Yeah, he caught and corrected himself. Too late. When the chips were down, President Obama didn't step up and truly take responsibility for the disastrous rollout of Obamacare. Instead of acting like a leader and the President of the United States, Barack Obama's first impulse was to cast himself as the victim.
In an interview with NBC Political Director Chuck Todd aired on this evening's NBC Nightly News, President Obama said that "I've been burned by a website." View the video after the jump.
If on Election Day 2014, 24% of Americans make Obamacare their #1 issue, Dems would be staring at a massive defeat.
But keen political analyst Ed Schultz, doing an endzone dance over Terry McAuliffe's victory, absolutely exulted today over the fact that "only" 24% of Virginians put Obamacare at the top of their issue list. Ken Cuccinelli closed a double-digit deficit down to three fingernail-biting points last night thanks to Obamacare. Extrapolate that kind of effect across the country and you have a tidal wave sweeping Dems out of office. But good old Ed gloated over the "only" 24%. View the video after the jump.
Political anaylst Charlie Cook bills himself as "non-partisan and independent." But on today's Morning Joe Cook couldn't curb his enthusiasm for Chris Christie. Cook said of Christie that there is "testosterone coming out of every more pore in his body" and that Christie's attitude "inoculates him against being called a RINO, pantywaist liberal Republican."
For good measure, Cook said he would "pay money" to see Christie reach down the throat and pull the lungs out of Tea Party member daring to call Christie a liberal! View the video after the jump.
To a liberal, what's worse than smoking crack? Opposing higher taxes! Admission: I'm libertarian when it comes to drug laws. I believe the War on Drugs has been a big bust, excuse the pun, just like Prohibition was.
That said, I still found hilarious Chris Hayes' statement on his MSNBC show tonight, commenting on the admission by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford that he had smoked crack cocaine, that Ford had done worse things. Among the litany of Ford's failures that were worse than getting on the pipe? Opposing higher taxes and privatizing garbage collection! View the video after the jump.
Too smart to be President. Is that really Barack Obama's problem? Mika Brzezinski thinks so.
On today's Morning Joe, as Mike Barnicle and John Heilemann kicked around the notion, as others have before, that President Obama doesn't much like politics and the people in it, Brzezinski piped up with a different explanation for his aloofness: he's "too smart for the job," she suggested. View the video after the jump.
MISSPEAK 1: to speak (as a word) incorrectly 2: to express oneself imperfectly or incorrectly [e.g., claims now that he misspoke himself]
In an editorial of today, the New York Times couldn't bring itself to say the simple truth: that President Obama lied when he repeatedly assured Americans that, under Obamacare, if they liked their healthcare insurance policies they would be able to keep them. The most the Times was able to admit was that [emphasis added throughout] "Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that." Misspoke. Yes, of course. As you see from the Merriam Webster definition above, the word does not imply any intent to deceive. Indeed, as in the example Merriam Webster offers, to misspeak implies a lack of intent. The editorial gets worse, as you'll see after the jump.
Of all the lame attempts to explain away President Obama's oft-repeated Obamacare lie that "if you like your plan, you can keep it," Melissa Harris-Perry might have come up with the most hilarious: President Obama figured people wouldn't like it!
Yes, that's what MHP actually asserted on her MSNBC show this morning, claiming the Obama administration figured people wouldn't like their plans, and would clamor for the ones offered under Obamacare. Of course the argument still leaves Obama as having lied. Even if if a majority of people with private plans didn't like them, that would still leave millions being forced out of plans they did like. So Obama would still have lied, albeit on a smaller scale. View the video after the jump.
What an odious piece of garbage. Today's Politico, in an article by Todd Purdum, accuses Republicans of "calculated sabotage" of Obamacare, comparing their opposition to the "pattern of 'massive resistance' not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954."
Purdum himself seems to recognize just how loony he comes off, writing "[t]hat may sound like a left-wing conspiracy theory . . . But there is a strong factual basis for such a charge." Sabotage, really? People who understand democracy would call it entirely legitimate opposition to a philosophy and a program that millions of Americans believe undermine what this country should be about. More after the jump.
Nicolle Wallace has yet again demonstrated why she's a Morning Joe kind of Republican.
Two weeks ago, even after the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, Nicolle Wallace wasn't sure she opposed the big-government monstrosity. Today, when Joe Scarborough alluded to Clinton's infamous "what difference does it make?" line about Benghazi, there was Wallace riding to Hillary's defense: "I don't think she meant it that way." View the video after the jump.
When a network's ad—putatively for its own website—extensively features a candidate for office in a high-profile race, at what point does the ad constitute a contribution in kind to that politician's campaign?
