Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts

Sunday, November 10, 2013

New York Times’ Obama cheerleading harms the nation

Poor Barack Obama. Ending his fifth year as the world’s most powerful man, he is running out of scapegoats and fairy tales. Blaming George W. Bush has lost its punch, and the ObamaCare debacle is shredding the myths he is competent and honest.
Still, before he rides off into that sunset of self-pity and low poll ratings, he ought to invite his remaining friends over for a heart-to-heart. That way he can tell The New York Times that its fanatical support does him no favors.
Instead, it feeds his arrogance and reinforces his belief that he can solve any problem with another speech. The unflattering truth doesn’t stand a chance — ­until it is too late.
Not that the president would admit any of that, of course, but the Obama Protection Racket, led by the Times, cuts both ways. It is a key reason he has defied political gravity for so long, and also why he is now in deep trouble. As watchdogs became lapdogs, the presidential bubble grew impenetrable, isolating him from ordinary Americans and the trickle-down pain of his policies.
From the broadcast networks to MSNBC and most large papers, Obama got the benefit of every doubt. The double standards were a daily disgrace so routine, they mostly provoked a shrug instead of outrage.
Via: NY Post
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Friday, November 8, 2013

NRSC Wants a “Conservative” Not “Republican” Senate, But Declares War on Conservatives

Screen Shot 2013-11-08 at 11.38.26 AMThe New York Times reports that Republicans are moving quickly to shut down the right wing of the party.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has declared war on conservatives — punishing any groups that work with the Senate Conservatives Fund.
So you might find it very funny that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which wants you to know it is not about principle, but about winning. According to Brad Dayspring of the NRSC:
Got that. It’ll take EVERYONE.
So why oh why then does the NRSC on twitter not say it wants to elect Republicans?
It doesn’t.
They’re trying to punish conservatives, shut them down, and marginalize them, but they claim they want not a Republican Senate, but a conservative Senate.
These guys will say or do anything to get money from you while screwing you and your candidates. These are the same people who wanted Charlie Crist and Arlen Specter.
And they accuse the Senate Conservatives Fund of trying to make money off conservatives. At least the Senate Conservatives Fund backs conservatives, not people posing.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

White House Terrified ‘Next Media Story Is Consumers Getting On ObamaCare Website And Finding Fewer Options, Higher Prices’

ocarewarrrroom
Washington (CNN) - Officials expressed concern that the next shoe to drop in the evolving story about the Affordable Care Act would be disappointment from consumers once they are able to get on the troubled HealthCare.gov website – disappointment because of sticker shock and limited choice, according to a new document obtained by CNN.
“Mike described a general concern of PM (Project Management): getting to the point where the website is functioning properly and individuals begin to select plans; the media attention will follow individuals to plan selection and their ultimate choices; and, in some cases, there will be fewer options than would be desired to promote consumer choice and an ideal shopping experience. Additionally, in some cases there will be relatively high cost plans,” say the notes from the Obama administration’s Obamacare ‘War Room’ from one week ago.
Project Management is a reference to those individuals in the Obama administration tasked with standing up the president’s health care law at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.
The discussion appeared to be in reference to an October 24 story by The New York Times titled “Health Care Law Fails to Lower Prices for Rural Areas.”

Sunday, November 3, 2013

NYTimes: Obama ‘misspoke’ when he claimed Americans could keep their health insurance

NYTimes: Obama ‘misspoke’ when he claimed Americans could keep their health insurance
YES!!  OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!!!

In its Sunday paper, The New York Times editorial board defended President Barack Obama from criticisms that he had intentionally misled the public when he had claimed if an individual likes their health insurance plan, they could keep their health insurance plan.
The paper’s board also attacked congressional Republicans for stoking fear and confusion, writing that Obama “clearly misspoke” when he repeatedly claimed Americans could keep their health insurance plans as he fought to pass the law and defend it during the 2012 election.
“Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that,” the editorial read. “By law, insurers cannot continue to sell policies that don’t provide the minimum benefits and consumer protections required as of next year. So they’ve sent cancellation notices to hundreds of thousands of people who hold these substandard policies. (At issue here are not the 149 million people covered by employer plans, but the 10 million to 12 million people who buy policies directly on the individual market.)”
Later in the editorial, the Times described Obama’s contradicted claims as an overblown controversy.
“This overblown controversy has also obscured the crux of what health care reform is trying to do, which is to guarantee that everyone can buy insurance without being turned away or charged exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions and that everyone can receive benefits that really protect them against financial or medical disaster, not illusory benefits that prove inadequate when a crisis strikes,” the editorial said.
Via: Daily Caller
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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

