ObamaCare

MSNBC's supposedly most intelligent "news" anchor almost had a total meltdown on HBO's Real Time Friday.

When repeatedly asked by host Bill Maher and guest Nick Gillespie for her opinion of  Massachusetts' healthcare program, Maddow whined like a little girl, "Leave me alone about RomneyCare, all of you" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

PBS will air “Dollars and Dentists,” a Soros-connected documentary advocating for socialized dental coverage, claiming that there is a lack of affordable dental care that is endangering the lives of millions of children. A press release and promo for the “Frontline” special, which debuts on Junes 26, reveals that in addition to the convenient election year timing, the documentary is hyperbolic, and made in conjunction with a group that gets funding from the the left-wing billionaire.

The narrator for the documentary is an outspoken proponent of lefty propaganda and the whole things is backed by organizations funded, in part, by George Soros. The arguments of “Dollars and Dentists” also closely parallel a CBS program that aired almost four years earlier to the day, during the last presidential election cycle.

The New York Times is disturbed that the blue-collar folks of Pennsylvania haven't swallowed Obama-care. Reporter Abby Goodnough blames conservative ad campaigns for convincing gullible citizens while suggesting the facts are on the side of Obama-care supporters, while opponents harbor "resentments and dark predictions." From the front of Thursday's National section, "Opinion of Health Care Law Reflects Ad Spending":

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule any day now on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far. How the media cover such a decision remains to be seen, but between 2004 and 2008 the Court issued multiple rulings tossing out key elements of George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, the policy centerpiece of that administration.

The MRC studied how the broadcast networks covered those decisions overruling Bush’s policy on detaining terror suspects, looking at the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage from the day each ruling was handed down — June 28, 2004, June 29, 2006 and June 12, 2008. On those nights, the networks aired a total of 15 stories about the Supreme Court rulings, totaling nearly 35 minutes of airtime. The results provide a template for how the networks might cover a decision voiding some or all of President Obama’s health care law — assuming network journalists approach their job without regard to partisanship, that is.

On Wednesday's edition of the Bill Press radio show, Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim put on his best conceited act and expressed that the Supreme Court just doesn't have great brains on it, and they're not qualified to overturn Obamacare. In fact, if they overturn Obamacare, Grim warned, "people's lives are at risk and people will probably die as a result." Conservatism kills.

It's amazing that Grim would say it's the Supreme Court with the failing brains, since he originally boasted (before oral arguments) that Obamacare would be upheld 6 to 3. Now he doesn't believe that, because the Justices are too stupid to rule on it, especially Antonin Scalia: [Video and transcript below]

Given two chances, New York Times reporters Jonathan Weisman and Michael Shear couldn't identify the universal-health-care backers Families USA as liberal in their Friday piece on what happens after the Supreme Court's imminent ruling on the constitutionality of Obama-care: "Parties Plan Next Move Once Supreme Court Rules on Health Care." Yet they had no problem spotting conservatives on the other side.

With the president's signature "achievement" on life support, The New York Times decided to bury the story in the Friday front-page article "Approval Rating for Justice Hits Just 44% in New Poll." Times reporters Adam Liptak and Allison Kopicki attacked the most prestigious institution in the country, claiming "the public is skeptical about life tenure for the justices, with 60 percent agreeing with the statement that appointing Supreme Court justices for life is a bad thing because it gives them too much power. One-third agreed with a contrary statement, that life tenure for justices “is a good thing because it helps keep them independent from political pressures.”   

While the Times seems to insist the court is losing public prestige, it doesn't want to report on how ObamaCare is still a flop with the public. They save this for paragraph 16:  "41 percent of Americans want the Supreme Court to overturn the entire health care law passed in 2010, while another 27 percent want the court to throw out the part of the law that requires most people to buy coverage. The poll, conducted by the New York Times and CBS News, reveals that more respondents disapprove of the law than approve, 48 percent to 34 percent."  

National "Public" Radio has barely touched on the 43 Catholic organizations that filed lawsuits against the Obama administration, but it continues to be a noisy sounding board for leftist nuns and their supporters. On Friday, NPR offered more than 14 minutes of air time to the left-wing forces.

