. ‘But you know what, why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems. We’ll get our families off to work and our kids off to school, yeah we’ll be ok‘. That’s sorta the optimistic spirit of America.

But sometimes, It’s not OK. It’s going to be harder for this generation to figure this out. There’s no cataclysmic event. It’s going to be hard.

You understand it, you’re here. You wouldn’t be here if you don’t get it. But what about the rest of America? Do they understand what is happening?

He’s really just comparing this generation to the greatest generation and why this situation is going to be harder for our generation to grasp. It’s that simple. There was no Hitler/Obama comparisons made.

Click over for the CBS article and the video of Santorum’s speech.

Silly Santorum — doesn’t he know that only lefties like Paul Krugman are allowed to use the Moral Equivalent of War argument?

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The day after Christmas of 2008, a New York Times editorial titled “The Gas Tax” was a lump of coal in every motorist’s stocking:

There are several ways to tax gas. One would be to devise a variable consumption tax in such a way that a gallon of unleaded gasoline at the pump would never go below a floor of $4 or $5 (in 2008 dollars), fluctuating to accommodate changing oil prices and other costs. Robert Lawrence, an economist at Harvard, proposes a variable tariff on imported oil to achieve the same effect and also to stimulate the development of domestic energy sources.

In both cases, the fuel taxes could be offset with tax credits to protect vulnerable segments of the population.

While oil prices are all but sure to rise again as the world emerges from recession, further tempering consumption with a gas tax would both slow the rise in the price of crude and steer more revenue from energy consumption to the United States budget, rather than that of oil-exporting countries.

A bitter recession is not the most opportune time to ratchet up the price of energy. But if the Obama administration is to meet its twin objectives of reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases, it needs to start thinking now about mechanisms to curb the nation’s demand for energy when the economy emerges from recession in the future.

This also would serve as a signal to American automakers and American drivers that the era of cheap gasoline is not going to last.

And now, with gasoline over $4.00 a gallon in California and rapidly approaching that key emotional price-point in other states, yesterday, the Times ran the following headline: “Rising Gas Prices Give G.O.P. Issue to Attack Obama:”

Rising gasoline prices, trumpeted in foot-tall numbers on street corners across the country, are causing concern among advisers to President Obama that a budding sense of economic optimism could be undermined just as he heads into the general election.

White House officials are preparing for Republicans to use consumer angst about the cost of oil and gas to condemn his energy programs and buttress their argument that his economic policies are not working.

In a closed-door meeting last week, Speaker John A. Boehner instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger they find among their constituents when they return to their districts for the Presidents’ Day recess.

“This debate is a debate we want to have,” Mr. Boehner told his conference on Wednesday, according to a Republican aide who was present. “It was reported this week that we’ll soon see $4-a-gallon gas prices. Maybe higher. Certainly, this summer will see the highest gas prices in years. Your constituents saw those reports, and they’ll be talking about it.”

They’ll also be talking about a president who explicitly campaigned on raising energy prices in order to — as we’ve since found out — help create his “green” crony venture socialism failed business ventures such as Solyndra and Fisker (not to mention the disastrous Government Motors Volt). And blocked the Keystone XL pipeline to assuage his far left environmentalist base.

In 2008, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, and tacitly, the San Francisco Chronicle all supported the notion of the then-incoming President Obama raising energy prices on consumers. Have gas prices risen sufficiently “gradually” to benefit Mr. Obama reelection chances? The Times doesn’t seem to think so, despite having called for them to rise three and a half years ago.

(Via Newsbusters.)

Update: “In Vicious, Personal Attack, Rick Santorum Questions the President’s . . . Environmental Views:”

The comments came at an event in Columbus shortly after the former senator from Pennsylvania said efficacy and safety improvements in oil drilling technology are considered by the president to be “a dangerous technology.”

“It doesn’t fit his pattern of trying to drive down consumption, trying to drive up your cost of transportation to accomplish his political science goal of reducing carbon dioxide,” he said.

Obama, he continued, is not motivated by “your quality of life.”

“It’s not about your job. It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology,” Santorum said. “Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology. But no less a theology.”

Environmentalism is an alternative religion? Gaia forfend!

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2008 — The Wright-Free Zone is built:

2009 — CNN anchor reminds viewers that “it’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging,” and in-field reporter berates a tea partier for his rejection of Obama’s (read the taxpayers’) stimulus funds.

