Jeff Shreiber also picked this up…

Sen. Joe Biden gave an interview on Friday to WFTV-Channel 9’s Barbara West:

Apparently the Obama team didn’t like that Ms. West asked very pointed questions, such as:

• Does Sen. Obama regret having said that he’d like to “spread the wealth around?”
• Does the Democratic ticket agree with “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (as is commonly quoted from the Communist Manifesto)?

WFTV news director Bob Jordan said, “When you get a shot to ask these candidates, you want to make the most of it. They usually give you five minutes.”

Jordan said political campaigns in general pick and choose the stations they like. And stations often pose softball questions during the satellite interviews.

“Mr. Biden didn’t like the questions,” Jordan said. “We choose not to ask softball questions.”

Jordan added, “I’m crying foul on this one.”

Why? Because:

“This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election,” wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign.

I would draw a different conclusion on this than what Jeff discusses. Over our past history, we have had numerous instances where the press has not done its job adequately or a given candidate simply refused to answer questions either by explicitly refusing to do so or covertly by way of constantly repeating talking points.

No matter how you look at it, it is truly up to we the people to be demanding better from those whose responsibility and duty could be to ultimately represent us before the rest of the world.

To bring this back around to the issue of full disclosure by candidates, here we have a Presidential candidate — Sen. Barack Obama — who has released neither his full vault birth certificate, medical records, any collegiate records, and no one with whom he has associated over the past few decades that he actually wants to be seen.

There’s not even a recent publicly-shown picture of he and his maternal grandmother. Says a lot about the man about which nothing is empirically known, doesn’t it?

-Phil

cbs3.com had another interview with the dear Senator as well: