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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!

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.

“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?

“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?

• “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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

James Pethokoukis has your scary-ass chart of the day and writes:

Tell me what U.S. consumers are thinking, Reuters:

Americans felt worse about their personal finances in early February, even as they saw a light at the end of the tunnel for the jobs market, a survey released on Friday showed. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan overall index of consumer sentiment fell to 72.5 in early February from January’s 75.0, which was the highest level since February 2011. The latest figure fell short of the median forecast of 74.5 among economists polled by Reuters. ”This pattern of responses – less favorable current assessments and more favorable prospects – is not surprising. It simply indicates that consumers find their current situation all the harder to bear when improvement is finally in sight,” said survey director Richard Curtin said in a statement.

When you drill down into these numbers, you find out two things. First, consumers are still pretty dour. Most of the drop in the index was caused by a decline in the current conditions index, which came in at 79.6 vs.  84.2 previously. Indeed, 45 percent of respondents said they were worse off financially than a year ago, up from 41 percent in January and 39 percent in February 2011.

Second, the drop would have been much worse if not for much greater optimism about the job market, with 34 percent of respondents saying they’ve been hearing good things about employment. This, Barclays Capital notes, was the highest percentage in the history of the survey. And 32 percent said that they expected better business conditions a year from now, which was the highest reading since May. Finally, 31 percent expected lower unemployment levels in the next 12 months, which was the largest percentage since 1984.

So people think today stinks, but tomorrow will be way better.

Read the whole thing.