2010 — Let the viewers eat cake! Baking a cake on-air to promote the “success” of the “Stimulus” program:

2012 — “CNN’s Piers Morgan and Soledad O’Brien ‘Obama Bump’ Roberta Flack at Whitney Houston Funeral:”

Of course, the network is totally objective — just ask any of their journalists the next time you Obama-bump into them.

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Every generation gets the media it deserves. In the 1950s, there was Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, decades before the conspiracy theories kicked in. Today’s media? Goodnight and good luck, indeed. First up, the generally left-leaning Media Bistro finally calls Keith Olbermann’s number:

When Big Journalism Contributor Lee Stranahan complied all the rape and sexual assault stories about Occupy in one post for the world to see, you’d think that would’ve been the end of it. But Olbermann’s ego won’t allow anyone to have the last word on anything, so he “debunked” each one, one by one.

Unfortunately for Keith, the Breitbart websites are not the silent, wallflower types even if their writing is sometimes abominable.

In his “debunking,” Olbermann changed his tune from “No Occupy rapes” to “Because almost none of the allegations are of rape and most of this list are duplicated…” to “2 stories duplicated” to “Occupy MEMBERS were victims.” That’s quite a journey in just one day, especially without ever acknowledging his position completely changed.

Even still, where he ended up, that the victims and not the perpetrators were the only Occupy people involved in these rapes and sexual assaults, isn’t the truth. After Olbermann’s “debunking, Stranahan was back a few hours later with a section by section debunking of what Olbermann said. Keith then went silent, maybe to bed, maybe to play with his baseball cards, or maybe to Stuart Smalley in the mirror to calm his nerves.

Hey, say what you will about the man behind Stuart Smalley; while Olbermann’s inability to play well with others during recess has driven him further and further into the bowels of cable media (from ESPN to MSNBC to CurrentTV aren’t exactly steps upward on the ol’ CV), Al Franken’s particular brand of idiocy took him from Saturday Night Live to the halls of the U.S. Senate. From that perspective, Al did OK playing a pretend journalist on “Weekend Update.”

And speaking of pretend journalists, Jon Stewart, dubbed “the most trusted man in America” and “the most-respected journalist in America” by his fellow Obama worshipers in the MSM* has a moment of clarity, regarding a fellow postmodern poseur. Hey Rube!, as the Professor would say:

”I don’t know if he’s going to re-elect us. I worry about Obama. … I get the sense with Obama, he doesn’t really like us all that much. He’s kind of had his fill.

But it’s just a moment, before Jon quickly retreats to the warm innervating afterglow of 2008:

He’s the only president I’ve ever seen who begins each press conference with a heavy sigh. … [Bush] was the kid in sixth grade who gave the book report about a book he clearly hadn’t read. … Obama is the kid who has read the book in first grade and he can’t believe you idiots are just getting around to it.”

Well, that’s what he wants you to think, but until he actually releases his grades (among the many known-unknowns of BO’s bio), why should we believe he’s smarter than George W. Bush — who after all is smarter than Obama’s 2004 media-created prototype?

To paraphrase a certain fictional starship captain** I’m laughing (to keep from crying) at the results of the superior intellect:

Besides, if it’s brainpower you want, Obama’s got plenty just down the hall:

* Which tells you all you need to know about the “real” journalists in the MSM. Not that there are many left.

** As opposed to the non-fictional starship captains…

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At Ricochet, Paul Rahe writes, “On the face of it, President Obama would appear to be shooting himself in the foot. Why would he risk losing the Catholic vote?”

One could, of course, argue that his aim was to excite the feminists and give them a reason to turn out in November. As a rationale, however, even this seems a bit lame. The benefit that the President proposes to provide is insubstantial. The administration’s claim to the contrary notwithstanding, the pill and other birth control devices are not free. But the expense involved is not great. Among those who are employed and have healthcare insurance, no one is hard put to come up with the paltry sum required.

This suggests that there can be only one reason why Sebelius, Pelosi, and Obama decided to proceed. They wanted to show the bishops and the Catholic laity who is boss. They wanted to make those who think contraception wrong and abortion a species of murder complicit in both.  They wanted to rub the noses of their opponents in it. They wanted to marginalize them. Humiliation was, in fact, their only aim, and malice, their motive.

