Photo Credit: Daily CallerFormer White House press secretary Jay Carney said Sunday that 2014 is “not going to be a good year for Democrats, by definition.”
The former White House spokesman appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” panel to discuss the 2014 midterms in one of his first appearances on the network since joining on as a contributor.
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Photo Credit: AP/ Carolyn KasterBy Dave Boyer.
White House press secretary Jay Carney is resigning, to be replaced by deputy press secretary Joshua Earnest, President Obama announced Friday.
“Jay has become one of my closest friends and is a great press secretary,” Mr. Obama said in a surprise announcement during Mr. Carney’s regular briefing at the White House. “I’m going to miss him a lot.”
The president said Mr. Carney, who took over the job in 2011, will spend most of the summer with his children before deciding what job he will take next.
He said Mr. Carney had asked to leave in April. He will leave in mid-June.
“Jay’s had to wrestle with this decision for quite some time,” Mr. Obama said.
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Photo Credit: Truth Revolt 9 Top Lies of Outgoing WH Press Secretary Jay Carney
“When I go stand up at the podium in front of the White House press corps, I never lie. I never say something that I know is untrue. Credibility is enormously important to a press secretary.”
By Jeff Dunetz.
In April of 2002 White House press secretary Jay Carney offered some important insight into his job. Speaking at a scholarship lunch hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, he said he never lies in response to reporters’ questions, even when he knows more than he can say: “When I go stand up at the podium in front of the White House press corps, I never lie. I never say something that I know is untrue. Credibility is enormously important to a press secretary.”
Of course when Carney made that statement, he was lying about never lying. In fact this press secretary offered up many a falsehood during his tenure of protecting President Obama from his errors, omissions, and scandals. To honor Mr. Carney on the day his resignation was announced, we offer his top 9 lies as press secretary:
1) Last month when it emerged that deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes had written an email directing Susan Rice to emphasize the YouTube video story during her Sunday news show appearances, Carney told the press corps the Rhodes email “was explicitly not about Benghazi.”
2) In mid-May 2014, Carney announced that the American Legion had praised the Department of Veterans Affairs for the “resignation” of top VA health official Dr. Robert Petzel. Carney was only off by 100%. The actual American Legion statement was, “the move by VA is not a corrective action, but a continuation of business as usual. Dr. Petzel was already scheduled to retire this year, so his resignation now really won’t make that much of a difference.”
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Photo Credit: IJ Review That Awkward Moment When Obama Bro-Hugged Carney Compared With Other Legendary Bro Hugs in History
By Kyle Becker.
Ater President Obama drained every ounce of prevarication Jay Carney had to offer in front of the White House podium, he gave him perhaps one of the most unexpected and awkward bro-hug send-offs in political history.
The cringe-inducing awkwardness reverberated throughout the blogosphere, as even the left-leaning Mediaite took notice. Here’s how Tina Nguyen aptly describes the bro-hug:
“Look, it’s fine for bros to Hug It Out, but the Obama-Carney bro-hug, at the end of the press conference wherein Jay Carney announced his imminent departure from the White House, looks less like a brotherly man-embrace and more like two men trying to slap the emotions out of each other.”
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Photos from the home of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney that accompany a Washingtonian magazine puff piece this week have caused a bit of a stir online after enterprising reporters and bloggers had a closer look. Take a look at the first one:
First of all, what kind of family are they feeding there? That’s enough food for a small platoon. I see three people in that picture. Three people evidently preparing to go into hibernation.
But secondly, and more interestingly, check out the posters in the background.
Yes, as reported by Business Insider, those are old Soviet propaganda posters. One of the posters encourages men to join the Soviet army, and the other encourages women to take the jobs vacated by the men who have joined the Soviet army…
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Photo Credit: APFresh questions about whether the White House deceived Americans with claims they could bypass the broken HealthCare.gov website by using the phone or mailing in an application provoked an exasperated response Monday from White House press secretary Jay Carney.
“I give up,” Carney told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, accusing the White House reporter of speaking “in tones of dramatic revelation” to inflate a story.
The exchange centered around documents released by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Monday.
Meeting notes from the administration “war room” handling the rollout of ObamaCare showed that consumers who called the ObamaCare hotline or applied for insurance would still have their information eventually entered on the glitchy HealthCare.gov website, which has been plagued by technical problems since its launch on Oct. 1.
“The paper applications allow people to feel like they are moving forward in the process and provides another option; at the end of the day, we are all stuck in the same queue,” one official wrote.
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White House Press Secretary Jay Carney wouldn’t answer Fox News correspondent Ed Henry’s question Thursday about reports on the CIA being on the ground the night of the Benghazi attack and whether operatives with information about it were being silenced by agency higher-ups.
Carney dodged, referring Henry to the CIA and claiming the agency had provided “an extraordinary amount of information” related to the attack. He also said he was not aware of any CIA employees who experienced retaliation, although a CNN report last week said there was an “unprecedented” effort by the agency to keep its Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out:
HENRY: Last one. Last week CNN reported that dozens of people were working for the CIA around Benghazi on the night of the attack, and they are claiming that some of these CIA operatives now feel like they’re being intimidated, that they’re getting polygraph tests sometimes on a monthly basis, which is much more frequent than CIA officials apparently normally get, because the government is trying to figure out whether or not they’re talking to the media, they’re talking to Congress about what happened that night. Can you assure the American people that’s not happening, and can you shed any light on what the CIA was doing? I realize there may be classified information there, but in general, is there anything you can say about what the CIA was doing there?
