Health Care

Somewhere, Lyndon Johnson is smiling.  Howard Dean has provided perfect proof of LBJ's adage that when it comes to potential adversaries, "it's better to have them inside the tent p---ing out than outside the tent" doing the reverse.Barack Obama chucked Dean out of his DNC chairmanship. Adding insult to injury, PBO denied the good doctor any role in his health care initiative. Now, it's payback…

Did someone make this "Declare Your Devotion To a Dem Day" at MSNBC?  You have to wonder.  During the network's noon hour, Dr. Nancy Snyderman declared herself a "big fan" of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.Not to be outdone, during the following hour Andrea Mitchell ended her interview with Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Ia.) by thanking him profusely—and I mean at length—for having pushed through passage…

Liberal hopes for a quick health care bill are in collapse, as Senate Democrats push any floor action off until the fall, a move House Democrats may match this week. But if the Obama White House is upset that their plans for a huge expansion of government health care have been delayed, they surely cannot complain about the media coverage.Last week, a new study by the Media Research Center’s…

[Update, 2:15 pm Eastern: Audio and video clips from the segment added.] HBO’s Bill Maher, after being asked during a segment on Monday’s Situation Room on CNN to explain his recent “soulless vampire bastards” moniker of the current health care system, pushed for President Obama’s “reform” plan, paraphrasing the Democrat’s own words: “We can’t do nothing- doing nothing is actually worse.” He also…

The New York Times' Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and staunch champion of government medicine a la the Canadian model of our neighbors to the north.  Just this past Saturday in "Toyota, Moving Northward" he flogged the advantages of the single-payer system Canada offers.  He postulated that one reason why the Japanese auto maker is locating it's new RAV4 plant in Ontario is…

In highlighting a new study which found $147 billion a year is spent on obesity-related health care and obese people spend $1,400 more a year for health services, ABC and CBS on Monday night couldn't resist interjecting a plug for imposing a tax on soda to bring in revenue to pay for ObamaCare. ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi asserted “health officials seem to like the idea of a federal soda tax” since “…

At least one journalist isn't impressed by the health care initiatives of  the White House and congressional Democrats, and is warning of consequences should they succeed. CNBC's Maria Bartiromo was on MSNBC's July 27 "Morning Joe" to preview her upcoming special "Meeting of the Minds: The Future of Health Care," set to debut on July 27. According to the Bartiromo, who also anchors "Closing Bell…

CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux made an apparent Freudian slip in response to a sound bite on health care reform from Senator Mitch McConnell on Monday’s American Morning. Malveaux initially labeled McConnell’s remark, in which the Senate Minority Leader cracked that the “only thing bipartisan about the measures so far is the opposition to them,” as a “snippy little phrase there” [audio clip…

A week after ABC anchor Dan Harris hailed how “Senator Ted Kennedy is using his own battle against brain cancer to make an emotional pitch for health care reform. Writing in Newsweek, Kennedy called it 'the cause of my life,'” Sunday's World News devoted a full story to Kennedy's cause as Harris' tease framed Kennedy's big government agenda in the most-benign light: “In the game. An ailing Ted…

In late April, the Associated Press's Calvin Woodward, in a "Fact Check" report ("Obama disowns deficit he helped shape"), hit President Barack Obama's claims that he and his party don't deserve much of the blame for the size of this year's deficit pretty hard. It was such a surprise that I wondered who had put truth serum in his coffee.Well, you might have guessed it would be Calvin Woodard…

ABC, CBS and NBC all led Friday night with President Obama’s decision to appear in the White House press room to backtrack on the fury he inflamed by presuming “stupidity” by the police in the Professor Henry Gates alleged “racial profiling” incident, but only Katie Couric trumpeted Obama’s appearance in the White House briefing room -- which the CBS Evening News ran for an uninterrupted four…