N&O's “Lipstick” On Obama’s Earmarks Signing

McClatchy’s liberal/leftist Raleigh News & Observer went heavy on the “lipstick” when reporting President Obama’s signing of the latest pork-laden deficit spending bill passed by the Dem-controlled Congress.

Headline: Obama: No earmarks, after this

Subhead: He says the spending bill, which includes thousands of them, is too important to wait.

“Too important to wait?” Yes, isn’t everything the Obama administration wants to d “too important to wait.”

The headlines are so Obama-supportive they parrot precisly what Team Obama said to justify his breaking a promise he’d made many times.

The story by McClatchy reporters Steven Thomma and David Lightman begins - - -
As a candidate, Barack Obama once said that a president has to be able to do more than one thing at a time. Wednesday he proved it, though not in the way he had in mind.

He criticized pork-barrel spending in the form of "earmarks," urging changes in the way that Congress adopts the spending proposals. Then he signed a spending bill that contains nearly 9,000 of them, some that members of his own staff shoved in last year when they were still members of Congress.

"Let there be no doubt, this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability," Obama said.

He said, however, that it was crucial for him to sign the $410 billion bill as soon as it arrived at the White House from Congress because it's needed to finance much of the government for the rest of this fiscal year. It was largely written last year but was held back while Republican George W. Bush was president because he opposed it.

The rest of the story’s here.

A few things worth noting:

The story doesn’t mention that earmarks Obama as Senator had put in the bill were stripped out so as not to embarrass him.

The story devoted only one paragraph near the end to criticism of the bill by a taxpayer advocate group.

The story included only one paragraph in which only one Republican is quoted criticizing the bill.

The story doesn’t mention until the last paragraph that one of the principal earmark "porkers" who stuffed his into the bill last year when it was being put together was then Senator Joe Biden.

At the Anything for Obama N&O it’s “Hope and Change” and heavy on the "lipstick."