Health Care

In an MSNBC interview today, Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio's longtime Supreme Court watcher, attempted to portray the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision as possibly wide-ranging, and even advised viewers that Anthony Kennedy's presence on the court may be the only thing preventing it from bringing in an era of sex and "foreign origin" discrimination by "hundreds and hundreds and…

On Monday’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC, substitute host and NBC national correspondent  Peter Alexander gave Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz the floor to sound off on the rulings from the Supreme Court on religious freedom and public employee unions. Not surprisingly, he refused to challenge the DNC Chair or even play devil’s advocate. Nor did Alexander…

On Monday's This Hour, CNN's John Berman underlined that the Supreme Court's ruling against the Obama administration's contraceptive mandate was "another setback to the administration, in what has been a difficult year for this White House." Berman later asserted that "this has to be very frustrating for them. They feel blocked politically, legally, foreign policy-wise. Pretty much, everywhere…

USA Today reporter Richard Wolf's afternoon coverage of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision this afternoon appeared to be completely ignorant of the dire financial consequences which would have been visited on the company had it lost today. He also allowed unscientific and objectively wrong arguments about conception to be advanced by those who wanted to see Hobby Lobby defeated.…

After Friday's World News on ABC ignored the White House report on the infamous problems with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Saturday's Good Morning America on ABC also ignored the scandal, while CBS This Morning Saturday and NBC's Today show -- both of which are two-hour programs - only ran short briefs, the one on CBS totaling 25 seconds and the one on NBC 19 seconds. By contrast, the…

Friday's World News on ABC glossed over the release of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Rob Nabors's report on the scandal at the Veterans Administration. President Obama had sent Nabors to look into the long wait times at veterans hospitals nationwide. Instead, the evening newscast set aside almost two minutes of air time to a woman, who is eight months pregnant, competing in a track and…

Sounding a familiar theme at the Associated Press ahead of awful economic news, Christopher Rugaber and Martin Crutsinger prepared a column in advance of tomorrow's final report on the economy's first-quarter economic contraction reminding us, with far more certainy than is justified, that "A GRIM US ECONOMIC PICTURE IS BRIGHTENING." Guys, before you "brighten," you first have to step out of…

Up a creek without a paddle. That pretty much describes the situation next year facing states that decided to set up their own Obamacare exchanges. And who is reporting this gloomy outlook? None other than one of the biggest media cheerleaders for Obamacare, Sarah Kliff of General Electric Vox. Kliff delivers the sad news in a story appropriately titled, "States don't know how they'll pay for…

Hillary Clinton is not as complex as the universe, but she's Big and Important enough for Peter Beinart to call his 4,600-word National Journal piece on her hypothetical presidency "A Unified Theory of Hillary" and appear to mean it (mostly) seriously. The article deals more with Hillary's personality than with her ideology (for what it's worth, Beinart classifies Hillary, along…

When your fellow journalists won't report the news, you get tripped up when you try to do your job. That's the likely takeaway from Martin Crutsinger's report on the government's May Monthly Treasury Statement yesterday at the Associated Press. The AP, like most establishment press outlets, has virtually if not completely ignored an inconvenient and alarming Obamacare-related statement in a…

On Tuesday, June 10, the Obama Administration issued a delay that will allow 18 states not to implement a portion of ObamaCare’s small business health insurance exchange until 2016. Despite the delay, which was issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, all three network evening news broadcasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored the story on Tuesday evening. 

In a video segment (HT Twitchy) entitled "How Low Can You Go?" on MSNBC's "Last Word," which the network's web site corrected as this post was being drafted, substitute host Ari Melber, filling in for Lawrence O'Donnell, is seen bemoaning the resignation of a Democratic legislator in Virginia. An accompanying visual originally showed a map of North Carolina. Apparent the answer to the map's…

In a Monday National Journal column about how many Democrats are allegedly saying they have "quit" on Obama — claims I find quite hollow, given that no one asserting this has yet had the guts to go on the record — Ron Fournier quotes "a senior White House official" with a head-shaking take on the Veterans Administration scandal. Specifically, "Questioning why the Veterans Affairs Department…

Sheesh! Talk about poor timing... On Sunday, Sarah Klifff of General Electric Vox gleefully reported on the "success" of the Connecticut Obamacare website. In fact so successful according to Kliff that Access Health CT is now thinking about selling its software to other states. However, unknown to Kliff who trumpeted her story with "How Connecticut built a healthcare.gov that actually works…