Kudos to the Associated Press

For the second time this month, the Associated Press deserves praise for removing the media's collective nose from the Obama Administration's collective brown-spot.

After last night's press conference, the AP published a Fact Check piece pointing out that President Obama does, in fact, share in the responsibility for the enormous debt and deficits our government faces. After all, Obama was in the U.S. Senate when the Wall Street bail-outs began and was hardly a spending-hawk at that time.

At the start of April, the AP called out Obama when he violated a campaign promise against new tax increases. Obama's support of a massive new tobacco tax isn't quite George H.W. Bush's "read my lips" moment, but the principle is exactly the same. Obama won an election by (in part) promising most people that their taxes would go down and not up, yet one of his first orders of business was signing an enormous tax increase.

Too often, the newsmedia has played a blind, overenthusiastic cheerleader to Obama and his team. That's good for Obama's popularity but bad for the country.

The Associated Press, however, has done its job and done it well.