CARNEY: I don’t have any information on CIA individuals or operations in — around the world. I would refer you to the CIA on that. I would also refer you to the very clear statement in response to that put out by the CIA, which says the CIA has worked closely with its oversight committees to provide them with an extraordinary amount of information related to the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi. Furthermore, CIA leadership has informed officers who may want to speak with the oversight committees on this matter that it will support and facilitate such contact. CIA employees are always free to speak to Congress if they want to, and there is an established process to facilitate such communication on a confidential basis…
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Photo Credit: APBy Elizabeth Harrington. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said there is “no question” that al-Qaeda is on the run, even though U.S. outposts remain closed due to terror threats throughout the world.
“We do stand by that,” Carney said on Tuesday when asked if he stands by his previous comments that al-Qaeda has been weakened despite the recent threat, according to the pool report.
“There’s no question that core al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been severely diminished,” he said.
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Obama’s ‘Victory’ Over Terror
By Michael Widlanski. “Al-Qaeda is on the run, and Osama Bin-Laden is dead,” declared President Barack Obama (in almost identical language) at more than a dozen campaign appearances and major policy speeches in the last year.
But when America closes embassies in more than 20 countries for fear of terror, it sends a very strong message that America, not Al-Qaeda, is on the run.
Britain, which made tremendous intelligence discoveries about Al-Qaida in Arabia and Yemen (some of which Obama aides endangered with credit-taking leaks), only closed its own embassy in Yemen, not in 24 countries.
“Al-Qaida is not dead, but is alive and kicking, and it has merely changed its form,” observed Professor Uzi Rabi, head of Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Several Israeli experts have said that Western governments must be alert to “terror chatter” but also have to be careful that they do not grant terrorists a victory by inflicting damage on their own countries by reacting recklessly to what may be a terrorist feint. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: WonderlaneWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday that the Obama administration has pulled the nation from the depths of the “Great Recession” with the creation of 7.2 million private sector jobs.
“And what is absolutely true is that we have come a long way since the depths of the Great Recession. We’ve created over 7.2 million private sector jobs,” Carney told reporters at a press briefing.
Here’s what Mr. Carney didn’t say:
Since February of 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million Americans are not working today!
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Photo Credit: APWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney apparently isn’t reading his hometown paper.
The Washington Post carried a fairly explosive story on Wednesday about a $34 million military headquarters in southwestern Afghanistan that probably will never be used by U.S. forces. A scathing inspector general letter was also released Wednesday morning on the war-zone boondoggle.
But asked on Thursday whether President Obama was outraged by the waste, Carney said he hadn’t heard anything about it.
“I would have to take the question. I haven’t seen the report,” Carney said.
He added: “But we’re obviously outraged by wasteful spending in general — again, I’m not aware of this report, or any specifics about the base that you described.”
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Photo Credit: YouTube
Both intense exchanges surrounded the federal government’s data collection of phone and internet records and the administration’s handling of the issue.
Carney’s back-and-forth with Henry was the most notable. The journalist asked a number of pointed questions, especially about Obama’s claim on Friday that “every member of Congress” had been briefed on the NSA’s program involving monitoring of phone calls and Internet service.
“Why then are not just Republicans but Democrats like Keith Ellison saying ‘I’ve heard nothing about this.’?”
Carney responded by saying he couldn’t speak to “individual members,” and then launched into a prepared statement saying that the chair and ranking members had made clear that “every member” had been “advised of this” and “had the opportunity for briefings.”
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Photo Credit: National Review ‘The misconduct had stopped in May of 2012,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Monday about the IRS’s improper targeting of conservative groups. Not so, say two D.C. attorneys, each representing a number of conservative groups that — after years of waiting and countless rounds of invasive questions — have yet to receive recognition from the IRS.
The American Center for Law and Justice, headed by chief counsel Jay Sekulow, plans to file suit in federal court in the coming weeks on behalf of more than two dozen conservative groups that claim their harassment at the hands of the nation’s tax authority continued long past the White House’s purported end date — and, for a number of them, continues still. Of the 27 organizations the ACLJ has represented to date, ten still have not received approval, two years after applying. Two others gave up.
Take the Albuquerque Tea Party. In December 2009, it applied for 501(c)(4) status, which would exempt the group from corporate taxes but does not make donations tax deductible). Its application is still pending — and the group received a letter from the IRS promising its status was “currently being reviewed” just one month ago.
Linchpins of Liberty, a Tennessee-based conservative leadership-development organization, applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status in January 2011. Two years later, their application is still pending as well — and the IRS sent its most recent dilatory letter on May 6 of this year, four days before the agency admitted its political targeting and a full year after the White House claimed the activity had ceased.
Says Sekulow, “Without question, the IRS misconduct of harassing and abusing our clients was still in high gear from May 2012 through May of this year. . . . To suggest this tactic ended a year ago is not only offensive, but it is simply inaccurate as well.”
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