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At the time of this writing, six “Gruber videos” have been released and “gone viral,” as they say in YouTube land. These are the videos of course, in which “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber lets the cat out of the bag on the process of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever. Of the many Gruber quotes burning up the internet, I was especially struck by this one, to which Charles Krauthammer refers in a recent article: Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget...

Has the network news been neglecting the recent comments by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber? NBC, CBS and ABC haven’t covered the story a dozen times, leading to questions of media bias, but “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd offers an understanding of why this is the case. [Snip] “It’s a political story,” said Todd on Gruber’s comments. “Network news, in general, hasn’t be covering the political back and forth of Washington a lot lately."

Watch Fox News Channel or listen to Rush Limbaugh these days and you will get a very large helping of Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor whose comments about the "stupidity" of the American people in relation to the passage of the Affordable Care Act has reignited political debate over the law. Gruber is quite clearly conservative catnip. But why? The key to understanding why Gruber has become a cause celebre -- but not in a good way -- for conservatives is that his comments about the ACA confirm two things that the right has long believed about Democrats and the...

Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of Obamacare who was intimately involved in the drafting of the legislation. That is a fact. It is not arguable. It is not assailable. It is backed up by overwhelming contemporaneous evidence long before Gruber became a controversial figure whose loose lips threatened to sink the Obamacare ship. And the people who pimped Gruber as the all-knowing health care savior who single-handedly built the model that guaranteed a future of health care glory were not Obamacare’s critics. They were its most ardent proponents. Gruber’s numerous video-taped remarks have caused enormous problems for the pro-Obamacare...

Universities that hosted Jonathan Gruber are now removing videos of the MIT professor from their websites after a series of candid admissions from the Obamacare architect ignited a firestorm against the health-care law. Videos from college conferences and Washington think tanks over the last few years show Gruber bragging about the law’s deliberate complexity and belittling American voters’ intelligence. Now at least two colleges who hosted the professor have tried to scrub Gruber from the internet. The University of Pennsylvania removed Gruber’s October 2013 panel appearance — in which he laughed about “the stupidity of the American voter” — on...

Jonathan Gruber set off a firestorm of controversy, at least in the conservative media, with the recent revelation of his comments about the "stupidity of the American people," which allowed the Affordable Care Act to be passed. In essence, he admitted that the bill was written in a way that would allow its purveyors to characterize it as the cure-all and salvation for a health care system that was in trouble, with no danger of their deception being discovered by a populace that is trusting and naive. He obviously never intended for his comments to make it into the public...

We’ll start with the undercard, then move on to the latest Gruber video. This is characteristically excellent work from Remy here, skewering Grubergate to the tune of Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ‘Em:”CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO If the Lena Dunham reference at the end went over your head, click over to Kevin Williamson’s devastating piece on Dunham’s autobiography…if you dare. It’s actually quite disturbing. (Dunham is apparently “raging” at “right-wing bloggers” for noticing the contents of her book, while her sister has issued an incoherent word soup of a response on Twitter). Back to the topic at hand. We...

The only surprising thing about Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s revelations that the legislation was based on a series of lies and voter stupidity was that Mr. Gruber was so stupid to think no one would see the videos of him saying so. The good news is that, perhaps, many more Americans will wake up to the fact that Obamacare is not the only hoax they have been subjected to, and will be much more skeptical about policy experts’ snake oil. Most of these schemes increase the power and money flowing to the political class and their “experts,” while robbing the...

During a Brookings Institution panel in April 2006, then-Sen. Barack Obama claimed he had “stolen” ideas from a gang of liberal economists and academics, including the now-infamous Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber. “You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally,” Obama said. “People ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee; Jon Gruber; my dear friend, Jim Wallis here, who can inform what are sometimes dry policy debates with a prophetic voice.” Despite Obama’s attempt to distance himself and his unpopular signature health care legislation from Gruber,...

"... Who's he ripping us off? He's not ripping off the Feds. He's ripping us off. This Gruber boy, you know this Gruber boy, he's Pajama Boy ..." "... Does this guy sound like he needs Ritalin, or whatever they give ADD people? ..."