Last week, when, in response to the fierce resistance he had deliberately stirred up, the President offered the bishops what he called “an accommodation,” what he proffered was nothing more than a fig leaf. His maneuver was, in fact, a gesture of contempt, and I believe that it was Barack Obama’s final offer. From his perspective and from that of Sebelius and Pelosi, the genuine Catholics still within the Democratic coalition are no more than what Vladimir Lenin called “useful idiots,” and, now that the progressive project is near completion, they are expendable – for there is no longer any need to curry their favor.

In his piece in The Washington Examiner, which I link above, Michael Barone mentioned Obama’s decree with regard to contraception and abortifacients in tandem with a brief discussion of the President’s decision to reject the construction of the Keystone Pipeline. He was, I think, right to do so – for there is no good reason that any student of public policy can cite for doing what the President did. Cancelling the pipeline will not delay or stop the extraction of oil from the tar sands in Alberta, and the pipeline itself would pose no environmental threat. If the President’s decision had any purpose, it was symbolic – an indication to all that he cared not one whit about the plight of the white working class and that he was capable of punishing those whom he does not like and more than willing to do so.

In 2008, when he first ran for the Presidency, Barack Obama posed as a moderate most of the time. This time, he is openly running as a radical. His aim is to win a mandate for the fundamental transformation of the United States that he promised in passing on the eve of his election four years ago and that he promised again when he called his administration The New Foundation. In the process, he intends to reshape the Democratic coalition – to bring the old hypocrisy to an end, to eliminate those who stand in the way of the final consolidation of the administrative entitlements state, to drive out the faithful Catholics once and for all, to jettison the white working class, and to build a new American regime on a coalition of  highly educated upper-middle class whites, feminists, African-Americans, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, and those belonging to the public-sector unions. To Americans outside this coalition, he intends to show no mercy.

James Piereson didn’t dub this worldview “punitive liberalism” nearly a decade ago for nothing.

Related: “Bill O’Reilly: If Obama Wins in November, ‘You’re Not Going to Recognize This Country in 4 Years.’”

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“Thus, the Obama stimulus, which wasted a trillion dollars of our children’s future earnings, was inspired and perhaps designed by an inveterate reckless gambler and financial mismanager.” Needless to say, there’s plenty of red meat here on the former governor of New Jersey from Ross Kaminsky of the American Spectator:

In the end, Corzine’s [Long Term Capital Management]-related activities cost Goldman about half a billion dollars. In other words, he wasn’t forced out of Goldman because he didn’t “consult” with other partners. It was because he was, and obviously remains, an out-of-control gambler—and I say that as a professional trader inclined to give other traders the benefit of the doubt.

IT WASN’T JUST HIS Goldman activities that should have given MF Global second thoughts before hiring Jon Corzine. His financial management of the State of New Jersey while serving as its governor from 2006 to 2010 was little short of professional misconduct.

Perhaps the best description of Corzine’s mismanagement came, not surprisingly, from his successor, Chris Christie, in a February 2011 speech at the American Enterprise Institute:

When I came into office we confronted a $2.2 billion budget deficit for fiscal year ’10. The one that had five months left. The one that Governor Corzine told me was just fine, cruise path into the end of the fiscal year; Governor, don’t worry about it, everything is fine. $2.2 billion…Imagine that. The state that has the second highest per capita income in America had so over-spent, over-borrowed, and over-taxed—that it would not meet payroll in March of 2010. So we acted immediately to use the executive authority of the governorship to impound $2.2 billion in projected spending…without raising taxes on the people of the state who had had their taxes raised and fees 115 times in the eight years preceding my governorship. 115 tax and fee increases in eight years.

Corzine has given nearly $3 million dollars to Democrats, mostly through donations to the Democratic National Committee, as well as serving as major “bundler” for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.

So it should come as no surprise that two of Jon Corzine’s biggest supporters are Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. At a Corzine campaign rally in Edison, New Jersey, in October 2009, speaking of the administration’s quandary regarding how to deal with the banking turmoil in 2008, Biden made it clear why, in retrospect, the Obama administration’s economic policies are so reckless and confused:

I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said “Jon, what do you think we should do?” The reason why we called Jon is because we knew he knew about the economy, about world markets, about how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew.

Biden went on to say that Corzine gave the administration the framework for a national economic recovery plan. Thus, the Obama stimulus, which wasted a trillion dollars of our children’s future earnings, was inspired and perhaps designed by an inveterate reckless gambler and financial mismanager.

