An especially hacky joke from an especially hacky blogger to keep the slow post-holiday news cycle moving along. Today it’s the beard, tomorrow it’s the voice, and then before you know it the little guy will be using Old Spice body spray. A strange-yet-true fact from the Greenroom comments on this: It does make him look a bit younger, doesn’t it? Before the beard, I would have guessed that Carney was in his early 40s; looking at him in the clip below, I would have guessed late 30s. He’s 48. Who’s laughing now, America?

If you took this as a sign that he’d turned over a new leaf and was going to lie less at the daily briefing, rest easy. Not a chance:

Speaking to reporters from the White House Monday, Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl how many people between the ages of 18 and 35 have signed up for Obamacare.

“We don’t have the data to provide, we don’t have data that is ready to be released,” Carney said. “Demographic data is not available.”

Of course they have the data, if not from every state exchange than at least from the 30+ states covered by Healthcare.gov. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t and every reason why they would. If, for instance, they’re seeing unusually strong sign-up numbers from a particular age/racial/religious demographic, they’d want to know that ASAP so that they can study their enrollment outreach techniques for that group and expand them to others. There’s no time to waste; they need to know what’s working and what isn’t in order to maximize the number of sign-ups before March 31st. If they’re keeping the data to themselves right now, it can only be because the numbers don’t include enough “young invincibles” and they’re nervous about a new rash of bad headlines. Remember, Carney also used to claim that day-to-day enrollment totals weren’t available before the numbers began to tick upward in November and HHS started leaking them to reporters. Good news is always, always available to share. Only the bad news isn’t.

Via Charlie Spiering of the Examiner, here’s Carney claiming that HHS itself never mentioned seven million as their target enrollment number by the end of March. Truth or lie?