[VIDEO] Glenn Greenwald: NY Times Has 'Helped to Kill Journalism as a Potent Force for Checking Power'

"[T]he kind of traditional New York Times model...I think has neutered and, in a lot of ways, helped to kill journalism as a potent force for checking power."
So said Glenn Greenwald during an interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman Monday (video follows with transcript and commentary):
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank people for bearing with us; the audio is not so great today in this video stream. But lastly, you’ve engaged in this very interesting conversation with Bill Keller of The New York Times, this debate between the two of you, the former executive editor of the Times. Keller began the debate by writing, "We come at journalism from different traditions. I’ve spent a life working at newspapers that put a premium on aggressive but impartial reporting, that expect reporters and editors to keep their opinions to themselves unless they relocate (as I have done) to the pages clearly identified as the home of opinion." He ended, saying, quote, "Embedded in The New York Times's institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, The Times, by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions. Its reporting is no less ’activist,' subjective or opinion-driven than the new media voices it sometimes condescendingly scorns." Can you comment on that and where you’re going with your new venture?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. And this came out of a New Yorker piece on the reporting that we did at The Guardian that quoted Bill Keller as saying he never would have allowed me, when he was the editor of The New York Times, to take the lead in reporting on these NSA stories, because I had expressed opinions about these topics previously. And so, he and I then had an email exchange about that, and he then offered, quite generously, to have a debate and publish it in his column. And I think it really reflects two very competing and different but strong frames in how journalism is understood: the kind of traditional New York Times model that I think has neutered and, in a lot of ways, helped to kill journalism as a potent force for checking power, and the kind of journalism that I think we intend to do, where it is much more passionate and [inaudible] and intended to be overtly adversarial to those in power. And I think you see the two competing visions in that exchange. And part of what I wanted to do was lay out for people why I think our vision produces better journalism, and to point to some of the really bad journalism that The New York Times has produced over the years—alongside some good stuff—which I think is a byproduct of this sort of obsolete way of thinking.
Via: Newsbusters
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Monday, October 28, 2013

BARACK OBAMA: THE MOST UNINFORMED PRESIDENT IN HISTORY

I've always thought of Barack Obama as the "Chauncey Gardiner" of American politics. Like Peter Sellers' character in the classic film, "Being There," Obama is an embodiment of outsiders' hopes and dreams for who they think he is. Reality, like the film, shows there isn't really a lot of there, there.

This weekend, we learned that President Obama "didn't know about" NSA spying on world leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He also "didn't know about" the posthumously obvious problems with the rollout of the ObamaCare website exchanges.According to the New York Times, these problems were evident eight months ago. Yet, it seems, they never made it to the President's desk. 
President Obama was also completely unaware that the IRS was subjecting conservative organizations to undue scrutiny on their tax-exempt applications. At the time of the alleged targeting, the IRS Commissioner visited the White House more than almost any other federal official, but, apparently, never disclosed his agency's targeting of political opponents of Obama. 
President Obama also, presumably, was unaware of the Justice Department's program to allow Mexican drug gangs to purchase military-grade arms from the US. Those arms have been used to murder thousands of Mexicans and at least two US border patrol officers. 
President Obama also, apparently, didn't know that his spy agencies were monitoring millions of phone calls and cataloguing billions of web visits and data transfers. He, it is reported, didn't know that these same agencies were also recording phone calls in foreign countries. 

