Free Republic

It's not every day that a high school student gets to ask a question at a White House press briefing. Yesterday, 16-year-old Gabe Finger, an intern at The Daily Caller, asked Press Secretary Jay Carney whether President Obama plans to take any action after the death threats to George Zimmerman and his family. Carney said he wasn't aware of any specific reports about death threats, but deferred to Florida authorities. He then brushed off the question as "ridiculous." Finger explained to Steve Doocy this morning that it was decided at the office what question would be asked and he had...

Most people find it difficult to lie; but most people are not White House Press Secretaries like Jay Carney. He finds lying quite easy to do. This week he flippantly dismissed Republican charges that Obamacare has forced employers to move away from full time employees because of the law’s oppressive requirements. With the kind of straight face only a studied liar could put on, Carney countered the charges by saying, “The data reflects that there is no support for the proposition that businesses are not hiring full-time employees because of the Affordable Care Act,” Now here’s the truth. The actual...

Critics of the White House's decision to delay the implementation of the health care law's employer mandate are "willfully ignorant," press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday. "People who suggest that there's anything unusual about the delaying of a deadline in the implementation of a complex and comprehensive law are deliberately sticking their heads in the sand or are just willfully ignorant about past precedent," Carney told reporters during his daily briefing. "It's not serious."

At Wednesday's White House press briefing, press secretary Jay Carney said those who criticize the delaying of Obamacare's employer mandate are being "willfully ignorant."

Someone over at Yahoo News had the awesome idea of going through the 500-plus briefings that Jay Carney has given reporters since he took the job as President Obama’s White House press secretary. They write that Carney has ducked questions on at least 9,486 occasions — that’s the number of times he used his top 13 verbal tactics to avoid giving a straight answer. Here’s my graphical breakdown of their data:

One thing is for sure, this definitely be for the press and low-information voters Democrats...

I’m beginning to realize that we are performing a major injustice when we call all of the events of the past year “scandals”. Scandals are what soap operas base their story lines off of. Scandals are actions of a President and his intern in the Oval Office. I will even admit that breaking into a private office to search for dirt on your opponent can be considered a scandal. However, what we are talking about with this administration is the infringement of American's constitutional rights, the use of the government to target our own citizens, and most importantly, the death...

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I would describe this man as an American hero, as a person willing to risk life, limb and liberty in order to expose to the American people one of the most extraordinary violations of the American principles, value judgments and the Constitution itself in all of our history. A person so familiar with the intelligence community, as you just heard from the excerpts that you just played. He's aware of the personal danger to himself. He knows of the likelihood of prosecution. But he also understands that the government listening to half the country is not what...

Over / under Appropriate / inappropriate: 30 Any reference to investigations: 50 Ask somebody else: 25Odds “Mistakes were made” 200:1 Carney is confronted on his bald faced lies about WH role in sanitizing Benghazi talking points: 8:1Benghazi Emails Directly Contradict White House Claims WH Live Stream

A classic case of MSM jujitsu. Yesterday, Darrell Issa called Jay Carney a "paid liar." So did Morning Joe today dig down to see if Issa was right? Of course not. Instead, its focus was on Issa--how he is "overreaching," "overplaying," etc. H/t NB reader Wayne T. The quintessential statement came from Mika Brzezinski, who actually said that Issa's accusation "makes us all want to walk away and ignore" the White House scandals. It's not as if Mika & Co. needed much convincing! View the video here, along with a medley of statements from Mika, Brian Shactman, Joe Scarborough, Jon...

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." That's the full text of the First Amendment. But (with apologies to the old Far Side comic), this is what many in the press, academia and government would hear if you read it aloud: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, blah blah blah, or abridging the freedom of the press, blah...

Yesterday’s and today’s press conferences by White House press secretary Jay Carney provide ammunition to the thesis proposed this week even by a few mainstream journalists. By Carney’s account, Obama knows little or nothing about several really awful things happening in his own administration. He is (as Carney claimed) deliberately kept in the dark by senior staff regarding matters you’d expect a president would really want to know about, such as a major scandal about to erupt regarding the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, which began just as his health care bill was running into difficulty. The long and the...

White House press secretary Jay Carney has been under serious pressure to handle the press’ grilling over the big scandals facing the Obama administration this past week, and when people get particularly stressed, they tend to do a lot of deflecting. In Carney’s case, he attempted to dismiss all the criticism of the Benghazi, IRS, and AP scandals (as well as an emerging one about Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius) by digging up what Bill O’Reilly would call an “old canard”: birtherism. During today’s press briefing, Carney sequentially smacked down the outrage over Benghazi, the IRS, and the...

Struggling with a reporter about which Republican concerns are and are not legitimate, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that if reporters are going to ask about every issue, they should include President Obama’s birth certificate. Carney was defending senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer, who on Sunday described the scandals Obama is dealing with as “partisan fishing expeditions.”

Carney: White House, Treasury strategized how to tell public By Justin Sink - 05/21/13 02:47 PM ET Officials in the White House discussed how and when the Internal Revenue Service would tell the public that the agency had targeted political groups, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday. Carney said that Mark Childress, the White House deputy chief of staff, twice spoke with officials at the Treasury Department about the strategy for revealing conservative targeting. Childress and the Treasury officials discussed the possibility that Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw the agency's tax-exempt organization, would reveal that an...

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is sweating it out under the harsh lights of the White House briefing room these days, revising stories and spinning away suspicious facts in what is becoming an almost comical daily exercise in scandal avoidance. “Are you going to ask me about Myanmar?” Carney joked Monday as yet another White House reporter teed up a question about one of the various scandals swirling about the administration. The leader of Myanmar was to meet with President Obama later in the day. Carney Monday was escorted by reporters down several nightmarish paths. The most ghastly of...

No, really, Jay Carney would like to know. Even though he only showed his face in the briefing room twice this week, and even though the White House press corps used him as a punching bag, Barack Obama’s press secretary wants you to know he’s really enjoyed having to address this avalanche of scandals. Wait — did we say scandals? We mean, er, opportunities:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “I dismiss the premise, the idea that these are scandals,” Carney said flatly, calling the controversy over Benghazi a “total concoction by Republicans,” and the IRS scandal merely “inappropriate behavior” by...

(Reuters) - Senior White House officials responsible for navigating the administration through a trio of scandals met on Thursday with outside Democratic strategists for advice on how to get past the controversies and back on track advancing the president's agenda. The White House is trying to regain the upper hand after being knocked on the defensive over its response to deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the seizure of journalists' phone records in a Justice Department leak investigation, and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for special scrutiny. Now, President Barack Obama's closest advisers want to find a way...

Press Secretary Jay Carney defended the Obama administration as it faces scrutiny for the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. Today on The Five, Eric Bolling voiced his concern, saying, “2011, I was pretty vocal against four more years of President Obama. […] I don’t know if it’s coincidence or not but I did get an IRS audit in 2012 for my 2011 tax returns. I’m not sure if there’s any correlation.”

"Imagine the story on Fox if that were to happen..."