Maybe (soon to be) poor Jonny C is just accident-prone. After all, a 2007 SUV accident (in which Corzine was a front-seat passenger) left him with multiple broken bones, in critical condition, and breathing through a tube. The state trooper driving the vehicle was going 91 MPH (presumably with Corzine’s consent) and Corzine was not wearing his seat belt. If that isn’t a perfect analogy for Jon Corzine’s professional career, I don’t know what is. And maybe he accidentally had a two-year affair with the president of one of New Jersey’s largest state employee unions, after which his ex-wife, Joanne, said that “Jon did let his family down, and he’ll probably let New Jersey down, too.”

Seriously, who would hire this guy?

Read the whole thing. Back in 2004, John Fund wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal titled “Louisiana North,” calling New Jersey a “pit of corruption.” (And it is.) If Kaminsky’s descriptions of Corzine’s financial misadventures are accurate, the state had a legendary — and as Kaminsky writes, reckless — riverboat gambler sitting in the captain’s chair of the riverboat.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Did I call this yesterday or what? NBC’s Matt Lauer begins a Today Show segment on rising gas prices by saying, “There’s some troubling news. Gasoline prices are back on the rise, and some analysts say it could get even worse, just in time for the summer driving season.”

If Matt sounds even more robotic than usual reading the script in his ‘prompter, that’s because the dean of NBC newsreaders anchormen pleaded with incoming president-elect Obama on Meet the Press to raise gasoline prices, when they were temporarily at their lowest, back in early December of 2008:

TOM BROKAW: Let’s talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: “Those days are gone. We’re not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore.”

You can see Brokaw in action in a Silicon Graffiti video I made at the time called “Rendezvous with Scarcity.” I’ve cued-up the YouTube clip to just before Brokaw’s appearance.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters wrote at the time in response:

If you needed any more proof that liberal media members don’t give a darn about the state of the economy or the American people, and instead just want to raise taxes, you got it Sunday when Tom Brokaw advocated gas prices, which have plummeted recently, be kept at $4 a gallon with government keeping the added cost.

And as I mentioned in the video, the New York Times and the Washington Post expressed near-concurrent identical sentiments as Brokaw. Groupthink or JournoList-style message coordination? You make the call!

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As Thomas Sowell writes in “The ‘Progressive’ Legacy,” “Obama’s ‘new’ vision is borrowed from an earlier age:”

Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States, but his doctrine is by no means unique. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished 100 years ago.

Many of the trends, problems, and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.

The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.

What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common — and what attracts some of today’s Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to be following in their footsteps — was a vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for the Constitution of the United States.

Like other Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business. In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and his own business ventures lost money.

“In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics” — what a marvelous turn of phrase. And as Sowell concludes regarding another president with a lacuna of economic common sense, “Barack Obama’s rhetoric of ‘change’ is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated 100 years ago.”

Think of it as “Barack to the Future.”

Of course, Wilson and both Roosevelt had the advantage of getting there first, and expanding a then-small government. Today, after a century of unending bloat, the left is now a series of competing special interest groups, often working at cross-purposes with each other, all vying, hat-in-hand for their president’s attention and the taxpayers’ money. Just as the Keystone pipeline pitted unions (who’d like more jobs) against radical environmentalists (who in the Rousseauian heart of hearts would like to see all industrial production everywhere end, as long as they can keep NPR and their local Starbucks), as the Anchoress writes,  “Obama Has Stranded the Catholic Left:”

But Obama’s move on Friday wasn’t about nuance; it was about destroying the surprising unity of the “Catholic Right” and the “Catholic Left” on this issue; it was about dividing and conquering. In a deeply cynical move, Obama used Sister Carol Keehan to foment that division; he needed her credibility to reassure the Catholic Left that it could prefer unity with his administration over unity with the church.

His punch was off. Possibly he hadn’t anticipated a block to guard the possession of rights, which are not his to dole out as he sees fit. He seems not to realize, even now–as his administration muddies up the story with talk of costs and savings–that his Catholic allies’ rejection of his HHS Mandate wasn’t about contraception or sterilization, nor could their approval be regained with a skillful uppercut to the men in the miters. What the HHS Mandate has revealed is that the preservation of the freedom of religion–of the churches rights to be who and what they are and to exercise their missions–is worth going to the mat for, no matter which corner you’re coming from.

QED.

