President Barack Obama, seen here on Feb. 6, cajoled Republicans into a health reform summit during a live Super Bowl interview. AFP/Chris Kleponis

The White House spend a full year promising transparency while subverting it.

And now, after a year’s worth of closed backroom meetings and midnight holiday weekend legislative sessions in which Republicans had severely curtailed ability to offer amendments, President Obama wants to invite them to a televised health care summit to talk about the GOP alternatives he said didn’t exist?

Please:

One of the first things that Barack Obama did after being swept into office on the wings of "hopenchange" was to sign an executive order that would close the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President Obama gave a one-year deadline after which, he triumphantly promised us, the facility would be closed. Well, we are at one year plus ten days after the signing of the order and Gitmo is still open. Yet few stories expressing outrage about this lapsed promise have made the rounds in the Old Media.

On January 22, 2009, Obama signed the Executive Order that gravely asserted that Gitmo would be closed "no later than 1 year from the date of this order." That was January 22, 2009. It is now February 3, 2010. I'd say a year and ten days after the order was signed just might constitute more than "no later than one year," wouldn't you?

Naturally, last year when Obama signed this order the Old Media covered it quite heavily. It was big news and was represented as an example of Obama's fulfilling a campaign promise. All one need do is type "close Guantanamo executive order" into Google and page after page of Old Media coverage of the signing of the EO will be discovered.

Certainly the Old Media was all aflutter over the signing in 2009. The Washington Post, for instance, trumpeted that Obama's action, "drew praise from human rights groups as well as politicians and statesmen around the globe."

MSNBC breathlessly informed its readers that, "President Barack Obama on Thursday moved quickly to undo a contentious Bush administration national security program…" For its part, the AP had a report posted on the CBS News page with a headline screaming that, "Obama Upends Bush, Will Close Guantanamo." And that's just the news, not the commentariat. Treatment was even more adulatory by political commentators throughout the Old Media.

"Did you cry?" the pained and frowning Dan Rather asked the "bereaved" father during the 60 Minutes drama."A father never runs out of tears," Juan (actually, the voice of Juan's drama school-trained translator) sniffled back to Dan. And the 60 Minutes prime-time audience could hardly contain their own sniffles.

Here's what America didn't see:

"Most of the questions Dan Rather was asking Elian's father during that 60 Minutes interview were being handed to him by Gregory Craig," recalls Pedro Porro, who served as Rather's in-studio translator during the taping of the famous interview. Dan Rather would ask the question in English into Porro's earpiece and Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian's heavily-guarded father. "Juan Miguel Gonzalez was surrounded by Castro security agents the entire time he was in the studio with Rather and Craig."

Officially, Gregory Craig served as attorney for Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. This humble man worked as a hotel doorman in a nation where the average monthly salary is $17. The high-rolling Gregory Craig, a Bill Clinton crony and until recently Obama's White House Counsel, then worked for Washington D.C.'s elite firm, Williams & Connolly, one of America's highest-priced law firms.

Upon accepting the case, Craig had flown to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. Craig's remuneration, we learned shortly after his return, came from a "voluntary" fund set up by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and "administered" by the National Council of Churches. The same MSM reporters and pundits, who routinely erupt with snide snorts midway through any statement by any Republican, reported this item with a straight face. But then, this media also reports that Castro's Cuba provides free and exquisite health-care. And the explanation of Craig's compensation issued from the same source. So no surprise.

EW: "Avatar" is the perfect eco-terrorism recruiting tool."

JC: Good, good. I like that one. I consider that a positive review. I believe in ecoterrorism."

Is he joking (there's no - laughs - insert included in the text)?

Would he like it if someone bombed a McDonald's selling some of his "Avatar" goodies? Surely they're clogging the planet's ecosystem, right?Heck, some have accused the burger chain of treating its food source inhumanely, too. Is a blue-skinned Na'vi toy biodegradable?

What if someone dies during an ecoterrorist attack? Or if people lose their jobs because of it?

Not all acts of eco-terrorism are created equal. Some are enhanced forms of civil disobedience. But surely someone as smart as Cameron knows not to endorse such tactics without a significant disclaimer.

So where is the follow up question? And has success turned Cameron's mind to mush?

The allegation is false, of course. Bill Kristol summarily disposes of the allegation and William Jacobson collects the comments of unamused liberal pundits who have condemned it.

Jim Hoft notes that that the Brown campaign has filed a complaint against the Massachusetts Democratic Party under state law prohibiting false statements against political candidates that are designed or tend "to aid or to injure or defeat such candidate," with a penalty of to $1,000 fine and up to six months in prison. Jim has also posted the Washington Times video of the Brown campaign press conference announcing the complaint.

The Democrats' gambit reeks of desperation. It suggests that Democrats know Coakley is down and that the dynamics of the race need to be reversed for Coakley to win.

Mr. Ailes, the son of a foreman at the Packard Electric plant in Warren, Ohio, described his upbringing with three words: “God, country, family” and said that credo was responsible for the success of Fox News.

“I built this channel from my life experience,” Mr. Ailes, 69, said. “My first qualification is I didn’t go to Columbia Journalism School. There are no parties in this town that I want to go to.”

Mr. Ailes majored in radio and television at Ohio University and worked for “The Mike Douglas Show,” where at age 27 he met then-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon in 1968.

“The camera doesn’t like you,” he told Mr. Nixon, according to “Crazy Like a Fox,” a book by Scott Collins about Fox News.

“It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” Mr. Nixon said.

All three men understood the power of visuals in communicating the strengths of the presidents they served on the campaign trail and in the office of the presidency.

I don't know where David Axelrod has been since President Obama began his ten-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but it is safe to say he is goofing off as much as his boss.

Since the Christmas Day terror attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on approach to Detroit, Axelrod and Team Obama have failed in their most basic duty of reassuring the American public that the president is on the job. It took four days, from when the attack occurred Friday morning Hawaii time to Monday afternoon Washington time, for Obama to be seen 'on the job' when he made a statement before the media about the terror attack.

In Obama's absence, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were sent out on the Sunday talk shows (except for Fox) to spin the administration line that "the system worked."

That PR strategy was mocked across the boards, forcing the administration to put Obama in front of the cameras for the first time since he went on vacation.

[click for detail]

1. CLIMATEGATE

2. THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT

3. FORT HOOD AND ISLAMIC EXTREMISM IN THE U.S.

4. ACORN and SEIU

….

It was also a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result Washington, rejecting ``business as usual,'' finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars at it. To be sure, it was a year that saw plenty of bad news. But in almost every instance, there was offsetting good news:

BAD NEWS: The economy remained critically weak, with rising unemployment, a severely depressed real-estate market, the near-collapse of the domestic automobile industry and the steep decline of the dollar. GOOD NEWS: Windows 7 sucked less than Vista.

BAD NEWS: The downward spiral of the newspaper industry continued, resulting in the firings of thousands of experienced reporters and an apparently permanent deterioration in the quality of American journalism.

GOOD NEWS: A lot more people were tweeting.