[VIDEO] OH YES SHE DID: MSNBC Panelist L. Joy Williams Calls Ben Carson a ‘Safe Negro’
Posted: November 3, 2015 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Joe Scarborough, L. Joy Williams, Left-wing politics, Mark Halperin, media, Mika Brzezinski, Morning Joe, MSNBC, National Prayer Breakfast, news, O’Brien Murray, Racism, Republican Party (United States), video Leave a comment
Black, female, hispanic, and gay Republicans are often criticized harshly for abandoning the Democratic party, but the jabs against Dr. Ben Carson on MSNBC’s UP were particularly harsh.
[Read the full story here, at Red Alert Politics]
Political strategists L. Joy Williams and O’Brien Murray were discussing the massive appeal Carson has over the GOP primary electorate. According to Real Clear Politics, the neurosurgeon is in a statistical tie for first place nationally with Donald Trump.
Watch the clip below:
Murray credited his popularity with his speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast criticizing Obamacare.
“It was his attack of Obama, and frankly a black man attacking a black president, which is something people get away. Remember he stood in front of the president and he made his bona fides originally attacking the president face-to-face, at a prayer breakfast, mind you.”
— O’Brien Murray
Williams added that many white conservatives are afraid to criticize Obama because of the race issue, so they found a champion in Carson’s comments. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Challenged By National Review Reporter, Mark Halperin Can’t Offer Single Policy Solution To Gun Violence
Posted: October 2, 2015 Filed under: Guns and Gadgets, Mediasphere, Self Defense, Think Tank, White House | Tags: Beau Biden, Charles C. Cooke, Democratic Party (United States), Gun control, Gun rights, Gun violence, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mark Halperin, National Review, Second Amendment, Stephen Colbert, Vermont, Voting Leave a comment
“Joe Biden doesn’t know how to fix this problem. I don’t know how to fix this problem. I think it’s fair to say you don’t know how to fix this problem. It’s a very complex question in a country with 300 to 350 million guns on the street.”
Daniel Bassali writes: National Review reporter Charles C. W. Cooke challenged Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin to offer his solutions to gun violence in America Friday morning on Morning Joe. After he insisted 
lawmakers must act to prevent further mass shooting in America, agreeing with President Obama, Halperin failed to deliver a single solution.
“Well, I think that the finding solutions are short-term in terms of legislation, state and federal,” Halperin said. “Then also, coming up with ideas.”
Halperin did not, however, ever manage to come up with an idea. The co-host of With All Due Respect’s idea was to have lawmakers come up with ideas of their own.
Cooke took issue with the president’s angry words at Washington’s refusal to pass gun control laws so soon after the mass shooting at Umpqua Comminuty College in Roseburg, Oregon. The reporter claimed liberals talk tough as if they have the solutions, but they do not offer specific ideas that could begin a dialogue. Halperin was his case in point.
“The way they talk is as if they have the answer and there are these recalcitrant forces in the country that say ‘no, no, no,’ even though deep down they know their legislation will work. That’s simply not the case. It’s far more complicated than that.”
“Joe Biden doesn’t know how to fix this problem. I don’t know how to fix this problem. I think it’s fair to say you don’t know how to fix this problem. It’s a very complex question in a country with 300 to 350 million guns on the street,” Cooke said….(read more)
Source: Washington Free Beacon
‘Secretly’? This Word Doesn’t Mean What John Heilemann Thinks It Means
Posted: September 14, 2015 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Heilemann, Mark Halperin, Republican Party (United States) Leave a comment
John Heilemann writes: If the vice president does decide to run against Hillary Clinton, the benefits of landing Robert Wolf would be many….(read more)
Source: Bloomberg Politics
[VIDEO] White House ‘Wasn’t Forthcoming’ on Gruber’s Obamacare Role: Mark Halperin: ‘They were right. The Republicans were right’
Posted: June 23, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Health And Human Services, Health law, Jonathan Gruber (economist), Mark Halperin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Morning Joe, MSNBC, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, White House 2 CommentsEmails show Jonathan Gruber, the economist who said Obamacare was written deceptively in order to pass the attention of stupid American voters, played a far wider role in the law’s instrumentation than the White House previously said.
Longtime political journalist and pundit Mark Halperin says he owes his Republican sources “an apology” after apparently doubting their claims that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber played a major role in crafting ObamaCare.
Halperin, Bloomberg Politics managing editor, addressed the controversy on MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” on Monday, after a Wall Street Journal report first revealed emails showing Gruber playing a deeper role than previously thought.
