Online Media

The following sentence appeared in a writeup on the ongoing failure known as HealthCare.gov by Politico reporters Kyle Cheney, Jason Millman and Jennifer Haberkorn: "President Barack Obama has gotten surprisingly few questions about the enrollment problems as the country — and Republican critics of the health law — focused on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling battle." Gosh,…

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this government shutdown has been the inability of the average person to get a handle on what's really going on. Outfits like the network evening news shows, the Associated Press, the New York Times and others compose their spin, and almost invariably tilt their coverage towards the Obama administration and Democrats; developments favoring the GOP and…

The Obama administration and HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius have had 3-1/2 years to get ready for Obamacare's rollout. Though we have yet to learn all of the gory details, America already knows what an unmitigated disaster HealthCare.gov has been thus far. But at least one could argue (not successfully, in my opinion, but work with me on this) that "programmming is hard." That's not the case…

Kathleen Pender at the San Francisco Chronicle (HT Zombie at PJ Media) had some Obamacare-related financial advice for her readers on Saturday: "Consider reducing your 2014 income by working just a bit less," because doing so could get you a "huge health care subsidy." This is not news to anyone who has studied Obamacare in detail, and shouldn't be a revelation to anyone in the business press…

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue … and committed the Original Sin of the liberal imagination. Peruse leftwing sites for observances of Columbus Day and you learn that the intrepid explorer brought only pillage, rape, murder, and enslavement to Eden of the Americas. On Oct. 10, Yahoo promoted the latest attack on Columbus in Jay Bushbee’s “Slavery, disease, death: the dark side of the…

Three New York Times reporters' coverage of HealthCare.gov's systemic failures is inadvertently funny. Its opening paragraph quotes Henry Chao, described as "the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace," as "deeply worried about the web site's debut" way back in March, and hoping that "it’s not a third-world experience." The Third World, many of…

Jonathan Karl and Rick Klein of ABC News teamed up recently for an online interview with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Posted to the ABC News/Yahoo! News “Power Players” blog, the interview consisted mostly of Karl and Klein trying to get Jindal to criticize his fellow Republicans, particularly those in Congress. Karl got right down to the GOP-infighting business with his first question: […

Andrew Couts at Digital Trends is apparently the one who has broken the story (link is in original) that "The exact cost to build Healthcare.gov, according to U.S. government records, appears to have been $634,320,919, which we paid to a company you probably never heard of: CGI Federal." Without getting into minutiae, some of that amount may not be directly related to HealthCare.gov, but…

Salon.com, which attacked Disney earlier in 2013 for its apparent lack of LGBT characters, plunged into a new depth of left-wing wackiness in a Saturday post that targeted a 15-year-old video game. Writer Jon Hochschartner unleashed against "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" for its supposedly "deeply problematic" handling of "class, race, gender and animal rights". The website…

While a great deal of attention has deservedly been given to Kathleen Sebelius's refusal to directly answer comedian Jon Stewart's question about why Obamacare's individual mandate was not been deferred until 2015 like the employer mandate was, at least one of her other comments about the wonders of the government-controlled "marketplace" has been ignored, and shouldn't be. Her supposedly…

Evidence of testiness on the Democratic side of the 17% government shutdown continues to accumulate. Today, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney had a tense exchange with ABC's Jonathan Karl, who was apparently so taken aback by Carney's answer to another reporter that he interjected himself into the dialog — to correct Carney about what House Speaker John Boehner said earlier today about his…

President Obama has pretty much completely outsourced his negotiations on the government shutdown to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a move which pleases hard-core liberals in Congress, reported Alexander Bolton of The Hill this morning. "This is a welcome change for Democrats who thought Obama was too accommodating to Republicans during previous crises," Bolton noted, adding, "…

In a story published early this morning by Manu Raju at the Politico which is primarily about Senate Majority Harry Reid's plans to aggressively pursue reelection in 2016, the Nevada senator took shots at the establishment press for "trying so hard to be fair that you are unfair." Proving Reid wrong in real time, Raju failed to mention Reid's response last week to a question by Dana Bash at CNN…

(UPDATE, 11:40 a.m.: AmberAlert.gov is working again.) In yet another news story which has bubbled up through social media and the blogosphere and which will test the establishment press's willingness to ignore obvious news, the Obama adminstration's Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has taken AmberAlert.gov offline. To the extent that it interrupts what DOJ has…