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Everybody and his cousin in the starboard side of the Blogosphere has linked to the Daily Caller’s first expose inside the paranoid Media Matters bunker, the sequel to their brilliant 2010 reporting on the JournoList, the self-described “non-official campaign” in the Beltway media to help elect Obama president in 2008. And speaking of which, note this in yesterday’s article:

“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”

“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.

Reached by phone, Sargent declined to comment.

“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”

“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”

“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”

Smith, who refused to comment on the substance of these claims, later took to Twitter to say that he has been critical of Media Matters.

Smith was also a self-confessed member of the JournoList; as Glenn Reynolds notes, MMFA and the JournoList share some remarkable traits:

Of course, to the extent that Media Matters affects coverage it’s because left-leaning journos regard it as legitimate, and want to help. In this regard, like JournoList, it’s a “self-herding device.”

And like the JournoList, a way to take ordinarily mild-mannered folks and whip them into a frenzied mob.

But Ed Morrissey, the source of our headline above, wonders if the Daily Caller didn’t out-think themselves and wound-up burying the lede on their story:

The actual story here might be the reverse of how Carlson et al frame it here.  This sounds as though the White House uses Brock and Media Matters to conduct a proxy war against its perceived enemies in the news media and to push its propaganda out through the MSM.  The DC’s descriptions of attacks on reporters and media outlets who don’t fall in line would make MMFA a very valuable pitbull for Jarrett and Obama, and one with some plausible deniability, at least until now.  This should really be the screaming red flag in the article, rather than some of the salacious tidbits about Brock.

Interestingly, just a few days ago someone else connected the White House to Media Matters, along with a warning that their relationship could cost Obama the next election.  The name of that right-wing nut?  Alan Dershowitz:

Read the whole thing (both Ed’s post and the underlying Daily Caller article).

Another timely question is posed by P.J. Salvatore of Big Journalism: “Who did MMfA tick off that so many sources as of late are throwing them under the bus?

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“Remember when no one understood why ABC asked about contraception at the NH Republican debate?” William A. Jacobson writes, adding that Newt’s comeback (posted above) “was prophetic in hindsight:”

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds.

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

Disney-ABC in tight message coordination with Democrats? Heaven forfend.

At the Tatler, Clarice Feldman adds, “It’s time the RNC asks [Stephanopoulos] if he coordinated this with the White House directly or through its media shills like Media Matters.  And if he did or refuses to answer or to offer a credible explanation, ABC should be booted from further debate moderating privileges.

Why should the RNC grow a spine now?

Earlier: “CNN Host Asks If Initial Outrage Over Contraception Mandate was ‘Manufactured’ to Hurt Obama.” Can you spell projection, boys and girls?

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “NBC’s Lauer to Obama: Can Mitt Romney ‘Identify With the Middle Class?’”

– Newsbusters, February 6th.

• “Sources connected to NBC tell TMZ … Lauer was done with Today and wanted out — but the word at the network is he will now re-sign if NBC ponies up way more than the $17 mil he’s currently making, “TMZ reported yesterday. “We’re told negotiations are now ongoing — but if NBC agrees … Lauer could score as much as $30 MILLION a year.”

Related: “Multimillionaire Chris Matthews: Is Mitt Romney ‘Just Too Damn Rich?’”  Matthews’ fortune is estimated at “$16 million with an annual salary of $5 million.”

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Forget six degrees of separation — CNN’s Roland Martin is separated by only one — very famous — person away from President Obama. During the 2008 NAACP speech by Obama’s infamous, presumably former spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Martin was namechecked, along with his fellow CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien (who dubbed Wright’s speech “a home run” on the air) as a “long-term friend” by Wright. Martin has also had friendly chats on CNN with Wright’s equally inflammatory colleague Father Michael Pfleger. But just as Obama threw Wright under the bus almost immediately after the aforementioned speech — with CNN quickly following his lead — when one of Martin’s Tweets hit the fan at the start of week, Martin discovered that everybody’s expendable in the MSM:

Roland Martin, tweeted on Sunday, walked it back Monday, chastened on Tuesday, suspended on Wednesday…

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. [Not to mention the rest of the country -- Ed] He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by.

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.

But a year ago, Martin himself was eager to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility in the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw not leading to his shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, in an editorial at CNN with the now ironic title, “After Tucson, will media tone it down?”