“I owe all my Republican sources an apology because they kept telling me he was hugely involved, and the White House played it down,” Halperin said. “They were right. The Republicans were right.” Read the rest of this entry »
Are Conservatives a Little Paranoid? The Obama Administration has ‘Richly Earned Citizens’ Distrust’, says David French
Posted: May 11, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Think Tank, War Room, White House | Tags: 9/11, Al Gore, Berkeley, Bush Administration, Conspiracy, Coup, Dissent, George W. Bush, Global warming, Hillary Clinton, IRS, Mark Halperin, Misconduct, Paranoia, Pope, Sedevacantism, University of California Leave a comment
No, the Obama administration isn’t going to invade Texas
David French writes:
…Let’s not forget that more than half of Democrat voters thought it was “very” or “somewhat” likely that the Bush administration either “assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.” Let that sink in: 
For all the elite’s disdain of allegedly gullible conservatives, a majority of the Left believed that an American president was complicit in mass murder.
[Disagreement as Mental Illness]
[Cultural Conservatives Have Barely Begun to Fight]
[The P.C. Thought Police Aren’t Fragile; They’re Vengeful and Malicious]
But extreme paranoia wasn’t limited to the Democratic rank and file. As National Review’s own Rich Lowry pointed out, Naomi Wolf (former campaign consultant to Bill Clinton and Al Gore) actually wrote a book explaining how the Bush administration was mirroring the early actions of dictatorships like those in Germany, Russia, and China. Harper’s Magazine published breathless stories about a barely averted Bush administration “coup” or “military dictatorship.” Even as recently as 2013, the National Journal published an article claiming that military officers were considering “staging a coup” against President Obama — the basis for the claim was a series of statements by a retired 
general who specifically declared that no coup was being contemplated.
[Democrats Push to Criminalize Dissent]
[The Burdens of Thought Policing]
In this atmosphere of earned distrust, it is appropriate for elected officials to ask questions about even benign and well-meaning military exercises. No, the Obama administration isn’t going to invade Texas or Utah. Yes, there are some bottom-dwelling, opportunistic conspiracy-mongers who’ve done their best to whip up public concern. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] THE PANTSUIT REPORT UPDATE: Hillary Supporters Starting to Squirm
Posted: March 19, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Barack Obama, Bloomberg L.P., Conservative Political Action Conference, Hillary Clinton, Jim Geraghty, John Heilemann, Mark Halperin, Morning Joe, New Hampshire, Scott Walker (politician), United States Department of State 1 CommentGame Change and Double Down co-authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann held a focus group with loyal Clinton supporters in New Hampshire. The results? Like Janeane Garofalo in a nylon pantsuit, moist and squirmy.
Hot Air‘s Noah Rothman writes:
…On Wednesday, it was discovered that the substandard security protocols applied to Clinton’s personal email system were so poor that it was vulnerable to “spoofing.” Meaning that a foreign intelligence service could easily 
have hijacked her email system and impersonated Clinton in electronic communications with her aides or associates inside the American diplomatic community.
Clinton will one day have to answer for all these charges. When she does, she will have to explain in granular detail why she behaved as callously as she has. If the press doesn’t force her into it, a Republican on a debate stage in October of 2016 will. And while the Beltway looks at the polls and shrugs, Clinton’s grassroots supporters are apparently far more disturbed by her behavior and its implications.
Recently, Game Change and Double Down co-authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in partnership with the polling firm Purple Strategies, traveled to New Hampshire where they held a focus group with loyal Clinton supporters. Read the rest of this entry »
Bloomberg Report: Hillary Counting On Media to Bail Her Out of Email Scandal
Posted: March 6, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Democratic Party (United States), Ethics, Foreign policy of the United States, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Mark Halperin, Michael McCaul, Nancy Youssef, Ted Cruz, United States 1 Comment
John Nolte reports: A fine piece of reporting from Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg Politics informs us that Hillary Clinton has a pretty brilliant strategy to get her out of her current email scandal: Wait for America’s unbiased, objective, not-at-all liberal media to bail her out. The strategy is a smart one that worked throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency. It also depends exclusively on the cooperation of a willing national media.
Clinton and her team are aware that her tactics will only hold out for so long and that she’ll eventually have to answer questions about her e-mail practices, but she and her advisers are aiming to delay that moment, ideally until she formally announces she’s running for president. At that point, they hope, the controversy will have subsided to the point where her campaign launch will be a much bigger headline than her response to a month-old scandal. An added benefit to the approach: the potential for Republicans to overreach and overreact while Clinton stays silent.