The question arises in light of MSNBC's ad for its new website that aired on today's Morning Joe. In the space of 30 seconds, the ad twice featured shots of Wendy Davis, the Dem candidate for Texas governor whose filibuster of a Texas law imposing restrictions on abortion made her an overnight liberal darling. For good measure, the ad also displayed jubiliant crowd reaction to Davis's filibuster. View the video after the jump.
The Hindenburg? The Titanic? Hurricane Sandy on steroids? Any of those might have been a better analogy for the monumental mess that is Obamacare than the lame one Jon Meacham proposed on today's Morning Joe.
The presidential historian somehow sought to analogize the Obamacare fiasco to . . . the classification of ketchup as a vegetable. Huh? View the video after the jump.
Don't take it from conservatives. The co-founder of a "very, very major social-media site" has said the criticism of the Obamacare website is fair because the "technology sucks."
So reported Willie Geist on today's Morning Joe, telling panelists that the person he interviewed was co-founder of a site so major that they would all know it and might have it open on their computers as he spoke. View the video after the jump.
For all his accomplishments, Henry Louis Gates might be doomed to being best remembered as the man whose arrest led to the "Beer Summit." But the Harvard prof had something surprising to say on today's Morning Joe: Gates questioned the need for affirmative action for affluent African-Americans, saying instead such programs should seek to help poor people, regardless of race.
Gates made the personal political, citing the case of his own two daughters, whom Gates described as having a "privileged" life."Do they really need to benefit from affirmative action?", asked Gates rhetorically. View the video after the jump.
So, were they lying, or merely clueless?
On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough disclosed that in off-the-record briefings prior to the rollout of the Obamacare website, Obama administration officials were "extraordinarily confident" of success. They displayed a site that Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said looked "great," "very user friendly" and "very simple." View the video after the jump.
Watch out, Alan Grayson: you've got competition when it comes to uttering the ugliest slur on Tea Party Republicans . . .
Sure, you've compared them to the Klan. But fellow Dem Steve Cohen has upped the ante. On Steve Kornacki's MSNBC show this morning, Cohen called Tea Party congressmen: "domestic enemies" that he took an oath to defend the country against. Did Kornacki challenge Cohen's libel? Hah! He merely observed that Cohen sounded "very pessimistic." View the video after the jump.
It was enough to make a conservative yearn for the good old Bush-era days of "Dissent Is Patriotic" . . .
For there on Morning Joe today was former Obama official Melody Barnes, warning Americans to "back off" their Reagan-inspired opposition to big government in general and Obamacare in particular. Instead, instructed Barnes, Americans should focus on making Obamacare work. View the video after the jump.
Amidst all the blather about Republicans going over the cliff and taking the world with them, a tantalizing bit of truth broke through on today's Morning Joe. Doomsaying notwithstanding, the GOP is actually positioned to do OK in 2014.
Making the comment particularly surprising was its source: none other than Barack Obama's former senior adviser himself—David Axelrod. View the video after the jump.
Nicolle Wallace is the perfect MSNBC kind of Republican: the kind who isn't sure if she opposes Obamacare.
On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough was seeking to make the point that while Republicans are divided over tactics, they are ideologically united in opposition to Obamacare. To demonstrate his thesis, Scarborough asked Wallace whether she supports Obamacare, taking it for granted that she would express her opposition. Amazingly, Wallace responded that she "wasn't sure anymore," then quoted her [former Bush aide] husband who had wondered "what do we hate about it?" She did then catch heself and admitted to not supporting Obamacare on the grounds that the government is not a competent deliverer of healthcare. Too late: Wallace had already betrayed her RINO roots. View the video after the jump.
Did you really have to be a pluperfect political prognosticator to have foreseen that none of Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann or Donald Trump was going to be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee?
Yet on today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough—by way of establishing his fortune-telling street cred—boasted of having made those predictions, before proceeding to claim that: 1. Ted Cruz will not be the 2016 Republican nominee; and 2. there's a "very real chance" that Cruz will break from the GOP and run as an independent. View the video after the jump.
Can you tell that "Bulgarian," "Sunbeam," and "Vladivostok" are different words? Congratulations: you're smarter than the Obamacare website! Just for fun, I tried to create an Obamacare account at Healthcare.gov this morning. At 6:48 AM CDT, I had no trouble getting in. Things were going swimmingly . . . until it came time to choose security questions and provide answers.
As you'll see from the screengrab, I was informed that my account could not be created because "two or more answers to the security questions cannot be the same. You must provide distinct answers to the chosen security questions." President Obama, Secretary Sebelius, or anybody else out there, please tell me, which of the following words are the same: "Bulgarian," "Sunbeam" and "Vladivostok"? Because those are, as you'll see from the screencap after the jump, the three answers I gave. Note: the first time I tried and failed, I supplied real answers, but for purposes of this blog, when I tried again I used fanciful ones. Didn't want the whole world to know that my favorite cuisine is actually Indian. Oops!] More after the jump.
