Wires Report Feds Will Wing It With Subsidy Payments to Insurers, Megy

On November 19, Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a congressional committee that "[W]e still have to build the payment systems to make payments to issuers in January" for those who have enrolled in plans through HealthCare.gov. On Black Friday, while almost no one was paying attention, Alex Nussbaum at Bloomberg News reported…
Tom Blumer
December 4th, 2013 11:10 AM

Kimmel: Obama's Given More Speeches About ObamaCare Than Have Signed U

As NewsBusters has been reporting the past few months, late night comics have been having a field day with the disaster that is ObamaCare. On ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday, the host spent a good part of his monologue trashing the program including an observation that “the number of speeches Obama has made about affordable healthcare is greater than the number of people who have actually…
Noel Sheppard
December 4th, 2013 10:26 AM

UPDATED: Networks That Skipped Bashir's Gross Attack on Palin Were Out

UPDATE: Bashir Resigns When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks went ballistic, making the conservative talk show host a centerpiece in their campaign to tarnish Mitt Romney and the GOP as engaging in a “war on women.” However when MSNBC’s Martin Bashir launched his own war on women against Sarah Palin, not a single anchor or reporter from the Big…
Geoffrey Dickens
December 4th, 2013 10:15 AM

'My Name Is Ed Schultz, And I Don't Read Articles I Discuss

MSNBC host Ed Schultz sometimes makes it clear that he shoots his mouth off before he reads what he’s talking about. Take his Monday rant on “The Ed Show” about a Politico article by Mackenzie Weinger about “5 ways to rescue liberal talk radio.” The funniest part of this little “Ask Ed” segment is that Schultz claims the Politico article was loaded with "right-wing consultants," when none of…
Tim Graham
December 4th, 2013 9:05 AM

Scarborough Mocks Chris Matthews' Shrinking Schedule

Call it a case of interview envy--in the context of an ongoing feud between two MSNBC hosts. There has been bad blood between Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews for years, as here, here and here.  On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough took the occasion of Chris Matthews' impending interview of President Obama to mock the way Matthews' on-air schedule has shrunk. In a particularly low blow,…
Mark Finkelstein
December 4th, 2013 8:26 AM

New York Times Skips Reviews of Every Conservative Best-seller On Its

This week's list of New York Times best-selling books proves as  usual that the Times doesn't review conservative best-sellers. The nonfiction list was topped by "Things That Matter," a collection of columns by Charles Krauthammer and then by "Killing Jesus" by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. The children's middle-grade list is led by Rush Limbaugh's "Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims." There…
Tim Graham
December 4th, 2013 6:53 AM

Time and AP Reviews of HealthCare.gov Act As If Security Isn't Even an

How does one do a report on an important commerce-related web site without mentioning serious known security problems which are so bad that respected IT experts warn that it shouldn't be used? Ask Kate Pickert at Time's Swampland blog and Kelli Kennedy at the Associated Press, because that's exactly what they did. Pickert and Kennedy reviewed the new and not much improved HealthCare.gov on…
Tom Blumer
December 3rd, 2013 11:30 PM

Bozell Column: Obama's Picture Perfect Propaganda

It might seem like another day in Tea Party Land when a conservative columnist accuses the Obama White House “airbrushing history” like the “Stalin era” Soviet Union. But the columnist isn’t a conservative. It’s Dana Milbank of the liberal Washington Post, complaining about what’s happened to White House news photographers. He’s not alone. A New York Times photographer has publicly compared…
Brent Bozell
December 3rd, 2013 11:07 PM

Chris Matthews: ‘We're Going To Be Hitting My Biggest Questions With

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, President Obama has chosen to sit down with one of his biggest fans in the news media Thursday. At the beginning of Tuesday’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews promoted the event hysterically saying, “We're going to be hitting my biggest questions with the President” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Noel Sheppard
December 3rd, 2013 8:24 PM

Daily Kos Writer: We Need New Right-Wingers Because the Current Ones H

The Marxist German playwright Bertolt Brecht, apropos of a 1953 situation in which the East German people allegedly had "forfeited the confidence of the government," wondered if it wouldn't be easier "in that case for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?" Daily Kos featured writer Hunter isn't that extreme. He doesn't think America needs a whole new group of people…
Tom Johnson
December 3rd, 2013 7:23 PM

Feds' Three Tentacles in the Common Core (Part

In Part 1 of my series on the Common Core State Standards being infused into 45 state public school systems, I revealed how the feds spent $350 million of taxpayer money, giving grants and waivers to muscle states and local school districts to accept the standards. And that was after 2009, when feds awarded, in the Department of Education's words, "governors approximately $48.6 billion ... in…
Chuck Norris
December 3rd, 2013 7:07 PM

Black Friday: A Dark Night Rises in Our Culture

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." -- John Lennon "Black Friday" was a metaphor beyond the merchants' bottom line. Headlines on last Friday's Drudge Report reflect a culture that is being trampled by the greed and me-only attitude of a growing number of us:
Cal Thomas
December 3rd, 2013 6:54 PM

Sharpton Hits RNC on Rosa Parks Tweet, Milbank: 'Racism' 'Bubbling' fr

On Monday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, host Al Sharpton and the Washington Post's Dana Milbank mocked the Republican National Committee for the wording of a tweet that the group sent out marking the anniversary of Civil Rights Movement icon Rosa Parks defying racist Jim Crow laws: "Today we remember Rosa Parks' bold stand and her role in ending racism." Sharpton picked up on liberal entities…
Brad Wilmouth
December 3rd, 2013 6:49 PM

MSNBC.com Ups Ante in ObamaCare Cheerleading: 'This Website Might Just

As my colleague Jeff Meyer noted earlier this afternoon, msnbc.com has been busy today boosting HealthCare.gov, insisting that the "bug" which made the website nearly inoperable in October and November was now fixed and everything was working just fine. Well now the landing page for the Lean Forward network is hailing HealthCare.gov as the "website [which] might just save your life." The…
Ken Shepherd
December 3rd, 2013 6:35 PM