On the afternoon talk show Tell Me More, NPR devoted nine minutes and 47 seconds to a segment they titled "Born to Be Wild: Catholic Nuns Hit the Road." These "wild" nuns were celebrated for opposing the Paul Ryan budget with a bus tour. Once again, NPR's honored guest was Sister Simone Campbell of Network, the "social justice lobby." Martin asked Sister to get out a club (or a ruler?) and whack Ryan:

Is the New York Times trying to soften up the Supreme Court before its Obama-care ruling, which may come later in June and could see the law declared unconstitutional? An unusual poll conducted by the Times and poll partner CBS News and plastered on Friday's front page is food for thought.

Friday's off-lead by Adam Liptak and Allison Kopicki insisted, "Approval Rating For Justices Hits Just 44% In Poll -- Decline Spans 25 Years -- Role of Personal Views Is Seen in Survey on Supreme Court." Yet the paper buried the continuing strong opposition to Obama-care. So why did the Times lead off with the relatively obscure angle on Supreme Court justices?

Last month 43 Catholic institutions across America joined together to defend the First Amendment and filed a total of twelve lawsuits against the Administration in order to protect the right to freedom of religion on behalf of all Americans. 

This is the most significant religious lawsuit in U.S. history and Christian leaders all across America have joined in support of the Catholic institutions.  This lawsuit is not a single action by a few “out of touch religious leaders,” as the liberal national media would like to portray it. 

While the networks largely ignored 43 Catholic institutions suing the Obama administration over the ObamaCare contraception mandate, since news broke on May 25 of the Pope's butler leaking classified Vatican documents, those same networks saw fit to provide 13 stories in 5 days proclaiming "another black eye for the Vatican" and supposed "corruption at some of the highest levels." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

ABC News lead the charge, with a total of six reports from May 26 through 28. NBC followed close behind with five reports, one of which was a news brief, from May 25 through 29. CBS had the lightest coverage of the controversy, with only two reports on May 28. CBS was also the only one of the three networks to provide any coverage of the Catholic lawsuit, offering a 19-second news brief on the May 21 Evening News and an interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan on the May 23 This Morning.  

Don’t look for sophistication in The Washington Post’s coverage of the Catholic lawsuits against ObamaCare. Religion columnist Lisa Miller began on Saturday: “Mommy and daddy are fighting, and the anguished children don’t know where to turn.”

“A small group of very conservative bishops has hijacked the church, or at least the public voice of the church,” Miller complained. “The bishops are playing the role of the authoritarian father. In case after case, their message to the faithful is ‘Do it because I say so.’” Mommy, naturally, is represented as the people who support Obama or favor ongoing "dialogue" with Obama:

The broadcast media's blackout on news of the Catholic Church's lawsuit against the Obama administration continues apace, while the news media covers much more important events like who won American Idol.

So it's no wonder that MRCTV's Dan Joseph found only one person yesterday who knew about the lawsuit. Watch the video in the embed below the page break.

Updated with new statements | Fury over the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts’ continued refusal to report the lawsuits Catholic entities have filed against the Obama administration has spread beyond the Media Research Center watchdog group and Catholic leaders to 11 additional Christian leaders equally concerned about this decision to deliberately not report national news. Below are statements released by FRC’s Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer of American Values and nine more leaders.

On NBC’s Tonight Show Tuesday, host Jay Leno battled former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) about the value of ObamaCare.

By the end of the debate, the former Republican presidential candidate marvelously got Leno to admit that he wouldn’t want the government running his television program (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

President Obama's ham-handed, laissez faire handling of his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare, "cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader," argued retiring one-term Sen. James Webb (D-Va.). Webb.

"If you were going to do something of this magnitude, you have to do it with some clarity, with a clear set of objectives from the White House," reporter Karen Tumulty quoted Webb, noting he made his comments Wednesday at "a breakfast organized by Bloomberg News." Webb held out ObamaCare as a key reason why the president may ultimately be unable to keep Virginia in the Democratic win column in the 2012 presidential race. But alas, Tumulty's reporting was consigned to six paragraphs and printed on page A4 in the Election 2012 digest.