Note the first sentence in the quoted passage below:

If we are to embrace the notion of civility and humility in our discourse, that means not falling into our old habits. I was impressed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel, relayed to Russell Simmons’ GlobalGrind.com what he told his staff after the Tucson shootings: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Who knows if this edict will be photocopied and posted in the office of every Fox talk show host, and throughout its newsroom, to serve as a reminder to everyone when the nation moves further and further away from the shooting?

And he’s correct; those who vehemently oppose the views of Fox News and conservative radio hosts must also adhere to the president’s call for civility.

Maybe what we should all do is make “Remember Gabby and the Tucson 6″ buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, as a way to stop someone in his tracks who chooses to get out of control.

Live by political correctness, die by it as well — or at least go into broadcasting purgatory. Or as Michael Graham asks at the Boston Herald, “What do the Catholic Church, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and CNN’s Roland Martin all have in common? They’ve all just been given a lesson in liberal ‘tolerance:’”

The most confused victim of the New Tolerance has to be CNN’s Roland Martin. All he did was send a tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”For reasons I don’t understand, this makes Martin a homophobe. GLAAD demanded he be pulled off the air, and his lame joke was labeled “the equivalent of cheerleading for violence against gays” in The Washington Post.

Now this isn’t David Duke. It’s Roland Martin — one of the New Tolerance thugs who has long played the race card in service of the liberal agenda.

If the left is willing to throw him under the bus, nobody is safe. Forget “Yes We Can!” Today it’s “You’ve Been Warned.”

Considering Martin’s impeccably radical chic connections, like the supine Outer Party member Parsons when he winds up in 1984′s Ministry of Love for political re-education and/or a visit to Room 101, he must have been astonished to find himself a victim of the same forces of political correctness — and correction — he’s long since championed. But then, as P.J. Salvatore writes at Big Journalism, “Nobody Expects The Progressive Inquisition.”

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Kathy Shaidle spots Timothy Noah of the New Republic (link safe; goes to Hot Air) with a bad case of the vapors over the newest revelations concerning JFK’s improprieties, in article titled “JFK, Monster:”

Afterwards, Alford says she was “deeply embarrassed,” and as she climbed out of the pool she “could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. ‘You shouldn’t have made her do that,’ Dave said. ‘I know, I know,’ I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both.” Alford believes that Kennedy showed “his darker side … when we were among men he knew. That’s when he felt a need to display his power over me.” Kennedy didn’t just have a thing for Social Register girls; he had a thing for humiliating Social Register girls. He also had a thing for humiliating his fellow Irishman, Dave Powers.

Maybe Kennedy wasn’t this much of a creep all that much (though Alford also tells of him once forcing her to take an amyl nitrite “popper” in Bing Crosby’s living room). But the poolside ritual of humiliation is not easy to reconcile with any kind of worldly tolerance for Kennedy’s peccadilloes. Perhaps the fairest conclusion to make is that Kennedy did some good things in his public life (and also some bad), but that he was capable of monstrous cruelty that’s hard to forgive and also hard to equate even with that of successors like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon (or with any in his less polished younger brother Ted, whose own private life had plenty of dark moments but whose public accomplishment ultimately outshone JFK’s). Clinton shared many vices with President Kennedy, but I can’t imagine him ever doing anything like this.

“I can, very easily. So can my readers,” Kathy writes, dubbing Noah’s response a textbook example of liberals as “naive sophisticates:”

As a matter of fact, isn’t one of the most famous quotes about the Clintons that of the female Democrat who claimed she’d have blown Clinton, just to thank him for keeping abortion legal? [Nina Burleigh, then-White House correspondent for Time magazine -- Ed.]

It’s always surprising what liberals claim they “can’t imagine,” despite all the stubborn protestations of “backward, paranoid” right wingers.

You don’t usually have to “imagine” it, guys. It’s usually right in front of you, and you’re just refusing to see it, because we’re the ones showing it to you.

Which dovetails into a related post of mine from November of 2010:

Ann Althouse spots an endless reoccurring cliche amongst Leftwing Elites:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people… that you have nothing but contempt for.

You see this worldview manifested endlessly among the left, whenever you hear the hyperbolic phrase, “I can’t understand why anyone would be a conservative/Republican/libertarian/vote for Bush/vote for Reagan, etc.” Well, why the heck can can’t you? Is it really that difficult to mentally spend a few minutes in our shoes? We’re always asked by the left to celebrate diversity, and to try to understand those not like ourselves. How hard it can be to get a handle on why someone has a different view on say, income tax rates, transfer payments, small business, and government handouts than you do? Or why he likes to get his news from channel #360 on his DirecTV dial than say, channel #202 or #356?