"Professor, do you really think the American voters are stupid?" "What about the Obamacare, is that just a hoax on the American people?" Hannity sent a camera crew to MIT today to talk to Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber about his controversial comments.

A consultant considered an architect to the federal health care law who said a “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were critical to getting it passed reportedly received $481,050 from the state of Michigan, and a recently elected state representative said he wants an investigation. Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created an econometric model intended to project health care spending and costs under different assumptions, along with his team, was granted a $481,050 contract by the state of Michigan, according to the Washington Post. He was paid that to help set up state...

The Colorado Consumer Health Initiative paid Obamacare advocate and administration analyst Jonathan Gruber to produce an “independent” report in support of Colorado’s Health Insurance Exchange in 2011. This work came after the analyst’s failure to disclose his paid work to editors at newspapers which published his columns advocating for the law. The Colorado Consumer Health Initiative describes itself as “active supporters” of Obamacare and its implementation here in Colorado. Gruber is currently under scrutiny for a series of video clips in which he 1) acknowledges having lied about the content Obamacare in order to help get it passed, 2) refers...

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber’s comments regarding the “stupidity of the American voter” necessitating legislators to craft the Obamacare law in such a way that voters wouldn’t understand its impact, have sparked outrage, mostly from conservatives. But while Americans are focusing on comments that Gruber has now retracted, they should also pay attention to the real misinformation that he has been peddling about the signature health care legislation all along. “He called you stupid,” writes Ron Fournier for National Journal. “He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and...

Phil Kerpen tweeted out this advice last week: Yeah, he wasn't making his contempt for voters much of a secret. RT @kerpen: Guys stop trying to number Gruber clips. I've seen hundreds.— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) November 15, 2014 We may already have gotten to the point where numbers have run past their usefulness in identifying Jonathan Gruber’s serial revelations. We may need to start naming them instead as we struggle to keep up with his arrogant bragging. For instance, we missed this little gem that emerged on Friday, where the MIT professor brags that RomneyCare was set up —...

Limbaugh "... Ted Kennedy was in on the scam and Gruber was proud of it and was out telling everybody what a great guy Ted Kennedy was for helping come up with a way to scam the federal government with Obamacare. ..."

All the president’s men could not shield the commander-in-chief from fallout surrounding recently uncovered comments made by Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber. The health policy and implementation expert who worked closely on the Affordable Care Act and the Massachusetts health care reform law has backed the administration into a corner after it was revealed he repeatedly celebrated the misleading way in which the law was crafted and the “stupidity” of the American voter over whose eyes the wool was pulled. “The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms...

Assuming Gruber's message is true, it means the Obama administration deliberately evaded our democratic process to pass its signature legislation. Its justification, which Gruber makes explicit, is not only that "we know what's best for you," but also that "you are too dense to know that yourself." This arrogant, condescending approach extends far beyond Obamacare. It is an essential feature of progressive politics for the past century. From the outset, progressive politics yoked expert advice to expansive state action, especially redistributive policies to help the poor. It says, "We are experts who want to help you, the great unwashed. You...

President Barack Obama addressed MIT economist Jonathan Gruber’s comments for the first time on Sunday. “The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama said at a press conference in Australia, Politico reports. In an interview with PBS in 2012, Gruber said he discussed the Cadillac tax with Obama at the White House. As Slate’s John Dickerson reported on Friday, Obama prominently acknowledged Gruber’s role in helping craft the law in the past....

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) adamantly denied that the trouncing her Democratic Party took at the polls last week constitutes a mandate for a different direction for government. “The problem is that our Party’s underlying message was drowned out by incessant GOP hammering on irrelevant crises and scandals,” she contended. “All the stories about ISIS beheadings, Ebola outbreaks, the flood of immigrants, IRS abuses, NSA spying, government waste and corruption masked the critical point that the Democratic Party is the Party of free stuff. Voters inundated by fears that their lives might be in danger, that their government might...