It's not every day that the ombudsman for one of the nation's elite newspapers puts, front and center, his publication's angst about publishing information counter to the Obama administration's spin, but there it is, today, in the Washington Post.

The Post's ombudsman, Patrick D. Pexton, frets that conservative bloggers overhyped a “modest” little story on a think tank's study that concludes that Obamacare will add at least $340 billion to the deficit over 10 years, not save $132 billion as promised by the Obama administration and backers of the law.

New York Times former Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse appeared on the CBS morning show Saturday to defend Barack Obama's unprecedented attack on the "unelected" Supreme Court and hold to her much-mocked belief, first presented in her March 21 column for nytimes.com, that ObamaCare opponents are "simply wrong" and their argument "analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection." A week later, that "weak" argument emerged triumphant during Supreme Court arguments, demolishing the White House's rationale for ObamaCare.

First, Greenhouse put the best spin on Obama's attack on the Supreme Court:

A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 2/3rds of Americans want at least a part of the ObamaCare overhaul tossed by the Supreme Court when it decides HHS v. Florida in June. Thirty-eight percent of respondents in the poll want the entire law thrown out while 29 percent say just a part of it being thrown out would suffice.

Yet rather than lead with these numbers in their story today, Washington Post reporters Robert Barnes and Scott Clement chose a question from the April 5-8 poll that shows 50 percent of Americans think the Court "will rule on the health-care reform case mainly on the basis... of their partisan political views."

NBC and CBS completely skipped a new report indicating that President Obama's health care law will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt. ABC's Good Morning America on Tuesday allowed a mere 17 seconds to the revelation that the law could balloon the deficit by $340 billion.

News reader Josh Elliott swiftly explained, "And President Obama's health care law could up costing a lot more than previously expected, at least according to one new study. It found that the law could add some $340 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade." However, he also parroted talking points that, according to the White House, the study was simply "new math." This was the only mention on GMA. NBC's Today and CBS This Morning ignored the story.

Not at all surprisingly, Georgetown University professor and MSNBC contributor Michael Eric Dyson on Sunday made the case that the criticism of President Obama's harsh remarks to the Supreme Court this week were racially motivated.

Fortunately for the sane component of those that view ABC's This Week, George Will and Peggy Noonan were there to add some desperately needed reason (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The fact that CNN's senior legal analyst squared off against a conservative legal scholar should be telling for the network's liberal bias. On Thursday night's Anderson Cooper 360, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin was confronted by Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice over his defense of President Obama's comments on a pending Supreme Court case.

"Jeff, do you know another President of the United States during a case that was argued and pending that made a statement about how the outcome of the case can be and talking about unelected judges?" Sekulow grilled Toobin. "And calling someone that would strike the law as unconstitutional 'judicial activist'?" [Video below the break. Audio here.]

No "embarrassment" here. Former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, last spotted (before the Supreme Court's arguments on Obama-care) calling skeptics of the law's constitutionality "simply wrong," was defiant in her online column Wednesday, even after the administration's case fell embarrassingly flat. In "'Embarrass the Future?'"(the headline is a quote from Chief Justice John Roberts on the Court's controversial "strip-search" decision) she still thinks Obama-care will prevail.

Greenhouse gathered much mockery for her column two weeks ago calling Obama-care opponents "simply wrong" in their belief that the legislation is unconstitutional, their case "rhetorically powerful but analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection."

On Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams accused a federal judge of bringing politics into the judicial process simply by ordering the Justice Department to explain controversial comments President Obama made against the Supreme Court: "Politics are ideally supposed to stay out of the nation's courtrooms, but that's not what happened this week in a federal courtroom in Texas."  

In report that followed, correspondent Pete Williams proclaimed: "The political controversy spilled into a Texas federal court, where the rules are designed to filter out politics, interrupting arguments about a challenge to part of the Obama health care law." Williams noted how Judge Jerry Smith "put a Justice Department lawyer on the spot" to explain the President's attack on the court system and made sure to point out that Smith was "a Reagan appointee."