Sunday, October 27, 2013

NY Times Writer Celebrates Single-Party Rule in CA

The New York Times news department has apparently become the official national propaganda machine of California’s liberals in control of state government, more-or-less in the same manner as the Soviet Communist Party’s newspaper Pravda served as the official organ of that one-party state in Russia during the Cold War. 
At least that’s the impression some better informed observers can come away with after reading the Time’s crack reporter Adam Nagourney’s rather unbalanced homage to the loveliness of one-party liberal rule in California’s state capitol these days.
With a sharply uncritical eye, Nagourney’s front-page above-the-fold piece in last weekend’s newspaper gushes about the wonderful “gridlock ease” in state politics as a result of the Democrats achieving supermajority status in both Houses of the State Legislature and sweeping control of every single state constitutional office in the last election. “A parade of bill signings” (as if that’s a good thing) and legislative successes now characterize Democratic-dominated Sacramento according to the article, where legislators are working together to solve problems in moderation and harmony. This is in contrast to the awful “shutdown in Washington,” where presumably Republicans still have some influence.
But Nagourney goes further and speculates that the current “end-zone dance” by liberals in Sacramento may instead be attributable to enactment of a handful of measures affecting elections “intended to leach some of the partisanship” out of state governance. Before those changes, Nagourney reports that California “was the national symbol of partisan paralysis and government dysfunction.” But now, after changes to the method of district apportionment, loosening of term limits, and elimination of partisan primary elections, Nagourney suggests even some Republicans are gleeful.
“We’re seeing, almost against the odds, a more centrist legislature, at least when it comes to jobs and budget issues,” according to liberal Republican Sam Blakeslee. The new rules “gives Republicans the chance to break with their caucus on certain issues” added a former Schwarzenegger aide.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Bitterly clinging to Obamacare


Campaigning during his first presidential run over five years ago, then Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) was overheard at a private fund raiser among the extremely wealthy in San Francisco infamously stating: 
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
So how is the now President Obama (still D) helping these bitter clingers?  He's not.  As a matter of fact he is making their lives worse with Obamacare and his other laws and policies.  As the New York Times discovered about the (Un)Affordable Care Act.

New columnist for New York Times is anti-Israel conspiracist

In addition to your daily dose of liberal invective, you will now get a monthly infusion of anti-Israel conspiracy on the New York Times opinion page.
Earlier this month, the New York Times announced that it had hired Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany to write a monthly column for the paper. But according to Egypt scholar Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Al-Aswany buys into the conspiratorial notion that a cabal of Jews controls American leaders.
Writing in the New Republic, Trager explains that Al-Aswany has been able to cultivate an image of himself in the West as an enlightened liberal who ardently opposed the dictatorial regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But his more nefarious views have largely been hidden from the West’s view because Al-Aswany most often expresses them in Arabic, says Trager.
For instance, notes Trager, Al-Aswany declared earlier this year on Egyptian television that President Obama is prevented from “go[ing] against Israel’s desire” by a “massive Zionist organization” that “rules America.”
Al-Aswany also holds the bizarre conspiratorial view that the United States supported the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in order to help Israel.
“[T]he United States supports the Muslim Brotherhood to reassure Israel,” Al-Aswany said on Egyptian television earlier this year, Trager reports.
“The Zionist John McCain, one of the biggest defenders of Israel, threatens Egypt if it does not release [Brotherhood leader] Shater immediately. The only explanation is that Brotherhood rule is in the interest of Israel,” Al-Aswany tweeted, according to Trager’s translation.
Though Al-Aswany himself supported Muslim Brotherhood-backed candidate Mohammed Morsi in the 2012 Egyptian presidential election, he has become a vocal supporter of the military-backed regime that took power as result of last summer’s coup.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Is Obama Tired Of Being President?

Is Obama Tired Of Being President?First, read this little item from Tevi Troy on Obama’s consumption – some would say over-consumption – of media. Now, I don’t really care about this sort of thing – the television I watch is something like 60 percent sports, 30 percent animated, and 10 percent Seinfeld reruns – but it just seems like the presidency would demand more attention.

But in the context of this NYT longread on Syria, it seems more troublesome.
Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum. In private conversations with aides, Mr. Obama described Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless and all the options are bad.
President Barack Obama didn’t know of problems with the Affordable Care Act’s website – despite insurance companies’ complaints and the site’s crashing during a test run – until after its now well-documented abysmal launch, the nation’s health chief told CNN on Tuesday. In an exclusive interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked when the President first learned about the considerable issues with the Obamacare website. Sebelius responded that it was in “the first couple of days” after the site went live October 1. “But not before that?” Gupta followed up. To which Sebelius replied, “No, sir.”
Via: The Federalist
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Monday, October 21, 2013

HealthCare.Gov Needs Five Million Code Lines Rewritten

Obamacare’s online exchanges have been riddled with problems since they came online three weeks ago, and those issues may continue for at least the next few weeks. Contractors said fixing the problems by the November 1 deadline set by the administration would be “unrealistic,” according to the New York Times.

From the sluggish websites to garbled enrollment information, the flaws require the extensive rewriting of code: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly,” theTimes reports — that’s out of a total of approximately 500 million lines of code, according to another expert. 

Others experts warned that some of the website’s problems are yet to come. One technical specialist involved in the repair effort said, “The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later.” 

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