Another example of this mindset can be in the title of Harry Stein’s terrific book last year, which grew out of a conversation he had with a self-described “liberal,” when Harry dared to supply the voice of reason at a dinner party in 2008 and suggest that the young would-be emperor, soul-fixer and lightworker had no clothes.

Perhaps the ultimate mote in a far leftist’s eye can be found here.

Also Related: Paul Rahe at Ricochet on “American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil.”

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In his weekly column, Mark Steyn writes, “The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass:”

Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’ edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be.”

Welcome to Obamacare.

You know what to do next.

Related: “No one wants to believe the president of the United States or any other high governmental official would deliberately lie to the Archbishop of New York. But what other conclusion can a reasonable person reach? That Valerie Jarrett and Kathleen Sebelius made him do it?” Michael Walsh writes:

One of the problems the Right consistently has in dealing with the Left is its touching credulity in their stated motives, instead of assessing their genuine objectives. Like the Archbishop, we’re constantly taken by surprise when the entirely predictable happens. Haven’t any of the princes of the Church read the essential text on the subject of good and evil (and the deception that evil must practice in order to overcome good), Milton’s Paradise Lost?

It’s star was certainly beloved by Saul himself.

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Ace asks a question that all of us have pondered at one point or another in the career of Barack H. Obama. “Has he gone insane?” As Ace notes in his headline, “Obama’s Compromise: I’ll Just Mandate That Employers Contract With Insurers To Cover Contraception For Free, and Hence Employers Cannot Be Said To Be Paying For It:”

The revised Obama mandate will make religious groups contract with insurers to offer birth control and the potentially abortion-causing drugs to women at no cost. The revised mandate will have religious employers refer women to their insurance company for coverage that still violates their moral and religious beliefs. Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide coverage at no cost.Essentially, religious groups will still be mandated to offer plans that cover both birth control and the ella abortion drug

According to Obama administration officials on a conference call this morning, a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

The birth control and abortion-causing drugs will simply be “part of the bundle of services that all insurance companies are required to offer,” White House officials said.

So here’s how this works.

I’m an insurer. Here were your two options, before Obama’s brilliant solution:

I could cover your employees for x dollars.

If you want birth control/abortifacient coverage, we’ll add that rider for y dollars. So this option is x + y dollars.

Obama’s genius solution is:

Hey, we’ll cover your employees for x + y dollars as a baseline. But we’ll toss in abortifacient coverage for 0 dollars.

Uhhh… That x+y is what it cost to have base insurance + birth control/abortifacient coverage. All that’s being done here is that people are lying about the costs — now the insurer and the contracting party lie and pretend the base insurance cost is x + y (which it isn’t; it’s x) and also pretend the cost for the birth control coverage is 0 (which it isn’t; it’s y).

All Obama’s doing is mandating that employers enter into a contract with insurers in which both parties pretend that the base cost of the service is higher than it is, and that abortifacient coverage now costs zero dollars.

Obama’s mandate solution is now just to force the conscience-objectors to lie about it.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey concurs with that last sentence:

Basically, the Obama administration told religious organizations to stop complaining and get in line.  This “accommodation” only attempts to accommodate Obama’s political standing and nothing more.

Update: The LA Times’ Jon Healy calls this new position “magical thinking”:

Here’s where the magical thinking comes in. The following is from the fact sheet the White House released Friday:

Covering contraception saves money for insurance companies by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services. For example, there was no increase in premiums when contraception was added to the Federal Employees Health Benefit System and required of non-religious employers in Hawaii. One study found that covering contraception lowered premiums by 10 percent or more.

Making everyone in a pool carry coverage whether they need it or not spreads the cost, saving money for those who really do need it and who’d choose to carry it if it were merely optional. But costs faced by the insurer are the same — and when the care is provided with no out-of-pocket costs, the insurer’s costs are likely to go up because more people will use it. Such is likely to be the case with contraception.

Also, let me emphasize one point that this does not address.  The government is forcing religious organizations to both pay for and facilitate activities that violate their religious doctrine.  If anyone thinks that passes muster with the First Amendment, that’s even more magical thinking than this funding shell game.

Mr. Obama has engaged in magical thinking throughout his public career. However, I’m not sure if the L.A. Times is the best source to attack him from that angle, lest anyone recall this infamous moment from the paper.

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