Appearing on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Thursday afternoon, Jeanne Cummings, Deputy Managing Editor for Bloomberg News, decided to attack the GOP over their supposed problem with female voters.

The Bloomberg reporter argued that the GOP has “moved the abortion debate into birth control. This is a huge step where women -- that's a threshold issue for women. That’s about birth control, controlling your life. This is being in control of your life. And they want to talk about taking that away? That's a whole different conversation than abortion.” [See video below.] 

The Golden Age of Obamacare has apparently not led to the Golden Age of access to medical care anywhere, any time its promoters promised. Thanks to non-payments, the true enrollment numbers aren't what we've been told. The networks patients can access — approved by government regulators — are often highly restricted. Sky-high-deductibles are present in most Obamacare plans before any kind of reimbursed coverage kicks in. Finally, since this is for the time being a country where people usually can't be forced to provide money-losing service, many doctors are refusing to see Obamacare-"covered" patients.

Since things aren't working out as wonderfully as planned, the left and the Obama administration are on the prowl for scapegoats. The easiest targets are the insurance companies, some of whom foolishly thought that being on the Obamacare team would buy them immunity. According to a Wednesday Associated Press story by Tom Murphy, they're being charged with chasing sick people away — even though it appears, from a sentence eight paragraphs into the dispatch, that it's not financially advantageous for them to keep such patients out.

World News anchor and long-time ABC journalist Diane Sawyer signed-off for the last time on Wednesday night. The host's final show included a music montage as she offered a behind the scenes look at how the program is created. Sawyer praised World News as "the flagship broadcast of ABC where Peter Jennings created a signature of such curiosity and courage." 

Talking to viewers, Sawyer said of the people behind her show: "Determination and the certainty of purpose: They're doing it for you." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Sawyer joined ABC in 1989 and if there's been one constant during her long career, it's fawning, credulous reporting on dictators. On February 19, 2008, she cooed over Fidel Castro: "From a tiny island, a larger than life personality....Castro knew life is a stage and played the part of the dashing revolutionary, coming to New York, getting rock star treatment." 

In an interview with Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown on Thursday, host and incoming Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd proposed a cause for the GOP's difficulty in attracting women voters: "...do the arguments about contraception end up...putting the party on mute with those same women voters who may like your economic proposals but say, 'You know what? There's just too many crazy white guys who have crazy theories about my reproductive system and I'm not listening.'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Priebus rejected the notion: "No, I don't think that's the case at all." Todd continued, this time imagining the thoughts of Hispanic voters: "And Hispanics, same thing. Hispanics who maybe on some social issues would be with you, but the immigration talk says, 'You know what? I can't trust because they've got a whole bunch of crazy guys that talk crazy on immigration.' Isn't that an issue?"

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is out with a new book in which she claims several of her male colleagues made comments about her weight following the birth of her second child. CBS This Morning eagerly jumped on Gillibrand’s story which was filled with numerous quotes from anonymous sources, a fact that CBS didn’t bother to question when promoting the Democrat’s allegations. 

On Thursday, August 28, co-host Gayle King introduced a segment by proclaiming “polls show that Americans have a very low opinion of Congress and this next story is probably not going to help that very much. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand says fellow legislators made rude and sexist comments to her about her weight.” [See video below.]

The New York Times tried to keep the politicized hit job against Texas Gov. Rick Perry alive in Wednesday's edition, insisting the dubious partisan indictment (from a Democratic district attorney's office that has filed failed  charges against prominent national GOP figures) actually has merit, with a "complicated back story" and "deep roots," while pouting that Perry's team has had "substantial success in the court of public opinion" so far. No thanks to the overexcited Times coverage.

Reporter David Montgomery filed "Texas v. Perry Emerges From Years of Struggle Over Anticorruption Unit," a follow-up to his Tuesday print edition hit. (By contrast, the Washington Post has limited its recent Perry coverage to blogs and Associated Press briefs.)

The hypersensitive leftists who screamed in social media at The New York Times over using the term “no angel” to describe Michael Brown after he was shot dead in Ferguson ought to read Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple.

Wemple took the “no angel” term into a Nexis search of the Times archives and found that somehow black columnist Charles Blow wasn’t Twitter-harassed when he described convicted killer Clayton Lockett (also black) as “no angel,” underlining that the term can be a way of clearing the throat on the way to sympathy, a "yes, but" and not a vicious insult:

In a Wednesday report on the Congressional Budget Office's downward revision of this year's predicted gross domestic product growth to a dismal 1.5 percent, the Associated Press's Andrew Taylor acted as if the Obama administration's prediction of 2.6 percent still has a realistic chance of occurring.

While one never wants to absolutely say never, the administration's higher prediction would require annualized growth to come in at roughly 4.3 percent during the second half of this year — something virtually no one is predicting. It would also rely on the second quarter, initially reported at 4.0 percent in July's first release, not to be revised downward significantly. The government's second iteration of GDP growth will be released at 8:30 this morning. Excerpts from Taylor's report follow the jump.

Chris Matthews devoted a segment during his MSNBC show Hardball on Wednesday evening to the tragic shooting death of a firearms instructor at a Arizona gun range after a nine-year-old girl accidently shot him with an Uzi submachine gun. Instead of discussing how tragic this incident was or possible safety measures to take in the future, Matthews and his guests chose to rail against the National Rifle Association (NRA) for somehow being connected to this terrible incident.

At the conclusion of the six-and-a-half-minute segment, Matthews shamefully declared: “This is the slippery slope, what we're watching. This is where you get when you go all the way with gun rights. All the way is what it looks like – take a look at that girl. That's a slippery slope to hell.” [MP3 audio here; Video below]

In his rush to flame-broil Burger King as an unpatriotic fast-food joint looking to skip out on paying its taxes to Uncle Sam, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews sought to enlist the famously pro-free market, pro-capitalism Wall Street Journal. The only problem is his claim is 100 percent Grade A baloney.

"The Wall Street Journal lead editorial today came out against it.... The lead editorial today, surprisingly, attacked this tax scheme," Matthews insisted to guest David Corn of the leftist Mother Jones magazine. In point of fact, the Journal editorial board slammed not corporate "inversion" schemes but the current U.S. tax code, which it called "the reigning world champion in punishing investment and discouraging job creation." [MP3 audio here; video embedded below page break]