The strategy is simple and, as Epstein points out, “time-tested.”
- Hunker down and refuse to answer questions until the media loses interest and moves on.
- Hope the media accuses a Republican — any Republican, of “overreaching” on the scandal. The Narrative around the scandal can then turn to those mean, wild-eyed Republicans.
Despite all the national security and ethical issues surrounding the use of an email server located in her own home, despite the fact that we will probably never know if we are seeing all of a former-Secretary of State’s emails, Clinton Land is certain that in the end none of this will matter to the media.
Rather than fearing the media will run the story to ground and demand she give a full accounting, Clinton is counting on being able to wait out the media and the fact that the media is always eager to find a way to blowback the story on any Republican that can be accused of “overreach.”
The media is already eager to pounce on overreach…
Hillary has no war room or WJC publicly defending; her best bet for relief is that old Clinton standby: a GOPer going too far in attack
— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) March 6, 2015
…the media is also circling the wagons by shaming aggressive reporters as stalkers. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark Halperin on Why IRS Scandal Not Media Obsession: ‘Democrat President’
Posted: June 24, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Al Hunt, Big Journalism, Internal Revenue Service, IRS, Mark Halperin, Morning Joe, MSNBC, United States, White House 1 Comment
For Big Journalism, John Nolte reports: On Monday’s edition of MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe,” Mark Halperin said out loud what every fair-minded person has known for over a year now, “I think with a different administration, one that was a Republican administration, this story would be a national obsession, and, instead, it’s getting coverage here and a few other places. But it deserves a lot more questions.”
Al Hunt, a Obama foot soldier disguised as an opinion columnist, thinks the IRS scandal is getting plenty of “aggressive” attention and argues, “The critical question remains whether there was political interference at the top by either Treasury or the White House and everything we’ve seen so far suggests not.”
“This isn’t bias. Bias is merely the act of being unfair. This is widespread media corruption.”
Halperin replies with what should be obvious to anyone with anything even close to nose for the truth: “I just don’t think we can presume an assumption of innocence” based on what the White House says. Read the rest of this entry »
The Bad-Faith Presidency
Posted: November 27, 2013 Filed under: Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Mark Halperin, Middle East, National Review, Obama, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Rich Lowry, Teleprompter, White House 3 Comments
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Rich Lowry writes: At the end of the day, the root of President Obama’s mendacity on Obamacare was simple: He didn’t dare tell people how the law would work. He couldn’t tell people how the law would work.
Forthrightness was the enemy. It served no useful purpose and could only bring peril, and potentially defeat. It had to be banished. Instead of candor, Obama made the sale on the basis of dubious blandishments and outright deceptions.
If this is the only way to pass your signature initiative—and a decades-long goal of your party—it ought to give you pause. But Obama was a natural at delivering sweeping and sincere-seeming assurances that weren’t true. This kind of thing is his métier.
If he were awoken at 3 a.m. and told he had to make the case for nationalizing the banks by denying he was nationalizing the banks, he would do an entirely creditable job of it, even without a TelePrompTer. The salesmanship for Obamacare represents in microcosm the larger Obama political project, which has always depended on throwing a reassuring skein of moderation on top of left-wing ideological aims.
All politicians are prone to shaving the truth, giving themselves the benefit of the doubt and trying to appear more reasonable than they are. Obama has made it an art form. Bad faith is one of his signal strengths as a politician, and makes him one of the greatest front men progressivism has ever had.
OUT: Obama’s Incompetence. IN: Obama’s Mendacity
Posted: November 26, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, CNN, Florida, John Heilemann, Mark Halperin, Obama, United States, White House 3 Comments
Carolyn Kaster / AP
Peter Wehner writes: The news for President Obama continues to get worse.
According to a new CNN/ORC International survey, only four out of 10 Americans believe Mr. Obama can manage the federal government effectively. Fifty-three percent don’t view him as a strong and decisive leader. And 56 percent say he does not agree with them on important issues and he does not inspire confidence.
But the numbers on the president’s personal characteristics should alarm the White House most of all. More than half (53 percent) believe he’s not honest and trustworthy, while 56 percent say he’s not a person they admire.
Each of these figures are all-time records for Mr. Obama in CNN polling.
