Good Read

E. J. Dionne has a good column today on the new No Labels political movement that has recently taken shape, and why this movement's existence is premised on a widely disseminated fallacy: that political polarization in this country is a result of the left moving too far to the left while the right has moved too far to the right. As Dionne notes, while the right has, indeed, gravitated to extremes that would even surprise Ronald Reagan, the left (and by this he means, not just Democrats, but even ideological socialists) have come to occupy the middle ideological ground in America. There is no such thing as a radical left anymore in this country.

It's worth a read.

Fox Strikes Again

Media Matters For America has gotten its hands on another internal Fox memo. This time newscasers are urged to cast doubt on the science behind global warming:

...we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

The memo, from Bill Sammon came moments after a Fox News reporter, discussing the so-called climategate incident, had noted that the data that provides evidence of global warming was consistent across various sources beyond the beseiged Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This, apparently was alarming to Sammon, since an appeal to respected scientific authorities on the subject does tend to undermine the mercenary criticisms of paid Oil Industry shills and lobbyists.

There is a big difference between "asserting notions as facts" and manufacturing controversy where there really is none. What Fox seeks to do, with respect to the issue of global warming, is clearly the latter, and their motivations are indisputably ideological ones.

Fox: Not Even Trying

It wasn't too long ago that the website Media Matters for America got hold of internal memos from Fox News brass ordering on-air newscasters and personalities to stop refering to the proposed public option as the "public option" and instead refer to it as the "government option." Seems GOP pollsters had discovered that the American public was less supportive of the public option if it was, instead, referred to as the "government option."

The revelation was just another in a long list of examples of the supposedly "fair and balanced" Fox propaganda channel taking orders from the GOP an skewing its coverage for ideological reasons. The channel's public relations staff, meanwhile, countered that they were not showing bias, but were instead simply trying to employ "an accurate, fair, objective term."

Yet, if accurate, fair and objective terminology is the goal of Fox producers, how do you explain this front page story on the Fox news website?

It is hardly "accurate" or "objective" to refer to the current health Care Reform law as "Obamacare," given that the legislation was crafted by congressional leaders with little guidance from the President. And as for fairness, only a deaf-mute hermit doesn't realize that the term "Obamacare" as applied to the Health Care Reform act is used exclusively by opponents of the legislation, as the following selection of Tea Party signage clearly shows.

It really shouldn't be necessary to write posts like these "exposing" Fox News propagandistic mission. Really, the only reason I do so is because so many people, including members of the press and political class, continue to act as if it weren't so, granting interviews, access and perks that the propaganda network clearly does not deserve.

In Which The GOP Cuts Off Its Nose To Spite Its Face

You've really got to marvel at the absurd degree to which Obama Derangement Syndrome has taken hold of the GOP. The latest example manifests itself in a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. The New York Times is reporting that a George W. Bush appointed Federal judge has declared the individual mandate portion of Health Care Reform to be unconstitutional:

In a 42-page opinion issued in Richmond, Va., Judge Hudson wrote that the law’s central requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance exceeds the regulatory authority granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The insurance mandate is central to the law’s mission of covering more than 30 million uninsured because insurers argue that only by requiring healthy people to have policies can they afford to treat those with expensive chronic conditions.

Of course, without the Individual Mandate, several key provisions of Health Care Reform are impossible to institute. Most significantly, without the individual mandate, it becomes economically impossible to legislate that health insurance companies be prohibited from denying coverage to individuals who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. That is because, without the individual mandate, widespread gaming of the system would lead to the financial ruin of health insurers. And yet the decisions made possible by the individual mandate are among the most popular provisions of the law: At 71% support, a desire to see insurance companies prohibited from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions means its not even close.

The uninsured are not going away, and even if it were to be withheld at the Supreme Court level, this decision does nothing to ameliorate their plight. Indeed, the numbers of uninsured are only projected to rise without implementation of the current Health Care Reform law. So what would be the upshot of a Supreme Court decision upholding this ruling and killing the Individual Mandate? The upshot would be this: the problem of the uninsured only gets worse. More and more people fall off the insurance rolls. As health insurance becomes more expensive, healthy people take their chances and drop coverage. As health insurance rolls are increasingly composed of ill people who simply cannot afford not to have health insurance, prices for health coverage begin to spiral out of control. Eventually, public anger leads to a Democratic wave sweeping both houses of Congress and the Presidency with an unambiguous mandate to fix the broken health insurance system.

Democrats must now craft a new Health Care Reform act that solves the problem of vast numbers of uninsured Americans. Many options are explored. One possible avenue, a system made up of private insurers delivering universal coverage buyoed by an individual mandate that makes it profitable, has already been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Right-wing political pundits fulminate at even the slightest mention of a single payer system such as exists in Europe and Canada. There is, however, one potential venue to universal coverage that relies upon an institution that is beloved of its participants and is as American as apple pie: Medicare For All.

It's single-payer, universal coverage through the back-door. And if the GOP continues in its ultimately self-destructive path of putting up roadblocks to a Health Care Reform act that is modelled on (or at least very similar to) proposals that were developed by the American Enterprise Institute in the 1990's, than that's exactly where we are headed.

Honestly, the only reason I don't rejoice at this prospect is that I suspect it will take between 10 and 20 years to get there if we follow this path, and during that time millions of uninsured Americans will lose their homes, their belongings, their loved ones and their lives.

How They Get Away With It

From a story on Leo Berman, a Texas legislator who is promoting a bill that would make it a crime in Texas for individuals to take actions that would further the implementation of the Federal Health Care Reform Act:

Berman said, "I don't think it's extreme at all. I think it's more extreme for Texans who have to pay $27 billion to put over 2 million illegal aliens on Medicaid. That's what's extreme," Berman said.

This is a pretty good example of everything that's wrong with the current state of journalism in this country. Here we see a politician making an outlandish claim that has no basis in law or fact, and the newspaper simply reproduces his comment with no attempt whatsoever to fact check. In fact, under the Health Care Reform Act, undocumented immigrants are prohibited from participating in the health care exchanges that provide subsidized coverage even if they spend their own money to do so. The bill in no way requires that these people be put on Medicaid. In fact, Medicaid only covers the U.S. born (and thus U.S. citizen) children of illegal immigrants, and reimburses hospitals for expenses related to providing emergency care to illegal immigrants. Hospitals are not going to turn away critically injured accident victims whose immigration status cannot be determined, and so Federal law recognizes this fact and reimburses them for such treatments. This is current law, the Health Care Reform Act does not change it, and expenses associated with such treatments come nowhere close to $27 billion annually (and certainly not for the state of Texas alone).

The GOP benefits greatly from party discipline. Messages are developed, tested in polling, and repeated ad-nauseum by politicians and conservative pundits alike. But a good part of the reason that the GOP message tends to resonate so widely, is that the mainstream media cannot be bothered to do even the most basic fact checking. This frees the GOP to say anything it wants, confident that mis-characterizations will go uncorrected, lies unchallenged and dstortions unanswered.

(Via: Wonkette)

Things the GOP tax cut could have paid for.

I think I'll make an occasional feature of legislation that the GOP has scuttled in favor of giving tax breaks to the top 2% of income earners.

Let's start with this: Republicans Block U.S. Health Aid for 9/11 Workers

Republican senators blocked Democratic legislation on Thursday that sought to provide medical care to rescue workers and residents of New York City who became ill as a result of breathing in toxic fumes, dust and smoke from ground zero.
...
In a vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a procedural move by Democrats to end debate on the 9/11 health bill and bring it to an up-or-down vote; 60 yes votes were needed, but the move received only 57, with 42 votes against.

Republicans have been raising concerns about how to pay for the $7.4 billion measure, while Democrats, led by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, have argued that the nation had a moral obligation to assist those who put their lives at risk during rescue operations at ground zero. The bill is known formally as the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named after a New York City Police detective who participated in the rescue efforts at ground zero. He later developed breathing complications that were common to first responders at the site, and he died in January 2006.

If the Democrats and their supporters fail to bring up these outrages over the next two years, and point out that they could easily have been paid for with the $75 billion dollar payout that the GOP handed to its wealthiest supporters, then they don't deserve to govern, let alone win the 2012 elections.

How To Go on Fox

This video should be required viewing for anyone who is preparing to go on Fox News:



Sadly, I have a pretty strong feeling Rep. Anthony Wiener won't be invited back on the network any time soon.

Via: Crooks and Liars.