In their fascinating behind-the-scenes book on the 2012 election, Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write that the campaign’s research showed “that there was a deep well of sympathy for Obama among voters.” In focus groups after the first debate, they write, “people offered excuse after excuse for his horrific presentation. In Florida, one woman said, almost protectively, ‘I just bet you he wasn’t feeling well.’”
The Secret Obama
Posted: November 11, 2013 Filed under: Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, David Plouffe, Halperin, John Heilemann, Mark Halperin, Mitt Romney, Obama, President, Rich Lowry, Robert Gibbs, Roosevelt Room 2 Comments
In the 2012 campaign, the president hid his progressive agenda. But he wasn’t happy about it.
Rich Lowry writes: President Obama’s harshest critics believe that he has always been hiding something. They believe that he is even further left than he has governed. They believe that he has kept himself under wraps to avoid running afoul of American political realities.
They might be surprised to learn that none other than the president of the United States agrees with them. The evidence for this is in the latest campaign book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, authors of Game Change and the sequel about 2012, Double Down.
In the fall of 2011, they recount, “All too often, Obama felt as if he were driving with his foot on the brake.”
In a strategy meeting with his political advisers, Obama brought up climate change as an example of his undue caution. According to Halperin and Heilemann, the president said: “Maybe I should just come out and say what I really feel about this. Maybe I should just go out and say what I think about everything.”
BOOK: Obama Said He’s ‘Really Good At Killing People’
Posted: November 3, 2013 Filed under: U.S. News, War Room, White House | Tags: 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama, Death of Osama bin Laden, Drone attacks in Pakistan, John Heilemann, Joint Special Operations Command, Mark Halperin, Somalia, Washington Post 1 Comment
This will not go over well for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
According to the new book “Double Down,” in which journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes.
Beware the “double-tap”
Peter Hamby of The Washington Post reported the moment in his review of the book.
The claim by the commander-in-chief is as indisputable as it is grim.
Obama oversaw the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, 145 Predator drone strikes in NATO’s 2011 Libya operations, the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and drone strikes that killed the Pakistani Taliban leader and a senior member of the Somali-based militant group al-Shabab this week.
His administration also expanded the drone war: There have been 326 drone strikes in Pakistan, 93 in Yemen, and several in Somalia, compared to a total of 52 under George Bush.
The Democrats Want a Shutdown
Posted: September 30, 2013 Filed under: Politics | Tags: Continuing resolution, Democrats, Mark Halperin, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Republican, Republican Party (United States), Rich Lowry 1 CommentRich Lowry notes: The Democrats are perfectly content to have a shutdown because they assume Republicans will be blamed. They could be wrong – it will be a fluid situation and things could bounce in an unexpected way – but it’s not a bad bet. The media, as Mark Halperin said this morning, will take the Democratic line during a shutdown, and given that Republicans are the anti-government party, there will be a natural tendency on the part of the public to believe they are solely responsible. I still think that House Republicans could trump the Senate Democrats if they made the fight about the Vitter amendment, and then go into the debt-limit fight without having suffered a damaging defeat over the CR, but no one seems to know what will be the House’s next move.
Panic is Delicious
Posted: October 12, 2012 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Barack Obama presidential campaign 2008, Big Bird, Florida, Mark Halperin, Mitt Romney, Nate Silver, Obama, Stephanie Cutter 2 Comments…In the 2012 election, as long as Obama was inevitable, he was inevitable. Beyond the pundits, there was the emerging belief that the macro polling models of guys like Nate Silver could not be wrong. The basic message was, “Obamas certainty of reelection is so large entirely new domains of mathematics are required to state it properly.”
The arguments for Romneys election were always framed as, “Well, IF he wins Florida and IF he wins Virginia and IF Hillary is an Al Qaida sleeper agent and IF Biden is caught in a Delaware hotel room with a Guatemalan pan flute band and a non-consenting farm animal…then maybe theres a fraction of a chance.”
The political media declared Mitt Romney dead for thirty long days between the end of the convention and the debate. But somewhere in those thirty days, Mitt Romney was born again. Hard.
You can see the fear in the Obama campaign now, as they careen from message to message, flailing, desperate for something – anything – to stick.
You can see their gyros tumbling as they slew from Big Bird to abortion to “Mitt Romney is a lying liar liarpants McLiar” to the walking disaster that is Stephanie Cutter every time she opens her mouth to the remarkable, bizarre interview the Three Divas Axelrod, Plouffe and Messina, obviously gave Mark Halperin this week. Their campaign is out of control, and they know it…
More (via Ricochet.com)
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